Posters, Patterns, and Pop

This article looks at the collage form and stop-motion in Jodie Mack’s Dusty Stacks of Mom as a type of cinematic “hoarding” and feminist historiography. Hoarding is often considered to be the socially deviant behavior of one who lacks control over their own desire to preserve objects and is considered to be the antithesis of collecting (or archiving). The image of the hoarder, as Anne Pfeifer observes, is that of an “old, reclusive, unmarried, female.” I argue that Mack aestheticizes hoarding, a potential form of feminized labor, in her film toward a feminist critique of forms of gendered labor devalued under capitalism. Dusty Stacks of Mom is an intergenerational project of archiving and feminist world-making that uses the aesthetics of hoarding to tell a touching story of filial bonds while questioning what happens to historical experience and the archive with increasing virtualization.