Hollie Lavenstein

As a teacher of filmmaking, I’ve become interested over the years in a peculiar genre of photograph—stills taken from student films featuring parents and grandparents, conscripted against their will. Some parents and grandparents, unable to conceal their irritation, break character, balk, and glare at the camera in mid-sentence or gesture. Others—I call them “the stoics”—perform with frozen smiles, no matter what the character they are playing might be undergoing. But some, like the woman pictured here, generously give themselves over to their roles. She has done her own make up. She wears her own nightgown. She pretends to wake from her actual bed in her actual bedroom in her actual house. But in spite of the fact that she tries to do everything that her granddaughter asks of her and in the manner in which she asks her to do it, this woman knows she’s not up to it. I think you can see it in her face. Am I doing this right? Who will see it? Will I look as foolish as I feel?