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MacDonald:
That material looks like found footage from another era.
Friedrich:
Yes, it does. I really liked shooting that first film. It wasn't a very good film, but it was fun to do. I liked the footage in it, but I wasn't crazy about the way it was put together. I was low on footage when I was making
Gently Down the Stream,
and I figured I might as well use this stuff. Actually, I was thinking of using some outtakes from
But No One
in
Damned If You Don't
. I like the idea of recycling things and of finding new meanings, in a new context, for images that have appeared in earlier films.
MacDonald:
There are some very weird dreams in
Gently Down the Stream
. The dream about making the second vagina and the image of the baby that crumbles are pretty powerful. I used the film in several classes this year, and the students found the film outrageous. They were riled up about it.
Friedrich:
If people see the film without knowing it's made from dreams, they do tend to get very anxious. But if they recognize that the texts are dreams, they tend to accept the film. We all have weird dreams.
MacDonald:
Well, there's also the question of admitting what you dream or feel. We may know we have embarrassing dreams, but publicly admitting what they are is something different. I'll bet most people repress confusing dreams very quickly.
Friedrich:
I've been surprised when I've traveled with
Gently Down the Stream
how many people tell me that they never remember their dreams or if they do they never bother to write them down. They don't take them seriously. I find that I go through periods when I don't remember any of my dreams, and I feel terrible after a while because I feel like I really need to remember them and look at them. When I went through my journal to find dreams for
Gently Down the Stream,
I found great dreams I hadn't rememberedthe one about making the second vagina was one of them. I thought, "What a great image. It's so loaded and says so much"and I'd forgotten about it! I would never have come up with that image during a conscious moment; I feel grateful for the images we create while dreaming.
The dreams that ended up in the film are suggestive in different ways. Remember the dream where I say that the woman sitting on the stage asks a friend from the audience to come and make love to her? Every time I show the film and I'm in the audience, I think about how somebody in the audience feels. As a filmmaker, I'm doing just what the woman in the dream is doing. I think there's something about making work that has to do with your wanting to please people, to make love with the audience. This dream is a bald statement of a desire that I think is part of a lot of films.