A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Hot Water

[1978], no longer in distribution, had sound), combines elements of documentary (on the soundtrack she interviews her German-born mother about her experiences growing up in Germany during the thirties as an anti-Nazi German) with elements familiar from avant-garde forms of cinema: the visuals are a mix of Friedrich's hand-scratched questions of her mother (we hear only her mother's responses on the soundtrack, not the questions that provoke them); photographic footage recorded with a hand-held Super-8 camera during Friedrich's visit to Germany to investigate her roots (this material has a gestural feel reminiscent of Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage); 16mm footage of her mother in her current Chicago environment, and of her own trip to a demonstration at the Seneca Army Depot in upstate New York; archival footage recorded during the Second World War in Germany; and home movies made soon after Friedrich's mother arrived in the United States with her GI husband at the end of the war. Diverse as the film's sources of information are, they are bound tightly by Friedrich's intricate editing, which develops a range of thematic and formal "ties" between the various visual and auditory strands of the film.

The Ties That Bind

is a consistently moving record of a filmmaker's coming to terms with her mother's troubled past and her own threatened present.

Friedrich's decision to explore her German background confronts an implicit cultural taboo. Like many of us who have German roots, Frie-

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Part of one of the dreams from Friedrich's

Gently Down the Stream

 (1981)

(frames should be read left to right).

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drich was/is haunted by the specter of the Holocaust: even if we grew up after the Holocaust ended, our genetic inheritance seems to condemn us. At the time when she talked with her mother, Fredrich could not be sure what her mother reveal about herselfand by implication, about Friedrich. And even once she had learned of her mother's fervent disapproval of the Nazis and what this stance may have cost her, Friedrich had to have been well aware that whatever suffering her mother and the rest of her family endured was probably mild compared to what went on in the camps, and that therefore a film that tried to create sympathy for a German family could seem counterproductive. The finished film, however, is useful and revealing in many ways, not least of which is that it allows people of German in heritage to admire the courageous example of some German's in resisting the Nazi horror and, one hopes, to feel their own progressive urges reconfirmed. Of course, Friedrich's decision to use the production of a film as a ''space" within which to try and resolve her personal conflicts with regard to her mother and their shared heritage is a departure from the detachment of conventional cinema and much independent cinema, as well.

Damned If You Don't

returns to the issue of Catholicism and lesbian sexuality. But where

Gently Down the Stream

grimly dramatizes the psychic trauma this conflict seems to have created in Freidrich,

Damned If You Don't

is as good-humored as it is daring. Friedrich imbeds a narrative about a nun (played by Peggy Healey) pursued by another woman (played by Ela Troyano) within an informal investigation of some of the ways in which the issue of nuns and sexuality has played itself out in Western culture.

Like

The Ties That Bind, Damned If Your Don't

is an amalgam of elements from disparate cinema traditions: the film begins with an amusing précis/critique of the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger melodrama

Black Narcissus

(1947), which the woman protagonist is watching on television. The woman's subsequent pursuit of the nun is interwoven with documentary imagery of nuns and convents, with formally lovely and metaphorically suggestive passages focusing on swans, snakes swimming in water, and white whales at the New York City Aquarium, and with a variety of information on the soundtrack: an interview with a high school friend (Makea McDonald), passages from Judith C. Brown's

Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and moments of self-reflexive conversation. The beautifully choreographed final scene of the nun and the Troyano character making love is the culmination of the narrative.

Damned If You Don't

is a courageous film on two different levels. Obviously, even to

seem

to attack nuns is highly unusual, and to do so with humor and in the name of an open expression of lesbian desire will

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