Nellie Killian Waxes Poetic About Roberta Cantow's Clotheslines and If This Ain't Heaven at Metrograph Journal

For some poetic film writing, look no further than Nellie Killian's piece in Metrograph Journal about experimental and documentary filmmaker Roberta Cantow, whose short works Clotheslines (1981) and If This Ain’t Heaven (1984) "provide a perfect introduction to her uniquely intimate style." From further in:

Cantow crafts a soundscape of overlapping voices, chimes, woodwinds, children laughing, gossipy whispers, a woman crying, and a round of applause. The breeze is palpable as the clothes sway on the line. The women talk not just about the tedium of washing clothes but about the neighborhood scuttlebutt the clotheslines generated, the pride they took in a tidy arrangement, and the way their mother’s hanging style elevated the endeavor to an art form. Cantow makes a good case for clotheslines being a form of folk art with each beautifully composed shot. The beauty of the lines and the vividness of the women’s testimonies create a nostalgia, even as they paint the laundry as an endless and all-consuming chore. As one woman says, “When I hang clothes on the line, I think of my mother. When I put clothes in the dryer, I never think of my mother.”

The invisibility and underappreciation of women’s domestic labor hardly ends with the laundry, but there is something especially galling about the erasure of what was (and still is) a quintessential element of the urban landscape. Clotheslines aren’t hidden, they weren’t something women did in the isolation of their own homes, but something completely in the public sphere. The clothesline thrusts a family’s private life into full view, something many of the women talk about with either insecurity or brazen disregard. While the scrutiny could be catty, or cruel, it also speaks to a cohesive community, where people didn’t just know their neighbors’ names, but the color of their underwear.

This urban familiarity is largely absent in the 28-minute If This Ain’t Heaven, at least between the human inhabitants of New York City. The film focuses on Mr. G, who introduces himself as “the man in number 4,” and his cat, Africa. There is an anonymity to Mr. G, a solitary figure who wiles away the hours by talking with Africa.…

Read on at Metrograph Journal. You can watch Clotheslines at Criterion.