Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film
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 Man, 1988) and perhaps most successfully, Wayne Wang
(b. 1949) (Chan Is Missing, 1982).
The 1990s witnessed innovative approaches to nonfiction 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 USborn). 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 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.