The Curator: FFC Interviews Brian Hu

Walter Chaw interviews Film Programmer Brian Hu

Brian Hu picked me up from San Diego International in 2019. I was a guest of the San Diego Asian Film Festival, for which Brian is the artistic director, and he took me directly to a little Mexican joint that served the best menudo I’ve ever had, cafeteria-style, in a bustling, air-conditioner-free space. For dinner, he and his staff introduced me to a dumpling place on San Diego’s 5^th Street, sandwiched between a wealth of used-record shops and vintage stores. They served things there that made me cry, for the first time since my father’s death, for the memories I was surprised with of the food he used to make us when I was a kid. Brian is as good a host, in other words, as he is a programmer, educator, and curator of cultural memory. The first room he showed me during my quick tour of the Pacific Arts Movement campus was a library lined, floor-to-ceiling, with shelves holding VHS tapes and DVDs of all the submissions the SDAFF had shown in its then-nearly 20-year history. I think of this image whenever I think of Brian.

An Associate Professor of Critical Studies in TV, Film, and New Media at UCSD, Brian has an encyclopedic knowledge of Asian American cinema and a firm grasp of its complicated and at times elusive history in the shadow of the mainstream. I hold him up as something like a role model for me. Here’s a guy who, while I was avoiding my culture (first out of anger, then out of shame for my anger), was at the forefront of defining who we are as Asian Americans through the art our community creates. It’s where he remains. Before being invited to his festival as a judge, I wondered if anyone Asian American had even thought of me as an Asian American film critic. I wondered, moreover, if I deserved to be thought of that way, given how little real work I had done to deserve inclusion. But along came Brian and programmer Christina Ree and fellow jurist/journalist Ada Tseng, who welcomed me with open arms and, well… I remain a work in progress, but their warmth and acceptance, and this exposure to a world of art I had only ever been dimly aware of, has made a difference in how I’ve seen myself since.

The Criterion Channel asked Brian to program a collection of Asian American films from the 1980s for their May schedule (“Asian American ’80s”, now live on their app), and I used this as a pretext to talk to Brain about life, the universe, and everything. We started at the beginning: I asked him, “Why the ’80s?” I mean, when you talk about Asian representation in American films circa that decade, you’re generally talking about Mr. Miyagi and Long Duk Dong.

BRIAN HU: Last year, I co-curated a series for Criterion on Asian American Cinema in the 2000s, and then Abby Sun and Keisha Knight, who oversee a group called Sentient Art Film, put out their own program of Asian American films from the Nineties, and between the two we must have been successful enough that Criterion wanted to try out the Eighties. I remember when they told me and my first thought, to your point, was, “Oh, is there enough in the Eighties?” Because we think about Asian American cinema as really taking off in like the late Nineties and then into the 2000s, right? At least that was part of the thesis that we had for our 2000 series: This is the decade where you hit critical mass with Justin Lin and all that. But then I sort of obsessively started doing research into the Eighties, and it’s true, there aren’t that many films, but what few they are… It’s surprising how good they are.

FILM FREAK CENTRAL: …and free.
Yes, the formulas hadn’t quite been set yet. None of the certain kinds of obvious Asian American genres we’ve come to know about–the immigration story or generational conflicts. I mean, there’s bits of that, of course, in these films, too, but they seem to be more interested, certainly more focused in, on other things. That was really exciting to me. [A]nd then I came to realize that there were all these short films, too, where a lot of the innovation was happening. There was a freedom from needing to cater to expectation, because the market for Asian American cinema didn’t exist yet.

Yet, we were here in the ’80s.
(laughs) We were just making films however we could. The important thing that happened though in the Eighties with regards to the Asian American audience was the development of the Asian American Film Festival Network. I don’t remember the exact date, it was probably like 1982 or so–corresponding with Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing, actually–you have Asian American film festivals first in New York City and then in L.A. and San Francisco, and these become the three major centres for Asian American media production, and they all have a different take on it. New York: a little bit more indie and experimental. San Francisco is really interested in documentary. And L.A., of course, has always been trying to find itself, vis-a-vis Hollywood. They started with festivals, but they eventually developed into media centres that did more than just film festivals. They were interested in networking artists, filmmaker education, financing. Before the Eighties, there were obviously Asian Americans who watched movies, but I don’t think they would think about themselves as watching an Asian American film…

But it’s not just semantic, right?
No, the semantics are important, but I think there was an essential philosophical shift. Before, you [were] just sort of like, well, huh, there’s Flower Drum Song. I watched it and it may or may not have anything to do with my life, and it was weird or cool or whatever it was, but now suddenly you have people who are contextualizing in a different way.

Semantics do play a role in organizing.
Yes, that’s true. It’s literally community organizing in that festival and creative space around how we would say, “Let’s watch a movie together and appreciate it as one of ours.” So that’s what happened in the Eighties, where it seemed like collectively, in three major cultural centres, we decided to organize.

Why all of a sudden? Or was it all of a sudden?
Really, the roots of this came about in the 1960s with educational, eventually political movements for ethnic studies–Asian Americans of college age during this time saying I may be Filipino or I may be Chinese or Korean, but all of us are stronger together. Here’s the emergence of the term “Asian American,” which did not exist before this period of activism. I mean before it… You know, my parents are from Taiwan. They don’t see how they relate to anybody from the Philippines or India at all. But I think it’s something to do with the second generation. Or really that in the 1960s, you have people who were fourth, fifth generation already, who are understanding politically why having a unifying umbrella is important. By the 1980s, that generation, the 1960s, late Sixties and early Seventies, that generation with that kind of consciousness, are perhaps raising their kids in a certain way or are among the first generation of students who are able to major in specifically Asian American studies, and it happens to be in places like L.A., New York, and San Francisco. These clusters naturally, then, became hotbeds for really refining a social identity.

Through the creation of our own media?
Yes. And in terms of why it’s been so slow developing a broader Asian American audience, it’s likely a product of a slow diffusion. Maybe a lot of these graduates weren’t initially interested in moving to the Midwest or other places, so that process is slow, maybe it’s still slowly happening even now, but the key element catalyzing the recent acceleration is probably social media. Like, that’s become people’s Asian American studies.

Help me crystallize what it was like for Asian Americans culturally in the media of the 1980s.
Well, first of all, it was a lot less ethnically diverse in the Eighties. We were seeing stuff mostly from the Japanese and Chinese, and it was very male, especially on the features side. That was something I was very cognizant of while putting this together. And unless we added documentaries, which was a very conscious decision that I had made with the Criterion folks not to, we wouldn’t find many female Asian American filmmakers from this period.

Why no documentaries?
The problem is there were rights issues with some key documentaries, and if we couldn’t get them, let’s not pretend we’re doing something as comprehensive as we’re representing it to be if we’re not gonna get the big ones. So culturally, I can say it was more homogenous back then. The Asian American scene didn’t really make sense culturally, not in the way it does now. Like now, something like boba is the great unifier. Or food culture, right? Soup dumplings. I think no matter who you are, this is what can bring us together, isn’t it? I don’t think there was an idea of what that could be then. A lot of these filmmakers were part of other scenes. A filmmaker like Greg Araki is a great example of this. He said, “I’m a queer filmmaker. You may claim me and I may not care about that because I belong to other things.” Steven Okazaki, who did Living on Tokyo Time, he’s interested in the world of rock-and-roll in San Francisco a lot more than he is in the world and history of Japanese Americans.

But that can be…freeing to the work?
Exactly. In some ways, that makes these films rather refreshing, even if it’s not as kind of culturally fleshed-out in a way where we can see our communities in a very obvious sense. It’s not focused on that. You see it, though, in films like Wang’s Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart, where you do feel like there’s a Chinatown here, there’s like a group of people, friends who hang out and have barbecues together. But in this period, they’re still inventing it. There are no assumptions that we have a consensus of what this Asian American community is. Certainty can be a hindrance more than a boon.

Wood Moy in Wayne Wang’s Chan is Missing

“I think even when you read a negative review of Asian American film, you’re honouring the fact that it exists on a level that is equal and worthy of criticism.”

Talk to me about Chan is Missing as a flashpoint.
Chan is Missing is the perfect example of something that’s unclassifiable. What is that movie like? How do you reduce it? You can’t and that’s what I love about it–I mean, the main character is literally missing. And, of course, Chan is referencing Charlie Chan.

The creation of a white guy, popularized in film by white actors.
Exactly. It’s a certain kind of stereotype, but here’s a film that announces that the typical American cultural reference for Asians is missing. So what’s there instead? And so Wayne Wang employs almost a documentary style, he’s almost just interviewing people off the streets. A lot of those people, the actors in there, are from the theatre world, but some of them are just people from the community. It’s a document of a community. And in the course of it, you definitely get that sense that something is sprouting from the ground in San Francisco’s Chinatown. We don’t really know what it is yet in 1982, but let’s cultivate it.

They Call Me Bruce? Came out that same year. Another film that challenges stereotypes. I loved that film.
Yeah, and I think for a lot of, like, say, white audiences watching that film, I don’t think they really necessarily understood that it was subversive to the point of actually being critical of them. It was just another, like, accented guy doing martial arts with a bit of silliness. There’s something kinda like Cheech & Chong about it, too, which is another kind of strange relic of Asian American culture that we never did, and we still don’t, talk about. I mean, Tommy Chong is an Asian American within this larger narrative. In a similar fashion, I think we underestimate the importance of They Call Me Bruce?. Here’s something that came from the Asian American community, and I’ve met so many Asian American filmmakers and others like you, who–that was the cultural bombshell more than Chan is Missing. It makes sense, because you’re not watching art films when you’re young, right? But that one was the accessible one. And there’s something about it, yeah? The voice feels a little bit different than the usual Bruce-ploitation movie.

What does success look like? What, finally, is “good” representation?
I think the stock answer has to do with diverse representations, right? There should be no boxes we must adhere to: you can be the villain or the hero. You could be the weirdo, you could be the stoner, you could be the charming romantic. There’s no single representation we’re chasing, but rather the possibility of endless representations because that’s how we know ourselves. But then related to that is the idea of freedom. How can we, as artists, be free to do whatever we want? And of course that’s vexing, because sometimes when we do what we want, we get in trouble for it, right? There’s always gonna be people who say like, well, why are you doing it that way? Including in our own community.

Arguably especially. The most vicious criticism of my work I’ve ever received is from the Asian American community.
Oh yes. That feels very familiar. This was Ada [Tseng] and I in the early 2000s, before social media, and filmmakers would get so mad at us for any criticisms we had for their work. I still have hate mail from them. I remember one director who said, “Who do you think you are? FILM COMMENT?” And I was thinking, “I would love to be FILM COMMENT!” (laughs). But it was like even the idea that there could be an Asian American film critic was against the rules. The implication is we are here to support each other. Unconditionally. I felt like I’m supporting you by telling you what I actually think about this movie. And it’s… It’s much, much worse now than it was back in the day because at least then there were just emails I could ignore.

How do we overcome that? How do we get past it?
I think they, we, have to deal with it. ‘Cause I don’t think it’s an option to just not be honest about our own films. I think we need to be past that point now, because the Internet, like, if you don’t write negative reviews, Asian Americans are still gonna go online and make snarky comments about these films. But what you do, at least you do in more than 140 characters and in such a way that’s thoughtful and detailed. I think even when you read a negative review of Asian American film, you’re honouring the fact that it exists on a level that is equal and worthy of criticism. I hope we’re getting to the point where we don’t have that kind of baggage anymore. I mean, what could we be with the kind of freedom white people have? Getting back to the question of good representation: To me, that’s successful representation–freedom to create. But that’s dodging your answer, which I think is asking about what do we actually see on the screen.

It’s a broad question, so a bad one by definition, I think, but it does lead me to ask if you think this “moment” for us with Everything Everywhere All At Once and now “Beef”–though that appears to be in the process of being murdered in its cradle–and others recently, like The Farewell and Minari… Are we really at a turning point, or is this another Blaxploitation in which our gains, whatever they are, are instantly colonized? Are we free?
I’m struck by the fact that all of these so-called “important” Asian American moments, these Asian American media moments right now, are all the product of A24. Like Minari, The Farewell, Green Knight if you call that Asian American for Dev Patel. Kogonada’s After Yang, Everything Everywhere All At Once, “Beef,” the upcoming “Sympathizer” series… And so it’s like, do we give them props for, “Hey, you’re doing our business for us?” I’m a little uncomfortable that it’s all in the hands of one company that we don’t control, and they’re getting a lot of credit for it. I don’t think Asian American commentators have really done anything with this question yet, and I’m not sure what I would really say, but I’m… To me, that’s not freedom. It doesn’t feel entirely like we’ve made it. More it means [that] A24’s made it on our backs. And all of that’s complicated because of course these films are–a lot of ’em are–great. I’m, like, so happy for these filmmakers. But I would like to see more people investing in our stories, including ourselves. That’s why, ultimately, I feel like what’s most important to me is the independent scene.

A24 isn’t independent.
Nope. Not really. It’s as independent as Miramax was in its heyday, but they’re cool. All the young people, like all my students, they bow down at the altar of A24… Oh, Past Lives is A24, too. Post-Moonlight, they’re very involved in every step of production. I think they’re more than just a distributor, they’re more than just a savvy marketer, which I think, of course, they’re both of those things, but a lot of people think about them as only those things because, in part, they are very savvy marketers. I don’t think it’s wrong to ask questions about who owns our stories.