I BURN THE WAY MONEY BURNS, Part 3

by Victoria Brooks

If long-form narrative cinema has only rarely taken unwaged work as its central concern (other than a mere staging ground for the domestic and/or erotic intrigue of the couple), films that think that work in its fraught junctures with formally-waged labor are all the rarer.

Blacklisted director Herbert J. Biberman’s decisively gendered 1954 movie Salt of the Earth1 is one of those rarities. Within its first few minutes, a wife and her husband, Esperanza (Rosaura Revueltas) and Ramón (Juan Chacón), argue over missing the credit payment for her radio. The scene sets the tone with a dynamic that continues to make explicit how the company-union fight plays out as much in the home as in the mine, as much around the kitchen table as on the picket. After Ramón slams his cup down on the radio console and strides out, Esperanza responds to his rebuke in silence, moving into the frame from the opposing angle to remove the coffee cup and wipe the wood clean.

by Herbert J. Biberman, 1954
by Herbert J. Biberman, 1954

This image, one that visualizes the everyday attendance to the care of family and objects alike which overrules the personal or emotional need of the housewife, is echoed in Joanna Davis’s 1979 film Often During the Day. A forensic investigation of the domestic sphere made over two years, it uses close-ups and detailed views of the kitchen to confront the cultural relations of “collectively defined” standards that can induce obsessional behavior, set out in Ann Oakley’s 1974 book The Sociology of Housework. In both films, separated by twenty-five years and coming from markedly different industry positions, the radio is a central narrative pivot. More than simply representing entertainment or creating a familiar domestic affect, it is presented as a threshold where there otherwise appears to be none. By lending its familiar tonality to the soundtrack, it both creates and blurs the boundary between inside and out. As if compensating for a lack of visible exits in the frame, it simply stands in for architecture, adding a sonic spatiality that sums up the psychological mapping of time and place of domestic experience more precisely than a static window or door ever could. The repetitive news headlines detailing a bomb in South Armagh exploit a similar episodic technique of the close up of the front door in Susan Stein’s She Said. Repetition narratively structures both of these films, always pulling our attention back to the threshold of the domestic by allowing the hint of the world of war outside, but always forcing us to hover at this threshold.

 

by Susan Stein, 1982
by Joanna Davis, 1979

Often During the Day encourages an exceedingly close reading. For first half of the film we ‘read’ each frame with the two dimensionality of a photograph or a book. Presented as a series of stills to be used as evidence, they convey the inner-voice of 1950s melodrama, but without the dramatic. In tracking across a single monochromatic kitchen wall, the camera pans across and down the shelving units past dangling keys, pots, and pans until resting on a wide shot that flattens the cooker, the kitchen sink and the countertops along the wall. It is in the familiarity of this well-used domestic design that we come to understand how “space speaks”2. This kitchen is not a neutral or “natural” space. It is a set, one examined in stills, panning shots and jump cuts, one whose past activity is narrated by a female voice, further overlaid by the radio and the continuous sound of the cutting of bread. But as we traverse the empty room through close ups of these forensically-examined surfaces, the actors are the dirt and the detail rather than a body and a bloody knife. The film draws special attention to the margins of the room. There, architectural geometry is disrupted by the organic as the floor meets the wall with a hairy curve. The sink is separated from the counter by a cracked black divot of old silicone, before a cut to the rolled tube used to fix it. “A geometry of creeping lines…” offers the voice-over in She Said, an almost perfect echo of these images that ooze the palimpsest of time and activity.

 

by Joanna Davis, 1979
by Joanna Davis, 1979

It is this murky “middle of time”3 that is attended to in Davis’s film. The sharp architectural details are disrupted by the ruptures of wear and tear, of the continual use that accompanies the long-term presence of bodies. To focus on these imperfections and their abstract textures and patterns is to dislocate the sense of time. In disarticulating the cinematic convention of the wide angle, the tight framing of the camera gestures towards what Nicole Brenez described in Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice (1930) as “social injustice […] inscribed within flesh itself, on walls, within the very fabric of urban organization, in the concrete occupation of space and time.”4 In Often, meanwhile, the marks and traces inscribed on the space appear as an archive of the processes of reproduction. The resolutely two-dimensional surface and close perspectives treat each frame only as a surface, forcing our gaze to objectively focus on the organization of architecture and objects. We are not allowed to enter his space, and there is no longer anyone there.

by Joanna Davis, 1979

This introductory mapping of the kitchen is followed in the same tone by the image of a man shaving in a cracked mirror. The frame cuts twice, each time closer in on his mouth. Davis’s Freudian mirror is less a self-portrait presented to the outside world than a portrait of the space itself, its aggregation of social relations channeled through the mouth of this man. In focusing on his mouth, the image betrays the soundtrack. He does not imagine the curdling hairs and soap mixing in the water-filled pan. The architecture is gendered not just through design but also through physical occupation. “Space is patterned by gender”5 and culturally determined. It is this “anchoring of a certain group of individuals in a specific sphere of social activities,” a definition so succinctly formulated by the authors of The Logic of Gender (End Notes #3), that the film points towards here. As it cuts to a page of Oakley’s Sociology of Housework recited by a man’s voice, Davis reinforces this logic in subverting the gendered specificity of the book.

 

by Joanna Davis, 1979
by Joanna Davis, 1979
by Joanna Davis, 1979

Halfway through the fourteen-minute film, the slow sequence of black and white stills abruptly cuts to color footage of kitchen table, with bright flowers, salt, butter, a tea-pot and bread board. A fixed camera, with a single shot of two people sitting, drinking tea and eating toast, only their torsos, arms and hands visible. A woman walks into the frame to cut and butter bread, the acousmatic foley sounds suddenly brought into connection with the image. Before sitting to eat she cleans, wiping crumbs from the table whilst the male hand on the right side of the frame lights a cigarette. Finally sitting to eat a fourth body appears to the right echoing her movements by filling the teapot, this ambiguous gendering of bodies and the presence of a different ‘present’ time-scale of lived activity breaks the strategy of forensic timeless experience of aggregation of time in the first half, whilst creating a different approach to the struggle to understand the time-scale that women are supposed to attend to. It implies the difficulty of rendering domestic time on film, which has a timeframe that runs counter to how we perceive the conventions of(industrial) cinema. Davis described the production of the film as “made in the odd hours and the activity of making it was quite close to the activity it describes… my relationship to the room is this because I clean it.”6 and in this quote links the production of image making directly to the (re)production of ourselves as women and mothers.

 

by Joanna Davis, 1979

In Oakley’s analysis she compares the experience of unwaged labour of the home to the time-scale of the factory assembly line. It is this difficulty of presenting the time of work in cinema that Alexander Kluge pointed towards in an interview on his film Part-time Work of a Domestic Slave (1973).

One particularly difficult thing is that if you want to make a film about labor in a factory, nothing happens; or, at least, nothing seems to be happening. Over 10 years a worker has quite a lot of problems, but you can’t combine them into an action story. That sort of action—which is interesting and gives pleasure, cinema-pleasure—is abolished in the factory. So that you can’t describe on film some of the major problems and experiences of our society in the same way that they exist in reality. 

In grappling with the multiple time-scales of women’s work, Often uses both the forensic, and in the second half, a direct-cinema or vérité technique to make visible the real difficulty of representing domestic labour and unwaged time. Through the lens of a gendered camera, Davis attends to patterns of these underlying processes unseen or overlooked by others, to the hairs in the soap dish, the crumbs on the table, to the damp floor under the cat’s bowl.


Victoria Brooks is curator of Time-Based Visual Art at EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.

CINENOVA is a non-profit organisation dedicated to distributing feminist films and videos. For more information on the CINENOVA Collection please see: http://www.cinenova.org/


Footnotes

1. Salt of the Earth, Herbert J. Biberman, 1954, 35mm, 92mins. For this particularly sequence watch 6:30-7:00 here

2. Ardener, Shirley “The Partition of Space” in Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. Eds. Jane Rendell,Barbara Penner and Iain Borden (Routledge: London, 2000) p113.

3.“What one saw was the middle of time. One saw nothing happening there, for nothing ever happens there. Until it does.” Quote taken from Anne Carsen, Men in the Off Hours (Vintage Reprint Edition: 2001) p.5.

4. Brenez, Nicole. À propos de Nice and the Extremely Necessary, Permanent Invention of the Cinematic Pamphlet (Rouge Press: 2005). The article can be found here.

5. Doreen Massey quoted by Jane Rendell in Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. Eds. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden (Routledge: London, 2000) p102. For further reading on space and gender by Massey see her book Space, Place and Gender (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1994)

6. Davis, Joanna. “Often During the Day” in Women Live (MC & LFMC: May 1982), p8. A pdf of the program can be found at Women’s Liberation Music Archive here.

7.Alexander Kluge interviewed by Jan Dawson, from the November/December 1974 issue of Film Comment. Full interview here.

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