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moment right before a homosexual moment, but I don't see sex as exclusively heterosexual or homosexual. At a discussion of
Damned If You Don't,
somebody asked whether I was trying to imply that all nuns are lesbians. I really hope that people don't think that that's what I'm saying in the film; it's very important to me that people
don't
think that. To be provocative, I said, ''Well, I think it would have happened exactly the same way if it had been a man and the nun." At the time I thought to myself, "That isn't entirely true!" But I wanted to make people think about it. I think the whole ritual of seduction works out to be pretty much the same thing between a man and a woman or between a woman and a womanat least that's been my experience. There are differences, but there's also something universal about being attracted to somebody and trying to make something happen about it.
MacDonald: Sink or Swim
is about your relationship with your father, but the way in which you present your struggle to come to grips with that relationship is unusual. Probably of all your films,
Sink or Swim
has the most rigorously formal organization. The only other film I know that uses the alphabet as a central structural device is Frampton's
Zorns Lemma
. Obviously, your film deals more directly and openly with personal material than Frampton's did, but I wonder, is there any conscious reference to cinematic fathers, as well as to your biological father?
Friedrich:
That's a hard question to answer. Offhand, I'd say I wasn't making a conscious reference to any other filmmakers, but that the structure was determined more by the fact of my father's being a linguist. I thought that using the alphabet was an obvious choice for the overall structure. I've certainly been influenced by many filmmakers, including some of the so-called structural filmmakers, like Frampton or Ernie Gehr, but my films are never meant to be a direct comment on or a reworking of ideas from other people's films.
I tend to think of the structural film school as avoiding the use of personal, revealing subject matter; I think they're more concerned with how film affects one's perception of time and space than with how it can present a narrative. Whenever I set out to make a film, my primary motive is to create an emotionally charged, or resonant, experienceto work with stories from my own life that I feel the need to examine closely, and that I think are shared by many people. With that as the initial motive, I then try to find a form that will not only make the material accessible but will also give the viewer a certain amount of cinematic pleasure. In that I feel somewhat akin to the structural filmmakers, since I do like to play with the frame, the surface, the rhythm, with layering and repetition and text, and all the other filmic elements that are precluded when one is trying to do something more purely narrative or documentary.