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drich confronts the brutality built into the conventional nuclear family by virtue of societal gender assumptions, directly and personally, though with subtlety and thoughtfulness. Her goal is not simply to respond to the long-term effects of painful childhood experiences but to aid viewersmen and womenin thinking about their own experiences as children and their own approaches to parenting.
As is true in all Friedrich's longer films, her desire to enhance viewers' willingness to interact in humane ways is reflected by her cinematic approach, which is, on one hand, to bring together filmmaking traditions that are normally (at least in North America) considered distinct and, on the other, to edit her visuals and her sound track so that these separate sources of information intersect in a wide range of obvious and subtle ways.
Sink or Swim
is a personal narrative recorded in a gestural style, but its organization suggests "structural film," particularly Hollis Frampton's alphabetically arranged
Zorns Lemma:
the individual stories that make up
Sink or Swim
are presented in reverse alphabetical order, according to the first letters of their one-word titles: "Zygote," "Y Chromosome," "X Chromosome," . . . Friedrich: tells her story clearly and powerfully enough to move a broad spectrum of filmgoers, but the interplay between sound and image can feed the eye and mind for many viewings.
First Comes Love
is a meditation on marriageon traditional heterosexual marriage and on the widespread illegality of same-sex marriage. The film begins with imagery of several couples arriving at New York City churches, with family and friends, to be married, accompanied on the sound track by a variety of musical homages to love and marriage. But once the various couples have arrived at the altar, Friedrich suddenly shifts to a rolling text (a ceremonial "scripture" of her own) that lists every country in the world where same-sex marriage is legally forbidden. When the long listing is complete, Friedrich returns to the marriage imagery and records the couples exiting the church, having their pictures taken, and leaving for receptions and honeymoons. At the very end of the film, Denmark is revealed as the only nation where same-sex marriage is currently legal.
First Comes Love
is a poignant combination of Friedrich's frustration with the conventional assumption that "first comes love, then comes marriage" (an idea clearly proven false by the worldwide resistance to same-sex lovers legalizing their bonds), of her recognition, often suggested by her editing, that conventional marriage continues to be about the consolidation of money and power, and of her sadness in being left out of a form of bonding that for many couples is deeply meaningful (this sadness is implicit in Friedrich's characteristically beautiful black-and-white imagery and in the subtlety of her interconnections between image and sound).