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Artifacts of Culture
Karen Ishizuka
A few years ago I was asked to testify before our National Film Preservation
Board and, while there are a handful of us around the country working with
amateur footage, as the Librarian of Congress and other Board members have
said to me many times since, my testimony was the first time the significance
and urgency to preserve home movies had been brought to their attention.
Today it was interesting to note that many previous speakers also relayed
feeling like a minority voice in the field and so it is a special pleasure
to be here amongst allies and colleagues I didn't even know I had.
Filmmaker Bob Nakamura and I would like to share excerpts from two of our
productions that feature home movies exclusively as well as the process
by which we collect, preserve and utilize our moving image collection at
the Museum.
First of all I'd like to reiterate and emphasize the importance of what
to us is an underlying assumption but to others is not apparent at all,
that is: amateur footage constitutes significant historical and cultural
documentation that, like selections from other genres, is worthy of our
best preservation efforts. In the field of film preservation, we are interested
in films as products about our culture and as products of our
culture. Amateur films, even more than professional films, are deeply contextual
and reflective of the life and times of the maker, region and time period.
They are visual statements, modern mediums of communication and symbolic
activity, that reflect qualitative aspects of lifestyle and remain as symbols
of the creator's real as well as constructed views of life. They supply
clues into the depth of people's experiences, particularly into the emotional
and aesthetic content of culture. They are statements about culture,
are artifacts of culture.
In addition, I would dare to add, that for so-called minority groups in
the United States (and I would expect the same is true in other countries),
because we went undocumented by early mass media of the day, home movies
constitute the only existing historic moving image documentation
of ethnic and regional groups from certain time periods.
Until as recently as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s (and some would
say even this is generous) - people of color were not considered particularly
newsworthy and therefore usually went unreported and hence undocumented
by the mass media, the chroniclers of modern society. We existed and yet
went unseen in advertisements, mainstream feature films, illustrations and
commercials in other than infrequent, usually stereotypic and oftentimes
downright racist portrayals. We have never seen images of the United States
in the early part of the century as lived by Mexican Americans, African
Americans, Japanese Americans and other ethnic groups - except as
recorded and documented in our own family albums and home movies. As such,
early home movies provide not only the most legitimate portrayals and real
reflections of ethnic American life, but the only motion picture documentation
of ethnic life from the point of view of those who lived it. They are never-before-seen
visions of the making of the United States and as such force the re-thinking
of issues of history and concepts of national identity.
As a nation of immigrants, the United States is the product of the collective
impact of ethnic and cultural groups. In the process of adapting
to this new country and transforming our own lives, we have brought a variety
of traditions, foods, values and history that have interacted and created
new forms that are now considered American. Each culture contains its own
assumptions and it is in terms of this cultural integrity, in association
with the external environment, that people construct their social, symbolic,
real, and even imagined worlds. Home movies, being products of the maker's
reality, are particularly important in that they provide entry and insight
into who they were and what gave their lives meaning.
Bob and I first heard about home movies taken by Japanese immigrants quite
by accident. Even though Bob had long worked with historic photographs of
Japanese Americans and pioneered the field of Asian American media, he had
not uncovered any home movies until the Summer of 1989 while we were researching
still photographs in Seattle, Washington. After a complex search, I found
the family spokesperson for the collection living in Denver, Colorado and
finally the collection itself in Oakland, California. This first collection
turned out to be twenty 400 foot reels of 16mm B&W film of some of the
earliest home movies taken in the States, beginning in 1925 just one year
after Eastman Kodak had introduced 16mm to the public.
On this early home footage were remarkable images - some we had never seen
visually documented even in stills. There was a very complete record of
the amateur filmmaker's lumber exporting business in the Pacific Northwest
including rotary saws cutting the logs, Japanese lumberjacks floating logs
down the Columbia River, loading them on big ships - even his trip to the
bank to get a business loan. There were early scenes of Seattle in the mid-1920s
including a chaotic unmarked intersection with vintage automobiles going
every which way and an Independence Day Parade featuring World War I vintage
tanks and soldiers. There were rare interior scenes in a Japanese American
bank with Caucasian workers using upright telephones and Japanese workers
calculating figures on the abacus. There was even a typical American picnic
scene complete with bootlegged liqueur, foot races and American flags -
except that most of the faces were Japanese.
Clearly these early home movies comprised true documentary footage of cultural
and historical significance. From then on, through public calls but mainly
through word of mouth, our collection has expanded to include over 100,000
feet of 16mm, 8mm and Super 8mm, B&W and color silent film footage and
is still growing. As indicated, the earliest collection dates back to the
mid 1920s when 16mm home movie making was first introduced and Japanese
immigrants began making America their new home. The collection continues
into the 1930s when the 8mm format was introduced. Even through the war-disrupting
1940s, and significantly in light of the fact that cameras during the wartime
exclusion and incarceration were initially considered contraband, Japanese
American inmates managed to film their mass incarceration during World War
II. The archive continues to chronicle the post-war 1950s and has ventured
into videotape with a collection of 110 reels of 1/2 inch videotape of significant
events, interviews and performances documenting the Asian American Movement
in the early 1970s. (Issues of videotape and its preservation are left for
another discussion.)
From this collection, Bob and I produced a 3-screen video installation called
Through Our Own Eyes, featuring home movies made by Japanese immigrants
as they made the United States their home in the 1920s and 1930s for an
exhibit on Japanese immigration; Moving Memories, a single screen
version that traveled with an exhibit and is available on VHS; and Something
Strong Within, a video featuring rare footage shot by inmates themselves
in the World War II camps.
In all of our productions, we have taken utmost care to maintain the integrity
of the original film footage. In the selection and editing stage, Bob tried
many variations which included editing thematically to chronologically.
We were finally guided by the collections themselves which presented unique
artistic visions of life as the filmmaker lived it. Instead of mixing collections,
each person's vision/version of life in their adopted country was presented
as a distinct segment. The clip from Moving Memories shows how Bob
structured the film by collections.
Each segment was introduced by a photographic representation of the original
amateur filmmaker, his name and birth and death dates. (At the time of production,
we had no women filmmakers in the collection. Although still predominantly
a male preoccupation in the 1920s-40s, we now have a few extraordinary collections
taken by women during that time period.) In this excerpt, the portrait of
the arts is a motion picture frame which unfreezes to become a moving image,
hence highlighting the immediacy and verisimilitude of the moving image.
The 3-screen installation had no narration, intending instead to let the
visuals speak for themselves and in a non-didactic manner, bringing the
vitality of the immigrant spirit back to life. Instead, a music track consisting
of Japanese and American songs that were widely listened to by immigrants
during the time period was selected to further augment the primacy of the
visuals and the immigrants' point of view - not unlike an historical music
video. Bob and I listened to and selected from over 300 78 rpm records that
were donated/loaned by immigrants or their American-born children - including
a lively rendition of the American popular tune "My Blue Heaven"
sung in Japanese.
This two-tiered method of filmmaking - the vision conveyed by the people
who actually lived the lives they filmed and that of the filmmakers - prompted
Bob Rosen, Director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, to review Through
Our Own Eyes as "eloquently speaking to the intrinsic power of
the moving image to evoke feelings and provoke imagination." He wrote,
"Nakamura found just the right balance of artistry and respect: the
artistry to structure coherent and meaningful experience and the respect
not to impose contrived meaning."
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Moving Memories edits the original 3-screen installation into a single
screen and adds a prologue, voice-over introductions to each of the home
movie collections and epilogue by popular actor George Takei, himself the
son of Japanese immigrants. It has received world-wide cable coverage and
has been translated into Japanese for broadcast in Japan. Moving Memories
was the only media production to receive an Award of Merit from the
American Association of State and Local History.
The second clip is from Something Strong Within, a piece we made
for an exhibit I curated called "America's Concentration Camps: Remembering
the Japanese American Experience." During World War II, the United
States government incarcerated more than 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry
living in the United States, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens by birth.
While the U.S. was at war with Germany and Italy as well as Japan, only
Americans of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated en masse on the allegation
they would be a threat to national security.
The title is taken from a diary of a young woman while incarcerated. It
reads, "Courage is something strong within you that brings out the
best in a person. Perhaps no one else may know or see, but it's those hidden
things unknown to others, that reveals a person to God and self." Again
told without narrative and through film footage shot by principals themselves,
Something Strong Within is a rare view from within the camps that
depicts the struggle to overcome betrayal and hardship to reconstruct a
community behind barbed wire. The intimacy of the personal images is enhanced
by first person accounts that provide insight into the experience of being
unjustly accused. An evocative music score by Dan Kuramoto, leader of the
jazz-fusion band Hiroshima, creates an emotional mood and atmosphere that
augments the immediacy of the presentation.
This piece was especially relevant to Bob who is himself a former inmate.
He recalls that some of the footage sent chills up his spine as it transported
him immediately to a space and time when he lived three years of his childhood
not knowing what he had done to warrant incarceration nor when he would
"go back to America." In this piece especially he wanted to take
the event beyond an abstraction to make it as real as possible. He strove
to evoke an emotional response from the viewer, to take the viewer beyond
an intellectual understanding of an historic abrogation of civil rights
into the inner realm of the personal and private. In this age of 20 second
sound bites and instant - if not deep or even necessarily accurate - information,
he wanted to avoid telling the viewer what to see but actively engage the
viewer in the act of seeing.
This excerpt begins with the opening of the piece to show how the footage
was conceived as a media production and contextualized within an historic
framework. Over a stirring music score and black screen, a series of text
cards historicizes the visuals that are about to unfold. Once again we purposefully
chose to go without a voice-over narration that would, we felt, exact both
an unwanted and authoritative pronunciation as well as subject the visuals
to being more illustrative than primary. Chilling B&W footage of uniformed
soldiers herding men, women and children into busses on an urban street
ends with a Caucasian woman whose daughter clings to her side waving good
bye. Bold white and red titles appear over this freeze frame dissolving
into a gritty, hand-held panorama of Minidoka, a camp in Idaho, with its
rows and rows of tar-paper barracks set in a desolate and wind-swept terrain.
It is interesting here to note that Something Strong Within has recently
received critical acclaim as a film which, rather than simply taken as personal
gratification, is meaningful in that a piece made exclusively of historical
home movies has been accepted and recognized as a media production of merit.
It has received a CINE Golden Eagle which entitles it to represent the U.S.
in international competitions; has been selected for screening at many international
film and video festivals including the Yamagata and Margaret Mead, and has
garnered several awards including a Bronze from the Houston International
and the Silver Muse in the overall competition of media productions by the
American Association of Museums as well as first place in its documentary
division. It was also invited to be one of the films to be discussed at
the upcoming Robert Flaherty Film Seminar. Its serious consideration in
the film world would seem to indicate that this "genre" of home
movies is being seen and appreciated by other than the already-enlightened
or converted and is becoming known and sanctioned as the cultural resources
and artistic visions they in essence are.
We ended Something Strong Within with a quote from an amateur filmmaker
who simply yet eloquently summarizes our sentiments on the significance
of home movies. He states,
I hope my home movies share with you one aspect of the camp experience -
that is the spirit of the Japanese American community. Despite the loneliness
and despair that enveloped us, we made the best we could with the situation.
I hope when you will look at the scenes of mochitsuki, pipe repairing,
dining hall duty and church service, you look at the spirit of the people.
You will see a people trying to reconstruct a community despite overwhelming
obstacles. That, I feel, is the essence of these home movies.
Made without the usual underlying incentives of filmmaking: to make money:
high art or to entertain; and without big budgets - home movies are thought
of or summarily dismissed as simple, naive, and unsophisticated. This set
of characteristics have both denigrated and endeared home movies in the
field of film study and preservation. When viewed against big bucks and
high art these qualities infer them to be inferior, inconsequential, and
unworthy of serious study and preservation. And yet it is specifically their
uncalculated sensibility, directness of gaze, and intimate nature that make
them true cultural artifacts and historical documents, or ultimately endow
them with the potential to actualize the intrinsic magic of the medium -
to transport the viewer to another time and place without leaving their
seats.
Home movies provide extraordinary views from within. When carefully considered
and contextualized with other documentation and understanding, home movies
constitute unique and evocative insights into issues of culture, concepts
of place and constructions of communication and meaning. Home movies function
as triggers of memory, help place the past within the present, connect the
self with others. Consideration of these and other more critical concerns
such as rights of privacy, the danger of mythologizing the medium, questions
of objectivity and subjectivity, issues of gender and class as well as race
and ethnicity and many more are our stimulating tasks for the future. I
look forward to joining you in these dialogues.
Productrice et conservateur du Japanese American National Museum
de Los Angeles, Karen Ishizuka présente deux productions réalisées
en collaboration avec Bob Nakamura qui font largement appel à des
films de famille d'immigrants japonais. Madame Ishizuka décrit les
méthodes utilisées pour rassembler, conserver et montrer la
collection du Museum qui accorde une importance particulière au films
d'amateurs en tant que documents historiques et aux films en général,
comme produits de (et sur) notre culture.
Les films d'amateurs sont autant de constats visuels, de moyens de communication
et d'échange symbolique, qui reflètent des aspects qualitatifs
du style de vie et de la vision de leurs créateurs.
Les films de famille constituent parfois la seule source de documentation
historique d'images en mouvement sur certains groupes ethniques ou régionaux,
à un moment donné de leur histoire.
Enfin, les films d'amateurs constituent de véritable constats sur
la culture d'une époque: par conséquent, ils sont des objets
de culture.
Objetos de cultura
Karen Ishizuka, productora y conservadora del Museo nacional Nipo-Americano
de Los Angeles, presentó, durante el Congreso de la FIAF que tuvo
lugar en esta ciudad, dos producciones realizadas en colaboración
con Bob Nakamura en las que se presentan películas de familia de
inmigrantes japoneses así como los métodos utilizados por
el museo para recolectar, preservar y mostrar sus colecciones.
Durante la ponencia, se subrayó la importancia del cine amateur como
documento histórico y el interés del Museo en este tipo de
películas cosideradas tanto como productos de nuestra cultura que
como testimonio sobre la misma.
El cine amateur, refleja, más que el profesional, las etapas de la
vida del director y de su entorno. Las películas de aficionado constituyen
simultáneamente testimonios visuales, medios de comunicación
y de intercambio simbólico, que reflejan aspectos cualitativos del
estilo de vida de su autor y de la región en que fueron filmadas.
A veces, las películas de familia subsisten como única fuente
de documentación histórica de imágenes en movimiento
referentes a grupos étnicos y regionales de ciertos períodos.
Los films de amateur constituyen asimismo un juicio de valor sobre la cultura.
Es más: son objetos de cultura.
La producción para 3 pantallas de Karen Ishizuka y Bob Nakamura Through
our Own Eyes (y su versión para 1 pantalla, Moving Memories),
presenta una importante colección de películas domésticas
de inmigrantes japoneses de los años 20 y 30.
La otra producción, Something Strong Within muestra inéditos
realizados por los internados de un campo de concentración americano
para japoneses durante la Segunda guerra mundial.