For this assignment, I watched The Wind Rises directed by Miyazaki. This film, a beautifully animated and sound designed film is an interesting film to talk about documentation with. From our discussions, it was hard to draw the distinction between documentary and the role documentation plays in fiction films. The film we watched for the week did not necessarily help with this, or at least to me and the way my mind works. However, pulling from the examples shown in class, I've come to understand that documentation (from my understanding) means or aims to show the coming of age or realization or growth of a child. Documentation exists to literally do just that: document the shifts and actual growing up of the character.
The Wind Rises, then, takes on the role of documenting the growth of one character: Jiro. He is a character who makes his way through adolescence in war torn Japan during WWII, and grows up to design the fighter planes for the army. He lives through many sorrows on his way--falling in love, losing his wife, surviving the war and being away from his family. Not only do we get documentation of his life and the things he experiences, but we also get documentation of some of the key historical events that were happening during the time of the war and the Great Depression. The cool thing about it, too, is that not only are we getting documentation of his life and the world but we are getting to see these historical events through the eyes of a character and in context of someone who we wouldn't necessarily get to see otherwise.
With Jiro, we get to see him periodically as he grows up. Some of the examples we watched in class were more about the exact moments that were specifically poignant or life-changing in a person's life. This is still the case with this film, but we get to see moments of importance and blips of significance as we follow along with the character. It's like watching someone's timeline: the moment they fell in love with planes and aircrafts, their days in school as they learn their craft, a day where fire and war took over and caused tragedy, the moment they met the love of their life, the times they spent with their best friend, the day their wife died, etc. All of this is shown to us in sequence, but condensed in time. In a few short hours, we get to see the entire journey and arc of one man.
It's perhaps in the end when Jiro's wife dies that the true importance of documentation shines through. I've found that the event itself is what holds significance and weight, and not just the lesson learned. The lesson almost comes later, with reflection. When life happens, one has to just kind of endure after it. It never truly goes away, it possibly never even gets easier. But it does, however, get easier to continue on. Maybe this is the thing about the movie that was so interesting and compelling. There is almost no closure to the trauma and the tragedy, there is just continuation. I liked that aspect of his story. Whether there were good things happening or bad things happening, it all just had to keep going on. There's a nostalgia and an impermanence in his story. But we don't get to dwell on it. We just move on.
That's kind of the beauty of documentation then. Because life does indeed move on without our consent, we can have media and home videos to preserve and to contain. It's kind of amazing, actually.
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