The DOI matches its Crossref record, with a small difference in title or year.
Anna May Wong and the Color Image
Open accessAbstract
In Cinema 1, Deleuze proposes the “color-image,” a type of film image with an “absorbent characteristic” that does not refer to a particular object but seizes all that happens within its range. Like color-images, racial categories have an absorbent, seizing quality: they assert “color” at the expense of the object of representation. Deleuze does not address the potential applications of his concept to race, but they are especially illuminating when applied to early color-process cinema. This essay approaches The Toll of the Sea (dir. Chester M. Franklin, 1922), starring Anna May Wong and set in China, the first Technicolor film to be widely distributed in general release, as a feature-length “China Girl” and feature-length color-image, in Deleuze's sense. It further shows how Wong and her world are virtualized in this film under the rubric of a fictional orientalist palette.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha embodies the Lotus Blossom stereotype, with suppressed emotions, reliance on appearance, and lack of autonomy.
“For example, Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) represents the lotus blossom stereotype, relying on her appearance and traditional role expectations, lacking emotional depth and autonomy.”
From From Dragon Lady to Authentic Representation: The Evolution and Cultural Impact of Asian Female Stereotypes in American Film (2025) · cites this paper as [14]
The “Exotic and Foreign” passages discuss Lotus Flower in The Toll of the Sea, not Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha. Searches for Sayuri and Memoirs of a Geisha, and for the claimed traits, found no passage in our copy assessing Sayuri or supporting the characterization attributed to this source. (LLM, conf=0.76)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
No references could be resolved yet.
Research works printed but not linked: 24
- Batchelor, 2000, Chromophobia
- Benjamin, 1972, Gespräch mit Anne May Wong: Eine Chinoiserie aus dem alten Westen, 523
- Bellour, 2000, To Enunciate (on Marnie), 217
- Cheng, 2019, Ornamentalism
- John, 1957, Crazy Golden Slippers, 12
- Deleuze, 1986, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 10.5040/9781350251977 · DOI
- Deleuze, 1989, Cinema 2: The Time-Image
- Diawara, 1988, Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance, Screen, 29, 66, 10.1093/screen/29.4.66 · DOI
- English, 2016, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color, 10.7208/chicago/9780226274737.001.0001 · DOI
- Freeman, 2000, Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations, New Literary History, 31, 727, 10.1353/nlh.2000.0046 · DOI
- King, 2015, Cinema's Virtual Chinas, 56
- King, 2010, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier
- Leyendecker, 1952, Technicolor Sees Increase in Its 1952 Feature Output, 8
- Long, 1903, Madame Butterfly
- Meyer, 2002, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art
- Ovid, 1955, Metamorphoses
- Proust, 1989, Swann's Way
- Raeburn, 2006, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography
- Russell, 2004, Anna May Wong: From Laundryman's Daughter to Hollywood Legend
- Schrader, 2015, Color: Part VII, Film Comment, 51, 52
- Street, 2019, Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s, 10.7312/stre17982 · DOI
- Wang, 2008, Anna May Wong: A Border-Crossing ‘Minor’ Star Mediating Performance, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 2, 91, 10.1386/jcc.2.2.91_1 · DOI
- Wang, 2005, The Art of Screen Passing: Anna May Wong's Yellowface Performance in the Art Deco Era, Camera Obscura, 20, 158, 10.1215/02705346-20-3_60-159 · DOI
- Yue, 2015, The China Girl on the Margins of Film, October, 96, 10.1162/OCTO_a_00228 · DOI
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Yu, Z. (2025) · Communications in Humanities Research · doi:10.54254/2753-7064/2025.22863
Metadata
- Authors
- King, H.
- Corresponding author
- King, Homay
- Venue
- liquid blackness
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- 2021-10-01
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 59-73
- ISSN
- 2692-3874 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3216411372
- Cited by
- 11
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 1 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 2.96
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-nd
- Locations
- liquid blackness (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr College) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Cinema History and Criticism
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Cinema and Media Studies
- Keywords
- Anna May Wong, Gilles Deleuze, color images, racial classification, technicolor, Orientalism, virtualization, race in film
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
