A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Well, I remember that I was in California on tour with Leslie Thornton, showing films. I wanted to make a movie, and I kept thinking of the phrase, "She built a house"just the phrase. I was doing a lot of drawings and making little notes to myself about having a sense of home, and one day I suddenly thought of my mother. She was someone I thought of as without her own homealthough she's lived in the United States since 1950 and is settled here, she'd always seemed a little bit uprooted to me, partly because I'd never met any of her relatives.

Suddenly, I thought that her life was something I absolutely had to find out about, something I had to work with. I went to Chicago to see her. I had to lie a little bit, to make it seem like this wasn't such a serious project. I was very diffident about it when I talked to her, and then I showed up with lots of equipment. I think she was suspicious. But she was great about the filming. She was so unselfconscious, and

I'm

the sort of person who

hates

to be in front of the camera, still or movie. I thought she would be very uptight; I thought she would worry about the way she looked, but she was completely indifferent. She just went about her business, paid no attention to me. One or two times, she said, "Oh, stop that filming for a minute." She'd be having a conversation with me, and I'd be behind this big camera grunting and saying, "Oh yeah? Oh yeah?" and I think after a while she felt uncomfortable with it. But she never refused to let me film anything.

MacDonald:

You recorded the tapes later?

Friedrich:

No. I did all the interviewing and some shooting on my first

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visit there, but the film was ruined because my filter holder wasn't completely in and the light was coming through. I went back about a month later and shot all the material you see in the film.

I felt really distressed about the project. I had started on it so quickly because I had such a passion about it, but I hadn't really thought it through. I was still insecure. When I saw the ruined footage, I felt

really

discouraged and almost didn't continue.

MacDonald:

How much taping did you do?

Friedrich:

I taped for five evenings. I was embarrassed about it. I had originally said to her that we were doing it so that the tapes could be transcribed, so that she could pass on her stories to her children. I was misleading her, and I was afraid that if I pushed certain issues too far, she might wonder what was going on. When I realized how upset she was becoming as a result of the discussions, I was worried. I thought she might just fall to pieces. Maybe suddenly I would say the wrong thing, and it would be the last straw for her, but she came out with a lot more than I expected.

MacDonald:

She seems very at ease. She's a good storyteller.

Friedrich:

Well, that might be my editing too. I did a lot of editing. There's always a certain artifice in even the most "natural" footage or sound of someone. For example, my mother became very upset when thinking and talking about certain experiences, and she tended to slow down and have long pauses between passages of a story. At first I thought those pauses should remain so that the viewer would feel her searching through her memories, but I realized that the effect would be boring, rather than moving. So I spent a lot of time cutting out silent passages.

MacDonald:

The story itself is interestingthe idea of knowing what it felt like to be anti-Nazi in Germany in the thirties. Even if she wasn't a member of The White Rose [an anti-Nazi underground organization discussed in

The Ties That Bind

], it took nerve to be who she was. The audience can empathize with her and admire her. Is she pleased with the film?

Friedrich:

If I ever hear myself on tape, I always think, "Oh my god, I sound like such a fool!" She had the same reaction at first, and she also felt that a lot of other people had suffered much more than her, or had been a lot more courageous, and that therefore she wasn't appropriate material for such a film. But the last time she saw the film, she seemed pretty comfortable with it.

Before I made

The Ties That Bind

I had such bad feelings about being German, being the daughter of a German; and my father is half German too. I don't think I really trusted the material I had. When I was working on the film, I told myself to stop worrying, to stop thinking I shouldn't

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be doing it, to stop disbelieving her, to trust her. I figured if the film was a failure in the long run I wouldn't show it. At some point I just stopped carrying on about it. It was strange to suddenly be thinking of my mother in this respectful way, to really be admiring her for what she did, for surviving. I had never thought of

her

.

MacDonald:

She's a remarkable person.

Friedrich: