“I felt rich of world when I had no budget.”
Current as of today’s writing, Tuesday, August 26th, 2025: 100 Canadian dollars equals 72.29 US dollars. Isiah Medina’s new film Gangsterism is just as up-to the minute, basically. It’s a dispatch on the cinema / the world, — doesn’t even sport the sort of lag inherent to Chris Hedges’ latest book A Genocide Foretold which was published this summer, although its reporting is only as current as October 2024 (due, I presume, to publication logistics). I bet money in all the currencies that Isiah wishes he were able to turn around a film every month or so, maybe like what Godard did in the 1960s making 2 or 3 films a year.
Snow / water / sleep washing over in the opening minutes: no commas for concatenation, just the slash, which is how I perceived this sequence (or sub sequence) of this very sequential, very consequential, film; “quantity cinema,” is an opening title relates. With his editing rhythm ‘like jazz’ as a schmuck might say (cf. the tendency of hacks to describe Godard’s Breathless as a whole, and its editing in particular, as: ‘jazzy.’), Medina conveys the very fine depiction of a dream, un sueño, dreamt by the Filipino-Canadian dreamer (both senses of the word) stand-in for Medina himself, Mark Bacolcol (as “Clem” — great name). (Ditto great name in “EZ” for Kalil Haddad, Arab-Canadian who ‘looks white’ — for further contemplation of racial politics, you need immediately go no farther than Isiah Medina’s Gangsterism.)
As the film puts it: “Let’s get something done before history ends again.”
Medina has his actors on occasion repeat salient lines three, four times. Clem says he makes films for other artists, grabbing the bull by the horns and admitting something, like Godard’s notion of a film-being-a-credit-card on Canadian TV. Medina and producer Kelley Dong took funding for Gangsterism from the Canada Council for the Arts, so one assumes it will be playing by law (‘play by law’) in all Canadian multiplexes, sea to shining sea. An American in good conscience such as myself can’t criticize awake Clem et al’s political opposition to the United States. Hayao Miyazaki feels the same way about the US in Japan. Others do too. Gangsterism is a screed and maybe an assault, in final form and in scenario. The actors give voice to the particulars of the matters at hand: an arch recitation, yet more natural than in Straub/Huillet (the filmmakers each taking different approaches). Medina’s characters speak with a (allow me to suggest) po-faced sincerity inside of the bubble, porous or leaky nevertheless, of academic inculcation, indoctrination, where intellectualism can often be confused with intelligence. Clem’s cell suggests a cult, like that constructed in Godard’s 1967 movie La chinoise, ou plutôt à la chinoise [The Chinese Girl, or, Rather: In the Chinese Style]. He telegraphs as the most arrogant man in the world, so seemingly self-satisfied with his own mental applications as they are onto Life, filtered through myriad works, from Godard, to Marx, etc etc. I appreciate, but couldn’t care less, about most of the things he says. (Here I set myself up as the Black American in Godard’s supreme Éloge de l’amour of 2001, postered in Gangsterism, who upon being told the Lotus sports- car was invented by the hero’s grandfather, mutters: “Who cares.”) And yet Medina (make no mistake this picture represents his own ode to love) poses the question implicitly: what is the Difference between depiction, endorsement, and irony? Our radical on-screen cinéaste (in the true French meaning of the word: “filmmaker,” and some connotations around such) nonetheless still slings together a budget accounting for a “script supervisor,” or a “playback operator.” The compulsion to have “production values” betrays a weakness of artistic stance, a maybe subconscious yearning to be accepted, based on those values, and have one’s work be more likely accepted to this or that film festival. On the other hand, one might make a case in Labor for the sake of Labor, and all the “breaking for lunch” stuff around a set. Cinema has yet to reconcile itself with Boycott, Divest, and Sanction.
The film quotes Nintendo auteur Shigeru Miyamoto as saying, I paraphrase, that his dream is the distillation of an experience to the press of a single button. The idea holds an ironic beauty. Gangsterism itself is a single button only insofar as it’s an agentic-stop-shop for a billion routines. I love Medina’s film because he’s thinking fast. So that’s why I said I wish he could deliver a few features a year. It’s been a decade now since his film 88:88 announced his arrival. In a world of arbitrary anniversaries, Medina has arranged a celebration that, for once, really counts. Taking his recondite method into consideration, we ascertain that Medina is himself a student, but one who has graduated to the ranks of the Canadian greats. •