A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

one-person shows because I kept making these short films and it didn't seem possible. But once I did

The Ties That Bind,

I got lots of invitations. It's always hard to be businesslike about your own art products, but I decided I had to force myself to accept that part of the filmmaking process, to deal with the hard work that comes

after

the hard work of getting the film made.

MacDonald:

I would think

The Ties That Bind

could have a pretty good-sized audience, certainly more than just the avant-garde film audience.

Friedrich:

I've shown it in a number of places where it seemed like a lot of people in the audience don't see experimental film. Afterward people would come up to me and say, 'I've never seen a film like this. I was confused at first, but by the end I really understood and enjoyed it.' When I was making the film, I was hard on myself about the relationship of sound and image. I wanted to be very precise, to push the two elements in a way that doesn't happen in a standard documentary, but I also wanted the film to be accessible to people. I respect people's intelligence enough to think that if they were shown this sort of film more often, they would be able to understand it. I don't think people will necessarily run screaming from experimental films, and I wish some programmers had more respect for their audience's intelligence.

And I think people might enjoy playing the games the film sets up. I certainly feel the difference between a film in which the person is trying to be communicative and one where a person is just trying to be obscure

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and go over everyone's head. I don't think

The Ties That Bind

feels deliberately obscure.

MacDonald:

Avant-garde film is always going to have technical 'weaknesses,' compared to commercial cinema. The secret is to use them to your benefit. When the viewer of

The Ties That Bind

hears the mike bang on the couch, the home-movie feeling of the film is enhanced; it's as if we're sitting in somebody's den looking at the slides of their trip. Your film is technically screwed up just enough to make the viewer feel at ease; it's the polar opposite of Leni Riefenstahl's

Triumph of the Will

[1936], which I've juxtaposed it with in courses a number of times.

Friedrich:

I have a very uneasy relationship with the technology of filmmaking. I think I'm careful only up to a point, and it's usually the point where redoing something would mean spending more money than I have. Past that point I think, 'Fuck it.'

MacDonald:

Has

The Ties That Bind

been shown on TV? Has it earned income as a semicommercial theatrical film?

Friedrich:

It was shown at a number of festivals, and it was shown on WNYC in New York.

MacDonald:

Do you think your work suffers when it's transferred to video?

Friedrich:

Scratched words don't look good on video. They lose the crisp articulation and rhythm that's there on film. And the material in

The Ties That Bind

that's blown up from Super-8 to 16mm looks terrible on video. It just falls to pieces. I have a horrible feeling about that because in the pastlet's say five or ten years agowhen I would go to a screening of films by women, many of them would be technically poor. There would be this urgency about getting the film made and saying this important thing, and if you didn't expose the image right or if the sound was bad, well those were the breaks. When I've seen my film on video, I've thought, 'My god, if somebody just turns this on and doesn't know me and hasn't seen the film projected, they'll think, 'Oh god, another film by a woman that looks like shit.'' Of course, these days many women are making technically competent films. And I think that that earlier period in our historyof making films out of a breathless sense of urgency despite technical limitationswas absolutely crucial. The same process happened in third-world countries when they were first developing their own film industries, and some incredibly powerful films were made despite the lack of technology.

MacDonald:

One feminist reaction to conventional cinema has been to confront patriarchal exploitation by eliminating the kinds of pleasure that conventional films thrive on. I'm assuming that in

Damned If You Don't

you're taking the position that there's no reason why feminist films shouldn't be as sensuously pleasurable as conventional cinema.

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Friedrich:

I think I did have that plan when I started. I wanted to make something that I (and viewers) would enjoy. But I don't think I set out to contradict any other person's film or any other kind of filmmaking. It's true that when I go to films that are determined

not

to provide traditional pleasure, I end up being really frustrated or bored or angry. My reaction to such films has been building for a long time. Even when I was making

Gently Down the Stream,

I had a combative stance toward antipleasure films, but at that time I wasn't able to do as much as I wanted to do in terms of providing pleasure myself. And certainly there wasn't much place for pleasure in

The Ties That Bind

. It wasn't until I was actually into making