- LORDVILLE extends Tajiri's on-going examination of ideas of history, place and race, and continues and propels larger conversations within the documentary field. - A work spanning categorizations; it is a landscape film, an experimental documentary, an ethnography of place, a personal meditation. - As is in HISTORY AND MEMORY, it is an inquiry into questions of law, land and citizenship and how these, in the context of American history, are complicated by notions of nation and race.—Chi-hui Yang; Curator, MoMa Doc Fortnight
- Rea Tajiri, critically acclaimed director of HISTORY AND MEMORY and STRAWBERRY FIELDS, opens her new film with a question: What does it mean to own the land? LORDVILLE is a sleepy hamlet in upstate New York on the Delaware River. Tajiri explores how landscape - in its tactile and spiritual dimensions - bears witness to history and change over time. Instead of tackling this subject through strictly human interpretation, Tajiri privileges the land itself, documenting forces of nature which have influenced the development of community both present and past. She ruminates over the never-ending conflicts regarding stolen land, ownership, and the idea of impermanence since the official historical founding of Lordville in 1800. Long-time residents' tales of their ancestors' roles in the founding of the town reinforce the notion of the impossibility of ownership. Sheila Spencer Stover, a Native American genealogist, introduces Betia Van Dunk, her great-great grandmother, wife of the town's founder and a Minisink,Delaware Indian. We glean a sense of the complex and problematic exchange between Native American and settler communities at the time of the founding and in subsequent years. Testimony from Tom Wessels, an environmental scientist identifies trees struck by lightning a 150 years ago; and mud layers left behind 450 millions years ago, contributing to our understanding of how human and environmental footprints equally contribute to a more precise historiography. Tajiri's deep investments with history and place stem from her own history as a child of Japanese American WWII internment camp survivors. Memories of her family's home and property being "stolen" reverberate with connections between land ownership, history, nation and race. This tone poem of a documentary highlights the layering of personal stories and histories beyond conventional recording and asks us to reconsider land and ownership over time.—Anonymous
- Lordville is a multi-layered essay film that resists facile classification. It is at once a personal meditation on Tajiri's relationship with Lordville; a commentary on the fate of US small town; a history of colonization and the decimation of native populations; a probing on the theoretical possibilities of representing history through nature (the river) and much more. Nora M. Alter Film Scholar, Film Media Arts Department, Temple University—Nora Alter, Film Scholar, Temple Unviersity
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