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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.
Scar Tissue
uses footage recorded on New York City streets to reveal the workings of patriarchy, in a mood of numbed horror.
The next two films, and especially
Gently Down the Stream,
are more specific to Friedrich's personal experience. In preparation for making
Gently Down the Stream,
Friedrich spent months collecting her dreams, writing them down, and etching the most powerful and suggestive into the emulsion of black-and-white film, word by word. At times there is no imagery except for the hand-scratched words; in other instances, the words, which are always the foreground of the film, are combined with photographed imagery, much of which provides metaphors for our voyage along Friedrich's "stream" of consciousness (a woman exercises on a rowing machine, another swims). In general, the dreams recorded in
Gently Down the Stream
reveal a conflict between Friedrich's Roman Catholic upbringing and her lesbian desires. Indeed, the words that tell these dreams often seem to quiver with the intensity of this conflict.
The Ties That Bind,
Friedrich's first long film and her first 16mm film with sound (an early Super-8 film,
Hot Water
[1978], no longer in distribution, had sound), combines elements of documentary (on the soundtrack she interviews her German-born mother about her experiences growing up in Germany during the thirties as an anti-Nazi German) with elements familiar from avant-garde forms of cinema: the visuals are a mix of Friedrich's hand-scratched questions of her mother (we hear only her mother's responses on the soundtrack, not the questions that provoke them); photographic footage recorded with a hand-held Super-8 camera during Friedrich's visit to Germany to investigate her roots (this material has a gestural feel reminiscent of Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage); 16mm footage of her mother in her current Chicago environment, and of her own trip to a demonstration at the Seneca Army Depot in upstate New York; archival footage recorded during the Second World War in Germany; and home movies made soon after Friedrich's mother arrived in the United States with her GI husband at the end of the war. Diverse as the film's sources of information are, they are bound tightly by Friedrich's intricate editing, which develops a range of thematic and formal "ties" between the various visual and auditory strands of the film.
The Ties That Bind
is a consistently moving record of a filmmaker's coming to terms with her mother's troubled past and her own threatened present.
Friedrich's decision to explore her German background confronts an implicit cultural taboo. Like many of us who have German roots, Frie-