Renee Tajima-Pena, the Japanese American filmmaker best known for My America (aka Honk If You Love Buddha) wrote, “Thematically, Asian American cinema chronicled the lives of ordinary people, not elites, and reconstructed their histories, drawing from the ideology and productivity of the Asian American studies movement.”(MTI 16)  From it’s inception, Asian/Pacific American filmic representations attempted to decenter histories told from the perspectives of the “elite,” that is the bourgeoisie, white, heterosexual, males in positions of power.  Oral histories and ethnographies told from the perspective of communities are powerful tools to bring forth the diverse voices of our communities. According to the Oral History Association, “Oral history is a method of gathering and preserving historical information through recorded interviews with participants in past events and ways of life. It is both the oldest type of historical inquiry, predating the written word, and one of the most modern, initiated with tape recorders in the 1940s.”  There is power in telling our own stories, especially through the lens.

Oral histories on camera require both skill as an interviewer, technical proficiency and artistic vision.  The following sections will look at the methodology to actually perform oral history on camera.  This tutorial is designed for instructors and beginning students to use video to preserve multiple narratives of history. Today, many students, researchers, archivists, and others are turning to digital video instead of tape recorders since the medium has become so affordable as well as being accessible.  These video oral histories can also be used as the basis for longer documentary projects.

In this tutorial, we will present almost everything you will need to bring a video oral history to life in the form of a video documentary. Please feel free to use this information and link to this page, but please do not redistribute or store this tutorial in any other form.

If you find this tutorial helpful, please let me know at secretmak[at]gmail.com