Drive-By Cinema’s Drive-Outs and U-Turns: Materiality, Mobility, and the Reconfiguring of Forgotten Spaces and Absurd Borders

Abstract

From December 2012 to June 2014, the San Diego Pacific Arts Movement sponsored a participatory project known as Drive-By Cinema (DBC). Refurbishing a U-Haul truck into a mobile cinema unit, DBC visited more than 36 neighborhood sites and screened films. In this article, I revisit the DBC project and its act of mobile cinema exhibition to examine its place-based rhetorics of belonging, materiality, and history. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s distinct and contrasting notions of “place” and “space,” I argue DBC’s radical mobility temporarily reconfigures places into spaces of social engagement, putting bodies into contact with history, materiality, and across racial and gender differences between residents sharing a neighborhood. In its act of screening in strip-mall parking lots and U-turning at the border, DBC reveals a neighborhood’s forgotten histories and the border’s absurdity in facilitating exploitative racialized and gendered patterns of transnational mobility and labor.

Keywords:

• Asian Americans
• cinema
• Michel de Certeau
• film festivals
• materiality
• mobility
• neighborhoods
• U.S.–Mexico border

Note

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Peter Odell Campbell, Alyssa Samek, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, and Yaejoon Kwon for their comments on earlier versions of this work. The author is appreciative and grateful for the time, energy, and openness of Christina Ree, Brian Hu, and the Pacific Arts Movement. Many thanks to Joan Faber McAlister, Joshua P. Ewalt, and Kristen Hoerl for their attentive editorial work.

Notes

1 For example, hosting a film festival’s opening night at a local corporate AMC theater differs from hosting it at the historic Castro Theatre in San Francisco, (un)intentionally putting Asian American communities into contact with a historically LGBTQ Castro neighborhood. The Center for Asian American Media’s CAAMFest often holds opening night and other notable screenings at the Castro Theatre.