Yukie tells of her earliest memories: "My little brother and I lay in bed, my mother in the middle. She breast fed us both at the same time. Disgusting!" "When I am a mother, I'll do it all differently", says Tomoto's daughter. A grandmother: "After 50 years of marriage I still don't know what love is. My life just happened to me, children and everything." This prologue provides the context for the story of these women and is at the same time a metaphorical summary of the video. It tells the modern fairy story of a New York girl who was convinced that there was a curse on her. She decided to run away from home, but she soon discovered that the curse followed her wherever she went. Since all objects can become gods in the far off country where she ended up, she collected 37 small stones and lay them in sequence next to each other. But: "not in a straight line, because everyone knows that a straight line brings bad luck". Silver made a marvellous video about the way in which grandmothers, mothers and daughters pass life on to each other with all the social conventions and feelings of guilt attached. In the same semi documentary form that she used in Meet the People (1986) and in The houses that are left (1989), Silver interviewed three generations of women from four families (in contrast to her previous work, the interviews here are real). To do this, she travelled to Japan where, Thanks to crumbling traditions, the generation differences are much greater than in the US. Without nagging or moralising and above all, not in a straight line, Silver unravels the complexity of the theme. A Japanese legend is woven through the interviews in which a mother and her grown-up daughter save each other from the claws of a monster. The way in which they manage to escape the danger, casts a different light on the story of the interviewed women.
– Lies Holtrop
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Music Lefdup & Lefdup, Editing Shelly Silver, Daiko Tsuruoka (assistant), Sound mixing Bill Seery, tolken Abbie Beichman, Kiara Kawauchi, Shiomi Nozawa, Lisa Spalding, subtitles Linda Haaglund, voicemen Yasuko Shimizu, Tracy Leipold, Dedicated to Anita & Gertrude Kurikoff
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