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Set in the late 1970s in North Chicago, 3725 traces the obsessions of a Japanese foreign student with the traditional Japanese toy kendama, jazz, and drugs, for an abstract portrait of Japanese culture’s transformation and the disastrous explosion of an individual’s inner life in the US.
In the whimsical Dreamworks (1983), a narrator recites a parody of Freud that analyzes the dreams of cats against abstract images that seem to represent those dreams and shots from a cat’s point of view, moving about a room close to the floor.
Sound in Sync (1984) consists of two ten-minute takes; Aoki films people on Michigan Avenue but soon pans up into the blue. The long middle portion of each take consists of almost imperceptible camera movements across the sky while the sound track continues to record people talking on the street, presumably in perfect sync with the image. The film refocuses our attention from what we’re most accustomed to looking at to a world almost of pure color.
In this austere and sorrowful portrait of his hometown, St. Louis, Harris sets his black-and-white 16mm camera loose to wander through the city’s decaying northside neighborhoods, an area populated almost exclusively by working class and working poor African Americans. Gliding down empty streets, across the facades of once-elegant homes, entering condemned buildings, the camera makes a detached but ultimately damning portrait of civic neglect and apathy. Poignantly, human beings are rarely encountered; their presence haunts the soundtrack of eerie footsteps, an unanswered telephone, and sparse voiceover commentary from found sources.
Seventy-five years ago, Executive Order 9066 paved the way to the profound violation of constitutional rights that resulted in the forced incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans. Featuring George Takei and many others who were incarcerated, as well as newly rediscovered photographs of Dorothea Lange, And Then They Came for Us brings history into the present, retelling this difficult story and following Japanese American activists as they speak out against the Muslim registry and travel ban. Knowing our history is the first step to ensuring we do not repeat it.
