Asian American Cinema



FROM SHORT SUBJECTS TO FEATURE FILMS

While the films produced by Sessue Hayakawa in the 1910s and 1920s are tenuously related to Asian American film production a half-century later, other filmmakers have a more direct relation by virtue of their subject matter and perspective, as well as their independent productions. The prehistory of Asian American cinema includes A Filipino/a in America (1938), a 16mm film produced by the University of Southern California student Doroteo Ines; the 8mm "home movies" shot by David Tatsuno in the Topaz internment camp during World War II (recognized in 1997 by the Library of Congress's National Film Registry); and Tom Tam's Tourist Bus Go Home (1969), a silent 8mm film documenting protests against tours of New York's Chinatown.

The period of the 1970s saw the rise of media arts collectives and centers and the filmmakers affiliated with them officially or unofficially. Many of their short films were shot without synchronized sound and utilized an essayistic mode of voice-over narration: Manzanar (Robert Nakamura, 1972), Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue (Curtis Choy, 1976), Wong Sinsaang (Eddie Wong, 1971). Loni Ding produced more conventional documentaries ( How We Got Here: The Chinese , 1976) as well as children's programming such as the series Bean Sprouts (1983). Nakamura, Duane Kubo, and others made Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980), arguably Asian American cinema's first feature-length narrative film.

Asian American cinema's networks are built around the spine of a number of regional media arts centers, supported by grants from federal and state agencies as well as private foundations. Los Angeles's Visual Communications (VC) was the first significant Asian American media-arts collective, coalescing around a core of filmmakers associated with the University of California Los Angeles's ethno-communications program. In 1971 VC was granted nonprofit status and produced a number of short films (primarily documentaries) over the next decade. In 1976 Asian CineVision (ACV) was founded in New York City. Centered initially in Chinatown, ACV organized workshops in video technique with the aim of producing programming for public-access cable, and it organized its first film festival in 1978. Following in ACV's footsteps, most of the media-arts organizations founded since have organized annual film festivals, including Seattle's King Street Media, Boston's Asian American Resource Workshop, and Washington, DC's Asian American Arts and Media. Chicago's Foundation for Asian American Independent Media (FAAIM), which evolved out of the Fortune4 group that organized a nationwide tour of Asian American rock bands, put on its first showcase in 1996: it remains to be seen whether future organizations will focus on maintaining production facilities or on promoting Asian American arts generally.

In 1980 the first conference of Asian American filmmakers was held in Berkeley, California. Motivated in part by the report "A Formula for Change" by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which identified the need for greater inclusion of minorities within PBS onscreen and off-, the conference produced a national organization, the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA) based in San Francisco. The NAATA organizers no doubt made note of the fact that CPB had provided funding to the Latino Consortium in 1979; CPB formally recognized the Latino Consortium and NAATA as "minority consortia" in 1980. In effect, CPB funds NAATA, which in turn funds independent filmmakers, whose projects are then slated for PBS broadcast. NAATA's mandate thus favors documentary projects suited for television broadcast, and the San Francisco Asian American International Film Festival features nonfiction programming to a greater degree than the annual festivals in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. (See Gong in Feng, Screening Asian Americans , pp. 101–110.)

The early 1980s saw the emergence of a number of documentarians in conjunction with PBS's increased receptivity to minority filmmakers. Loni Ding made Nisei Soldier (1983) and The Color of Honor (1987), and Christine Choy and Renee Tajima collaborated on Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987). Arthur Dong ( Forbidden City, USA , 1986) and Curtis Choy ( Fall of the I-Hotel , 1983) were joined by Steven Okazaki ( Unfinished Business , 1985; Days of Waiting , 1990) and Mira Nair (b. 1957) ( So Far from India , 1982; India Cabaret , 1985). Okazaki has continued to produce documentaries as well as feature films ( Living on Tokyo Time , 1987), while Nair has established herself as a feature filmmaker with Mississippi Masala (1991), Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996), and Monsoon Wedding (2001), as well as non–Asian-themed features such as Hysterical Blindness (2002) and Vanity Fair (2004). Other feature filmmakers to emerge in the decade include Peter Wang ( A Great Wall , 1986; The Laser

WAYNE WANG
b. Hong Kong, 12 January 1949

Named after John Wayne, Wang studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he also studied film history and production. Wang worked as a director for a television comedy in Hong Kong in the 1970s before returning to the San Francisco Bay area, working as an administrator for a Chinatown community organization and assisting in the production of children's television programming aimed at Chinese American children.

Chan Is Missing (1981), Wang's breakthrough feature, was originally planned as a video documentary about cab drivers. The cast, which combined theatrically trained actors skilled in improvisation with nonactors in supporting roles, was completed on a budget of $22,500, with the lion's share of funding coming from the American Film Institute and the National Endowment for the Arts. Along with sex, lies, and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989), Chan Is Missing has been credited with launching the independent film scene of the 1980s and 1990s.

Wang is perhaps best known for directing the 1993 screen adaptation of Amy Tan's best-selling debut novel The Joy Luck Club (1989), financed by Disney's Hollywood Pictures division and produced by Oliver Stone. In the intervening decade, Wang had directed two feature films with funding from public television's American Playhouse (both with Chinese American themes, including a 1989 adaptation of Louis Chu's 1961 novel Eat a Bowl of Tea ), an independent feature with predominantly white characters played by a cast of established actors, and a low-budget film (produced in collaboration with writer-director-actor Spencer Nakasako) drawing upon European art cinema Ă  la Jean-Luc Godard. Wang has demonstrated a commitment to guerrilla filmmaking: establishing himself as a skilled director of studio-owned properties, he has generally followed these mainstream projects with his own productions, taking advantage of technological developments such as digital video to restrict costs and facilitate an improvisatory approach. Blue in the Face (1995), for example, was improvised on the same sets and with much of the cast of Smoke (1995). Wang followed Anywhere But Here (1999), an adaptation of the novel by Mona Simpson, with The Center of the World (2001), shot on digital video and written in collaboration with (among others) Paul Auster, who had previously worked on Smoke and Blue in the Face .

Wang's early films, produced during a period of rapid growth and reconsolidation in the US film industry, have provided the template for independent Asian American feature filmmaking. Wang has expressed the desire not to get pigeonholed as an Asian American or Chinese filmmaker, but he has also returned repeatedly to Asian and Asian American themes. He has demonstrated a commitment to alternative cinematic modes that balances his lowbrow commercial films ( Maid in Manhattan [2002], Because of Winn-Dixie [2005], and Last Holiday , 2006). In many ways, Wang's career evinces the same liminality as Asian American cinema as a whole.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Chan Is Missing (1981), Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), The Joy Luck Club (1993), Smoke (1995)

FURTHER READING

Liu, Sandra. "Negotiating the Meaning of Access: Wayne Wang's Contingent Film Practice." In Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism , edited by Darrell Y. Hamamoto and Sandra Liu, 90–111. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Patterson, Richard. "Chan Is Missing, or How to Make a Successful Feature for $22,315.92." American Cinematographer 64 (February 1983): 32–39.

Wang, Wayne. Chan Is Missing . Edited by Diane Mei Lin Mark. Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1984.

Peter X Feng

Wayne Wang at the time of Blue in the Face (1995).

Man , 1988) and perhaps most successfully, Wayne Wang (b. 1949) ( Chan Is Missing , 1982).

The 1990s witnessed innovative approaches to non-fiction film and video as well as the emergence of a new generation of independent feature filmmakers. Spencer Nakasako collaborated on a series of "camcorder diaries" with Southeast Asian youth in the San Francisco Bay Area ( A.K.A. Don Bonus , 1995, with Sokly Ny; Kelly Loves Tony , 1998, with Kelly Saeteurn and Tony Saelio; Refuge , 2002, with Mike Siv). The video artists Richard Fung ( The Way to My Father's Village , 1988; My Mother's Place , 1990; Sea in the Blood , 2000), Rea Tajiri ( History and Memory , 1991), and Janice Tanaka ( Memories from the Department of Amnesia , 1989; Who's Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? , 1993) combined documentary technique with first-person videomaking in a series of strikingly personal video essays, while the experimental filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-Ha critiqued conventional ethnographic, documentary, and fiction film practices in Reassemblage (1982), Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), and A Tale of Love (1995). Tajiri has also directed a feature film, Strawberry Fields (1997), as well as a more conventional documentary, Yuri Kochiyama: Passion for Justice (1993, with Pat Saunders).

The feature filmmakers Quentin Lee and Justin Lin (b. 1973) collaborated on Shopping for Fangs (1997); Lin's Better Luck Tomorrow (2003) was picked up for commercial distribution by youth-oriented MTV Films. Tony Bui (b. 1973) established himself as an art-house filmmaker with Three Seasons (1999) and Green Dragon (2001). Certainly the most successful of these filmmakers was Ang Lee (b. 1954), whose first features were produced with Taiwanese funding ( Pushing Hands , 1992; The Wedding Banquet , 1993) and who has escaped pigeonholing with Emma Thompson's adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1993), as well as The Ice Storm (1997), Hulk (2003), based on the popular Marvel Comics character, and the gay-themed western Brokeback Mountain (2005).

The audience for Asian American film remains small: it is not just that there are fewer Asian Americans than African Americans and Latinos, but also that a smaller percentage of Asian Americans are regular consumers of film and the other arts, perhaps due to language barriers (foreign-born Asians outnumber US-born). To survive, independent filmmakers have relied heavily on grassroots and Internet-based publicity campaigns. The release strategy for The Debut (Gene Cajayon, 2000) and Robot Stories (Greg Pak, 2003) involved a city-by-city rollout, with reliance on e-mail lists to spread word of mouth. Evolving distribution technologies may impact independent filmmakers in surprising ways, perhaps bringing them into more direct contact with their audiences. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, regional film festivals, video distribution through NAATA, and airings on PBS are still the primary venues for Asian American cinema.

The return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997 precipitated an exodus of action stars and filmmakers. Hollywood has been eager to assimilate the expertise of these filmmakers as well as exploit their popularity in the Asian market. The impact of these new arrivals on Asian American feature filmmaking is uncertain. Directors have typically taken on mainstream US projects without discernible Asian content. Actors such as Chow Yun-fat (b. 1955) ( The Replacement Killers , 1998; Bulletproof Monk , 2003) and Jet Li (b. 1963) ( Romeo Must Die , 2000; Cradle 2 the Grave , 2003), by virtue of their appearances on screen, sometimes inspire narratives that account for their presence on US soil—either marking them as foreign or temporary visitors, or narrativizing their immigration status. Such movies arguably dramatize

The ensemble cast of Wayne Wang's The Joy Luck Club (1993).
an Asian American context. However, it is also the case that the importation of established stars does little to increase the visibility of Asian American independent filmmaking. From Hollywood's perspective, the Asian American audience (as a market) is equally receptive to escapist entertainment with established Asian stars as it is to independent (not to say art-house) movies with unknown Asian American stars.

In contrast with the Hong Kong industry, there has been virtually no crossover from the Hindi cinema of India (known as Bollywood). Indian film stars have occasionally appeared in English-language films produced in Canada and the United Kingdom, which is not surprising given patterns of Indian migration between former Commonwealth nations. The most notable US-based filmmaker of South Asian ancestry is Mira Nair, who has produced films in the United States as well as in India. Interestingly, many of these films produced by Britons and Canadians of South Asian ancestry, such as Hanif Kureishi (b. 1954), Gurinder Chadha (b. 1966), and Deepa Mehta (b. 1950), have much in common with Asian American narrative filmmaking. While the context of the north of England may differ significantly from that of the Atlantic seaboard of the United States, thematizations of acculturation, racism, and romance suggest that much can be learned by taking a "diasporic" approach, comparing films made by Asian minorities in "Western" (English-speaking) countries. Many of Kureishi's films have been produced by Channel Four Films (later Film Four) or for the BBC; like NAATA and CPB in the United States, then, the national television service in the United Kingdom is specifically tasked to distribute money to diverse, often first-time filmmakers. Unlike the US system, however, Channel Four funds primarily narrative features.

SEE ALSO Diasporic Cinema ; Race and Ethnicity

Feng, Peter X. Identities in Motion: Asian American Film and Video . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

——, ed. Screening Asian Americans . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Garcia, Roger, ed. Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema . Milan: Edizioni Olivares, 2001.

Hamamoto, Darrell, and Sandra Liu, eds. Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Leong, Russell, ed. UCLA Asian American Studies Center and Visual Communications. Moving the Image: Independent Asian Pacific American Media Arts . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991.

Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism . New York: Vintage–Random House, 1979.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Wong, Eugene Franklin. On Visual Media Racism . New York: Arno Press, 1978.

Peter X Feng



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