Screening

Film Screening: The Motherhood Archives (2013)

31 Oct 2013

Regular hours

Thursday
11:00 – 19:00

Cost of entry

Free

Save Event: Film Screening: The Motherhood Archives (2013)

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The Photographers' Gallery

London, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Just off Oxford Street so accessible by bus services to Oxford Street and a 2 minute walk from Oxford Circus Tube Station.
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About

The Motherhood Archives (2013) Directed by Irene Lusztig. Archival montage, science fiction, and an homage to 70s feminist filmmaking are all woven together to form this haunting and lyrical film excavating hidden histories of childbirth in the twentieth century. Assembling an extraordinary archive of over 100 educational, industrial, and medical training films (including newly rediscovered Soviet and French childbirth films) The Motherhood Archives inventively untangles the complex, sometimes surprising genealogies of maternal education. From the first use of anesthetic ether in the 19th century to the postmodern 21st century hospital birthing suite, The Motherhood Archives charts a fascinating course through the cultural history of pain, the history of obstetric anesthesia, and the little-known international history of the natural childbirth and Lamaze movements. Revealing a world of intensive training, rehearsal, and performative preparation for the unknown that is ultimately incommensurate with experience, The Motherhood Archives is a meditation on the maternal body as a site of institutional control, ideological surveillance, medical knowledge, and nationalist state intervention. The film works both as a feminist recuperation of obsolete maternal histories and as a visual analysis of the persistent disciplining of the pregnant / laboring body. Free, booking required via The Photographers' Gallery website.

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