Again and again people judged the book not as readers but as mothers, and it was judgment of a sanctimoniousness whose like I had never experienced.

Penelope Leach gives, I think, an accurate definition of postnatal depression: she says that in postnatal depression the mother believes that there is something faulty or abnormally difficult about her child. It used to be incomprehensible to me that women of the time attacked early feminists so violently, that they loudly objected to their own sex being given the vote. DL:Paolo Soleri was the first to agree to be in the film, and the first interview was with him, and the first footage was of Arcosanti. My great love for my children and step-child slowly liberated me from much of what I felt about the past. Andy and Wolfgang have that gift few people have: they instinctively know (after many years of experience) what to shoot, where to put the camera, and how to light the shot.

I am struck by this distinction, for it is clear that they hunger to express themselves not as women, not as commentators or intellectuals, but as mothers. My previous film, Tango Octogenario, took a long, circuitous and bizarre route to the eyes of a programmer for New Directors/New Films, the showcase put on by Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Andy’s enthusiasm for and positivity in the project sustained me and gave me the confidence to keep going, even after we finished production, maybe especially after production. The reproduction, modification, distribution, or re-publication of the content (including RSS feeds) without prior permission is strictly prohibited. It was a beautiful place in the Brendon Hills in Somerset, the rattling ghost of a grand estate, where a miniature ornamental lake still languished in the overgrown pleasure gardens, and the trees in the neglected orchard shed rare red, heart-shaped apples like the apples in a medieval tapestry. I had a LOT of time to think about the film: the look, the pace, what to shoot, what to ask, how to edit, what was needed, and what was not.

Every single day, some woman with her child strapped into the front seat of her car shakes her head at us.

In a brief introduction, Cusk notes that the memoir was written just six months after her first daughter’s birth and while Cusk was pregnant with her second daughter. You might feel moved to describe the moments of desperation that follow nine hours of incessant wailing. Perhaps strangely, it was the second remark that troubled me more than the possibility that humanity would be extinguished by my hand. Sooner or later, you end up in family therapy, because it has never occurred to you that it might be an idea to simply bring children up to be happy, or to consider happiness as an option for yourself . Motherhood, as it is lived, is still individual, personal, private, and therefore deeply undervalued, sometimes even by those of us (and nowadays that is most of us) who move between the "real" world of work and the shadow world of family life.Despite the number of people who had praised and admired it, and the letters I received to that effect from readers, I regretted, constantly, the fact that I had written A Life's Work. When author Rachel Cusk wrote A Life's Work, her disarmingly frank account of motherhood, she was shocked by the vicious reaction it provoked from other women.

Fittingly, the film begins with Soleri and ends with Stein ruminating about his mentor and what it means to carry on a legacy. It was, perhaps, our isolation - idyllic though it was - that sealed these events in a profound melancholy from which I subsequently found myself unable to escape. I realize, too, that the crying has stopped, that she has survived the first pain of existence and out of it wrought herself. David Licata (DL):I began editing the film myself for financial reasons, but I knew I wasn’t doing the idea and the footage justice.DL:I reached out to organizations and people who were associated with the four topics of the film: architecture, gospel music, astronomy, and arborists. What is really startling about A Life's Work is that it is genuinely post-feminist, not in the sense that we do not need feminism any more, but in the sense that it implicitly points to the holes in the familiar feminist discourse. Paolo Soleri, controversial architect behind Arcosanti, a town designed to test his theories about housing an overpopulated planet while also preserving, and nurturing, the natural environment; and Jeff Stein, AIA, Soleri’s mentee at Arcosanti in the 1970s and his successor after his death in 2013. Although Cusk focuses on the shock, the anxiety, and the guilt of motherhood, the memoir is shot through with profound experiences of love and transformation made possible by her daughter: “One evening, sitting outside in the garden in the dusk, I realize that three months have passed and that summer has come.