Gunvor Nelson’s RED SHIFT opens up the Grandma’s Grammar evening on Saturday, March 22th, at Sapieha Palace in Vilnius, Lithuania. The screening is part of the “Moving Images” series and is dedicated to the presence of grandmothers in films. Curated by Inesa Brasiske and Elena Gorfinkel.
Programme:
Work distributed by Filmform
RED SHIFT
Gunvor Nelson
1984, 00:50:00
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.
PROGRAMME
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
Aldona
Emilija Škarnulytė / 2013 / Lithuania / 16:00
Chiyo
Chiemi Shimada / 2019 / Japan, UK / 13:00
