Interviews

1. An Unexpected Ephiphany

2. Formula for Freedom

3. Creating Culture

4. The Master of Media

5. A Pleasant Past

Robert A. Nakamura

(b. 1936) Filmmaker

Formula for Freedom

There’s a lot of things going on at that time, and so I wanted to put it in context, ‘cause if you look at V.C [Visual Communications] by itself, you say “oh these guys really did some different things,” but if you look at it within a context of the early 60s, late 60s, early 70s, you see the whole, it was a whole movement, cultural change movement along with the political parts....If you came through the ‘50s and into the ‘60s, you picked up a lot of baggage, negative baggage, about who we are, who are Asian Americans, who are quote orientals. So I think that’s the unique part of the beginning of V.C.…

I think what was different about V.C…First off, is that we were not in film school, we were not learning media to, as art, as self expression, as experimenting with visual forms. That was not our, where we began with. We really began with the idea of recapturing our past and presenting our past.

And I think, this is very important, our audience was really our own communities…It wasn’t about art, it wasn’t about self expression, it wasn’t even about breaking stereotypes to the majority society. We wanted to break stereotypes to ourselves.

Asian American movement communities identity Visual Communications (organization)

Date: August 16, 2011

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Alexa Kim

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Born on July 5, 1936, in Venice, California, to an Issei father and Nisei mother, Robert Akira Nakamura left a successful career in photojournalism and advertising photography to become one of the first to explore, interpret and present the experiences of Japanese Americans in film. His ground-breaking personal documentary, Manzanar (1972), has been selected for major retrospectives on the documentary form at the San Francisco Museum of Art and the Film Forum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

A graduate of Art Center College of Design (BFA, 1966) and the UCLA Department of Motion Picture & Television Production (MFA, 1975), where he recently retired as a Professor, Nakamura has garnered over 25 national awards for his innovative and evocative films, including Wataridori: Birds of Passage (1975); Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980), Moving Memories (1992), Something Strong Within (1994), and Looking Like the Enemy (1995).

In 1970, Nakamura founded Visual Communications where he continues to serve as a member of the Board of Directors. He also founded the UCLA Center for Ethnocommunications in 1996, and the Media Arts Center of the Japanese American National Museum in 1997.

Nakamura was the first recipient of the annual Steve Tatsukawa Memorial Award in 1985 for outstanding achievement and leadership in Asian American media, and, in 1994, the Asian Pacific American Coalition in Cinema, Theatre & Television of UCLA, instituted the “Robert A. Nakamura Award” in his honor to recognize outstanding contributions of other Asian Pacific American visual artists. In 1997, the Smithsonian Institute presented a retrospective of his work and in 1999 he was named to the Endowed Chair in Japanese American Studies at UCLA. (August 2012)