Making Asian American Film and Video

Making Asian American Film and Video

Author: Jun Okada

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-03-06

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0813565030

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The words “Asian American film” might evoke a painfully earnest, low-budget documentary or family drama, destined to be seen only in small film festivals or on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). In her groundbreaking study of the past fifty years of Asian American film and video, Jun Okada demonstrates that although this stereotype is not entirely unfounded, a remarkably diverse range of Asian American filmmaking has emerged. Yet Okada also reveals how the legacy of institutional funding and the “PBS style” unites these filmmakers, whether they are working within that system or setting themselves in opposition to its conventions. Making Asian American Film and Video explores how the genre has served as a flashpoint for debates about what constitutes Asian American identity. Tracing a history of how Asian American film was initially conceived as a form of public-interest media, part of a broader effort to give voice to underrepresented American minorities, Okada shows why this seemingly well-intentioned project inspired deeply ambivalent responses. In addition, she considers a number of Asian American filmmakers who have opted out of producing state-funded films, from Wayne Wang to Gregg Araki to Justin Lin. Okada gives us a unique behind-the-scenes look at the various institutions that have bankrolled and distributed Asian American films, revealing the dynamic interplay between commercial and state-run media. More than just a history of Asian Americans in film, Making Asian American Film and Video is an insightful meditation on both the achievements and the limitations of institutionalized multiculturalism.


Identities in Motion

Identities in Motion

Author: Peter X Feng

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2002-08-14

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0822383985

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This innovative book shows how Asian American filmmakers and videomakers frame and are framed by history—how they define and are defined by cinematic projections of Asian American identity. Combining close readings of films and videos, sophisticated cultural analyses, and detailed production histories that reveal the complex forces at play in the making and distributing of these movies, Identities in Motion offers an illuminating interpretative framework for assessing the extraordinary range of Asian American films produced in North America. Peter X Feng considers a wide range of works—from genres such as detective films to romantic comedies to ethnographic films, documentaries, avant-garde videos, newsreels, travelogues, and even home movies. Feng begins by examining movies about three crucial moments that defined the American nation and the roles of Asian Americans within it: the arrival of Chinese and Japanese women in the American West and Hawai’i; the incorporation of the Philippines into the U.S. empire; and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In subsequent chapters Feng discusses cinematic depictions of ideological conflicts among Asian Americans and of the complex forces that compel migration, extending his nuanced analysis of the intersections of sexuality, ethnicity, and nationalist movements. Identities in Motion illuminates the fluidity of Asian American identities, expressing the diversity and complexity of Asian Americans—including Filipinos, Indonesians, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Laotians, Indians, and Koreans—from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.


The Making of Asian America

The Making of Asian America

Author: Erika Lee

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-09

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 1476739404

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"In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. But as ... historian Erika Lee reminds us, Asian Americans also have deep roots in the country. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day. An epic history of global journeys and new beginnings, this book shows how generations of Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants have made and remade Asian American life in the United States: sailors who came on the first trans-Pacific ships in the 1500s to the Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. Over the past fifty years, a new Asian America has emerged out of community activism and the arrival of new immigrants and refugees. No longer a "despised minority," Asian Americans are now held up as America's "model minorities" in ways that reveal the complicated role that race still plays in the United States. Published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the United States' Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that has remade our "nation of immigrants," this is a new and definitive history of Asian Americans. But more than that, it is a new way of understanding America itself, its complicated histories of race and immigration, and its place in the world today"--Jacket.


Ghostlife of Third Cinema

Ghostlife of Third Cinema

Author: Glen M. Mimura

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0816648301

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Asian American filmmakers and video artists have created a substantial, diverse, and challenging body of work that reimagines the cultural and political representation of Asian Americans. Yet much of this work remains unknown. Ghostlife of Third Cinema examines such potent issues as diasporic identity, historical memory, and queer sexuality through sophisticated readings of a wide range of film and video projects, includingTrinh T. Minh-ha's experimental documentary Surname Viet Given Name Nam;avant-garde works by Japanese American filmmakers Rea Tajiri, Lise Yasui, andJanice Tanaka; and queer videos exploring the intersection of race, nation, andsexuality by Pablo Bautista, Ming-Yuen Ma, and Nguyen Tan Hoang.


Making Asian American Film and Video

Making Asian American Film and Video

Author: Jun Okada

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-03-06

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 0813573955

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The words “Asian American film” might evoke a painfully earnest, low-budget documentary or family drama, destined to be seen only in small film festivals or on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service). In her groundbreaking study of the past fifty years of Asian American film and video, Jun Okada demonstrates that although this stereotype is not entirely unfounded, a remarkably diverse range of Asian American filmmaking has emerged. Yet Okada also reveals how the legacy of institutional funding and the “PBS style” unites these filmmakers, whether they are working within that system or setting themselves in opposition to its conventions. Making Asian American Film and Video explores how the genre has served as a flashpoint for debates about what constitutes Asian American identity. Tracing a history of how Asian American film was initially conceived as a form of public-interest media, part of a broader effort to give voice to underrepresented American minorities, Okada shows why this seemingly well-intentioned project inspired deeply ambivalent responses. In addition, she considers a number of Asian American filmmakers who have opted out of producing state-funded films, from Wayne Wang to Gregg Araki to Justin Lin. Okada gives us a unique behind-the-scenes look at the various institutions that have bankrolled and distributed Asian American films, revealing the dynamic interplay between commercial and state-run media. More than just a history of Asian Americans in film, Making Asian American Film and Video is an insightful meditation on both the achievements and the limitations of institutionalized multiculturalism.


Identities in Motion

Identities in Motion

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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DIVConsiders questions of Asian American Identity and issues of homeland and home in Asian American film./div


The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media

The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media

Author: Lori Kido Lopez

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-02-24

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1317540840

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The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media offers readers a comprehensive examination of the way that Asian Americans have engaged with media, from the long history of Asian American actors and stories that have been featured in mainstream film and television, to the birth and development of a distinctly Asian American cinema, to the ever-shifting frontiers of Asian American digital media. Contributor essays focus on new approaches to the study of Asian American media including explorations of transnational and diasporic media, studies of intersectional identities encompassed by queer or mixed race Asian Americans, and examinations of new media practices that challenge notions of representation, participation, and community. Expertly organized to represent work across disciplines, this companion is an essential reference for the study of Asian American media and cultural studies.


Countervisions

Countervisions

Author: Darrell Y. Hamamoto

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9781566397766

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Spotlighting Asian Americans on both sides of the motion picture camera, Countervisions examines the aesthetics, material circumstances, and politics of a broad spectrum of films released in the last thirty years. This anthology focuses in particular on the growing presence of Asian Americans as makers of independent films and cross-over successes. Essays of film criticism and interviews with film makers emphasize matters of cultural agency--that is, the practices through which Asian American actors, directors, and audience members have shaped their own cinematic images. One of the anthology's key contributions is to trace the evolution of Asian American independent film practice over thirty years. Essays on the Japanese American internment and historical memory, essays on films by women and queer artists, and the reflections of individual film makers discuss independent productions as subverting or opposing the conventions of commercial cinema. But Countervisions also resists simplistic readings of "mainstream" film representations of Asian Americans and enumerations of negative images. Writing about Hollywood stars Anna May Wong and Nancy Kwan, director Wayne Wang, and erotic films, several contributors probe into the complex and ambivalent responses of Asian American audiences to stereotypical roles and commerical success. Taken together, the spirited, illuminating essays in this collection offer an unprecedented examination of a flourishing cultural production. Author note: Darrell Y. Hamamoto is Associate Professor in the Asian American Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Nervous Laughter: Television Situation Comedy and Liberal Democratic Ideology, Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Poltics of Television Representation, and New American Destinies: a Reader in Contemporary Asian and Latino Immigration. Sandra Liu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley.


Asian America Through the Lens

Asian America Through the Lens

Author: Jun Xing

Publisher: Rowman Altamira

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780761991762

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In Asian America Through the Lens, Jun Xing surveys Asian American cinema, allowing its aesthetic, cultural, and political diversity and continuities to emerge.


Moving the Image

Moving the Image

Author: Russell Leong

Publisher:

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13:

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"s the first volume to document the remarkable body of film, video, and radio produced by Asian and Pacific Americans from the 1960s to the 1990s. Fifty award-winning filmmakers, media artists, and writers speak firsthand to issues of generation and gender, ethnicity and nationality, which shape their imagery and identities. Three introductory essays provide an overview to the subject: Stephen Gong, of the Pacific Film Archives in Berkeley, surveys the role of Asian American media organizations in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco; Renee Tajima, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, charts twenty years of Asian American filmmaking; and Russell Leong, editor of UCLA's Amerasia Journal brings forth key issues on media culture and the Asian American experience."--Back cover.