Content area
Full text
The Locarno Film Festival is one of Europe's premier film events. Its unique feature is a nightly screening in the Piazza Grande where some 8,000 plus spectators view a recently released film on a gigantic screen. Seven other theaters and auditoriums show films and videos on a continuous basis from early morning until after midnight. Another hallmark of Locarno has been its retrospectives. This year the festival presented "Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema," the first-- ever attempt to chronicle the history of Asians in American cinema through the presentation of over sixty films and videos. The curator was Hong Kong-born film producer Roger Garcia, who spoke eloquently about 11 the broken history" of Asians in American film. Although Sessue Hayakawa, Anna May Wong, and Bruce Lee were all legendary matinee idols, Hayakawa was rejected for the Chinese lead in Broken Blossoms, Wong was rejected for a lead role in The Good Earth, and Lee was rejected for the lead in Kung Fu (the television series he conceived) in favor of actors in "yellow-face" makeup. In the postwar era, even as James Shigeta was effectively combating Asian stereotypes in various films, a prominent star such as Marlon Brando was performing in "yellow face" in The Teahouse of the August Moon (1956).
An important milestone in Asian-American film came in 1981 with Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing, an independent art-house film that took on the question of Asian-- American identity. Twelve years later Wang's adaptation of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club would bring those issues to mainstream audiences. In the succeeding decades, Asian Americans increasingly have been visible in both mainstream and independent productions, film and video, documentaries and features.
For purposes of the retrospective, Asian-- American cinema was defined as the cinema created by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Cambodian, or Vietnamese ancestry. Films imported from abroad and films by Asians who just happened to work in Hollywood were excluded. In this context, Garcia identified three broad categories of Asian-American film. Most dominant throughout the twentieth century were films that grappled with what were seen as exotic cultures. The Asian characters were usually foreign nationals, immigrants, or simply inscrutable Oriental Others. During the World War II era, the focus began to...