Conversations at the Edge (CATE) Resource Guides

A landmark of feminist cinema, Michelle Citron’s staggering Daughter Rite examines the emotional terrain between mothers and daughters while underscoring the many ways the personal is also political. The film links together scenes from her own family’s home movies, verité-style scenes of two sisters unraveling family secrets, and a diaristic voiceover that delves into a daughter's complex feelings of suffocation, anger, and love for her mother. Together, these interlocking parts also raise profound questions about media’s claims on reality and truth. The film’s innovative structure was informed by her connections to Chicago’s community of feminist organizers, makers, and theorists, many of whom had been a part of Films By Women/Chicago ’74.

After the screening, Citron will join scholar B. Ruby Rich—one of the Film Center’s founding programmers and a key figure behind Films By Women/Chicago ’74—for a discussion about Daughter Rite and the influential ideas and communities that shaped its creation.

Michelle Citron is an award-winning film and digital artist whose work explores the lives of women and the border between documentary and fiction through melodrama, home movies, snapshots, and memoir. Citron’s work has screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, as well as at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and New Directors/New Films in New York. Her films and interactive narratives are in the permanent collections of over 250 universities and museums. Citron’s book, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (1999, University of Minnesota Press), is the recipient of multiple awards, including a Special Commendation from the And/Or (formerly Kraszna-Krausz) Book Awards, which described the book as offering “a radical new way of thinking and writing about film.” Citron’s films are archived in the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Academy Film Archive; her interactive art is archived in the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University; and her papers are archived in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research at the University of Wisconsin/Madison.

Artist Website

Living With Our Pain, and Love: On Daughter Rite [Article]
Jane Feuer | Jump Cut | October 1980

The Right of Re-Vision: Michelle Citron's Daughter Rite [Book Chapter]*
Rich, B. Ruby and Linda Williams | in Chick Flicks: Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement | Duke University Press, 1998
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login

Concerning Daughter Rite [Article]*
Michelle Citron | Journal of Film and Video | 1986-87
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Holding the Jalopy Together: The Optical Printer and DIY Culture [Book Chapter]*
John Powers | in Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture | Oxford University Press, 2023
*This is a library resource that requires ARTIC login

Women and Film: A Discussion of Feminist Aesthetics [Article]*
Michelle Citron, Julia Lesage, Judith Mayne, B. Ruby Rich, Anna Marie Taylor | New German Critique |1978
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Films by Women/Chicago ’74
Festival Program.

Conversations at the Edge Lecture Recordings
Conversation at the Edge video recordings (2016–present.) Available with SAIC login credentials.