New on 16mm: Nursing History by Marian McMahon
Posted June 17th, 2015 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Films, News / Events
Canyon Cinema is honored to offer Nursing History by the late, great Marian McMahon for loan on 16mm. Marian McMahon’s contributions to Canadian critical film and video practice have had a substantial impact on contemporary art discourse in Canada. Her work created a dialogue for women’s experiences, interlacing personal and shared subjectivities to examine the dominant framework of the Canadian nationhood and history. For more information on McMahon and her work, please see her filmmaker page.
Nursing History (1989 | 10 minutes | color | sound)
Nursing History began as an inquiry into the nature of woman’s work, specifically the relationship between woman’s work as wives and mothers, and woman’s work as nurses. Having worked as a nurse for ten years, I decided to locate this inquiry historically, within my own past as represented in the home movies that, for the most part, my father had made and that stand as a record of our family’s collective history.
From 1968-1984, 60 minutes worth of history, on Super 8 film, were recorded. Out of this footage there were forty minutes of weddings and in each case it was the bridge that was related to our family. In reviewing this public record of interpreted events, I found myself living within memories of events that could not be seen. While watching these familiar faces represented in this official history, I recalled other versions of the events recorded, as well as other events that didn’t get recorded but had occurred at the same time. I began to ask what else was being recorded here and whose histories were these images claiming to represent? (MM)
