These Amazing Shadows Page #5

It isn't just Hollywood films.

It's films that

document America's life and...

America's heritage.

There's a wonderful film that was named

to the Registry a few years ago.

It's a piece of amateur filmmaking

made by the wife of a doctor in a sort of

agricultural town in Minnesota in the '30s,

and she went around photographing

what the place looked like.

Well, this is wonderful. It's like watching

a bunch of live Edward Hopper and Charles

Sheeler canvases come to life, you know?

Who knew?

So there's a film that...

very specifically preserves

a niche in a corner of American life.

There is some sense of sadness

and poignancy.

It's part of our history,

it's part of our family history.

It's the history of a people,

history of our country.

One of the most tragic,

yet fascinating

moments in our country's history

was the mass internment...

of 120,000 Japanese-Americans.

Overnight,

American citizens of Japanese ancestry

were looked at with fear and suspicion,

simply because we looked like the people

who bombed Pearl Harbor.

Mass hysteria took over the country,

and President Roosevelt ordered...

120,000 people taken from their homes,

moved within three days

and put in internment camps

throughout the country.

I still remember that day

when two American soldiers

with bayonets on their rifles

came stomping up...

to the front door of that house

and ordered our family out.

And I remember my mother had tears

streaming down her cheek...

as we moved out.

It became normal for me

to begin the school day

in a black tar paper barrack

with a Pledge of Allegiance to the flag.

I could see the barbed wire fence

and the sentry towers

right outside my schoolhouse window

as I recited the words...

"with liberty and justice for all."

I have a nine-year-old daughter

and I want her to be able to experience

and see what these camps looked like.

I think when you talk about

the history of an experience,

you can't really feel it

unless you can see it and visualize it.

My father is Dave Masaharu Tatsuno

and he was responsible for the film Topaz,

which documents life in an internment camp

during World War II.

That's my mother holding me in the desert.

It wasn't meant to be a documentary.

He was just trying

to do a family film for us.

What has come to be known as his film,

was really just a portrayal

of life in the camps,

of the daily struggles

that people experienced

and it captured for all time

something that America

didn't want anyone to see.

Home movies are so important.

They show our history

of our family, of our community,

of our country.

That's important,

that's very important.

The addition of the Zapruder film,

the home movie that captured

the assassination of John Kennedy,

demonstrates, I think,

at its farthest extent...

that America's film heritage,

its movie heritage...

embraces much, much more

than just a Hollywood feature film.

I think, "This film is real

and it happened during my lifetime."

I saw it, it's ugly, it's sudden,

it's shocking and it's inexplicable,

and the only way that you can recreate

the experience of it, is showing it.

Hey you, come on out of there.

Come on!

Well, I'm a... too many of you

dames gettin' away with it these days.

- The cops in the yards'll take care of you!

- Oh, wait a minute.

You wouldn't throw us

off the train, would you?

- Yeah, and you're gonna get 30 days for it.

- In jail?

Yes, in jail!

Now why don't we sit down

and talk this thing over?

Almost always, the things that people

wanted to cut out of movies... were ideas.

And so you have ideas

being cut out of the original Baby Face

by the New York censors.

That man of mine...

Baby face was really interesting 'cause...

I'd known the film for a long time and

actually, I had a copy of it on laserdisc...

for those who remember

what laserdiscs were.

They asked me to go and check the negative

to see what condition it was in,

and that's when I noticed

that we actually had two negatives.

So I get 'em out,

and I start looking at the two reel ones

and I notice

that there's something strange about them,

so I put the two reel ones down on a table

and set one of top of the other one

and that's when I noticed that, you know,

like the one reel one was this big...

And the other reel one was like this big,

and I'm like,

"There's something going on here."

Say, I like it here.

How about a job?

- Oh, we...

- Oh, now don't tell me

in this great big building

there ain't some place for me.

Have you had any experience?

Plenty.

And I started going through the two negatives

and also listening to the soundtracks

and began finding these differences,

great differences between the two films.

And then he has the Eureka moment

and he realizes that what he has...

is the film before it was edited!

That the five minutes with Barbara Stanwyck

going to the city to use what she has,

you know, to get what she wants

is in there,

and they thought it was lost.

The boss won't be back for an hour.

Well then, why don't we go in

and talk this over?

The original negative was cut

to the censorship version.

The duplicate negative

was the original pre-censored version

that had all the naughty bits still in it,

and that was just... I mean that was just

the find of a lifetime.

Look, here.

Nietzsche says "All life,

no matter how we idealize it,

is nothing more nor less

than exploitation."

That's what I'm telling you.

Exploit yourself!

Go to some big city

where you will find opportunities.

Use men!

Be strong!

Defiant!

Use men

to get the things you want!

The version that was discovered...

puts some of the sex back,

but it puts a lot of the philosophy back.

Yeah.

The New York censors altered

the sharpness of the philosophical thrust

for the release version because they

were afraid that it would offend people.

What chance has a woman got?

More chance than men.

A woman... young, beautiful like you are...

could get anything she wants in the world

But there is a right and a wrong way.

Remember the price of the wrong way

is too great.

Go to some big city

where you will find opportunities.

Don't let people mislead you.

You must be a master,

not a slave.

Be clean, be strong, defiant.

And you will be a success.

You always hear about these things

but they never survive.

Yeah.

And to this day, I don't think

we've found out exactly why...

this negative survives

and why on this particular film,

they actually made this duplicate negative

before they cut the film.

You can make a movie, by the way,

that endorses conventional morality,

that's not the problem.

The problem is that

it was not sincere, it's not real.

And in the case of Baby Face,

when it really said what it wanted to say,

of course, it's better.

That is why censorship is so horrible.

Because censorship

blocks the free expression of an era

talking to another era.

For the most part, most films that are made

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