Clockwise from top left: Big Trouble in Little China, Enter the Dragon, M. Butterfly, The Joy Luck Club, Charlie Chan in Honolulu and Flower Drum Song 20THCENTFOX/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION (2); COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION (3); TAKASHI SEIDA/GEFFEN PICTURES/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION
The program, curated by documentarian and Academy member Arthur Dong, features both celebration and critique of the first century of depicting Chinese in cinema.
The Academy Museum is dedicating November to a monthlong reflection on the history of Chinese depictions in cinema.
“Hollywood Chinese: The First 100 Years,” programmed by documentarian and longtime Academy member Arthur Dong, is a screening series of features and shorts – some classics, some obscurities – that mark both highlights and lowlights of how Chinese have been portrayed in film, particularly in the Western studio system. The series is an evolution of Dong’s 2007 documentary, which kicks off the series Nov. 4, and 2019 book of the same name.
In his programming of the series, Dong intends to help attendees reckon with the complicated and sometimes contradictory legacy of Chinese portrayals in Hollywood, sometimes within the same film, such as Charlie Chan in Hollywood, The Sand Pebbles (which earned Makoto Iwamatsu an Oscar supporting actor nomination) and even Flower Drum Song. “Flower Drum Song is one of my all-time favorite films, it’s celebratory, but as David Henry Hwang says, it’s a film that has a lot of guilty pleasures. Sand Pebbles is beautifully made and kickstarted Mako’s decades-long career on screen and stage and put him on the map. But it’s about colonialism and white saviors and Chinese prostitutes and lecherous Chinese men played by James Hong,” says the programmer. “Most if not all the films have questions but also levels of celebration, of saying that we should be proud of what we’ve accomplished – within context – and we should take the critique in context and move forward and learn from all that.”