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WISDOMS OF DREAMS
MoMA Retrospective Salutes Local Lesbian Auteur
by IOANNIS MOOKAS, Gay City News Review
Volume 5, Number 39 Sept. 28 - Oct. 4, 2006
Thirty years ago Su Friedrich moved to New York, and for nearly
as long, she has been patiently creating a body of subversively
autobiographical, formally daring films. Usually filed under lesbian,
feminist, or experimental cinema, her work surpasses category. MoMA’s
mid-career retrospective, like a cherry on their two-scoop queer
series this summer, is a welcome chance to catch up with Friedrich’s
recent video works and marvel again at her classics.
The city into which Friedrich emerged in 1978 with her first Super-8
short “Hot Water” sure was a different place. Beguiling
urban views punctuate her early work, one of their incidental charms:
the vanished Orchard Street souk in “Cool Hands, Warm Heart”
(1979), weathered, cheek-by-jowl sidewalk merchants selling essential
goods at humane prices; overhead angles of working girls on the
stroll along the Sara Delano Roosevelt park in “But No One”
(1982), shot from the roof of Friedrich’s old building on
Forsyth Street.
In 1984 Friedrich made a quantum breakthrough with the feature-length
“The Ties That Bind,” probing historical memory and
lineal responsibility through a portrait of the artist’s mother
Lore Bucher, whose childhood in Ulm, Germany, was shadowed by Hitler’s
rise. Emulsion-scratched questions alternate with Lore’s account
heard in voiceover while we observe her in asynchronous black-and-white
footage.
As a young woman Bucher met and was brought to the U.S. by the Yankee
soldier Paul Friedrich, who would later achieve renown as a linguist,
divorce her in 1965, and become the subject of his daughter’s
film “Sink or Swim” (1990). The coruscating sensual
beauty of “Sink or Swim” manifests in shifting counterpoint
with its nerve-stripping honesty. Twenty-six poetically condensed,
intermittently harrowing chapters from Friedrich’s life with
dad are organized around an inverted alphabetical schema, from Zygote
to the mythic Athena, Atalanta, and Aphrodite.
“The Ties That Bind” and “Sink or Swim”
were prefigured in part by the current in 1970s documentary and
feminist filmmaking that trained the camera on filmmakers’
own private lives. In turn, Friedrich’s singular innovations
upon the form helped catalyze the early-’90s explosion of
what cinema scholar Michael Renov has called “domestic ethnographies.”
Yet Friedrich has never paraded traumas or “secrets”
lightly; her disclosures are always tempered by great formal rigor
and open continually outward, revealing layered historical and social
inscriptions.
A second breakthrough occurred with “The Odds of Recovery”
(2002), an anamnesis of Friedrich’s six surgeries across her
adult lifetime, owing to various causes and complications from abnormally
elevated levels of the hormone prolactin. Beginning with removal
of a massive cyst from her spleen in 1977, Friedrich leads us through
an odyssey of physical traumas, alienation in the maw of the medical/industrial
complex, emotional turmoil and relationship stress, forays into
Eastern medicine and T’ai Chi, and ultimately a reconstituted
equilibrium, far from the gloomy conclusion initially implied.
“The Odds of Recovery” is at once Friedrich’s
most approachable and visceral work to date. Trading emulsion-etched
lettering for lime-on-black title cards, Friedrich combines metallic
camcorder examining-room footage with luscious 16mm passages of
her garden in Brooklyn, an ideal space of turtles and mockingbirds,
or of herself calmly stitching a needlepoint roundel depicting her
history of illness as a vining creeper, the busy needle evoking
a scalpel. Friedrich indicts medical negligence merely by playing
back her physicians’ obtuse questions or infantilizing prattle.
And yet, “Until I started trying to be healthy,” she
admits, “I didn’t realize how invested I was in being
sick.”
The retrospective also includes the local premiere of Friedrich’s
newest video, “Seeing Red” (2005). Stepping off in a
seemingly buoyant vein, she takes the simplest of motifs as the
vehicle for a diaristic set of mordant riffs. Sanguine tulips, a
child’s carmine windbreaker, construction-site safety netting,
a robin’s breast—a whole giddy menagerie alternates
with a series of static self-portraits cropping her face just out
of frame while she addresses the viewer through an ostentatiously
clipped-on wireless mic, accompanied by samples from Glenn Gould’s
rendition of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”
Friedrich recites the audio-visual dictum that “red doesn’t
look good on camera” while lavishing your eyes with opposing
evidence. Aleatory details—a close-up of a street vender’s
dyed hands dispensing an Italian ice and counting out dollar bills,
a black boy daydreaming alone on a playground—tremble with
feeling. Perhaps there could have been a fraction less product placement
for Staples. But altogether, “Seeing Red” reveals the
artist declining to coast on laurels, pushing herself—and
us—toward newer shores of perception through scrupulous attention
to infinite configurations within the superficially similar. When
we see red, she asks, are we really seeing it?
In a program note reprinted in the Collective for Living Cinema’s
1982 compilation “10 Years of Living Cinema,” Friedrich
wrote, “I also respect those dreams that can create an uncanny
confusion between what was dreamt and what was done ‘in real
life.’ … In general I am more concerned with finding
ways to integrate the (harsh) wisdom of dreams into my life…”
Adept as ever at mining “uncanny confusions,” Friedrich
still has a lode of wisdom to impart. At meridian she’s discovered
that it need not be harsh. And we can keep on dreaming with her. |
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