Grandma's Bottle Village: The Art of Tressa Prisbrey (1982)

Overview

Third in the series "Visions of Paradise." Directed by Allie Light and Irving Saraf. 1982. Grandma Tressa Prisbrey built her first bottle house to hold her 17,000 pencils. This was the beginning of The Bottle Village in Simi Valley, Calif. At 84, Grandma Prisbrey is a vivacious guide to her brilliant houses crammed with objects scavenged from the county dump. At her wittiest-she sings, jokes with her older sister, and combs through the dump. The film is an exploration of Grandma Prisbrey's creativity, pizzazz and sense of the absurd. The film lovingly documents the interiors of 15 of her houses, including Cleopatra's Bedroom, The Round House, as well as the marvelous sidewalk mosaics -- all masterpieces of assemblage art and tapestries of artifacts from the first half of the 20th century.