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Peng Toll of the Sea
The deeply rooted conflation of race and skin tone promotes the assumption that the development of colour cinematography leads to better representations of racial differences qua different hues of the skin.
Color cinematography accentuates the difference in skin tones between the Anna May Wong character and her Caucasian husband, his wife and her Caucasian-looking son.
Put bluntly, the skin tone of Asian peoples is not literally yellow. And the colour yellow is largely absent in this early Technicolor film because it cannot be reproduced adequately by the two-colour subtractive methods used in the multitude of orientalist productions in the 1920s and early 1930s, despite the fact that bright yellow was used in trade advertisements to promote films like The Toll of the Sea
Lotus Flower is almost always framed beside the flowers and foliage, with the colour of her dresses and her ornamental headpieces blending in with the colour of the environment.
The valorization of colour as a shorthand for the complex historical process of racialization is crucial to our understanding of the history of colour cinema, for this abstraction of colour as the sole index of race has proved especially inadequate and defective in the development of this representational technology.
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the fatal mistake that Lotus Flower commits is not that she receives the gift from the treacherous sea, but that she mistakes whiteness, and the power it possesses, as a sign of virtue and honour. She is ultimately punished for this blind faith in the white man as well as for her failure to recognize an unsurpassable racial difference.
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When Dragon Ladies Die
The dismantling stereotypes school of criticism is primarily concerned with deconstructing Anna May Wong as a signifier of exoticism, cruelty, and Asian despotism, and as the female embodiment of masochism.
White males are generally provided with the necessary romantic conditions and masculine attributes with which to attract the Asian females' passion. While Asian males are seen as rapist or non-masculine.
Why should we screen the Chinese always scheme, rob, kill? Wong was dissatisfied with how Asian were being portrayed and what roles they were given.
When there were rumors that she was married to a rich Asian business man, she replied with "I am wedded to my art"
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Film Keywords
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Scholars and documentaries label Asian American in American cinema as the site of racialized and sexualized abjection, fear, and desire.
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Asian American cinema actively constitutes and shapes Asian American identities, communities, and culture.
Representation itself is neither positive nor negative, but is always produced through and in relation to power. Moreover, representation, like race, has very real effects within social hierarchies of power.
Made-Up Asians
Yellow face describes the theatrical convention of using makeup, costumes, and visual technology to make someone look East Asian.
Asian American actors have been protesting yellow face at least since the 1960's but it is still prominent in the twenty-first century.
Yellow face evolved after the Exclusion era. In the exclusion era people were lynched, driven out of towns, and deported (Chinese). The Japanese were place in interment camps during WWII. Asians were legally excluded while fictional Asian were popular on stage.
Non-white races used yellow face to raise their status in the racial hierarchy. Yellow face was used politically.
Yellow face symbolizes the foreign, the strange, the undesirable, and the excluded.
Hyper sexuality of Race
Hypersexual representations of Asian women actually express various experiences of trauma, terror, and pain as well as joy, self-recognition, and alliance for those who produce, consume, and criticize these images.
To reject the hypersexuality of Asian women is to reject how we are shaped by and wrestle with these images.
Representations of subservience and non-normative sexuality in representation are continually framed as bad, negative, and ultimately injurious.
Chinese prostitutes, Japanese war brides, Korean war brides, Mail-order brides, and Asian sex workers are embedded in history of Asian women.
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Said Orientalism
Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.
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Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles.
The Cheat
Sexism
Edith is the damsel in distress that needs to be saved. First she loses the all the money she got for from the donations. Kayakawa takes advantage of this and helps her. This causes her to later shoot him and her husband takes the fall for the shooting.
Richard is the bread maker for the family and sacrifices himself for Edith when she shoots Kayakawa. While, Edith offers very little in terms to the family besides being the "wife".
Sexual deviance
Edith spends a lot of time with Kayakawa, while her husband works. You could say that she was friendly with him or interested in him due to him being Asian/different.
Kayakawa tries to rape Edith and he also brands her. This can be seen as him attempting to taint a white women and the notion that women are seen as objects.
Sterotypes
East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet. Asian's were seen as a threat to white society. So, Asian men were often portrayed as a villain in films. Kayakawa played the villain in this film.
Richard is the standard white male capitalist. Richard is a businessman and is the bread maker for the family.
Bhabha Sterotype
Colonial discourse depends on Fixity, which is the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation: it connotes rigidity and an unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy, and daemonic representation.
Ambivalence is one of the most significant discursive and psychical strategies of discriminatory power. Ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures.
To judge the stereotyped image on the basis of a prior political normativity is to dismiss it, not to displace it. The people in power uphold the stereotypes in society, which represent the norm of the current society.
Daughter of the Dragon
Sexism
Ling Moy is seen weak and incompetent due to being a women. Pledges to be a son to her father before he dies. She couldn't kill Ronald due having feelings for him. Her assistant calls her weak due to her not being able to kill him and says he is going to burn an incense to get ride of the "women" in her.
Joan would rather die then lose her beauty, when Ling Moy tries to use acid on her face. Women were seen by their looks, nothing else.
Orientalism
Dragons, incense, gongs, and traditional Asian clothes.
Filial piety, in terms of the film Ling Moy respecting her father and vowing to complete his revenge even though she has to say she will be his "son". Also, calls her father honorable father.
Ling Moy and the asians were seen as the villains in the film, besides Hayakawa.
Even though Hayakawa was good at this work, the whites didn't want to give him the official title of detective. Asians were seen as a threat of white society.
Sacrifice
Hayakawa sacrifices himself so that he can notify the detectives about what is going on. He literally rolls out of a window of the second floor. He then sacrifices the one Ling Moy, the person he loves in order to protect Ronald. East sacrificing for the West.
Ling Moy sacrifices her love for Ronald. She must kill the person she has feelings for in order to complete her father's revenge. In the end it costs her life.
My Geisha
Racist
Yellow face, Lucy is a white actor playing the role of a Geisha, even though they are Japanese women.
Lucy is trying to play the role as a Geisha in public, trying to fool her husband and Robert (Bob). She pretends to speak Japanese, but is actually just speaking random Japanese words. She also speaks broken English (talks with accent).
Lucy thinks she can learn how to be a proper Geisha in a week, when it takes years to be a become a proper Geisha.
When Lucy visits the teacher they are disrespectful. The way they sat wasn't appropriate. Also when he brings up tea ceremony and it being tranquil. They compare it to things in America, which are not similar at all. Lucy does the same for tea, she was like I love tea we have tea in America too.
Stereotypes
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Typical white director and white capitalist. Men must be more successful than a women in order to be a man. Lucy decided to not reveal that she was the actor of the Geisha in order for her husband to get all the credit and success in the film.
Sexism, Robert (Bob) tries to force himself onto Yoko(Lucy), sneaks into her room. Also, gladly wants to take Yoko's first kiss when she mentions its her first time. Thinks Japanese women are great because they don't take alimony.
East vs West. In the beginning when they called the person in New York about the film. He said he won't pay for Robert (Bob) to kiss a Japanese women. That Lucy should play the role, or else he isn't gonna give that much funding for the movie. Also, for in the film she is filming she gives away her white child and commits suicide.
Japanese Culture
Tea ceremony, Japanese clothing, Onsen, temple, incense, and sumo wrestling.
Toll of the Sea
Stereotypes
Women treated as objects, especially Asian women. White males have relationships with Asian women and then abandon them when they go back to the states.
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Lotus flower must sacrifice her child and give it Allen's wife. She also decides to give up on Allen and then she then commits suicide at the end.
Ethnocentrism
Asian culture is seen as different in a bad way. Meaning white and asian culture cannot combine. White culture is seen as superior and elegant.
The way Asians dress, eat, and manners seem weird and improper compared to white culture.
Lotus flower dresses up in clothes that western people wear. She is trying to fit in and act western even though she is Asian.
World of Suzie Wong
Asian women
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Suzie gets beat by a sailor and admits she has been beaten by others in the past. Prostitutes are seen as objects to satisfy the sexual desires of men.
Suzie had to become a prostitute in order to make a living in Hong Kong. Does not know how to read and write, I assume that a lot of other women in the same situation as Suzie.
Stereotypes
It is seen as taboo for a white person to marry an Asian person. East vs West, cultures and looks divide them.
White man protecting his pride/masculinity. The sailor was rejected by Suzie so he tried to force himself on her, ended up beating Suzie because she hit him. Robert finds out and Robert hits the sailor for his treatment of Suzie. Man "protecting" his women.
Robert starts to look for a job because he cannot support Suzie and her child with just selling paintings. Man must provide for his family and he sacrifices his painting to work.
Typical white business people, wear suits and have money.