Page 309
In the text of
Sink or Swim,
I had to make a decision about form. I was using stories from my own life and began by writing them in the first person, but I got tired of that very quickly. I sounded too self-indulgent. Writing them over in the third person was quite liberating. The distance I got from speaking of "a girl" and "her father" gave me more courage, allowed me to say things I wouldn't dare say in the first person, and I think it also lets viewers identify more with the material, because they don't have to be constantly thinking of me while listening to the stories. Some people have told me afterward that they weren't even aware it was autobiographical, which I like. The point of the film is not to have people know about
me
; it's to have them think about what we all experience during childhood, in differing degrees.
On the other hand, it can sometimes be a problem to impose a structure on a story. I was happy to have thought about using the alphabet, but then that forced me to produce exactly twenty-six stories, no more, no less. I went into a panic at first, thinking that I had either seventy-five stories or only ten, and wasn't sure that I would be able to say all I wanted to say within the limits of the twenty-six. But that became a good disciplinary device; it forced me to edit, to select carefully for maximum effect.
MacDonald:
I think the irony is that Hollis, for example, really thought his formal tactics were keeping his films from being personal (his use of Michael Snow to narrate
nostalgia
is similar to your use of the young girl to narrate the stories in
Sink or Swim
). When I talked with him about his films, he rarely mentioned any connection between what he made and his personal lifea conventionally "masculine" way of dealing with the personal in art. But from my point of view, his best films
Zorns Lemma, nostalgia, Poetic Justice
[1972],
Critical Mass
[1971]are always those in which the personal makes itself felt, despite his attempts to formally distance and control it.
Friedrich:
The issue for me is to be more direct, or honest, about my experiences but also to be analytical. I think there's always a problem in people seeing my films and immediately applying the word "personal."
Sink or Swim
is personal, but it's also very analytical, or rigorously formal.
I don't like to generalize about anything, but I do think it's often the case that the more a person pretends or insists they're not dealing with their own feelings, the more those feelings come out in peculiar ways in their work. Historically, it's been the position of a lot of male artists to insist that they are speaking universally, that they're describing experiences outside of their own and thereby being transcendent. I think conversely that you get to something that's universal by being very specific. Of course, I think you can extend beyond your own experience; you can