Schmaltz Grüb

Schmaltz Grüb
Project produced at Yaddo
Location: Saratoga Springs, NY
Film Duration 8 Minutes 10 Seconds
2025

Featuring A Poem for a Hole
read and written by Eleanor Stanford

Schmaltz Grüb was made possible by Yaddo.

Schmaltz Grüb is a surreal short film set in a world where detritus and holes speak. Shot during a summer residency at Yaddo, the work navigates the emotional terrain of absence and absurdity. Ignored and overlooked spaces become sites where tension, humor, and longing co-mingle. Echoing Lynchian sensibilities and elements of Herzog’s film Fata Moragana, Schmaltz Grüb reveals an alternate reality where voids become visible and personal history takes shape.

The narration heard in the film is of a poem written and read aloud by Eleanor Stanford, titled— A Poem for a Hole. It was created specifically for the film to serve as its foundational mythology. Stanford’s voice was modulated to imbue the narration with more androgynous and mystic qualities.

The film merges Stanford’s uncanny narration and vocal resonant frequencies with imagery of overlooked forested spaces and serves as a meditation on memory, loss, and the strange persistence of what’s been discarded and forgotten. Sounds and objects emerge. Holes open. Stories linger but don’t resolve. In this strange world, there is no center—only the gravitational pull of what’s missing.

A Poem for a Hole
Eleanor Stanford

I started as a small hole.
It was a time of rising temperatures. Of an abundance of mammals—of the first horses, bats and whales.
Someone tossed a ping pong paddle into the hole.

The hole was a riddle I was trying to solve.
A fragment of song that wouldn’t resolve.                

Childhood was a kind of hole. A cool dark rapture. I lifted my arms to the sky.

You can throw a lot of things into a hole.
Those clouds mean the weather is changing, Anna said.
Cumulonimbus—into the hole.
Despair, metaphysics—into the hole.

It was a time of hypnotic looping. Of keeping score. The second epoch of the Tertiary Period.

Pregnancy was another kind of hole. The kind you dig for yourself, then have to lie down in.

The rush of the traffic intensified. Whistle of tractor trailers. Hum of the drone.

You’re still in the birth canal, Jess said. That’s why it’s so dark. That’s why it’s hard to move.

We were talking on the phone, me in the birth canal, her in Petaluma.

It can be a scary thing, a hole.
You need to keep your wits about you.

My sixteen-year old texted me from the interior of Bahia. We are having many spiritual breakthroughs, he texted. He also sent a video of a three-legged dog.

The absurdity of the hole. How we keep trying to pretend it’s not a hole.              

My grandmother used to say, of someone touched by good luck, that they had fallen into a schmaltz grüb—a tub of chicken fat.

She chewed her words softly. She was deeply depressed, but her favorite song was Bésame Mucho. She would sing it with abandon, with fabulous gusto.

The hole, one might say, was a schmaltz grüb.

The hole doesn’t miss the shovel. This is what I tell myself when my children don’t call for weeks.

Why didn’t anyone tell us it would be like this, Jess and I kvetched to each other.

It was a time of our children leaving home. Of one extinction event after another.

My oldest son asked me what I think about karma. We were covered in dirt, sharing one pair
of gardening gloves. Our tools were insufficient to the task.

The hole has plenty to say about karma.

The nation is broken, but the hills and rivers remain, said Li Po, a thousand years ago.

And now? This muddy hole by the highway.

The prayer that goes, the unadorned body is beautiful. The one that goes, I’m down in a hole, I’m down in a hole, down in a deep dark hole. You should grow like an onion, my grandmother also used to say. With your head in the ground.