I once interviewed Quentin Lee for an article about the distribution of independent Asian American feature films. Quentin astutely pointed out the Catch-22 involved--the extreme limitations of the label on the one hand and the extreme vagueness on the other: "When reviewers write about an 'Asian American film,' then everybody already has some kind of expectation--or else they don't know what the hell it is.

" But if there are expectations, I wonder, what are they? Does an archetypal Asian American film exist, one etched into the cultural memory? If I asked this of my Asian American film class at Berkeley, my students might be hard pressed. JOY LUCK CLUB, maybe. CHAN IS MISSING? I was surprised how few had heard of it, much less actually seen it. FLOWER DRUM SONG? Each time I've shown it, it's been a delirious excavation, the discovery of a lost civilization of shamelessly singing and dancing orientals. And while CHAN or FLOWER seemed carbon-dated in their period-defined dreams of Asian America, it was always shocking to see how up-to-date DeMille's THE CHEAT (1915) or Griffith's BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919) could be (especially when compared to their weaker descendants, THE CORRUPTOR, say, or ANNA AND THE KING). "Asian American" is a slippery concept, but orientalism is forever.

Do Asian Americans possess a cultural memory? I ask this because, by the late '90s it seemed safe to say that the book had closed on the most fertile period in Asian American cultural history, the '70s and '80s. Certainly this vitality was true of Asian American film, whose humble goals were nothing less than the revisualization of history and the construction of a cultural mythology, as Renee Tajima points out in probably the only thing we have resembling a history of Asian American independent film, the title essay in Moving the Image.

That book was published a decade ago, and yet, I'm unsure what to report has happened since then, besides the continuing maturation of the filmmakers already mentioned in the book. My sense is that, quite understandably, younger filmmakers and filmgoers possess the same unease with this legacy as does Quentin--that the second option, "they don't know what the hell it is," might be the better one. For me, though, the suggestions of those who would prefer Asian American cinema to go tabula rasa (again) haven't been particularly heartening. Is Lucy Liu the answer? Or Sammo Hung? Haven't we all played this shell game before?

Does Asian American film have to reinvent itself? A decade that was endlessly fascinated by itself, the '70s were definitely an era Asian Americans (to their credit?) worked hard to avoid. Or at least the part of the '70s that concerned Asian Americans. I can easily imagine a precocious Asian American filmmaker meticulously studying the grammar of '70s Hollywood in order to produce some kind of time-warped copy ˆ la JACKIE BROWN, or an Asian American turntablist raiding old funk records, but I can't really imagine an Asian American film or videomaker having any inclination to do anything with THE FALL OF THE I HOTEL or WHO KILLED VINCENT CHIN?, other than regard them as homework. When I play DUPONT GUY in my class, discussion stops dead at its dated angry yellow man politics, as if the look of it--the Chinatown of its time, its disorienting collage of touristed sounds and drive-by visions, fused by beautifully period-frozen Asian American poetry--was somehow incidental and not aesthetically designed. Whereas, as we well know, the styles of "The Brady Bunch", or SHAFT, or Parliament, are anything but incidental. They are the entire point. It's easy to forget that Asian Americans invented a style in the '70s and that Asian American documentaries, in particular, pioneered a way of looking at reality. But who recognizes this style, and can therefore appreciate how films like CHAN IS MISSING, or the works of Valerie Soe, or MY AMERICA, or even STRAWBERRY FIELDS, play with and transform the elements of Asian American documentary?

Of course one doesn't expect mass familiarity with the sub-underground field of '70s Asian American independent cinema, as interesting as that cultural history is and the aesthetic acheivements within it, but one does expect it from new filmmakers, critics, and academics who are working after its very real political and artistic accomplishments. To me, that's what developing a historical context for this festival is about. Ignoring that context, we simply fall into the game of trying to come up with the "Asian American MATRIX" or the "Asian American SWINGERS" or whatever. Asian America is moving forward, at a pace that's so incomprehensible that it's legitimate to ask whether it constitutes any kind of community any more, and there are always new realities to be shown and new voices to be heard. I'm sure there's plenty of fascinating Asian Americans out there who deserve to have their reality portrayed. I also think that art is about building upon the accomplishments of one's predecessors, that the masterpiece we're all waiting for isn't going to come out of big dreams and thin air.