Quite honestly, I had no expectations for this movie before I saw it, but I admit that I was pleasantly surprised. This story about a woman's quest to uncover a hidden piece of her history made me re-evaluate the way I think about America's past. I was surprised after I saw the movie how many people were upset that they thought the film hand-fed them the story of the Japanese internment during WWII. In reality, the documentary was a statement of historical fact. The winners write the history, and for many years, American historians have brushed passed this time in our past. Tajiri compiled a history of her family and other internees - documenting their history with the hope that it will be remembered as well. This movie isn't trying to force history on the viewers, but to create a documentation of history where one didn't exist before - and to make sure it is remembered.
3 Reviews
A daughter explores Japanese internment through historical and personal accounts.
scrybog18 November 2002
An experimental mixture of historical footage and recent video shots
supplement an examination of Japanese internment during WWII that is
essentially made in voice over narration. The creator talks about her struggle to understand the internment through the memories of her mother and other family members. She explores their words as spoken or written by them. She adds
her own comments and uses the historical footage (mostly from military sources) for comparison. While informative and intriguing, the film is rather amateurish and could have been better edited for clarity -- the experimental nature of the filmmaking
precludes the message of understanding at times.
supplement an examination of Japanese internment during WWII that is
essentially made in voice over narration. The creator talks about her struggle to understand the internment through the memories of her mother and other family members. She explores their words as spoken or written by them. She adds
her own comments and uses the historical footage (mostly from military sources) for comparison. While informative and intriguing, the film is rather amateurish and could have been better edited for clarity -- the experimental nature of the filmmaking
precludes the message of understanding at times.
Docu-realization
Polaris_DiB29 October 2007
Warning: Spoilers
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
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