making films asian american

Last week's bell hooks essay discussed the fine line between African American authors becoming defined by broad stereotypes of African American culture, and dismissing or distancing themselves from the identity completely. "Making Films Asian American" touches on the same issue, asking whether Asian American filmmakers can push the boundaries of categorized "Asian American low-budget cinema" while resisting the crossover to mainstream (white) hollywood cinema. Projansky and Ono quote Roddy Bogawa's essay, "An(other) Reflection on Race?": "For artists of color, expectations of what their work should investigate simultaneously dictate what the work should not explore...They construct Asian-American filmmaking as a uniform practice, ignoring the diverse complexities of each film and each filmmaker. Their function is to stereotype, control, and marginalize" (277). Still, Asian American filmmakers who wholly resist definition as Asian Americans compromise an important part of their identity: "[Peter X. Feng] notes that Asian and Asian American filmmakers tend to cross over to relatively big-budget Hollywood pictures only when they "have either submerged their Asian identities to make films about white Americans or have added Asian 'flavor' to Hollywood films" (265).

Both hooks' and Projansky and Ono's essays advocate a happy medium between individual and group identity, embracing the authentic while trying to stave away the stereotypes. I appreciate P & O's argument that the filmmaker is not dead - that s/he can provide valuable insight into his or her films. They draw the obvious (though apparently fiercely debated) conclusion that a definition is not fixed in stone, that "both Lee and Shopping for Fangs are consistantly engaged in defining, transforming, and asserting what Asian Americanness is...identity construction in discourse is a process, not a thing" (277-278).