On Sarah Friedland's Choreographies of Aging

Margaret Tait’s Portrait of Ga, part of the program Choreographies of Aging at Metrograph

On a windy Scottish day, a grey-haired woman in a long coat strides jauntily up a hill, smiling as she picks up a flower and enjoys a cigarette. So begins the priceless four-minute film A Portait of Ga (1952) by doctor-turned-poet-turned-filmmaker Margaret Tait. Tait’s film of her mother is as jaunty as its subject, composed of small gestures including a closeup of the mother’s dextrous and delicate hands unwrapping a glistening piece of butterscotch candy. It is in essence a dance film, observing the woman’s simple movements. The mother may be aging, but all we can feel is her vitality. Here is someone whose days may be numbered (as are all of ours) but who is taking great pleasure in each moment of existence.

The film is part of a wondrous Metrograph program Choreographies of Aging: A Short Film Program curated by Sarah Friedland, writer-director of last year’s assured feature Familiar Touch, with Kathleen Chalfant as an elderly woman adjusting to the onset of dementia and her new life in an assisted living residence. That film was rare in its unsentimental empathy and interest in the inner lives of old people. Familiar Touch clearly inspired Friedland’s Metrograph series, Coming of Age, which includes the shorts program and is stacked with feature-length masterpieces including Tokyo Story, The Last Laugh, No Home Movie, Poetry, Umberto D., The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection, and The Beaches of Agnes. While every one of these feature films is worth seeing, the “Choreographies of Aging” program, despite its potentially uninviting title, is an exhilarating and eclectic selection of experimental films that sees life through the perspective of people whose bodies may be showing wear and tear but who also bring genuine exuberance to their daily lives. 

Su Meiling in Dance With Third Grandma

To make Dance with Third Grandma (2015) Chinese-born choreographer and filmmaker Wen Hui went to a remote mountain village to film a recently discovered relative–her grandfather’s aunt–the 88-year-old Su Meiling. With her magnificently wrinkled face, infectious single-toothed grin, and dressed in a bright short purple coat and red knit cap, Su is the most charismatic person I’ve seen on screen in recent memory. With grasped hands and intertwined arms, Wen and Su perform a slow, intimate dance, while seated. These scenes are intercut with moments from Su’s daily life. A three-second shot of a group of piglets bursting through an open gate to attack their feeding trough, startling a majestic colorful rooster in the process, is a thrilling action sequence, punctuating what is otherwise a tender, richly observant document of Wen’s encounter with her “third grandmother.” 

In Kevin Jerome Everson’s three-minute film Ninety-Three (2008), a brief moment in a family celebration is transformed into a richly textured study of perseverance and of the mixed emotions evoked by birthdays. (Slow-rolling death sentence, or cause for celebration?) A 93-year old man blows out all 93 candles on a cake; filmed in a grainy black-and-white closeup in ultra-slow motion, the film captures the man as he focuses all of his energy and concentration on the task at hand; his hard-earned success extinguishing the flickering flames results in a blackening screen. The poignance of the metaphor is undercut by the man’s hard-earned triumph.

Simone Forti, the highly influential modernist choreographer and dancer (a major influence on Yvonne Rainer, who was in turn a key inspiration for Friedland), is both filmmaker and performer in Sleep Walkers/ Zoo Mantras (2017), a simple recording of a deceptively casual solo performance. Forti, dressed in jeans and sweater on what seems to be a crisp fall day, stands on a concrete driveway in front of large metal doors, slowly making animal-like movements as she rolls towards the camera and then away from it, the soundtrack consisting not of music but of off-screen traffic noise. This seven-minute film is an adaptation of one of Forti’s most celebrated dances, which was developed from observational trips to a zoo, and was first performed in 1968.

Barbara Hammer’s Optic Nerve (1985) was a breakthrough work for the prolific avant-garde filmmaker, a rapid-fire kinetic montage of home movie material–including Hammer’s footage of her first visit to a nursing home with her grandmother–all of which has been fragmented and transformed with optical printing techniques. These highly cinematic techniques, which turn the film into a cubist dance, have the curious effect of bringing us both emotionally closer to the footage, and creating a distance that invites reflection. As Hammer explained “I tried to introduce emotional feelings to structural film.”

Sarah Friedland’s 2017 film Home Exercises is a playfully structural work organized as though it was a series of VHS home exercise videos, with elderly people going through basic movements that have become more difficult for their creaky bodies; going down stairs, walking dogs, practicing Tai Chi. These mundane activities are made to feel vital, and as with nearly all of the films on the program, they reveal the choreography and the simple beauty of our movement through the world. For the people in Home Exercises, their physical activities are not just a means of getting from Point A to Point B; the movement itself becomes the point.

Although a bit of an outlier on a program so focused on physical gestures, the wonderfully entertaining, drily comic personal essay film Being John Smith (2024) is a reflection on identity and self-worth by the British avant-garde filmmaker with the least avant-garde name imaginable. Smith has made more than fifty films since 1972; he made this film after a battle with brain cancer, which drove him towards this introspective study. Smith acknowledges in the film how strange it is to be making inward-looking personal films today, during a time of constant global crisis. Weighty philosophical, artistic, and political questions emerge  during the film, but always with a light touch, and as all of the films on the program can boast, with grace and wisdom that are among the benefits of aging.