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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-