A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

You mentioned earlier that you feel your parents gave you the skills you needed to be able to support yourself. How do you earn money?

Friedrich:

I do pasteup. I haven't worked lately but when I do, I get eighteen dollars an hour. I hate it passionately, but I learned how to do it by pasting up the first couple of issues of

Heresies

(with some other women). You just take the text and the picture and set it all up for the printer. It's, very exacting, mechanical manual labor. Actually, I think it's

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affected my filmmaking. My ability to be precise with the scratched texts is partly a result of my experience as a pasteup person. At this point I don't want it anymore as an influence, but I don't know what else I would do to earn a living. During the past two years, I've also been able to earn about twenty percent of my income by doing one-person shows at schools and museums. It gets pretty difficult at times to answer the same questions over and over, but it's important to make contact with the audience, to know the people ''out there" who still support these sorts of films. I've also gotten a few grants, which were a real blessing; it would have taken me twice as long to make

Damned If You Don't

without them.

MacDonald:

When you took on

The Ties That Bind,

did you assume its length would generate more shows?

Friedrich:

I had no idea that

The Ties That Bind

was going to be as long as it was, and I also didn't think that people were going to be that interested in it. It just got longer and longer and more expensive, and then I found that because I had an hour-long film it was easier to get shows. Before that, I had always been in group shows. (Actually, I started out doing some programming myself, setting up shows in galleries in the East Village, in churches.) I had never really worried much about getting one-person shows because I kept making these short films and it didn't seem possible. But once I did

The Ties That Bind,

I got lots of invitations. It's always hard to be businesslike about your own art products, but I decided I had to force myself to accept that part of the filmmaking process, to deal with the hard work that comes

after

the hard work of getting the film made.

MacDonald:

I would think

The Ties That Bind

could have a pretty good-sized audience, certainly more than just the avant-garde film audience.

Friedrich:

I've shown it in a number of places where it seemed like a lot of people in the audience don't see experimental film. Afterward people would come up to me and say, "I've never seen a film like this. I was confused at first, but by the end I really understood and enjoyed it." When I was making the film, I was hard on myself about the relationship of sound and image. I wanted to be very precise, to push the two elements in a way that doesn't happen in a standard documentary, but I also wanted the film to be accessible to people. I respect people's intelligence enough to think that if they were shown this sort of film more often, they would be able to understand it. I don't think people will necessarily run screaming from experimental films, and I wish some programmers had more respect for their audience's intelligence.

And I think people might enjoy playing the games the film sets up. I certainly feel the difference between a film in which the person is trying to be communicative and one where a person is just trying to be obscure

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and go over everyone's head. I don't think

The Ties That Bind

feels deliberately obscure.

MacDonald:

Avant-garde film is always going to have technical "weaknesses," compared to commercial cinema. The secret is to use them to your benefit. When the viewer of

The Ties That Bind

hears the mike bang on the couch, the home-movie feeling of the film is enhanced; it's as if we're sitting in somebody's den looking at the slides of their trip. Your film is technically screwed up just enough to make the viewer feel at ease; it's the polar opposite of Leni Riefenstahl's

Triumph of the Will

[1936], which I've juxtaposed it with in courses a number of times.

Friedrich:

I have a very uneasy relationship with the technology of filmmaking. I think I'm careful only up to a point, and it's usually the point where redoing something would mean spending more money than I have. Past that point I think, "Fuck it."

MacDonald:

Has

The Ties That Bind

been shown on TV? Has it earned income as a semicommercial theatrical film?

Friedrich:

It was shown at a number of festivals, and it was shown on WNYC in New York.

MacDonald:

Do you think your work suffers when it's transferred to video?

Friedrich:

Scratched words don't look good on video. They lose the crisp articulation and rhythm that's there on film. And the material in