The transitional and the transnational: Hollywood and transnational Chinese cinemas before 199

In the 1980s, three films that explored Chinese subject matter were made in the United States: John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Wayne Wang's Chan is Missing (1982), and the Eddie Murphy vehicle The Golden Child (1986). This thesis argues that these films lay the groundwork for what film scholars identify as Hollywood's transnational partnership with China. Scholars of transnational Chinese cinemas place the beginning of Hollywood's partnership with China in 1997. The films this thesis analyzes prefigure later transnational filmmaking projects through their investigations of space (particularly U.S. Chinatowns), their experiments with narrative, and their articulations of Chinese-American identity. In doing so, this essay intervenes in both a critical discourse and a popular media fixation. It challenges the periodization and borders of transnational Chinese cinemas by providing a history of association between Hollywood and Chinese film. It also allays popular concerns that Hollywood's symbiosis with the Chinese film market will undermine or subsume U.S. film's national identity. "Transitional Cinemas," an analytic this thesis advances, creates a place for films that exist outside the explicit confines of the transnational, but which fall into a longer trajectory toward it. The trajectories this thesis identifies are threefold: Hollywood films' influence by the Chinese kung fu genre, Chinese directors' relocation to the United States, and Chinese-American independent filmmakers' induction into mainstream Hollywood.