A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The dreams that ended up in the film are suggestive in different ways. Remember the dream where I say that the woman sitting on the stage asks a friend from the audience to come and make love to her? Every time I show the film and I'm in the audience, I think about how somebody in the audience feels. As a filmmaker, I'm doing just what the woman in the dream is doing. I think there's something about making work that has to do with your wanting to please people, to make love with the audience. This dream is a bald statement of a desire that I think is part of a lot of films.

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MacDonald:

How many dreams did you start with?

Friedrich:

Ninety-four. I asked my current lover, who was a man, and a former lover, who was a woman, and one male friend and one female friend (both of whom are gay) to read all the dreams and tell me which ones they liked.

After I got all their responses, I studied them to see which ones the men liked and which ones the women liked. I didn't really use that as the basis for making a final decision about which to use but it did help me to think about the dreams. Finally, I chose to do the dreams about women with moving scratched words and the dreams about men with optically printed freeze-framed scratched words. I did about forty dreams, some with images, many without. I put it all together and showed it to a few people. They said, "It's just horrible; it's way too long! Nobody could ever make any sense of it." So I went through a painstaking process of cutting dreams out: each one I eliminated felt like such a great loss. But that experience was a crucial lesson for me because I learned that no matter how painful it is to let go of material, a film usually benefits from a very severe editing process. As I whittled the film down, I also started developing more ways to use images; I started combining images with dreams that hadn't had any before.

MacDonald:

Your use of text reveals a strong sense of poetic timing. Do you read much poetry?

Friedrich:

No. I read Walt Whitman one summeralmost nothing but him. The only other poets I've read closely are Sappho and Anna Ahkmatova. But I have trouble reading poetry. I get impatient with it.

MacDonald:

There's something about the timing and the spacing in your films that reminds me of William Carlos Williams.

Friedrich:

Well, the timing is important. I started out with each dream on an index card, and kept whittling down the phrasing until it was really succinct. Then I started breaking it up into lines to see how it should be phrased in the film. I heard the rhythm of each dream very clearly in my mind before I started scratching. I would scratch them onto the film and project the results. If something wasn't right, I'd cut out a few frames or add a few frames.

MacDonald:

I remember Hollis Frampton saying that once you

can

read you can't

not

read. When the words appear, the viewer has no choice about reading them. You participate in this film on a different level from the way you participate in a conventional film.

Friedrich:

I have a fantasy that one day I'll show

Gently Down the Stream

and the audience will say the whole thing out loud.

I'm at a strange point now, as far as using text goes. I had so much fun making

Gently Down the Stream

that I ended up making a second, similar film,

But No One

. I liked what I did in

But No One,

but I wasn't

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crazy about it.

But No One

is made out of a certain amount of repression and depression, and it shows.

MacDonald:

Even the device of scratched texts doesn't work as well.

Friedrich:

I feel very intimate with that device, but I also feel that I might not be able to use it much longer. Actually, I pushed it further in

Gently Down the Stream

than I did in

But No One

or

The Ties That Bind

.

MacDonald:

You may articulate it more in

Gently Down the Stream

than in

The Ties That Bind,

but in the longer film you found a way of using it without its dominating the entire experience.

Friedrich:

One large area that I haven't really worked with is scratching words over images. I mean I did that a little in

The Ties That Bind

(when I go to my mother's house, for example) and at the end of

Gently Down the Stream,

where "blindness" is spelled out over the water with that incredible movement. That's one area I'd like to explore more. I'm interested in what would happen if I started using scratched text to comment on the images that you're seeing, or to completely confuse the image, to have them be so contradictory that you couldn't, or wouldn't, want to be looking and reading at the same time.

MacDonald:

What got you started on

The Ties That Bind

?

Friedrich: