Characters Disappearing
A half-hour into Connor Sen Warnick’s Characters Disappearing, left-wing revolutionary Mei (Yuka Murakami) hangs up a poster declaring “The East is Red.” Until that point, the film seems to take place in the strict past-tense, moving through the domestic spaces of Asian Americans in New York’s Chinatown in the early 1970s. But when Mei crosses the street, a woman moves through the frame in front of her in a mask and puffy jacket clearly out of our current decade—Mei, and her radical moment, exist in a past which haunts our present.
Warnick’s film doesn’t hide the reality of how and where he’s shooting, much in the way that DP Owen Smith-Clark doesn’t hide the 16mm’s scratches and grain. Warnick started researching the era that Characters Disappearing places itself in and stumbled upon the I Wor Kuen, a mostly forgotten militant group of communist radicals that operated in NYC’s Chinatown half a century ago. That specific radical setting, though, belies Warnick’s form and overarching thematic exploration. Mei also exists at a crossroads with her boyfriend Leonard (Dylan Breaux), a Black man on the fringes of her community, but has a total determination to her cause, willing to risk life and limb for liberation. While Mei’s spiritual path is to revolution, Warnick’s character, Chris, is studying for religious enlightenment, looking back at the teachings of a 250 year-old monk his grandfather met in the mountains of China. Chris’s journey is more demonstrative of the film’s form, one of extraordinary patience, restraint and an intentional embrace of ambiguity.
Scenes often play out durationally, with Warnick placing his actors in a statuesque mise-en-scene and locked-down composition, with movement predominantly coming from falling leaves, modern cars rushing across the backdrop, or wind in people’s hair. While the characters are inhabiting their moment, the modern world seems to spin around them. Characters Disappearing is a surprising synthesis of both political and poetic cinema, a style which has been developing in Asian film movements since the end of the 20th century but rarely finds itself in American independent film.
I caught up with Warnick after Characters Disappearing screened in Baltimore at Next/Next Film Festival.
Filmmaker: Tell me about how you came to the environment that Characters Disappearing takes place in.
Warnick: I started out with research into this period of the late ’60s and early ’70s in Chinatown, trying to learn more about some of these revolutionary groups and student activist collectives I hadn’t heard of before, and I don’t think many people of our generation are that aware of. One article in Gothamist touched upon the I Wor Kuen, or the IWK, who were essentially a counterpart to the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. They formed out of a group of Asian American students at Columbia in the late ’60s, then lived together in a commune in Chinatown and were trying to live by that ideology while organizing on behalf of residents there. They were trying to counter things like housing injustice, lack of access to education, police brutality, as well as protesting the war and things happening in China, which was affecting the political climate of Chinatown itself. The majority of people in Chinatown were from mainland China and more conservative, with nationalist pride, so they were generally very against the IWK and younger progressive, radical groups. Local bureaucratic officials would hire the local gangs to disrupt and antagonize the IWK.
Originally this research was more just for my own curiosity at a time when I was looking for sources of inspiration to act against a lot of the violence and racism happening towards Asian Americans in New York, but also across the nation. In Atlanta, at this massage parlor, a number of immigrant women were attacked and killed. I personally encountered a couple of dangerous situations on the subway and on the streets after COVID. The more I was learning about this period in the past, the more parallels I was seeing in the present. When you have an understanding of a moment in the past that you may not have lived through yourself but feel some kind of identification with, then you feel like you want to explore it.
I was interested in trying to create an environment that hadn’t been presented of that era before. When we think of the Black Panthers, for example, or films or texts about that period, I feel like we collectively have very clear imagery about that in our heads. But I don’t think there has been much representation of that for Asian American artists or activists in fiction, or how that history interacted with African American communities, as well as the more narrativized art community that we also know about—people like Warhol, Ginsberg, Bob Dylan or Patti Smith. I’m generally less interested in the depictions that we already have. I also was not interested in making something that felt nostalgic, per se.
All those things were swirling in my imagination as I was developing those characters. Two were Asian American cousins, then a third would be one of their partners, who is African American. There’s this other plotline about spiritualism: Chris and his cousin Mei discover that their great-grandfather—a powerful military figure in southern China in the early 20th century—after retiring from his military career, [was] exiled into the mountains and sought out the teachings of this reportedly 250 years-old, seven-foot tall ancient monk, who was a local legend. My great-grandfather really was that person. He stayed alive until 1976. My mom met him when she was very young. In my mind, when I heard about him from my mom growing up, she was like “He’s one of these lords.” I associated him with this ancient, feudalist society kind of person who had 17 wives and 40-something kids. I never believed that that person would be alive at the same time as all these other people—but when I did the research, he would also be alive when my film is set.
Filmmaker: At first, the film takes place largely in interiors, and the setting is ambiguous, but you slowly start to get ideas that this is the early ’70s. Once you go out in the streets, you’re pretty honest that this is a film made in the 2020s. I imagine some of that is budgetary, but tell me about framing the film that way.
Warnick: I think if we had the budget, I wouldn’t have tried to create that period element. My intention was to transpose these situations from the past into the present rather than recreate them or tell the story of that period exclusively. But, of course, that definitely factored into the locations. Myself and my team—DP Owen Smith-Clark, costume designer Regina Melady, art director Sammy Kim, props master Mariana Sanchez Bueno and production designer Bethany Yeap—all were very in sync on how we wanted the film to look and feel.
Chinatown is shot in to death at this point not just in films, but commercial and fashion shoots, consistently shooting on a couple of streets—Pell Street, Mott Street, Doyer Street—that have very recognizable iconography, with lanterns, neon lights, dragons. We were very strict about not shooting in any of those places. If you strip away those material signifiers, can you still express something about what it is to be Asian American in Chinatown? What’s left?
Filmmaker: In many shots people will be in one or doing one movement over and over again. What draws you to that, and what do you think that brings out?
Warnick: There’s a sense of the cyclical nature of time and routine, but also a question of what things persist from ancient times to the present. That’s where the spiritual themes of the film come into play, as well as one’s growth as a person, especially in the lives of characters in their early 20s. I wanted to show each of them in more solitary modes, where they’re in confined spaces stretching or meditating. Popo, their grandmother, has this long dance sequence in silence that is a tribute to her husband who has just passed away. It’s honoring that, but I feel like it’s also making contact with this realm that we can’t see. I think there’s a way to bring a spectral presence into the frame without it needing to be a special effect or something like that.
Collapsing the past into the present is something I think a lot about. Eleanor [Yung], who plays Popo, was a member of the groups depicted in the film and also a choreographer and movement artist, a contemporary dancer. That was part of her organizing as well. She was really excited about the opportunity to perform this piece that she choreographed herself for the film. In the mournful context in the film, it added a layer of meaning. The same could be said for Bob Lee, who plays the grandfather character Gong Gong, who was not only a member of both the IWK and Basement Workshop in the 1970s, but also founded the Asian American Arts Centre and went on to be among the most prominent curators of AAPI art for the past four decades.
Filmmaker: You shot on 16mm, with a lot of durational shots. Were you able to film things more than once, or were you shooting scenes with the intent that it would be the only time you were capturing it?
Warnick: Most scenes we did two takes max; a lot of them we did one. That was mainly due to the limitations of celluloid and the amount of scenes in our schedule. But I think that constraint and necessity adds a lot of positive things to the process. It forces you to rehearse and prepare much more, to be that much more intentional about every decision. Everything in the frame and every waking second that passes is something you need to be conscious of. There are only a couple scenes where the language shifts to covering a scene with multiple shots or more close-ups and angles. That was more an artistic choice than born out of necessity. Same with the stillness of the camera. There’s a couple of shots that are long with tracking and panning side-to-side at a distance, but a lot of them are very still and static. The interplay of motion with stillness is very much the way I understand memory and inner reflection, as well as the memory of a city that a place actually has.
Filmmaker: I want to talk about what influenced your ethos on this. There’s scenes in it, like Popo dancing, which remind me of Zhao Tao in Platform, or there are some sequences that remind me of late Bresson.
Warnick: Some of the foremost references are Tsai Ming-liang and Pedro Costa. Owen Smith-Clark and I really studied Ossos, the way he frames reality as if it’s cinema.The same DP [Emmanuel Machuel] who shot Bresson’s last film, L’argent, shot Ossos almost 20 years later. Other filmmakers who really inspired how we shot it and how I was thinking about it would be Angela Schanelac, especially Places in Cities, Passing Summer, Marseille, more of her earlier films. Edward Yang—I think Taipei Story is always a reference point. Taipei Story is also an influence on the structure of the narrative, having these two central characters who are at a divide—one male and female, both on different paths in the same city—overlap with each other.
This might be less obvious, Echoes of Silence by Peter Emmanuel Goldman, a New York avant-garde movement film from the late ’60s, would have been concurrent with the world of Characters Disappearing. It’s a film that’s shot in raw black-and-white 16mm, mostly handheld, interspliced with hand-drawn title cards that are almost like calligraphy—they have captions as well as illustrations of things in the film. It doesn’t have a [diagetic] soundtrack, just a jazz score. It mixes in black-and-white photographs as well. I watch it at least once or twice a year, and I’m always blown away by how good it looks and how real the characters look. There’s not really a story; it’s a very sad reflection of a certain time in the lives of young people, this kind of malaise or abyss you can fall into, especially living in New York. The ethos of that shaped the core of Characters Disappearing.
I like to give an intro before the film, because I found that people approach the film expecting something that it isn’t necessarily. This history, of the political movements and these groups, I don’t think they’re necessarily the bottom line of what the film is truly touching on. I think it is more concerned with mysteries of the human spirit, as well as this collapsing effect, this cyclical nature of time and history, as well as a portrait of the city in a specific time. The film tries to take a much more emotional approach to its storytelling as well as to how it unfolds.
Filmmaker: It’s probably easier to sell a movie that’s talking about a radical group rather than a more spiritual thing. But watching it, that spiritualism definitely comes first in how the film moves. It almost makes those more radical elements, especially when they do get into confrontations, all the more shocking and punchy.
Warnick: The bursts of violence are pretty crucial. We didn’t want to glamorize or romanticize any of those scenes. We wanted them to happen fast. I was much more interested in not showing the brutality necessarily, but the after-effect and impact it has. At the end, we see Chris at a bar, and he’s looking around the bar and there’s suggestions of threats all around him. The next thing we see is him with the knife in his leg. We really did not want to identify the assailant. I think Chris is very much ignorant to the dangers that exist, and I felt like once you make it very clear that this was the gang members or someone else, you give a face to the violence, to the threat, and that becomes what the film is about. That can be kind of reductive. I was much more interested in how it affected not just Chris, but Mei and her friend Lou afterwards, having to treat him. It’s the event that sets them off on their paths in the future beyond the film.
Filmmaker: It reminds me of how in A Brighter Summer Day—when the gang war finally boils over and you get the huge sequence of violence—the mechanics of who the second gang that’s brought in is kind of opaque, and then the film immediately transitions into being a domestic drama. It’s sort of this thing that you see and then then no one can talk about.
Warnick: Exactly. When we were ramping up pre-production, someone I was close with was attacked and stabbed. All of the discourse centered on the guy that attacked her. People learned his name and his story; I found myself also trying to psychoanalyze him based on what I knew about him. It was very traumatizing, but also an impactful experience for me that I felt could also be cathartic to include in the film in some way, because it thematically had a lot of overlap with what I was already grappling with. It colored the way that I thought about violence as well as the narrativization of an incident like that in real life. The people that get forgotten about are the victim and the people that take care of that person, and how much it affects them.
Our DP Owen was also in a major accident just two months before production that left him hospitalized and crippled. He ended up recovering at my house upon his release from the ER. It seemed quite uncertain whether he would physically be able to shoot the film, but his determination never wavered. Between visits from doctors, family and friends, this period was when we really honed in on shaping the language of the film, shot-for-shot. Separately, I also got hit by a car within that stretch of time. The random and sudden nature of violence, as well as the fragility of the body, were thus ideas Owen and I were reflecting on deeply. These near-death experiences we both endured framed the cathartic emotion we poured into the project. At risk of sounding hyperbolic, it truly felt like our lives depended on making the film from that point on.
