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by victoriadelgadillo

La Moda

La Moda was created for Caught Between A Whore and an Angel, a women’s performance exhibit at Regeneracion/The PRC in Highland Park.  La Moda (1996), shot on VHS with a separate cassette sound track was filmed in 1 hour, with the soundtrack taking 8 hours to construct to compliment the footage.

Mexican Spitfire, Victoria Delgadillo filmed La Moda in a straight shot, no edit format (mainly due to a lack of resources). Each time she began to shoot a segment, the borrowed camera rolled back the tape, sadly losing some of the action. The sound track was edited from music left-behind by friends except for The Last Poets on the closing credits. The sound became Victoria’s presence in the story line of a neighborhood cabaret-style beauty pageant.

La Moda was made in a Direct Cinema style, characterized by a desire to directly capture reality and represent it truthfully, and to question the relationship of reality with cinema. Captured were Marco Trejo’s (†) love of Elvis practicing karate (opening credits), Patricia Valencia dancing flirtatiously and kissing the camera (a huge hit at the premiere) and Elizabeth Delgadillo Merfeld wearing clothes with sales tags still on it, an early hip-hop fashion statement about the “haves and have nots.”

Victoria studied Video Filmmaking at UCSD, during the growth in popularity of the Cinema Verite and the early stages of the portable video camera. Drawing from personal experiences as a non-conformist artist, her artwork and ideas have been profoundly influenced by growing up in a predominately African-American neighborhood in San Diego, California during the civil rights era, as well as by a word-of-mouth Mexican cultural experience in America living on the international border.

View LA MODA here

by victoriadelgadillo

My Film Making Inspiration

What inspires my art, are those around me. If you look at enough of my work, you will start to realize that many of the models I use are people that I know, mostly friends.  I suppose all artists draw from their surroundings.

Especially, when I look at my body of film work, I realized that I am not creating a film, but more of a moving photograph of my subject.  I don’t try to write a script or make my stars do anything that is foreign to them. I pick my subjects, because I have noticed them doing a certain activity that I find intriguing and then try to capture that same action or gesture on film. My actors are not playing a role, they are being themselves–or a portion of themselves. They are playful, absurd, emotional or sexual—all the emotions that pepper my art.

I draw from the American film industry way of creating films, where ‘film star’ personalities are always the same character in any film in which they appear.  There are no surprises when you go see a favorite American film star. You want to be transported by their usual magnetic and truthful screen persona–which is always the same. Great acting is more of an artistic expression–where the actor convinces you that they are someone else. I believe that the ‘film star’ is a more truthful human portrayal than an actor.  No matter how excellent an actor is, they are still acting.

That is why I look to my friends as a source of inspiration and translate that inspiration into art.  There are times when I laugh loudly and inappropriately, because I notice one of my friends in one of ‘their gesture’ modes and I am delighted. I am always conscious of the roles we all play in the stage of real life and often step outside of life-dramas as a viewer, while they are occurring.

I have been asked, “How did you accomplish that?” or “How did you make that person do that?” I explain that the person is being themselves or the “self” that I bring out in them.  I piece together a loose and changeable story line, review it with my stars, create a supportive setting, leave the dialogue up to the stars or direct them to say something while I am filming.

I usually do all my own film shooting and sometimes edit while I am filming, because something occurs to me in the moment or because some perfect lighting or. background change happened. I use inexpensive film equipment to bring an element of ‘snap-shot’ culture to my work. I think super slick color and lighting would throw me off or I’d try figuring out how to make it look less Hollywood.