Framed
Framed is presented in a single-channel video using two elements. The first element is the film footage that was found by the artists at the U.S. National Film Archive. These staged films, produced by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), captured a fictional idealized life of Japanese Americans in the American concentration camps during World War II. More than a hundred thousand innocent civilians of Japanese descent were incarcerated solely based on their ancestry. To legitimize the abrogation of civil rights, the WRA produced this wartime propaganda. The second element is the slide show in which the still images reframe the raw material of the WRA films.
Bruce Yonemoto
Norman Yonemoto
Also Directed by Bruce Yonemoto
In the novella Blinky The Friendly Hen (1978), artist Jeffrey Vallance documented the supermarket purchase of a frozen chicken and its burial in the Los Angeles S.P.C.A. Pet Memorial Park. Naming the fryer Blinky, Vallance transformed poultry into pet, paying tribute to the billions of hens sacrificed each year for our consumption. Ten years later questions of the true cause of Blinky’s death continue to swirl. Blinky, the videotape, documents the search for this cause. Alas, like the shroud of Turin, Blinky’s death cannot be completely resolved. Blinky’s ten-year story ends where it began, in our culture’s glistening, dreamlike symbol of heavenly closure, the supermarket.
Potatoes, indigenous to the farmlands of Andean Peru serve as the principle metaphor in this revisionist documentary. Papa replicates Vincent Van Gogh’s original composition, The Potato Eaters. The “uncivilised, unpeeled dusty faces” of the original Dutch peasants are portrayed by an indigenous Andean Quechua family who continue to this day “to earn their meals honestly.” Following the model of Luis Buñuel’s landmark 1932 surrealist documentary, Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes), Papa attempts to parody the discourse typically adopted by the ‘voice of god’ documentary form, simply by bringing the underlying elitism of such formalism to the foreground – the distance that is inherent to ‘objectivity’ is revealed merely as cynicism.
Europe’s enchantment with American consumer culture is depicted, as well-known European architectural landmarks – the Eiffel Tower, the Acropolis, London Bridge – are reflected in the glossy surface of a 1960s Cadillac convertible, the ultimate symbol of the “golden age” of American consumerism.
This experimental video, created by Karen Finley and Bruce Yonemoto while artists-in-residence at California’s Montalvo Arts Center, touches on the racism of the Center’s founder, James D. Phelan, and brings the story up to the present. Finley’s performance channels Phelan, one of the biggest proponents of anti-Japanese-immigration laws at the turn of the last century
Spalding Gray comes to LA to perform a set of monologues.
This stylized narrative is the first in the Yonemotos' Soap Opera Series,in which they employ the traditional syntax and codes of melodrama to explore how mass media formulas manipulate desire and sexuality, fantasy and reality. Played out with the self-conscious acting and dialogue of a soap opera, this story of the dissolution of a contemporary romance is set in the context of the postmodern Southern California art scene. By emphasizing modes of representation — TV, movies, art — the Yonemotos reconstruct a narrative of melodrama itself, illustrating their assertion that personal dramas and romantic ideals are the result of media propaganda, a social fantasy that becomes reality.
PANPANORAMA features the famous “kiss” in Alfred Hitchcockʼs VERTIGO. The locations which panoramically circle around the lovers in VERTIGO are replaced with tracking shots from famous scenes in classic films from all over the world. By replacing the locations of the loversʼ desire, the installation underscores the fact that “global cinema” has faded into the background of the Hollywood cinematic desire.
Barravento Novo depicts correspondences between Antônio Pitanga—a Cinema Novo actor seen here delivering lines from Glauber Rocha’s first feature, Barravento, from 1962—and his daughter, Camila Pitanga, a well-known actor and filmmaker working today.
Deconstructing the myth of Oedipus within the framework of an ancient Japanese folk story, the Yonemotos craft a highly charged discourse of loss and desire. Quoting from Bunuel, Freud, pop media and art, they place the symbology of Western psychosexual analytical theory into a cross-cultural context, juxtaposing the Oedipal and Kappa myths in a delirious collusion of form and content. The Kappa, a malevolent Japanese water imp, is played with eerie intensity by artist Mike Kelley; actress Mary Woronov plays Jocasta as a vamp from a Hollywood exploitation film. Steeped in perversions and violent longings, both the Kappa and Oedipus legends are presented in highly stylized, purposefully "degraded" forms, reflecting their media-exploitative cultural contexts. In this ironic yet oddly poignant essay of psychosexual compulsion and catharsis, the Yonemotos demonstrate that even in debased forms, cultural archetypes hold the power to move and manipulate.
Yonemoto’s video recreates the opening sequence from The Sound of Music, replacing the Austrian Alps with the Peruvian Andes, the village of Salzberg with Incan ruins and Julie Andrews with a young Andean boy. Sweeping aerial views and a solitary figure accompany the soundtrack, sung by the Andean boy. His song is a translated version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s infective melody into the indigenous Incan language of Quechua, spoken by 13 million people throughout the Andes and South America. Yet the language is probably best known through its place in popular culture; George Lucas’ villain Jabba the Hut spoke this disappearing language.
Also Directed by Norman Yonemoto
This stylized narrative is the first in the Yonemotos' Soap Opera Series,in which they employ the traditional syntax and codes of melodrama to explore how mass media formulas manipulate desire and sexuality, fantasy and reality. Played out with the self-conscious acting and dialogue of a soap opera, this story of the dissolution of a contemporary romance is set in the context of the postmodern Southern California art scene. By emphasizing modes of representation — TV, movies, art — the Yonemotos reconstruct a narrative of melodrama itself, illustrating their assertion that personal dramas and romantic ideals are the result of media propaganda, a social fantasy that becomes reality.