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lot of tests with scratched words, but then I realized that that was a completely inappropriate form for such a film, which would have to be a much more accessible sort of documentary. Since I didn't want to work in a documentary style, I gave it up.
I started working on
Gently Down the Stream
because I was having a lot of trouble, and I wanted to reread my journals and then burn them all. Instead I got interested in many of the dreams I'd recorded. I developed
Gently Down the Stream
from those dreams.
When I made
I Suggest Mine,
I thought I should try to do something very personal, entirely about me. I failed miserably. I was much too self-conscious about exposing myself. By the time I got around to
Gently Down the Stream,
I had accepted the idea of using personal material, but I had also found a way to work with it with some sort of distance. At first, when I was reading the dreams and thinking about them, I felt really embarrassed about revealing them. But by the time I began to see how they looked when they were scratched out and saw what images went with them, I had lost some of that personal investment.
When I was doing
Cool Hands
and
Scar Tissue,
I was much more rigid in my thinking, both about film and about myself as a woman. With
Scar Tissue,
especially, I wanted to be very extreme, to just use a few elements and be very aggressive with them. In both films I wanted to convince people of something; I wanted to show them some little corner of the world and say, "You see, this is the way it is, and it's not good that it's this way." When I made
Gently Down the Stream,
I felt differently. I had certain assumptions about what my dreams meant, and I certainly had ideas about what it meant to be involved with a woman and then involved with a man. I had ideas about how to work with dreams and how I felt they were useful. But I also liked the idea that, being less doctrinaire, I was leaving things more to chance. I wasn't saying that all women are good or that it's only good to be with women. I was saying, well, you know, things are kind of messy in our private lives and in our dream worlds and that's just the way it is. At first it seemed that if I was going to be a "good" feminist I should show the relationship with the woman to be a good one as compared to the relationship with a man. But I couldn't because the dreams that I had about the relationship with the woman revealed a lot of problems. The dreams revealed that both relationships were pretty much failures, and that seemed more realistic than trying to sell some theory about how relationships
should
be.
MacDonald:
Are there a couple of shots from
Scar Tissue
in
The Ties That Bind
?
Friedrich:
Yes. There's also a lot of footage from
Hot Water
[1978], my very first film, in
Gently Down the Stream
: the stuff of the woman swimming in the pool and the woman rowing on the rowing machine.