Los Angeles Magazine review of "Mining the Home Movie," reprinted in Ithaca College blog:

http://allthingspark.blogspot.com/2008/02/descriptions-of-films-that-you-may.html

LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE, March 2008, Review by Robert Ito

Ishizuka and Zimmermann/MINING THE HOME MOVIE
"Screen Savers: A New Anthology Ponders the home movie

In 1998, Karen Ishizuka, an L.A.-based writer, curator, and documentary producer, organized an international symposium at the Getty Center examining, of all things, home movies. While fellow scholars heard of her plan and thought only of birthday parties and Yosemite trips, Ishizuka saw the films as a way of recovering lost histories. The anthology 'Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories' (UC Press, 333 pages, $25), edited by Ishizuka and film professor Patricia Zimmerman(n), grew out of that symposium. In a film discussed in the book, a Belgian couple conceals two Jewish children from the Nazis. In another, Japanese American Boy Scouts wave U.S. flags in a Wyoming internment camp. As Ishizuka notes, the movies are often the sole records of peoples and stories that would otherwise go undocumented; the groundbreaking essays intrigue with descriptions of films that you may never see but wish you could."