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Abstract:
Tom Forman's 1922 film Shadows capitalizes on the link between the motion picture and its proto-cinematic forerunner, the shadow play. Like many early American films, it links the Chinese subject to shadow puppetry, theatricality, and magic in order to produce the mystical, mysterious "Oriental." The film's Orientalist discourse is routed through a nostalgic play with the origins of the screen image. The racialized figure that results stereotypes the Asian character while also creating a mythical status for the cinema.
On October 27, 1922, after months of pre-release publicity, Shadows (Tom Forman) premiered in New York to a crowd of producers, exhibitors, actors, academics, and journalists. The film, an adaptation of the 1917 short story "Ching Ching Chinaman," by Wilbur Daniel Steele, starred Lon Chaney as the Chinese launderer and outcast, Yen Sin. A week later, the producers took out a full-page ad in the exhibitors' trade magazine, Moving Picture World. Under the banner "We are Proud," the producers declared the premiere a rousing success. The ad highlighted the audience: "October 27th was the greatest day in our history! This was the day SHADOWS was first shown to an audience ... an audience that was as representative of the world and its viewpoints as an audience could possibly be. It comprised people from all walks of life and from every quarter of the globe ... there was Hayakawa ... Abe Blank of Des Moines ... E.V. Richards of New Orleans ... Sam Katz of Chicago ..."1
"Hayakawa" refers to Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, whose celebrity was well established in 1922. Perhaps best remembered today as the treacherous ivory merchant from Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915), Hayakawa had played both heroes and villains to critical and popular acclaim, with roles that sometimes played on, and sometimes challenged, the Oriental stereotype in American culture.2 The ad's barrage of endorsements for the film begins, significantly, with Hayakawa's: "Lon Chaney s characterization of an Oriental is the truest and most realistic impersonation an Occidental could possibly portray." Two screen Orientals come together here-the "real" one authenticating the impersonator. Together, they authorize the film as acceptable and believable, and around these two figures a "representative" audience gathers. The enthusiastic response to Chaney (which was not limited to Sessue...