Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

ASIANAMERICANCINEMA
Asian American cinema, broadly defined, refers to all
films (and videos) produced by filmmakers of Asian
descent in the United States. More narrowly defined,
Asian American cinema refers to independently produced
films that evince an Asian American sensibility (perspective)
and/or Asian American subject matter. Materially
speaking, only a small fraction of Asian American films
achieve commercial distribution: the vast majority are
exhibited at film festivals, broadcast on public television,
and increasingly are sold directly to home viewers (often
via the Internet). While feature-length narrative films
achieve more visibility, documentaries dominate festival
and television programming.
The term ‘‘Asian American’’ first received currency
through its adoption on college campuses in the late
1960s. In years past, Americans of Asian ancestry tended
to identify (and form organizations) with nations of
origin (China, Korea, and so on). The civil rights era
produced new racial formations, among them a growing
panethnic sense of Asian American identity, at least
among English-speaking Asians born in the United
States. These shifting sensibilities are reflected in government
policy, which has come increasingly to recognize
panethnic terms such as ‘‘Asian’’ and ‘‘Pacific Islander,’’
displacing an emphasis on national origin.
In an important sense, then, Asian American cinema
could not exist before the ‘‘Asian American’’ conception
of racial identity gained acceptance. Furthermore, while
some filmmakers might identify themselves as Asian
Americans (and their films might thereby evince an
Asian American sensibility), without the existence of networks
of filmmakers, institutions devoted to the production
and distribution of films, and an audience or
marketplace for the films, the label of Asian American
cinema remains purely academic. Therefore, while the
term ‘‘Asian American’’ might be applied retrospectively
to describe people or films made before the 1960s, such
semantic relabeling obscures the historical specificity of
films produced by cultural institutions established in
the 1970s and 1980s, although a prehistory of Asian
American cinema can be traced back to the 1910s.
PRECURSORS
Asian Americans have been prominently involved in the
US film industry since the 1910s. While none of these
filmmakers may have thought of themselves as ‘‘Asian
Americans,’’ many of the most famous demonstrated a
racial consciousness that suggests they are ancestors of
the ethnically identified filmmakers who followed in their
footsteps. For example, after the matinee idol Sessue
Hayakawa (1889–1973) made such an impression as a
villain in The Cheat (Cecil B. DeMille, 1915) he contractually
required Paramount to cast him as the hero
(and often romantic lead) as often as they employed him
as a villain. When The Cheat was reissued in 1918,
Hayakawa’s character was identified as Burmese in deference
to Japan’s role as a wartime ally; given that context
of racial sensitivity, it is reasonable to conclude that
Hayakawa was motivated by concerns about racial stereotyping
as much as by an actor’s desire for varied roles.
With the founding of Haworth Pictures in 1918,
Hayakawa became arguably the first Asian to head a US
production company. Films such as The Dragon Painter
(1919) were set in Japan, evinced themes drawn from
Japanese philosophy, and influenced later generations of
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 123