Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Green Card: An American Romance, USA 1982, video, colour, sound, 79 min
Using the syntax of daytime soap operas, Green Card tells the story of Sumie, a Japanese artist who marries an American surfer/filmmaker to enable her to remain in the United States. When the couple’s views towards the agreement move in opposite directions, cultural differences and expectations become pronounced. Casting an ironic eye on the Los Angeles lifestyle and art scene of the early 1980s, this stylised narrative asserts that the delirium of Hollywood ‘reality’ has a manipulative impact on personal relationships.
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Vault, USA 1984, video, colour, sound, 12 min
Vault employs the hyperbolic, melodramatic and psychoanalytic language of advertising, cinematic and television texts to tell the love story of a pole vaulter/concert cellist and a cowboy/Abstract Expressionist painter. Self-conscious strategies such as flashback reconstructions of childhood traumas, overtly Freudian symbols, Wagnerian orchestration and loaded clichés are wielded with deft irony. Termed a ‘deadpan homage to Buñuel’s amour fou melodramas,’ the video both critiques and celebrates the artifice of mass media mythologies.
Bruce and Norman Yonemoto Vault 1984, film still. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York