Click here to visit its current home at USC.
Subscribe to the APA Newsletter
A four-star establishment indeed. Courtesy of www.outsidelands.org/fourstar.html
Wish Upon a Star
With the 4 Star Theatre’s legal woes mounting, so is the urgency of saving the nation’s last Chinese movie theater. APA's Brian Hu waxes nostalgic about the San Francisco treasure.
When I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area five years ago, the 4 Star Theatre in the Richmond District became one of the real pleasures for a young film lover such as myself. As the only remaining theater in the United States playing new Hong Kong films, the 4 Star represented a universe of filmgoing that existed in Asian-American communities before I was old enough to know who Wong Fei-hong or Asia the Invincible were. Attending 4 Star screenings of new and classic Hong Kong cinema showed me that while my many friends and family preferred their Asian cinema on bootlegged VHS and VCD, there was still a stronghold of fans -- Asian and non-Asian alike -- who made it a principle to see Hong Kong films on the big screen with a group of fellow cinemagoers.
Now living in Los Angeles, I’ve become nostalgic for my 4 Star days, and I even periodically check the theater website to see what I’m missing, especially during festival season in August. Last week though, the website imparted some bad news. The 4 Star is facing eviction from the Canaan Lutheran Church, which purchased the property in 2001 and has waited for the 4 Star’s lease to run out so they can move in. Frank and Lida Lee, owners of the 4 Star, are suing the church, claiming that such an eviction violates a city ordinance which prohibits theaters from getting shut down because cinemas bring business into the surrounding area. Neighborhood businesses have petitioned, expressing their support for the 4 Star.
I’m sure the 4 Star is good for business (heaven knows how many bowls of shaved ice I’ve had at the restaurant across the street) and I’ll leave the legalities to the lawyers. But as a lover of non-Hollywood film and a Chinese film scholar in training, I’m arguing for the 4 Star not because of economic or legal reasons, but because its survival is a cultural imperative. Many independent movie theaters -- and there aren’t too many remaining -- are facing similar economic threats, but the 4 Star is one of the few that embodies an entire generation of film spectatorship. While the 4 Star hasn’t always played Chinese films (it was owned by the Pathé Company during the nickelodeon days), it serves as a symbol of the Chinese-American enterprise and forges an imagined community for immigrants displaced from their homeland. During Chinese New Year season, going to see a local film is a Hong Kong tradition. While the 4 Star’s annual Chinese New Year selections have gone down in quality (I caught the dismal Magic Kitchen/Fantasia double feature in 2004), the community still comes out in droves because traditions still mean something, even in America. This is a different kind of cultural preservation than the parades and architecture of Chinatown; it is a celebration of the modern Chinese lifestyle and a reminder of the thriving Chinese culture an ocean away -- embodied by pop idols, movie stars, gossip tabloids, and karaoke. As a result, the 4 Star still attracts moviegoers. Independent movie theaters may not draw the crowds of a megaplex, but the 4 Star certainly isn’t the ghost house depicted in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye Dragon Inn. When I was at a 4 Star fundraiser on December 17, the theater lobby was bubbling with nostalgic conversations about the state of Hong Kong cinema. When I visited the 4 Star last year for a matinee screening of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Springtime in a Small Town remake, the theater was packed with senior citizens wanting to see a new film in their own language.
The 4 Star is also a physical reminder that Hong Kong cinema has never simply been a local phenomenon. Since the 1940s (if not earlier), Hong Kong cinema has counted on the patronage of Chinese audiences throughout Southeast Asia (especially Singapore and Malaysia) as well as Taiwan, where films often made the majority of their revenue. Before long, the industry began to export films to Chinatown movie theaters all over the world, including cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Today, the video distributor Tai Seng exists because of this diasporic, movie-hungry U.S. market. But of course, before home video, these audiences consumed Hong Kong cinema in theaters specializing in Asian cinema. There was a moment in the '70s when Hong Kong martial arts films spilled over into mainstream theaters, but when that trend fizzled, these Chinese movie theaters continued as the only theaters showing new Hong Kong films. Therefore, for the historian, these theaters are essential to the understanding of how Chinese cinemas developed and what kind of audiences were attracted to the films from Hong Kong and Taiwan before the post-Crouching Tiger Asian vogue of the present.
The fact that Frank and Lida Lee own original prints from the span of Chinese film history is also significant from both a practical and cultural perspective. In November, the UCLA Film and Television Archive showed Wu Ma’s 1971 The Deaf and Mute Heroine from a DigiBeta source, which is the only English subtitled version housed at the Hong Kong Film Archive. Yet, this month, I saw a 35mm English/Chinese subtitled print of the same film at the 4 Star. When I asked Frank Lee about this after the screening, he told me he was unable to lend the print to the UCLA archive because of its poor physical condition. What’s amazing to me is that quite possibly the only subtitled 35mm print in the world of this classic martial arts film is housed in San Francisco rather than the Hong Kong Film Archive, another reminder that Hong Kong cinema has always been a transnational entity and that its fans and cultural guardians often have non-Asian addresses. The fact that such a treasure can only be shown in San Francisco is further reason that the 4 Star must be saved.
The Lees aren’t simply sitting on a goldmine of classic Chinese films; they’re programming events to allow the community access to seeing original 35mm prints. Comprised of countless old school martial arts films from the Lee collection, the Hong Kong Movie Madness series in the summers of 2002 and 2003 depicted a different side of the genre from the landmark, but more scholarly and canonical Heroic Grace series that was touring the country at the same time. In addition, the annual Asian Film Festival, now in its 9th installment, not only plays the best of new Asian cinema, but always features a few prints from the Lee collection. This year, they played the classic Chinese Ghost Story. In 1999, the fest screened the rare epic The Last Woman of Shang, and 2003 saw Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury, King Hu’s legendary Touch of Zen, and The Marigolds, a Brigitte Lin adaptation of a Qiong Yao romance novel. Frank Lee tells me he’s got plenty others, from mainstream Hong Kong and Taiwanese films to 16mm documentaries from the mainland. If the 4 Star goes down, the travesty isn’t simply that this extraordinary film collection will lose its primary programming venue; it’s that I doubt there’s a single repertory, museum, or archive theater outside of Chinese communities interested in regularly programming these classic mainstream Chinese films.
The annual Asian Film Festival is also something that cannot exist elsewhere. It is a true independent film festival: no sponsors and not even a theater that needs to be rented. In other words, Lee can play whatever new films he can get his hands on. The problem tends to be convincing sales agents and distributors to choose his indie fest over big name events like the San Francisco International Film Festival or NAATA’s San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. But these bigger festivals have a limit to the number of new commercial Asian films that they can show, so plenty of important works slip past their radar. As a result, the Asian Film Festival has held the local or national premieres of contemporary classics such as Ju-on: The Grudge, Men Suddenly in Black, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, A Single Spark, 12 Storeys, and many others. My personal favorite 4 Star find is Cheng Wen-tang’s aboriginal drama Somewhere over the Dreamland, one of the best Taiwanese films of the past decade, and which was criminally ignored by the city’s two other big festivals. Despite its enormous acclaim, to this date the film is still unavailable on video anywhere in the world, including its native Taiwan. If the 4 Star didn’t play the film, I’m not convinced I could have seen it anywhere else.
Thus, the 4 Star is a place where fans of Asian cinema converge and where Chinese immigrants can momentarily reclaim a sense of home. On a personal note, the 4 Star Theatre is where my girlfriend (a Taiwanese immigrant) and I (a Chinese cinema novice) got to know each other years ago. “I don’t know if you’ve heard of this film,” I remember telling her, “it’s called Ashes of Time and apparently it has a lot of famous stars.” Our night out in the Richmond district enabled me to attach names like Tony Leung, Carina Lau, Jackie Cheung, and Andy Lau to faces, but more importantly, it initiated a discussion of Chinese cinema that continues to this day. In the following years, we saw Devdas at the film fest, the New Year double feature, and several others. I remember that we’d get there early to scout out the residential areas for free parking by creeping slowly around 22nd, 23rd, and 24th Streets in hopes that somebody may pull out of a prime spot. Then we’d get some xiaochi in the neighborhood eateries before a night of Sammi Cheng, Wong Kar-wai, or those pesky Twins.
I respect the Canaan Lutheran Church and I wish them luck in finding another piece of property in San Francisco. But to convert the 4 Star into a place of worship is counterproductive: the community has been worshipping the movie gods there for a century now, and it has no intention of stopping.
The San Francisco Chronicle on the latest legal battle
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/10/DDGQ1G51GS1.DTL
4 Star Theatre website
http://www.hkinsf.com/4star/
“Save the 4 Star” website
http://www.save4star.net/
Previous APA articles on 4 Star programs:
http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/082903/20030829_asianfilmfest.html
http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/071803/20030718_fourstarmovie.html
Date Posted: 12/22/2005