Asian American Cinema

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 Asian American artists (for example, the jazz musician Mark Izu, who composed a score for The Dragon Painter).

If Hayakawa struggled with the roles granted him by Hollywood, the options open to Anna May Wong (1905–1961) were limited still more. As a woman, Wong was typically cast as either a "Butterfly" or a "Dragon Lady," the specifically orientalist inflections of the woman as victim and vamp. At the age of seventeen, Wong starred in The Toll of the Sea (1922), Technicolor's first feature film using its two-strip color process. The film's plot was lifted from Madame Butterfly: Lotus Flower surrenders her child to her American lover and his white wife and then commits suicide. This was the first of many roles in which convention dictated that Wong's character expire to redress the taboo of interracial romance. Citing her frustration with such limitations, Wong departed in 1928 for Europe, where she tackled some of the most interesting and complex roles of her career in films such as Schmutziges Geld (Song, 1928) and Piccadilly (1929). Wong's European roles were still orientalist, with her exotic sexuality emphasized in the manner of her contemporary Josephine Baker (1906–1975), but her characters often drove the plot, exhibiting an agency largely absent from her US roles. In the early 1930s Wong crossed the Atlantic frequently to make films such as Shanghai Express (1932) in the United States and Chu Chin Chow (1934) in England. After losing the lead role in MGM's adaptation of Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth (1937) to the white actress Luise Rainer (b. 1910), Wong traveled to China to see her family and to study Mandarin. Wong was received with some controversy in China, where many in the cultural elite had disapproved of many of her film roles. Wong's film career was virtually ended by the mid-1940s, although she did star in a mystery series for the Dumont Network in 1951 (The Gallery of Madame Lui-Tsong).

Winifred Eaton Reeve was most likely the first significant Hollywood screenwriter of Asian ancestry. Born in Montreal in 1875 as Winifred Eaton to an English father and a Chinese mother, Eaton adopted a Japanese persona and published a number of best-selling novels under the pen name Onoto Watanna in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Arriving in New York in 1924, she was hired to head the scenario department at Universal's New York headquarters, then transferred to Hollywood the following year. She is credited with a half-dozen screenplays in the late 1920s, most notably Shanghai Lady (with Houston Branch, 1929) and East Is West (with Tom Reed, 1930).

James Wong Howe (1899–1976) immigrated to the United States from China with his family at the age of five. Hollywood lore has it that Howe, while working as a still photographer for Famous Players–Lasky, was championed by the actor Mary Miles Minter (1902–1984) and given the opportunity to shoot two of her films in 1923. Over the next fifty years, Howe shot over 125 feature films, winning Academy Awards^® for The Rose Tattoo (1955) and Hud (1962). He is known as an innovator in deep-focus cinematography, the use of low-hung ceilings (Transatlantic [1931]), and hand-held camera work (he shot the boxing sequence in Body and Soul [1947] on roller skates), and most of all for his lighting. Howe directed only two feature films, the story of the Harlem Globetrotters, Go, Man, Go! (1954), and Richard Derr's 1958 portrait of Lamont Cranston, the Shadow, The Invisible Avenger.

REPRESENTATION AND STEREOTYPES

Representations of Asians have been at the center of US film history from its inception. At the turn of the twentieth century, interest in the Spanish-American War was met with both "actualités" (documentary or news footage) and "reenactments" (staged depictions of key events). These early representations drew from US attitudes toward other races: early cartoons depicted Filipinos as vaguely African in appearance, for example, and a 1899 film, Filipinos Retreat from Trenches, employed African American actors to portray Filipino insurgents. Throughout film history, cinematic portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans have shifted in response to world events and US foreign policy on the one hand, and have drawn from a legacy of Western attitudes toward the "Orient" on the other.

Edward Said's influential 1979 book Orientalism had a major impact on postcolonial studies, cultural studies generally, and literary studies specifically. Said argued that orientalism was not a politically neutral field of knowledge, but rather a system of governing the so-called Orient. (Note that in Europe the term "Orient" has traditionally referred to North Africa [the "Middle East"] and the Indian subcontinent [the "Near East"], whereas in the United States "Orient" typically refers to the "Far East.") While Said was specifically concerned with representations of the Middle East, scholars interested in East Asia and in Asian Americans have appropriated the term. Said argued that European writings did not illuminate the Orient so much as they revealed European attitudes about neighboring lands. After Said, then, to label a text as "orientalist" is to imply that it is culturally biased, trafficking in stereotypes of sensuality, decadence, and weakness.

Said touched briefly on the sexual aspects of orientalism, but did not fully develop these arguments. Said's conception of orientalism as the will to dominate and possess is entirely congruent with patriarchal sexuality. The "white man's burden" (the title of an 1899 poem by Rudyard Kipling, subtitled "The United States") justifies imperial domination under the guise of uplift, but is then faced with a dilemma of integration and assimilation. In Gayatri C. Spivak's formulation, the white man's burden is specifically inflected as "white men saving brown women from brown men" (287), thus allowing for simultaneously repressing Asian masculinity and celebrating Asian femininity.

Rapidly changing geopolitical circumstances, such as shifting attitudes toward US colonialism in Asia, produced complex and contradictory representations. Shifting US relations with China offer another example: in the 1920s and 1930s Hollywood depicted Chinese as despots or warlords, most famously in the figure of Fu Manchu. As China developed into an ally, the Charlie Chan figure gained ascendance, but when the Communists came to power in 1949, Hollywood shifted its attention back to Japan and Korea, where US military presence was bringing Americans into closer contact with Asia.

Fu Manchu, created by Sax Rohmer (1883–1959) (Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward) in the 1910s, is the prototypical despot bent on world domination. Fu Manchu's criminal successes are dependent not just on his position as king of a criminal underworld, but also on his tremendous intellect and scientific genius. Fu Manchu is simultaneously ascetic and sexually threatening, which is to say that his Scotland Yard foes suppose his deviance to extend to misogyny even as he seems repulsed by virile masculinity. In seeming polar opposition to Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan represents law and order. Created by Earl Derr Biggers (1884–1933), the Chinese detective from Honolulu was portrayed by Warner Oland (1879–1938) in a popular series of films produced by Fox from 1931 to 1942. Upon Oland's death in 1938 the role was taken over by Sidney Toler (1874–1947), and when Fox ended production Toler continued to play Chan in a series produced at Monogram starting in 1944. Upon Toler's death, Roland Winters (1904–1989) took on the role until the Monogram series ended in 1949. (In total, Fox made twenty-seven films, Monogram made seventeen.) Accompanied by his "Number One Son" (played with all-American vim by Keye Luke [1904-1991]), who did much of his legwork, Chan traveled the globe, and his reputation as a brilliant detective preceded him and typically won over racist skeptics. Chan is perhaps best known for his aphorisms, witty sayings that have been derided by his detractors as "fortune-cookie philosophy."

Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan are seeming opposites, but both were known for their keen intellects and weak bodies (both men delegated strenuous activity to their children—Fu Manchu to his vamp daughter, Chan to his eldest son). Another curious point of similarity is their paradoxical sexuality: Fu simultaneously asexual and predatory, Chan seemingly shy but blessed with dozens of children. In Hollywood films, such paradoxes were typical for Asian masculinity. The "chink" in Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919), played by Richard Barthelmess (1895–1963), is a noble figure in large part due to his refusal to act on the sexual desires that inspire his devotion; General Yen (Nils Asther) in The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933) commits suicide and thus spares the missionary (Barbara Stanwyck) the need to resolve her own anxieties about miscegenation.

The situation for Asian femininity was somewhat different. The roles accorded to Asian and Asian American women in the studio era were of course constrained by Hollywood conceptions of gender. Career women, regardless of race, were portrayed as homewreckers or dragon ladies of a sort. Nevertheless, US attitudes toward miscegenation cannot be discounted when considering cinematic depictions of gender. Romantic relationships between Asian women and white men were far more prevalent than those between Asian men and white women, in accordance with US perceptions about cultural difference and assimilation (men posed a threat of ineradicable foreignness while women had the potential for absorption into US culture). In the years following World War II, when US gender roles were being redefined in large part due to the legacy of Rosie the Riveter, the popular representation of working women during the period, the perceived traditionalism of Asian cultures (an orientalist perception) marked Asian women as domestically oriented and subservient. Concurrently, the US occupation of Japan and Okinawa following World War II, and US involvement in the war in Korea (1950–1953), were responsible for significant numbers of interracial marriages (between US servicemen and foreign nationals) as well as, perhaps, an association of Asian women with prostitution. In the 1957 film Sayonara, Marlon Brando (1924–2004) portrayed an Air Force officer stationed in occupied Japan who falls in love with a Japanese woman (Miiko Taka) after much soul-searching. The film's message of racial tolerance is put in service of a conservative affirmation of the sexist ideology of romantic love. The apotheosis of romantic melodrama in this mode was The World of Suzie Wong (1960), adapted from a Broadway play that was in turn adapted from a best-selling novel by Richard Mason (1919–1997). An American expatriate (William Holden) falls in love with a Hong Kong prostitute (Nancy Kwan) and (again, after much soul-searching) asks her to follow him (presumably, back home to the United States). While Sayonara's heroine was a woman of some social standing, Suzie Wong transmitted the notion that Asian women are inherently submissive, even to the point of depicting Suzie's friends complimenting her for inspiring violent jealousy in her lover.

These romantic melodramas differed from pre-1940 tragic romance narratives by allowing the interracial attraction to be consummated. Movies made under the Production Code generally ended with the death of one of the lovers (with the white partner surviving more often than not). Furthermore, the Asian characters were typically portrayed by a white actor made up in "yellow face" makeup (minimally, minor prosthetics to alter the shape of the eyes). Cultural conventions dictated that if the characters were of different races, it would be preferable if the actors were both white. Thus the practice of "yellow face" casting was driven not solely by economic concerns (casting a film with established white stars in favor of unknown Asian American actors), but also by responsiveness to societal taboos.

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 à 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

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 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

FURTHER READING

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