A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Priests had some influence too, but the nuns were more immediate for me because they were my teachers for eight years. And, of course, they're women and they set what I thought was a bad example for me as a woman. But as I worked on the film and remembered more about the nuns, I realized that there was also a very good side to them, and I found myself feeling a lot of affection for some of them. Later, when I had the footage, I just wanted to look at them and remember them somewhat affectionately through this footage.

In the passage you asked about, the nuns are just walking around on the street looking very ordinary. I would look at that material and think about the nun in

Immodest Acts

who's in a delirious state because Christ is supposedly removing her heart while another nun watches from behind a curtain. By combining that text with the footage of nuns looking like they lead a fairly normal life, I wanted to create an uneasy feeling. When you see the nuns, it's hard to imagine that they would go so far as to believe that their hearts could actually be taken out of their bodies. Yet there's an ambiguity: maybe they've all had that kind of experience.

But to answer your earlier question: I apologized at the end because I'd had to lie to the nuns at the convent so that they would let me shoot, and I felt guilty about it.

MacDonald:

What did you tell them you were doing?

Friedrich:

I said I was making a narrative film about a woman lawyer who's working on a case and struggling with some ethical problem that causes her to have a flashback about a nun she'd had in grade school who taught her an important moral lesson. They were very flattered and liked the idea of my filming. When we were there, they kept coming in and out of the convent and saying hello. If any of them had spent time watching what we were doing, they would have sensed that something else was going on. I mean, here was this nun looking out from behind a tree while another woman was walking by. I don't know if they figured anything out.

MacDonald:

At the Flaherty seminar [Friedrich was a guest at the thirty-third Robert Flaherty Seminar in August 1987], after Johan van der Keuken's

The Way South

[1981], you were very angry at his manipulation of the people he filmed. I thought then and still think someone could ask a very similar question of you.

Friedrich:

Of course, it's convenient for me to be able to see a distinction between the two.

MacDonald:

I'm interested in hearing the distinction.

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Friedrich:

Well, I would never have interviewed any nuns on film or on tape and then have used the material without their knowing the complete context of the film. All the nuns I shot were in the public domain; they were out in the world. And I wasn't making a direct connection between any of those particular nuns and specific material in the film. I think it would be very different and completely unacceptable for me to interview nuns and then reveal their private lives, the way van der Keuken revealed the people in his film, without their permission. I gave my mother final approval of

The Ties That Bind

. I certainly could have thought, "Fuck her, she's my mother; I can do whatever I want with the material." But if she had said that any part of that film was not permissible to use, I would have removed it. When I filmed at the convent, I very deliberately didn't show the name. I tried not to create a context by which people could identify the convent. I wanted the material to be anonymous.

MacDonald:

I would argue that were van der Keuken to explain his politics to the people he films, they would be comfortable about appearing in his film. On the other hand, if the nuns whose images you use knew what the politics of your film were, I'd guess they would be quite horrified.

Friedrich:

Again, this may be splitting hairs, and the nuns definitely wouldn't be interested in my hair splitting, but I made a conscious choice not to use any images of them over any explicit sexual material. I thought that would be going too far. I'm sure you're right that they would all be incensed to find themselves in the film, but what can I do? There

are

nuns who have either come out or have gotten involved with men and left the convent, so the issue in the film is legitimate. I don't think it's sacrilegious or vulgar to suggest that some nuns might be sexually frustrated by their vows and might go to certain extremes to break away from their past beliefs and practices.

MacDonald: Damned If You Don't