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Su Friedrich
The critique of conventional cinema that is articulated in Su Friedrich's films
Cool Hands, Warm Heart
(1971),
Scar Tissue
(1980),
Gently Down the Stream
(1981),
But No One
(1982),
The Ties That Bind
(1984),
Damned If You Don't
(1987),
Sink or Swim
(1990), and
First Comes Love
(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
Film-makers' Cooperative Catalogue
finished and published and is a regular workshop leader at the Millennium Film Workshop, and for years she was an active member of the
Heresies
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.
Cool Hands, Warm Heart
documents several women performing conventional, but normally private, women's ritualsone woman shaves her