Group 8 Blog 4

    For this blog post, we decided to focus on the demise of Chinatown theaters, specifically the Great Star Theater, when Chinese films began to be shown in mainstream American cinemas. We were interested in how the Great Star Theater was able to outlive the other Chinatown theaters and turned to the Online Library to help us find more information. We initially were going to collaborate with another group also researching the Great Star Theater in speaking with the founder, but they never responded. We wanted to tour the theater and create a vlog of sorts to document the area around it and what the founder had to say about how the place looks now compared to when it first opened. Nonetheless, we found some online sources to guide us in our research.

    Upon our research, we came across “Asian American Film Festivals” where there is a chapter on the Great Star Theater and the minimal physical documentations there are of the theater. Most of Chinatown history lives on “oral history” rather than being officially recorded by the city of San Francisco, which is why the exact closing of the Great Star Theater remains ambiguous and unknown. The source does mention that the theaters outside of Chinatown began showing Chinese films by the 1990s, which did not bode well for the Great Star. Though the Great Star Theater is the only one of the six Chinatown theaters to keep their doors open, it only occasionally opens the doors for Chinese opera performances and special events and regularly shuts down for several years at a time when finances become an issue. 

    An article called “Postwar Urban Redevelopment and the Politics of Exclusion: The Case of San Francisco’s Chinatown” by Chuo Li might shed light on the above questions. Li examined the landscape change of San Francisco’s Chinatown resulting from urban redevelopment after World War II. Li makes an appealing case to suggest that as the Chinese population increased in the United States from 1940-1970, growing business opportunities boosted the real estate values in Chinatown. Chinatown was facing redesigns to fit more financial functions. However, residents in Chinatown could not get affordable housing and were not happy with a capitalist functionality crowding out their cultural landmarks. Consequently, Chinese and Filipino immigrants protested at a I-Hotel that they were trying to preserve from governmental redesign. We are intrigued by this article and wonder whether the redevelopment of Chinatown and reinclusion of immigrants to the city around 1960-70s was in any way related with the demise of Chinatown theaters. Particularly, Great Star theater might stand as an example of an effort to reinforce group identity, continuing to embody a social and cultural use value of Chinatown. 

    The Los Angeles Times refers to the 1990’s as the Golden Age for the latest wave of Chinese immigrants in America. Many Chinese people began to move to America around this time for financial and economic reasons. Their numbers became so influential that some would claim they dominated the swing vote in California. In California alone, there were around 322,309 Chinese people in the 1980’s. With their influence being so strong, it makes sense that Chinese culture began to spread outside of Chinatown in San Francisco. However, that is probably what led to the fall of five of the six Chinese theaters in San Francisco. With Chinese culture permeating throughout California, the theaters probably found that Chinese immigrants were either assimilating to American culture or Chinese culture was integrating into America. Either way, there was sadly no longer a need for six Chinese theaters. For our next, final blog post, we hope to expand on answering why Great Star Theater is the only Chinese theater to still stand as a working theater in San Francisco. 

Citations:

Högerle, E. F. (2020). Asian American Film Festivals: Frames, Locations, and Performances of 

Memory. Germany: De Gruyter.

Chou, Li. (2019). Postwar Urban Redevelopment and the Politics of Exclusion: The Case of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Journal of Planning History, Vol. 18 (I) 27-43. 

“1990s: The Golden Decade : In Pursuit of a Better Way of Life.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 15 Jan. 1990, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-01-15-ss-95-story.html.