The Influences of My Mother

Directed by Sara Diamond

Canada, 1982 (video art, 24 minutes, English)

Image: © V tape

Film Description:
"'I produced this tape over a two year period to assist and represent a process of recovering and ordering my memories of my mother. By exploring her history and context, as well as memory. This tape discloses the stages of my emotional understanding of her as an autonomous person, beyond our familial relationship.' S.D.
The stages of awareness about this relationship are presented in six sections: Denial; Anger, A Medley of Mixed Emotions, Mother as Historical Object, Heroic Mother and finally Mother as Subject."
-- V tape (source)

Quote about The Influences of My Mother

"Made in 1980-2, the twenty-three-minute video Influences of My Mother is ostensibly about Diamond's attempt to make an identity out of and for her mother, who died of cancer when Diamond was ten years old. As it is about her mother as an absence—as present only in photographs, the elusive memory of a ten-year-old girl, and memorabilia—the tape speaks to fundamental issues about identity as that which is produced from loss and from the remains of time ('How do you go about recreating a once living woman through whom to see yourself?')"
-- Susan Lord (source)