Collapsing the Past Into the Present: Connor Sen Warnick on Characters Disappearing

A half-hour into Connor Sen Warnicks Characters Disappearing, left-wing revolutionary Mei (Yuka Murakami) hangs up a poster declaring The East is Red. Until that point, the film seems to take place in the strict past-tense, moving through the domestic spaces of Asian Americans in New Yorks Chinatown in the early 1970s. But when Mei crosses the street, a woman moves through the frame in front of her in a mask and puffy jacket clearly out of our current decade-Mei, and her radical moment, exist in...