Page 293
crazy about it.
But No One
is made out of a certain amount of repression and depression, and it shows.
MacDonald:
Even the device of scratched texts doesn't work as well.
Friedrich:
I feel very intimate with that device, but I also feel that I might not be able to use it much longer. Actually, I pushed it further in
Gently Down the Stream
than I did in
But No One
or
The Ties That Bind
.
MacDonald:
You may articulate it more in
Gently Down the Stream
than in
The Ties That Bind,
but in the longer film you found a way of using it without its dominating the entire experience.
Friedrich:
One large area that I haven't really worked with is scratching words over images. I mean I did that a little in
The Ties That Bind
(when I go to my mother's house, for example) and at the end of
Gently Down the Stream,
where "blindness" is spelled out over the water with that incredible movement. That's one area I'd like to explore more. I'm interested in what would happen if I started using scratched text to comment on the images that you're seeing, or to completely confuse the image, to have them be so contradictory that you couldn't, or wouldn't, want to be looking and reading at the same time.
MacDonald:
What got you started on
The Ties That Bind
?
Friedrich:
Well, I remember that I was in California on tour with Leslie Thornton, showing films. I wanted to make a movie, and I kept thinking of the phrase, "She built a house"just the phrase. I was doing a lot of drawings and making little notes to myself about having a sense of home, and one day I suddenly thought of my mother. She was someone I thought of as without her own homealthough she's lived in the United States since 1950 and is settled here, she'd always seemed a little bit uprooted to me, partly because I'd never met any of her relatives.
Suddenly, I thought that her life was something I absolutely had to find out about, something I had to work with. I went to Chicago to see her. I had to lie a little bit, to make it seem like this wasn't such a serious project. I was very diffident about it when I talked to her, and then I showed up with lots of equipment. I think she was suspicious. But she was great about the filming. She was so unselfconscious, and
I'm
the sort of person who
hates
to be in front of the camera, still or movie. I thought she would be very uptight; I thought she would worry about the way she looked, but she was completely indifferent. She just went about her business, paid no attention to me. One or two times, she said, "Oh, stop that filming for a minute." She'd be having a conversation with me, and I'd be behind this big camera grunting and saying, "Oh yeah? Oh yeah?" and I think after a while she felt uncomfortable with it. But she never refused to let me film anything.
MacDonald:
You recorded the tapes later?
Friedrich:
No. I did all the interviewing and some shooting on my first