Commentary | "History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige" (1991)

Filmmaker Rea Tajiri is well-known for her avant-garde style -- so when I watched this film I was prepared me to examine her work within an avant-garde framework, meaning I was prepared to search for abstract meaning in “germinal” images and conceptual film techniques. Though her scrolling script and zooms and pans on still images were certainly powerful, what I found most compelling about History and Memory was simply Tajiri’s narration. There was a haunting quality to her voice, something in her tone that made it clear that she needed to find justice and resolution for this piece of her life that she somehow had always known was missing. Because her family did not have photographs or belongings that could serve as memoirs, she drew from her memory an image of her mother filling a canteen in the desert.

Along with this image, Tajima explores a number of seemingly unrelated fragments and weaves them together, allowing them to draw from and enrich one another until they become a tangible and personal story about the internment camps. She creatively inserted her memories and their spin-offs alongside a history that was told through Hollywood images of Japanese Americans and World War II propaganda. For Tajiri, combining history and memory was an attempt to reconstruct her own version of history—her decided choice to identify a story to tell among a history that was incredibly multi-layered and even confusing.

Despite it being somewhat fictionalized, her film nevertheless comes across and feels truthful because she reconciles that she’s still struggling to fill in the gaps. I felt that the disjointed nature of the film really spoke to how difficult it is to represent the past. And when she said, “I began searching because I felt lost, ungrounded,” her words expressed an inherent sadness that I felt we could all relate to; sadness about a past that is not necessarily ours but that we empathize with because it relates to what we could image our own family’s experience to be, and for more reasons that are hard to articulate.

Company Credits (via wmm.com):
Production Company / Unknown
Distributor / Women Make Movies (wmm.com)

Commentary | "Flower Drum Song" (1961)

My initial reaction to Flower Drum Song was one of indifference. Though I had heard of the movie, I was unfamiliar with its subject matter and therefore viewed it as simply another generic old Hollywood musical. Certainly upon closer inspection, Flower Drum Song is not simply a standard American musical set in San Francisco’s Chinatown; the mere fact that the movie concerns generations of Chinese American characters is in itself a stark departure from anything typically Hollywood.

One of the numbers I found most aggravating was “Chop Suey,” because the notion of “chop suey” that the song seems to be trying to suggest would entail an actual blend of cultures. What I saw and heard instead were only stigmatized images of Chinese traditions (American dance styles that ended with “Asian” bows) and a glorification of American culture (“Hula hoops and nuclear war/ Doctor Salk and Zsa Zsa Gabor…”).

To give the film some historical context, its release date was in step with the Civil Rights Movement -- information which only furthered my critical perception of the film. Considering the contemporaneous threat of “blackness” and the need for different racial groups to align as either closer to “black” or closer to “white” allowed me to understand why Flower Drum Song has been criticized for its implication that the “good Asian” is one who assimilates and maintains the model minority image that continues to persist in the mainstream.




Company Credits (via IMDb.com):
Production Companies / Hunter-Fields, Universal International Pictures
Distributors / Universal Pictures (1961) (USA) (theatrical), National Broadcasting Company (NBC) (1968) (USA) (TV) (original airing)