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THE FILMS OF SU FRIEDRICH
by WILLIAM C. WEES, Senses of Cinema Review
Published: November 2006
Su Friedrich is one of the most important figures in the generation
of filmmakers who changed the course of American avant-garde/avant-garde
film in the 1980s. In contrast with the predominantly formalist
and apolitical “visionary” films of the American avant-garde
from the 1940s to the 1970s, these filmmakers openly engaged with
contemporary social, political and cultural issues while maintaining
the avant-garde tradition of pushing the boundaries of cinematic
form and content. Feminism and lesbian desire and self-realization
figure prominently in Friedrich’s work but, with the exception
of her advocacy documentary The Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire, Too,
her films and videos resist easy categorization, and because she
draws upon a wide range of formal techniques and employs a variety
of formats (from Super-8 and 16mm to several different kinds of
video) there is no clearly marked Friedrich style of filmmaking.
She goes where her life and interests lead her, which makes all
of her work, in a general sense, autobiographical.
Four films – Gently Down the Stream, Sink or Swim, The
Rules of the Road, and The Odds of Recovery
– are overtly autobiographical, but each differs radically
from the others in form and specific subject mater. For the early,
silent Gently Down the Stream, Friedrich drew upon her
dreams for brief, but powerful, erotically charged texts scratched,
word by word, into the film’s emulsion. In keeping with the
dislocated associations of dreams, the relationship for the film’s
words to its images is indirect and metaphorical, rather than literal
and illustrative.
In Sink or Swim, a young girl recounts in voice-over
a series of telling moments in Friedrich’s life, particularly
those involving her father, who divorced her mother and “deserted”
the family while Friedrich was still quite young. While the girl’s
account maintains a narrative coherence in its portrayal of Friedrich’s
mental and emotional life as she grows up and comes to terms with
her deeply ambivalent feelings toward her father, the images seldom
illustrate the denotative meaning of the girl’s words; instead,
they help to extend their implications into metaphoric, symbolic,
and even mythic, realms of signification. The film’s formal
inventiveness and intricacy of cross-references and allusions make
it, in my view, her strongest work and one that amply repays multiple
viewing – which, thanks to the DVD version, is now possible.
While Rules of the Road is less “avant-garde”
than Gently Down the Stream and Sink or Swim,
it nevertheless demonstrates Friedrich’s ingenuity in translating
autobiography into cinematic form. Shot after shot of old station
wagons parked and travelling through the streets of New York create
a theme-and-variation accompaniment for Friedrich’s narration
of the role a 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass Cruiser played in her relationship
with her girlfriend – even after she and her girlfriend break
up. It is a clever and touching film, shot with a sharp eye for
the subtle range of colours and textures offered by old cars and
urban environments, and edited with a sure command of cutting rhythms
and audio-visual relationships.
The Odds of Recovery is the most up-close and personal
of the autobiographical films. Friedrich appears in front of the
camera for substantial portions of the film as she goes through
a series of consultations and examinations in New York hospitals.
With varying degrees of bemusement, frustration and anger, she addresses
the camera directly to recount the history of her medical problems,
including six operations, and their effect on her life generally
and her sex life in particular. The result is a candid, courageous
self-portrait, equally successful in avoiding exhibitionism and
self-pity. It gains in depth of meaning by being interwoven with
other footage depicting Friedrich’s life outside of hospitals
and examining rooms. Two complementary and symbolic activities stand
out: gardening and embroidery. Along with a number of shots of flowers
and vines in a roof-top garden and Friedrich at work in the garden,
there are shots of her embroidering a long, sinuous vine with a
variety of brightly coloured blossoms, blossom-like shapes suggesting
internal organs, and leaves with dates corresponding to the low
points in her medical history: a “1985” leaf next to
an “Abscess on ovary” leaf, a “1989-99”
leaf next to a “High prolactin level” leaf, etc. The
embroidered vine, like the film itself, distils messy life into
the orderly patterns of art.
Of the remaining films, the most controversial – at least
when it appeared – is Damned If You Don’t,
a lesbian love story in which a woman successfully seduces a not-unwilling
nun (the film ends with the two in bed making love). Set against
this mini-narrative is found footage from a 1940s melodrama about
the travails and temptations experienced by nuns in a convent. It
is watched on a television by the nun’s seducer while a woman,
in voice-over, describes and makes wry comments on the films’
plot and characters. A third strand is Friedrich’s own footage
of actual nuns going about their business on city streets, and in
churches and convents; a fourth is voice-over quotations from the
book, The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy; and
a fifth is enigmatic, yet strangely poetic, images of a swan, a
water snake and white whales. Although these strands create interesting
relationships, they do not – for me, at least – fully
cohere into a unified work of art. Nevertheless, the film is important
as an early example of a feminist filmmaker’s refusal to excise
the visual pleasure offered by shots of a woman’s body, and
as an irreverent exploration of the intersection of piety and sexuality–prompted,
at least in part, by Friedrich’s own experience of being educated
by nuns during the years she was discovering her own sexual orientation.
That covert autobiographical element comes closer to the surface
in Hide and Seek, a combination of interviews with lesbians
recalling their early sexual awakening, found footage from stilted,
conventional sex education films from the 1950s and ’60s,
and a fictional narrative about a tomboyish pre-adolescent, Lou,
and her school friends. The film does much more than implicitly
critique the conventional, heterosexual point of view of the educational
films and their efforts to instil an extremely limited concept of
what constitutes “normal” sexual behaviour. Through
the interviews, it celebrates the variety of ways these lesbians
discovered and expressed their sexuality, the good humour with which
they tell their stories, and the psychological insights those stories
include. It also explores the open borders between friendship, intimacy,
nascent sexual awareness, and social bonding among Lou and her friends.
It is an educational film in the best sense of the term.
Friedrich’s technique of mixing diverse film sources first
appears in The Ties That Bind, which is also her first
film with sound and the first to straddle the border between avant-garde
and documentary film. In voice-over, Friedrich’s mother vividly
describes growing up in Nazi Germany (her family deeply disapproved
of the Nazi régime, but did not actively oppose it), experiencing
the war years and the Allied occupation, marrying an American soldier,
Paul Friedrich, and moving with him to Chicago (where she still
lives). The visuals include home movies of the young couple after
their move to the US, archival footage from war-time Germany, Friedrich’s
own Super-8 footage shot during a trip to Germany, extensive footage
of Friedrich’s mother shot at the time the film was made,
and Friedrich’s questions (scratched into the film’s
emulsion) that prompt her mother’s reminiscences. Friedrich’s
editing and her mother’s voice are the formal ties that bind
the material together in a compelling blend of history and biography.
In an interview in Scott MacDonald’s A Critical Cinema
2, Friedrich remarks, “To me, the most fantastic part
of constructing a film is taking many disparate elements and making
some sense out of them, making them work together and inform each
other.” In her best-known works, Friedrich accomplishes this
feat over and over again, as I hope the preceding discussion has
indicated. Certainly, one of the pleasures offered by Friedrich’s
films is the opportunity to discover formal, thematic, metaphoric
and symbolic relationships among the diverse audio and visual ingredients
the filmmaker chose to work with.
But as Rules of the Road illustrates, Friedrich’s
editing skills serve equally well when she works with relatively
uniform audio-visual material, as is also the case with First
Comes Love, a quasi-ethnographic study of the costumes and
rituals (formal and informal) of conventional church weddings. The
soundtrack is composed of fragments of popular songs about love–requited,
lost or denied. Friedrich’s cinematography (some of the best
in her entire œuvre) and editing (a textbook example of cutting
images with – and against – the rhythms of pop songs)
make First Comes Love Friedrich’s most “entertaining”
film and, therefore, a perfect vehicle for a statement about same-sex
marriage. Half way through the film, between a shot of a couple
exchanging vows in front of an ornate altar and a shot of them starting
back up the aisle, Friedrich inserts a statement about the inability
of same-sex couples to be legally married, and, in a slow scroll,
lists every country in the world where that is the case (or was
the case in 1991). Following the final shot of the film –
a boy sweeping up rice on the street – we read, “In
1990 Denmark was the first country to legalize homosexual marriage.”
Outcast Films, the distributor of The Films of Su Friedrich,
describes itself as “dedicated to the fair and equal representation
of media made by or about the diverse Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender
community”. While Friedrich’s films fall within that
broad category, their importance extends well beyond it, and an
audience capable of appreciating them is not limited to the LGBT
“community” but includes anyone interested in avant-garde
film and the more experimental strains of documentary film. And
while each DVD can be purchased individually, it takes all five
to fully demonstrate the range and strength of Friedrich’s
work over the past 25 years.
In addition to including two or more films (as listed at the beginning
of this review), each DVD includes Friedrich’s complete filmography,
and, for the longer, major works, English and Spanish subtitles.
Purists (like myself) will grumble about a “softening”
of the film image when transferred to video (only The Lesbian
Avengers Eat Fire, Too and The Head of a Pin were
shot and released on video), but the quality of the images throughout
is acceptable, if not ideal. Sound quality varies considerably,
at least on my low-tech home video set-up. Recorded interviews and
synch sound apparently recorded with microphones mounted on the
camera tend to be mushy and occasionally indecipherable (that’s
when I resorted to English subtitles). But these are relatively
minor complaints about a collection representing some of the best
work of the post-1970s generation of American avant-garde filmmakers. |
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