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SY: Well, okay, so... well, so your next film after Manzanar, Manzanar was...

RN: Yeah, that was my...

SY: First film, 1971 I have as the date.

RN: Yeah. Then I did Wataridori: Birds of Passage, and that was my thesis film for my MFA.

SY: So VC was operating then.

RN: Yeah, we were operating.

SY: But you weren't doing as much administrative work then?

RN: No, I did it as VC -- I mean, I did it as my thesis. We did a lot of things like that. So it was my thesis film but it was a VC film. So I had written a proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities and got funded. And at that time, we thought it was important to do films about history and in this case Japanese American history. So Wataridori was about three Issei immigrants and their experience. So one was a Mr. Miura who kind of pioneered the whole fishing industry here, and Mrs... anyway, an Issei woman, her name will come to me, kind of giving a woman's view. She's a widow now, but her husband had kind of pioneered the whole cotton growing, the development of the Central Valley and the south. And then my father, who was a gardener and had the whole classic immigrant story. So they were the three lives kind of intertwined. So that was my...

SY: And was that one of the first films that sort of received...

RN: Well, see, technically... well, we called Manzanar, Wong Sing Song and some of the early ones, those were, we considered them VC films although VC wasn't quite together then. But you'll see on Manzanar it says "Visual Communications."

SY: And how much, do you remember how much it cost to make Wataridori?

RN: Probably seven thousand... everyone worked free. But filmmaking was expensive, so we had, it's raw stock dailies, and eventually negative made and cut and all of that.

SY: And the people who worked on it were all...

RN: They were all fellow students or mostly VC people who worked on it.

SY: So they were, it was sort of a training ground for other filmmakers as well, the making of...

RN: Yeah, for the VC people, yeah. So Duane and we all... and then Alan Kondo came and we learned a lot from him.

SY: And what kind of exposure did you get initially to your films?

RN: Well, see, once again, we weren't really interested in exposure to the audience per se except to a community audience. So we would take our films to screen in church basements and campuses. So that's a whole different, you have to... it's a whole different mindset. We were not interested in distribution per se, other than maybe sustaining the organization. So we weren't interested, and there was no PBS at the time, so we were not interested in network television, and there would be no use for our stuff in Hollywood. And so our whole idea was presented ourselves, to ourselves. At least, there might be other people who thought a little differently, but from my point of view, that was the whole reason for me putting all that time in.

SY: Would you have rejected the notion if someone came to you and said they wanted to show it to a larger audience?

RN: Oh, no. I had no problem with that, but that's not our initial motivation. Because, see, if you think about it, once you're looking at a market, then you begin to compromise and you begin to aim everything. Because even PBS, it's supposed to be alternative television, and it's really not... then you get Ken Burns and all these people and you have a particular PBS look and style and subject matter. So you begin to think PBS or you begin to think cable TV. So I think we, maybe it wasn't articulated then, but all we wanted to do is document ourselves. And part of the understanding of our approach was that no matter what you showed, you had rave reviews from the audiences because they've not... it's hard. I can't get across to my students, I said, "Imagine not even the term 'Asian Americans,' we were 'Orientals.' Imagine not even knowing the term 'Asian Americans,' not having Asian American Studies. They were non-existent until the late '60s, early '70s." And so when audiences would see themselves on film, because film kind of validates, you kind of exist, right? It's like being published in a book or being put into a film, and, "Oh, yeah, I really exist." So for a lot of Asian Americans, especially immigrant or first generation, seeing themselves on the screen, it was a big... so they felt like they're valid people and they should exist. So it was very basic. So there's no thought, per se, other than survival or sustaining the organization, there was no idea of art, self expression, or making it big in Hollywood or becoming... well, there's no Ken Burns at that time, or anthropological studies or anything like that.

SY: But it brings to mind, I'm curious what the reaction to Manzanar was.

RN: Oh, well, this was early on, so, yeah, it was, that was interesting. Later, this was early on to where Niseis never talked about it, and Sanseis. I'm generalizing within Sansei, because there was a lot of progressive Niseis who wanted to talk about it. But generalizing, the Nisei generation didn't want it. They wanted to ignore it, not bring it up, and then Sansei, some of the young people, activists begin to say, "What is this about?" and so they begin to... so since it was one of the first films, it got mixed reviews. The more conservative Nisei people said, "What are you doing bringing up things and photographs of camp and all of that?" And then, of course, the younger generation, it's the first time they'd seen those photos. You have to remember those photographs were not... some of the photographs I used in it were not really seen. Bob Suzuki got 'em through Raymond Uno who got it through the National Archives, but we had never seen any of that.

SY: It was before Years of Infamy was published.

RN: Oh, yeah, yeah.

SY: It was very early on.

RN: Very early on.

SY: And you used... that is interesting that you had WRA photos. That was the historical...

RN: Yeah. And a lot of Miyatake films, photographs, which we didn't even know, Toyo gave a lot of prints away, so people had some shots of camp squirreled away in their collections. I'm kind of wandering, but that was another part of VC. We realized there was no archival material to call on, so we started developing our archive. So we took care of all the photographs, duplicated all the photographs that are now in the JARP collection at UCLA, which is the largest collection on early Japanese Americans. So all the, mostly the photos that are duplicated, we did that. We were paid by the center to do that, so we had made copies for ourselves and decided to put an archive together. And so now we have one of the, VC has one of the largest, or probably the largest collection of Asian American images.

SY: That's the Japanese American... is it JAARTA or JARP?

RN: JARP, Japanese American Research Project.

SY: Research Project.

RN: Because it's the preeminent collection in the country, it's housed in UCLA. There's oral histories and all of that.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.