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make/shift, feminisms in motion, Issue no. 2 Fall/winter 2007-2008
Su Friedrich Is Seeing Red
by Andrea Richards
There is a moment near the beginning of Su Friedrich’s latest
film, Seeing Red, when the protagonist (Friedrich)
melts down, sobbing while filming a video diary about – of
all things – her habit of baking for her roommates. Though
what is seen on screen is simply a red torso with a lavalier microphone
attached, a voice recounts, “I spent a lot of years not having
kids and doing…you know, eating out at shitty restaurants
and doing my own work “cause I thought I’ll be goddamned
if I’m going to be a fucking housewife…and I have turned
into a fucking housewife and I can’t stand it! What the fuck
am I doing baking all the time? Why am I doing this?”
In the dark of the theater, I sink down in my seat, not just due
to the rawness of the sentiment on screen but also because the contradiction
is familiar. Is she calling me out for the three hours I spent this
afternoon in the kitchen preparing an elaborate soup – a procrastination
technique masquerading as necessity? I never wanted to be a housewife
either, and yet there I was, making soup in the middle of a Monday.
Why am I doing this?
This is often how a Friedrich film works: her poetic and probing
meditation on specific aspects of her own experience (she’s
an acute observer of domestic routine and familial ritual) reveal
the subtle negotiations, hidden desires, and secret frustrations
most of us glide over in daily life. In Seeing Red, one women’s
existential dilemma implicates all. When I sat down with the filmmaker
a day after the West Coast premiere of the films, we talked about
its prior reception in New York: When I showed the film for the
first time publicly, it had been almost a year since I’d finished
it…The film started and people laughed and I didn’t
expect that….I was really happy. I thought, oh my god, it’s
true: We are ridiculous. We’re so filled with our sense of
injustice and hardship and the struggles of life. But it’s
all absurd.”
Renowned for her innovative use of autobiographical material –
the 2006 retrospective of her work at New York’s Museum of
Modern Art was titled “The Personal Films of Su Friedrich”
– Friedrich continues to experiment with narrative form and
a viewer’s expectations. “Seeing Red”
is a tidy twenty-seven minute film that interweaves three main elements
-= monologues (such as video diaries), montages of red objects,
and music (Bach’s Goldberg Variation performed by Glen Gould).
The video diary – that ubiquitous and banal trope on YouTube
– is, in the hands of this avant-garde artist, reconfigured.
Friedrich’s diaries deny the confessional form its usual casual
identification by withholding the speaker’s face. It’s
a simple, and paradoxical, device that shifts attention to what’s
being said instead of who is saying it. (Friedrich has used similar
distancing strategies in other learning to keep your distance –
“In the end what I’m concerned about is that the viewer
experience something that has to do with them. And the only way
for a person to think about themselves is to not be bombarded with
me.”
It’s a balancing act she’s perfected in her two decades
of work. Friedrich began making films n 1978. A member of the famed
Heresies collective, a non-hierarchical volunteer group that published
a popular feminist journal on art and politics from 1977 to 1992,
she never questioned whether the personal was political. In her
thirteen films, she lyrically explored her life, from her relationships
with her mother and father (The Ties That Bind,
1984 and Sink or Swim, 1990) to a breakup with
her lover understood through the lens of a used station wagon (Rules
of the Road, 1993). Multifaceted in both form and content,
her hybrid films (she freely mixes documentary and narrative forms)
investigate subjects as wide-ranging as the ignorance of urbanites
in the country (The Head of a Pin, 2004) dreams
(Gently Down the Stream, 1981) and lesbian adolescence
(Hide and Seek, 1996).
Unlike most of Friedrich’s films, the structure of Seeing
Red came about “haphazardly.” While at work
on another film (“about coffee,” she says). Friedrich’s
increasing personal frustration was noticed by her partner who encourage
her to explore that pain instead of a project she wasn’t feeling
connected to. The result was a highly introspective film, with Friedrich
recording her thoughts as video diaries and riding around on her
bike to shoot red objects. (The first diary entry she shot was the
baking one.) Friedrich explains that the process “just kind
of came together over a period of six months, and it was really
different for me…I approached them [Seeing Red
and an earlier film, The Head of a Pin] without
that strict idea of how they could be structured and tried to be
more open both in the way I shot and in the way I edited.”
Part of the reason for this shift is that Friedrich’s medium
has changed. She shot her last two shorts, Seeing Red
and A Head of a Pin, on video. As for most independent
filmmakers, video is an economic necessity, but it’s a hard
switch for Friedrich – celebrated for her technical virtuosity
– to stomach. Her work often showcases the tactile beauty
of 16mm film, making frequent use of sensual black-and white images,
optical printing, and even scratching on the film’s surface.
While leaving her Bolex behind hurts, it’s also liberating:
“I am finding that I am work differently now than I was in
the past because of video, and maybe because of being older, and
maybe because of having done films in a certain way for such a long
time that at some point you have to challenge yourself – you
have to stop doing Su Friedrich and see what happens.”
Seeing Red does feel like an exorcism of sorts,
with the filmmaker flagrantly breaking some of her own cardinal
rules, albeit ironically. As a line in the film suggests, she’s
shooting red “because you know something like red doesn’t
look good on video “which is followed by the wisdom that “metaphors
have to be handled carefully.” By giving us so much metaphor
and so much red – endless variations on the same theme –
Friedrich’ starts to break the framework that any one notion
is the right one. It’s a bold statement of limitless multiplicity.
“I feel like I got around to saying something in this piece
that I had probably been thinking about saying for a long time and
didn’t know how to say, almost without planning I managed
to do it, but I have no idea where that leads next, except there’s
some way in which it’s kind of the culmination of my work
– the work that’s been very personal,” Friedrich
reflects. She mentions two current projects, one the aforementioned
coffee film, the other about the gentrification of her neighborhood
(Williamsburg, Brooklyn). Both, she admits, are less personal subjects,
but “it’s kind of a strange feeling to think you can
plumb the depths of your experience for only so long, and then maybe
there’s a world out there to observe.” The filmmaker
assured me that neither project will take a conventional form: “A
lot of me rebels against doing a conventional documentary. I’m
at a crossroads; I really don’t’ know what I’ll
do. Until I do it.”
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