New York: Gateway to the East

Abstract After a number of aborted attempts to secure distribution and exhibition in the West in the 1950s and 60s, producers of the Chinese cinema came to understand that film festival prizes, which had been the Japanese model, were not going to work for them. Instead, early attempts were made to break into the US market via an exhibition in New York. The commercial distribution of Hong Kong’s commercially-oriented martial arts movies in the 1970’s satisfied the long-standing desire of producer Run Run Shaw for success in the West, but hardly provided a similar opportunity for the more specialized auteur-cinema of the Mainland and Taiwan in the 1980s. Instead, the New York Film Festival emerged as the premier showcase for Fifth Generation Chinese filmmakers and the New Cinema of Taiwan, along with the Art cinema of Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai.