A Blanket of Sameness

Opa, Oma, Astrid (2020) Analysis

By Kleopatra Vorria

How does one make use of their time? In Anne Schoemaker’s 8-minute video piece Opa, Oma, Astrid,
the first thing one’s mind picks up on is the patience and deliberation with which the family portrait is
being laid out before us. The camera’s gaze is gentle, allowing its subjects to lead the way and letting the
spaces around them breathe. Outside of the film’s three titular subjects, if one pays close attention,
three more can be pinpointed that interact in revealing ways with the former: Schoemaker herself from
behind the lens, the house, and finally time. Setting aside the house itself as a space of everyday life, I
am more interested in the short film’s relation to time, experienced through repetition and the
household’s rituals. At the film’s centre, time takes on a seductive texture; an unmalleable element of life
that one can simply fill in with that which is all-familiar.

The three people at the heart of this film live ostensibly repetitive lives: in retirement or working a
part-time job delivering mail, their time is mainly occupied around the domestic sphere. That is the
space where the film allows its audience to peer into. Relative to that gaze is Rita Felski’s engagement
with repetition as “the temporality of the everyday”. “[Everyday life] refers not to the singular or unique
but to that which happens ‘day after day’” (81). Its time is cyclical instead of linear (84), perpetual. In
shaping that cyclical sense, the lives of those at the centre of the film are built upon through multiple
repetitive acts: Opa (Dutch for grandfather) immersed in the caretaking of the garden or Oma
(grandmother) handling chores, and further on rituals or habits, such as that of counting newspapers out
loud. A moment of interest arises when, before the halfway mark, Oma remarks on Astrid’s newspapers
being late as they look out the window – another action that forms a habit. The routine has been
disrupted.

The biggest disruptor of the household is found in the camera – and by extension Schoemaker herself. Its
presence for its audience is most of the time muted, yet each person captured by it reacts differently to
its gaze. The two elders learn to utilize it as a way to bring out ‘the distinctiveness’ of their everyday life,
revealing parts of their own private worlds. The first time this is apparent is in Opa’s exhibition of a leaf
eating bug, as he notably puts effort into getting it “camera-ready” and carefully picking out a leaf to
display it on, eager to allow it a narrative of its own. The camera later on follows Oma into a an
unspecified children’s bedroom, where once again we are let on to a more private ritual, her meticulous
attention to the stance of the toys decorating the space and sitting down to sing along to John Denver’s
“Take Me Home, Country Roads”, effectively performing for the spectator and the one behind the
camera. In these moments a utopian impulse of routine becomes apparent (79), as the two people
assert pridefully their familiarity with the space they inhabit.

To fully comprehend the effect of time as a tangible form in repetition however, one needs to examine
the behaviour of the third titular subject: Astrid. Astrid never feels truly at ease in front of the camera’s
gaze. Always seemingly aware of her observer, her movement becomes strained and her words are
limited, her eyes unavoidably coming back to the centre of the lens. Although Astrid is not the only one
to acknowledge the camera itself, she is unique in her framing of it as an intrusive presence, refusing to
perform in front of it and effectively rendering her experience of everyday-ness as dissimilar, inauthentic.
Evidently, through the assertion of the camera in the family’s space, something sacred has been
trespassed, something has shifted. In appraising this invisible transgression, we can turn our attention to

Highmore’s examination of the seductiveness of routine. “The lure of routine is to surrender to a certain
temporal rhythm” (146). Highmore makes the distinction between routine and the pursuit of intellectual
projects, defining this surrender as “pleasure in the form of self-nullification” (146). Similarly, Felski
asserts that everyday life is typically “distinguished from the exceptional moment” (80). It is the
non-heroic, the mundane. However, in this discourse of ‘surrender’ and ‘unexceptionality’, there is little
seductiveness to be found. The true allure of repetition as a temporal experience lies in its inherent
comfort, in its ability to build autonomy in the spaces its subjects inhabit. As Felski expands: “everyday
rituals may help to safeguard a sense of personal autonomy and dignity, or to preserve the distinctive
qualities of a threatened way of life”. The control of habitude creates solace, through its intransigent
nature, as routine is what founds the personable. “We become who we are through acts of repetition”
(84). To reiterate, Astrid’s unease in front of the lens happens as such because of her recognition of the
filmmaker as someone out of place, not a part of her habitual spaces, an existence she cannot allow to
blend into the background.

Schoemaker’s greatest grace is the stoicism of her lens. The manner in which her subjects allow
themselves to be present in front of it, sometimes in acts of self-performance, sometimes in acts of
defiance, the foreground and background in conversation with each other. The rituals and habits
encapsulated in either of those moments are what reveal the fragility of the spaces they have
constructed. The three characters have confined themselves in these spaces, some resolving themselves
to the exterior, some grounded in the house’s interiors, complacent with observing the outside world
through their home’s windows. Through these replicated moments the amorphous sameness of
everyday life transforms into a textural comfort. “The charms, possibilities and problems of habit are at
the heart of ordinary life’s complex orchestration. It is the accommodation of the human sensorium to
the rhythms of external life” (Highmore, 153). The comfort of the expectable carries within it its own
complexity and resistance. It lies in the moments where the camera stays on the rhythm of the watering
system, in the view of a bird perching on the very top of an old tree, in the sound of newspapers stacking
up. In the subtextual substance of those moments, time becomes personal, essential in its lack of
consequence.

Works Cited

Felski, Rita. Doing Time : Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. New York ; London, New York University Press, Cop, 2000.

Highmore, Ben. Ordinary Lives : Studies in the Everyday. London, Routledge, 2011.

Schoemaker, Anne. “Opa, Oma, Astrid.” Anne Schoemaker, 2020, anneschoemaker.nl/opaomaastrid.