OUR CATALOG

Available only as part of Elida Schogt Trilogy.

Elida Schogt's moving portrait of her family's experience during the Holocaust. Available only as part of Elida Schogt Trilogy.

Elida Schogt’s deeply personal trilogy of short documentaries on Holocaust memory: ZYKLON PORTRAIT (1999), THE WALNUT TREE (2000) and SILENT SONG (2001) have been screened around the globe, garnering numerous awards. This trilogy includes: ZYKLON PORTRAIT, a Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery that combines archival instructional films with family snapshots, home movies, underwater photography, and hand-painted imagery for an expressive exploration of how history and memory are related to one family's loss. THE WALNUT TREE examines Holocaust memory, the family, and the role of photography in history through a striking combination of documentary and experimental approaches. As its point of departure, the film shows three girls in Dutch costumes posing for their father's camera. This sweet but fleeting moment, made static in a snapshot, is contrasted with live-action images of railway tracks--tracks that carried the death transports--now blurred by the passage of time. “In SILENT SONG Schogt deftly conjures an elaborate dialogue around issues of memory in its various forms - personal, historical, filmic… [her] rich and nuanced economy of style is brilliantly illustrated here as these meditations lead to the most basic, yet most cogent statements on the nature of memory itself. Perhaps more importantly, Schogt points to the unstable nature of the recorded image, one that history has come to rely on.” - Barbara Goslawski, Independent Film Critic and Curator, Toronto

Groundbreaking and haunting, this film is a poetic composition of recorded history and non-recorded memory. Filmmaker Rea Tajiri’s family was among the 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were imprisoned in internment camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor. And like so many who were in the camps, Tajiri’s family wrapped their memories of that experience in a shroud of silence and forgetting. Ruminating on the difficult nature of representing the past – especially a past that exists outside traditional historic accounts – Tajiri blends interviews, memorabilia, a pilgrimage to the camp where her mother was interned, and the story of her father, who had been drafted pre-Pearl Harbor and returned to find his family’s house removed from its site. Throughout, she surveys the impact of images (real images, desired images made real, and unrealized dream images). The film draws from a variety of sources: Hollywood spectacle, government propaganda, newsreels, memories of the living, and sprits of the dead, as well as Tajiri’s own intuitions of a place she has never visited, but of which she has a memory. More than simply calling attention to the gaps in the story of the Japanese American internment, this important film raises questions about collective history – questions that prompt Tajiri to daringly re-imagine and re-create what has been stolen and what has been lost.