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DISPLACED PERSON
A retrospective of filmmaker Su Friedrich's work features
her powerful film about personal responsibility.
by GEORGE ROBINSON, The Jewish Week, September 22, 2006
When Su Friedrich started work on her 1984 film "The Ties
That Bind" she had thought about an abstract idea that appealed
to her feminist politics. What she ended up with was quite a different
story.
"I was only 28 when I started working on the film in 1982,"says
Friedrich, whose work will be the subject of a mid-career retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art next week. "I had the idea of making
a film about a woman who didn't have a home. I was a young feminist
with an abstract idea, then I realized that the woman I knew who
didn't have a home was my mother."
Strictly speaking, Friedrich's mother, Lore Bucher Friedrich,
was living in New York City. But she had grown up in Ulm, Germany,
and had lived through the years of the Third Reich with considerable
dismay, a Catholic who harbored a deep distaste for the Nazis. When
she met Paul Friedrich, an American working in the de-Nazification
program, where she served as a secretary, she married him and left
her home for a new life in the United States.
"I realized that my mother was displaced," Friedrich
says today. "Even though my father's family were half-German,
she still felt like a foreigner."
As a German who never supported Hitler, Lore felt a double alienation.
As her daughter says today: "I had a sense that my mother was
deeply ashamed, very angry, had a deep personal sense of loss. She
would never be understood, never seen as a person who had been in
opposition. She would always be implicated."
Friedrich readily admits that as a child of a Nazi-era German,
she felt implicated too, even though she was born in New Haven,
Conn., in 1954.
"The Ties That Bind" with its witty juxtaposition of
found footage, home movies and new images, is an exploration of
memory, a film that directly speaks to Lore Friedrich's pained sense
of a compromised and divided identity.
It's a film that asks, "What do people do with memory?"
the filmmaker says.
Sometimes people choose not to remember everything. During the film
Lore says that "nobody died in Dachau." Friedrich couldn't
let that statement go unchallenged.
"I had to contradict her," she says. "I had to
add a title that says how many people died in Dachau."
When she showed the film in Germany in the mid-1980s, Friedrich
was almost literally hit over the head with that kind of denial
of memory.
"I thought people would be grateful for a film that gives
voice to a non-Jewish progressive German," she says. "Instead
I used to get audiences that were hostile, who said to me, ˜Well,
you people had the Vietnam War.' I had a [German] tutor who once
told me, ˜When I was growing up in Germany the history books
stopped with 1938 and started again in 1947."
"The Ties That Bind" is a small but powerful attempt
to fill that silence with the life of one German woman and an inventive
way of examining the tangled skeins that make up the fabric of mother-daughter
relations.
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