A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

It's true that I'm not explicit about my sexual involvement with the women in the film, some of whom I slept with, some of whom I didn't. It seemed to me not the point of the film to graphically render that dimension of things, even if it had been possible to do so. I think that by being respectful of the women involved in the film vis-à-vis my sexual involvement with them, the film gains more than it loses. To have been more explicit would have pushed the film into sensationalism and solipsism that ultimately would have been alienating. Also, we have to keep in mind that this is a film about real people and real events. It's a documentary, not a fiction, and there are certain issues of privacy one simply has to respect. But the sexuality being alluded to and yet not directly revealed adds a subtle tension to the film that I hope works in its best interests.

It's also true that the Ross McElwee who's presented in the film is not a completely rendered Ross McElwee. I don't say everything about myself that I could be saying. I don't tell you everything that's on my mind. I am creating a deadpan persona. Perhaps I create a heightened sense of depression, heightened in an attempt to attain some sort of comic level. I'm creating a persona for the film that's based upon who I am, but it isn't exactly me. Of course, it's hard to make the judgment myself. It's like the problem Wittgenstein describes when he talks about how the eye can see the world but can't see itself. It's difficult to know yourself and to know how you're presenting yourself to the world.

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Su Friedrich

The critique of conventional cinema that is articulated in Su Friedrich's films

Cool Hands, Warm Heart

(1971),

Scar Tissue

(1980),

Gently Down the Stream

(1981),

But No One

(1982),

The Ties That Bind

(1984),

Damned If You Don't

(1987),

Sink or Swim

(1990), and

First Comes Love

(1991)has roots in two different cultural projects: the development of North American avant-garde cinema and the recent feminist reassessment of modern society (and of the popular and independent cinema). Each of her films represents a different combination of these sources, and she has demonstrated her loyalty to both in her extra-film activities: she was instrumental in getting the 1990

Film-makers' Cooperative Catalogue

finished and published and is a regular workshop leader at the Millennium Film Workshop, and for years she was an active member of the

Heresies

collective. Her particular gift has been to find ways of combining cinematically experimental means and a powerful feminist commitment in films that, increasingly, are accessible to a broad range of viewers, even to viewers unaccustomed to enjoying either experimental or feminist filmmaking. This accessibility is, to a large degree, a function of Friedrich's willingness to use her filmmaking to explore the particulars of her personal experience. And her success in reaching audiences represents a powerful attack on the assumption that viewers will only respond to conventional film rhetoric.

At the beginning of her filmmaking career, Friedrich's films were fueled by a grim feminism, personal only in the most general sense.

Cool Hands, Warm Heart

documents several women performing conventional, but normally private, women's ritualsone woman shaves her

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legs; another, her armpits; and a third braids her hairon a crowded street on the Lower East Side, as a way of rebelling against canons of "feminine modesty" in commercial media and against those independent filmmakers who argue that films shouldn't polemicize an identifiable politic.

Scar Tissue

uses footage recorded on New York City streets to reveal the workings of patriarchy, in a mood of numbed horror.

The next two films, and especially

Gently Down the Stream,

are more specific to Friedrich's personal experience. In preparation for making

Gently Down the Stream,

Friedrich spent months collecting her dreams, writing them down, and etching the most powerful and suggestive into the emulsion of black-and-white film, word by word. At times there is no imagery except for the hand-scratched words; in other instances, the words, which are always the foreground of the film, are combined with photographed imagery, much of which provides metaphors for our voyage along Friedrich's "stream" of consciousness (a woman exercises on a rowing machine, another swims). In general, the dreams recorded in

Gently Down the Stream

reveal a conflict between Friedrich's Roman Catholic upbringing and her lesbian desires. Indeed, the words that tell these dreams often seem to quiver with the intensity of this conflict.

The Ties That Bind,

Friedrich's first long film and her first 16mm film with sound (an early Super-8 film,