Mother's day

A humorous, satirical and overwhelmingly skilful experimental film by San Francisco poet James Broughton who has discarded the conventions and cliches of film making. Accepting the potentialities of the medium to manipulate both time and space, he brings past and present head-on as he regards with adult feelings his childhood, family and friends. Grown-ups romp like children, and by their magnified infantilism playfully underscore such basic traits as sadism, sensuality and egocentricity. While mother tuns out to be the biggest infant of them all, blindly holding to her ideal of beauty, blind to its disastrous effect upon her entire family. The undertones of this film are disturbing and Broughton has knowingly added to that sense of disturbance by introducing into it a range of objects that appear symbolic. Broughton, however, attempts to expose the audience to a total visual experience, that is poetic and not merely a mystic maze of hidden symbolic meanings. This exploration of an artist’s world of memory, imagination and perception is among the most challenging experimental films produced in America during this period. Photography by Frank Stauffacher.