MOTHER'S DAY (US, 1948, James Broughton)
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“Humorous, satirical, and overwhelmingly skillful, this ironic camera exploration of the artist's world of memory, imagination and perception is among the finest, most challenging films yet produced in this country.” —Arthur Knight
One of the first major works of the San Francisco film movement, MOTHER’S DAY is a painfully humorous recollection of childhood in which a family of singular adults recreate their infancy by behaving as they did when growing up.
As noted by programmers at the Melbourne International Film Festival, “Accepting the potentialities of the medium to manipulate both time and space, Broughton brings past and present head-on as he regards with adult feelings his childhood family and friends. Grown-ups romp like children, and by their magnified infantilism playfully underscore such basic traits as sadism, sensuality, arid egocentricity.”
Broughton himself described the film as follows:
“[MOTHER’S DAY is] a capricious but unsparing souvenir of a San Francisco childhood, recollected in the nostalgic style of a cluttered family album… this film exposes the fetishes and enigmas and secret nonsense rituals of a large household dominated by a self-absorbed mother with a taste for exotic hats and stereotyped children. Although it is a film of unhappy memories revisited, wherein adults absurdly reenact their infancy by playing as they did while growing up, the focus is upon the tyranny of the mother's misguided romanticism. She who thinks of herself as a frail Victorian miniature, but is actually a voluptuous and severe in the flesh, finds no real human being acceptable to her, so that when her children have mocked her and rebelled, she is left alone in riding boots with nowhere to ride to. But she would explain her history thus: ‘Once upon a time there was a very beautiful and refined young girl who had a great many suitors. But she married the wrong one. Then she had a great many children and she did not know what to do with them either.’”
MOTHER’S DAY was well-received when it first premiered and is now widely regarded as one of the most important works to emerge from the 1940s West Coast avant-garde film scene. The film continues to have its admirers. In 2010, critic Jonathan Henderson was laudatory in a retrospective review: “MOTHER’S DAY is one of Broughton’s earliest works, and it immediately establishes an a rather complex, ambiguous tone that slips between absurdity, satire, and a certain authenticity with ease… One would think that the title would be a loving tribute, but Broughton seems to be mocking the notion of delusional ‘lovely’ mothers who want their children to be all-lovely too… The film is awash in bizarre, surreal images, jarring frames, and jagged editing patterns. If one were to watch this with no knowledge that Broughton was behind it, they might be tempted to attribute it to a recently found Luis Buñuel silent film. Broughton himself even uses the silent film aesthetics of expressive, grim faces and intertitles to add to the absurd and satirical tone.”
“MOTHER’S DAY for me is one of the great films in film history.” —Peter Kubelka
MOTHER'S DAY
(US, 1948)
Director: James Broughton
Director of Photography: Frank Stauffacher
Music: Howard Brubeck
- 21 minutes
- 16mm
- B&W
- Sound
Distribution Format/s: DSL/Downloadable 1080p .mp4 file on server
Published By: GME
Classroom Price: $250
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