The Mom Tapes
Ilene Segalove American
A child of the 1950s, Segalove was slightly too young to identify fully with the countercultural revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Mom Tapes is a brilliantly sharp, funny, and sad look at the generation of her parents through a set of quasi-anthropological interviews with her own mother (conducted using the newly available Porta-Pak video camera) as she wanders through and around their Beverly Hills home. This “Greatest Generation" was consigned to oblivion by their hippie children, and Segalove's subject seems a ghost wandering through the Escher-like house giving advice on which butcher to go to or where to buy a cocktail dress—the kinds of questions that would provoke contempt in up-to-date young people. But Segalove's tone is affectionate and melancholy, not mocking—perhaps because she knows that a culture that values only the new will ultimately consign her to the same fate.
