“Domestic work offers both an agonizing ennui and the satisfaction of a necessary task being completed. In the 1981 documentary Clotheslines, filmmaker Roberta Cantow mines these two moods, as well as the subtler emotions that fill the distance between them. Over the course of this thirty-two-minute, nearly ekphrastic meditation on the art of laundry, we listen to twenty-one women reconcile their feelings about this mundane chore. Cantow’s interviews with them play out over impressionistic 16 mm footage of high-hanging delicates, vigorous handwashing, and socks being clipped one by one onto nearly invisible lines. ... Clotheslines expands on a tradition of feminist cinema established in the seventies by a wave of filmmakers who aired their own grievances on similar themes, including Chantal Akerman, Julia Reichert, Amalie R. Rothschild, and Claudia Weill. ...”
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