Displaced View
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Canada, 1988 (documentary / experimental / fiction, 52 minutes)
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Film Description:
"Midi Onodera's The Displaced View deals with an increasingly common late twentieth century dilemma: floating anchorless in the multicultural world. An elegantly understated examination of the cultural, behavioural and ideological distances between the filmmaker (a third-generation Japanese-Canadian) and the two generations of women who preceded her, the film is a touching and unfailingly intelligent account of a search for an ever-diminishing sense of cultural identity."
-- Festival of Festivals
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Notes about Displaced View
- Shown at the Festival of Festivals (Toronto) in 1988.
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Quotes by the Director
"Cinematically, The Displaced View tackles the notion of the
documentary as truth. The construction of the film is documentary based,
insofar as nonactors perform in stories which are based on authentic oral
history—the cultural and familial links between three generations of
Japanese-Canadian women. However, the stories are reconstructed and
reassembled through a script, and the creation of a fictional family is used as the vehicle by which the audience reads the story."
-- Midi Onodera
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"When I began work on the film [Displaced View], I decided immediately that my primary
audience would be the Japanese-Canadian communities. Within that community,
my priority viewer would be the Issei, first-generation JCS. I felt that
this generation, my grandmother's was dying out, and it was important for me to convey their story in their language."
-- Midi Onodera
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Quote about Displaced View
"Part oral history, part minimalist expression, The Displaced View succeeds by grafting several identities together; [Midi] Onodera finds identity through difference. Like Speak Body [by Kay Armatage] and Our Marilyn [by Brenda Longfellow], Onodera's film uses memory to filter the information; she 'makes up the past for you' to fill in the silence. We see images through her voice. 'Onodera' within the film investigates the meaning of the photographs, the questions of identity, then poses those questions to her grandmother in person. All three of these films adopt an experimental polyphonic strategy, intended to oppose dominant forms of representation, and address the cinematic apparatus and its ideological inscription."
-- Kass Banning
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Bibliography for Displaced View
Brief Sections of Books
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Onodera, Midi. "Locating the Displaced View."
In Feminisms in the Cinema, edited by Laura Pietropaolo and Ada Testaferri. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.
(pp. 22-24)
Brief Sections of Journal Articles
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Banning, Kass. "The Canadian Feminist Hybrid Documentary." CineAction, no. 26/27 (Winter 1992). (pp. 111-113)
Dissertation Chapters
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Sivak, Nadine. "Exposing the Limits of Knowledge: The Displaced View and Skin Deep."
In "'Howwe Gonna Find My Me?': Postcolonial Identities in Contemporary North American Drama and Film," 99-139. PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2000.
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Wilson, Sheena L. "Midi Onodera's The Displaced View."
In "Paradigms Lost and Re-membered: The Case of the Japanese Canadian
Experience in Canadian Media, Cinema, and Literature," 187-220. PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2006.
