Rea Tajiri

Rea Tajiri is a filmmaker and video artist who earned her BFA and MFA at the California Institute of the Arts studying studio art. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, which is where her family settled after her father served in the 442nd regiment during World War II. Tajiri’s film History and Memory, an experimental documentary about the internment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, won several awards from the San Francisco International Film Festival, the International Documentary Association, and the Atlanta Film and Video Festival and is considered an essential part of the experimental film canon. Tajiri currently teaches at Temple University as an Associate Professor in the Division of Theater, Film and Media Arts.

This interview was conducted over Skype from California to Pennsylvania in November 2018.

Jaime Barrairo: What got you started in film?

Rea Tajiri: Well let’s see. I was studying art first. I didn’t go to film school. I went to CalArts, an art school that’s in Southern California. I guess I had a lot of interests. When I went in, I was painting, printmaking; I had a lot of training in those things. In high school, I was going to a community center and I learned printmaking. But I went to a lot of movies and I saw a lot of art films and I really liked them. And then right when I got into CalArts, Super 8 was kind of -- there was a lot of innovation. It seems so funny because Super 8 seems like such a funny medium now. But there were a lot of new cameras that could record sound. I was playing around with it, and I really loved moving image and I really loved playing with time and I loved the color– Super 8 has this kind of really beautiful Kodachrome. It looks really beautiful. So I really liked making films at that time.

There were festivals that would have Super 8 sidebars. People were making features on Super 8, there was a whole punk movement in New York where people were using Super 8. So it was a really interesting, fun medium that was really outside mainstream film. I was just working with that. And that’s how I started. While I was at CalArts, I just took a lot of film classes and watched a lot of films and then took a 16mm production class, but, for some reason, at that time, it was just so intimidating, so I didn’t really go anywhere with that. But then, later on, there were some people that came [to teach at CalArts]; Dara Birnbaum, she’s like a video artist, she came. And I started working in video art. That’s how I started.

JB: What sparks the idea for your films?

RT: Usually I’m interested in the interface between a personal experience, which can often be something that is felt by many people...something very specific, but it’s often things that a lot of different people understand, but it’s something that’s not spoken about widely. Those are things that intrigue me. Right now, I’m working on a film that has to do with the experience of caregiving for an elderly person who has dementia. I was a caregiver to my mother who had dementia, and that was around sixteen years. It was such a particular experience. It touches on a lot of issues about both aging, what it means to age, how aging is shunned, how people misunderstand the process of aging, or they don’t deal with or understand elderly people.

Dementia is something that people see as very tragic, almost like the new cancer. My film is about looking at dementia and that experience. This is part of the human condition. Aging is part of the human condition. Dementia actually isn’t something that [just recently] came about. People have always been aging in this way. When you talk to a lot of gerontologists and people who really look at aging, they all say “This has always been around. Now that we don’t live with extended family, this has suddenly become a crisis.” But the film really looks at how it developed over time. I was able to just really, simply, listen to my mother, develop a kind of intimacy, and really communicate with her even though she didn’t always make logical sense, or maybe she lived in a time travel state. She would go back and forth between memory, her childhood and the present. She tried to convey a sense of experience she lived through– 20, 30, 50 years ago– as if it were the present moment. It’s normalizing - how to give space to that process of how to hear, listen, and value what an elderly person is going through in dementia, rather than seeing it as a pathology.

JB: What was the first video or film you created that you were proud of and how did it impact the rest of your career as a filmmaker?

RT: Well, a lot of the early video art that I was making...when you’re just starting out, you make things and you might share them with people or you might screen them at school. There’s this point where you have an audience, whether that’s your peers or other people in school or your instructors. There’s a point where you suddenly connect with people and people want to talk to you about what they see and that’s always an interesting moment when people start to get what your ideas are. It’s exciting. When I moved to New York, somebody that I was a teaching assistant for, an artist named Barbara Kruger, I was in the program with another person who was a video artist, and Barbara was really generous and wrote this review of our work and a lot of people saw it. People wanted to program this work that I made; it was called Hitchcock Trilogy. That was pretty interesting, because now I had another kind of art audience that was interested and wanted to talk to me about these ideas. But I think there was a point, too - it was interesting, because in art school, there was a schizophrenia because the art world at that time was still very white, very male. My parents would say, “Well what are you making? What kind of art are you making?” And I would try to explain it from the theoretical language that I had learned, that I had been schooled in. And they would just kind of look at me like “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but okay that sounds great.” And it was interesting to realize that I felt like I had this divide of cultural identity and being an artist in this whiter frame.

My family was unusual, being that my uncle was an artist, my father was a photographer, and they were really interested in the arts. My family encouraged me to go into the arts. But on the other hand, I think they felt like “I wonder what she’s doing. We don’t really understand what she’s doing. Can you make any money?” There were practical concerns. But there was a moment, I remember I met Yuri Kochiyama in New York and she said she was very excited to meet me: She said, “Wow you have a screening. I want to come down and I want see it.” She came down to The Kitchen and she looked at my work and she said “I don’t really understand this. Can you explain it to me?” So I was trying to explain it to her and she didn’t really get it. Could I do something different that was really more about the experiences that I had?

That was when I decided to make History and Memory. I wanted to make something because of the legislation that was going to grant reparations - and really address the injustice of the incarceration that was coming forward. It made me reflect on my family’s experience and I decided to make this piece History and Memory. I wanted it to both have a subjective voice and be formally very rigorous, but I wanted it to be very accessible. I think that that piece really connected to people in this very deep way and that was, for me, a turning point. I feel like that was a very important film that really shifted a lot of things for myself. But it also made a statement and carved a space within documentary to consider subjective voice; and to really also connect with a lot of people of color around subjectivity, history, memory, the role of memory in terms of unacknowledged histories.

JB: Speaking of History and Memory, how did you choose the clips and memories you did?

RT: I did a lot of research. I went to the national archives. There’s a combination of different kinds of filmic texts. For instance, there are Hollywood films. There’s archival that came from a national archive. There’s home movie footage. I was interested in all of these different ways in which these narratives existed around the moment of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and how that shifted everything for Japanese Americans. I was looking at both this Hollywood depiction, this narrative that was this very famous film, From Here to Eternity. And then I started looking at films that were considered propaganda films. I found in the national archives, a clip from a Japanese propaganda film. I wanted to juxtapose all of them to create this argument about this divide about how that moment in history was depicted. The narratives that people absorb as part of how they think about World War II. But I also wanted to include very subjective, very particular fragments that my parents remembered, and my relatives remembered.

I found a lot of footage that the Army Signal Corps shot of the people that were interned. That footage was really disturbing and really strange to me. At that point, since there were so few documents that were moving image and visual, that a lot of those pieces of footage ended up in other films about the internment that Japanese American makers used to say “This is what the internment was.”

What I found really disturbing was the slate. The person marking the slate was a soldier, a white soldier, an army person. I thought that was a really disturbing juxtaposition as though this was an ethnographic film. But it was an ethnographic film shot in a concentration camp. And the ethnographic subjects were people who looked like me, Japanese Americans. Also, just looking at moments where people were looking into the camera, recognizing that they were being filmed. Those were interesting to me to put in the film.

JB: Can you explain more about the text you chose to scroll through during the film?

RT: I mentioned that I was doing video art. A lot of the early video art work that I did had scrolling text. The way that I was using the scrolling text was kind of based on scrolling film titles or film credits at the end of the movie. That sort of layering where you read this information. I was influenced by Barbara Kruger, she was somebody I’d studied with and she used a lot of text over image.

I liked the idea of both having a layer of information that both interrupts the reading of the image, it forces a critical distance for the viewer. You’re also receiving two channels of information because you’re receiving a linguistic description of something that you’re not seeing and, at the same time, you’re seeing an image. It’s like this weird doubling that I wanted to work with in this film. In the beginning of the film, I’m describing things that the viewer doesn’t see and it’s meant to point to that absence. The absence of something that existed, and we know it existed, but, at the same time, we don’t have any accounts for that. We’re forced to imagine it, to construct that in our mind.

JB: You brought it up earlier that the filmmaking industry is a “white industry.” Being an Asian American and a woman, both having minimal representation, what is it like navigating the filmmaking industry?

RT: The filmmaking industry is a mirror of the society we live in. There are certain stories that are privileged and valued over other stories or certain kinds of representations. At one point, I made a dramatic feature. I made a film called Strawberry Fields. I had to go through all those tropes of the industry, pitching, attending festivals. I talked to agents, talked to people, but I turned away from that, I valued other things and other kinds of experiences.I didn’t see myself trying to fit within that commercial world. Now I think it’s interesting, it’s really hopeful.I think things are shifting. For instance, the generation my students are in. They’re entering a different industry.

JB: What brought you to the experimental genre?

RT: That word is a funny word because I teach. There’s this push toward narrative filmmaking, that narrative is a really strong force in storytelling and in our society and how we share these stories with each other. And if you say “experimental,” there’s a frustration like “It’s just gonna be this weird thing that we don’t understand.” There was this resistance to that kind of form. “Experimental” is a really loaded word for a lot of my students, but there’s a long tradition with experimental film. When I was at CalArts, I saw a lot of experimental film. I feel like I took on some of those things and adapted them. For me, experimental film is about playing with form. It’s also about creating this alternate way of using the medium. It doesn’t really have to, necessarily, involve all of those same kind of mastery and skill sets. It’s a way to have access to be able to work with certain kinds of subject matter, reinvent the form. Maybe some of the cinematic language we are raised on can be constraining, kind of colonial. I’m interested in how that cinematic space can do other things. And that’s what I’m interested in opening up the room for imagining things or having a space in which you’re addressed as the viewer in a different way than you might be in a conventional film.

Jaime Barrairo is an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. They are studying Cinema and Digital Media with a minor in Asian American Studies.