Monday, February 12, 2007

Memory in Ruins: remembering, repeating and working through

Anne Tenney in To the Other Shore 1996 (photo: Sandy Edwards).
"To the Other Shore" is a work of mourning. "It completes a project of feminist filmmaking by articulating feminism’s primal scene themes in relation to the father and his cinema. The starting point...for a reading of "To the Other Shore" as feminism’s ‘optical unconscious’ is Susannah Radstone’s distinction between reciprocal memory films and nostalgic history films. By rethinking the figure of the filmmaker/spectator in terms of a reciprocal, maternal look this article argues that To the Other Shore reveals the obstacles to a maternal gaze within feminist cinema." Felicity Collins, Screening the Past, Latrobe University, December 2001.

"To the Other Shore" is made from inside the therapuetic encounter and reflects the process of psychoanalysis written about by Freud in his 1914 paper Remembering, Repeating and Working Through. The film took me ten years to make; I began it in 1985 when my daughter was born and I completed the film in 1996 when she was ten. During that time my parents died and my partner's parents died, too. The film evolved into "a work of mourning" as well as a diary film about being a mother. "To the Other Shore" is often used by community groups in their work with mothers and new babies -see this link for details re purchasing copies.

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