Arthur Dong: 5 Films That Transformed My Moviegoing Into Cinema – A.frame

“Going to the movies during childhood, watching Chinese-language films from Hong Kong in the neighborhood theaters of San Francisco Chinatown, was a regular source of social entertainment and free babysitting for my working-class family,” Arthur Dong tells A.frame. The Oscar nominee and former Academy governor recently took the chance to look back on his earliest moviegoing experiences ahead of the launch of the Academy Museum’s newest program, “Hollywood Chinese: The First 100 Years.”

The series, which launches on November 4 and runs until November 27, was guest programmed by Dong, who describes his experience curating the program as “a dream come true.” For Dong, who is a member of the Academy’s History and Preservation Committee and has served on the Academy Museum’s Inclusion Advisory Committee since it was founded in 2017, the program is “the culmination of a decades-long quest to investigate an art form and industry often ignorant about race, yet at times paradoxically receptive.” The series will, in other words, offer attendees the chance to dive into the history of Chinese American cinema in a manner they likely never have before.

“I hope this presentation of selected films shown in their entirety, in a state-of-the-art theater, provides audiences not only a look at how cinema affects perceptions – and misperceptions — of the ‘other’ in America, but also an affirmation of the incredible work by Chinese and Chinese American artists during the first hundred years of film,” says Dong, whose own cinematic memories date back to his early days in San Francisco.

After spending many hours watching Chinese-language films in his local movie theaters, Dong’s growing love of cinema eventually led to him exploring movies from other countries, filmmakers, and genres. “I later ventured to other-language films, particularly Hollywood features, where going to the movies was not only an immersion into the moving image, but also became an exploration of the art, history, and impact of film,” Dong says.

Below, Dong shares with A.frame the five films that, as he says, “transformed my moviegoing into cinema during this early period of discovery.”