A double exposure, a portrait of a body, a house that oscillates between its narrative past and its literal presence. The melodramatic, 1950s films of amateur filmmaker Joan Thurber Baldwin are psychically projected onto the house in which my grandmother raised seven kids as it is cleaned out and put up for sale after she passed away. Upholding the narrative structures of melodrama that often center around men, even when the films are about women, the film asks the viewer, as Thurber says in her introduction, to pay attention to the peripheries.
>Very interesting and largely metaphysical work. A wonderful but also oppressive energy is felt, not only the panning and the subsequent -dramatization without people, or characters dramatizing-, but also, a kind of unknown restlessness to listen to in this very peculiar short film as an echo impregnated in the furniture and things, chairs and Carpet moments from the past, or from the alternative present of -what I understand- are key fragments of controversies or misunderstandings of life, I repeat, we ignore the spectators, perhaps only with the exception of Elsaesser or close relatives, such as couple or family dilemmas, because there is no sister or sister-in-law and the husband or brother, very much apart from the epistolary passage as enigmatic as it alludes to the director's grandmother. I love narrative exploration with such imponderable syntax. I've already seen it twice, I think Elsaesser should explore this sui generis vein more, I will continue to applaud these 'unique perspectives'.