the mother-child relationship; it's as though its 'feeling' is beyond formal expression. Psychoanalytic theory does provide a language and concepts to analyze it and begin to 'speak' it. So although we felt, politically, that motherhood had been silenced and should be given cultural space and a means of expression, at the same time, we recognized the difficulty of doing so within the language of the patriarchy. It was a challenge. And that challenge was the starting point for the film. We wanted to bring together theory, the avant-garde, political aspiration, and this emotional, but uncolonized, experience of motherhood.
To what extent did
grow out of your own direct experience?
Of being a mother?
Yes. I've always wondered to what degree Louise is based on Laura.
She wasn't, really. While we were developing the idea for the film I was conscious of the close relationship between my sister and her two-year-old daughter. Chad, my son, was by that time a strapping seven-or eight- year-old, and when he was very little, I would leave him with my mother a lot. So Louise's leaving Anna with her mother, the second stage of her development,
much closer to my experience. My grandmother had taken care of me and my favorite first cousin, so I thought babies should be brought up by their grandmothers. My sister and her daughter are in the film, in the playground sequence. The little girl with the blonde hair in the same sequence is Dinah's two-year-old daughter, Georgia (Dinah plays Louise). Diane, the camerawoman, also had a two-year-old daughter, who plays Anna in the film. So there were all these two-year-old girls around!
[
My mother is in the film too. She plays the grandmother in the garden scene.]
But I'd also been reading. Louise's story wasn't just based on observation. I'd read Maud Mannoni's account of the case history of a mother who refuses to abandon her child to the symbolic and tries to keep the child within the dyad. This is there to some extent, at the beginning of Louise's story: Anna is too big to be carried around and babied. We wanted to imply that she was being kept too long, artificially, within the pre-oedipal.
[
Maud Mannoni's books were very important. She's a child analyst, a Lacanian who later disagreed with Lacan when he began to emphasize his 'mathemes' and topological diagrams. She stressed the importance of the positioning of each child within a system of 'Law' (the 'Symbolic' in Lacan's terms). The question that interested us was how the Law itself was constructed and whether it was possible to envis-
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Louise (Dinah Stabb) and Maxine (Merdelle Jordine) look at old photographs
while Louise's mother cares for Anna, in Mulvey and Wollen's
(1977). By permission of the British Film Institute.
age a nonpatriarchal Law, rather than trying to escape from the patriarchal Law by retreating back into the pre-oedipal (the 'Imaginary' in Lacan's terms), the dyadic relationship between infant and mother. This psychoanalytic approach to the mother-child relationship is also what relates the film to Mary Kelly's
part of which we use in the editing room sequences.]
Historically speaking, just after
came out, the psychoanalytic feminist world got very preoccupied with the question of essentialism, and because
focused on mothers and daughters, on pre-oedipality, on the sphinx, and so on, it got very much tarred with the essentialist brush, which I think was unfair. The French feminists, like Helene Cixous and Julia Kristeva, had been interested in exploring and analyzing the mother-daughter relationship in the pre-oedipal stage, within a feminist politics of psychoanalysis. They've been criticized for valorizing this sphere of the feminine pre-oedipal. Anyway, it was a complicated time, and
seemed to come into the middle of it all, and was seen as an essentialist film. I thought that was also theoretically unfair from another point of view. While one could perfectly well write 'correct theory' in articles, journals, lectures, one of the points of writ-
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ing literature or poetry or making movies is to be more daring; you can push against the boundaries of theoretical correctness. This, perhaps, is how culture can change. You're not really going to
people by writing theory. If you want to
people, you can't always have correctness hanging over you like the sword of Damocles. When
