Clotheslines always make me think of home. Of Villeray, more precisely—of those lines cutting across the narrow sky of its many alleyways, of garments swaying in the wind; small patches of color against a cloudy backdrop. “They’re like pieces of sculpture,” says a woman in Clotheslines. And this is precisely one of the film’s strengths: through it, the clothesline is elevated to the status of a gently ordinary work of art, even as it becomes the symbol of gendered domestic labor, endlessly repeated, generation after generation. Framed with reverence, the object becomes both a physical and metaphorical thread of a shared history, a history of women who clean, hang, and fold. Throughout the film, a soft polyphony takes shape. Voices, always off-screen, speak alternately of a mind-numbing chore and of a cathartic task; washing and then drying clothes becomes a gesture carefully captured, delicately magnified by Cantow’s camera and tape recorder. The chore is a shared memory.

Charlotte Lehoux
Programmer