Partial Form: An Experimental History of Asian American Film and Video 1916-1999

FAIN: FEL-282342-22

Eve Oishi
Claremont Graduate University (Claremont, CA 91711-5909)

Research and writing resulting in a book on avant-garde Asian American film, material forms, and industry practices. 

This is a book-length history of Asian American film and video from 1916-1999. While previous scholarship locates the start of the field in the 1970’s, my project begins with several recently discovered films that were made well before the birth of the Asian American movement and considers films from the 1910s to the 1960s as part of the canon. In addition to providing an expansive new history of Asian American cinema, this book draws on extensive archival research to read this history in relation to the history of avant-garde film in order to ask questions about the process of canon formation and the fragile materiality of media forms. The early films I discuss were recovered in pieces and only exist in damaged and partial form. In arguing that film scholars must account for this instability as a central facet of our relationship to the work, this project provides a critical framework that offers tools of analysis for the study of film and video more broadly.