Editor’s Introduction to [v.17.4] Part One, “Film Across the Pacific: Projections, Screens, and Mirrors”

Charles W. Hayford

To tell the truth, when we issued the Call for Papers for our theme issue, we had no idea that we would get such an enthusiastic response. We received so many good articles that we are publishing the issue in two parts, with more articles in the pipeline.[1]

We did not issue an agenda or set of theoretical concerns, and the themes and topics of the articles we selected form a scattered mosaic, not balanced coverage. Most of the films are not high art. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the articles form a useful survey of film in American-East Asian relations and pose questions for further discussion (and you might want to go back to a few of the films with new eyes). Some of these articles might feel too centered on Asia for film journals and others might feel too confined to film for a journal in Asian studies. It seems that our journal has found a niche.

This raises a key question: What is this niche? Why should a journal concerned with American-East Asian relations look at film? Did film play a unique or specific role in these relations? After all, cinema in every part of the world, not just on both sides of the Pacific, has the same basic purposes, in various combinations: pleasure, profit, and persuasion. Because film tells stories through images, not words, from its beginnings the medium has been uniquely global and transnational. But cinema became intertwined in the development of the nation-state; each country in Asia claimed a national cinema as part of its entry into the modern world – never mind that we now are not so clear about what “national” or “modern” mean in understanding cinema.[2]

The niche for our journal is not national or even global cinema since these categories apply to all film.  Some of our articles look into the complex institutions which produced films or tried to control them, and these particular institutions function in a cross-Pacific world. Other articles look into the films themselves. The nature of our niche was shown when it turned out that our authors shared the assumption that films make arguments, or at least that filmmakers do, and that the arguments in these films are as much a part of the political and cultural discourse on cross-Pacific relations as those in newspapers and books.

This theme issue illustrates our niche by showing that there are stories to be told and arguments to be made about specific “projections,” “screens,” and “mirrors” going back and forth across the Pacific. The diverse meanings of these terms indicate the range of interests:

(1) Projections: Projections onto screens and into our minds. Projections of images going both ways across the Pacific. Projections of what filmmakers and audiences desire, what they fear, and what they think will sell. Film projectors – until recently you could not see a movie without one. Projection of trends into the future. Projections as intrusions or outcroppings. Psychological “splitting and projection” in which we defensively split off bad thoughts and project them onto others. National projects.

(2) Screens: Theaters screen films so “screens” mean business: Distributors count success by the number of screens. Films are screened and films screen – filter out – what is inconvenient, objectionable, or will not sell. We are screened from reality.

(3) Mirrors: Films hold up a mirror for audiences to see themselves. Maybe it is a funhouse mirror that shows distorted or sentimentalized views. Sometimes a mirror is a looking glass, like Alice in Wonderland’s, through which we pass into a magical and upside down world. Mirrors show reverse images; the left hand is on the right, the right is on the left. Sometimes it’s a one-way mirror, like in the police station or psychology lab, which allows the observer to be unobserved. Breaking a mirror is seven year’s bad luck.

We probably should add another optic category:

(4) Telescopes: Telescopes see from far enough away that we cannot hear, smell, feel, or taste what we see.

This scattering of meanings and associations suggests that our niche is a roomy one.

Cinema with a Purpose: Our Articles

Zhiwei Xiao’s “A Century of America on Chinese Screens” is a natural and appropriate lead article, for it quickly but meticulously covers nearly a century of film history and sets up major questions.^[3] Hollywood created a range of stock characters, both Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, but film studios in China, despite the major role played by the West in Chinese politics, and in contrast to the major debates over this role in print media, produced a comparatively small number of films set in the West or films with Western protagonists (given the dominance of American films, perhaps they did not need to). When examined carefully, Xiao concludes, the portrayals of America in these films reveal official ideology and, more interesting, their “consistent themes and motifs” show ambivalence about the values of modernization and affluence for which America stood. But Xiao makes clear that Chinese filmmakers, like their Hollywood counterparts, were more interested in America as a symbol than in exploring the realities of American society.

Three of our articles analyze war films as evidence for larger political debates. For much of the last century, American-East Asian relations were shaped by the fear or imminence of war, actual hot conflict, or the Cold War. Films which deal with war test the line between entertainment (not to mention art), debate of political and cultural questions, and propaganda.

A few years ago, the political scientist John S. Nelson turned his attention to war films as a genre. He found that war films test character, that they provide audiences with “political experiences,” and that they do so for various reasons: “to sympathize or criticize, to inspire actions or invent alternatives, to think through ideas or argue contentions.” Nelson concedes that Hollywood moguls scorned overt politics – “if you want to send a message, use Western Union,” said one – yet he finds that “scores and scores of war movies are mostly and primarily engaged in making arguments.” Their arguments are built into plots which by nature are propelled by a contradiction. On the one hand, the story “must come to constructive terms with realist injunctions to fight wars all out, no holds barred, with personal survival and individual gain what matters most,” but on the other hand, this practical realism is at war with “personal and communal codes of honor that insist on higher values and conduct in the most dire situations.”[4]

Jon Cowans’s article, “A Deepening Disbelief: The American Movie Hero in Vietnam, 1958-1968," traces the arc of American elite public opinion during the key decade of involvement in the Vietnam War. Methodologically, he expands the techniques for the study of public opinion by creatively examining newspaper reviews of three American films, The Quiet American (1958), The Ugly American (1963), and John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968).  Cowans looks at the cinematic construction of his films, but expands most tellingly on the critical reaction to them. He goes beyond two or three coastal newspapers to get a wide range of regional reviews to show not just changes in the approval or disapproval ratings of the sort available in public opinion polls, but a proper understanding of the reasoning behind them. As the war develops, critics shift from an emphasis on the spirit of individual sacrifice for the good of the nation to a questioning of the national goals. Perhaps the change is not so much in goals and values as much as a shift in priorities among them. In any case, Cowans helps us to see and debate these changes.

In “Revisiting Cold War Propaganda: Close Readings of Chinese and American Film Representations of the Korean War,” Paul Pickowicz gives shot-by-shot close readings of two parallel Cold War films, the Chinese Shangganling (1956) and the American Pork Chop Hill (1959), both set in the Korean War, both intended for domestic consumption, and both of which exhibit the tension John Nelson sees between the realism which keeps the individual alive and the altruism which preserves the group or nation. Pickowicz has analyzed elsewhere Chinese “popular resistance narratives” set during the war against Japan in which very little is said about the massive violence of the war itself and the face of the enemy is never seen. Directors told those stories in terms of the fate of the family.[5] But in Shangganling the sacrifice is for “China,” the nation, which is not represented in terms of the personal – “my wife, my children, my parents, my girlfriend, my house” – but as a “collective cultural and spatial entity to which all citizens are steadfastly loyal.”  He points out the irony that many in the film’s audience would know more than the film acknowledged about the soldiers’ hardships both during the war and after their return. The G.I.’s in the American film wonder why the United States is fighting for this particular pile of dirt, but finally understand and commit themselves fully. It is less clear, Pickowicz remarks, that the “wariness and skepticism of ordinary Americans was addressed in any meaningful way by this type of propaganda.”

These articles study national political discourse, but Pickowicz, writing in 2007 about the field of Chinese film studies, urged us to also go farther. He wrote that “on reflection, I think it is nearly impossible to appreciate the meaning of film artefacts without knowing about the film culture that produces, distributes, and consumes them.” He wants us to remember that films are not “texts” that “float independently in space.” They are “produced, distributed, viewed, and debated by real flesh-and-blood people who occupy historically distinctive time and space.” [6]

The last article in Part One, Yunxiang Gao’s “Soo Yong (1903-1984): Hollywood Celebrity and Cultural Interpreter,” artfully takes us into this culture of film production in a story of race, competing gender roles, and commerce. Soo Yong grew up in Hawaii, graduated from Columbia Teachers College, appeared in several Broadway plays, then spent the year 1930 as interpreter for the North American tour of the Peking Opera star Mei Lanfang. The connections and reputation she made helped start her career in Hollywood. Unlike the slightly younger Anna May Wong (1905-61), Soo Yong resisted being cast as the sexually liberated New Woman and did not publicly rebel when she was left out of consideration for leading roles, in particular, in the movie of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. Instead, she developed a career as a supporting player and go-between for the culture of her ancestors and her American public.

The lead article for Part Two, Wang Xiaofei’s “Movies Without Mercy: Race, War, and Images of Japanese People in American Films, 1942-1945," also answers the call for studies of film culture with a potent and suggestive study of concrete practices in the culture of film production, studio management, and government censorship in wartime Hollywood.  In categorizing the changing ways that Hollywood projected the Japanese enemy, Wang has identified a key point where several strands of analysis come together. Using studio archives, the article is grounded in the production history of particular films and documents the struggle between producers, directors, screen writers, actors and actresses, and governmental agencies, each of which had its own interests and agenda. The Office of War Information (OWI), for instance, was frustrated in promoting liberal internationalism and educating the public about the origins and nature of Japanese militarism. But Wang’s larger aim is to relate the construction of racial and ethnic images to the history of war and the field of international relations.

The two concluding articles move on to questions of political control and film as a business. Michael C. Wall’s “Censorship and Sovereignty: Shanghai and the Struggle to Regulate Film Content in the International Settlement” mines both American diplomatic records and Shanghai archives of the 1920s and 1930s. Expanding on the work of Zhiwei Xiao,[7] Wall lets us see the resistance of film in various aspects to governmental censorship and political agitation.  The foreign-controlled Shanghai Municipal Council shrugged off attempts by the newly installed Nanjing government to censor the potentially subversive new medium and to assert its control in Shanghai’s foreign sector. When anti-imperialism came to a boil in the mid-1920s, patriots demanded boycotts of films which made China look comic, backward, or weak. But Wall makes clear that in spite of politics and patriotism, Shanghai Chinese audiences still flocked to see the films they loved.

Ramona Curry’s “Benjamin Brodsky (1877-1960): The Transpacific American Film Entrepreneur Part One: Making ‘A Trip Thru China’” is the first of a two part article, the second part of which will appear later this year. This is an intriguing tale based on imaginative detective work in ship’s records and treaty port newspapers. Brodsky was a legendary figure long credited with producing the first Chinese films in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Curry, building on recent discoveries by the international band of Brodskyites, has found that much of the accepted story is based on “sketchy assertions offered without any clear evidence.” An American immigrant from the Ukraine, Brodsky frequently traveled from California to Tokyo and Shanghai in the early years of the twentieth century. He parleyed shipboard encounters with well connected Chinese into support for his film enterprises. His documentary film, “A Trip Thru China,” which survives in only a single copy, showed China just after the 1911 Revolution to audiences all over North America.

Part Two’s final article, Peter Vernezze’s light-handed but fundamentally serious piece, “We’ll Always Have Chengdu: East Meets West on the Silver Screen,” demonstrates a good way to learn about audiences and audience reception – ask them what they think and listen to what they say. Vernezze, trained as a philosopher, was a Peace Corp Volunteer at Sichuan University in Chengdu, where he ran a film series of classic American films. After each showing, he conducted discussions which revealed surprises about how educated young Chinese responded to the ideas and cultural values in the films.

Part Two will also run my Editor’s Introduction, “Film Across the Pacific: Crossing the Ocean of Cultures and Rivers of Time,” a brief history of film in the relations between East Asia and the United States.

In closing, I would like to add that we have asked Wang Xiaofei to curate a Forum of notes, observations, and comments, planned for publication here in the summer of 2011.