Homemade History

An endless web of cracks in the parched ground fans out across the desert landscape. A gust of wind blasts past a row of stark barracks. Someone in a trench coat walking hand in hand with a small child. A smiling man--his head wrapped tightly in a blue scarf--sweeps away the snow with a broom.

For Dave Tatsuno, this was life at the Central Utah Relocation Camp.

Tatsuno meticulously documented his incarceration at the camp in Topaz, Utah, during World War II with the aid of an 8-millimeter camera that a camp staff member secretly allowed him to use.

His simple images of camp life--about 75 minutes of footage--was placed on the National Film Registry by the Librarian of Congress in December, making Tatsuno’s film the first submission by an Asian American to be included in the 8-year-old collection.

Tonight at 7:30, about 10 minutes of Tatsuno’s footage, along with a documentary featuring other home movies from internment camps, will be shown at a free screening at the Japan America Theatre, 244 S. San Pedro St., in Little Tokyo.

“The Topaz Footage” is the second home movie ever to be part of the registry. Abraham Zapruder’s film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was the first.

*

Tatsuno, 84, says he was surprised to be selected for the registry. “To me, it was old hat,” he said in an interview from San Jose, where he runs a Japanese gift shop his family started 50 years ago. “I’d seen it so often and had thought nothing of it,” he said. “But other people, they say, ‘Wow, this was taken 50 years ago behind barbed wire.’ ”

The films could not have been made without the help of Walter Honderick, a War Relocation Authority staff member who was Tatsuno’s supervisor at a dry goods co-op at Topaz, Tatsuno said.

“To me, it was just a home movie,” said Tatsuno, who was imprisoned at Topaz with his wife and three children from 1942 to 1945. “The man who deserves the credit is Walter Honderick. No camera, no movie. You see, it’s as simple as that. It never would have happened if I hadn’t been standing next to him. He suddenly took out a camera and was filming when I said I’d give my right arm to have my camera here.”

Tatsuno had been a home movie enthusiast since 1936. But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, cameras were deemed contraband for Japanese Americans. So, he asked a white friend in Oakland to hang on to it until after the war.

Honderick told Tatsuno to have his friend send the camera to him.

“One day, [Honderick] came to my barracks with the camera,” Tatsuno recalled. “He told me to be careful and to not take it near the fence where the guards are.”

Tatsuno shot scenes of what he calls “everyday life” at the relocation center. “I mostly filmed the cooperative, the staff, really innocent things,” he said. “Church on Sunday. A dust storm. The snow in the desert. Very peaceful scenes. Nothing very dangerous. I wasn’t trying to spy.”

Of the 75 minutes he filmed, Tatsuno says he believes there is one piece of footage that perfectly illustrates the tragic irony of what the U.S. government had done to Americans of Japanese ancestry.

“Here we are behind the barbed wire and my brother comes in [wearing] an American Army uniform with a guard to visit his family in a concentration camp,” Tatsuno said. “At that time, I didn’t think about it. But it’s a very important shot.”

*

Karen L. Ishizuka, senior curator at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo, submitted Tatsuno’s footage to the National Registry.

“It was a longshot” for the footage to be selected, said Ishizuka, who is building an archive of home videos shot by Japanese Americans. “The idea was to encourage the preservation and increase the access to home movies of historical importance.”

Each year, the registry adds 25 films based on cultural, historical, aesthetic significance, said Steve Legett, spokesman for the National Film Preservation Board, which recommends films for inclusion to the Librarian of Congress.

Among the other films inducted into the registry last year were “Woodstock,” “The Graduate,” and the 1936 version of “Showboat.”

“The Topaz footage shows the importance of non-Hollywood footage,” Legett said. “Plus, it a fairly riveting story.”

Milt Shefter, a former member of the preservation board who recommended that “Topaz” be included on the registry, said: “In the true role of a documentary, it held the mirror up to society, and what we saw was not the fairest. But the attempt at normalcy by all of the people is what struck me.”

*

Ishizuka said Tatsuno’s film is “really a tribute to everyday people, the people who are making history. I think so many people see home movies as a leisurely pastime. But it really can be a filmic documentation from the point of view of an everyday person.”

Ishizuka argues that until recently, scenes from the lives of people of color in the United States were rarely captured on film and that in many cases, home movies are the only documentation of how they lived.

“Home movies, such as the Topaz footage,” she said, “are never-before seen images of America.”