Many Women Make Movies films deal with the construction of the feminine self through maternal identification. A variety of themes -- such as body image, illness, aging, -- are used to explore the mother-daughter relationship as it relates to the development of identity. In this passage, Brauerhoch briefly discusses psychoanalytic theory of the mother-child relationship, and applies it to Mommie Dearest (1981), a film based on the memoirs of Joan Crawford's adopted daughter, Christina. Brauerhoch's discussion is important to consider for its potential application to WMM films that deal with similar issues. She writes:

For the child, the face of the mother is a battleground for many contradictory and dynamic processes. With psychoanalysis' (and in extension film theory's) shift from ego psychology to object relation theory, the face (although still too neglected) came into focus as a precursor to the mirror. What the baby first sees in the mother's face is a reaction to itself: the face reflects the child back to him/herself. What it sees, then, is affirmation or negation. The face of the mother is therefore closely connected to processes of happy symbiosis as well as necessary ego differentiation and super-ego formation: pleasure and pain. Some of this seems to reverberate through the cinema, not least of all because films are able to show faces from a privileged, intimate perspective which only the child once had. In close-ups, especially of women, we may find traces of that time when the mother's face was the center of our world but whose reflections we could not always trust. Seen in this light, a film like Mommie Dearest looks like a reaction to the instability of the "goodness" in the mother's face, due to a process of gradual disillusionment. The face of Dunaway in this film serves to work out (or create) insecurities as to 'truth' and 'falseness' of 'mother' ". (58)

In the Women Make Movies film Daughter Rite, director Michelle Citron utilizes the "privileged, intimate perspective" of the child by interspersing audio of journal readings over very short, looped clips of home movie images (often shown in close-ups) featuring a mother and two daughters. The repetition of the somewhat blurred black and white movie clips is dizzying and unsettling, further adding to the film's theme of the daughter's conflicted feelings about her mother. In Daughter Rite, a sense of the "instability of the 'goodness' in the mother's face" is suggested, in part because the mother is only portrayed through photographs, rather than filmed on camera. How does the photographic close-up (considered the child’s perspective) differ from the close-up of the classically male gaze? What happens when the daughter gazes, rather than a man? Is Citron replicating Hollywood-style cinematic techniques or commenting on them?

In this chapter, Fischer looks at documentary and avant-garde films that deal with the mother-daughter bond, including many that are WMM films (Daughter Rite and Coffee-Coloured Children among them). Fischer argues that feminist filmmakers have broadened the spectrum of these types of female relationships.

Within the theory of realist cinema, the screen has been configured as a ‘window on the world’ ironically, the only such portal at which woman is not entirely welcome. By deforming the codes of realism, by distorting Baudrillard’s masculine Truth, feminist filmmakers have expanded the cinematic horizon to accommodate a maternal outlook. . . In this respect, feminist filmmakers have made the screen not only a window but a mirror . . .one that reflects the image of mother and daughter as positioned within the frame of gender, race, and nation. (210)

If “feminist filmmakers have expanded the cinematic horizon to accommodate a maternal outlook” can films such as Daughter Rite, (which primarily focuses on the daughter’s outlook) still function to “reflect the image of mother and daughter”? Or does it only reflect the image of the daughter? Many of the mother-daughter films in the WMM repertoire were made by daughters who wanted to explore their relationship to their mothers. Does this complicate the notion of the “maternal outlook”? Does the distinction between the maternal outlook and the daughter's outlook matter?

In this article, Linda Williams considers a narrative genre called the “maternal melodrama,” which deals with issues of motherhood (most often the relationship between mothers and daughters). She utilizes feminist and psychoanalytic discourse (with theorists such as Laura Mulvey, Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, Adrienne Rich and Julia Kristeva) to construct her argument on the utility of this genre. This article serves as an excellent source for theory that is applicable to discussions of the mother/daughter relationship in film. Williams concludes her essay with this:

The divided female spectator identifies with the woman whose very triumph is often in her own victimization, but she also criticizes the price of a transcendent “eradication” which the victim-hero must pay. Thus, although melodrama’s impulse towards the just “happy ending” usually places the woman hero in a final position of subordination, the “lesson” for female audiences is certainly not to become similarly eradicated themselves. For all its masochism, for all its frequent devaluation of the individual person of the mother (as opposed to the abstract ideal of motherhood), the maternal melodrama presents a recognizable picture of woman’s ambivalent position under patriarchy that has been an important source of realistic reflections of women’s lives. This may be why the most effective feminist films of recent years have been those works like Sally Potter’s Thriller, Michelle Citron’s Daughter Rite, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman . . ., and even Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating that work within and against the expectations of female self-sacrifice experienced in maternal melodrama (22-23).