HCAF '24: Connor Sen Warnick on the Cinema of Absence

As part of our coverage of Houston Cinema Arts Festival 2024, Hyperreal Film Journal viewed a work-in-progress screening of Connor Sen Warnick’s feature debut, Characters Disappearing. Currently in post-production, the film is pending its final cut. Inspired by his experiences with Asian-targeted hate, Warnick wanted to tell a story about the past in order to speak to the present. Set in his own neighborhood of Chinatown, New York City in the early ’70s, Connor tells a story about intersecting activist groups that meditates on the quiet spaces between traumas.

In an interview with Connor Sen Warnick, we discuss his real world inspirations, Taoist and Zen influences, and the psychology of perseverance.

Note: This interview contains spoilers.

Connor Sen Warnick, thanks for sitting down with us. So first question, what is this film about?

Well, for me, this film is primarily about young people trying to find meaning within collective efforts versus their individual efforts, and how those things connect or contradict based on each person's own beliefs and character, especially in the face of immense disaster and failure on their path towards whatever it is they're trying to achieve as a group or as an individual. 

The film also is about how disasters and failures affect personal relationships with other people that you're close to. Especially in multiethnic, or specifically Asian and Black, groups who are trying to find solidarity, but discover that it's more complicated than that.

I would also say the film is very much about a sense of dread and mystery that comes with living in New York when you're not a part of social groups that are more widely seen or visible. 

As the character Lu, played by Von Hyin Kolk, says at the end of the film, every city has a memory. The world of the film examines what remains from its less visible past, as well as how that past can haunt the present.

What was the inspiration for Characters Disappearing? 

Originally, it started from a desire to learn more about certain roots in New York dating back to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s of various Asian activist collectives within Chinatown that I hadn't known about before. And that was mostly in response to a lot of the violence that happened against Asian Americans in America, but especially in New York, as well as some personal encounters with violence, and dangerous, even life threatening circumstances that I and friends of mine found ourselves in. So I was really just looking for methods of combating that at a time when I wasn't really sure how to handle it.

I had read about some of these movements in the West Coast at that time and in China, but as far as New York, in terms of this revolutionary period, I only really knew about the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. And I feel like there’s much more of a commonly known, aesthetic representation of those groups in film and art and music and history classes. I assumed there had to be something parallel happening with Asian Americans, but I didn't know what it was, so I was trying to just learn more about that for my own curiosity. Then, the more I discovered, the more I felt like there were parallels between that era and our current time period.

It sounds like it was very personal for you. 

It was deeply personal.

You’ve also got this talent for composing images. The way you frame indoor shots plays with spaces within spaces. When you frame your outdoor shots, there's still sort of a directionality in these very open, airy spaces. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to shot composition? 

Honestly, I don't think too hard about that. I was very much in sync with my cinematographer, Owen Smith Clark, who I've worked closely with before. Making these images together was very rewarding, because there was a total synthesis of what I like and what he likes in there.

Usually I already have something in mind. That comes together during the writing, and then it comes from the language that we've already developed through preparation and research.

This film has a lot of static compositions. I do like to feel time passing when you're watching a film, and I wanted to sit within the purity of that experience, rather than manipulating the viewer too much. I'm more interested in the emptiness of that sound and that space. The longer you have to look at it, the more you find ways to appreciate it. 

That was how we wanted to approach this project. But in general, I'm more interested in images that can dare to not be beautiful, or not be so carefully composed and designed. I don't really think I'm much of a design minded person. I'm much more intuitive. 

Your character arcs weave into converging and diverging paths. Can you tell me about your thought process while writing those arcs? 

Dramatically speaking, I'm very interested in stories where people's lives are overlapping in ways that they're maybe not always aware of. And if I could push it even further, someday, I really would like to make films that have no protagonists. Some of my favorite films are films that have no clear protagonist. But in this film, there are three main characters that the narrative is following, and they each are living by a different code. That's something I'm interested in: How people form the codes that they live by and how that informs how their lives carry out. 

In Characters Disappearing, these are characters who are still forming their codes. They're younger, they're near the end of college or shortly thereafter, which is  a period of your life that's very ripe for impression.There are things that you're capable of at that age that can be quite incredible, because you may not be as inhibited by things that'll drag you down later in your 20s.

All three of the characters are shades of myself and aspects of the people who played them. Yuka Murakami and Dylan Breaux—the actors who played Mei and Leonard, respectively—also brought their own ideas and perspectives to those characters. At the level of the writing though the characters are based on things that I was going through at the time.

This screening was a work in progress, pending further editing. Can you talk about how the editing enhances the interweaving subplots? 

A lot of that is credit to my editor, Noah Weisfogel, who I brought on for this re-edit of the film that was shown in Houston, and will be helping with the final cut. I think the world of the film is quite large actually, despite its scale as a production. I feel like we really expanded the city around these characters far beyond just Chinatown. I think the more we were able to connect those spaces in the editing, with the color and sound, the richer the experience was that we created. I wanted a film that felt kind of freewheeling and sprawling, across the city.

Even within all that, there’s a core sensibility that's holding it all together. And that might come from some of the Taoist and Zen philosophies that were at the core of our production and the film itself. 

Your approach plays with the idea of reading between the lines, reading the thing that's omitted in the aftermath of an action. Your camera likes to imply the things that are missing from a shot.

I’m interested in absence. There’s something in Taoist philosophy that's like, when you cut holes out of a box, then it turns into a house. If you empty a pond, that's when you really get the fish. I think there can be a lot of power in removing, or finding meaning through the absence and through the removal of things. It’s a lot like calligraphy actually. I was looking at a lot of Zen art and ancient Chinese paintings. Every stroke carries so much meaning. And even if the color palette is sparse, it forces you to be intentional. It forces you to be more conscious of your instincts too, because you don't have many bites at the apple. 

We also only had enough celluloid to do one or two takes of each scene. So we had to prepare very carefully, and we had to be very deeply spiritually connected as a crew. That’s one of the reasons I prefer shooting on film. It sharpens your focus and forces you to be much more disciplined. 

Your story leans heavily on the implications of a scene. The negative spaces, things that are not included are as loud as the things that are included. Can you talk to me about the Cinema of Absence?

I don't necessarily believe that clarity is the most important thing. If someone misses something, I'm not thinking that I made a mistake, necessarily. You don't catch everything that happens around you in everyday life. I'm much more interested in showing a glimpse of something. You really only catch glimpses of things most of the time, and then it might click for you later. It's more true to life. It's more true to experience. When you're experiencing something in the moment, it happens really fast. 

I’m more interested in communicating feelings through these smaller clues. I think this approach also rewards repeat viewings. I have found that people who watch the film for a second or third time pick up on a lot more things than they do the first time around, and it becomes a lot clearer.

Even if you can't make obvious sense of it, you're left to put the pieces together from the  emotions and the impressions that you’re left with immediately afterward. That kind of experience is more what I'm interested in creating, even if it’s confusing. 

Mei’s character has this arc that involves her rejecting certain aspects of the world around her, while at the same time she's watching the IWK, I Wor Kuen, this group of communist activists in Chinatown that she’s a member of, being targeted by both suits and gang members. Is her story the story of a fire being extinguished by forces bigger than her?

That's a good question. We’re showing all the forces trying to extinguish her and establishing all these threats. Like, you have the men in suits, you have the ghost shadows, the gang members, you also have her own partner. You have her own allies, seemingly, within the neighborhood. But, these people— she can't really trust them anymore.

I wanted the viewer to be aware of all these threats as a constant presence, but not aware of who's directly responsible for certain actions, because once you make that identification, then that becomes what the film is about. It's like, okay, now it's Asian-on-Asian violence, or it's FBI surveillance, or it's white-on-Asian, or it's black-on-Asian. So I wasn't interested in defining that in a singular way. I wanted to suggest it all and make it more about the aftermath, as well as the people who are left to care for the damage that’s caused, and the psychology behind that. By the end of the film her flame is not extinguished. She’s not broken and she's found a new sense of peace within this decision to persevere.

I think what Mei and Lu say to each other at the end of the film is very representative of what I’m talking about. What Mei comes to accept is - in the face of all that and tragedy, she’s not gonna quit, she’s not gonna run away. She’s gonna stay there and continue to do the work she believes in because it’s just who she is. Everything around her has changed. Her community efforts are completely sabotaged. Her relationship ends. Her best friend is moving away. Her cousin, who’s woefully ignorant to his own status as a target of this type of violence, is brutally attacked. She’s left to clean up the mess as always. These are all reasons why she’s considering leaving New York. But she realizes that she has to stay. She’s deciding to stay in New York, and she’s gonna stay who she is. 

That, to me, is what she’s questioning the whole film. When people change, do they move forward? What does that mean? Does change always equal progress? And when awful things happen to people, is the nature of that change more external, in terms of how they present themselves and how it affects the things around them? Or is it more internal - does it actually change the way you look at things and how you look at yourself and how you think about the world. To me, those are crucial questions that the film is addressing actually.

She and Leonard are emotionally absent from each other. Is Mei’s relationship with absence also an internal one?

Well, you could compare her to Chris for example. Chris is searching for emptiness and passivity. He's searching for the void, whereas I think May is actively trying to live a very meaningful life. She’s more in touch with things that are substantial. You know, whether it's activism, whether it's family, whether it's friends, whether it's art, making films, or organizing these community events. Mei is engaging with impacting the world around her.

But within that there is this great force that she's encountering, that's staring back at her. Everything's getting sucked into that void, no matter how hard she's fighting. Whereas with Chris he's trying to remove all these things from his life. He's removing interaction, food, people, and work. He's trying to just completely empty his existence. And we see it does major damage to his health and his relationships. And as much as he tries to connect with the void in a spiritual sense, he neglects the stuff that's still present, the real world that's still there, right? The story tragically reminds us that they both suffer. The film shows that suffering will be unavoidable.
For Mei, though, things she cares about are forcibly removed from her life –  including these relationships, and her community activism. She’s trying to control as many things as she can, but by and large most of that agency is being taken away from her. Whereas with Chris, it's the opposite, where he's actively trying to take these things out of his life, and it’s his lack of accountability that is then punishing him. So the film is asking: if this is a world where suffering is unavoidable, will you change your stance or will you hold your ground? 

Suffering is one of the Buddhist marks of existence.

It is. How do you find meaning when something you struggled so hard for winds up being so unsatisfying? 

I can compare the story to filmmaking too. The making of this film very much paralleled the journeys of the characters. When you make a film, especially an indie film, you basically talk yourself into like, “Okay, if I put in all this effort, if I made all these other things line up for this amount of time, if I sacrifice everything, then I can make this happen.” You need miracles on a daily basis. That's how it feels. You talk yourself into it and you believe, like, “I've sacrificed all this. There's no way it can fail.” But in reality it guarantees nothing. That shouldn't stop anyone from doing what they believe in, but I'm interested in that -  how you motivate and talk yourself into feeling determined. I think there’s a similar struggle with activism too sometimes. 

My sense is there may be a misunderstanding for people who expected this film to be about activism or be a film that’s clearly about this moment of political and revolutionary history where these activists came together and did something amazing. There’s images of that in there, but I was never thinking about making an entire film like that. I was much more interested in an activist’s inner dilemma when the odds are insurmountable and the people around you seem misaligned with what you believe in, you still do it. You still talk yourself into it. And then, if the efforts are failing, it’s really more about how you make meaning after the experience in spite of it being so unsatisfying.

Who are your biggest influences as an artist, filmmaker?

It’s changed a lot over the years. But for this film, it was pretty clear the main influences were Tsai Ming-Liang, Pedro Costa, Angela Schanelec, Edward Yang…of all films, I’d also single out Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still (2018) as a major influence on the project. I was inspired to make a film that was formally aligned with this type of patient and restrained cinema that resonated most with me during those difficult years. But I also wanted to infuse that with a distinct, raw New York feeling that I also identify with, which maybe would be more in line with Wayne Wang, Peter Emmanuel Goldman, or even Spike Lee’s early films.  

What’s next?

We’re still optimistic that Characters Disappearing will have a festival run and find an audience. This new, sharper cut feels much clearer and people here in Houston seem to have received it well, which is encouraging. 
I’ve also started shooting a new film. It will be very different. My ways of thinking, with respect to language, storytelling, and film production as a whole, have all changed a lot since Characters Disappearing. I feel a strong desire to make new work which reflects this, so that’s what I’m doing now. I have a title, and strong convictions about where this new film will be heading but would prefer to keep certain details about this new project secret for now.

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