Stretching the cord: Autobiographical documentary and maternal bond in Stories we tell, Hija, Amazona and Look at us now, mother!

Abstract

This text reviews the films Historias que contamos (2012, Stories we tell, Sarah Polley), Hija (2012, María Paz González) Amazona (2017, Clare Weistkopf) and Portrait of my mother (2016, Look at us now, mother! Gayle Kirschenbaum) from the resources and methodologies proper to the autobiographical documentary, its entity as research within the subtype documemoir, from the narratives of the types of attachment of social psychology and from its contribution to deactivate the idealization of motherhood as a patriarchal myth in conflict with the heterogeneous real motherhood. These examples make use of the interview, the real or recreated home movies, the road-movie, the filmed travel diary demonstrating their belonging to the participatory and reflexive subtypes. They share the subjectivity, personal temporality and performativity of memory films. The comprehensiveness of their collaborative proximal autobiography allows them to address the bond with their reference attachment figure, their mother, explaining the secure and insecure preoccupied attachment styles they have developed in dealing with them. The documemoir subtype thus proves to be a suitable container for addressing motherhood and freeing it from the narrow patriarchal narratives of its idealization inherited from the 1990s towards narratives of real motherhood.