A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

eat them. In some ways, I feel critical of the idea of people living a hedonistic life, divorced from serious thought and ignorant of the consequences of history. On the other hand, my experience with my father was that he was absolutely indebted to Western civilization and to the world of books and theory. I wouldn't say that he would defend Western culture against other cultureshe's an anthropologist who's spent a lot of time studying other culturesbut in some more profound way his life is organized around the principles and institutions of Western civilization. If you've lived your life in an ivory tower at a university, if you've lived your life in books, that can exclude you from a lot of experiences.

In some ways I was trying indirectly to critique a certain kind of film practice that's been in vogue for the last ten or fifteen years, and a certain kind of film theory that is often quite divorced from normal experience (although I wonder about the word "normal"). The story later on in the film about the kind of articles my father was writing while my parents were getting divorced was meant to be a dig at a lot of the writing that's done about films that I think strips the life out of them. I'm interested in more direct speech, something more visceral, more emotionally honest. I wanted to touch on that, but not directly.

MacDonald:

I assume this project was similar to

The Ties That Bind

in that you worked at great length on the editing.

Page 316

Friedrich:

I started editing in November 1989 and worked pretty steadily until April. I had some breaks of a week or two here and there, but I pretty much kept to it that whole time. It took a tremendous amount of juggling decide what the order of the stories would be and what the overall visual theme of each section would be, and how to make the images move. As I've said before to you, when you're working with voiceover, you have to be extraordinarily careful about how your images work so you don't lose your audience. I think we tend to see more than we hear; I think we favor the sensual experience of images. I realized I had written a dense narration, and felt it would be drowned out by he barrage of images if I didn't work really carefully to keep the two elements informing each other.

Some people who have seen

Sink or Swim

have said that sometimes they spaced out, that they couldn't follow every word of every story. I understand that because I don't think I'd be able to either: the film presumes a second or third viewing. but that was something I really struggled with. I also didn't want the film to work just on asymbolic level, or to be completely literal, so I go back and forth between the two. For example, there's a story about going over to the neighbors' and making ice cream sundaes and then watching a circus on TV, which is synched with circus imagery; and the story of the chess game, which is illustrated by a chess game. But other stories are accompanied by more symbolic imagery, like the story about the poem my father wrote about going to Mexico, which you hear as you see a glass vase being filled with water and three roses. And there are stories that are somewhere between the two poles, which I like. I most prefer when something is both symbolic and literal, though it's hard to do.

MacDonald:

I think probably the dimension that gets lost most easily in your films is the intricate network of connections between sound and image. In both The

Ties That Bind

and

Sink or Swim

the subject is so compelling that the subtleties of your presentation can easily be overlooked.

Friedrich:

I think people might not be so articulate about that level of the films because, not being familiar with the field of avant-garde film, they might not have the language with which to describe those effects. But I do think there's an unconscious recognition of that level; that's why the film is working. If I wasn't editing well, if I was putting stupid images up against those stories, the stories might have a certain impact, but the images I use produce so many more meanings, and

that's

what people are really responding to, even if they think it's primarily the stories that are affecting them. If they come up afterward and say, "That was really powerful," I think, "Well, it's powerful because it's the right shape, the right texture, and the right rhythmall those things."

There was a period when I thought it was important to deny myself

Page 317