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and go over everyone's head. I don't think
The Ties That Bind
feels deliberately obscure.
MacDonald:
Avant-garde film is always going to have technical "weaknesses," compared to commercial cinema. The secret is to use them to your benefit. When the viewer of
The Ties That Bind
hears the mike bang on the couch, the home-movie feeling of the film is enhanced; it's as if we're sitting in somebody's den looking at the slides of their trip. Your film is technically screwed up just enough to make the viewer feel at ease; it's the polar opposite of Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will
[1936], which I've juxtaposed it with in courses a number of times.
Friedrich:
I have a very uneasy relationship with the technology of filmmaking. I think I'm careful only up to a point, and it's usually the point where redoing something would mean spending more money than I have. Past that point I think, "Fuck it."
MacDonald:
Has
The Ties That Bind
been shown on TV? Has it earned income as a semicommercial theatrical film?
Friedrich:
It was shown at a number of festivals, and it was shown on WNYC in New York.
MacDonald:
Do you think your work suffers when it's transferred to video?
Friedrich:
Scratched words don't look good on video. They lose the crisp articulation and rhythm that's there on film. And the material in
The Ties That Bind
that's blown up from Super-8 to 16mm looks terrible on video. It just falls to pieces. I have a horrible feeling about that because in the pastlet's say five or ten years agowhen I would go to a screening of films by women, many of them would be technically poor. There would be this urgency about getting the film made and saying this important thing, and if you didn't expose the image right or if the sound was bad, well those were the breaks. When I've seen my film on video, I've thought, "My god, if somebody just turns this on and doesn't know me and hasn't seen the film projected, they'll think, 'Oh god, another film by a woman that looks like shit.'" Of course, these days many women are making technically competent films. And I think that that earlier period in our historyof making films out of a breathless sense of urgency despite technical limitationswas absolutely crucial. The same process happened in third-world countries when they were first developing their own film industries, and some incredibly powerful films were made despite the lack of technology.
MacDonald:
One feminist reaction to conventional cinema has been to confront patriarchal exploitation by eliminating the kinds of pleasure that conventional films thrive on. I'm assuming that in
Damned If You Don't
you're taking the position that there's no reason why feminist films shouldn't be as sensuously pleasurable as conventional cinema.