A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

is a meditation on marriageon traditional heterosexual marriage and on the widespread illegality of same-sex marriage. The film begins with imagery of several couples arriving at New York City churches, with family and friends, to be married, accompanied on the sound track by a variety of musical homages to love and marriage. But once the various couples have arrived at the altar, Friedrich suddenly shifts to a rolling text (a ceremonial "scripture" of her own) that lists every country in the world where same-sex marriage is legally forbidden. When the long listing is complete, Friedrich returns to the marriage imagery and records the couples exiting the church, having their pictures taken, and leaving for receptions and honeymoons. At the very end of the film, Denmark is revealed as the only nation where same-sex marriage is currently legal.

First Comes Love

is a poignant combination of Friedrich's frustration with the conventional assumption that "first comes love, then comes marriage" (an idea clearly proven false by the worldwide resistance to same-sex lovers legalizing their bonds), of her recognition, often suggested by her editing, that conventional marriage continues to be about the consolidation of money and power, and of her sadness in being left out of a form of bonding that for many couples is deeply meaningful (this sadness is implicit in Friedrich's characteristically beautiful black-and-white imagery and in the subtlety of her interconnections between image and sound).

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Friedrich and I discussed the films up through

Damned If You Don't

in March 1986 and again in September 1987. We discussed

Sink or Swim

in June 1990.

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MacDonald:

I find

Scar Tissue

and

Cool Hands, Warm Heart

hard to look at. They seem to have been made within a small circle of friends as feminist exercises. The change from those two films to

Gently Down the Stream

seems considerable, even though the style of all three films is related. I feel somewhat the same way about the jump from

Gently Down the Stream

and

But No One

to

The Ties That Bind

. Do you see big leaps in power from the earlier films to the later ones?

Friedrich:

I think of those early films as being too obvious, or too much about a single issue or image.

Cool Hands

is about these acted-out women's rituals;

Scar Tissue

is about certain midtown men and women.

Scar Tissue

was made with a small audience in mind. I think it was made in part as a response to Dave Lee and his film

Remembering Clearing Space

[1976, 1979], which was made with black and clear leader and footage from the Margaret Mead film

Trance and Dance in Bali

[1952]. We'd had this ongoing debate about what happens when you use clear and black leader. When I made

Scar Tissue,

I was doing the opposite of what he did. We were very close then, and we talked a lot about film. I do tend to think of just one or two people when I'm working on a film. Actually, after I made

Scar Tissue,

I made a film that you haven't seen. It had two titles: first it was called

Someone Was Holding My Breath

; I changed it to

I Suggest Mine

. I didn't like that film; it was so personal, about such neurotic aspects of my self-image, that I re-edited it, but I still didn't like it. Then I started working on a film about excision in Africa.

MacDonald:

That's the removal of the clitoris?

Friedrich:

Yes. And sewing up the vagina and the labia. I was really freaked out about the subject. I'd seen Ann Poirier's film

Primal Fear

[1978]. In it there was this brief bit of footage of an excision being done on a little girl in Africa. When I saw that footage at the New York Film Festival, I screamed out, "No!" But then I got interested in doing a film about excision. I read lots of material, and I started doing scratched-word tests because I wanted to make the film a conversation. One voice would be the "experts," like Western doctors or African men and women who would talk about why it's done, and the other voice would be the women describing what it felt like and their memories of it. I did a

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lot of tests with scratched words, but then I realized that that was a completely inappropriate form for such a film, which would have to be a much more accessible sort of documentary. Since I didn't want to work in a documentary style, I gave it up.

I started working on

Gently Down the Stream

because I was having a lot of trouble, and I wanted to reread my journals and then burn them all. Instead I got interested in many of the dreams I'd recorded. I developed

Gently Down the Stream

from those dreams.

When I made

I Suggest Mine,