Response Essay
Prepare a 2-page essay for 2 question sets(4 pages in total).
Question 1
Who Killed Vincent Chin? is about one of the most important civil rights cases involving Asian Americans. It is a key film and cultural text, which is successful not only in its cinematic and story-telling achievements but also as apolitical documentary. Address the questions below in prose form; that is, organize your thoughts and outline a plan to write a short essay about the film, Who Killed Vincent Chin?Ideally, you can foreground a main thesis, and incorporate much of the following:What is the significance or rhetorical function of the title as mode of address?Describe the uniqueness of the film form, of WKVC? and what effect/effectiveness it produces?For example, how does WKVC? derail narrative without destroying it?What does having no narrator serve to do?What position are you, the viewer, placed in?How and why, does WKVC? present/propose alternative knowledge?Do you think alternative forms of storytelling must be used (not classical, linear narrative) to represent stories about Asian Americans? Why or why not?Identify one or two examples of a cut or juxtaposition that affected you in viewing the film and explain the close analysis.How do you feel, how do you react to the close-up shots of the interview with Ron Ebens? With Lily Chin?What is the role of African Americans in this film? Who are they? What made this a difficult case to win? First as a civil case, then as a federal Civil Rights case?Ron Ebens may not be a racist, but how is he in a position of white/race privilegeWhat defines his whiteness?Think about the concept that this was a tragic accident. And think about Ebens and his family and friends. How, in their minds, was this something that just happened?…Ask yourself: Would Vincent Chin have been beaten to death in the manner that he was if he was white? Would Ron Ebens and his son have gotten off, found not guilty, if they were Black? Respond to the question that the film reiterates as the official legal dilemma: Was it a case of racism, or a barroom brawl?
Question 2
Consider the following points of analysis by Anne Cheng, and then respond to some of the discussion questionsabout the film in your own written voice. Flower Drum Song: is a morality play about national identity; offers multiple narratives (diegetic, narrative, choreographic, musical) that tell very different [conflicting] stories about that identity; astonishes simply because it fills the stage with Asian-looking bodies…. I propose that this visual impact complicates, rather than confirms, the Orientalist fantasy that this movie is supposed to offer. For the ‘real’ Asian bodies solicited to ‘play themselves,’ far from granting substance to the fiction, heighten the instability underlying such efforts of delineation. The visage of citizenship the face of American is the question that raises anxiety that must be according to both film and psychoanalytic theory anxiety must be allayed. …it is the very modeof that anxiety on which a peculiar form of melancholic national identity what will be called AsianAmericaness gets born. Chengs main understanding of Flower Drum Songis that it represents Asian Americaness and Asian American identity, as melancholic, depressed, abject, and in the end, impossible.
Who kill vincent chin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-HUTFEkr1I
Flower Drum Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOj7mjFTAGQ
