리아 타지리의 영화 <역사와 기억>에 대한 연구

A Study of Rea Tajiri's work, 'History and Memory'

Japanese-American independent filmmaker, Rea Tajiri' addresses the inheritance of imprecise and elliptical familial memories of a traumatic event in history that involved their relocation to the Japanese-American internment camps in the United States following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during the Second World War in <History and Memory>(1991). Tajiri pays particular attention to her mother's memory of the event - which is so incomplete it approaches the condition of amnesia - in order to investigate the way generational silences and fissured memories of the past have affected her own sense of identity and memory. Her mother's silence is accompanied by a further absense of images : photographs of the internment were illegal and thus her family has none in their possession. In order to reconstruct these silences, gaps and holes back into forms of personal memory and history, Tajiri must access the past through public archives, records, documents, popular culture and finally through the remains of the camps themselves. By investigating the process by which some images are made to construct official history, while others simply disappear, Tagiri's work itself, becomes a new working historical document. Moreover, the missing images of her inherited past inaugurate a physical return to the site of her mother's internment. Tagiri tries to render the invisible visible again through representation. Tagiri's journey back is made in order to construct new, alternative images for an event that has no such image yet. She attempts to render a presence out of absence. Her video is thus constructed out of, she says on the soundtrack, “the search for an ever absent image and the desire to create an image where there is none.” Through this precess of returning to the past makes new images of an invisible, forgotten and buried past, creating a mnemonic text in the process. Tagiri's 'History and Memory' is a project of making what was invisible in history and in memory, visible again, “I can forgive my mother her loss of memory”, she says on the sound track, “and make this image for her.”