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SU FRIEDRICH
by Scot Foundas, LA WEEKLY, March 14, 2007
Wind your way backward through the work of acclaimed avant-garde
moviemaker Su Friedrich, as will be possible during REDCAT and Outfest’s
co-presented two-night retrospective, and you will find yourself
on a remarkable journey from the elegant informality of such recent
short video works as Seeing Red (2005) and The Head of
a Pin (2004) through to the razor-sharp black-and-white imagery
of Friedrich’s earlier, densely constructed feature-length
films. Those works in particular are dazzling mashups of myth, pop
culture, personal reminiscence and fictional narrative, as Friedrich
channels her intelligence and yen for experimentation into a study
of lust, gender politics and the epochal struggle to truly know
thyself. Yet, above all, Friedrich is a storyteller, fascinated
by the various forms stories can take and by what we can see of
ourselves in them. Made in 1990, Sink or Swim assembles the
fragmented portrait of a young girl and her relationship with her
estranged, abusive father over the course of 26 “chapters”
that are layered with allusions to Greek mythology and excerpts
of what look like 1950s-era sex-ed films. In the equally mesmerizing
Damned if You Don’t (1987), Friedrich reconstructs
a 16th-century nun’s life of forbidden passion via narrated
fragments from the nun’s diary, re-photographed sequences
from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus
and dramatized scenes in which an actress plays a contemporary clergywoman
similarly touched by desire. Friedrich’s newer work is no
less concerned with matters of desire and animal instinct —
hence The Head of a Pin, whose title refers to its macroscopic
look at the natural world, including a tour-de-force sequence of
a spider slowly trapping and devouring a wasp. Friedrich’s
finest achievement, however, may be Hide and Seek (1996),
in which documentary interviews with adult lesbian women alternate
with a lyrical narrative about a tomboyish pubescent girl’s
sexual awakening. It is one of the most piquant memory films I know,
at once roiling with the tenderness and cruelty of adolescence and
marbled by the wisdom of age.
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