Group 1 Blog 1
Chinese Cinema in the Bay Area Research Project: Group 1 Blog 1
Grisis Yu, Jessica Nye, Katie Scarlett Day, Ryan Wexler
For our blog this week, each of our group members decided to explore a different venue or form of Chinese media in the Bay Area before coming together to decide which one to narrow our focus in on for the group research project. We each discuss our personal explorations below:
Jessica:
Hello everyone! My name is Jessica and I’m a fourth year majoring in Film and Cognitive Science. I chose to research the Silicon Valley Asian Pacific Film Festival because I attended this festival myself last October. For UC Berkeley’s year-long Advanced Digital Animation class (also called CNM 190), ten other students and I created a 3D animated short film called Noodles centered around a Chinese family and were lucky enough to be selected for this festival. The festival allowed us to attend a social-distanced in-person screening where we were able to watch our film along with ten other Asian Pacific themed short films in an AMC movie theater.
The festival has been hosted for seven years and included a total of 11 different films ranging from one minute to over ten minutes. The SVAP film festival, made up of a committee of about 20 members, is a volunteer organization under the Contemporary Asian Theatre Scene (CATS). Here is a collection of images from the festival and the brochure. Additionally, here is a link to the film in case you wanted to check it out!
Katie:
Hi friends, my name is Katie. I am a fourth year majoring in Media Studies. I was super curious in researching the Fox Theater located downtown Oakland. Since I have been living in Oakland since the start of the fall semester I have frequently passed by this theater and wanted to learn more about it. Growing up in a small city located outside Los Angeles, I was only exposed to national chain theaters such as Regal Cinema. Being able to learn more about a local theater will give me insight into the city’s history.
Ryan:
Hello! My name is Ryan Wexler and I am a third year transfer student studying Film and Media. I decided to look at The Great Star Theater in Chinatown San Francisco. This theater was built in 1952 and is the only remaining theater in San Francisco's Chinatown. While the theater is closed to the public, it periodically opens to screen for film festivals in the bay area.
Grisis:
Hi everyone, my name is Grisis Yu. I am a senior student majoring in film and theater and performance study. The theater I chose is also The Great Star Theater in Chinatown in San Francisco. I am lucky that I learned about this theater in my last semester's course. It is the last Cantonese Opera theater in the United States, and it is also one of the few theaters that paid for sifu (coaches who train actors systematically) to teach actors. And the real power of this theater comes from the middle class and middle aged generation, who usually live in the East Bay and other suburban areas. In addition, some of the actors are successful professionals, some of the actors are wealthy housewives. Beyond that, the theater has a lot of interesting things to tell, and I'd be happy to expand on that in the future if you're interested.
Great job on your first blog post! I loved reading about your different interests coming into this project and seeing the careful examples you laid out. This Wednesday during our meeting, my advice was for your group to narrow your research focus on past series and screenings from CAAMfest (Center for Asian American Film Festival), and to investigate what kind of programs it has had with Chinese-language cinema, and what local theaters and historical theaters it has held screenings before. This way, you can look at how a festival works with different theaters in the Bay Area that may be of interest to you. I also want to emphasize that you will want to find primary sources (e.g. theater flyers, original photographs, memorabilia, letters, program guides) and secondary sources (such as the one that Grisis shared during the meeting) that help you understand the context of this history.
ReplyDeleteI mentioned to Grisis and Jessica that this classic Hong Kong Film, One Armed Swordsman, was screened at the Great Star Theater during CAAMFest 2015: http://caamfest.com/2015/films/one-armed-swordsman/. You might be interested in finding more screenings from past years of CAAMfest like this, and you're welcome to include this screening and information you find about it in your research. If you want to see the film too, I can try to find a copy for you. Here's another helpful link to the history of CAAMfest: https://caamedia.org/history-timeline/
Other links I provided in our class lecture last Tuesday (can be found on the ppt slide):
Community-run website with pictures, ads,
cinemas, including SF, SF Chinatown, and Oakland!
- http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/3939
- http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/5128
- Jack Tillmany, The Theatres of San Francisco, the United States of America. Arcadia Publishing, 2005 (can check it out in our school library): https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products
/9780738530208
I also recommend you take a look at the scans of Chinatown flyers that EAL gave us on our Class Course Files --> Resources from Library Presentations ---> Flyers from the Stephen Horowitz Collection (link). You can examine them and do some analysis, and then make an appointment with the East Asian Library to see them more closely.
Also please check out the Ethnic Studies library collection (recommend you look through the Asian American Studies Vertical Files and the Him Mark Lai pdf catalog), and see if there's anything of interest in the catalogs related to Chinatown, theaters, and NAATA (the former name of CAAM):
http://eslibrary.berkeley.edu/asian-american-studies-collection
Another thing is that I'm trying to ask the director of CAAM to speak with our class next month - just fyi!
If you have any other questions or want to set up another meeting with me in the future as a group, you are welcome to do so. Looking forward to seeing your updates soon!