CLOTHESLINES reviewed by Laurence Barratt-Manning
With the rain gone and the sun bright, I was inspired to watch Roberta Cantow's CLOTHESLINES over lunch, a half hour documentary about laundry: as ritual, necessity, artistry, and labour. It comprises beautiful 16mm footage of washing (on lines, in baskets, in laundromats, sometimes even on people) across New York cultures and socio-economic backgrounds, with a commentary of twenty or so middle-aged women reflecting and philosophising on what for them is often a daily task and a cornerstone of their domestic, married lives coded as "women's work". The voices aren't labelled or separated, but it's not really a feeling of anonymity you get here but of a communal body, organic links and connections between speakers. Occasionally, the voices drown each other out in a polyphonous babble, or fade into the gently psychedelic jazz background.
What emerges from these commentaries is a very rich picture of domestic and psychological life as framed by the laundry: not just the task itself and what it makes these women think of (or how they weave it into their psychic life) but maybe the mental space afforded by the physical monotony - time to think and dream. There's fascinating insights coming one after another: conceptions of laundry as a way of feeling control in an otherwise male-dominated life, as a status symbol (the perfection of the whites, the rigour of the hanging, hanging men's socks as a sign of a partner), as a cleansing ritual (something I've always enjoyed about doing the laundry) or just as a fucking neverending backache, a sisyphean flow of dirty socks and sheets. To all these reflections there's resignation, hope, humour, and a touch of the special kind of mysticism reserved for our private, inner, almost unconsidered lives.
It's in this half-believed mysticism that you get some of the strongest reflections...the artistry of the washing, as emerging from a "non-artistic" person or task (I found one of the woman's descriptions extremely compelling: of her mother's unenjoyed, unwanted, yet absolute *mastery* of folding clothes). There's intonations of washing on the line as ghosts of the wearers, or as sculpture. More than anything there's the sense of washing as communication between women, households, streets, families, generations: the signs given by different articles of clothing, the chatter across the fence or through the window, and once again, the mental time found in having no-time. at this point, the film almost no longer seems to be about washing at all, but the entire everyday, domestic backdrop of life and the web of interlinked existence that grows from it, voices reaching each other across time through shared tasks.
it pretty much all adds up to one thing, which is the apparently constant physical and mental creativity and resolve these women have, whether despairing or joyous. The line (among many) that stuck out most of all to me was near the end, when the job of laundry was described simply and inescapably as "just part of life". There's a tendency towards looking life squarely in the face here, a bravery that is absent in stoics, marines or self-help gurus. At one point, a woman's laughter is extended and extended again until it could be (and perhaps is) tears.
Laurence Barratt-Manning
