Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements by Jun Okada

Abstract

Reviewed by: Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements by Jun Okada Kent A. Ono (bio) Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements by Jun Okada. Rutgers University Press. 2015. $80.05 hardcover; $26.95 paper; $15.98 e-book. 180 pages. In Making Asian American Film and Video: History, Institutions, Movements, Jun Okada both surveys Asian American independent films and videos from 1970 to the present and carefully examines key representative works from this genre. Ultimately, she asks for more: more Asian American films and videos, more diversity of production, more political effectivity, more complexity, and more awareness of the political, cultural, economic, and social stakes involved in film and video production. The key contribution to scholarship of her book is its focus on Asian American documentary, avant-garde, and fictional films and videos in terms of their institutional production. Noteworthy in her study is the simultaneous emergence of a platform for diversifying public television and the birth of Asian American film and video. In the introduction, she locates her study within the scholarship on Asian American film and video published before her book and then briefly tells the history of the "Task Force on Minorities in Public Broadcasting." The task force produced a report, titled "A Formula for Change," which ultimately led to the creation of consortia responsible for encouraging the production of minority media. One consortium founded because of that report was the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA, later the Center for Asian American Media, or CAAM), which eventually became the largest distributor of Asian American films and videos, as well as home to the largest and most successful Asian American international film festival, the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF). Chapter 1, "Noble and Uplifting and Boring as Hell," details the history of Asian American film and video from 1971 to 1982. [End Page 164] Here, Okada explores numerous organizations, such as Visual Communications, EthnoCommunications, and Asian CineVision. Each played formative roles in the institutionalization of Asian American film and video. In this early period, films and videos made by California film students "had risen out of political necessity to fight institutional racism and invisibility within Hollywood and dominant media."1 Okada goes on to provide extended reviews of early representative films, such as Manzanar (Robert A. Nakamura, 1971), Wong Sinsaang (Eddie Wong, 1971), Chan Is Missing (Wayne Wang, 1982), Wataridori: Birds of Passage (Robert A. Nakamura, 1974), and Cruisin' J-Town (Duane Kubo, 1974). Although there was a strong ideological bent in films developing out of West Coast institutions, as well as an emphasis on collaborative and community authorship, at least one key Asian American film critic on the East Coast argued for a different foundation for Asian American film and video. Daryl Chin, programmer of the Asian American International Film Festival, argued for the need for experimental and avant-garde productions, including work not specifically affirming an Asian American identity. Okada offers a thoughtful consideration of filmmakers in this more formalist vein, such as Janice Tanaka and Bruce Yonemoto and Norman Yonemoto. Their aesthetically challenging works, which resist standard formal and ideological conventions of the genre of Asian American film and video to this point, deviated from previously institutionalized films, providing an important counterpoint. Chapter 2 tells two stories: one about the relationship that developed between NAATA and PBS, and the other about the SFIAAFF, which Okada understands to be representative of a counterpublic sphere. In the first story, she suggests that (at least on paper) NAATA's goals were incompatible with those of PBS. Whereas NAATA was committed to funding "a broad spectrum of films that 'present stories that convey the richness and diversity of Asian Pacific American experience,'" NAATA's agreement with PBS required NAATA to provide films "the Asian American community [could] embrace, but appeal to a larger mainstream audience, as well."2 These two goals were at odds, and this sometimes led NAATA to fund and promote films that had the potential to be legible to a broad audience but that did not "convey the richness and diversity of Asian Pacific American experience."3 Moreover, Okada observes a common dimension in her study...