Grandma’s Grammar: Memory’s Hands

Introduced by Elena Gorfinkel

Maria’s Days
Cecilia Mangini, 1960, 10 min

Cecilia Mangini’s ode to the woman she considered her godmother, Maria di Capriati, is narrated with a declaratively poetic assertion of her existential and social station in life. Capriati – an unmarried peasant who had many children out of wedlock and continued to work the land and oversee workers on a farm estate in rural Apulia – figures both a refusal to accept inutility in later life, “I’m still here, I’m still useful,” and the labours, exhaustions, and folk rituals of a province outside the onrush of modernization and the reach of the “economic miracle.” Faithful to the charismatic force of Maria’s presence and the concreteness of her days and habits, Mangini bestows her maternal mentor with the potency of an irreducible, flinty alterity.

Memory of August
Margaret Rorison, 2017, 6 min

Margaret Rorison’s tender observations of her grandmother’s recovery in a rehabilitation facility are rendered in a rich use of black and white film, and a face-to-face regard with the frailties and tenacity of a body persisting in time. Clutching at and contemplating a photographic album with knotted hands and a reading glass, Rorison’s grandmother pauses on a past photo image of herself in life’s memory book, another kind of à deux.

A Love Song in Spanish
Ana Elena Tejera, 2021, 24 min

A hybrid work, Ana Elena Tejera’s portrait of her grandmother utilizes archival images, re-enactment and “biographical performance” to exorcise painful personal experience, family secrets, and Panamanian military dictatorship in the 1980s a history felt “through the skin.” Grandmother recounts how her husband returned from military training in Israel, fundamentally altered. “Why did God make me love you?” she asks, underlining a domain of fear, entrapment, and hidden violence. A moment of joy in movement ruptures memory’s prison-house, as grandmother dances alone in her old living room, a room where moving her body had long been forbidden.

Aldona
Emilija Škarnulytė, 2013, 16 min

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, 13 min

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.”

Nao Sao Favas, Sao Feijocas
Tania Dinis, 2013, 10 min

Tania Dinis’ dappled super 8mm observational sketch of her grandmother tending to her garden, planting, gathering, and feeding chickens and rabbits, is dynamized by a voice track of Esmeralda de Jesus’s reactions to her filmed likeness in dialogue with Dinis. Grandmother quips back at her own image, moving between confirmation as she asserts that burn marks are “cooks’ medals,” and dissension, “what the hell kind of idea is this?” Seeing herself through granddaughters’ eyes, in that collision between self and image, Esmeralda affirms her primacy with biting wit, but also equanimity.

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Presented as part of Open City Documentary Festival