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Friedrich and I discussed the films up through
Damned If You Don't
in March 1986 and again in September 1987. We discussed
Sink or Swim
in June 1990.
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MacDonald:
I find
Scar Tissue
and
Cool Hands, Warm Heart
hard to look at. They seem to have been made within a small circle of friends as feminist exercises. The change from those two films to
Gently Down the Stream
seems considerable, even though the style of all three films is related. I feel somewhat the same way about the jump from
Gently Down the Stream
and
But No One
to
The Ties That Bind
. Do you see big leaps in power from the earlier films to the later ones?
Friedrich:
I think of those early films as being too obvious, or too much about a single issue or image.
Cool Hands
is about these acted-out women's rituals;
Scar Tissue
is about certain midtown men and women.
Scar Tissue
was made with a small audience in mind. I think it was made in part as a response to Dave Lee and his film
Remembering Clearing Space
[1976, 1979], which was made with black and clear leader and footage from the Margaret Mead film
Trance and Dance in Bali
[1952]. We'd had this ongoing debate about what happens when you use clear and black leader. When I made
Scar Tissue,
I was doing the opposite of what he did. We were very close then, and we talked a lot about film. I do tend to think of just one or two people when I'm working on a film. Actually, after I made
Scar Tissue,
I made a film that you haven't seen. It had two titles: first it was called
Someone Was Holding My Breath
; I changed it to
I Suggest Mine
. I didn't like that film; it was so personal, about such neurotic aspects of my self-image, that I re-edited it, but I still didn't like it. Then I started working on a film about excision in Africa.
MacDonald:
That's the removal of the clitoris?
Friedrich:
Yes. And sewing up the vagina and the labia. I was really freaked out about the subject. I'd seen Ann Poirier's film
Primal Fear
[1978]. In it there was this brief bit of footage of an excision being done on a little girl in Africa. When I saw that footage at the New York Film Festival, I screamed out, "No!" But then I got interested in doing a film about excision. I read lots of material, and I started doing scratched-word tests because I wanted to make the film a conversation. One voice would be the "experts," like Western doctors or African men and women who would talk about why it's done, and the other voice would be the women describing what it felt like and their memories of it. I did a