29 - What Is American about American Film Study?

Summary

For over a decade, the Hawaii International Film Festival has been the world's premier showcase for significant new films from Asia and for American films that, in whatever ways, contribute meaningfully to the enrichment of mutual understanding between Asia and America. Of all the exemplary features of the Hawaii Festival – the fact that all screenings are free to the community, for example – none has proved worthier than the annual Symposium in which we are all presently engaged.

I have had the pleasure and privilege of participating in three of these events. There is no way I can exaggerate their importance to my own education in Asian cinema (this also means my education in cinema, as every Asian nation, like every Western one, has participated in its own way in the international history of film).

The first was in 1985. At that time, I possessed little special knowledge of Asian films or the conditions of their production beyond what was expected of any conscientious American professor of film study. This was more than we were expected to know about Martian cinema, but not much more.

Apart from the Apu trilogy and perhaps one or two other films by Satyajit Ray, few among us, in 1985, knew the work of any “serious” Indian directors or were familiar, except by hearsay, with the vast subcontinent of the Indian commercial cinema. Other than martial arts films, few of us had seen a single film from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or mainland China.