Daughter Rite (1978)
(53 minutes) 16mm A&B rolls, color reversal, Optical Track, 14 in. Mag Track
Director: Michelle Citron
Grant Awarded to: Michelle Citron
Archive: UCLA Film and Television Archive
An experimental, feminist film about the often-fraught emotional space between mothers and daughters, DAUGHTER RITE centers its lens on two adult sisters, Stephanie and Maggie, who return to their mother’s home while she lies ill in the hospital. This “cinema verité” narrative thread of the two sisters talking about their relationship with their mother, is interwoven with a second family’s story: that of an unnamed narrator and her relationship with her sister and her mother. The narrator speaks over footage from home movies that have been optically printed to manipulate the images, often rewinding and repeating a movement over and over. The documentary footage is staged, scripted, and acted; the home-movie images have been processed with techniques developed by avant-garde filmmakers in the early seventies. And in this regard, the film’s aesthetic blurs the boundaries between documentary, narrative fiction, and experimental filmmaking. In so doing, it brings into relief another fiction: the separation between these different genres and film approaches.
Still from Daughter Rite (1978)
While the film presents as autobiographical, it’s based on a series of interviews of women reflecting on their relationships with their mothers, which have been combined and then represented by the two sisters. The daughters in the film discuss highly charged subjects: sexual abuse, lack of boundaries with their mothers, and their love/hate back and forth relationship. DAUGHTER RITE explores the narrow current between seemingly contradictory opposites: memory/history; fiction/documentary; fragments/narrative cohesiveness; emotional depth/formal invention. At its core, and ahead of its time in this regard, the film goes beyond binaries and reveals that is in that in-between place that the truth breaths.
“Daughter Rite is a classic, the missing link between the ‘direct Cinema’ documentaries and the later hybrids that acknowledged truth couldn’t always be found in front of a camera lens.” B. Ruby Rich, scholar, film critic.
Still from Daughter Rite (1978)
Michelle Citron is an award-winning film and digital artist whose work includes the films Daughter Rite, Parthenogenesis, What You Take For Granted…, Leftovers, and Lives:Visible and the interactive narratives Cocktails & Appetizers, Mixed Greens, and As American As Apple Pie. Her media art explores the lives of women – mothers and daughters, women in the workplace, the trauma of incest, lesbian culture – as well as ethnic identity. These works blend experimental styles with melodrama and an exploration of the border between documentary and fiction. An additional theme that flows through all Citron’s work is an examination of the autobiographical impulse, particularly as it is expressed through home movies, snapshots, and memoir.
Citron’s work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art/Chicago, as well as the New Directors, Berlinale, London, Edinburgh, Oberhausen, and NYMIX film festivals. Her films and interactive narratives are in the permanent collections of over two hundred fifty universities and other institutions.
Still from Daughter Rite (1978)
Her book, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), won three awards, including a Special Commendation from the Krasza-Krausa International Book Award, which cited the book for being “an extraordinary blend of autobiographical and film writing which offers a radical new way of thinking and writing about film.”
She received two National Endowment for the Arts Filmmaking Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Humanities Media Grant, and three Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowships – for filmmaking, screenwriting, and digital arts.
Citron’s films are archived in the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy Film Archive; her interactive art is archived in the Rose Goldsen Archive, Cornell University; and her papers are archived in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, University of Wisconsin/Madison.
