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affected my filmmaking. My ability to be precise with the scratched texts is partly a result of my experience as a pasteup person. At this point I don't want it anymore as an influence, but I don't know what else I would do to earn a living. During the past two years, I've also been able to earn about twenty percent of my income by doing one-person shows at schools and museums. It gets pretty difficult at times to answer the same questions over and over, but it's important to make contact with the audience, to know the people ''out there" who still support these sorts of films. I've also gotten a few grants, which were a real blessing; it would have taken me twice as long to make
Damned If You Don't
without them.
MacDonald:
When you took on
The Ties That Bind,
did you assume its length would generate more shows?
Friedrich:
I had no idea that
The Ties That Bind
was going to be as long as it was, and I also didn't think that people were going to be that interested in it. It just got longer and longer and more expensive, and then I found that because I had an hour-long film it was easier to get shows. Before that, I had always been in group shows. (Actually, I started out doing some programming myself, setting up shows in galleries in the East Village, in churches.) I had never really worried much about getting one-person shows because I kept making these short films and it didn't seem possible. But once I did
The Ties That Bind,
I got lots of invitations. It's always hard to be businesslike about your own art products, but I decided I had to force myself to accept that part of the filmmaking process, to deal with the hard work that comes
after
the hard work of getting the film made.
MacDonald:
I would think
The Ties That Bind
could have a pretty good-sized audience, certainly more than just the avant-garde film audience.
Friedrich:
I've shown it in a number of places where it seemed like a lot of people in the audience don't see experimental film. Afterward people would come up to me and say, "I've never seen a film like this. I was confused at first, but by the end I really understood and enjoyed it." When I was making the film, I was hard on myself about the relationship of sound and image. I wanted to be very precise, to push the two elements in a way that doesn't happen in a standard documentary, but I also wanted the film to be accessible to people. I respect people's intelligence enough to think that if they were shown this sort of film more often, they would be able to understand it. I don't think people will necessarily run screaming from experimental films, and I wish some programmers had more respect for their audience's intelligence.
And I think people might enjoy playing the games the film sets up. I certainly feel the difference between a film in which the person is trying to be communicative and one where a person is just trying to be obscure