Film Studies

While some Asian American films and filmmakers are beginning to achieve acclaim in mainstream U.S. culture, neither academic scholars nor society as a whole has sufficiently taken account of the history of this rich and growing body of cinematic production. In Asian America Through the Lens, Jun Xing accomplishes the colossal task of surveying Asian American cinema for the first time, allowing its aesthetic, cultural, and political diversity and continuities to emerge. ...

The words "Asian American film" might evoke a painfully earnest, low-budget documentary or family drama, destined to be seen only in small film festivals or on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). In her groundbreaking study of the past fifty years of Asian American film and video, Jun Okada demonstrates that although this stereotype is not entirely unfounded, a remarkably diverse range of Asian American film-making has emerged. Yet Okada also reveals how the legacy of institutional funding and the "PBS style" unites these filmmakers, whether they are working within that system or setting themselves in opposition to its conventions. ...

This innovative essay collection explores Asian American cinematic representations historically and socially, on and off screen, as they contribute to the definition of American character. The history of Asian Americans on movie screens, as outlined in Peter X Feng's introduction, provides a context for the individual readings that follow. Asian American cinema is charted in its diversity, ranging across activist, documentary, experimental, and fictional modes, and encompassing a wide range of ethnicities (Filipino, Vietnamese, Indian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Taiwanese). ...

Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown. For Mimura, Asian American cinema is the spectral, ghostly return of the international film movement known as Third Cinema. Tracing contemporary Asian American cinema as a continuation of Third Cinema's radical enterprise of making marginalized subjects visible in the First World, Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, including Trinh T. Minh-ha's experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam; avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, and Janice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, and sexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang. ...

Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from WWII to the Present charts how the dominant white and black binary of American racial discourse influences Hollywood's representation of the Asian. The Orientalist buddy film draws a scenario in which two buddies, one white and one black, transcend an initial hatred for one another by joining forces against a foreign Asian menace. ...

Yellow Future examines the emergence and popularity of techno-oriental representations in Hollywood cinema since the 1980s, focusing on the ways East Asian peoples and places have become linked with technology to produce a collective fantasy of East Asia as the future. Jane Chi Hyun Park demonstrates how this fantasy is sustained through imagery, iconography, and performance that conflate East Asia with technology, constituting what Park calls oriental style. ...

Asian American cinema refers to an ongoing struggle for moving image representation by and about Asian Americans in the United States. The civil rights and Third World movements having established a group identity that now included previously disparate groups, the Asian American cinema movement identified a systematic social problem: the invisibility and misrepresentation of Asian Americans in mainstream industry representations, that is, their absence on screen signified a lack of power in shaping US politics and history. ...

This film documents the representation and involvement of the Chinese in American cinema from the silent era to the 21st century. While celebrating their contributions to American filmmaking a haunting and telling undercurrent of racism and stereotypes weaves its way in, suggestive of the difficulties that Chinese men and women found working in Hollywood--particularly in the early years. As a historical footnote, Dong also makes film history by rediscovering and editing in footage from what is alleged to be the first Asian-American film ever made: the 1916 The Curse of Quon Gwon directed by Marion Wong.

From silent film star Sessue Hayakawa to Harold & Kumar Go to Whitecastle, The Slanted Screen explores the portrayals of Asian men in American cinema, chronicling the experiences of actors who have had to struggle against ethnic stereotyping and limiting roles. The film presents a critical examination of Hollywood's image-making machine, through a fascinating parade of 50 film clips spanning a century.

Describes racial and gender stereotyping of Asian women in U.S. motion pictures as well as other filmic media, with Reloaded updating the original documentary by noting the effects of globalization and a changing population within the past 25 years. Includes interviews with actresses and other Asian American women who describe their experiences of such stereotyping.