A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

That's a hard question to answer. Offhand, I'd say I wasn't making a conscious reference to any other filmmakers, but that the structure was determined more by the fact of my father's being a linguist. I thought that using the alphabet was an obvious choice for the overall structure. I've certainly been influenced by many filmmakers, including some of the so-called structural filmmakers, like Frampton or Ernie Gehr, but my films are never meant to be a direct comment on or a reworking of ideas from other people's films.

I tend to think of the structural film school as avoiding the use of personal, revealing subject matter; I think they're more concerned with how film affects one's perception of time and space than with how it can present a narrative. Whenever I set out to make a film, my primary motive is to create an emotionally charged, or resonant, experienceto work with stories from my own life that I feel the need to examine closely, and that I think are shared by many people. With that as the initial motive, I then try to find a form that will not only make the material accessible but will also give the viewer a certain amount of cinematic pleasure. In that I feel somewhat akin to the structural filmmakers, since I do like to play with the frame, the surface, the rhythm, with layering and repetition and text, and all the other filmic elements that are precluded when one is trying to do something more purely narrative or documentary.

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In the text of

Sink or Swim,

I had to make a decision about form. I was using stories from my own life and began by writing them in the first person, but I got tired of that very quickly. I sounded too self-indulgent. Writing them over in the third person was quite liberating. The distance I got from speaking of "a girl" and "her father" gave me more courage, allowed me to say things I wouldn't dare say in the first person, and I think it also lets viewers identify more with the material, because they don't have to be constantly thinking of me while listening to the stories. Some people have told me afterward that they weren't even aware it was autobiographical, which I like. The point of the film is not to have people know about

me

; it's to have them think about what we all experience during childhood, in differing degrees.

On the other hand, it can sometimes be a problem to impose a structure on a story. I was happy to have thought about using the alphabet, but then that forced me to produce exactly twenty-six stories, no more, no less. I went into a panic at first, thinking that I had either seventy-five stories or only ten, and wasn't sure that I would be able to say all I wanted to say within the limits of the twenty-six. But that became a good disciplinary device; it forced me to edit, to select carefully for maximum effect.

MacDonald:

I think the irony is that Hollis, for example, really thought his formal tactics were keeping his films from being personal (his use of Michael Snow to narrate

nostalgia

is similar to your use of the young girl to narrate the stories in

Sink or Swim

). When I talked with him about his films, he rarely mentioned any connection between what he made and his personal lifea conventionally "masculine" way of dealing with the personal in art. But from my point of view, his best films

Zorns Lemma, nostalgia, Poetic Justice

[1972],

Critical Mass

[1971]are always those in which the personal makes itself felt, despite his attempts to formally distance and control it.

Friedrich:

The issue for me is to be more direct, or honest, about my experiences but also to be analytical. I think there's always a problem in people seeing my films and immediately applying the word "personal."

Sink or Swim

is personal, but it's also very analytical, or rigorously formal.

I don't like to generalize about anything, but I do think it's often the case that the more a person pretends or insists they're not dealing with their own feelings, the more those feelings come out in peculiar ways in their work. Historically, it's been the position of a lot of male artists to insist that they are speaking universally, that they're describing experiences outside of their own and thereby being transcendent. I think conversely that you get to something that's universal by being very specific. Of course, I think you can extend beyond your own experience; you can

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speak about your own experience while also describing the experience of other people you're close to or decide to know. But I think you have to start at home.

MacDonald:

Maybe these things are cyclical. I'm sure those late sixties, early seventies filmmakers who avoided the personalFrampton and Snow, Yvonne Rainerwere reacting against the sixties demand that art, including film art, had to be personal. You bring two things togetherthe sixties' emphasis on the personal

and