Celebrating a commodity like Mother's Day may feel especially fraught in the face of ongoing threats to abortion access, a global backlash against feminism and widespread queer/transphobia. It is precisely in such times that motherhood must be examined for its pointillistic complexity, to prevent maternal suffering from being crudely distorted. Presented in 35mm prints that make even the murkiest depths of despair shimmer, the Harvard Film Archive's selection of films—Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), Pier Paolo Pasolini's Mamma Roma (1962), John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Martin Scorsese's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), Chantal Akerman's News From Home (1976), Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother (1999) and Bong Joon-ho's Mother (2009)—pulls back the curtain and reveals the mother to be a historical subject with far more contradictory motivations than valiant love.

The films in this series take apart the naturalization of maternal suffering by foregrounding what lies beneath the noble appearance of sacrifice: obsession bred by a fear of rejection, resentment towards the family unit as a usurper of autonomy. The tipping point where selflessness becomes an alienating self-obliteration forms a chasm between mother and child in Michael Curtiz’s hugely influential Mildred Pierce, a hardboiled maternal melodrama that follows in the footsteps of King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937). In hopes of earning her daughter Veda’s love, single mother Mildred becomes fixated on attaining upper-class gentility. Curtiz depicts Mildred in near-constant movement—her transition from cooking and cleaning to shuffling across office buildings and restaurants shows that not only has she always worked, but she has also never dreamed.

This maternal work ethic, which demands private yearnings be placed on the backburner, should be understood as a pained response to history rather than a given virtue. Mildred Pierce's entrepreneurial spirit derives from a refusal to relive the Great Depression; ironically, she cannot protect her children from inheriting a paranoia about never having enough. For his seventies-set tribute to the woman’s picture, Scorsese places the heroine of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore in the overwhelmingly wide expanse of possibility carved out by the women’s liberation movement. Shedding her habits as a former housewife, Alice makes an awkward heel-turn towards independence and allows her once-forsaken dream of becoming a singer to no longer be a modest hobby. Released the same year as Alice, Cassavetes' claustrophobic A Woman Under the Influence takes on this same juncture with measured hope. The film follows stay-at-home mother Mabel's attempts to express her free-spirited nature within her sequestered world, and the increasing discomfort she faces from her husband and his mother. By focusing on Mabel's subjectivity as she incrementally ekes out her autonomy, Cassavetes assigns her private resistance just as much historical significance as the larger political revolution occurring outside.

None of the films explicitly identifies a historical crisis or connects one to the narrative at hand; instead, history is treated as a secret. The sex worker Mamma Roma in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma is overjoyed to relocate herself and her son to postwar public housing built on the outskirts of Rome. But her rose-tinted worldview does little to protect her from the reality of how little Italy has progressed since the war and in turn, how little she has moved from the bottom of the ladder. The eighteen months Chantal Akerman’s mother Nelly endured in Auschwitz are never mentioned in the letters read aloud in News from Home, but buried within her words is a palpable separation anxiety. For Mother, Bong Joon-ho moves away from the broader context of class inequality in South Korea and focuses on a mother who pursues vigilante justice for her disabled son. Most of the film’s tension operates on the sheer audacity of the mother to attempt exercising the same authority as a nation-state.

The filtration of history through the tunnel vision of a mother’s survival instincts results in a fractured awareness regarding the lives of others. Both the film Mildred Pierce and Mildred Pierce herself are kind towards but ultimately uninterested in the maid Lottie, played by Black actress Butterfly McQueen—whether this character also has a family or a dream is a total mystery. And although All About My Mother was one of the most successful films featuring trans characters at the time of its release, the film places much weight on the idea that gender transition cannot make a bad father a good mother. To the credit of Almodóvar, who collages his references as ostentatiously as Jean-Luc Godard did in the sixties, All About My Mother is a celebration of inauthenticity that dares to say a cisgender mother is involved in just as much of a performance as a lesbian stage actress, a sexually active nun and a trans sex worker.

Rather than lapse into flat narratives of martyrdom, this program interrogates the mother’s serpentine mysteries—her desires, her memories, her pain—with risks in genre and form inspired by a shared canon of films about motherhood. As a key progenitor, Mildred Pierce lends several expositional details to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (an atypically introspective title in Scorsese’s oeuvre), and its genre-bending to Mother. All About My Mother conjoins the sentimentality of the woman’s picture with the unwieldy vulnerability embodied by Gena Rowlands (thanked in the film's end credits) in A Woman Under the Influence and Opening Night (1977). Chantal Akerman expressed great affection for the “documentary dimension” of Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, in particular its tracking shots (which, in rhythm, resemble those in News from Home and, later, From the East (1993)). The cross-pollination between these films makes for a wonderfully cohesive assemblage of matrilineal film history. – Kelley Dong