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Bright Lights Film Journal
Issue 57 | August 2007
Close to Home
The Films of Su Friedrich on DVD
Autobiography sometimes trumps art in these uneven works
By Tom Sutpen
Su Friedrich is a disciplined and highly skilled filmmaker who teaches
school (film and video production at Princeton, to be precise) and
has a curriculum vitae of honors, awards, foundation grants, festival
entries, one-person shows, and retrospective screenings at Modernist
temples appropriate to an artist of her station.
On its face this may sound like a safe, neutral recitation of fact,
one that could easily border on the sarcastic should ears be tuned
to such alpine frequencies. But in truth it has more immediate bearing
on a consideration of her art than may be apparent at first blush.
For these are not just flat and soulless facts but emblems, trophies
of accomplishment won in a realm one could choose to toil in only
deliberately. In the course of almost three decades — a period
ably represented by Outcast Films' five-DVD collection The Films
of Su Friedrich — Friedrich has managed to carve a formidable
presence in the knotty, overcrowded, and corpse-strewn moonscape
of America's avant-garde cinema. And while she draws her work from
what seems a narrow resource of human experience (in short: The
Life and Times of Su Friedrich), she embroiders this relatively
small frame of reference with an astonishing wealth of cinematic
technique; a fully absorbed, veritable encyclopedia of long-ago
invention that enables her to move from semi-documentary polemic
to fractured narrative to structuralist rampage (often within the
contours of a single work) without once lessening her focus upon
whatever side of her life she chooses to explicate. It is an aesthetic
that segments of the movie-reviewing community have, literally for
decades, considered the summa of personal expression.
Su Friedrich and her mother in The Ties That Bind (1984)It must
be said, however, that Friedrich's formal commitment to the once
blazing, now vanished glory of the avant-garde does at times bring
with it a tendency to fall into the trap of its most hoary clichés.
1984's The Ties That Bind, for example, is an often compelling remembrance
by the filmmaker's mother, speaking on the soundtrack of the myriad
troubles she faced in her youth during the Nazi regime. As a vision
of placid life sundered, as placid life generally is, by social
forces beyond one's immediate control, it covers perfectly honorable
if not exactly underexplored terrain. But very early in the proceedings
Friedrich hauls out, as the unmistakable brawn of her film's symbolic
labor, a plastic, snap-together Vollmer model farmhouse —
its pieces detached and carefully laid out, one next to the other,
with obsessive precision. It's a small (if crucial) running symbol,
but it subtly enervates everything that surrounds it. One need not,
after all, possess a degree in film studies or have seen more than
a handful of films by American avant-garde titans to sense immediately
that the home will, by film's end, be both lovingly assembled then
stomped to smithereens.
In a sense, Friedrich can't be blamed for trotting out this shopworn
device; it was the sort of thing expected from so-called experimental
filmmakers in those latter days. She began making movies in the
late 1970s, a time when such tropes were still sovereign, and the
most vigilant cheerleaders of America's avant-garde cinema were
hard put to pretend even the simulacrum of anything novel was happening
within it. The New American Cinema — on which so many movie
reviewers and schoolteachers in the 1960s placed so much of their
hope for a new birth of cinematic freedom — was dead, having
wasted away in the early '70s from a combination of public neglect,
institutional vanity, and the beginnings of a perception (mostly
erroneous) that it had all turned horribly anemic and incestuous,
that it had lost any connection it had with the outside world. In
the main, this notion was given life by the woeful, paint-by-numbers
literature it had spawned; the films and filmmakers, as is often
the case when the most sordid critical voices begin to play a defining
role, assumed secondary, even tertiary importance. Thus did the
much vaunted school of American Cinema that had once seemed New
begin to look very old indeed; and what had been an inspiring reservoir
of expression in the most vital art the world has known devolved
into a joyless playground for theoreticians and post-grad zombies
who instinctively embraced an antiquated Modernist standard with
no vision of the world larger than itself.
Friedrich, for good or ill, is immensely influenced by this tradition,
but she isn't always hobbled by it. The Ties That Bind makes a game
leap toward such prickly matters as incipient Fascism in Reagan's
America and the numberless indignities endured by Womankind under
the big-ass boot-heel of the Third Reich. It's simply that the thrust
of her work almost always blends, uneasily, the parochial and the
worldly, to a point where the two conditions often cancel each other
out. What measure of engagement she may have with this exterior
issue or that one, then, can never help but appear less engaged
than her attending preoccupation with subjects as close to home
as humanly possible.
The balance of The Ties That Bind's pictorial weight — stark,
black-and-white tableaux of children playing by the seashore, of
Friedrich's mom swimming, mom's hometown of Ãœlm, of
Friedrich herself flipping through a variety of New York tabloids
and magazines and her own junk mail; even a few stray shots left
over from her extraordinary 1979 film, Scar Tissue — is, as
I say, borne upon the shoulders of a maternal rake-up of the past.
Taken at her word, Friedrich's mother indeed led an interesting
life as one who resisted the Nazis in spirit (if not exactly in
deed) and came to these shores the bride of an officer in the U.S.
military's Denazification program (she does, unfortunately, retail
the old one about how nobody at the time knew what could possibly
have been going on in all those camps Germany's Jewish population
had been carted off to). But in the midst of all the toy house destruction
and fund-raising letters from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, there
is a curious suggestion of far greater trauma inflicted upon this
woman than any we actually hear of directly. Now, only hopelessly
jaded ghouls out there could desire another litany of 20th-century
horror. But the gulf between what is implied and what is revealed
causes the film's visual constituent (brilliantly constructed though
it is) to act less in the manner of poetic underscoring or even
counterpoint than as a kind of textual steroid, enhancing the viewer's
sense of bearing witness to a grim memoir in a way the memoir itself,
shorn of this tactical support, cannot seem to manage on its own.
Sink or Swim (1990)This is not without an attendant irony when one
learns of the true anguish and psychic injury Friedrich's mother
endured many years later. But the film in which this position on
the Friedrich life chart is disclosed, Sink or Swim (1990, right),
does not principally concern itself with this development, dire
as it was; nor, in truth, is it the searing examination of Life
with Father it purports to be. Like much of her work, Sink or Swim
is a film about Su Friedrich, constructed and narrated like a third-person
apocrypha of American girlhood, spent in the shadow of a strange
and remote man given to small, passive-aggressive acts — warning
his daughter, falsely, about the presence of water moccasins in
a New Hampshire lake; peevishly withdrawing from all further games
after she beats him at chess; that sort of thing. One who, in the
end, flew the coop and remarried, leaving a broken family in his
wake.
Using another array of scattered imagery to bolster the spoken text
— this time female bodybuilders, circus performers, home movies,
parades, kids at play, and on and on — Friedrich embarks on
a creative mission more vast and thoroughgoing than that of The
Ties That Bind. The earlier film was a more or less straightforward
recitation of past events, and its images putatively functioned
as everything from direct illustration to poetic coloring. Sink
or Swim, on the other hand, seems geared not toward the universality
of one daughter's ever-evolving relationship with her prick of a
dad, but more toward pushing the whole idea beyond that condition
and into the realm of myth. That Friedrich again wields a nimble
technique in the service of a problematic, often doomed enterprise
— for she is scarcely the first artist to sift through the
remnants of a prosaic childhood in avain search for its mythic dimension
— only makes the failure of these intentions all the more
vivid.
Which is not to suggest that Su Friedrich's entire body of work
is set before a looking-glass positioned to give us, the viewers,
the most comprehensive view of its maker. In the manner of a sermon,
Damned If You Don't (1987, below) takes as its text the not-so-buried
sensuality of Powell and Pressburger's Black Narcissus — not
to mention some dubious-sounding testimony from an ancient tribunal
proceeding against a nun accused of "immoral acts" —
to illuminate the sparest of narrative lines, wherein a Novice (Peggy
Healey) wrestles with the sort of inchoate longings that novelists
and playwrights 60 years ago used to construct their fictions around.
Once more, Friedrich wrests considerable beauty from her manipulation
of images and sound (few filmmakers use silence as strategically,
or as well), but despite this considerable formal elegance, she
reveals little about the unsleeping compulsions in your average
convent that had not already been explored (and explored) in such
nunsploitation epics of the 1970s as Love Letters of a Portugese
Nun, Flavia, the Heretic, and Behind Convent Walls — though
admittedly Friedrich recasts this phenomenon in a somewhat more
restrained manner.
Damned If You Don't, 1987
The closest thing to a flat-out narrative work in the Friedrich
canon, Hide and Seek is also the most high-profile, reaching audiences
(via television broadcasts) that other avant-garde film artists
rarely approach. Apart from the odd burst of sublime lyricism, however
— a killer schoolyard rendition of the Supremes' "Stop!
In the Name of Love," for example — and the unusual richness
of Jim Denault's cinematography, Friedrich's tale of a girl named
Lou (Chels Holland) and her budding inclination toward other girls
in the mid-1960s retains a kind of wooden predictability that otherwise
makes the clips from vintage sex ed films used lavishly throughout
seem more like replicas of the film embodying them than the ironic
counterpoint they were intended to be. It would be impossible to
impute any degree of sardonic acerbity to Friedrich's vision of
growing up lesbian in a studiously homophobic society; her film
is far too affectionate a look back at that time and those impulses.
And therein lies its most debilitating flaw. Like virtually all
coming-of-age stories, Hide and Seek is painfully, oppressively
sincere, meting out the carcass of a more or less common experience
as something unique and momentous.
Friedrich's great saving grace — her uncommon facility with
the means of film expression — is generally deployed most
effectively in her shorter works, which have little time to let
sincerity or excessive self-reflection metastasize. With its succession
of stolen, black-and-white shots of men and women, charging from
here to there in the midst of Manhattan's daytime whirl, the aforementioned
Scar Tissue unleashes a small, concentrated bombardment of physicality
on the viewer, transforming the clichéd hustle and bustle
of city life into a bleak and menacing, chaotic battleground of
the sexes where no one is safe and only defeat is conceivable. By
way of contrast, Rules of the Road (1993) is positively ebullient.
A lyrical essay about a past love and the 1983 Oldsmobile Station
Wagon that bound them together, it may be the only film in history
to convey a wondrous sense of the open road and all its fabled expanse
while remaining entirely within the congested confines of New York
City. 1991's First Comes Love, virtually in the same vein, is an
odd, songlike reflection on wedding ceremonies — that ritual
by which notions of romantic love are formalized in the eyes of
God, the state, or both. Set to a series of pop songs and laced
with slightly embittered observations on what was then the absence
of similar opportunities for lesbian and gay couples, Friedrich
refuses to go the Diane Arbus route by avoiding any impulse to satirize
the proceedings and make everyone look like a pack of overdressed
bozos, substituting what instead seems a yearning for the social
acceptance, even comforts, these unions imply.
Such a yen as this is somewhat anomalous in light of The Lesbian
Avengers Eat Fire Too, Friedrich's quaint 1994 video chronicle (co-directed
with Janet Baus) of a year in the life of the titular activist group;
one of approximately 40,000 such radical outfits to spring forth,
fully formed and ready for action, in the Family Values ether of
the early '90s. It is unusually artless, however; less a documentary
or an agitprop production number than a kind of celebratory infomercial
— following the group from protest action to protest action;
always emphasizing affirmative progress over grim, determined struggle
— one more naturally suited to the dimensionless maw of Public
Access Television than the backwater festival circuit works of this
stripe often land in as they reach the summit of their public profile.
I only mention Lesbian Avengers because it is not, to me, a coincidence
that Friedrich's lone departure from a more or less autobiographical
approach to filmmaking also represents the nadir of her skill. But
for the scarcity of rickety, sloppy camerawork so ubiquitous in
documentaries of this kind, there's no indication that Lesbian Avengers
is in any formal sense the work of a film artist with her mastery
of technique. She and her co-director do absolutely nothing with
their material, as if turning away from the purely personal, however
momentarily, ushered in a terrible paralysis of creative inspiration.
The Odds of Recovery.
Fortunately this is the only film of Friedrich's about which that
dour conclusion can be reached. But it does, I think, give a sense
of how inextricably bound her art is to her life; how necessary
the element of self-reflection has been to her frequently brilliant
work, regardless of how compelling the reflection may or may not
be at this end of the screen (and no such reflection could possibly
be more personal than Friedrich's disquieting 2002 medical history,
The Odds of Recovery, above). Of course, she is not the only artist
to make from the errant strands of their personal experience the
fabric of their art, nor is that a fundamentally debased approach
to creation (the achievements of everyone from Eugene O'Neill to
Sylvia Plath would be unimaginable had their authors been of a less
insular cast). But cinema, despite everything that has been said
and written lo these many decades, bears the kind of directly personal
approach Su Friedrich specializes in only rarely, and not with any
ease. It never has. What might, in one medium, be a window into
your life or mine can easily resemble mainstream narcissism in a
medium so everlastingly powerful as film. And narcissism, however
well-crafted and celebrated, is neither entirely satisfying to contemplate
nor easy to watch.
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