PIONEERS: FIRST WOMEN FILMMAKERS
November 06 only
THE CURSE OF QUON GWON: THE FAR EAST MEETS THE WEST
Featuring a Q&A with contemporary Asian American women in cinema including Felicia Lowe, Valerie Soe, and Jackie Dallas!
“As an American-born-Chinese, Wong’s long residence in Oakland and her Chinese heritage enables her to weave both Chinese folklore and her transnational life experiences into the script [THE CURSE OF QUON GWON: THE EAST MEETS THE WEST]. The title mixed Chinese and Western dressing styles in the film indicate Wong’s awareness of the cultural conflicts and the mixture of East and West that would give rise to the formation of a transnational identity. From the surviving materials available for viewing, one can see that THE CURSE OF QUON GWON is a melodrama filled with love, passion, jealousy, and family conflicts.
The existence of THE CURSE OF QUON GWON suggests that although some early independent filmmakers may have found the financial means to produce a film, they were yet unable to publicize or to promote their productions. Scholars continue to look for clues to the history of the film in the surviving material—the thirty minutes of the original 35mm camera negative, labeled as reel 4 and reel 7. Both the 35mm footage and a forty-two-minute 16mm version made at Violet’s initiative in 1969 after Marion’s death contain black leader spliced between scenes. The Kodak edge numbers on the film stock confirm that the 35mm negative was shot in 1917. Most importantly,THE CURSE OF QUON GWON brings the name Marion E. Wong, motion picture producer-director and president of the Mandarin Film Company in Oakland, California, out of obscurity”. -Jenny Kwok Wah Lau, Women Film Pioneers Project.
This film will be preceded by a program of short films (12 min) by Zora Neale Hurston, considered the first African American female filmmaker. Ethnographic in nature, these short takes on African American life reflect a focus of folklorists of that time period who believed that “…cultural performance and beliefs must be expeditiously collected and documented because they would soon be gone forever.”
Panelists
FELICIA LOWE
VALERIE SOE
JACKIE DALLAS
Co-presented with CAAM.
PIONEERS: FIRST WOMEN FILMMAKERS: Upcoming Showtimes