Dial M for Mother

The penetrating ring of a telephone dominates the soundscape of “Dial M for Mother” allowing neither protagonist nor viewer space to breathe. Likewise, the visual field is saturated, images of the American independent icon Gena Rowlands filling the screen almost persistently. Eli Cortiñas Hidalgo has dissected and reassembled three films by John Cassavetes where Rowlands plays the lead (“A Woman Under the Influence”, “Opening Night”, and “Gloria”), the resultant loop presenting a breath-taking tour de force through the depths of the human psyche. An unresolved mother-daughter conflict comes to the surface, revealing itself as a struggle for identity and autonomy that can be neither won nor lost. Cortiñas works with found footage and material from her own archive, including telephone conversations with her mother, expertly separating it into audio and visual elements, which she then brings together to form a collage where new semantic fields emerge. The viewer’s focus is constantly wrested to and fro between various sequences, heightening the tension. The interplay between real and imaginary space, documentation and fiction, as well as off-screen and on-screen elements serve to make this a work of great complexity.