Mollie
Tyler Bain
Mollie is an elegy for my late grandmother, Clyda ‘Mollie’ Bain, who passed away in February 2017 at the age of 94. It is a coalescence of two narratives: a visual narrative depicting my daily life under 2020 COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, and an aural narrative composed of two interviews, conducted in 1996 and 2000, between Mollie and my father.
Mollie was shot between August 2020 and March 2021. Depressed and restless, I had been obsessively filming my day-to-day life, with no particular outcome or goal in mind, when, in the process of moving house, I came across the several hours of my father’s interviews with Mollie that I had digitised years before and forgotten about.
Listening back to the tapes, I found a strange similarity between my father’s direct, unemotional approach to archiving his mother’s life and family history, and my own obsession with recording my days, afraid that they would otherwise be lost.
Mollie is a document, as well as an attempt to approximate the relationship between my father’s and my own archival processes, and my grandmother’s life.
I ended up moving two doors down the road, and I’m happier now.
Mollie was shot between August 2020 and March 2021. Depressed and restless, I had been obsessively filming my day-to-day life, with no particular outcome or goal in mind, when, in the process of moving house, I came across the several hours of my father’s interviews with Mollie that I had digitised years before and forgotten about.
Listening back to the tapes, I found a strange similarity between my father’s direct, unemotional approach to archiving his mother’s life and family history, and my own obsession with recording my days, afraid that they would otherwise be lost.
Mollie is a document, as well as an attempt to approximate the relationship between my father’s and my own archival processes, and my grandmother’s life.
I ended up moving two doors down the road, and I’m happier now.