A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

material was saying, "OK, you want a narrative; here, take it: you can have it. And you can have it just for its high points; you don't have to slog through all the bullshit, all the transitions." In a way it was a joke on the conventional narrative "hook." I do think there's a real awkward-

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ness for about five minutes after the

Black Narcissus

critique is over, when the audience has to shift out of this really safe, funny world into something that's less clear. And I did want the

Black Narcissus

critique to be interesting and amusing on its own terms.

MacDonald:

Are Makea McDonald's reminiscences her own or did you write them?

Friedrich:

I interviewed seven women who had gone to Catholic schools. One was my sister; four were women I've known from living in New York; and two were women I went to high school with. I had gone to school with Makea and met her again in New York after many years. Some of the other women were gay, but they didn't really talk about their relationship to nuns in terms of being gay. For a while I tried to collage their voices, but it got too confusing and so I settled on Makea. She was the only one who talked about having crushes on nuns, and I really identified with some of what she said, not just about nuns, but about other things too. I particularly love what she says during the Coney Island section, when she talks about her spirit splitting from her body when she had sex with a man. That was really beautiful. It was nice to discover her again and have her be such a crucial element in the film.

MacDonald:

She enacts one of the conflicts that the film's about. She talks about being gay and yet she also sings the Lord's Prayer.

Friedrich:

Yes. That ambivalence was very appropriate for the film. And since she's a trained soprano she has a powerful voice.

MacDonald:

We see two motifs during

Damned If You Don't:

the black-and-white snake that curls through the water and the swan through the fence. On one level both are reminiscent of the nuns because of their formal coloring, but both are also traditional phallic images. I assume that you're reappropriating the imagery so that it represents female sexuality.

Friedrich:

The first time the snake and the swan appear is when Ela has fallen asleep after seeing

Black Narcissus

. My alternating between them was meant to be a dream sequence of hers. I was thinking of the snake being the Ela character (its movements are very sensual but sort of dangerous) and the swan being the nun. But actually, I think it was just that I loved the footage and wanted to use it, and worked it in that way!

MacDonald:

At the end you announce the women's sexual union by showing a routine between male and female tightrope walkers. It's a convenient metaphor for the nun's doing this chancy thing of coming to the other woman's room. But why did you use a heterosexual tightrope couple?

Friedrich:

I liked the dance between them. I thought it was a wonderful ballet of a seduction. I certainly considered that it was a heterosexual

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moment right before a homosexual moment, but I don't see sex as exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. At a discussion of

Damned If You Don't,

somebody asked whether I was trying to imply that all nuns are lesbians. I really hope that people don't think that that's what I'm saying in the film; it's very important to me that people

don't

think that. To be provocative, I said, ''Well, I think it would have happened exactly the same way if it had been a man and the nun." At the time I thought to myself, "That isn't entirely true!" But I wanted to make people think about it. I think the whole ritual of seduction works out to be pretty much the same thing between a man and a woman or between a woman and a womanat least that's been my experience. There are differences, but there's also something universal about being attracted to somebody and trying to make something happen about it.

MacDonald: Sink or Swim

is about your relationship with your father, but the way in which you present your struggle to come to grips with that relationship is unusual. Probably of all your films,

Sink or Swim

has the most rigorously formal organization. The only other film I know that uses the alphabet as a central structural device is Frampton's

Zorns Lemma

. Obviously, your film deals more directly and openly with personal material than Frampton's did, but I wonder, is there any conscious reference to cinematic fathers, as well as to your biological father?

Friedrich: