Michelle Citron – Daughter Rite (1980)

Quote:
“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. Scandalous in its day for bending the rules of representation to enlighten its audience about filmmaking, DAUGHTER RITE has a lot to teach folks hooked on reality TV, too. Citron’s documentary inquiries into feminism, women in the trades, and feminist approaches to media representation are time capsules that merit re-opening.”
-B. Ruby Rich, author of ” Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement”

Director: Michelle Citron
Cast: Victor Penelope, Anne Wilford
Producer: Michelle Citron
Cinematography: Michelle Citron
Production Company: Iris Films
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 49mn

Quote:
Michelle Citron’s film DAUGHTER RITE commences with the voice of a narrator, speaking in a dull tone as if reading from a diary. At the age of 28, the voice tells us, she began working out her conflicting feelings toward her mother. Now, two years later, she is able to dedicate this film to her mother, “a woman whom I am very much like and not like at all.” Presumably the 50-minute film we are about to see will detail this process. Under the voice, however, we receive a different message. In a blown-up home-movie image, slowed down to a crawl and printed over and over again, a little girl and her mother run toward each other, always missing each other’s embrace. Finally, the mother grabs the daughter and the film’s title comes up. A curious “daughter rite,” indeed. For the remainder of the film, similar narrated home-movie footage alternates with “documentary” segments (described below) in which two grown sisters discuss their mother. Each “story” expresses with visual and verbal force the schizophrenia every woman I know feels toward her mother: total hatred amidst total love. The diarist appears to move toward a resolution of this conflict; the sisters in the documentary do not.

Throughout the film, the diarist speaks directly of her ambivalence. As home movie images of the two little sisters carrying suitcases appear to float slowly off to screen-left (as if trying to escape their mother’s grasp), the voice intones: “I hate my weaknesses…, my weaknesses are my mother.” The image switches to the little girls, dressed daintily and identically in blue dresses, leaving the house. The voice continues: “I hate … my bitchiness and my selfishness. That part, too, is my mother.” The little girls come toward the camera as the voice finishes: “And in hating my mother, I hate myself.” Yet later in the film the diarist deals with that other side of mother-hating which is mother-loving. The home-movie footage is of a baby buggy race in which dozens of little girls in lace dresses are socialized into frilly feminine roles as their mothers cheer from the sidelines. And yet, over this scene, which would appear the ultimate in indoctrination into passivity and weakness, the voice speaks of forgiveness: “I am not the angry one. I am filled with sadness and love for this woman.” In the final home-movie sequence of the film we see the mother as a young woman, laughing with her daughters, walking across a green field with her arm around the older daughter. The narrator tells of a dream in which her sister dies and the mother helps clean up the remains. The sequence ends with images of reconciliation and the words. “She holds me in her arms and I start to cry.”
– Jane Feuer

Daughter Rite (Citron, 1980).avi

General
Container:	AVI
Runtime:	48mn 31s
Size:	569 MiB
Video
Codec:	XviD
Resolution:	624x464
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	1 499 Kbps
Audio
2.0ch MP3 @ 128 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/0E893B828B2928E/Daughter_Rite_(Citron,_1980).avi
https://nitro.download/view/A97DC6C7323695F/Daughter_Rite_(Citron,_1980).srt

https://rapidgator.net/file/f249287ae928c4b0838ec417bda1f873/Daughter_Rite_(Citron,_1980).avi
https://rapidgator.net/file/c800354b9ca0bcba9af10736a9ff12f5/Daughter_Rite_(Citron,_1980).srt

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English