Grandma’s Grammar

Grandmothers populate the body of non-fiction and experimental cinemas, and Grandma’s Grammar aims to point at the diversity of their appearance in historical and contemporary film practices. 

Grandmothers are multiplicitous subjects, archives, and prisms for modes of sodality, solidarity and kinship. They are privileged subjects for the work of testimony, the construction of history, and of the lineage of women’s lived experience. And further the grandmother models alternative modes of perception, of thinking and feeling across alterity and horizons of historical experience.

Grandmothers have long been feminist filmic resources, a way to think laterally across generations, articulating a relationship to past traditions and temporalities, to social rituals, the historicity of gender and of patriarchy’s demands, and the witnessing of historical trauma and oppression. In this the grandmother also operates as a very specific proxy for the thickness and entanglement of any given story of lineage, inheritance, or the bequeathing of storytelling itself. What is narrated by the grandmother? And what does grandmother refuse to narrate? Such questions have long animated feminist historiography and theories of gendered and raced subjectivity, especially as the oral traditions and embodied knowledges transmitted across generations have sustained alternative narrations of history and History.  

One of feminist history’s desires, untold, is the desire for the grandmother.  

(Revised, expanded extract from Elena Gorfinkel, “Cinema of the Grandmother,” in E. Balsom and H. Peleg eds. Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image. MIT Press, 2022.)

The programme features films by Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, Chiemi Shimada, and Emilija Škarnulytė. Grandma’s Grammar is curated by Elena Gorfinkel, who will present the films in person. The event will be held in English.

Elena Gorfinkel is a film scholar and critic, and Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. Her research, writing and programming concerns independent, underground, and experimental cinemas, and women’s filmmaking practices. She is the author, most recently, of Wanda (Bloomsbury/BFI), and, with John David Rhodes, The Prop, (Cutaways, Fordham), as well as Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema in the 1960s; she is co-editor of the volumes Global Cinema Networks (Rutgers) and Taking Place: Location & the Moving Image (Minnesota). She was the recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for a book in progress on “cinemas of exhaustion.” Her criticism has been published in venues such as Criterion, MUBI Notebook, Sight & Sound, Cinemascope and Art Monthly.

Red Shift

Gunvor Nelson / 1984 / Sweden / 50:00 

Oscillating between extreme proximity and distance, Red Shift is a film of domestic interiors, tactile details, and mutable intergenerational dynamics. Nelson, daughter Oona, and Oona’s grandmother, Carin Grundel, appear playing family roles. Two other actors represent a “past” of mother-daughter relations. They are tethered in a relay of extreme closeups and long shots: hands grasping and tending, creased flesh, polished silver, windowed views, resonant shards of time and memory, ritual and habit. Along with gnomic proverbs and snatches of banter, Edith Kramer is heard reading excerpts from over two decades of Calamity Jane’s late 19th century letters of regret to an estranged daughter. “The years have slipped by…” In a multivalent work of generational transmission, Jane’s lamentations yoke motherhood’s psychic freight to a vaster temporal horizon.   

Optic Nerve

Barbara Hammer / 1985 / USA / 16:00 

Barbara Hammer used filmic techniques associated with the baring of the apparatus towards materializing an embodied empathy. Hammer had to place her grandmother Anna – losing her sight and with a deteriorating illness – in a nursing home. Optic Nerve’s images, manipulated by optical step printing, repetition, and re-photography, dilate, arrest, and filter the moments Hammer spent with her grandmother in the rooms and halls of the care home, suffused by the tensions of memory and opacity, re-collection and disintegration. Making palpable their intersubjective bond, Hammer layers perceptual, corporeal, and psychic strata, conjuring her grandmother’s sensate experience and fading sight through a prismatic materiality.  

Aldona

Emilija Škarnulytė / 2013 / Lithuania / 16:00 

Aldona presents an encounter between collective and personal histories, where abstracted ideologies, monumentalized, reconvene with the historical subjects whom they have shaped. Grandmother Aldona suffered permanent blindness suddenly in 1986 due to poisoning by the Chernobyl explosion. Škarnulytė, contemplates her grandmother’s trip to Grūtas Park, in Drusinkinkai, where near one hundred Soviet-era monuments, extirpated from public squares and city centres throughout Lithuania after the fall of Communism, are repurposed in a sculpture garden. Communing with a concretized past, Aldona’s hands are observed slowly tracing the physical surfaces of the giant effigies, touch tarrying with other unspoken reckonings. 

Chiyo

Chiemi Shimada / 2019 / Japan, UK / 13:00 

A poetic work that captures the ritual of the granddaughter’s visit with her elder, Chiyo maps not only the incandescence of Shimada’s grandmother’s subjectivity, but also the suburban environment of Yashio where she lives: everyday traffic, a summer night fair, Buddhist ritual, and flashes of fireworks. Snippets of conversation between grandmother and granddaughter move to what she sees in her dream life, “Dreams can’t stay in one place, they end abruptly.” Shimada’s camera observes grandmother strolling, with a walker, back curved by labour and time’s gravity. Chiyo’s images bear a haunting ineffability, whether tracing the wafting of incense smoke as it draws a line in space or attending the consoling sound of grandma’s somnolent breathing. “I can walk for a long time in my dreams.” 

Total run of the programme: 1 hour 35 minutes