Tag: Emily Zou

Categories
Art Blog Cinema Feminism gender motherhood

Mother-Daughter and The Unsaid Things/ FILM

By Emily Zou

In my last post on Obachan’s Garden, a Japanese-Canadian documentary, I wrote about how focusing on the stories of mothers and grandmothers is important in disrupting the way that we remember our history and ancestry. For this week’s post, I’d like to write more locally about the wonderful way that a mother-daughter relationship is explored in Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird.

You’ve probably heard of Lady Bird, which made waves three years ago for its painful authenticity; Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut went on to score five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Director, and Actress. The consensus is clear: Lady Bird has brought together a ridiculously charming cast and created a captivating vision of Sacramento, all with some of the funniest and most heartbreaking dialogue committed to the screen.

But motherhood and daughterhood is the movie. In fact, the original draft for the film was titled Mothers and Daughters. The title Lady Bird instead refers to the name that our heroine, Christine (Sairose Ronan) chooses for herself, a perfect example of how eclectically rebellious she is. Desperate to fly to the east coast, to find “real culture”, Lady Bird follows Christine in her senior year of high school, as she falls in and out of love, smokes weed, gets into college, passes her driving test and performs in musicals. All the while, she fights with her mother, Marion, (Laurie Metcalf), a father dealing with depression, and coming to terms with her family’s status in a class-stratified society.

While ruminating on having to talk to people about creating her film, Gerwig remarks in a 2017 NPR interview that “most of those people are men. And if they were raised with sisters or if they had daughters, they knew what it was… But if they didn’t, they had no idea that that was how women fought and how they loved, too. I think it was kind of like they were getting to look into a world that they didn’t know existed”. As more women take the helm in moviemaking, stories that only we can tell come to light and are shared. And its movies like Lady Bird, that capture how beautifully painful leaving home and loving it only after you do so, can be. It’s a story that honors motherhood and our homes that was created because of the women’s own experiences.

There’s one scene that really sums up what makes this film so special to me, it goes something like this: Christine is talking about her college essay with a nun, she wrote it about Sacramento, and the nun remarks that you can tell how much she loves the town. No, Christine replies, I hate this place, I just pay attention, but the nun asks, gently, “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?” Cut to her Mom, anxiously waiting for her in a thrift store.

See, love is not always gentle, is not always understandable. But the best love is often the kind that perseveres even when it’s not easy, even when it’s not wanted. The realest loves are embarrassing and irritating and overcritical, but you have to love something a lot to believe in it. To love someone not because they are worth loving but because they are someone.

Lady Bird is painful to watch because it’s real. Gerwig has tapped into this very egocentric teenage stream of worries and worries. You change so much in adolescence; you’re in a constant state of shame for some past iteration of yourself and how earnest you were in being that version of you. You’re always cringing because of the things you forgot to love properly or for the things that you didn’t appreciate enough. And of course, you think you know everything, especially once you realize that you don’t.

And so after seeing a version of you (a teenager) portrayed on screen, you have to take a moment to step back from being caught up in your own head and your own worries. You take note of your surroundings, the home you take for granted, and then the people that have become part of your home.

I remember talking about Lady Bird with my mom after we watched it; we were hiking up a mountain and she was displeased that I had watched a movie that deals with sex and homosexuality. She didn’t like it, and in trying to explain why it touched me, I found that there were tears in my eyes as I tried to describe the raw, heartrending ending scene. She pointed out the traitorous evidence of my emotions and laughed at me.

And I guess its moments like that that prove Lady Bird’s point. Gerwig quipped “I don’t know any woman who has a simple relationship with their mother or with their daughter”, and the very messy way we love our mothers and daughters comes across so effectively in her movie.

I don’t even know if I will even be going to campus in the fall (I’ll be a freshman), but I have become acutely aware of this strange, liminal space that I float in, still at home but not really belonging to it anymore. We owe such an existential, unpayable gratitude to our mothers for all of the trouble they went to allow us to live our little lives. I don’t really talk to my mom much these days, but even when we do, whatever I say never seems to be enough to capture just how deeply I am in her debt. How do you even begin to walk around all of the unsaid things?

I haven’t the faintest clue. But I’ll place my faith in whoever is penning my coming of age story, hoping that they’re as fond of me as Gerwig was of Christine. That it’ll all turn out okay, that I’ll finally have the courage to say Thank you.

(Even if it’s only when I’m 460 miles away).

Categories
Art Cinema Feminism gender History International motherhood

Obachan’s Garden – A Look At Motherhood In Cinema

“We think back through our mothers if we are women”– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

By Emily Zou

Obachan’s Garden is a 2001 documentary directed by Linda Ohama, made to honor and remember her grandmother. (Obachan means grandmother in Japanese). Despite this simple conceit, the film takes on a wholly different life as the past is revealed and history is questioned. Moreover, the concepts of what a “good mother” is, are questioned, as well as how different cultural expectations of mothering can clash with each other.

The act of creating film centered on mothers and their experience of motherhood itself disrupts how we are used to learning about history– through our fathers and grandfathers. “Male- centered assumptions about history, as well as feminist ambivalence about motherhood, have complicated the enterprise of searching for mothers in history” writes Jodi Vandenberg-Daves in “Teaching Motherhood in History”. The act of remembering through our mothers offers not a new, but hidden perspective from the past.

“Ryosai Kenbo” is a Japanese word meaning “good wife, wise mother”, introduced during the Meiji period (1868-1912). Based on Confucian ideals of filial piety, it reinforces the idea that women could best serve their country by working at home. This was the ideal that Obachan was raised under, Obachan’s Garden explores how Obachan was trained from a young age to become a housewife, learning languages and dancing. Obachan then relocates to Canada as a picture bride, only to reject her husband the moment she sees him. She works for years to repay him for the ticket to Canada.

Motherhood in Canada was rapidly changing in the pre-World War Two era (when Obachan immigrated), with focus on an idea called the “Good Mother”, where mothering became more “professional”. There were more expectations on what a mother should or shouldn’t do, and the act of mothering became much more heavily scrutinized. A study by Western University explored how advertisements and magazines targeted mothers during this time period, “If mothers indulged their children with too much attention, their children would grow up to be dependent and sissified. Mothers who attended too little to their children’s needs and too much to their own, turned into screaming shrews, and their children became neurotic and fearful. If these precautions were not sufficiently intimidating, the articles also held up mothers who did everything so perfectly that they became unbearable prigs”. It is clear, then, that the way to be a mother was, and still is, heavily influenced by the rest of society.

All of this creates a multi-layered backdrop for Obachan as a mother, a complicated one that is explored through the documentary itself. Ohama paints a picture of a family learning more about their matriarch and her history.

Indeed, the documentary explicitly tells the audience the profound themes the film will explore. “How do we learn about things that have happened before us? And what about memories, what people remember? Are these memories always real?” Narrated over dreamy visuals, Ohama explores how our memory is fallible, how the stories that we hear are always one-sided. Through really getting to know her grandmother, the documentary pieces together a complicated past with motherhood.

In her article examining Obachan’s Garden, Sheena Wilson writes that “the telling of mother-stories can be reclaimed as an act of resistance, whether mothers are telling their own stories, or daughters and granddaughters are retracing their matrilineal genealogies”. We need more of these stories to “think through our mothers,” to see our history from their point of view.

Sources:

Fullerton, Romayne, and M.J. Patterson. “Procrustean Motherhood.” FIMS Publications, 2010.

Larsen, Robert. “Ryousai Kenbo Revisited.” Hastings International and Comparative Law Review, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001.

Wilson, Sheena. “Obachan’s Garden.” Demeter Press, 2016.

Read about Emily’s Remote Internship with MOM: Reviewing Motherhood in Cinema [CLICK]

 

Categories
Art Cinema Featured Feminism gender motherhood

Motherhood in Cinema

By Emily Zou

“Motherhood studies as an area of scholarship is on precarious ground”, Samira Kawash warns in her article New Directions in Motherhood Studies. Advocacy for mothers and the study of feminism are inextricably linked, yet the study of motherhood has been largely neglected by the feminist movement. There are numerous reasons for this (which Kawash elaborates in her article), including the desire to remain separate from conservative “family values” and changing feminist theory. It will take years and a lot of work for this field to be more broadly recognized.

So this is that: the years and the work.

Through the next few weeks, I hope to understand and discuss films through a lens of motherhood studies, or as museum founder and scholar Martha Joy Rose elaborates “Mother Studies” citing motherhood as an institution, mothering as an act, and mothers as the persons at the center of this discourse. But, before we begin, I would like to explain why I feel studying both cinema and mothers is important.

There are three main reasons as to why film is worth thinking and writing about. The first is the most obvious: cinema has an audience, and the messages portrayed onscreen have real life impacts. Franklin Fearing wrote in 1947 that “motion pictures achieve their effects because they help the individual to cognize [their] world.” This still holds true today; anyone who has seen a film knows that it is not a passive experience, it is an interaction. Cinema allows us to peek into worlds that we could never imagineThey also can change our minds; a 2015 study from the University of Dayton found that 25% of participants changed their stance on the government after watching Argo and Zero Dark Thirty. The ideas expressed in movies are of consequence– they shape how we see the world. This is why so many people campaign for diversity onscreen and fight for more female directors. Accuracy in visibility is key to the millions of people who come in contact with these ideas.

So, studying fictional mothers is important because of what they mean to their audience. Of the influence of the portrayal of mothers in cinema, Asma Sayed writes in “Intersection Interventions in Global Cinema”:  “–are these mothers good? How quickly are they able to reclaim their pre-baby bodies? How do they balance work and mothering? Such questions are a reflection of societies in which, historically, a woman’s primary role has largely been defined by her ability to bear and rear children.” The representation of the maternal figure on screen both reinforces and is produced by societal values.

But motherhood, mothers, and their portrayal onscreen reveal much more about society. Like how Sherlock tells us that oceans can be deduced from a drop of water, a singular film can provide insight into the context of the world that made it. Why it was created, how it was created, how people responded to it, and all of its intentional and unintentional effects can be profound and impactful. Jennifer Wingard’s article “(Re)Producing Globalization: The Labouring Body in Maria Full of Grace” links how capitalism and imperialism affects the bodies of mothers in the film Maria Full of Grace. Sayed aptly summarizes Wingard’s article: “It is important to follow the movement of Maria’s body not only to understand how women’s bodies affect and are defined by the contradictory flows of global capital, labour, and migration but also to see the limited range of choices available to women navigating within this system. Wingard points out how women’s labour is not recognized as part of economic production, even though it is essential to sustaining the global economy.” fictional mothers may not always be explicitly metaphors for any socio-cultural commentary, but the idea of the maternal and how it relates to those issues are still expressed through them.

Intersectionality is essential to creating an inclusive environment to learn about motherhood, which varies across race, class, and culture. Family dynamics are constantly changing across the world. Samira Kawash remarks that “…we need to broaden our awareness and understanding of the diverse positions and meanings of motherhood. Feminist scholarship on motherhood in the past decade has focused attention on the various ways in which mothers cannot or will not submit to the (white, middle-class, heterosexual) norms of good mothering.” So, not only can mother characters reveal infinitudes about the world, but we must expand our study of mothers of all kinds, from all around the world.

My last and most romantic reason is that the appreciation of art is what makes this life meaningful. There’s this quote that I love by Donna Tartt: “Beauty alters the grain of reality.” She was describing paintings, but this idea applies to all forms of the sublime that we are lucky to experience on Earth. The cinematic experience is a wonderful one, and I am  excited to reinterpret them over the course of the next months.

As a final note, I would like to bring up the idea Kawash concludes her article with, that “feminism cannot possibly hope to remain relevant without acknowledging motherhood in all its contradictions and complexities.” It is only through understanding mothers and the way we treat them that we can hope to advocate for gender equality without leaving our mothers behind. We must embrace the many forms that mothering can take in order to uplift and honor the legacy of the generations of mothers that have largely gone forgotten and misrepresented.

*side note: In Kawash’s article, she writes “One positive development is a new Museum of Motherhood, “a real and virtual social change museum focused on amplifying the voices and experiences of mothers while connecting ‘the cultural family,’… there is also an opportunity, not only in the Museum of Motherhood but in the broader field of popular and academic investment that the museum seeks to make visible.”