*Virginia Woolf For Woolf, one's mothers are also one's artistic and historic precursors. They provide an inheritance-the desire to create, access to the past, stories to reinterpret, and the possibility of change. In Anna Campion's family drama, The Audition (1990, 24 mins, Color), Jane Campion, the filmmaker's sister, auditions their mother for the role of a schoolteacher in the film An Angel at My Table. One senses that the resulting unease is actually with their roles of mother and daughter. Gunvor Nelson encounters the past through her gaze at her mother, bedridden in the present, in Time Being (1991, 8 mins, B&W). Su Friedrich questions her mother about her life in Nazi Germany in The Ties that Bind (1984, 55 mins, B&W). Friedrich's questions are scratched directly into the surface of the film. One writes, the other speaks, one asks, the other answers. While the roles of mother and daughter are rethought so that both teach and learn, create and interpret, the sense of ambiguity is inescapable. Friedrich can imagine another story, told by a mother more political, more like herself. And yet her mother's experiences intensify both of their personal perspectives. In "thinking back," the historical becomes internalized, the personal externalized. -Kathy Geritz