Su Friedrich: Interviews

Su Friedrich (b. 1954) has been described as an autobiographical filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker, an independent filmmaker, a feminist filmmaker, and a lesbian filmmaker—labels that she sprucely dodges, insisting time and again she is, quite simply, a filmmaker. Nevertheless, the influences of the experimental film culture and of the feminist and lesbian political ethos out of which she emerged resonate across her films to the present day.

Su Friedrich: Interviews is the first volume dedicated exclusively to Friedrich and her work. The interviews collected here highlight the historical, theoretical, political, and economic dimensions through which Friedrich’s films gain their unique and defiantly ambiguous identity. The collection seeks to give a comprehensive view of Friedrich’s diverse body of work, the conditions in which her films were made, and how they have circulated and become understood within different contexts.

The volume contains fifteen interviews—two previously unpublished—along with three autobiographical writings by Friedrich. Included are canonical early interviews, but a special focus is given to interviews that address her less-studied film production in the twenty-first century. Echoing across these various pieces is Friedrich’s charmingly sardonic and defiant personality, familiar from her films. Her occasional resistance to an interviewer’s line of questioning opens up other, unexpected lines of inquiry as it also provides insight into her distinct philosophy. The volume closes with a new interview conducted by the editors, which illuminates areas that remain latent or underdiscussed in other interviews, including Friedrich’s work as a film professor and projects that supplement Friedrich’s filmmaking, such as Edited By, an online historical resource dedicated to collecting information about and honoring the contributions of women film editors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Mar 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781496838186

Book preview

Su Friedrich: Interviews

Conversations with Filmmakers Series

Gerald Peary, General Editor

SU

FRIEDRICH

INTERVIEWS

Edited by Sonia Misra and Rox Samer

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

A Conversation with Su Friedrich by Erin Trahan republished with permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, from Independent Female Filmmakers: A Chronicle through Interviews, Profiles, and Manifestos, edited by Michele Meek, © 2019; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Copyright © 2022 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2022

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Misra, Sonia, editor. | Samer, Rox, 1986– editor.

Title: Su Friedrich: interviews / edited by Sonia Misra and Rox Samer.

Other titles: Conversations with filmmakers series.

Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2022. | Series: Conversations with filmmakers series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021040782 (print) | LCCN 2021040783 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3816-2 (hardback) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3817-9 (trade paperback) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3818-6 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3819-3 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3820-9 (pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3821-6 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Friedrich, Su—Interviews. | Motion picture producers and directors—United States—Interviews.

Classification: LCC PN1998.3.F784 A5 2022 (print) | LCC PN1998.3.F784 (ebook) | DDC 791.4302/33092—dc23/eng/20211210

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040782

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021040783

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents

Introduction

Chronology

Filmography

Su Friedrich to Leslie Thornton, Leslie Thornton to Su Friedrich

Su Friedrich and Leslie Thornton / 1983

Interviews with New York Filmmakers: Su Friedrich

Stephanie Beroes / 1986

Su Friedrich

Scott MacDonald / 1986–1990

Does Radical Content Deserve Radical Form?

Su Friedrich / 1988

Girls Out of Uniform: Su Friedrich Remembers Being Twelve Years Old and Gay

Lydia Marcus / 1997

Framing Lesbian Angst: Filmmaker Su Friedrich

Erin Blackwell / 1997

Film Buffs are Film Buffs No Matter Whom They Sleep With

Su Friedrich / 2008

Su Friedrich’s Cinema

Cecilia Muhlstein / 2008

Su Friedrich

Katy Martin / 2008

It’s Alright, Williamsburg (I’m Only Bleeding)

Cynthia Lugo / 2013

Q&A with Filmmaker Su Friedrich

Carlos J. Segura / 2013

Su Friedrich

Claudia Steinberg / 2013

Su Friedrich Returns

Adam Schartoff / 2016

Su Friedrich in the Swamp of Images

Giovanni Marchini Camia / 2016

Interview for Dykes, Camera, Action!

Caroline Berler / 2016

A Conversation with Su Friedrich

Erin Trahan / 2018

Personal and Collective Memory in Su Friedrich’s Films

Allison Ross / 2020

Editors’ Interview

Sonia Misra and Rox Samer / 2020

Additional Resources

Index

Introduction

Over a career that spans four decades and counting, Su Friedrich has made more than twenty films about topics as wide-ranging as heartbreak, aging, illness, sexual desire, lesbian childhood, coffee production, gentrification, parent-child relationships, rituals of gender, and totalitarianism. Her work characteristically foregrounds the personal in service of a far-reaching social, cultural, and political reflection and critique. The poignancy and incisiveness of her films rests not only on their deftness connecting the subjective and the social but also on her unwavering sincerity in both serious and humorous registers. With few exceptions, Friedrich shoots and edits her own films, and her adroit attention to image and sound, in concert and in rhythm, appeals to her viewers’ bodies and minds. The sensuality and wit of Friedrich’s films construct an intimacy that both comforts and unsettles.

Su Friedrich was born in 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut, to an American anthropology and linguistics professor father and German pianist mother. She first attended the University of Chicago before transferring to Oberlin College where she studied photography and earned a BA in art and art history. After graduating in 1975, she made a six-month solo trip through West Africa, taking photographs. When she returned to the states, she moved to New York City where she would soon become a member of the feminist art collective Heresies. In the late 1970s, during the ascendancy of feminist film theory, Friedrich moved from still photography into filmmaking. Just as Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston, the Camera Obscura Collective, and others delimited the forms most fitting for feminist filmmaking, Friedrich shattered all sense of what was formally and thematically possible for a feminist filmmaker.¹

Su Friedrich has been described as an autobiographical filmmaker, an avantgarde or experimental filmmaker, a documentary filmmaker, an independent filmmaker, a feminist filmmaker, and a lesbian filmmaker. According to cinema and media studies scholars, she is also a domestic ethnographer and a maker of dyke docs and experimental ethnography.² But in interviews, Friedrich sprucely dodges such interpellations, pointing to the strictures of such labels and insisting time and again that she is quite simply a filmmaker. Nevertheless, the influences of the experimental film culture and of the feminist and lesbian political ethos out of which she emerged resonate across her films to the present day, even if at times opaquely.

Friedrich is best known for her films from the 1980s and 1990s namely The Ties That Bind (1984), and Damned If You Don’t (1987), and Sink or Swim (1990). Friedrich’s more recent films, though lesser known, are far from more minor works. They echo the emotional immediacy of earlier works, and they continue to operate outside of traditional documentary form even as they adapt to reflect evolving personal and political concerns. Discussing I Cannot Tell You How I Feel (2016) and The Ties That Bind in an interview with Adam Schartoff, Friedrich notes, Thirty years later, I still am really interested in picking up my camera and shooting the world in front of me, but that doesn’t mean I’m [yet] going to do a talking heads documentary. I have no objection to that kind of film. I see lots of them. I think they’re great, but it’s not who I am…. I think this shows that, in all these years, I haven’t really left some of those early principles or ideas that I had. There are profound connections to be drawn across her body of work, some of which are parsed out in the interviews collected here. Yet, there are also notable differences that must be acknowledged, as a result of her move from film to digital video and growing comfort with humor. Through both the directness of her own words in interviews and the continued dynamism of her recent films, Friedrich makes it clear that her career as a resolute yet adaptable filmmaker has heartily carried on since the ’90s.

For Friedrich, each new project is catalyzed by a distinct set of formal and thematic preoccupations, many of which are illuminated in the interviews collected in this volume. She typically works on a single film at a time, completing one before moving onto the next. Friedrich approaches each film as a unique text, selecting the modes and approaches most apt in the moment. Frustrating easy categorization, Friedrich’s films employ a wide range of aesthetic strategies, which include words scratched into celluloid, recycled found footage, and appropriated segments from canonical works of cinema, original documentary footage that tends toward realism, and montages of voice, text, and image. She blends documentary, avant-garde, and narrative to explore the likewise permeable boundaries between the private and public, inside and outside, self and Other, reality and imagination.

Friedrich’s defiance of aesthetic and genre categories is matched by a defiant affect that colors the emotional content of her work, ranging from vulnerability to rage. What binds her films, perhaps more than any mode, method, format, or genre, is a philosophical commitment to that which is most personal and intimate in service of the political. This is a far cry from Hollywood, which lifts up queer love stories by asserting they are not gay or lesbian but universal. Friedrich’s films do not let you forget the particularities for their broader relevancy. Instead, she takes you so close to her experience and the experiences of her family, friends, and lovers that they feel as if they might be your own, while also building in formal signs that guarantee you remain well aware that they are not.

The unfamiliar home footage of Sink or Swim tells you that this is not your abusive father; nonetheless, in his words and actions, enhanced by Friedrich’s arresting editing, patriarchy’s rife paternal violence is unmistakable. It might not be your ex-girlfriend’s station wagon, with its cigarette smoke-scented brown fabric seats and cranked-up radio dial, that haunts every step of the unseen protagonist of Rules of the Road (1993), but Friedrich’s narration and the hard cuts of the film’s soundtrack remind you of what it’s like to have grief triggered by the sight of a certain object or sound of a particular song. Even if you have not witnessed your own neighborhood destroyed by the fast-encroaching capital of big business, you will feel anger and helplessness as Friedrich’s camera refuses to look away from the buildings collapsing around her in Gut Renovation (2012).

Friedrich’s films address our bodies and minds. Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979), Scar Tissue (1979), and Gently Down the Stream (1981) utilize handheld black-and-white cinematography to examine and caress both people and objects. Rules of the Road and its peers of the mid-’90s feature playful soundtracks of non-diegetic pop tunes, cutting across nostalgia and hope alike. Her films of the 2000s are characterized by sardonic voiceovers and onscreen text commentary, which animate the objects before the camera in a humorous flurry. Friedrich works within strict financial limits, but this has never led to artistic paralysis. Her early black-and-white films, shot on a 16mm silent Bolex, are arguably so beautiful because they cannot include synch sound. The Ties That Bind, Friedrich’s first longer film, provides an early demonstration of her prowess at coupling image and sound. She edited together interviews with her mother about growing up in 1930s Germany, photography of her mother’s present-day life in Chicago, archival footage of postwar Germany, and hand-scratched black leader of her own narration inserted as written text.

NEA and NYSCA grants in the mid-1990s allowed Friedrich to experiment with synch sound in crafting Hide and Seek (1996), which ambitiously weaves together fiction, nonfiction, and experimental modes to offer a collective treatise on lesbian childhood. When film became too expensive, she was given a digital camera by painter, Cathy Nan Quinlan, her partner and Hide and Seek and Gut Renovation collaborator (and Rules of the Road heartbreaker). The Odds of Recovery (2002), Friedrich’s film about her decades-long medical struggles, was her last film to be edited on 16mm and to include 16mm home footage (along with digital footage shot in unknowing doctors’ offices). The Head of a Pin (2004), Seeing Red (2004), and the six other films she has made since were all shot and edited digitally.

Friedrich’s long reluctance to abandon film stemmed from a belief that analog and digital video are simply ugly in comparison. She expresses such anti-video sentiments in the first interview collected here: I hate the light, I hate the way it looks. However, as the more recent interviews chronicle, her turn to digital video also opened up avenues of expression. Much of Gut Renovation—including the long takes of an impenetrable boulder occupying the lot across the street—would have been impossible on film, as the time need to shoot without cutting exceeds the windup Bolex’s capabilities. In The Odds of Recovery, digital video enabled her to sneak cameras into doctors’ offices, recording the neglectfulness of the medical profession. In Gut Renovation, Friedrich continues this highly personal, anti-capitalist guerrilla filmmaking, recording open houses in the neighborhood’s new luxury condos at hip-level under the auspices of prospective condo ownership. For I Cannot Tell You How I Feel, Friedrich was able to capture digitally her mother’s move from her home of fifty years in Chicago to an independent living facility in New York, complete with her mother’s real-time objections, Friedrich’s thoughts and feelings on these matters conjoined through digital intertitles added in postproduction.

This is the first book dedicated exclusively to Su Friedrich and her work. The interviews collected here highlight the historical, theoretical, political, and economic dimensions through which her films gain their unique and defiantly ambiguous identity. In selecting these interviews, we sought a comprehensive perspective on Friedrich’s diverse body of work and the conditions in which they were made. We wished to show how they have circulated and become understood within different contexts. Together these interviews underscore central preoccupations of Friedrich and the evolution of her career and life. The repetitions seen at times in her answers reflect the centrality of these sentiments and points of analysis.

This collection contains fifteen interviews with Friedrich and three autobiographical writings. While the majority of scholarly and critical attention to Friedrich’s oeuvre focuses on the first third of her career, more than half of the interviews included here discuss those films made in the twenty-first century. This choice does not undercut the immense significance of her earlier work or the value of interviews from the ’80s and ’90s, but it allows us to focus attention on films that have been much understudied. Su Friedrich is a major filmmaker, early and late.

Interviews such as the nuanced discussion between Friedrich and avant-garde film scholar Scott MacDonald have been foundational in framing her works in terms of both their aesthetic strategies and political resonances. MacDonald’s talks with Friedrich detail her early films up to Sink or Swim. More recent interviews, such as that with Caroline Berler, reflect on Friedrich’s historical positioning, with Berler’s particular interest being Friedrich’s 1990s work as it aligns with and challenges the decade’s lesbian historical imaginary. The volume closes with our Editors’ Interview, which seeks to illuminate areas that remain latent or under-discussed in other interviews. One such area is Friedrich’s position as a film professor at Princeton University, in particular how her pedagogy and choice of employment have influenced her career as a filmmaker, and vice versa. This interview also draws attention to Friedrich’s projects that supplement her own filmmaking, such as creating a website for the late African American filmmaker William Greaves, and Edited By, an online historical resource dedicated to collecting information about and honoring the contributions of women film editors.

Echoing across these various interviews is Friedrich’s charmingly sardonic and defiant personality, familiar from her films. Her occasional resistance to an interviewer’s line of questioning opens up other, unexpected lines of inquiry as it also provides insight into her distinct philosophy. We must thank Su, who graciously made herself available for any questions we had as we pieced together this project. She also assisted us in tracking down potential interviews and other writings to include in this collection, as well as providing contact information for authors as we worked to secure copyright permissions. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with her on this project. It is our hope that, by perusing this collection, readers may get to know her a little bit better, gaining a sense of her deeply personal filmmaking and the ways in which Friedrich’s life becomes intimately entangled with her art.

Notes

1. Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975), 6–18; Claire Johnston, Women’s Cinema as Counter Cinema, in Notes on Women’s Cinema (London: Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973); Camera Obscura Collective, Feminism and Film: Critical Approaches, Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory 1 (Fall 1976), 3–10; Camera Obscura Collective, Chronology: The Camera Obscura Collective, Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory 3–4 (Summer 1979), 5–13; Mary Ann Doane, Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body, October 17 (Summer 1981), 22–36; Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982); and E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (New York and London: Routledge, 1983).

2. Michael Renov, Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self, in Collecting Visible Evidence , ed. Michael Renov and Jane Gaines, 140–55 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Chris Holmlund, When Autobiography Meets Ethnography and Girl Meets Girl: The ‘Dyke Docs’ of Su Friedrich and Sadie Benning, in Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, and Gay Documentary, ed. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs, 127–43 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); and Catherine Russell, Hide and Seek: Looking for Lesbians, in Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video, 148–56 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999).

Chronology

Filmography

HOT WATER (1978)

Director: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Production Company: Su Friedrich Films

Distribution: Vimeo

Super 8mm, black & white, 12 minutes

COOL HANDS, WARM HEART (1979)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Cast/Interview Subjects/Voiceover Performers: Donna Allegra Simms, Sally

Eckhoff, Jennifer MacDonald, Rose Maurer, Marty Pottenger

Production Company: Su Friedrich Films

Distribution: Outcast Films; Canyon Cinema

Super 8mm and 16mm, black & white, 16 minutes

SCAR TISSUE (1979)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Production Company: Su Friedrich Films

Distribution: Outcast Films; Canyon Cinema

Super 8mm and 16mm, black & white, 6 minutes

I SUGGEST MINE (1980)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Production Company: Su Friedrich Films

Distribution: Private Collection

16mm, color and black & white, 6 minutes

GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM (1981)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Cast/Interview Subjects/Voiceover Performers: Jennifer MacDonald, Marty

Pottenger

Production Company: Su Friedrich Films

Distribution: Outcast Films; Canyon Cinema; Film-Makers’ Cooperative; Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre; Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek; Light Cone

Super 8mm and 16mm, black & white, 14 minutes

BUT NO ONE (1982)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Production Company: Su Friedrich Films

Funding: New York State Council on the Arts

Distribution: Outcast Films; Canyon Cinema

16mm, black & white, 9 minutes

THE TIES THAT BIND (1984)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Sound Editor: Su Friedrich

Cast/Interview Subjects/Voiceover Performers: Lore Friedrich

Production Company: Su Friedrich Films

Funding: New York State Council on the Arts

Distribution: Outcast Films; Canyon Cinema; Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre; Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek; Light Cone

16mm, black & white, 55 minutes

DAMNED IF YOU DON’T (1987)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Script Consultant: Cathy Nan Quinlan

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Sound Editor: Su Friedrich

Cast/Interview Subjects/Voiceover Performers: Peggy Healey (The Nun), Makea McDonald, Cathay Nan Quinlan, Martina Siebert, Ela Troyano (The Other Woman)

Production Company: Su Friedrich Films

Funding: New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome Foundation, and German Academic Exchange Service

Distribution: Outcast Films; Canyon Cinema; Film-Makers’ Cooperative; Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre; Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek; Light Cone

16mm, black & white, 42 minutes

SINK OR SWIM (1990)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich, Peggy Ahwesh, Carl J. Friedrich Editor: Su Friedrich Sound Editor: Su Friedrich

Cast/Interview Subjects/Voiceover Performers: Su Friedrich, Jessica Lynn, Martina Meijer, Peggy Ahwesh

Production Company: Su Friedrich Films

Funding: Guggenheim Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, Jerome

Foundation, New York Foundation on the Arts, and Art Matters, Inc.

Distribution: Outcast Films; Canyon Cinema; Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre; Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek; Light Cone

16mm, black & white, 48 minutes

FIRST COMES LOVE (1991)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Sound Editor: Su Friedrich

Production Company: Jezebel Productions, Inc.

Funding: Rockefeller Foundation

Distribution: Outcast Films; Canyon Cinema; Film-Makers’ Cooperative; Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre; Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek

16mm, black & white, 22 minutes

LESBIAN AVENGERS EAT FIRE, TOO (1993)

Director: Su Friedrich and Janet Baus

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich and Janet Baus

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich, Janet Baus, Jean Carlomusto, Julie Clark, and Harriet Hirschorn

Editor: Su Friedrich and Janet Baus

Sound Editor: Su Friedrich and Janet Baus

Production Company: Lesbian Avengers

Distribution: Outcast Films; Lesbian Avengers

Video, color, 60 minutes

RULES OF THE ROAD (1993)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich

Editor: Su Friedrich

Sound Editor: Su Friedrich

Cast/Interview Subjects/Voiceover Performers: Su Friedrich

Production Company: Jezebel Productions, Inc.

Funding: Rockefeller Foundation

Distribution: Outcast Films; Canyon Cinema; Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre; Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek; Light Cone

16mm, color, 31 minutes

HIDE AND SEEK (1996)

Director: Su Friedrich

Screenwriter: Su Friedrich and Cathy Nan Quinlan

Producer: Eva Kolodner and Katie Roumel

Executive Producer: Su Friedrich

Cinematographer: Su Friedrich and Jim Denault

Editor: Su Friedrich

Editing Consultant: Cathy Nan Quinlan

Sound Editor: Juan Carlos Martinez

Cast/Interview Subjects/Voiceover Performers: Chelsea Holland (Lou), Ariel Mara (Betsy), Linzy Taylor