page_title: The Dragon Painter
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: The Dragon Painter / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Screen shot of the 1919 film The Dragon Painter featuring actor Sessue Hayakawa and actress Tsuru Aoki.
context_page_description: The Dragon Painter is a 1919 English language silent romance drama film. It is based on the novel of the same name, written by Mary McNeil Fenollosa. It stars Sessue Hayakawa as a young painter who believes that his fiancée, is a princess who has been captured and turned into a dragon. It was directed by William Worthington and filmed in Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, California.
  The Dragon Painter was restored in 1988 by the American Film Institute with the George Eastman House and MoMA. In 2014, the film was added to the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
context_section_description: Japanese film theorist Daisuke Miyao wrote in his book The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Cinema that "The Dragon Painter...a Hayakawa star vehicle...was a perfect example of Aoki providing authenticity to the Orientalist imagination of Japan." He further wrote "Playing the role of Ume-ko, Aoki provides a sense of authenticity to the stereotypical self-sacrificing Japanese woman like Cio-Cio-San." The film was praised for successfully reproducing an authentic Japanese atmosphere. However, the Japanese film magazine Kinema Jumpo noted that the film had not shown "either contemporary or actual Japan". Katsudo Kurabu, a Japanese film trade magazine, commented, "Even though Mr. Sessue Hayakawa took subject matter from Japan, Japanese styles and names in The Dragon Painter are very inappropriate...a film about Japan that does not properly depict Japanese customs is very hard to watch for us Japanese." The Motion Picture World stated that Hayakawa had, "steadily advanced in popularity" and that several of the well known exhibitors had contracted for every collaboration between Hayakawa and Robertson-Cole. The film is regarded as the first in the series of "Hayakawa superior pictures" produced by Robertson-Cole. Margaret I. MacDonald praised the "authentic" Japanese presentation and wrote "one of the especially fine features of the production is the laboratory work, mountain locations of extreme beauty, chosen for the purpose of imitating Japanese scenery and supplying Japanese atmosphere, are enhanced by the splendid results accomplished, in the work of developing and toning."
  Contemporary critics have rated the film favorably. According to New York Times review of a Hayakawa retrospective: "The film is a kind of visually sophisticated fairy tale, with tinting (best is the moonlit blue of the night scenes) and neatly composed interiors and silhouettes. Set in Japan with Japanese characters, The Dragon Painter, though written by an American, seems like a relic from a parallel Hollywood: one without the cultural and sexual fetishism that often characterized its forays into the exotic."
caption: Sessue Hayakawa (left) with actress and wife Tsuru Aoki in a screen shot from the film
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