A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

[1980; at the Collective for Living Cinema in New York City], I saw it and liked it. I talked to somebody afterward who said, "It's one of those films that was made on a Steenbeck." At that point I had never worked on a Steenbeck, and so I didn't even know what he meant. He said, "Well you know, it all gets done in the editing." Part of me thought, "Well, that's an interesting criticism; maybe it is a problem," but on the other hand, I found myself thinking that I liked the film and wondered how the method could be so bad if it resulted in something so intricately woven together? I guess I do admire Brakhage's editing, though I don't always admire what he's making the film about. To me the most fantastic part of constructing a film is taking many disparate elements and making some sense out of them, making them work together and inform each other. That process was really hard in

Damned If You Don't

because I had shot so much for a more documentary film, and the more the narrative took shape, the less that other stuff worked with it.

Also, at times I felt really angry at myself for getting caught in this bind between narrative and experimental. That was something I had always warned myself about and critiqued other people for. I had felt that once you start dealing with narrative, there really isn't the room for serious experimentation that there is when you don't use narrative at all. I don't know what will happen the next time I make a film, but in

Damned If You Don't

I do manage to create certain moments I really enjoy, which are a result of the film's mixture of very different approaches.

MacDonald:

You could say that the film reclaims certain kinds of pleasure that are the stuff of commercial cinema without accepting the commercial cinema's ideology

and

that the film reclaims certain kinds of pleasure that are particular to avant-garde film without necessarily accepting the ideology of the films in which these avant-garde pleasures are usually experienced.

Friedrich:

It seems that the issue is always giving yourself the maximum amount of freedom. If you make narrative film, thensome people would argueyou have more freedom because you're making something that will be accessible to people and will get to more audiences. Other people would say that only if you're doing something extremely

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experimental do you have absolute freedom, because you never have to worry if anyone understands anything you're saying. There are drawbacks to both positions, and advantages to both. Actually, I think when they're good, experimental films are as accessible as good narrative films.

MacDonald:

Name some experimental films that you think compete on an enjoyment level with commercial films.

Friedrich:

I'd say a number of films by Brakhage or Frampton or Maya Deren. Margie Keller's films. Leslie Thornton's. God, there are so many.

I think that in the past my animosity toward narrative film had to do with not having the usual experience of identification. This was partly because I'm a woman (I saw a lot of films about interesting male characters and stupid female characters) and at times because I couldn't identify with the romantic line of the films. One of the things that changed me was finally seeing Fassbinder's films. I certainly have my differences with his style and with what some of his films are about, but I have a strong identification with many of his films. When I first saw them, I had the feeling that here finally was a narrative filmmaker who was talking about stuff that I wanted talked about in films. Experimental films were mind-expanding for me in other ways that related to my studying art history, especially painting and sculpture.

It's tempting to want to work on every possible level in a film. Narrative is tempting in its way, but I can't imagine eliminating the footage that deals with elements of the materiality of film. There

is

a danger. You can make something that's terribly compromised, that doesn't do either thing well. To me

Damned If You Don't

was risky because I didn't know what I was going to end up with. One of my oldest friends, who had once been an experimental filmmaker, was very critical of

Damned If You Don't

. He saw it as a weak compromise.

MacDonald:

I'd say that since conventional narrative cinema and experimental cinema have been ghettoized away from each other, the radical thing to do is to bring them together.

The critique of

Black Narcissus,

which is funny and precise and which, I'm sure, nearly everyone enjoys, builds patience that allows the more materially experimental elements to be accepted by the audience. Because you begin by giving them elements of conventional pleasure, you enable them to go with less conventional experiences.

Friedrich:

What I felt I was doing by beginning with the

Black Narcissus