A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

The Ties That Bind

that's blown up from Super-8 to 16mm looks terrible on video. It just falls to pieces. I have a horrible feeling about that because in the pastlet's say five or ten years agowhen I would go to a screening of films by women, many of them would be technically poor. There would be this urgency about getting the film made and saying this important thing, and if you didn't expose the image right or if the sound was bad, well those were the breaks. When I've seen my film on video, I've thought, "My god, if somebody just turns this on and doesn't know me and hasn't seen the film projected, they'll think, 'Oh god, another film by a woman that looks like shit.'" Of course, these days many women are making technically competent films. And I think that that earlier period in our historyof making films out of a breathless sense of urgency despite technical limitationswas absolutely crucial. The same process happened in third-world countries when they were first developing their own film industries, and some incredibly powerful films were made despite the lack of technology.

MacDonald:

One feminist reaction to conventional cinema has been to confront patriarchal exploitation by eliminating the kinds of pleasure that conventional films thrive on. I'm assuming that in

Damned If You Don't

you're taking the position that there's no reason why feminist films shouldn't be as sensuously pleasurable as conventional cinema.

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Friedrich:

I think I did have that plan when I started. I wanted to make something that I (and viewers) would enjoy. But I don't think I set out to contradict any other person's film or any other kind of filmmaking. It's true that when I go to films that are determined

not

to provide traditional pleasure, I end up being really frustrated or bored or angry. My reaction to such films has been building for a long time. Even when I was making

Gently Down the Stream,

I had a combative stance toward antipleasure films, but at that time I wasn't able to do as much as I wanted to do in terms of providing pleasure myself. And certainly there wasn't much place for pleasure in

The Ties That Bind

. It wasn't until I was actually into making

Damned If You Don't

that I realized I could create some of the visual (and aural) pleasures I had wanted to experience in other people's films. Maybe it took me this long to be able to begin to work with pleasurable material because I had my own reservations about it. As much as I was angry about what other people were doing, I knew that I wasn't prepared politically or emotionally to do something different. I had to overcome my own backlog of things I

shouldn't

do.

MacDonald:

The subject of

Damned If You Don't

doesn't seem a very likely place for humor, and I'm sure to some people it isn't at all funny.

Friedrich:

I have a tendency to look at things too seriously. When I made

Damned If You Don't,

I was particularly close to someone who has a really good sense of humor and who definitely pushed me into putting more humor into the film. Also, when I told my brother I was working on the film, he said, "Oh god, why don't you just once make a film about a light subject!" He imagined, rightly, that I was planning another anguished exposition. His saying that really stuck in my mind.

MacDonald:

The woman who delivers the critique of

Black Narcissus,

Martina Siebert, does a terrific job.

Friedrich:

I chose her partly because she's German and has a German accent. Initially I thought of it as a joke on the expert German scientist in fifties documentaries. But her delivery didn't come through that way. Her English is good, but she didn't always understand the cadence I intended, so a lot of times she said things in an odd way I couldn't have anticipatedwhich ended up working out for the best.

MacDonald:

Another section of the film that's pretty funny, and I assume consciously so, is when the text from

Immodest Acts

is juxtaposed with the shots of the nuns walking around. When the reader says, "I saw Christ coming," one nun looks up as though she sees something coming. It's as if the nuns are unwittingly acting out the story. At the end of the film you apologize to those nuns. Was that because you felt you had made jokes at their expense?

Friedrich:

Well, I started the film feeling very angry toward nuns and

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toward the Catholic church, and I wanted the film to be a condemnation of everything about the church.

MacDonald:

Why were you angry at nuns in, particular?

Friedrich: