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Abstract:
Asian American film and video evolved out of the civil rights and ethnic studies movements, sharing with them a fundamental ideology of social change. However, a closer examination of its institutional history shows how this tradition conflicted with an equally important and at times contradictory discourse of aesthetics and form.
In Identities in Motion, film scholar Peter X. Feng marks the unexpected box office popularity of Chan Is Missing (Wayne Wang, 1981) as the beginning of a recognizable genre: Asian American film and video. The film "announced that Asian Americans could be artists, could be commercial filmmakers, and could support Asian American filmmaking, as well as successfully market Asian American films to wider audiences."1 What this particular origin point elides is the fact that Chan Is Missing, a neo-noir nominally about a search for a missing Chinese immigrant and more symbolically about Chinese American identity, began in the worid of independent Asian American film as a work of the avant-garde, a "dialectical" film, originally called Fire Over Water. After bewildering audiences with the work at small Asian American film festivals, Wang reedited that version, which eventually became the realist, narrative, fiction feature that has come to be known as the birth of a genre.
Yet another moment poses as an origin point of Asian American film and video: its sponsorship by public television. At around the same time in the early 1 980s, filmmakers and activists formed NAATA (National Asian American Telecommunications Association), which, with major funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, supported filmmakers, set up an educational distribution catalog, and most importandy, programmed documentaries to national public television.2 Both Chan Is Missing and NAATA exposed Asian American film and video to greater mainstream visibility and the subsequent need to conform die creative, filmmaking enterprise to the function of narrating the politics of Asian American identity. Yet, prior to institutionalization by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the growing indie film movement, Asian American media was imbued with much greater formal diversity, especially in experimental film and video. What concerns this article is the complex early history that led to these later apocryphal origin points of Asian American film and video. A comparison of the diverse films and discourse produced by...