Rea Tajiri remembers an image from her youth: her mother huddling at a spout in the desert, filling up a canteen with water. This image is not something she's experienced but something she's been told about, but she clings to it as the only basic revelation of the WWII Japanese internment her mother was subject to. As the documentary proceeds, Tajiri attempts to discover more about the Japanese experience during that era, only to find a significant lack of documents and photojournalist images, thus making this documentary an exploration more into the attempt to find the documentary than a revelation of the experience itself.
Tajiri uses many different approaches to replace this specific dearth. Instead of images she wanted to find, she puts in rolling descriptions of them. Instead of so-called historical quality clips, she puts in clips from Hollywood movies that communicated pro-American and anti-Japanese sentiments at the time. Instead of talking heads illustrating "the experience", she has sound clips of her family speaking scattered throughout the work, and significantly, they're hard to hear.
The effect is an experiment in audio-visual overload, but once again the result is the revelation of the documentary form that already exists than the creation of a new one. Sure, it's hard to read a scrolling text while someone else is talking over it, but then again, what makes it easier to regard a moving image while a description goes on at the same time? Documentaries themselves are often forced to overload the senses just to connect various media together into a cohesive form.
--PolarisDiB
Tajiri uses many different approaches to replace this specific dearth. Instead of images she wanted to find, she puts in rolling descriptions of them. Instead of so-called historical quality clips, she puts in clips from Hollywood movies that communicated pro-American and anti-Japanese sentiments at the time. Instead of talking heads illustrating "the experience", she has sound clips of her family speaking scattered throughout the work, and significantly, they're hard to hear.
The effect is an experiment in audio-visual overload, but once again the result is the revelation of the documentary form that already exists than the creation of a new one. Sure, it's hard to read a scrolling text while someone else is talking over it, but then again, what makes it easier to regard a moving image while a description goes on at the same time? Documentaries themselves are often forced to overload the senses just to connect various media together into a cohesive form.
--PolarisDiB