When I was younger, I never wanted to sing German songs. It was hard for me to get involved with anything that was connected to the German word “Heimat”. I had a close relationship with my grandmother, but many years after her death, when I became a mother myself, I realised that I knew nothing about her. She was a quiet woman who never talked much. When I was little, I learned from her how to grow potatoes and roast them on the fire. Only once, when I was a teenager, I asked her about her upbringing within the Nazi regime. She told me, I was a girl and we met with the other girls to sing and knit. I liked being together with them. She also said that she didn’t know about the murder of the Jewish people.
I yelled at her, how she couldn’t know about it and we never talked about her history again. How did this collectively repressed guilt and shame, the following silence among women, shape her understanding of female live and motherhood? She was a 17-year-old girl when the war ended. What must it have been for her to be a young woman in post war Germany? Years later, I found a hood of a traditional costume. I remembered that she had hung it on the wall and that I was both fascinated and frightened by it as child, because it was beautiful but all black. It was not hers. It must have been from her mother.
I started my research with this struggle for words. But it seems that it was not only because of the lack of language, but even more because my subject was something for which I had no words. In the urge to talk about it, I called it rupture at the time. After two years of research, the metaphor became a theme - symptoms and scars in trans-generational female history, how they shape our relationships, and the fact that love and care are always intertwined with violence. I examined the most enduring involuntary relationship we have in our lives. The relationship with our mother. Starting from my personal experience, I trace a relationship between a mother, a doctor and a daughter, a filmmaker, marked by the history of the loss of female identity after the Second World War, by collective guilt, shame and and unspoken traumas such as the instrumentalization of womanhood and motherhood, but also by resilience, resistance and a lot of strength. I used the camera as a tool to film our relationship at the very moment when I became a mother myself, to explore what scars and symptoms history has left in our relationship.
I wanted to keep thinking about structures. I was intrigued by the idea of the carrier bag theory of fiction from Ursula K. Le Guin, as a narrative concept of a fiction because it radically reshapes the classic hero‘s journey, but even more the idea of using this nonhierarchical structure in your artwork to engage with your own personal experiences as material, such as caregiving, motherhood, death, family legacy as things that are not valued so highly in our out- come-based society.
If we, as filmmakers, engage with our own carrier bag to create narratives, can this be a response to the hegemonic patterns of filmmaking and relate to an idea of a feminine way of filmmaking?
Creating filmic material from our relationship to use it as a sculptor would use clay: it became a method. Over a phase of experimentation I used the camera in different manners to produce hours of material. I used it as a witness of our daily routines, as an extension of my body, a witness of staging scenes and I invited a camerawoman to work with me on the images.
Working with the footage I filmed of the domestic rituals, I was struck by how the bodies behaved in relation to each other and how the frame of the camera highlighted this. The bodies in the frame started to reveal something about the relationship of the characters through their gestures and postures.
So what are these gestures. Looking at something can be a gesture, a touch can be a gesture, an interruption, walking, laughing, waiting or even refusing to look.
Can silence be a gesture?
Using personal family stories, conversations with my mother, family images, and gestures I inherited from my grandmother, I have traced parts of narratives that have traveled across generations of women in my family on their bodies. Themes such as the incision in female knowledge, repressed guilt and shame, the lack of control, the inability to be intimate, the lack of narratives due to silence, but also strong resilience and resistance in female ancestry emerged.
Can we read re-read the history inscribed in female bodies through gestures and body positions?
My research on the traditional garment my grandmother collected - a strange costume that I never saw her wearing, was an entry point into tracing the loss of collective rituals that were part of female identity. But it also soon became a place- holder for the histories of the woman generations before my grandmother. The act of wearing it made the experience a bodily experience. To feel the texture of the material, but also to experience how my movement changed in the garment. To reread the stories from the body but also to embody them became a method of working.
Can we rewrite embodied female history through filmmaking?
To rework the conflict in trust and control , I realised that one way to connect and rebuild another relationship with my mother it might be to follow her treatments. I surrendered my body to her. With these images of the medical treatments that involved a violent yet caring act, the symptoms and scars on my body became visible.
The material I collected during my research, within the domestic space, rituals of care, working with our own bodies, relate to a tradition of women’s film history and female video art. Alison Butler connects women’s film with the notion of ‘minor’ cinema. In this sense, I felt the need to go a step further and take them out of a documentary reading. I started to think how not to only to represent but rather to begin to evoke/rework these female narratives that were emerging in the images I had filmed. So I began to rewrite scenes that I had already shot into scripted scenes and reworked them. They became fictional scenes. A film appeared.
A film about a daughter visiting her mother after becoming a mother herself. In the domestic sphere, while preparing dinner, bathing the child, receiving treatments at the mother’s doctor’s office in the house, family patterns of hidden violence reveal themselves between the three characters. The daughter sets out to find traces from the past of the women of the family. Unable to leave the place, the young mother keeps postponing her departure and slowly there is a transformation of their relationship. The research becomes the texture of the film. Me, my mother and my son are turning into characters.
Int. Research center traditional costumes - Day
The young mother enters a room with two boxes. Another woman, the researcher is greeting her.
R.: “You wanna show me what you have? Do you mind putting everything here.
Carefully they unfold the fabric.
R.: “Beautiful pieces. When was your grandmother born?”
Y.M: “1928.”
R.: “The clothes are from the 19th century. She must have collected it.”
Y.M: “This one is from my grandmother, the others are from the neighbours. They did not want it anymore.”
They look at the clothes again.
R.: “All you have here is more for festive occasions. For weddings, holidays and church.”
Y.M: “They married in black?”
R.: “Yes. White marriage came only after the royal wedding of....”
Y.M: “Could you see how the body was shaped due to the measurement of the clothes?”
R.: “Yes this is possible. Even if the body was deformed. We could find out with an old wedding dress that the bright must have had a hump.”
Y.M : “I tried this one on. It fit me, but the skirt was too big. The researcher is looking at her.
R.: “No it fits you. It’s because they were wearing several layers under the skirt. The young mother feels the little details of the hood.
Y.M.: “Does the pattern in the head have a meaning?”
R: “This means mourning. Because it’s all black. With a little blue. Half mourning. If it was not the husband, father or mother you could wear a little bit of color after half a year.”
The work on this project is an attempt to develop a method of filmmaking based on the embodiment of a story, with the aim of allowing hidden female narratives to appear in the film images and to question methods of feature film production.
Désirée Pfenninger is a filmmaker and artist living in Berlin and Amsterdam. She studied camera and feature film directing in Paris and Potsdam, Babelsberg. Her visual work explores human relationships, intergenerational history and female filmmaking. She portrays the most intimate areas such as the domestic space and the body to speak about the trauma of socio-cultural factors, lost identity and resistance. In her working methods, she questions and transforms the way she works with fictional narratives to examine female life as an open structure. Through filming bodies and objects, she engages with the nuances of female subjectivity, using the camera as a tool to understand and express embodied trans- generational history and how human relationships are shaped through it. Her narrative film works and research projects are reassembled in ways that reveal and evoke alternative histories. Her work has been shown at international film festivals and exhibitions. In 2021, she enrolled in the Master's program in Artistic Research in and through cinema at the Netherlands Film Academy.
