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The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (2003)
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According to an interview, Fleming was recovering from a traffic accident when she acquired 16 mm film reels which were home movies of her great-grandfather, the mysterious magician whose name was Long Tack Sam.[1] Intrigued, she went to find out more about him, how a Chinese man could have been a successful vaudeville star during days of political strife and racial tension in the early 20th century who was, as the film later reveals, world-renowned, yet forgotten.
As a narrator and character herself in the story, Fleming traces her grandfather's footsteps all over the world, from Canada to the United States, China, England, Austria and later back to Canada. Her journey for clarity proves difficult when contradicting origin stories of Sam emerge.[2] Daniella Trimboli argues that instead of focusing on multiplicities, the filmmaker deconstructs the idea of singular truth by blending traditional documentary forms with her non-conventional storytelling techniques.[3] Fleming does this by combining comic-book strips for Sam's origin stories and animation of characters in old photographs with interviews, first-person narration and old footage. She even includes a cartoon of herself, 'Stick Girl', which she designed for her previous projects.[2]
The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam is part of a subgenre that Jim Lane calls the ‘family portrait documentary’ in which the boundaries of private and public histories intersect as the filmmaker’s life interweaves with the family in focus, as an autobiography layering the biography of the family.[4] An example as such is Fleming's profession directly affecting Sam's; the movies were overtaking vaudeville in the American mainstream entertainment business.[2] Rocio C. Davis sees the documentary as an important project and product of Asian Canadian cultural and historical revisioning, a way for Fleming to claim for her ancestor, and by extension, for herself, a place within Canada's cultural and historical narrative.[5] Trimboli also notes that the film can be a useful tool for engaging in cosmopolitanism with its 'persistent self-reflexivity' on the ideas and themes of cultural differences, ethnic identity, and orientalism.[3]
- ^ Tanner, Matt (5 Oct 2007). "INTERVIEW: Ann Marie Fleming, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam author, artist, and filmmaker". Smith. Smith Magazine.
- ^ a b c Fleming, Ann-Marie (2003). "NFB.Ca". The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam. National Film Board of Canada.
- ^ a b Trimboli, Daniella. (2015). "Memory Magic: Cosmopolitanism And The Magical Life Of Long Tack Sam". Continuum 29 (3): 479-489. doi:10.1080/10304312.2014.986063.
- ^ Lane, Jim (2002). The Autobiographical Documentary in America. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0299176549.
- ^ Davis, Rocio. G. (2008). "Locating Family: Asian Canadian Historical Revisiting in Linda Ohama's Obaachan's Garden and Ann Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam". Journal of Canadian Studies.