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Oppositions
that once drove passionate debates during the heady,
early days of feminist film theorizing and production
have attenuated significantly in the past fifteen years.
Feminism as a whole has witnessed some remarkable shifts,
perhaps the biggest of which has been the discovery that
not all women are white, heterosexual, and middle-class.
In the area of feminist film theory, the
psychoanalysis-driven concerns of the seventies and early
eighties have broadened to include questions posed by
critical race studies and queer theory. The sector of
non-commercial feminist film production has likewise seen
its share of changes. Gone are the leftist-activist,
vérité-influenced films such as the
Newsreel Collective's The Woman's film as well as
the "avant-garde theory films."[1]
Drawing on both of these filmmaking traditions and
capitalizing on the aforementioned theoretical and
political developments, first-person film and video has
surfaced as a form with both popular appeal and critical
acumen. Although it is not a new area for feminist visual
expression, contemporary first-person film and video
appears to reconcile earlier arguments and stand-offs and
is also expanding, if catalogue contents at Women make
movies and programming choices on public American
television are anything to go by.[2]
What are the reasons for the change in generic status?
According to Patricia Aufderheide, the diminishing border
between public and private is responsible for the recent
increase in first-person work, which she describes as a
hybrid genre that includes commercially-unfunded film and
video as well as profit-making media like tabloid news,
talk shows, and reality TV. While I am not so optimistic
that such a range of work can be explained within a
single essay, I will borrow her term "first-person
documentary" to explore a somewhat more narrow media
field. In this essay I want to explore
independently-funded documentary film and video by women
directors that features a first-person element, that has
been made in the past fifteen years.[3]
I want to explore this work in light of major
changes that have occurred during this period, in the
documentary genre and in feminism. From a
critical perspective, documentary has received a huge
amount of attention during the last fifteen years. It has
been the subject of numerous scholarly books and essays
and of at least one major annual international academic
conference (Visible Evidence, now in its ninth
year), and has claimed space at the centre of significant
academic discussions about truth, evidence, and
representability. The notion of what counts as
documentary is perhaps less clear now than it has ever
been, with interpretations ranging from Dirk Eitzen's
reception-oriented one[4]
to the discursive poetics definition promoted by Michael
Renov[5]
to Trinh Minh-ha's all-out rejection of the term ("there
is no such thing as documentary"),[6]
though such ontological uncertainties do not seem to have
been detrimental to the genre. While the jury may be
permanently out on where documentary's limits lie, what
is clear is that the genre includes a range of aesthetic
forms and approaches, including experimental
ones.[7]
First-person work is a excellent exemplar of such
hybridity, incorporating forms and styles typically
associated with experimental media, within a rubric that
is still called documentary. The experimental
autobiographical videos by Vanalyne Green, Janice Tanaka,
and Lynn Hershman, the "dyke docs" of Sadie Benning and
Su Friedrich, and Leslie Thornton's Bio-pics would
certainly seem to stretch the limits of what counts as
documentary, but in spite of this have all recently been
assigned a space under the documentary
umbrella.[8] Perhaps the
most interesting change documentary has recently
undergone has been in its relationship to feminism and
feminist theory. Whereas once the relationship between
the two areas was one of mutual dismissal, there is
indication that the situation is improving. The 1970s
interpretation of feminist documentary as naïvely
"realist" and incapable of posing sophisticated
theoretical questions, has recently been roundly
condemned.[9]
Two excellent anthologies appeared a short while ago on
the topic of feminism and documentary, and gay and
lesbian documentary, meanwhile issues of feminism and
gender are more visible than ever before in documentary
writings.[10]
At the same time that documentary theorists have begun
making space for feminist issues, feminists are now
posing questions once thought beyond the pale of feminist
inquiry, about history, memory, and the nature of
evidence. For example, in an essay on feminist video,
Julia Lesage poses the question of whether women make use
of a different "structuring principle" than men do in the
creation of autobiographical
stories,
and
in so doing raises the question of whether certain kinds
of evidence are gendered as female.[11]
While Lesage is not alone in raising such
questions, I believe the most fruitful conceptualizations
of the confluence of feminist and documentary issues have
occurred not in feminist writings but in feminist
first-person practice.[12]
What are the qualities of such work in relation to the
aforementioned issues? Overall,
first-person feminist work is highly suspicious of
conventional forms of evidence and of the truth-telling
power that conventionally accrues to it.[13]
First-person documentary prefers to subject
conventionally trustworthy material (interview testimony,
archival footage) to interrogation, with the aim of
altering, denaturing, and, it would seem, ultimately
de-authorizing it. Once re-fashioned in this way, the
forms of evidence are re-construed as historically
representative -- however not of historical "fact" but of
the director's subjective understanding. In works where
the virtue of accuracy, or more precisely its ability to
be attained, is open to question, the only trustworthy
information is that which admits to being highly
subjective.[14]
An excellent example of this is found in Ruth Ozeki
Lounsbury's part-mockumentary about three generations of
Japanese and Japanese-American women, Halving the
bones (Japan/USA 1996). In the film, we see home
movie footage and hear diary accounts that were
ostensibly produced by the director's grandfather and
grandmother respectively. Several sequences later the
director confesses that she "made up" both the diary and
the home movie footage herself, basing her ideas on the
real family stories she had heard about the two relatives
and on a photo she had once seen of her grandfather
holding a movie camera. She explains: "I made up these
things because I never really knew my grandparents. And
now they're dead, and I didn't have very much to go on. I
thought I would understand them better if I just
pretended to be them. Anyway. I just wanted to set the
record straight." What emerges with this confession is a
subjective and present-tense dimension to the sequences
that was not initially apparent. But there is something
else: implicit in the director's preference for what
seems a radically voluntarist version of history, is a
critique of the matter and question of who gets to "have"
a history to begin with. Just prior to Ruth's comments
related above, she qualifies the grounds for her
fabrication, "I know he really did make those movies, but
his cameras and films were confiscated during the war."
While on the one hand, Ruth's seemingly willful
"pretending to be them" empties the footage of its
historical capital, on the other hand, it is not only
personal choice that determines her actions, but distinct
political, historical circumstances. Without the original
seizure of the grandfather's equipment, Ruth might very
well not have had to invent such things; because of the
seizure, her creation of the movies is a reminder of the
fact that representation, having representation, is only
ever politically determined. Certainly no "real" account
of 1920s first generation immigrant experience, the 1995
interpretation of that experience that Ruth creates, is
evidence of the history of absence that is her familial
and indeed cultural legacy. As the "objective" dimension
fades from view, a subjective but implicitly critical
political dimension appears in its place. The preference
for subjective representation is apparent in the
prevalence of, and comparably high status accorded to,
re-enactment footage in the works. Fictional or fantasy
sequences in The body beautiful (Ngozi Onwurah UK
1991) and History and memory: for Akiko and
Takashige (Rea Tajiri USA 1992) as well as numerous
other works, contrast sharply with "official" medical or
state utterances, which are construed as
unreliable.[15]
Yet family accounts also prove untrustworthy, tending
towards the hyperbolic, the fantastical, the
contradictory, and the downright un-true.[16]
In many works, the characters argue about the details of
an event, highlighting the fragility of individual
memory. Often relatives are not as cooperative as the
director hopes they will be, impeding the
information-gathering process because they no longer know
the answers, grow bored with the questions, or simply
want to be selective.[17]
And, as exemplified in my discussion of Halving the
bones above, there is the problem of physical
evidence: photographs go missing and written documents
disappear or have become illegible. What exists cannot be
trusted, and what is reliable is not there. To summarize,
first-person documentary makes a representational and I
believe political choice not to conceal the personal and
institutional difficulties surrounding the explorations
that each seeks to undertake, but to draw attention to
the political history of the absence of evidence, that
circumscribes and limits the stories each is able to
tell. The politics of evidence has received extensive
attention from a number of theorists, most concertedly
Hayden White and Bill Nichols in their critiques of the
discourses of historiography and documentary
respectively. Ideas of theirs that have become
commonplace include the notion that presumably
"disinterested" discourses like history writing and
documentary production employ codes, conventions, and
tropes in the same way that fiction writing or fiction
filmmaking does; and that history is no longer a set of
puzzle pieces waiting to be fitted together, but an
assemblage of more or less relative truths that say more
about the contemporary period and the historiographer
than about the past "as it really was."[18]
Signs of such a reflexive acknowledgment of the
contemporary world are evidenced in a preference for
overtly non-documentary footage: subjective
representation, reenactment scenes, and so on.
First-person documentary by women directors is a concrete
and practical illustration of these conceptual issues and
spells out what is interesting about them to
feminists. Perhaps the
biggest change feminism has undergone in the past fifteen
years, as I mentioned in my opening paragraph, has been a
shift in understanding of who -- or what -- is the
subject of feminism. While seventies writers took for
granted the race and sexuality of their subject, the
eighties and nineties saw a huge outpouring of work by
and about what Teresa de Lauretis has called the
"eccentric subjects" of feminism -- subjects
traditionally at the margins of the field, such as
women-of-color, lesbians, and, I would add, indigenous
women.[19]
In terms of directorial demographics and subject matter,
first-person feminist filmmaking has witnessed an
analogous shift. Since 1985, works have appeared on the
subject of African-American and African-diaspora
experience (She don't fade (Cheryl Dunye USA
1991), The body beautiful, Remembering Wei
Yi-fang, Remembering myself: an autobiography (Yvonne
Welbon USA 1995), The wash: a cleaning story (Eve
Sandler USA 1999), B.D. women (Inge Blackman UK
1994)), Asian-American and Asian-diaspora experience
(Who's going to pay for these donuts, anyway?,
Memories from the department of amnesia (Janice
Tanaka USA 1989); History and memory, Halving
the bones, A place called home (Persheng
Sadegh-Vaziri USA/Iran 1998)), Latin-American experience
(The devil never sleeps (Lourdes Portillo USA
1996)), Native American and Indigenous Australian
experience (Navajo talking Picture (Arlene Bowman,
US 1986), Real Indian (Malinda Maynor USA 1986),
Black sheep (Louise Glover Australia 1999)),
Jewish experience (Naomi's legacy (Wendy Levy, US
1994), Fresh blood (b.h. Yael Canada 1996)), and
lesbian experience (the aforementioned Naomi's
legacy, She don't fade, Remembering Wei
Yi-Fang, Black sheep, B.D. women, as
well as Tender fictions (Barbara Hammer USA 1995),
Sink or swim (Su Friedrich USA 1990), Hide and
seek (Su Friedrich USA 1996), Juggling gender
(Tami Gold USA 1992), Complaints of a dutiful
daughter (Deborah Hoffman US 1994, and videos by
Sadie Benning). Obviously it
is a condition of all autobiographical work to suggest
that the experiences of an individual are more broadly
significant to a larger group, that is, to focus themes
of cultural identity and group belonging through the lens
of the personal. In these post-1985 stories, seemingly
insignificant, one-off, minor events attract layers of
political and cultural meaning. Personal discoveries and
losses are cultural discoveries and losses;
investigations into the familial lead to findings about
the cultural. Family loss signifies cultural catastrophe,
conversely matters of cultural consequence have a
resonance that is deeply personal. Because of the number
of works directed by members of an immigrant or removed
culture and/or by members of a lesbian subculture, a key
concern is the articulation of diaspora and/or
subcultural identity, in its relationship to history,
memory, and group belonging. Common in many of the
stories is a figure who appears to have access to
historical information and/or language skills that the
protagonist (often a second generation immigrant) has
little or no grasp of. Through the knowledge that the
older character provides, the past becomes tangible; her
recognition of the protagonist facilitates the latter's
membership in a specific culture or group, without which
both culture and family would be lost.[20] As the subject
of feminism has been redefined, so too has feminism's
focus. Whereas a priority for Second Wave feminism was
the analysis of the spectrum of institutions of male
domination, feminism in the 80s and 90s has turned its
attention away from the technologies of women's
oppression by men, towards the myriad forms of
relationships (sexual, symbolic, political, and
psychological) between women themselves. Feminist theory,
including some feminist film theory has kept pace with
this shift, moving away from a near-exclusive interest in
the vicissitudes of the "male gaze" towards alternative
forms of women's agency -- visual and otherwise. Feminist
film practice has seen a broadening into areas of
historiography and new forms of documentary as I've been
discussing, and has witnessed a revival of a popular
theme from older '70s first-person work -- the
mother-daughter relationship. Female generation is a
recurring subject of interest in contemporary
first-person documentary, which has featured stories
about mothers and daughters (A healthy baby girl
(Judith Helfand USA 1996), Naomi's legacy,
Halving the bones, The body beautiful,
History and memory, Complaints of a dutiful
daughter, The ties that bind (Su Friedrich USA
1984), Daughter of suicide (Dempsey Rice USA
1999); Mother right (Michelle Citron USA 1983)),
grandmothers and granddaughters (Halving the
bones, Navajo talking picture), and stories
about women's generations more broadly (Remembering
Wei Yi Fang, Halving the bones). The
construction of such relationships is both nostalgic and
complex. The theme of maternal injury or lack is found in
many of the works, with the daughter seeking in some way
to compensate for or make good a loss that she perceives
that her mother has suffered, due to illness
(Complaints of a dutiful daughter, The body
beautiful, A healthy baby girl), abuse
(Naomi's legacy, Mother right, Memories
from the department of amnesia), forced migration
(Halving the bones, Naomi's legacy), or
internment (Memories from the department of
amnesia, History and memory). A frequent
effect of the loss is an incompleteness in the mother's
(or sometimes grandmother's) memory, which, although it
thwarts the documentarist's desire to set the record
straight, paradoxically provides the grounds for the
documentary to come into being. Repeatedly, filmmakers
testify that their reason for making the film or video is
to fill in, restore, or compensate for their mother's
lack of memories about a specific event or chain of
events. In the language of anthropology, these works are
"salvage" projects designed to recover and make material
forgotten histories and stolen memories. Where
remembrance is flawed or lacking or the images are not
there, the documentary performatively serves to fill the
gaps. What has been
left out of history, or removed from memory, are matters
of extraordinary familiarity to students of documentary.
What is unique about the examples I am discussing is that
they unfold within a generic frame of interest to women
(i.e., within the context of mother-daughter stories)
while at the same time providing women with the
opportunity to address each other in an engaged and
creative way. Women creating images and stories about
each other and for each other, is a topic that has
received a good deal of positive press from feminist
theorists seeking to redress the balance in the all too
often androcentric world of image-making; however it is a
topic that has been all but neglected in the popular
visual cultures. The distance of first-person
relationships to such characterizations, in terms of
feminist politics and feminist representations, cannot be
overstressed. While it is not present in every
first-person feminist documentary, the theme of a woman
creating or "performing" memory for another woman is
significant to nearly all of the work I have talked
about; certainly it is what makes it unique, within the
worlds of both documentary and "women's
cinema." At this point
I will take a more detailed look at three documentaries
that are especially representative of the issues under
consideration. I need to clarify that I discuss these
works not because they are exceptional illustrations of
the matters at hand, but rather because of their very
representativeness of these issues. Formally,
Halving the bones is a deceptively
straightforward-appearing work whose use of storytelling
is generous, and flamboyant visual devices, spare. The
segments into which the film is divided, which include
"Grandma Matsuye's story" and "Mom's story," highlight
the centrality of storytelling to the film as well as the
key personalities that figure. As in all first-person
documentary, the significance of personal matters to
issues of culture and cultural identity is a key theme
for the film, and is well evidenced in a story that is
told about the birth of Lounsbury's mother's, Masako. The
story relates that Masako began life misdiagnosed as a
cancerous tumor, rather than as a baby. According to
Masako, it was not until the day of her birth that she,
"the tumor," was perceived as a pregnancy. While Masako
is convinced of the story's significance for her, her
daughter is initially unsure of its implications. How
might such a truly silly story relate to her experience?
Finally, over silent footage of her mother wrestling with
a Thanksgiving turkey (which, according to Lounsbury, she
"never really got the hang of"), Lounsbury returns to the
tale. She says: Offering here
an analysis of her mother's metaphor, the director
highlights how a seemingly simple family tale is the
vehicle for a complex of issues surrounding race and
inheritance, as they are informed by biology and culture.
In Lounsbury's interpretation, cultural isolation and
racism are not social products but rather biological
matters that have been passed on, as genetic material is
said to be. Now, as any reader of social construction
theory will know, current cultural theory holds that
"race" is in practical terms a "cultural" product that
has little to do with biological matters (genes, for
example), but is rather an effect of social and
historical circumstances. Thus the construction of "race"
as genetic (for example, as biological) in a film as
well-informed in issues of identity as Halving the
bones , is clearly ironic, to say the least, flying
in the face of all contemporary understandings. However,
in spite of this, there is nonetheless a deadly
seriousness to Lounsbury's metaphor of race-as-genetic,
that suggests that "race" is experienced as immutable and
lived as if it were a biological attribute, regardless of
whether it is culturally constructed or not. From the
mother's understanding of herself as a "cancer" unravels
a thorny knot of issues not initially
apparent. As with the
moment I've just discussed, the act of "halving the
bones," to which the film's title refers, belies a
complex negotiation about identity and cultural
inheritance. The title of the film alludes to a family
responsibility that Lounsbury has agreed to take on,
which is to transport some of her grandmother's bones
back to her mother in the U.S. The bones are meant as
consolation for Lounsbury's mother, who wasn't able to
attend the grandmother's (that is, her mother's) funeral.
At the time of the film's making, Masako is an elderly
woman who lives contentedly in suburban Connecticut. She
has little desire to go back to Japan and seems not to
regret missing the funeral; no doubt the fate of the
bones is the last thing on her mind.[21]
Thus the accomplishment of the event of the film's title
begins to seem more and more uncertain as the film
progresses: how is Lounsbury even to broach the topic of
the bones, let alone convince Masako to take half of
them? Unlike Masako,
Lounsbury enjoys visiting Japan and takes pleasure in
meeting her mother's relatives. For her, making the film
is an opportunity to confirm, in spite of language
differences, her similarities with the relatives and to
tell stories about the things they have in common. For
example, we are told that her grandfather shared her
passion for photography, and that both mother and
grandmother were "tough" and "pragmatic," traits which
the director also seems to possess. Ultimately, the film
is also the ground for the re-kindling of Ruth's mother's
interest in her Japaneseness, which is accomplished via
the act of carrying out actions she otherwise would not,
such as going through the grandmother's letters, her
Japanese passport, and pieces of clothing, and examining
the grandfather's poetry and writing about life in the
internment camp in Houston. The mother's interest is
especially sparked during Lounsbury's showing of some
home movie footage. While in Japan for the funeral,
Lounsbury shot a piece of silent, black and white footage
in the cemetery where the grandparents are buried. The
footage includes glimpses of the area around the
graveyard, of the gravestone, and images of Lounsbury
scrubbing the stone. Masako takes a great interest in the
cemetery, grilling her daughter about the surrounding
trees, the size of the grave markers, and about the
process of scrubbing the stone. She comments on the
existence of barbed wire above the graveyard, which both
women find ironic given the grandfather's experience as
an internee. Bookended by the acts, on the one hand, of
going through the grandparents' effects and, on the
other, of examining the grandmother's bones, the viewing
of the footage is one of three moments of jubilation for
Lounsbury and a turning point for Masako, who has tended
to express little interest in these subjects. Like
Halving the bones, Naomi's legacy also
explores a relationship between mother and daughter, only
in this film, in the context of an immigrant Brooklyn
Jewish family. The work makes use of a range of footage,
including re-enactment imagery representing the period of
the filmmaker's adolescence, real and constructed home
movie footage, and a short segment of historical war-time
footage. Although the film is formally complex at all
levels, the editing is especially elaborate, enabling a
range of issues and metaissues to be raised. Storytelling
voices and home movie footage are not left whole, but are
interrupted, truncated, and looped, with differing
effects. There are three separate voices in the film,
which, in order of importance, are the voice-over of the
adult filmmaker looking back on the period of her
adolescence, the voice-over of the filmmaker's mother
reflecting on her relationship to her mother and events
from her childhood, and a grandmother's voice telling, in
Yiddish, the story of her migration to
America. Of the three
generations of women whose lives are described, the
mother's and daughter's emerge as most important. Wanting
to establish the similarities between the two women,
Naomi's legacy traces the progress from
estrangement to tacit acknowledgement to open recognition
that has, it would seem, only recently been established.
We hear about occurrences from the mother's 1940s
childhood as the daughter of a Romanian mother and Polish
father. We hear about the atmosphere of criticism and
complaining that both women experienced while growing up,
and about the cycles of anger and rebellion. The
grandmother's voice is the first that alerts us to the
grandfather's abuse, saying how he was hardly ever home
and that the marriage was unhappy. In interview testimony
later in the film, the director's mother corroborates and
augments this information, adding a story about how her
father refused to come to the hospital when she was born
on account of her being a girl (rather than a boy).
Though the mother sounds sufficiently at ease in
describing this and other childhood events, the director
suggests that such confiding would not come easy to her
mother, who, the director says, "never talked about my
father -- I mean, her father much when I was growing up."
And indeed the fullest account of the events in the
mother's life, including the grandfather's not coming to
the hospital, including his bringing his daughter to a
card game instead of to the zoo as he had promised, and
making her wait under the table, are told by the youngest
family member: the film's director. It is she who names
most directly the terms of his abuse and its denial by
the family: "the fact that he beat my aunt when she was
very young managed to escape me, the fact that he
molested my mother is not spoken or remembered this time.
In my memory, he looks like a very nice man. I never knew
my grandfather, but goddamn it! I wanted him to be a very
nice man. I wanted him to be a very nice man. A very nice
man. A very nice man." Because of her
directness in discussing the family events, the director
is able to complete the stories that the mother and
grandmother only initiate. Specific cinematic devices add
further meaning to her telling that was not initially
there. In the instance just discussed, the repetition of
the words undermines the typically taken-for-granted
truth-telling power of the evidence. The effect of the
looping of the phrase "a very nice man" is a
destabilization of the fact of the man's "niceness." By
the end of the sequence, viewers are thoroughly unsure
what about this man was "very nice" or indeed whether he
was "very nice" at all. Elsewhere in
the film, repetition adds a different kind of value. As
the mother bemoans her own mother's critical treatment of
her -- a complaint which is identical to that voiced by
the director at the film's beginning -- her words, "I was
never right for her," loop three or four times. Here the
looping draws attention to the "not-rightness" of the
mother, which is indistinguishable from the "not
rightness" of the director that we have already heard
about. In this case, the looping helps bridge the gap
between the mother's and daughter's experience,
overcoming what the daughter claims has been a major
problem between them, which is the unwillingness of
either woman to acknowledge their similarities. Testimony
to the time and effort it has taken to come to terms with
that idea, the film is also a key player in the
reconciliation. "Who chose
what story to tell?" is the question that animates
History and memory. The words to this question
appear over archival footage from the Department of War
Information, serving as but the first of many ironic
juxtapositions that appear in the movie. Like Naomi's
legacy, History and memory is a highly
structured work that makes use of a vast storehouse of
images and sounds. Taken from a wide variety of sources,
these images fall into roughly two different groups, one
of which reflects the history of the record, and a second
which depicts the histories which are never or only
rarely ever seen. Tajiri's stated wish is to right the
balance between the events for which, in her words,
"there were cameras watching" and the events whose only
witnesses were ghosts, that is, to make visible those
things "which have happened for which the only images
that exist are in the minds of the observers" as well as
those events "which have happened for which there have
been no observers, except for the spirits of the dead."
These comments announce the video's central thesis, which
is that representation-in-history is a privilege of the
victor; and that, the words infer, if you see things the
victor does not wish you to see, you could very well wind
up as a ghost. The flip side of this thesis is that for
the losers of history, there is only mere "memory," which
only ever exists in fragments. The film wants to give
shape to these never-before-seen fragments, which include
life in the internment camps during World War Two, the
seizure and physical removal of the family's suburban
house, and the discriminatory policies of a paranoid
racist government. These hitherto unrecorded events are
contrasted with the hitherto overrecorded ones that
appear in Universal news clips, Department of War
Information films and PSAs, and nationalist Hollywood
movies like Yankee doodle dandy (Michael Curtiz
USA 1942). The same events may well figure in both sets
of representation, what differs markedly is the ways and
means by which they have been recorded, edited, and
shown. The family
story that is the point of departure for History and
memory is that in 1942 the Tajiri family was removed
from its Northern California home to a temporary holding
station in Salinas; from there the majority of the family
was transported to what used to be the Colorado Tribal
Indian Reservation in Poston, Arizona. Taken from the
Native Americans practically overnight, the land became
one of several places that held the 110,000 persons of
Japanese descent who were interned during the war under
suspicion of treason. That the removal was able to occur
in spite of the fact that Tajiri's father was serving as
a soldier in the US army, and in spite of the
historically non-existent grounds for the measure (not a
single Japanese or Japanese-American citizen was ever
convicted of treason on US soil), is but one of the
bitter paradoxes that the film brings to
light. History and
memory is a lesson in the virtues of collecting,
cataloguing, counter-cataloguing, and archiving. Objects
from camp experience are located and identified, such as
a wooden bird Tajiri's grandmother made in mandatory
carving class; so-called alien I.D. cards; a drawing made
by an interned uncle; a piece of tar-paper from the
barracks where the family lived; illegal photographs and
8 mm movies, taken with smuggled in cameras. Memories, of
differing lengths, complexities, and degrees of clarity,
are described, argued over, and, in some cases, performed
for Tajiri's camera. These are cross-cut at points
throughout History and memory with other
"versions" of history, like Come See the Paradise
(Alan Parker USA 1990) and Bad Day at Blackrock
(John Sturges USA 1955), and represent memories that
relatives might once have had, were prevented from
having, or which have grown dim over the years. For
example a version of the train journey to Poston that the
family was compelled to take, is filmed by the daughter;
and an image of Tajiri's mother filling a canteen at a
water tap in the desert is enacted and shown in
slow-motion. The explicit motivation for these shots is
Tajiri's mother, who has practically no memory of the
experience of the camp, except, as her daughter puts it,
for why she cannot remember. So, Tajiri explains, "on
April 12, 1988, I went to Poston in a rental car and
filmed the view for her." From this explanation we can
conclude that sequences of this type are restorative or
compensatory in their aim, a quality that distinguishes
all the work under discussion in this essay. In conclusion,
first-person documentary in general and these three works
in particular take pains to distinguish between "history"
on the one hand and "memory" on the other, suggesting,
broadly speaking, that history is what the state produces
while memory issues from a more local source of
enunciation. My interpretation of the films' and videos'
understanding of the word narrows further. "Memory" seems
to me to include most particularly those sequences of
film-within-the-film (or video-within-the-video), such as
photographs, old home movie footage, and enactment
footage. What is interesting about this category of
footage is its performative aspect. As I have mentioned,
"memory" is nearly always memory for someone: the
expressly stated motivation for nearly all of the
filming-within-the-films is a relative of the filmmaker,
specifically the filmmaker's mother, who doesn't know or
can't remember things that the director thinks she
should. Sequences of this sort are stand-ins for the
memories that the mothers ought to have, substitutes for,
or correctives to, the missing or flawed memory fragments
that the older women no longer hold. To take first the
example of the cemetery footage from Halving the
bones. There are two explicit reasons why Lounsbury
shoots this footage. Firstly, she does so as a tribute to
the relatives' memory, that is, as an offering to them,
whose effectiveness is plainly acknowledged by her mother
(far better "than a couple of flowers that're going to
die," says her mother). Secondly, she creates the footage
as a gift for her mother, compensation for the fact that
Masako couldn't be in the graveyard or in Japan herself.
Although Masako was never physically even near the
graveyard, that is, never had an image of the gravestones
in her head, Lounsbury does not discriminate: what is
important to her is to supply her mother with a version
of "memory" that, by rights, belongs to the older woman.
In Naomi's legacy, shots that I have mentioned of
the grandfather, where the director is wishing him to be
"a very nice man," as well as the director's more pointed
naming of the violence the mother suffered, function as
surrogate memories for the director's mother, for whom
the real memories of childhood violation and abuse are
too traumatic to remember. Finally, in History and
memory, Tajiri's motivation for shooting both the
train journey sequence and the footage of her mother
filling the canteen in the desert is explicitly because
her mother was prevented from, or can no longer remember
seeing, these events herself. Of this second image,
Tajiri says, "When someone tells you a story, you create
a picture of it in your mind.... Sometimes the picture
will return without the story. I've been carrying around
this picture with me for years. It's the one memory I
have of my mother speaking of camp while we were growing
up. I overhear her describing to my sister this simple
action. Her hands filling a canteen, out in the middle of
the desert. For years I've been living with this picture,
without the story.... Not knowing how they fit
together." In addition to
being substitutes for the respective mothers' missing or
flawed memory fragments, each sequence I have named is a
representation of the daughter's desire that the mother
have a full and complete memory. Although the original
stories behind the images that Tajiri (for example)
carries about her mother's experience are unknown to her,
she hopes that one day she will no longer need to know
the original stories. The process by which this is
achieved is complex and painful, as she testifies. It is
a quest whose solution is that there is no solution,
except for forgiveness and perhaps, another film. As
Tajiri concludes, "But now I found I can connect the
picture to the story. I can forgive my mother her loss of
memory, and can make this image for her." A place
called home (Persheng Sadegh-Vaziri, USA/Iran,
1998, 30 min.) Bad day
at Black Rock (John Sturges, USA, 1955, 81
min.) B.D.
women (Inge Blackman, UK, 1994, 20
min.) Black
sheep (Louise Glover, Australia, 1999, 26
min.) Come see
the paradise (Alan Parker, USA, 1990, 138
min.) Complaints
of a dutiful daughter (Deborah Hoffmann, USA,
1994, 44 min.) Daughter
of suicide (Dempsey Rice, USA, 1999, 72
min.) Fresh
blood (b.h. Yael, Canada, 1996, 55
min.) Halving
the bones (Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury, USA, 1995, 70
min.) Hide and
seek (Su Friedrich, USA, 1996, 65 min.) History
and memory: for Akiko and Takahige (Rea Tajiri,
USA, 1992, 32 min.) Juggling
gender (Tami Gold, USA, 1992, 27 min.) Memories
from the department of amnesia (Janice Tanaka,
USA, 1989, 13 min.) Mother
right (Michelle Citron, USA, 1983, 25
min.) Naomi's
legacy (Wendy Levy, USA, 1994, 26 min.) Navajo
talking picture (Arlene Bowman, USA, 1986, 40
min.) Real
Indian (Malinda Maynor, USA, 1996, 8
min.) Remembering
Wei Yi-fang, Remembering Myself: An Autobiography
(Yvonne Welbon, USA, 1995, 29 min.) She
don't fade (Cheryl Dunye, USA, 1991, 24
min.) Sink or
swim (Su Friedrich, USA, 1990, 48 min.) Tender
fictions (Barbara Hammer, USA, 1995, 58
min.) The body
beautiful (Ngozi Onwurah, UK, 1991, 23
min.) The
devil never sleeps (Lourdes Portillo, USA, 1996,
82 min.) The ties
that bind (Su Friedrich, USA, 1984, 55
min.) The
wash: a cleaning story (Eve Sandler, USA, 1999, 9
min.) Who's
going to pay for these donuts, anyway? (Janice
Tanaka, USA, 1992, 58 min.) Yankee
Doodle Dandy (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1942, 126
min.) (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [1]
The term is Ann Kaplan's. See "The realist debate in the
feminist film: a historical overview of theories and
strategies in realism and the avant-garde theory film
(1971-81)," in Women and film: both sides of the
camera (London: Methuen, 1983): 125-41. [2]
Perhaps as much as half of the 2001 catalogue for
Women make movies, the largest distributor of
women-directed film and video in the Anglophone world,
contains material that can be construed as first-person
in content. Regarding U.S. public television, my comments
are based on Patricia Aufderheide's well-documented
remarks about the visibility of first-person within two
key venues, the public T.V. series P.O.V. and the
production service Independent Television Service (ITVS).
Patricia Aufderheide, "Public intimacy: the development
of first-person documentary." Afterimage 25, no.1
(July-August 1997): 16. [3]
In the introductory abstract to the essay, Aufderheide
claims that first-person expression of all stripes owes
its emergence to the "public's preference for
sensationalism and emotional exhibitionism." While this
may make sense for media phenomena like Maury Povich
(which Aufderheide discusses), it makes less sense for
feminist first-person work which overall avoids
sensationalism and accepts the co-presence of "private"
and "public." [4]
See for example Eitzen's comment, "it is not the
representational or formal aspects of a movie that
determine whether viewers 'frame' it as a documentary but
rather a combination of what viewers want and expect from
a text and what they suppose or infer about it on the
basis of situational cues and textual features." Dirk
Eitzen, "When is a documentary? Documentary as a mode of
reception," Cinema journal 35, no.1 (Fall 1995):
92. [5]
I am referring to Renov's identification of four
fundamental tendencies of documentary as 1. recording,
revealing, preserving; 2. persuading or promoting; 3.
analyzing or interrogating; 4. expressing. "Toward a
poetics of documentary," in Michael Renov, ed.
Theorizing documentary (New York, Routledge,
1993): 21. [6]
Trinh T. Minh-ha, "The totalizing quest of meaning," in
Renov: 90. [7]
A number of writers have noted the increasingly blurred
boundary between documentary and experimental forms. Cf.
Bill Nichols's comment that "much of what we have called
documentary might be reconsidered as experimental and
much of what we have called experimental or avant-garde
might be reconsidered as documentary," in Bill Nichols,
Blurred boundaries: questions of meaning in
contemporary culture (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994):
103. [8]
See Julia Lesage, "Women's fragmented consciousness in
feminist experimental autobiographical video," in Janet
Walker and Diane Waldman, eds., Feminism and
documentary (Minneapolis: U Minnesotta P, 1999):
309-37; Chris Holmlund, "When autobiography meets
ethnography and girl meets girl: The 'dyke docs' of Sadie
Benning and Su Friedrich," in Chris Holmlund and Cynthia
Fuchs, eds., Between the sheets, In the streets:
queer, lesbian, gay documentary (Minneapolis: U
Minnesotta P, 1997): 127-43; Chris Holmlund, "From
rupture to rapture through experimental bio-pics: Leslie
Thornton's There was an unseen cloud moving," in
Waldman and Walker: 287-308. [9]
Janet Walker and Diane Waldman, "Introduction," in
Waldman and Walker: 10-11. Although the hegemony of
feminist film theory's anti-documentary stance is
apparent in numerous 1970s articles, it is important to
note that the intervention by Walker and Waldman is
actually only the latest in a reasonably long line of
objections to this hegemony. See "Introduction,"
especially pages 10-13. [10]
In addition to aforementioned anthologies edited by
Walker and Waldman, and Holmlund and Fuchs, other books
dedicating significant sections to matters of feminism
and gender include Michelle Citron, Home movies and
other necessary fictions (Minneapolis: U Minnesotta
P, 1998) and Paula Rabinowitz, They must be
represented: the politics of documentary (London:
Verso, 1994). [11]
Julia Lesage, "Women's fragmented consciousness in
feminist experimental autobiographical video," in Waldman
and Walker: 310. [12]
The idea that feminist practitioners are often
conceptually in advance of their theoretical counterparts
is a point that deserves mentioning here, and that Alison
Butler has touched on. See "Feminist theory and women's
films at the turn of the century," Screen 41, no.4
(Spring 2000): 73-9. [13]
Examples of this can be found nearly everywhere, however
the director in Naomi's legacy (Wendy Levy USA
1994) expresses this especially well when she says about
some home movie footage, "these films are dangerous! They
lack a true or even incidental connection to what they
portray, they resist truth, the souls of the subjects are
rarely (if ever) present." [14]
For a polar-opposite take on autobiographical film, in
particular its ability to express authorial subjectivity,
see an early essay by Elizabeth Bruss, "Eye for I: making
and unmaking autobiography in film," in James Olney, ed.,
Autobiography: essays theoretical and critical
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980): 296 - 320. While
Bruss's valuing of categories like the "subjective" and
the "personal" is not open to question, her blanket
dismissal of cinema autobiography on the grounds that it
cannot not be impersonal strikes me as a most
naïve and uninformed remark that can only have been
uttered by someone who has never seen films of the French
new wave, the American avant-garde of the sixties and
seventies, or a work of so-called "women's
cinema." [15]
In Rea Tajiri's video about her relatives' experience of
internment, History and memory, I am referring to
the recurring, technically "fictional" image of Tajiri's
mother at a water tap in the desert that is construed as
infinitely more "true" than the lavishly well-documented
but completely propagandistic Department of War
Information imagery. In The body beautiful, about
the relationship between a British-African daughter and
her British mother, I allude to a sequence that appears
as a fantasy of the director's mother, a radical
mastectomy survivor, that contrasts with the patronizing
voice-over of the medical authority. The relatively high
value placed on such re-enactment scenes runs counter to
their conventional worth, which, according to Bill
Nichols, is typically rather low on the scale of usable
evidence. Representing reality: 21. [16]
In the aforementioned Naomi's legacy the director
and her mother argue about which game the grandfather was
playing on the day he made his young daughter (the
director's mother) hide under the table ("maybe I just
dreamt the whole rest of it," wonders the director). In
History and Memory, Tajiri's aunt expresses a
clear preference for fantasy in lieu of "reality,"
collecting images of movie stars in a box which she then
passes on to Tajiri's sister. The director's grandmother
in Halving the bones is constructed as a teller of
tall tales, inventing the aforementioned tumor in order
to justify escaping her return to Japan, and overstating
the success of her marital relationship as well as her
feelings for her new USA home. [17]
Parental forgetfulness (due to mental illness and
alzheimers, respectively) is the central theme in Janice
Tanaka's Who's going to pay for these donuts,
anyway? (USA 1992) and Deborah Hoffmann's
Complaints of a dutiful daughter (USA 1994), while
grandparental evasiveness is the main theme in Navajo
talking picture (Arlene Bowman USA 1996) and an
important one in Halving the bones, as this
comment from the director of the latter film attests: "I
don't think Grandma ever really opened up to me. She told
me some stories, the same ones over and over again. But I
think that's because I didn't really know anything about
her. She could remember her past any way she wanted to.
It's like she was cleaning it up, so she could put it
away." [18]
Some of the characters we encounter sound like colleagues
of White and Nichols, for example Ruth Lounsbury's mother
who comments, "I don't think you can talk about the
accuracy in memory, because I think you may want to,
without even realizing it, you may want to color it, and
make it more interesting, or make it somehow to your
advantage...." [19]
Teresa de Lauretis, "Eccentric subjects: feminist theory
and historical consciousness," Feminist studies
16, no.1 (Spring 1990): 114-150. [20]
This is elegantly illustrated in the old testament story
that is related in Wendy Levy's film Naomi's legacy.
A metaphor for the film's on-screen relationship, it
could also stand for the relationships in the other two
works. In the story, Naomi's husband and sons die of the
plague, and she sends her daughters-in-law away to find
new husbands. While one of them consents to leave her,
the other chooses to stay with her, saying, in the
director's words, "where you go, I will go. Your people
shall be my people, your God, my God." As in all of the
works, with the selection of this family relationship,
the protagonist gains both a mother and a
culture. [21]
Her daughter's explanation for Masako's attitude is that
Masako lives completely "in the present," but for
viewers, the distance that the older woman feels from her
childhood and culture is palpable. Evidence of this
distance is that Masako is hardly able to recognize
herself in the old photos that her daughter shows her,
and refers to the childhood version of herself and her
brother in the third person, as "these children" or
"they".
7,807 words
Abstract
Documentary:
developments and theories
Changes in
feminism: eccentric subjects
Halving
the bones
On
some level, I really did think of Mom as manifesting
certain characteristics of a cancer. The metaphor
contained something that I recognized. A deeply rooted
conflation of sickness and race.... The yellow
peril.... The malignant Japanese who had to be
excised.... I'd seen these images all my life and I
believed them. Anyway, this was old history, but even
so, I knew I shared it. Cancer invades the body. Mine
was different from everyone else's in Connecticut and
it was obviously because of mom. Her genes in my body
had prevailed. So you see it was this eurocentric and
primitive understanding of history and genetics, that
left me susceptible to a metaphoric confusion about my
mother's origins. She'd started life as a tumor, and
cancerous, she'd spread. I was her offspring, and
hardly benign.
Naomi's
legacy
History
and memory
Performing
memory
Filmography
A
healthy baby girl (Judith Helfand, USA, 1996, 57
min.)
Endnotes
