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gestures within the shot, combined with the rhythm of the roll bars, combined with the cadence of the speech at the moment. It became an elaborate game to play, though my eyes were on the floor when I was done.
MacDonald:
One of the things that draws me to your films is their precise rhythmic control, which I connect with a certain tradition of sixties filmBrakhage, for example.
Friedrich:
Actually, a long time ago when Marjorie Keller first showed
Daughters of Chaos
[1980; at the Collective for Living Cinema in New York City], I saw it and liked it. I talked to somebody afterward who said, "It's one of those films that was made on a Steenbeck." At that point I had never worked on a Steenbeck, and so I didn't even know what he meant. He said, "Well you know, it all gets done in the editing." Part of me thought, "Well, that's an interesting criticism; maybe it is a problem," but on the other hand, I found myself thinking that I liked the film and wondered how the method could be so bad if it resulted in something so intricately woven together? I guess I do admire Brakhage's editing, though I don't always admire what he's making the film about. To me the most fantastic part of constructing a film is taking many disparate elements and making some sense out of them, making them work together and inform each other. That process was really hard in
Damned If You Don't
because I had shot so much for a more documentary film, and the more the narrative took shape, the less that other stuff worked with it.
Also, at times I felt really angry at myself for getting caught in this bind between narrative and experimental. That was something I had always warned myself about and critiqued other people for. I had felt that once you start dealing with narrative, there really isn't the room for serious experimentation that there is when you don't use narrative at all. I don't know what will happen the next time I make a film, but in
Damned If You Don't
I do manage to create certain moments I really enjoy, which are a result of the film's mixture of very different approaches.
MacDonald:
You could say that the film reclaims certain kinds of pleasure that are the stuff of commercial cinema without accepting the commercial cinema's ideology
and
that the film reclaims certain kinds of pleasure that are particular to avant-garde film without necessarily accepting the ideology of the films in which these avant-garde pleasures are usually experienced.
Friedrich:
It seems that the issue is always giving yourself the maximum amount of freedom. If you make narrative film, thensome people would argueyou have more freedom because you're making something that will be accessible to people and will get to more audiences. Other people would say that only if you're doing something extremely