A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

I thought I should try to do something very personal, entirely about me. I failed miserably. I was much too self-conscious about exposing myself. By the time I got around to

Gently Down the Stream,

I had accepted the idea of using personal material, but I had also found a way to work with it with some sort of distance. At first, when I was reading the dreams and thinking about them, I felt really embarrassed about revealing them. But by the time I began to see how they looked when they were scratched out and saw what images went with them, I had lost some of that personal investment.

When I was doing

Cool Hands

and

Scar Tissue,

I was much more rigid in my thinking, both about film and about myself as a woman. With

Scar Tissue,

especially, I wanted to be very extreme, to just use a few elements and be very aggressive with them. In both films I wanted to convince people of something; I wanted to show them some little corner of the world and say, "You see, this is the way it is, and it's not good that it's this way." When I made

Gently Down the Stream,

I felt differently. I had certain assumptions about what my dreams meant, and I certainly had ideas about what it meant to be involved with a woman and then involved with a man. I had ideas about how to work with dreams and how I felt they were useful. But I also liked the idea that, being less doctrinaire, I was leaving things more to chance. I wasn't saying that all women are good or that it's only good to be with women. I was saying, well, you know, things are kind of messy in our private lives and in our dream worlds and that's just the way it is. At first it seemed that if I was going to be a "good" feminist I should show the relationship with the woman to be a good one as compared to the relationship with a man. But I couldn't because the dreams that I had about the relationship with the woman revealed a lot of problems. The dreams revealed that both relationships were pretty much failures, and that seemed more realistic than trying to sell some theory about how relationships

should

be.

MacDonald:

Are there a couple of shots from

Scar Tissue

in

The Ties That Bind

?

Friedrich:

Yes. There's also a lot of footage from

Hot Water

[1978], my very first film, in

Gently Down the Stream

: the stuff of the woman swimming in the pool and the woman rowing on the rowing machine.

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MacDonald:

That material looks like found footage from another era.

Friedrich:

Yes, it does. I really liked shooting that first film. It wasn't a very good film, but it was fun to do. I liked the footage in it, but I wasn't crazy about the way it was put together. I was low on footage when I was making

Gently Down the Stream,

and I figured I might as well use this stuff. Actually, I was thinking of using some outtakes from

But No One

in

Damned If You Don't

. I like the idea of recycling things and of finding new meanings, in a new context, for images that have appeared in earlier films.

MacDonald:

There are some very weird dreams in

Gently Down the Stream

. The dream about making the second vagina and the image of the baby that crumbles are pretty powerful. I used the film in several classes this year, and the students found the film outrageous. They were riled up about it.

Friedrich:

If people see the film without knowing it's made from dreams, they do tend to get very anxious. But if they recognize that the texts are dreams, they tend to accept the film. We all have weird dreams.

MacDonald:

Well, there's also the question of admitting what you dream or feel. We may know we have embarrassing dreams, but publicly admitting what they are is something different. I'll bet most people repress confusing dreams very quickly.

Friedrich:

I've been surprised when I've traveled with

Gently Down the Stream

how many people tell me that they never remember their dreams or if they do they never bother to write them down. They don't take them seriously. I find that I go through periods when I don't remember any of my dreams, and I feel terrible after a while because I feel like I really need to remember them and look at them. When I went through my journal to find dreams for

Gently Down the Stream,

I found great dreams I hadn't rememberedthe one about making the second vagina was one of them. I thought, "What a great image. It's so loaded and says so much"and I'd forgotten about it! I would never have come up with that image during a conscious moment; I feel grateful for the images we create while dreaming.