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.
