A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

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be downright shocking for many viewers. The lovemaking scene where the Troyano character undresses the nun is as outrageous as it is sensual. The second level of Friedrich's courage is her rejection of what has often been seen as one of the central tenets of feminist filmmaking since the mid seventies. Once the filmic gaze was recognized as essentially (or at least traditionally) male, some filmmakers and critics came to see traditional film pleasure as an implicit acceptance of the workings of patriarchy, and it seemed necessary to expunge female sexuality and nudity from serious cinema in the service of progressive feminism. Other forms of film pleasure also seemed questionable: the sensuous rhythms, textures, and structures of personal and structural forms of avant- garde film were seen as self-indulgent. While some filmmakers refused to take such concerns seriously and continued to make films to be enjoyed, regardless of the implicit gender politics, other filmmakers eliminated or interrupted all conventional forms of film pleasure.

Friedrich may have originally been in sympathy with this feminist position (

Cool Hands, Warm Heart

and

Scar Tissue

suggest she was), but by

Damned If You Don't,

she had come to see it as a dead end, an attitude that implicitly reconfirms patriarchy. If male films are sensual and pleasurable, while female (or at least 'feminist') films are rigorously unsensual and pleasureless, males are defined, once again, as having something females lack. Traditionally, women have been 'damned' to function as cogs in an exploitative male cinema that thrives on female sensuality. In some feminist films, women are 'damned'' a second time, to wander through ideologically pure but pleasureless (or, at least, sexless) narratives.

Damned If You Don't

is Friedrich's declaration of independence from this pattern. It energizes the feminist response to patriarchal cinema by locating it within a context of two forms of reappropriated film pleasure: the excitement of melodramatic narrative and the sensuous enjoyment of cinematic texture, rhythm, and structure. Friedrich's decision not only to include a representation of female sexuality but to use it as the triumphant conclusion of the film is crucial. Friedrich has cinematically reappropriated the pleasure

of

women

for

women. Yet she is willing to share this pleasure with men (her use of imagery of a male and female tightrope walker to announce the lovemaking of the two women suggests that the sexual pleasure of women need not be confined to women): if men are fortunate enough to be able to take pleasure in the pleasure of women, so be it! Regardless of what men or women do, however, Friedrich can

not

be a nun, Catholic or filmic.

In

Sink or Swim,

which can easily be seen as a companion piece to

The Ties That Bind,

Friedrich returns to her family history to explore her relationship with her father, anthropologist/linguist Paul Friedrich, who left the family when Friedrich was a child. In

Sink or Swim,

Frie-

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drich confronts the brutality built into the conventional nuclear family by virtue of societal gender assumptions, directly and personally, though with subtlety and thoughtfulness. Her goal is not simply to respond to the long-term effects of painful childhood experiences but to aid viewersmen and womenin thinking about their own experiences as children and their own approaches to parenting.

As is true in all Friedrich's longer films, her desire to enhance viewers' willingness to interact in humane ways is reflected by her cinematic approach, which is, on one hand, to bring together filmmaking traditions that are normally (at least in North America) considered distinct and, on the other, to edit her visuals and her sound track so that these separate sources of information intersect in a wide range of obvious and subtle ways.

Sink or Swim

is a personal narrative recorded in a gestural style, but its organization suggests 'structural film,' particularly Hollis Frampton's alphabetically arranged

Zorns Lemma:

the individual stories that make up

Sink or Swim

are presented in reverse alphabetical order, according to the first letters of their one-word titles: 'Zygote,' 'Y Chromosome,' 'X Chromosome,' . . . Friedrich: tells her story clearly and powerfully enough to move a broad spectrum of filmgoers, but the interplay between sound and image can feed the eye and mind for many viewings.

First Comes Love

is a meditation on marriageon traditional heterosexual marriage and on the widespread illegality of same-sex marriage. The film begins with imagery of several couples arriving at New York City churches, with family and friends, to be married, accompanied on the sound track by a variety of musical homages to love and marriage. But once the various couples have arrived at the altar, Friedrich suddenly shifts to a rolling text (a ceremonial 'scripture' of her own) that lists every country in the world where same-sex marriage is legally forbidden. When the long listing is complete, Friedrich returns to the marriage imagery and records the couples exiting the church, having their pictures taken, and leaving for receptions and honeymoons. At the very end of the film, Denmark is revealed as the only nation where same-sex marriage is currently legal.

First Comes Love

is a poignant combination of Friedrich's frustration with the conventional assumption that 'first comes love, then comes marriage' (an idea clearly proven false by the worldwide resistance to same-sex lovers legalizing their bonds), of her recognition, often suggested by her editing, that conventional marriage continues to be about the consolidation of money and power, and of her sadness in being left out of a form of bonding that for many couples is deeply meaningful (this sadness is implicit in Friedrich's characteristically beautiful black-and-white imagery and in the subtlety of her interconnections between image and sound).

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