In 1885, two boys came across a large collection of Chumash Indian religious artefacts in a cave in California’s San Martin Mountains. Later named Bowers Cave, it is now located on a landfill site. Lee Lynch and Lee Anne Schmitt’s graceful, protean short braids together a panoply of different texts and images to unearth the different layers to this all-too American story and allow its wider implications to resonate: photos of museum exhibits given their Chumashan names in voice-over, historical quotes that move across views of contemporary industrial activity, Indigenous figures rendered as bright plastic toys, the mouth of the cave and the markings carved into its walls.

A granddaughter visits her grandmother in her house in the country, her grandmother is close to 100. We never see the granddaughter, as she is the one behind the camera, and we only see the grandmother fleetingly, moving through the shadowy interiors, gathering herbs from the vegetable patch to make tea, watching a mantis perch on her hand. But this is as much a portrait of her as it is of the space she inhabits, although we never see the whole of that either, just carefully selected fragments in compositions that play with focus and shade: knick-knacks and trinkets, photographs, textures, glimpses of sky through the window, ants, butterfly wings, resting pigeons, a wasp nestled in her palm, the fur of the last remaining dog.
Sounds ebb and flow through this hushed bestiary of the everyday, the voice of the grandmother talking in voice-over of family, spirits and canine reincarnation, the noises of the places in the photos, the television blaring in the background, the different layers of rippling silence that reassert themselves when everything else goes quiet. How do you capture a whole life in just 20 minutes? By listening to its echoes in space.

“There was this great doctor who stitched me up with such gentle accuracy.” Catholicism and mental distress are entwined in the mother’s life. The grainy 16mm material shows scratches, other, physical scars are mentioned in voice-over. In this resistant miniature, respect for decisiveness triumphs over criticism of moral judgement. A few images, a giggle and a song sung together suffice to achieve this. References remain open, the ambivalence arising between the black-and-white images of interiors, medicinal and devotional arrangements, between on and off, is allowed to stand. Even in the bible there are people who have lost the strength to live. At the end, lotion has softened the skin, and images, text and singing are gently stitched together.