Asian American Cinema

Definition of Asian American Cinema

Broadly Defined:

All films and videos produced by filmmakers who are Asian descents in the United States

Narrowly defined:

Independently produced films that evince an Asian American sensibility (perspective) and/or Asian American subject matter.

History of Asian American Cinema

The very beginning of Asian American Cinema can be traced back to early twenty centuries. Before that, most of the movies made non-Asians performed the oriental concepts by using racialized make-up, settings, and costumes. The film productions in early times, most Asian-American actors’ roles were limited to the background and in offensive roles. Not until 1920s there are two actresses- Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa became veritable superstars. However, in the dominance of Hollywood, many Asian origins were frustrated because there were still very few works available in American films or they can only play supporting roles for white people in yellow face.

In 1960s, little had changed. Asian-American theaters started to prosper and its growth in the 1970s coinciding with the decline of the Hollywood studio system, all that began to change with the rebirth of Asia-American Cinema. The first socially aware Asian-American theatre company, East West Players, was founded in 1965. And then in 1970, Visual Communications was established, which is the oldest community-based media arts center in the US today. This organization held Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival annually after 1983. Frank Chin founded the Asian American Theater Workshop in San Francisco in 1972 to encourage plays focused on the lives of Asian Americans. Two of Chin’s movies- Chickencoop Chinaman (1972) and Year of the Dragon (1974) are the first Chinese American produced movies that focused on the complexities of Asian identity in America.

The growth of Asian-American theaters provided an amount of film works for Asian Pacific American Actors. As a result, Asian-Americans started to appear on TV and films in increasing numbers, playing roles that occasionally challenged the stereotypes and bit parts they'd been relegated to in mainstream America.

At the same time, in 1970s, more than 130,000 refugees arrived to America from Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, drastically changing the make-up of the Asian-American population, challenging the mid '60s-born concept of Asians as "the model minority. The next 30 years, the number of Asian American continued increasing gradually.

With those efforts and factors, Asian American cinema has been budding since then. It took off in 1980s, and by the '90s, the scope of Asian-American Cinema broadened considerably. This trend still continued in the 2000s.