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THE PERSONAL FILMS OF SU FRIEDRICH
by ED HALTER, The Village Voice
September 26th, 2006
Su Friedrich created her latest experimental documentary, the half-hour
Seeing Red, from just three elements: video diaries, shot
from the chin down, in which she wears a red top; seemingly aleatory
footage, often taken on the sly, of red things found on streets,
in parks, or in backyards; and snatches of Glenn Gould's rendition
of Bach's Goldberg Variations. At times, red bits of the
world dance ecstatically to Gould's cascading keys. Alone, to her
camera, Friedrich confesses a string of related fears: Having turned
50, she faces the stubborn constancy of her self-identified "control
freak" patterns and insecurities and wonders if she still has
time to change for the better. Friedrich is one of the most accomplished
avant-garde filmmakers of her generation, with a career of films
and videos whose masterful construction and precise beauty attest
to the positive aspects of her self-criticism, and her stature only
makes the humbling existential crises in Seeing Red more
poignant. Yet she has always found ways to create beauty that resist
the illusion of transcendence by sticking close to the grounds of
hard reality—an influence and logical extension of her feminist
politics. Seeing Red premieres at MOMA's mid-career retro,
organized to coincide with her five-DVD compendium, along with her
early silent-film works—gorgeously grainy black-and-whites
exploring lesbian identity and gender differences—and later
featurettes taking on memories of both her father (Sink or Swim)
and her mother (The Ties That Bind), collective experiences
of lesbian childhood (Hide and Seek), and her own mortality
(The Odds of Recovery).
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