Deep Inside Clint Star "My Porn"

With a sweet innocence Clint Star (aka Clint Alberta) focuses on issues of gender, identity and cultural heritage getting us deep inside Clint Star.  That's a terrible first sentence, and one for the cliche trash bin, but somehow it seems right for this film.  Not that the film is full of cliche's, and neither does it get us deep inside Clint, metaphorically, physically (thank God, since it is subtitled "My Porn"), nor very deeply on a purely emotional level.  What it does do however is utilize an innocence and an unrestrained, almost child-like abandon in it's style, revealing embarrassment, vulnerability, issues of ethnicity and gender and sexual identity–of his people: Canadian Native Americans. 

Problematizing ethnicity, people in Clint's film are refusing ethnicity.  The cliche Proud Indian line of ethnicity is what we expect, but his characters don't want to accept this.  It seems there is an embarrassment about it.  Tawny Maine, Native American in appearance, wonders about her Egyptian-Swedish ancestry.  Tawny's life seems to have been lived as someone she is not.  Using mostly talking-head interviews, and 1980's-90's music video-like cuts, Clint evokes memory from his characters as his storytelling line.  How is he framing scenes for us to read deeper into them?  What does he want us to read?  It's not always apparent on the surface, just like what resides below the surface of a persons skin is not always what we read on the outside.

We as Visual Anthropologists study visual representations.  The idea of memory as a narrative symbolic landscape representing a deeper truth is what I believe Clint is trying to do.  As a talking-head interview-type film, which can be quite boring and non-revealing, Clint's playful style and in-your-face sexual questioning seem to touch on a different and unseen plain of memory's landscape.  And, if we are able to realize this, we see below the surface of just Native American, of just gay and deeper inside the human that Clint wants us to see.