Vintage Viewing: Marion E. Wong, Energetic Entrepreneur

What is certain is that, while ultimately upholding the value of family and of traditional culture, ‘The Curse of Quon Gwon’ gives vivid expression to the frustrations of women within those rigid norms, doing so with a cinematic language of the female gaze that centers female perspectives.

Marion_Evelyn_Wong

Written by Brigit McCone, this post is part of Vintage Viewing, our series exploring the work of women filmmaking pioneers. It also appears as part of our theme week on Women Directors, Part 2.


When considering the ethnographic films of Zora Neale Hurston, as one of the few surviving remnants of early cinema to be directed by a woman of color, I discussed the doubly distorted image of themselves that such women confronted, in a culture without their authorship. At the same time, the article surveyed the significant numbers who were recorded as making films that have not survived, with the intersection of racism and sexism placing obstacles in their path at every stage from financing to distribution to preservation. One of the most energetic women to struggle to fully author her own uncompromising vision, the first Chinese American director, as well as among the earliest female directors, was Marion E. Wong.

Wong founded the Mandarin Film Company (the first Chinese American film company) with ambitious plans to create non-stereotypical images of Chinese Americans, assuming, perhaps naively, that the American appetite for exoticized images of East Asia would make them even more eager to see authentic content. She shared with the Oakland Tribune that she wanted to “introduce to the world Chinese motion pictures with ‘some of the customs and manners of China.’” Mandarin Film Company was practically a one-woman show, with Wong serving as screenwriter, director, supporting actress, and costume designer on their only feature film, 1916’s The Curse of Quon Gwon: Where the Far East Mingles with the West. It’s “the earliest known Chinese American feature” film and “the first and only film made by an all-Chinese cast and an all-Chinese company.” 1917’s Oakland Tribune describes Wong as “energy personified,” with “imagination, executive ability, wit and beauty.” An article in Moving Picture World indicates that Wong traveled as far as New York and China in search of distributors for her film, but none were forthcoming. The film would have likely been as lost as the 1922 film, A Woman’s Error, by pioneering African American filmmaker Tressie Souders, had not two reels of it been unearthed in a basement in 2005. Watching Wong’s film now, we can catch a glimpse of what early cinema might have been, if the viewpoints represented had been more diverse.


Curse of Quon Gwon

The Curse of Quon Gwon: Where the Far East Mingles with the West – 1916

Opening with a statue to the household god Quon Gwon (Guan Gong or “Lord Guan,” a deity based on Guan Yu, a historical general immortalized in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese Literature). Worshiped in Chinese folk religion, popular Confucianism, Taoism, and Chinese Buddhism, Guan Gong represents the principles of loyalty and righteousness. Though the recovered reels of The Curse of Quon Gwon were lacking intertitles, they have been added to this version to enhance the viewing experience, with Guan Gong speaking the words of the Three Brothers’ Oath in the Peach Tree Garden, from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, in translation by Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor. We are then shown the heroine’s formal introduction to the family of her groom. Wong stretched her budget by filming with an amateur cast: the heroine was played by Wong’s sister-in-law, Violet Wong, the villainess by herself, the mother-in-law by her own mother, Chin See, and the child by her niece. However, her sets are lavish and her camera moves gently back and forth to prevent the scene from being static. In general, Wong’s shot composition and editing compare very well with the industry standard of 1916.

Mixing Western and Chinese costume, Wong raises the cultural tensions and transnational identity of Chinese Americans at the time, resisting the tendency of mainstream cinema to portray “Oriental” characters as static stereotypes, instead imagining them in a state of fluid cultural transformation. As the heroine resists her maid’s efforts to transform her hair into a traditional Chinese style, her aspirations toward Western fashion are clear. An over-the-shoulder shot of her face in the mirror encourages the audience to identify with the heroine’s gaze, one of several moments by which the film establishes an aesthetic of female gaze and subjectivity.

One of the film’s central showpieces is its depiction of a traditional Chinese wedding ceremony, complete with regalia and gifts, reflecting Wong’s desire to showcase Chinese culture to her imagined Western audience. The beauty of these scenes make it difficult to imagine that a lack of quality was the reason for her film being rejected by distributors. Perhaps its centering of a Chinese American woman’s experience was judged unrelatable to viewers, though the struggle of a restless woman to accommodate herself to the strict rules of her culture is a universal theme. The heroine struggles to walk in her high shoes and laugh with her groom at his regalia, showing their unserious attitude toward Chinese traditions, even as Wong’s film celebrates them. After the wedding, Wong utilizes dissolves to show her heroine hallucinating that she is shackled with chains, anticipating Germaine Dulac’s dramatizing of the interior perceptions of women.

When comparing with Dulac, it is worth remembering that Dulac’s revolutionary impressionist and surrealist aesthetics evolved over the course of many films, from a beginning making conventional narrative cinema. Considering how impressive the cinematic imagination of her debut is, if Marion Wong had received support and distribution, there is no telling how experimental she might have become.

Curse-of-Quon-Gwon-scene-1.5mb

After her husband’s departure, the heroine finds herself rejected and driven from the family home, following a false accusation by the villainess, played by Wong herself. She seeks to take her child with her but is prevented, despite pleading for her child to be returned. Stripped of jewelry, she seizes a knife and contemplates committing suicide to purge her dishonor, before throwing it aside and resolving to live on without shelter, friends, or support. Her befriending a lamb may represent her innocence, or the contrast between compassionate nature and cruel culture.

As the heroine wanders off, grief-stricken, across a windswept wilderness, I was reminded of chapter 28 of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which Jane strikes out alone and spends the night on the moors, confronting her place in the universe and testing her endurance. In depicting the heroine’s confrontation with nature, her right to be seen as a self-sufficient being and independent of her bonds with others, is affirmed. It occurred to me that I had never seen an Asian woman in an American film in this way, a different form of empowerment from martial arts (kung fu, wuxia, etc.) heroics – the right to be self-sufficient and to seek existential meaning. Zhang Ziyi’s leap from the mountain at the conclusion of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is the only other example that springs to mind. In 100 years, depiction of Asian women in Hollywood has not matured in its nuance to the level that Marion Wong achieved in 1916. To celebrate the connection of Wong’s heroine with Jane Eyre’s psychological journey as rebellious woman in restrictive society, and acknowledge the Western leanings of Wong’s heroine, extracts from Jane Eyre have been used as intertitles to illustrate the heroine’s thoughts throughout the film.

As a guilt-stricken maid resolves to confess to the heroine’s husband, who has returned and is heartbroken to discover his wife banished, the villainess attempts to choke the maid into silence. Instead, the husband bursts in on them and learns the whole truth (without the original intertitles, it is impossible to determine exactly what the false accusation was, though it possibly involved the heroine’s adorable child). As her husband sets out to find her, the heroine stumbles home, weary from her wanderings. The triumphant reunion of the family, and the despairing suicide of the villainess, conclude the film.

As the heroine adopts Chinese dress, dabs her eyes sorrowfully then gazes on the idol of Guan Gong, bowing solemnly to it, before flashing forward to a scene of the happy family with an older child, the final message of the film is ambiguous. Was the heroine justly punished for her Westernized disrespect of tradition, repenting and learning better by embracing her duty to family? What is the curse of Guan Gong? In the Three Brothers’ Oath, Guan Yu vows, “If we turn aside from righteousness and forget kindliness, may Heaven and Human smite us!” Did the curse then apply to the villainess, who turned aside from righteousness by making the false accusation? Or was it the heroine who was cursed for her rebellious impulses and disrespect of tradition, but redeemed by divine mercy? Are we, finally, to see her Western attitude as transgression or simply as individuality? What is certain is that, while ultimately upholding the value of family and of traditional culture, The Curse of Quon Gwon gives vivid expression to the frustrations of women within those rigid norms, doing so with a cinematic language of the female gaze that centers female perspectives.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ5dbcFjXhQ”]


Photo of Marion E. Wong via Wikipedia in the public domain in the U.S.


 

Brigit McCone keeps trying to learn Chinese but can’t tell the tones apart, though she is happy the ‘Ireland’ is apparently written as ‘love you orchid’. She writes short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and writing posts like this one.


Vintage Viewing: Zora Neale Hurston, Open Observer

In her ethnographic films, Hurston, by contrast, strikingly resists fictions of objectivity and pointedly draws attention to herself as observer. A woman and a dancing child smile directly into her lens in extreme close-up, with shy pride or beaming pleasure at her clearly encouraging attention. Instead of merely observing their games, we join the circle of clapping children and they interact with the camera as it pans over their faces.

Part of Vintage Viewing, exploring the work of female filmmaking pioneers.

Zora Neale Hurston: Frame-Changer
Zora Neale Hurston: Frame-Changer

 

“Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground. ” – Zora Neale Hurston

The seven principles of Kwanzaa (Nguzo Saba), designed to foster community empowerment in the face of racial stigma, include Kujichagulia, the right to “define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.” Though we often debate choice of imagery on Bitch Flicks, it is impossible to create an image that represents another group’s equality, because their right to define their own image is fundamental to that equality. Caribbean-American comedian Bert Williams became the first Black artist to write, produce, direct and star in a film, with 1916’s A Natural Born Gambler, having already broken boundaries as writer-star of In Dahomey (1902), the first Black musical on Broadway. Williams’ performances exploited the blackface conventions of his age to be acceptable to a wider audience, while illuminating them with humanity and subversive subtext, as he continually fought for greater creative control. At the climax of A Natural Born Gambler, his character plays an imaginary poker game in prison. By losing, even in his own fantasy, Williams makes virtuoso mime into poignant commentary on internalized stigma, also the theme of his hit song, “Nobody,” from the 1906 musical Abyssinia. The same year, Williams’ Fish cast himself, then in his 40s, as a young boy who escapes his chores to catch fish and is punished for his entrepreneurship. In a society where even Black children were often viewed as prematurely adult, Williams’ demand that audiences recognize the child in the man was challenging, and audiences reacted unfavorably. Neither of Williams’ surviving films feature significant roles for women.


  [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naUN5L56Zg4″]

Bert Williams masked biting commentary under comic delivery


In 1920, Oscar Micheaux wrote and directed Within Our Gates, the oldest surviving feature film by a Black director. The film argues for education and against the unquestioned domination of the church, while breaking many taboos, including depicting a lynching and the attempted rape of a Black woman by a white man. However, its heroines remain stilted and rigidly defined by Madonna/Whore framing. Micheaux’s 1925 film, Body and Soul, features a powerful performance by Mercedes Gilbert as a rape victim, opposite a menacing debut by Paul Robeson. Yet, the heroine must demonstrate her virtue by dying of shame, harnessing the martyrdom of the female body to score Micheaux’ points about oppressive religious hypocrisy. 1910’s White Fawn’s Devotion by James Young Deer (the Nanticoke director of 34 Westerns, whose role in shaping the genre is rarely acknowledged), uses the martyred suicide of White Fawn to prove to her Euro-American husband that she is attached to homeland and kin, once more scoring its racial points through female martyrdom (even if the heroine recovers for a happy end).


 

Once tipped for an Oscar, Louise Beavers remained typecast as 'Maid'
Once tipped for an Oscar, Louise Beavers remained typecast as “Maid”

 

“As long as the plays are being written and produced by whites for whites, there will be the same chance for criticism. The only remedy is for such plays as would meet popular favor to be produced by us.” – Louise Beavers

Mabel Normand‘s star vehicle, Mickey, featured sympathetic scenes of bonding between Mickey and her foster mother, played by Cheyenne comedienne Minnie Devereaux, while Mae West’s films showed extensive, sympathetic banter with maids played by Louise Beavers (whose performance in Imitation of Life was acclaimed as Oscar-worthy, without promoting Beavers from supporting roles) and Soo Yong (cast as aunt to a yellowface protagonist in The Good Earth). Though these displays of interracial female solidarity by Normand and West would be considered progressive for their time, they limit women of color to supporting roles, reinforcing their heroines’ white supremacy. The fact that white female filmmakers tended to reinforce white supremacy with their representations, while male directors of other races utilized disempowering sexist tropes, surely illustrates why they cannot collectively represent women of color.

As Deborah Riley Draper points out in her Bitch Flicks post, “#EarlyCinemaSoBlack,” many Black women were striving to bring their perspectives to the screen at this time. Tressie Souders became probably the first Black woman to write and direct a film with A Woman’s Error in 1922, but her film is now lost. However, considering how Chinese-American writer-director Marion Wong’s 1916 feature, The Curse of the Quon Gwon: When the Far East Mingles With The West, turned up unexpectedly in a basement in 2005, Souders’ film might yet be similarly rediscovered. Wong showcased traditional Chinese ceremonies to satisfy Western curiosity about the exotic Orient, but she also explored Chinese-American cultural tensions with the nuance of an insider. The Curse of the Quon Gwon uses superimpositions and dissolves in a short fantasy sequence to represent the heroine’s own imagination, predating similar effects by Germaine Dulac. It’s worth remembering that Dulac made a series of conventional films before developing the impressionist and surrealist styles that she is celebrated for, while The Curse of Quon Gwon was Marion Wong’s only film (denied financing, distribution or promotion, despite her striving to secure them). With the same support as Dulac, how far could Wong have developed, described by the Oakland Tribune as “energy personified”?


 [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAxpLXP6O_M”]


Where they did not face the stigma of a racial minority, women of color found more filmmaking success. In India, Fatma Begum directed the first of eight fantasy epics in 1926. The following decade, Sakane Tazuko became the first female director in Japan, while Elena Sánchez Valenzuela directed a feature documentary in her native Mexico, acclaimed by journalists for “hundreds of the most beautiful, evocative scenes” but now lost. Esther Eng began writing and directing in Hong Kong in 1937 (documentary clip). Still, the ethnographic films of Zora Neale Hurston remain a rarity: vintage footage directed by a woman of color, available online. Better known as the playwright of 1925’s prize-winning Color Struck, as a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, and as the author of novels including Their Eyes Were Watching God (see Bitch Flicks‘ review of Darnell Martin’s adaptation), Hurston also studied anthropology under Dr. Franz Boaz, who dedicated his life to challenging assumptions of Western cultural superiority. Believed to be part of Hurston’s wider research into African-American folklore, these ethnographic films were made in the Southern United States between 1928 and 1929. The footage is scored in the embedded video with Hurston’s own performance of folk songs that she collected. At first glance, her films seem like simple anthropological records. However, they are equally revealing when read as explorations of our ways of seeing, framing and interpreting others.


 Logging (1928) – Children’s Games (1928) – Baptism (1929)

“She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes!” – Zora Neale Hurston

The Palestinian-American founder of postcolonialism, Edward Said’s Orientalism explored how the psychological needs of the observer shape their observations, as much as the nature of the thing observed. Criticizing the constant framing of “things Oriental in class, court, prison or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline or governing,” Said noted that imperial observers tended to interpret the Orient through “synchronic essentialism,” as something fixed and unchanging. Essentialist interpretations deny responsibility: if something is unchanging, it is impossible for oppression to impact it. If women are essentially and eternally nags, you aren’t responsible for your wife’s annoyance. If colonized people are hotheaded savages, they need no reason for rebellion. If dispossessed peoples are permanently lazy, it isn’t a symptom of their demoralizing dispossession. Oppressors become invisible to themselves through their interpretative framework.

Fictions of objective and invisible observers (oppressors?) are the traditional framing of anthropology. A “native” may be scowling because the photographer is intrusive, but their image will be frozen as an “objective” record of the “hostile native”, with viewers instinctively imagining themselves in the photographer’s place. Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North charmed audiences with its warm intimacy, popularizing the art of the documentary feature. But by claiming objectivity and obscuring his sexual relationship with his subjects, however, Flaherty distorted their shared banter and flirtation into essentialized features of the “happy-go-lucky Eskimo” and his “smiling one” wife, fueling a popular image of Inuit naivete and availability.

In her ethnographic films, Hurston, by contrast, strikingly resists fictions of objectivity and pointedly draws attention to herself as observer. A woman and a dancing child smile directly into her lens in extreme close-up, with shy pride or beaming pleasure at her clearly encouraging attention. Instead of merely observing their games, we join the circle of clapping children and they interact with the camera as it pans over their faces. Hurston’s camera is dynamic, tracking up a logging railway and lingering on tapping feet. We instinctively warm to her subjects, as we share Hurston’s sense of belonging through her camera’s gaze. She contrasts the work of an elderly lumberjack with the machinery of professional logging, showing a world of changing realities, and lingers on sawmill workers’ leisure rather than fetishizing their labor, casually noticing a woman among them. Is their mechanized modernity an improvement on the old man’s axe?

Faith Ringgold: 'In Picasso's Studio'
Faith Ringgold: “Picasso’s Studio”

 

“She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.” – Zora Neale Hurston

Of most interest for questions of self-representation, Hurston briefly portrays woman’s life in the community. Opening with the woman framed against her home environment, a wooden cabin, in the pose of a typical anthropological subject, Hurston’s woman then holds our gaze purposefully and walks up close. Hurston instructs her to smile, turn and present her profiles; she is reframed as a model, or an actress on a casting call. Compare Faith Ringgold‘s “Picasso’s Studio”: her nude heroine models against a backdrop of African “primitivism” that has been reframed by Picasso as “modernism,” while Ringgold playfully reframes Picasso himself in the African-American, feminine “folk art” of quilting, challenging the gendered and racialized ways art is interpreted and (de)valued, just as Zora Neale Hurston challenges the devaluing subtext of the anthropological frame through glamor modeling. As Hurston cuts to her woman sitting with another woman on the porch, laughing in each other’s company, this is surely the silent film equivalent of a Bechdel pass. Bouncing to a wide angle on the cabin environment, the next shot reframes the woman again, draping her over her porch railing in the “Venus reclining” pose. Hurston’s use of this classical pose recalls the 19th century African-American/Ojibwa sculptor Edmonia Lewis‘ use of Classical Grecian styles to visually code her African and Indigenous subjects as noble. From this static pose, Hurston cuts to the woman’s feet tapping as she rocks, adding musical sensibility. Hurston has thus reframed her subject five times: 1) as a product of her environment, 2) as a glamorous beauty, 3) within a community of female friendship, 4) as an iconic goddess and 5) as an appreciator of music. In total silence, in under a minute and with a mediocre camera, Hurston achieves a multi-faceted portrait. Imagine what she could have done with a budget and a distributor.


  [youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtPrN-zYZc4″]


The world’s first animated feature film, 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, was a celebration of Middle-Eastern folklore, animated by Lotte Reiniger. Reiniger’s concept, for creating feature-length animations based on classic folklore, would become box office gold for Walt Disney, winning him a special Oscar for innovation, while he also patented a design for a multi-plane camera almost identical to Reiniger’s. Despite his debt to Lotte Reiniger, Disney would exclude women from creative work in his company. Next month’s Vintage Viewing: Lotte Reiniger, Animating Innovator. Stay tuned!

  


Brigit McCone writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and learning new things.