LGM Film Club, Part 570: Manzanar

Manzanar is a 1971 Robert Nakamura film about the concentration camp by that name where Americans threw the Japanese based on their race during World War II. It’s a student film and looks like a student film. The narrative isn’t always that strong and there’s not much of a structure to it. Nakamura was at UCLA and growing into becoming a really important filmmaker. What makes this so compelling is that his willingness to address the issues of Asian oppression in this nation. This is just at the moment when the Yellow Power movement was peaking and Asian Americans were demanding representation, acknowledgement of the oppression they had faced in this hopelessly racist nation, and a discussion of their history. Before this, the Japanese American survivors of the concentration camps didn’t even want to discuss it. When John Okada published his amazing book No-No Boy, he was basically shunned in his community; when he died just before this and no university would take his papers and manuscripts, his wife just burned them. So what Nakamura is doing is taking his camera and telling a Japanese American story about Japanese American oppression and the terrible place where it happened for the first time. It’s a really important document. In fact, Manzanar was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2022.

There’s not much of it on YouTube. It is streaming on Criterion. But here’s a tribute to Nakamura that includes some of it.