A
merican Studies Assistant Professor Denise Khor is on a mission to preserve the early history of Asian American cinema.
Professor Denise Khor Rescues Rare Asian American Silent Film BY DANIELLE BILOTTA
In 2016, Khor was researching for her book, Transpacific Convergences: Race, Migration, and Japanese American Film Culture before World War II ( forthcoming from University of North Carolina Press), when she received a surprising email: The only surviving print of the 1914 film The Oath of the Sword had been found at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Japanese actors play the leads in the film, and it was made by the Japanese American Film Company, a company based in Los Angeles and led by Japanese immigrants. A three-reel silent drama about an ambitious young man leaving behind his beloved in Japan to study abroad at the University of California, Berkeley, the movie is a rare surviving
example of early Asian American filmmaking. “The film was really interesting, and it’s so powerful to have,” Khor said. “It’s very much a Western story of the East, with the fallen Japanese woman and this interracial romance.”
Khor, along with the George Eastman Museum and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, California, recently received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve The Oath of the Sword and give it new life.
“We all worked on the application together in this beautiful, amazing collaborative process that I think is going to yield such an important and significant development in terms of American film history, Asian American film history, and of the legacy of filmmaking, independent filmmaking, and filmmaking at large. It’s just so exciting,” Khor said. The George Eastman Museum will oversee the preservation process, restoring the film’s original tinting and producing a 35mm restored print with a digital master copy. Copies will be archived at the George Eastman Museum and the Japanese American National Museum, which also has plans to incorporate it into their core exhibit. “I’m so looking forward to being able to engage new audiences around the film,” Khor said. “To see it on the big screen is going to be amazing. I can’t wait to screen the film on campus here at UMass Boston.”
A rare example of early Asian American filmmaking, Oath of the Sword was produced in 1914 by the Japanese American Film Company and features Japanese cast members in starring rolls.
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UMass Boston Fall 2021
