By Rudy Ojeda
For the first time in its curriculum East Los Angeles College will be offering a class on Asian and Asian American film that will cover visual media from the Asian pacific region. The Instructor for the class would be David K. Song who is the advisor to the Asian American club on campus.
The class would be the first of its kind being offered at ELAC and will fulfill the humanities requirement for transferring. Mr. Song, being the advisor to the Asian American club here on ELAC has been known by students to be extremely passionate about teaching Asian studies on campus.
When speaking to David he emphasized the Asian Pacific being a very broad place to select certain film areas of studying, but the class will include films from Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It can also explore other cinematic regions like India, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and so on.
Included in this course would be both sides of time from the historic cinematic eras to the more contemporary artistic films.
Being a survey course David plans on expanding the mind of a student and introducing them to great major directors like Akira Kurosawa. Akira being known as one of the greatest cinematic film maker in history. More directors David will hope to expand light on will be Wong Kar-wai and Park Chanwook.
The course will also examine Asian American film makers as well. From documentaries and narrative films.
This course will also analyze the visual literacy in such films and critically analyze each film and the era.
David said that the plan is to get the course taught every semester because it is a transferable course and it also fulfills the humanity requirement.
For updates on that course (as well as other Asian American Studies courses), students can also visit the official ELAC Asian American Studies webpage at facebook.com/elacaas