reminds me more of the literary device of creating a narrating character whom the reader does not entirely identify with, or, at least, who is different from the writer. In
there's a lot you don't reveal (information about whether or not you're sexually involved with the women, for example). We get an inside view of your life,
you as filmmaker shape what we see in such a way that we come to see you as a separate and somewhat mysterious character.
In
I am represented primarily through my subjective voice-over narration. You do see me in a mirror shot, and playing the piano, but those are the only times you see the filmmaker. In
I go a step further. I deliver monologues; I try to create an almost literary voice-over. I think this enables the film to achieve a subjectivity it wouldn't have otherwise. I could have filmed the same people in the same situations without having said anything or revealed anything about my personality. That film might have been interesting, but I think not as interesting as when you hear something of what the filmmaker is thinking at a particular juncture in the film, and when you occasionally see the filmmaker in the setting where the film is unfolding
Page 282
(such as at the treehouse on the island when you see me in the bunk bed). It seems to me that these things are absolutely necessary to make the film work.
It's true that I'm not explicit about my sexual involvement with the women in the film, some of whom I slept with, some of whom I didn't. It seemed to me not the point of the film to graphically render that dimension of things, even if it had been possible to do so. I think that by being respectful of the women involved in the film vis- a-vis my sexual involvement with them, the film gains more than it loses. To have been more explicit would have pushed the film into sensationalism and solipsism that ultimately would have been alienating. Also, we have to keep in mind that this is a film about real people and real events. It's a documentary, not a fiction, and there are certain issues of privacy one simply has to respect. But the sexuality being alluded to and yet not directly revealed adds a subtle tension to the film that I hope works in its best interests.
It's also true that the Ross McElwee who's presented in the film is not a completely rendered Ross McElwee. I don't say everything about myself that I could be saying. I don't tell you everything that's on my mind. I am creating a deadpan persona. Perhaps I create a heightened sense of depression, heightened in an attempt to attain some sort of comic level. I'm creating a persona for the film that's based upon who I am, but it isn't exactly me. Of course, it's hard to make the judgment myself. It's like the problem Wittgenstein describes when he talks about how the eye can see the world but can't see itself. It's difficult to know yourself and to know how you're presenting yourself to the world.
Page 283
Su Friedrich
The critique of conventional cinema that is articulated in Su Friedrich's films
(1971),
(1980),
(1981),
(1982),
(1984),
(1987),
(1990), and
(1991)has roots in two different cultural projects: the development of North American avant-garde cinema and the recent feminist reassessment of modern society (and of the popular and independent cinema). Each of her films represents a different combination of these sources, and she has demonstrated her loyalty to both in her extra-film activities: she was instrumental in getting the 1990
finished and published and is a regular workshop leader at the Millennium Film Workshop, and for years she was an active member of the
collective. Her particular gift has been to find ways of combining cinematically experimental means and a powerful feminist commitment in films that, increasingly, are accessible to a broad range of viewers, even to viewers unaccustomed to enjoying either experimental or feminist filmmaking. This accessibility is, to a large degree, a function of Friedrich's willingness to use her filmmaking to explore the particulars of her personal experience. And her success in reaching audiences represents a powerful attack on the assumption that viewers will only respond to conventional film rhetoric.
At the beginning of her filmmaking career, Friedrich's films were fueled by a grim feminism, personal only in the most general sense.
documents several women performing conventional, but normally private, women's ritualsone woman shaves her
Page 284
legs; another, her armpits; and a third braids her hairon a crowded street on the Lower East Side, as a way of rebelling against canons of 'feminine modesty' in commercial media and against those independent filmmakers who argue that films shouldn't polemicize an identifiable politic.
