*the Asian femme fatal (or dragon lady)
*the Asian hooker (Suzy Wong)
*the geisha
*the Asian female co-anchor (Connie Chung)
*the Asian nail artist (Miss Kwan on Saturday Night Live etc.)
*the Asian family grocery (Do the Right Thing etc.)
*the sensei/master (Karate Kid etc.) which is related to...
*the Asian martial artist (Jackie Chan)
*the (too) smart little Asian kid (with glasses) which is related to...
*the socially awkward and hard-working Asian guy (every role played by John Cho etc.)
*the Yakuza (or other gangster)
*the exotic Asian housewife (usually of an ex-GI)
*the opium den

Directors and Titles:

*Tsai Ming-Liang (The Hole: 2000 As Seen By...)
*Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, House of Flying Daggers)
*Takeshi Miike (Dead or Alive, Ichi the Killer, The Happiness of the Katakuris)
*Huaxun Zhang (Deadly Fury)
*Akira Kurosawa (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Dreams)
*Sadao Yamanaka (Humanity and Paper Balloons)
*Mabel Cheung (Now You See Love... Now You Don't, City of Glass)
*Wang Haowei (Sunset Street, After Divorce)
*Wang Ping (Bruce Lee: The Man and the Legend)
*Zhang Nuanxin (Sha Ou, Sacrifice of Youth)

Films/TV Shows:

*Margaret Cho's "All-American Girl" (and all of her movies)
*Jackie Chan's movies
*Bruce Lee's movies
*Sandra Oh in "Grey's Anatomy"
*John Cho in "Harold and Kumar"
*Lucy Liu in "Charlie's Angels," "Kill Bill," and "Ally McBeal"

Okay. It's a visually stunning film. I usually like to watch movies with backgrounded thoughts of how I would have shot this differently, how I would have made that sequence move more quickly, how I would have used this kind of light-- especially when I'm seeing something for the second time. But "The Piano" didn't make me think about any of that. Instead I was focused on the question of whether or not this is a feminist text.

...

I'm still slightly torn.

I have so much respect for everyone in this movie. I thought I knew a lot of women directors and/or cinematographers, but I definitely saw so many pioneers that I had never heard of until today. I really enjoyed the wide variety of types of footage compiled in WBtC. It reminded me of making a documentary about my own life. Most importantly, it's very wonderfully symbolic to pull together all of these different stocks, stuff on VHS, and new interviews done on a sparkley mini DV camera to create a portrait of the experiences of so many different people. I loved seeing the intersections of identity articulated by each woman. The context of this piece is something I was pretty familiar with already-- and it was not surprising to hear of the extreme sexism and discrimination in the film industry that was there in the beginning and is definitely still present. These stories did, however, lead me in some interesting directions personally.