9

Haunted Houses

Reclaiming ‘Women’s Cinema’

Safe as Houses

Girl ‘hood, as Carol Morley shows in The Falling, is intimately entwined with questions of maturity and maternity, including a mourning for the lost possibilities of mother-daughter relationships. The film ends with a reconciliation between Lydia and Eileen: when Lydia jumps/falls into the mere beneath the oak tree at the peak of her grief, her mother Eileen braves everything to come after her. As Eileen pulls her out of the water, Lydia sees (her mother as) her best friend Abbie, eliding the two most potent women in her life. Lydia positions Abbie as a second mother, her pregnant, sexually more mature friend who nurtured her and inducted her into adult life; but she also realizes that her mother was once Abbie, a beautiful and brave young woman trapped by patriarchy.

Crucially, this realization and reconciliation happens outside a major patriarchal trap: the family home. There’s a telling scene in which Lydia folds herself into the bottom shelf of a wardrobe, mimicking her mother’s agoraphobia. The films discussed here are simultaneously wedging themselves into that womb-like space and working themselves out of it, dealing with both the longing and the visceral anxiety provoked by the thought of the domestic, maternal home. Rebecca Solnit borrows the phrase ‘the faraway nearby’ from letters by Georgia O’Keeffe to describe her relationship with her mother.1 I borrow it here in turn as a powerful descriptor for how feminist cinema approaches maternity and domesticity: something so intimate it requires distance to be approached.

Dodie Bellamy, another San Francisco-based writer, uses her love of E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) to frame an essay about caring for her mother while she had cancer. From its title onwards, ‘Phone Home’ evokes the daughter’s simultaneous alienation from the domestic and her longing to return, and the subsequent strangeness of her location in the maternal home as an adult, via the film as viewed on TV. ‘As we watch E.T. fragments coalesce and point in one direction: Home. Home is a place of perfect belonging, wholeness. Home is an instinct, a yearning that has never, ever been satisfied’.2

Televisions conjoin the interlinked yet fractured familial spaces in Lucrecia Martel’s first film La Ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001). Martel’s film won the Golden Bear at Berlin, ‘mark[ing] what might be the most auspicious debut of a woman cineaste so far this century’.³ Patricia White describes the film as a ‘deconstructed, oneiric melodrama’, a drift through the history of the melodramatic ‘women’s film’ and its Latin American equivalents.⁴ As in a telenovela, there are thwarted quasi-incestuous romances, sororal rivalries, wounded bodies, a hidden pregnancy, languid heat, rebellious daughters, lost dresses, a final symbolic disaster, lots of early afternoon drinking – and an apparition of the Virgin. It’s this latter that forms the televisual substrate of the film, one which blurs the medium and its message as monstrous matriarch Mecha (Graciela Borges) and her sprawling family (children, sister, nieces and nephews, domestic workers) catch ongoing news reports about the apparition on the water tower of a nearby house.

The first characters in the film to ‘see’ the Virgin are Mecha’s youngest daughter Momi (Sofia Bertolotto) and the family’s younger domestic worker Isabel (Andrea Lopez), a young indigenous woman on whom Momi has a desperate crush. They are lying in a tangle of limbs watching TV as a reporter interviews a woman called Nilda whose daughter Miriam saw the Virgin on the tank that looms on stilts above their small house. Television can’t capture the Virgin’s image: we can see only a rusting water tank and then a shy young woman who struggles to find the words to describe her experience once it is mediatized. Television is doubly a home invader, first as the doorstepping camera, and then as the screen in the corner. Visuality – and particularly televisuality – are paralleled with the European colonizers, who have brought the faraway nearby.

Mecha even fears her own telephone, forcing her indigenous domestic workers to answer it. Telephones link there to here, creating dangerous cracks in the self-sufficiency of each location and speaker. Several scenes in the film consist of one side of a phone conversation in which information circulates between the various domestic spaces, infecting them. Sound, which leaks and connects, creates the palpable mood of threat: the film opens with the sound of thunder and closes, over the end credits, with the sound of a car door slamming and a radio playing mariachi, then losing its tuning as the thunder encroaches.

These noises off are explicitly linked to the indigenous community when Mecha’s extremely sound-sensitive sister Tali (Mercedes Morán) complains vehemently about ‘their’ noise in the street, which sounds to her like a protest. It’s a carnival, and there is a thread that links the music in the street to the final music on the radio, and to the rumble of thunder, as a premonition of an indigenous resurgence or revolution in the face of the European invaders. The Swamp, as do Martel’s subsequent films, raises the faint possibility that it’s the daughters who may escape the monstrous middle-class home via loving allegiance with other young women, particularly indigenous women.5 After Isabel, who is pregnant, leaves Mecha’s house, Momi goes to see the Virgin.

Fig. 23: Isabel and Momi in Isabel’s room, The Swamp

Although the Virgin never (re)appears, there’s something supernatural and haunting about The Swamp. Martel told Haden Guest that all her film titles ‘seem like B-movie titles, and I love that’.⁶ With no special effects or direct scares, The Swamp is a horror film, with Mecha and Tali’s late bedridden mother as, suggestively, the ghost who haunts the decaying house – and even as the house itself. Mary Ann Doane argues that in women’s films such as Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), ‘the house becomes an analogue of the human body, its parts fetishized by textual operations’.⁷ In contemporary animated children’s films such as Monster House (Gil Kenan, 2006) and Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009), the suburban home is haunted by – and in the former, literally possessed by – a dead housewife.

House Wives

The angel in the house, to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase, continues to haunt even avowedly liberal feminist cinema: the latest wave of female-helmed indies from the USA is still in thrall to the malaise identified in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Canadian director Tara Johns’ The Year Dolly Parton Was My Mom (2011) at least sets its depiction of an oppressed housewife in 1960s suburbia, and tackles divorce and adoption as well. Rebecca Miller adopts a similar strategy in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009), which roots its eponymous protagonist’s (Robin Wright) marital discontent in memories of her working-class 1950s childhood. But unhappy marriages abound, and heteropatriarchal capitalism is rarely mooted as the cause.

Contemporary white, well-educated, middle-class housewives may try to throw off the shackles of discontent via elective sex work (Concussion, Stacie Passon, 2013), adopting a homeless sex worker (Afternoon Delight, Jill Soloway, 2013), or having an affair (The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko, 2010) in current ‘edgy’ female-helmed comedies. All of these solutions seem patently borrowed from le cinéma du papa; we could call them the Belle du jour (Luis Buñuel, 1988), Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning, Jean Renoir, 1932) and bleeding obvious models. Jules’s (Julianne Moore) affair may be with her sperm donor, cheating on her female partner Nic (Annette Bening), but Cholodenko’s film wears its social politics so lightly it’s hard to tell whether the cliché is being deployed knowingly to satirize the smug middle-class marrieds who have left queer politics behind, or it’s just a witty twist.

And witty these films are: well-crafted, well-acted, well-made and well-received, prompting debate and fandom in equal measure. Yet the comedy of awkwardness often only touches on hot-button issues. Moreover, as when Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) invites McKenna (Juno Temple) into her home in Afternoon Delight, these films use the outsider as a step in their normative protagonists’ recovery programs. Why, five decades after Friedan’s book, are so many women whose mothers read it still caught in the home trap? Bright, white, privileged ciswomen, the protagonists of these films are trying to be good and to have it all.

Soloway’s online series Transparent has the insightful twist of having transwoman Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) wrestling with the burden and duties of the liberal American Jewish paterfamilias. After coming out and moving into a queer community block, she slips the question of selling the family home by giving it to her oldest child, Sarah (Amy Landecker), who has left her heteronormative marriage to reunite with her college girlfriend Tammy (Melora Hardin). Maura’s youngest daughter Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) then goes on a hot date with transman Dale (Ian Harvie). He may over-determinedly ask her to call him Daddy, but all the (straight) father figures have disappeared and (queer) mothers proliferate, attached umbilically to Maura’s mid-century modern California dream house.

Nicole Holofcener comes the closest to blowing the whistle on these home/bodies, with Catherine Keener as her muse. She is a restless, discontented presence in Lovely and Amazing (2001), where her character Michelle’s tiny furniture is surely the wellspring for Lena Dunham’s so-titled film (2010). In Friends with Money (2006), Please Give (2010) and Enough Said (2013), Keener is indeed keener: both sharper and more elegiac in her portrayals of women on the edge. Michelle is an artist and stay-at-home mom who initiates a relationship with teenage Jordan (Jake Gyllenhaal), ending in a make-out session fatally undermined when she notices that his mom (Lee Garlington) has the same dressing gown that she does. As Claire Perkins observes, ‘Keener’s distracted fixation on the mother’s robe may mock middle-class values and behavior, but it does not reduce female experience to a caricature of malaise’.8 It’s her no-bullshit bond with her youngest sister Annie (Raven Goodwin), an African American girl recently adopted by her white English mother Jane (Brenda Blethyn), that is most hopeful – not least because the film closes with Annie rearranging her mother’s pillows in a scene that both suggests she’s found a home, and that she now holds the point of view.

Even Holofcener’s and Keener’s sharp-tongued anti-heroines can’t escape the house/wife double helix. It’s there too in Joanna Hogg’s Exhibition (2013), in which artist D (Viv Albertine) finds that the aesthetically stunning space she had thought was her ‘room of one’s own’ is both a difficult child and a sterile trap, an aesthetic project that remains coextensive with her physical and affective body. Straight marriage and middle-class bohemian life have frustrated and etiolated her: can she break free? As Kim Longinotto’s documentary Salma (2013) shows, the trap of the home/body is not just metaphorical for many women outside the over-developed world. ‘It’s so hard to know the full scale of the suffering’, she notes, ‘because it happens behind closed doors, in secret, in the family’.⁹

Longinotto writes that, ‘Salma’s mother was like her jailer – refusing to let her go out or go to school’, on the instruction of her husband; yet once her daughter married and began writing poetry, ‘she helped her escape by smuggling out the poems in the dirty laundry’.¹⁰ Salma, now a celebrated poet and politician, makes clear, however, that her rebellion is within the context of a continued connection to her family and village, not a rejection. In ‘My Ancestral Home – 2’, Salma speaks unsparingly about her mother’s hysterectomy and the loss of her first home:

          The excitement pouring forth

          from the center of my heart

          that bit of flesh, where

          my life had once found shelter

          turns later into enormous grief.¹¹

The poem speaks to the complex emotional and practical bonds between mother and daughter, flesh and feeling, home and world.

The home – and its associations with motherhood, family, domestic labour and the economic – is thus both hymned and horrorized in feminist cinema. In particular, the middle-class white mother seems caught in the double bind. As Tammy Oler writes in ‘The Mommy Trap’, Stewart Thorndike’s low-budget horror Lyle (2014) ‘is Rosemary’s Baby [Roman Polanski, 1968] meets [Sheryl Sandberg’s book] Lean In: a horror film that takes the idea of sacrificing your children for your career to its logical yet horrible extreme’.12 Jennifer Kent’s international hit The Babadook (2014), which is where Oler starts her review of the trope, has renewed discussions about the possibility of a feminist horror cinema. It joins Lynne Ramsay’s critically-acclaimed adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011) in the small canon of feminist films about maternal disquiet, violent and vivid expressions of the everyday mutual love-hate that binds mother and child under patriarchy.¹³

Like The Falling, The Babadook is motivated by ambivalence about the family home as safe space. In The Falling, Eileen’s home contains (in both senses) the rape by which she conceived Lydia, but also the traumatic loss of her husband through divorce or separation. Amelia’s (Essie Davis) home in The Babadook similarly contains deep grief for the loss of a husband, a grief that she can’t move through. In both cases, the mothers project their own traumatic, melancholic relation to the absent fathers onto their eldritch children. The Babadook commits totally to its genre semantics, gleefully and chillingly reworking the psychological horrors of the maternal dyad latent in films such as Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976, and remade by Kimberley Peirce, 2013). In Kent’s film, paternity is the repressed, in Freudian terms, that returns through son Samuel (Noah Wiseman) as medium. That’s audible in the very title of the film: Peter Bradshaw may hear it as ‘perhaps baby-talk for baby’s book, or mama’s book’, but the babadook is clearly the dadda-book.¹⁴ The house is haunted by the controlling narrative of the nuclear family in which the mother and child are lost without the father.

Horror and science fiction have long exploited the alien anxieties of pregnancy, motherhood and the family home, an association identified by Sigmund Freud when he defined the uncanny in relation to the womb and female genitals.¹⁵ Bodies and buildings that are supposedly ‘safe as houses’ are overrun with supernatural or interstellar beings, generally as a comment on the fearful Otherness with which patriarchy regards ciswomen and their (in)ability to conceive (and choice to do so or not). Being a mother equates, in the patriarchal imagination, to being a bad mother, who ended the dyad and will not allow the subject to re-enter the womb. There is no way out of the double bind: pregnant women and mothers are monsters, childfree ciswomen are unnatural.

Chika Anadu’s B for Boy (2013) shows the impact of these deep-seated wish-fears on Amaka (Uche Nwadili), a post-modern Igbo Lagosian ‘have it all’ working mother with a loving and beloved husband and beautiful daughter. But her husband, influenced by his traditional mother, wants a son. When Amaka miscarries, she turns to Joy (Frances Okeke), a surrogate involved in a con. Joy is pregnant, broke and has run away from her partner in the scam; Amaka agrees to support Joy if she can adopt Joy’s son. The women bond precariously, riven by the demands of a patriarchal and capitalist society that sets them against each other, resulting in a provocative ending. Imperious, entitled and haunted, Amaka is as complex and ambivalent a character as Eva (Tilda Swinton) in We Need to Talk About Kevin, while Joy – like McKenna in Afternoon Delight – is opaque, her motivations unknowable to the viewer as they are to Amaka. Through Amaka’s false pregnancy belly, her mother-in-law’s village rituals, and the strange apparitional and transferable pregnancy, Anadu mobilizes the tropes of Nollywood horror within a realist film.

For Jax (Nadine Marshall) in debbie tucker green’s Second Coming, her perimenopausal, possibly pregnant body and her family home are entwined as sites of anxiety through a similar combination of the realist and the fantastic. She has vivid nightmares (initially coded as waking hallucinations) in which torrential rain falls on her in her bathroom, as her husband and son sleep. Again, social realism and horror semantics are fused, with the film never settling the question of paternity, or even of her pregnancy’s reality. tucker green takes a bold risk in exploring the association of maternity, menopause and madness, wielding a powerful combination of authenticity and genre-inflected ambiguity towards an ending that privileges Jax’s perceptions and experiences as a woman and a mother.

House Call

While horror is the genre of (bad) motherhood, the police thriller is currently being used, by feminist filmmakers, as a genre of displaced motherhood, one that examines the conflict between career and parenting, and points to the state as bad father. In particular, feminist procedurals offer a powerful site for critiquing the nuclear family’s secrets and abuses, and effecting alternate, elective families predicated on mutual respect borne of shared survival of trauma.

Amy Taubin writes of July Jung’s Dohee-ya (A Girl at My Door, 2014) that ‘Jung’s indictment of Korean machismo is as unsparing as her depiction of the confusion of identification, desire, and guilt in the policewoman’s rescue fantasy’.16 Unsurprisingly, a film in which Young-Nam (Doona Bae), an alcoholic lesbian policewoman, attempts to redeem herself by rescuing Dohee (Sae-ron Kim), a brutally, systematically abused teenage girl who – on realizing she has inadvertently sent her protector to prison – sets up her father to be arrested for rape, has proven controversial. The final shot, of Young-Nam watching Dohee sleep in the rain-spattered car, suggests that she has re-inscribed the work of policing from upholding state justice (which is corrupted by patriarchal norms) to caring immediately and intimately.

A growing number of cisfemale onscreen cops are tackling gendered violence, as in Maïwenn’s ensemble drama Polisse (2011). Undercover anti-corruption officer He Yanhong/An Xin (Zhao Wei) in Ann Hui’s Goddess of Mercy (2003) is an unusual exception. Writers and filmmakers want to foreground investigations into sexual violence, but at the same time, female detectives are pigeonholed into those roles and/or given traumatic backstories that not only justify but naturalize their commitment to their jobs. This is true of Robin (Elisabeth Moss) in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, but it’s one of the many clichés that Campion explores in order to expose.

As Anne Helen Petersen notes in her ‘incomplete list of all the shit Robin Griffin has to deal with’, Campion shows Robin as embedded in rape culture rather than a tragic exception. Her investigation of herself and her gang rape as a teenager is the loose thread that unravels the entire weave of the home town to which she has returned. What sets Robin apart from recent televisual detectives, argues Petersen, is ‘her desperate desire to save the next generation of women from her own fate. Lots of characters try to save their daughters, but the wide-eyed, wordless Tui embodies something broader than blood connection’.17 Robin, who is a child offences officer, finds herself, like Young-Nam, protecting one particular girl, Tui (Jacqueline Joe), the mixed-race daughter of smalltown crime lord Matt (Peter Mullan) and his ex-wife Kimmie (Michelle Ang).

In particular, Robin trails Tui when she goes missing via photographs, texts on her cell phone and a video clip, whose author is indeterminate: possibly a local man who is on the sex offenders’ register; possibly Tui’s best friend Jamie (Luke Buchanan). Robin’s job is to rescue Tui from being or becoming the cinematic artefact that these traces imply, one more (di)splayed dead girl, contained and punished for leaving home, like those on concurrent British television shows as observed by Fiona Sturges.¹⁸ Robin grasps these tools, the trail of breadcrumbs that Tui leaves for her, in order to crack the case, finally pointing her cellphone camera, balanced on her gun, at the members of paedophile ring responsible for the rape of Tui and other teenagers in the town.

Campion uses the multi-part, ensemble nature of the TV mini-series to conjure the eerie over-closeness of a small town whose supposed safety acts as a cover for the depredations of corrupt police chief Al (David Wenham). It is in Al’s house that Robin discovers and reveals that it is the paternal state, which polices women, that is itself commissioning violence against them. Home, here, is too close for comfort. By trusting her intuition and rejecting the police hierarchy, Robin finally forges an unconventional family of her own with her lover Johnno (Thomas M. Wright), Tui and Tui’s son Noa, all four of them posited as Matt’s children at one point or another, and now all of uncertain paternity. They are living on what was once Matt’s land, known as Paradise, whose sale to a female commune was the prompt for many of Matt’s irrational actions (including murder). Matt’s story about the land’s name, which relates it ironically to the murderous European colonizers who first appropriated it, makes clear the show’s attempt to foreground the connection between colonial and sexual violence. In a transitional unhome on this contested land Robin, like Young-Nam stopped in a car between two places, begins to reconcile her traumatic experiences and career ambitions with the demands of family.

Home Work

Among the other terrible things with which Robin Griffin has to deal is her mother Jude’s (Robin Nevin) suffering and death from cancer, which brought her back to Laketop from Sydney. Emerging into maturity requires a reckoning with being a daughter in feminist home/body cinema. In The Swamp, Mecha and Tali may not be mourning their mother, but they are certainly compelled by her memory. Martel says that her ‘love of storytelling comes from oral tradition, the stories from my grandmother and conversations with my mother. The world is full of discussions of condensation, drifts, misunderstanding, repetition. These are the materials I work with. My debt is to these women’.19 Domestic labour and the haunted house unite in the oral tradition.

As Marina Warner notes, ‘Cinderella is a child in mourning for her mother, as her name tells us; her penitential garb is ash… the sign of loss, the symbol of mortality’.²⁰ Warner points out that the upper-class men who wrote the story down, Giambattista Basile and Charles Perrault, both explain her name through an association with housework and her status as a domestic worker. Cinderella, grey among the ashes, stands for all invisible and undervalued domestic labour, as described by Silvia Federici in her still-searing pamphlet Wages against Housework in 1975. She argued that ‘housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character’.²¹

Claudia Llosa’s La Teta Asustada (The Milk of Sorrow, 2009) resurfaces the filial grief for which this essentialized domestic labour is a cover story. Her film’s title literally means The Frightened Breast, which shares a B-movie quality with Martel’s titles (The Terrified Tit, maybe). Llosa also followed Martel in winning the Golden Bear at Berlin, as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, Peru’s first ever. The film opens with Llosa’s regular collaborator, Quechua actor and singer Magaly Solier, listening to an older woman sing, in Quechua, a litany of her rape and torture, which will be part of the film’s larger indictment of sexual violence by European-ancestry men against indigenous women.

Perpetua (Bárbara Lazón) is dying. Her daughter Fausta (Solier) tends to her mother’s body, suggesting that the true fairytale labour of a daughter among the ashes is mourning for the lost mother, who also stands for and carries in herself the loss of indigenous land rights and culture. Jules Koostachin’s beautiful short documentary ‘PLACEnta’ (2014) narrates the inverse of this, as Koostachin seeks the correct spot for a traditional Cree Nation placenta ceremony after her son’s birth. On the way, she (and we) learns from elders and young women who are reviving and carrying forward the traditions, repairing not only family bonds, but the larger social bonds damaged by colonialism.

Without these resources, Fausta, like Amelia in The Babadook, remains arrested in her grief. According to her uncle, Fausta suffers from ‘frightened breast’, which he describes as a transgenerational inheritance common to Andean children born during the ‘time of terror’ (1980–1992, during the conflict between the government and Shining Path). The breast referred to is at once Perpetua’s, as she transmitted her trauma to her daughter through breastfeeding, and Fausta’s, naming her fear of intimacy, particularly sexual. Fausta learned from her mother to keep a potato (emblematic of the Andes, where the tuber originated) in her vagina as a rape prevention method. Fausta carries herself as Andean earth into her domestic work in Lima. Her employer Señora Aída (Suis Sánchez) bribes her to sing traditional musical notes with pearls, which Fausta collects to pay for her mother’s burial. Meanwhile, Aída creates a concert performance based, unattributed, on her employee’s music in a veritable Faustian pact. Pearls, drops of milk, potatoes, even musical notes: there is a fairy tale-like exchange of spherical objects that are at once associated with fertility and with pain to their host vessels.

As in Martel’s film, there is a movement between houses and home bodies: Fausta’s body means something different in the rural lean-to she shared with her mother and in Aída’s glossy metropolitan apartment. The poor, often brown-skinned, working-class women – who enable middle-class women to resist tradition in ways approved and earned by white liberal feminism (family planning, white collar jobs) – are only very gradually taking centre stage in feminist cinema. Rahel Zegeye’s Beirut (2011) is the first feature made by a migrant domestic worker, about migrant domestic workers. She told Beti Ellerson:

Most media and organizations working to help migrant domestic workers in Lebanon portray the worker as a helpless victim, her fate ruled by evil agencies and bad madams. Although this often does happen and is definitely an issue that needs attention, reality is much more complicated. I want to shed light on the inner lives and thoughts of a domestic worker, an aspect which is usually hidden from the Lebanese and foreign public.22

Fausta and Isabel are part of a trend identified by White, whereby ‘the tension between white women and indigenous domestic workers has risen to the fore in recent Latin American films’.²³

In Alicia Scherson’s Play (2005), the point of view rests with Cristina (Viviana Herrera), a young Mapuche woman who has moved to Santiago from her tribal land in the south of Chile in order to work as a carer. Cristina’s desire drives the film, as Fausta’s does, albeit in a more light-hearted way. She finds the briefcase of wealthy, recently separated architect Tristan (Andres Ulloa) after it’s been stolen, and develops an obsession with him. Cristina breaks into Tristan’s house, dressing up as his wife in a feminist reworking of both Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and moral panic films about the ‘other’ woman such as Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987). Cristina tries on the role of wealthy white housewife in the house of, notably, an architect, even pursuing the convention of an affair with the couple’s working-class gardener Manuel (Juan Pablo Quezada). Cristina’s ease of movement and masquerade contrasts with Fausta’s, as does her relationship to her work as carer for Milos (Franscisco Copello), a frail Hungarian émigré. Her breast is not frightened by her desire for Manuel and/or Tristan, which becomes polymorphous when she starts sniffing strangers’ necks on public transport. Tristan meanwhile, has taken his romantic and physical wounds (from the theft of his briefcase and his separation) back to his mother’s house.

It’s telling that Scherson began work on Play while away from Santiago, studying on a Fulbright in Chicago.²⁴ For Cristina, the question of home is not one of literal but cultural maternity and its loss. She reads to Milos from a National Geographic article about the genocidal displacement of an Amazonian tribe, and makes sad phone calls home. Pun (Arkaney Cherkam) makes similar phone calls in Jao nok krajok (Mundane History, 2009), Anocha Suwichakornpong’s first feature. Pun is a professional nurse who has migrated for work to Bangkok, leaving his family in the provinces. He is taking care of Ake (Phakpoom Surapongsanuruk), a spoilt upper middle-class teenager who has been paralyzed in a car crash. Ake’s mother (as in a fairy tale) is dead, and his father is not only distant, but possibly so distracted, uncaring or resentful that, a flashback implies, he caused the crash that injured Ake.

Sounds off and news footage locate the film during the red-shirt anti-government protests in Bangkok in spring 2009, and Ake’s father is clearly a figure of the state and/or government. As in the films of her mentor Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Anocha uses medical metaphors to allegorize the relationship between state and citizen in a country where even indirect criticism of the royal family risks prison. Ake, who figures the urban/middle-class citizenry, gradually mellows under Pun’s care. Films about carer-patient relationships usefully displace gender essentialism and allow for an examination of class and ethnic tensions in intimate situations. Even within the white middle-class milieu of Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages (2007), these tensions arise, particularly through Wendy’s (Laura Linney) blunderingly liberal relationship with her father’s nurse Jimmy (Gbenga Akinnagbe), an economic migrant to the USA.

In Hui’s Tou ze (A Simple Life, 2011), caretaking roles are reversed in a profound comment on the gender and class of caring. Ah To (Deanie Ip), an elderly maid, retires to an old people’s home after a life in service to one Hong Kong Chinese family, and forms a mutually sustaining relationship with sole surviving family member Roger (Andy Lau), in a story based on the experience of Hui’s producer. Like Mundane History, A Simple Life is a national allegory: Ah To was orphaned in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and her relationship with Roger operates as a comment on the relationship between Hong Kong and China.

Anocha’s film goes further, finding in its national allegory a cosmic dimension. Pun takes Ake to visit the Bangkok planetarium, in which they first see a diorama with models of Stonehenge and other prehistoric sites considered to have an astronomical function, before entering the dome. Through Pun, Ake is once again at home in the world – a world enlarged by care beyond the bedroom, the house and even the nation-state. Like Fausta and Cristina through their indigenous inheritance, he is reconnected to a spiritual and historical continuum that is at once outside the home, and a home in itself.

House Music

The housing and unhousing of grief threads through Milagros Mumenthaler’s Abrir Puertas y Ventanas (Back to Stay, 2009). Albeit somewhat sunnier, it shares with Martel’s work its lassitude, its intense sound world and its loving attention to young women. In a setting at once fairy tale and Chekovian, there are three sisters who have to decide what to do with the house of the grandmother who raised them, using the odd but beautiful approach of playing through her record collection. Like Milk of Sorrow, Back to Stay formulates feminist genealogy through music. In The Acoustic Mirror, Kaja Silverman suggested that sound is feminized in mainstream cinema, and therefore offers feminist filmmakers a site to intervene for representational justice. Nonverbal sound is intimately linked to our first home; Silverman draws on Julia Kristeva’s conception of the chora, the embryonic soundspace that ‘figures the oneness of mother and child’.25

Nowhere is that more profoundly felt than in a transcendent central scene in Francesca Comencini’s Lo spazio blanco (The White Space, 2009), adapted from Valeria Parrella’s novel. Maria (Margherita Buy) becomes pregnant after a one-night stand and decides to carry to term, albeit with considerable anxiety about how having a child will change her life. The child is very premature, and Maria’s home shifts from her dark, messy flat to the neon-lit hospital, specifically its hushed neonatal ward. Under the even, dimmed lighting, against the pallor of the walls, time appears to stop, holding Maria and her baby in a precarious and fraught unity. It only seems certain that Maria wants to be a mother when she performs, along with other parents in the ward, a dreamlike ballet of holding, rocking and cradling to Cat Power’s ‘Where Is My Love’. The singer’s love is faraway nearby, both carried towards her on galloping horses and in her arms, a painfully acute description of Maria’s relationship with her child, whose survival is not guaranteed.

The gentle sound of the song softens the ‘white space’ of panic in which Maria has been since discovering the pregnancy. Music offers a similar, brief connection and emotional release in Villa Touma (Suha Arraf, 2014). While the film was listed as stateless at Toronto and London due to a dispute with the Israeli Ministry of Culture about its funding grant, the home for which the film is named is emphatically Palestinian, in Ramallah: a film with(out) a home, for a homeland whose film culture has been severely circumscribed.²⁶ Like Mumenthaler, Arraf appeals to the fairy tale figure of three sisters: aristocratic Christians Juliette (Nisreen Faour), Violet (Ula Tabari) and Antoinette (filmmaker Cherien Dabis). They take in Badia (Maria Zreik), the orphaned daughter of their beloved younger sister who eloped with a Muslim. Badia is a Boudu, shaking the house up with her (terrible) piano playing, and even inducing the youngest, prettiest sister Antoinette to play a record and dance.

When Badia meets Khaled (Nicholas Jacob), a handsome wedding singer, it seems inevitable that she will follow her mother’s path. Imprisoned in the house after her aunts discover she is pregnant by Khaled (who dies in an attack by Israeli soldiers), Badia is a potent figure for the trapped Palestinian nation. So potent that the film, like her aunts, isn’t sure what to do with her: in the end, the house and the three sisters endure – and a baby’s soft cry sounds from a hidden crib.

For Marina (María Canale), Sofía (Martina Juncadella) and Violeta (Ailín Salas) in Back to Stay, their grandmother is an auditory ghost, (dis)embodied by her record collection of English and American psychedelic folk – the film takes its English title from a John Martyn song the sisters listen to. Somehow LPs by Martyn, Bridget St. John and Linda Perhacs have made their way to Buenos Aires, a counter-cultural sound that could be read as able ‘to open doors and windows’ (to translate the Spanish title) during the junta, and represents the sisters’ passage from abandoning themselves to grief to re-entering social life. The hothouse atmosphere of the film, which is almost entirely contained (like Villa Touma) within four walls, the sense of a lost chora that is both soothing and (s)mothering, is related through the nostalgic, fragile music.

Musical performance – like the home – provides a particular site to examine the politics and pragmatics of women’s choices. Feminist filmmakers have documented the lives of beloved female singers who – particularly in the Middle East – are metonyms for a public, sexually, intellectually and expressively liberated womanhood. Didem Pekün’s documentary Tulay German: Years of Fire and Cinders (2010) features the singer-as-revolutionary, throwing off her parents’ middle-class expectations to emerge as the performer who invented Anatolian pop and became the voice of the Turkish community in France, while in a relationship with an exiled Marxist writer.

As part of Profession: Documentarist (2014), an omnibus project by seven Iranian female documentarians, Farahnaz Sharifi made a short film about legendary singer Googoosh, who was banned after the Revolution and stands as a symbol of liberation and modernity. The opening text screen proclaims that: ‘We, Iranian documentary directors, have movies that can only be made in our minds. Sometimes, we tell them to each other’. Sharifi thus poetically tells her film, describing, foregrounding and resisting her inability to include any footage of Googoosh singing under censorship codes in Iran.

In the USA, a wave of female-helmed biopics of African American musicians emphasises the female voice as a site of resistance and possibility. Whitney Houston (Whitney, Lifetime, Angela Bassett, 2015), Nina Simone (Nina, Cynthia Mort, 2015) and Bessie Smith (Bessie, HBO, Dee Rees, 2015) are presented as working performers, iconic self-made artists whose lives testify to the interconnection of political, emotional and aesthetic struggles. Although Allison Anders switched from a chilly film industry to a welcoming TV industry this century, her last two films, Grace of My Heart (1996) and Sugar Town (1999, with Kurt Voss), are celebrations of female musicians and indictments of the music industry. Anders maintains a blog chronicling her listening adventures through Greta Garbo’s record collection,27 and her films convey clear parallels between the music biz and the film industry, which puts a provocative reading on Jane (Frances McDormand), the boob-flashing, daughter-in-law seducing rock producer in Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon (2002). Callie Khouri’s return to public view also focuses on women in the music business, although where Anders tackles New York’s Brill Building in the 1960s and LA’s rock scene in the 1990s, Khouri is focused on the megabucks, media-friendly, female-fandom-oriented world of mainstream country in Nashville (ABC, 2012–).

In the show’s opening scene, Rayna James (Connie Britton) is stressing about the mortgage on her house, bought with her music earnings and mortgaged to support her husband’s business. Anxieties about downsizing, property prices and home ownership – also seen in Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) – are indexed to the 2008 financial crash, but also reflect, as in Boyhood, an anxiety about good-enough mothering, particularly about working mothers and mothers in the public eye. Rayna, whose first name means ‘queen’, is still grieving for her mother’s death in a car accident when she was a teenager. She is both a biological mother (to two daughters who want to be musicians) and, as the show goes on, a professional mother to young female talent, remortgaging her house to start her own boutique record label. In Season 3, she and the show openly identify a crisis in mainstream country music, currently dominated by male singers; Rayna frequently evokes both her own coming-up in the 1990s and her mother’s singing career in the 1970s as lost golden eras for talented female artists.

Her commitment to feminist genealogy – including supporting wild child pop musician Juliette Barnes (Hayden Panettiere) – can’t but be read through the lens of the scrutiny applied to the Dixie Chicks, as documented in Barbara Kopple and Cecila Peck’s Shut Up & Sing (2006). What started as a straightforward tour doc became a record, at once dazzling and searing, of the profound misogyny and gendered violence fostered by right-wing politics and media in the USA. Kopple comments that, ‘we all came to see this experience of the Dixie Chicks as a lens through which to see the current political climate in America’. She adds that she ‘also filmed with their families in intimate moments’, including IVF treatment, capturing the difficulty of balancing life as a working musician and mother.²⁸

The title Shut Up & Sing quotes a comment from a death threat letter to the band, referring to verbal silence, but there is an uncanny echo of the women ‘shut up’ in Villa Touma. If music is the sound of the chora, the powerfully unsettling bond between mother and child that contests patriarchal authority, then when it’s made public, it makes trouble. When Dixie Chicks’ lead singer Natalie Maines declared on stage in London in 2003 that she was ashamed to be from George W. Bush’s home state of Texas, it was an out-loud sign of dissent from a supposedly conservative milieu, as was the band’s subsequent album. It began the recuperation of country as a feminist genre, showing that genres discounted as feminized by dominant culture can harbour resistance all the more powerful for being unexpected.

Home Movies

At the centre of Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell (2012) is a short piece of black-and-white footage of a poised blonde woman – Polley’s mother, Diane – singing ‘Ain’t Misbehavin”, written by Fats Waller in 1929 when he was in prison for non-payment of alimony. It’s a painfully apposite soundtrack, as inserts are intercut relating the story of Polley’s mother Diane’s divorce, which led her to lose custody of her children to her wealthy husband. It’s also ironically apposite to the arc of the film in general, which tells the story of Polley’s discovery that a persistent family joke was true: she was not her father Michael’s biological daughter. Her mother had been ‘misbehavin’’, and Polley set out to discover with whom.

As Polley and her three parents are media figures, and the personal story was broken in the Canadian media, Stories We Tell represents Polley’s determination to bring the narrative back ‘in house’.29 She also sets out to reclaim it for her mother: although Michael and possible paternal figure Harry Gulkin have an almost overwhelming presence in the film, its purpose is not to adjudicate between their claims. Through their stories, Polley sets out to rediscover Diane, who died when she was eight, and to reforge their bond.

The black-and-white audition footage is the only cinematic evidence we see of Diane’s career in theatre and as a casting agent. The majority (60 per cent) of the home movies seen in the film were staged by Polley using over 20 Super 8 cameras provided by the Canadian National Film Board. Her producer Anita Lee commented that the team ‘literally searched through people’s basements for the right Super 8 camera’, putting the ‘home’ in home movies, in a neat parallel to Polley’s excavation of her family’s memory-basements.³⁰ While the diegetic revelation of Polley at work directing these scenes unsettled many viewers, it provides a still all-too-rare cinematic image of a female filmmaker at work and an uncanny revelation of the family house as constructed set.

Fig. 24: Sarah Polley and cinematographer Iris Ng making a home movie, Stories We Tell

Polley also uses the pull-back to stage a scene in which we see her talking, unheard under the non-diegetic musical soundtrack, to Rebecca Jenkins, the actor playing Diane in the reconstructions. She is most likely giving direction, but film allows the illusion that the grown-up Polley has travelled back in time to talk to her mother as she was before her birth. She is at once completing her mourning and reconciling with the mother she lost doubly: once to death, and the second time to a revelation that changed her sense of self, both the fact of her paternity, and that her mother considered aborting the pregnancy. These tasks are accomplished through her work as filmmaker, as the moment onscreen with Jenkins shows. She has done what Diane could not and successfully entered the film industry, taking charge of the story.

As Michelle Citron argues in her essential book Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions, not only are all home movies fake to some extent, as edited versions of family life, but they implicitly suggest a man (the father) behind the camera.31 Both assumptions are exposed by the book in its consideration of Citron’s germinal experimental feminist documentary ‘Daughter Rite’ (1978), in which optically printed home movies provide a ‘faraway nearby’ through which to think about her mother and her childhood home. In her multimedia project Mixed Greens (2004) Citron revisits both her family’s various homes as they migrated from Dublin to a working-class Boston neighbourhood, and the home movies she discusses in Home Movies – particularly the first one she shot, on returning from college with her fiancé and the woman on whom she had a crush.32

This first home movie as director acts as the fulcrum between the documentary chapters of her extended familial autobiography and a series of staged ‘home movies’. These recreate American lesbian life and community from the 1950s to the 2000s through era-appropriate media, from tinted stills that evoke the covers of lesbian pulp fiction to developing Polaroids that prefigure the cellphone selfie. Biological, adoptive, elective and rejective families are part of this herstory, which itself intersects with and draws on other parts of Citron’s overarching Queer Feast project. Its final ‘course’ Leftovers (2014),³³ is an intense and careful archival documentary about baseball players Norma and Virginia, who lived together for 45 years amid boxes of the lesbian subcultural ephemera that Ann Cvetkovich describes as ‘an archive of feelings’.³⁴

For Cvetkovich, the official record of history is utterly lacking because it dismisses home/bodies and their intimate memories, often encoded in small or friable objects, clothes, craft projects, oral storytelling and home movies. These are the things that Polley has to invent, setting them against paternal writing (both Michael and Harry write to her copiously about Diane), in order to reconnect her mother’s life to history. Judith Butler remarks that one effect of revolutionary discourse is that:

politics is no longer defined as the exclusive business of public sphere distinct from a private one, but it crosses that line again and again, bringing attention to the way that politics is already in the home, or on the street, or in the neighbourhood.³⁵

The home/body is always already a political animal, connected outwards through media, labour, music and the politics of class and race as well as gender.

She is also, always, the affective origin of our politics and our aesthetics, as she is of the selves we carry through the world. We may not literally adopt Fausta’s potato method, but these films argue that we cannot leave our mother (earths) behind. Like Robin, Young-nam and Fausta, we may also find that opening ourselves to the broad spectrum of maternal (non-essentialized) caring labour enables us to find a critical distance from the state, while still taking up public space. Diane Polley’s divorce made the news pages of the Toronto Star; in the 1990s section of Citron’s Mixed Greens, a mixed-race lesbian couple announce their commitment ceremony in the newspaper. These facts, grounded in the domestic and affective, are the material of public discourse, and thus of political change.