So I just watched an amazing movie entitled "Face/Off". It stars John Travolta and Nicholas cage in what might be the awesome height of their careers. It involves doctors taking the face....off. (The term "Face...off" is overly used in the film to the point of self-masichism and punching anyone who is within punching distance in the face.)

Anyhow, this marvelous work of film was directed by the One and Only John Woo. I happened to notice that, in one of the scenes, there are doves fluttering around a church, often framed in slow motion flapping their wings across the screen. This also happens in John Woo's Mission Impossible II. This makes me wonder if the dove/white bird thing is a John Woo signature, and whether or not that makes him an "auteur". John Woo is well known for action films, but is that enough to make him an esteemed "auteur"? What about his tendency for slow motion?

In the first paragraph of the article, “making films asian american” Projasky and Ono state, “few continue to write of the auteur as the originary and privileged location of a text’s meaning.” They continue, saying that, “film studies scholars now avoid modernist auteurship studies”. I had not previously connected the idea of the death of the author to films before, but looking back, it seems odd I took an entire class on the autuer and not once did the problem of the author arise. The class was titled “American Film Directors: Kubrick, Cassavetes, and Altman” and revered the three.

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).