Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom [Paperback]

"Fascinating ... an exceptionally rich and provocative study of race and national imagery at the beginnings of the Hollywood film industry."--Richard Pena, Program Director, Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Professor of Film Studies, Columbia University "This is the definitive work on Sessue Hayakawa. It is a work of great originality, a truly unique attempt not only to give a thorough account of the career of one of the first and most unusual stars of silent cinema but also to approach Hayakawa from the perspective of his identity as an ethnic Japanese gaining worldwide stardom. That Daisuke Miyao is able to interrogate not only Japanese sources but the Japanese-language newspapers in the United States makes this perhaps the most thorough--and complex--treatment of the ethnicity of a movie star ever offered by a film historian. And Miyao's placing of Hayakawa's stardom within the context of the political and cultural relations between the United States and Japan is nothing less than masterful."--Tom Gunning, author of The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity "[O]ffer[s] important new opportunities to develop our understanding of the transnational history of Hollywood cinema. From the vantage point of the particular systems of production, representation and reception concerning the deployment of East Asian actors within American narrative filmmaking, [it] uncover[s] valuable insights into Hollywood's global strategies during a time of enormous political upheaval and cultural change regarding the construction of American self-identity and the USA's attitudes to its East Asian citizens and neighbours. [Miyao] write[s] impressively from 'within' in order to stage...understanding of the ambivalent status...of Americanization and modernization...The way that Miyao comes to...his remarkable nuanced analysis is by arguing that, like his screen persona more generally, Hayakawa embodied a mobile middle-ground between Orientalized and Americanized modes of performance...Miyao also allows us to see a more complex set of negotiations being staged within the distinctive transnational cultural force-field that Hayakawa occupied during his heyday within the Hollywood system...It is the unique achievement of Miyao's book that we are able to visualize the vectors especially of this first aspect of Hayakawa's stardom for the first time. By examining the Japanese-American Japanese-language press and by also discussing the critical reception of Hayakawa's films within his home country, Miyao intensifies the complexion of his history in a substantial way...propose[s] a vital contribution to the current reconceptualization of Hollywood cinema within the framework of modern international film studies." Alastair Phillips, Screen 2008, issue 49

While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886-1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in "The Bridge on the River Kwai "(1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa's stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor's remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille's "The Cheat" (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes.

Drawing on early-twentieth-century sources in both English and Japanese, including Japanese-language newspapers in the United States, Miyao illuminates the construction and reception of Hayakawa's stardom as an ongoing process of cross-cultural negotiation. Hayakawa's early work included short films about Japan that were popular with American audiences as well as spy films that played upon anxieties about Japanese nationalism. The Jesse L. Lasky production company sought to shape Hayakawa's image by emphasizing the actor's Japanese traits while portraying him as safely assimilated into U.S. culture. Hayakawa himself struggled to maintain his sympathetic persona while creating more complex Japanese characters that would appeal to both American and Japanese audiences. The star's initial success with U.S. audiences created ambivalence in Japan, where some described him as traitorously Americanized and others as a positive icon of modernized Japan. This unique history of transnational silent-film stardom focuses attention on the ways that race, ethnicity, and nationality influenced the early development of the global film industry.