that I realized I could create some of the visual (and aural) pleasures I had wanted to experience in other people's films. Maybe it took me this long to be able to begin to work with pleasurable material because I had my own reservations about it. As much as I was angry about what other people were doing, I knew that I wasn't prepared politically or emotionally to do something different. I had to overcome my own backlog of things I
do.
The subject of
doesn't seem a very likely place for humor, and I'm sure to some people it isn't at all funny.
I have a tendency to look at things too seriously. When I made
I was particularly close to someone who has a really good sense of humor and who definitely pushed me into putting more humor into the film. Also, when I told my brother I was working on the film, he said, 'Oh god, why don't you just once make a film about a light subject!' He imagined, rightly, that I was planning another anguished exposition. His saying that really stuck in my mind.
The woman who delivers the critique of
Martina Siebert, does a terrific job.
I chose her partly because she's German and has a German accent. Initially I thought of it as a joke on the expert German scientist in fifties documentaries. But her delivery didn't come through that way. Her English is good, but she didn't always understand the cadence I intended, so a lot of times she said things in an odd way I couldn't have anticipatedwhich ended up working out for the best.
Another section of the film that's pretty funny, and I assume consciously so, is when the text from
is juxtaposed with the shots of the nuns walking around. When the reader says, 'I saw Christ coming,' one nun looks up as though she sees something coming. It's as if the nuns are unwittingly acting out the story. At the end of the film you apologize to those nuns. Was that because you felt you had made jokes at their expense?
Well, I started the film feeling very angry toward nuns and
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toward the Catholic church, and I wanted the film to be a condemnation of everything about the church.
Why were you angry at nuns in, particular?
Priests had some influence too, but the nuns were more immediate for me because they were my teachers for eight years. And, of course, they're women and they set what I thought was a bad example for me as a woman. But as I worked on the film and remembered more about the nuns, I realized that there was also a very good side to them, and I found myself feeling a lot of affection for some of them. Later, when I had the footage, I just wanted to look at them and remember them somewhat affectionately through this footage.
In the passage you asked about, the nuns are just walking around on the street looking very ordinary. I would look at that material and think about the nun in
who's in a delirious state because Christ is supposedly removing her heart while another nun watches from behind a curtain. By combining that text with the footage of nuns looking like they lead a fairly normal life, I wanted to create an uneasy feeling. When you see the nuns, it's hard to imagine that they would go so far as to believe that their hearts could actually be taken out of their bodies. Yet there's an ambiguity: maybe they've all had that kind of experience.
But to answer your earlier question: I apologized at the end because I'd had to lie to the nuns at the convent so that they would let me shoot, and I felt guilty about it.
What did you tell them you were doing?
I said I was making a narrative film about a woman lawyer who's working on a case and struggling with some ethical problem that causes her to have a flashback about a nun she'd had in grade school who taught her an important moral lesson. They were very flattered and liked the idea of my filming. When we were there, they kept coming in and out of the convent and saying hello. If any of them had spent time watching what we were doing, they would have sensed that something else was going on. I mean, here was this nun looking out from behind a tree while another woman was walking by. I don't know if they figured anything out.
At the Flaherty seminar [Friedrich was a guest at the thirty-third Robert Flaherty Seminar in August 1987], after Johan van der Keuken's
[1981], you were very angry at his manipulation of the people he filmed. I thought then and still think someone could ask a very similar question of you.
Of course, it's convenient for me to be able to see a distinction between the two.
I'm interested in hearing the distinction.
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