Please prepare a 2-page essay for 3 question sets (6 pages max). You can choose the first two from several options and your third is required for everyone to answer.
Read, and re-read the questions carefully, as you formulate your responses. Each essay is worth up to 33 points (everyone will get 1 free point); make an effort to write in an organized and substantive manner to fulfill as much of the point total as you can.
The Midterm Exam must be typed, double-spaced, and submitted/uploaded at our 165D Canvas Course Site by Wednesday, May 15. You may use your notes and consult the readings in preparing your essay answers. Talking with classmates to develop ideas can be useful and productive, but your writing must be original work. Re-viewing the visual/media material will definitely be helpful.
CHOOSE TWO question sets to write a response to from the following:
A) Compose a short essay involving Renee Tajima’s historical overview and analysis of Asian American Independent Filmmaking and Peter Feng’s writing, employing his chapter on Chan Is Missing and/or recalling how he defines “Asian American” and “Asian American Cinema” as laid out in lecture. What are the two stages that Asian American cinema has gone through? Elaborate upon them, and provide examples. How are these films expressly political? Name the particular characteristics in the Asian American film movements (developed in the 1960s and 1970s). What is the “anti-slick” approach to filmmaking, and the “politics of the imperfect aesthetic” that Tajima discusses? Three areas of concern are: funding, audience, venue; what are ways that you see the “watershed” film of the 1980s, Chan Is Missing, engaged with these concerns? What is Feng’s main argument in “Being Chinese American, Becoming Asian American”? How does he suggest we understand the contested term, “Asian-American” and why? One of the key objectives in forging Asian American cinema/media is to conceptualize and materialize subjectivity – what does it mean to have subjectivity (in a film or story)? Finally, respond to Tajima’s critique that the work of Asian American filmmakers gets “defined by thematic, not cinematic, significance” – that is, there is a false dichotomy between politics and art. What are examples you can identify from films/examples we have seen in class where the thematic is linked to the aesthetic or cinematic (not separated)? Consider especially: My America: Or Honk if you Love Buddha, The Grace Lee Project, All Orientals Look the Same, and/or Chan Is Missing (you can draw from other pieces if you choose).
B) Define Orientalism. Explain how is it about control? What is an ‘Other’? Illustrate examples of Orientalism, in specific terms, from films such as (including though not limited to): Broken Blossoms, The World of Suzie Wong, clips from The Slanted Screen and/or Slaying the Dragon; you might also want to refer to mainstream U.S. media
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depictions related to the Vietnam War. Scholar and critic Eugene Franklin Wong (who is seen in the documentary, Slaying the Dragon) argues that stereotypes have marketability – what do you think this means? Furthermore, why is Wong concerned about how (the lack of) knowledge influences the creation of images and stories? Define controlling images. How are controlling images part of an Orientalist discourse? Elaborate upon at least one an example. Compare the key points in John Tchen’s essay about the portrayal of the Chinese man in Broken Blossoms with Ono and Pham’s Chapter 2 (about Yellow Peril); how would you describe the two approaches and how they differ? Similarly, Gina Marchetti’s chapter about the White Knight and Peter Feng’s Nancy Kwan-dary analyze the representation of Asian women in relationship with Western white men, though Feng’s piece offers, potentially, a more optimistic/empowered view. Explain how so, by outlining their key points. Finally, using Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model, can you describe what a dominant, negotiated, or oppositional viewing experience of The World of Suzie Wong might be like?
C) Consider the following points of analysis by Anne Cheng, and then respond to some of the discussion questions about the film in your own written voice. Flower Drum Song: is a morality play about national identity; offers multiple narratives (diegetic, narrative, choreographic, musical) that tell very different stories about that identity; the film “astonishes simply because it fills the stage with Asian-looking bodies…. I propose that this visual impact complicates, rather than confirms, the Orientalist fantasy that this movie is supposed to offer. For the ‘real’ Asian bodies solicited to ‘play themselves,’ far from granting substance to the fiction, heighten the instability underlying such efforts of delineation.” The “visage of citizenship” (the face of ‘American’) is the question that raises anxiety that must be – according to both film and psychoanalytic theory – anxiety must be allayed. “…it is the very mode of that anxiety on which a peculiar form of melancholic national identity – what will be called ‘Asian Americaness’ – gets born.” Cheng’s main understanding of Flower Drum Song is that it represents Asian Americaness and Asian American identity, as melancholic, depressed, abject, and in the end, impossible (i.e., Helen Chao). The discussion questions are posted in Canvas; you are welcome to discern from the list a few you want to write responses to.
D) What does giving Don Bonus a camera allow him to do? Describe the way that he films his home and school; describe the emotions he expresses, mediated by the presence of the camera. What kind of storyteller would you describe him as? How is aka Don Bonus counterhegemonic, an example of presenting a counternarrative and countermemory? How is The Story of Vinh similar? What is the difference between an immigrant and a refugee? In The Story of Vinh, what are the competing narratives being offered? Why do you think Don has more agency than Vinh? Why do the two stories – and the two young men – come across so differently (even if both films are made by Asian American filmmakers)? What are the structural and directorial differences? Discuss the ending of each film, and how each (ideologically) concludes ~ i.e., the politics of the happy ending. What did you hear and learn about the context of militarism in The Story of Vinh and/or aka Don Bonus? How would you connect The Story of Vinh to another film you have seen in 165D?
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E) How do you see that ‘memory’ is produced? How do Janice Tanaka (Who’s Going To Pay for These Donuts, Anyway?) and/or Tad Nakamura (Pilgirmage) challenge or critique the cause for the loss of memory, the denial of memory? How does this then give their films – and their filmmaking process/project/effort – political as well as personal and artistic significance? What is the relationship between history and memory that both Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? and Pilgrimage portray? How do these films produce counter memory/ies? Kent Ono understands spectatorship as participatory (not passive or simply observatory). What does it mean to you to be a witness? Who Killed Vincent Chin? is also about memory and the experience of “historical consciousness.” Bill Nichols in his essay argues for the importance of collage as a crucial technique for representing the case of Vincent Chin. From your viewing experience of the film, how is this collage presented, what is its impact on you, and to what extent does such collage help you understand (if it does) the causes of Chin’s death? Does this skillful collage make the film feel less or more like a documentary? As with Renee Tajima-Pena’s film, My America: Or Honk if You Love Buddha, what are some cinematic and artistic techniques that Who Killed Vincent Chin? employs that make it an uncommon and innovative documentary? Describe how you respond to Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? and Pilgrimage as social documentaries.
F) One of three key arguments in Asian Americans and the Media, by Kent Ono and Vincent Pham (as laid out in Chapter 1) is that a critical intervention into media is possible. What are the other two? What is the methodology that the authors utilize in their project? Why do you think this approach is useful or necessary? Ono and Pham articulate two statements in setting up a theoretical framework, explain each of the two following quotations:
“Our overall theory about how media operate with regard to Asian Americans is that, because of a lack of systemic power within mainstream media production, they typically appear in ways that comport with colonial representations …” and “Such images … also have a mass psychological effect within US society; more importantly, these images are part of a history of image-making and story-production linked to historical and continuing systems of oppression.”
Respond to the question that Ono and Pham raise in the introductory chapter of our course textbook: “Do TV, film, and other media systems play an important role in maintaining a racialized social order …?” You can invoke examples from class as well as from outside of class if you like. Finally, thinking about the documentaries in particular about Hollywood – Slaying the Dragon about the patterns of representation of Asians and Asian American women in particular, and The Slanted Screen: Asian Men in Film and Television – what might you identify as a factor in the lack of significant change in the representation of Asian Americans?
Remember, you can write approximately 2 pages per Exam Question, and you can strive to organize your responses in a way that flows.
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REQUIRED QUESTION for Everyone:
Who Killed Vincent Chin? is about one of the most important civil rights cases involving Asian Americans. It is a key film and cultural text, which is successful not only in its cinematic and story-telling achievements but also as a political documentary. Address the questions below in prose form; that is, organize your thoughts and outline a plan to write a short essay about the film, Who Killed Vincent Chin? Ideally, you can foreground a main thesis, and incorporate many of the following:
What is the significance or rhetorical function of the title as mode of address?
Describe the uniqueness of the film form, of WKVC? and what effect/effectiveness it
produces? For example, how does WKVC? “derail narrative without destroying it?”
What does having no narrator serve to do?
What position are you, the viewer, placed in?
How – and why, does WKVC? present/propose alternative knowledge?
Do you think alternative forms of storytelling must be used (not classical, linear narrative)
to represent stories about Asian Americans? Why or why not?
Identify one or two examples of a cut or juxtaposition that affected you in viewing the
film, and explain the close analysis.
How do you feel, how do you react to the close-up shots of the interview with Ron
Ebens? With Lily Chin?
What is the role of African Americans in this film? Who are they?
What made this a difficult case to win? First as a civil case, then as a federal Civil Rights
case?
Ron Ebens may not be ‘a racist,’ but how is he in a position of ‘white’/race privilege –
What defines his whiteness?
Think about the concept that this was a “tragic accident.” And think about Ebens and his
family and friends. How, in their minds, was this something “that just happened”?…
Ask yourself: Would Vincent Chin have been beaten to death in the manner that he was
if he was white? Would Ron Ebens and his son have gotten off, found “not guilty,” if they were Black? Respond to the question that the film reiterates as the official legal dilemma: “Was it a case of racism, or a barroom brawl?”
Finally, relate WKVC? to at least one other film you have seen in 165D so far. EXTRA CREDIT (5 points). Answer in a few sentences:
Describe what Dumbfoundead performs and critiques in “Safe”? What cinematic techniques does he employ and what is the effect? How is the music video counter- hegemonic? Why do you think Dumbfoundead’s song is called, “Safe?” What image/moment stays with you, and why?
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Visual Texts (through Week 6):
All Orientals Look the Same (1986), and Black Sheep (1990), Valerie Soe The Grace Lee Project (2005), Grace Lee
My America … or Honk if You Love Buddha (1997), Renee Tajima-Pena Seeking Asian Female (2012), Debbie Lum
Slaying the Dragon (1988), Deborah Gee
The Slanted Screen: Asian Men in Film & Television (2006), Jeff Adachi
Profiles in Science (2002), Wes Kim
Broken Blossoms (1919), D.W. Griffith
Monday (2017), Dinh Thai
a.k.a. Don Bonus (1995), Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Ny
Yellow Brotherhood (2004), Tad Nakamura
The World of Suzie Wong (1960), Richard Quine, with Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006 ), Justin Lin Flower Drum Song (1961), Henry Koster
Forbidden City, U.S.A. (1989) Arthur Dong
Chan is Missing (1981), Wayne Wang
Another America (1996), Michael Cho
Mele Murals ( 2016), Tad Nakamura
Pilgrimage (2007), Tad Nakamura
Who’s Going to Pay for These Donuts Anyway? (1992), Janice Tanaka
Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987) Christine Choy and Renee Tajima
The Story of Vinh ( 1990), Keiko Tsuno
