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speak about your own experience while also describing the experience of other people you're close to or decide to know. But I think you have to start at home.
MacDonald:
Maybe these things are cyclical. I'm sure those late sixties, early seventies filmmakers who avoided the personalFrampton and Snow, Yvonne Rainerwere reacting against the sixties demand that art, including film art, had to be personal. You bring two things togetherthe sixties' emphasis on the personal
and
the reaction against itand make the intersection into something that exploits the useful parts of both approaches.
Friedrich:
I am a child of both worlds. When I was studying art history, I really responded to conceptual art, minimal artthose approaches which were very much about form and not about personal drama. But then, of course, I grew up through the women's movement and from the start really responded to the personal drama involved there. Not just that: I love fiction, I love to read about other people's lives, to learn about the choices people make and the ways in which they survive, or overcome, their personal histories. So I feel very much caught between the two approaches and I learn from both.
As an artist, it's important to me to keep both issues alive: to remember that my responsibility is to speak honestly about how it feels to be alive, and that my pleasure is to use my medium to its greatest advantage. I wouldn't be happy if I only let film tell a story in a conventional form, but I would feel that the heart of the work was missing if I only worked with the film as a material, if I only investigated its formal properties. The film scene is in a constant state of flux, and I think this effort to convey meaningful subject matter through unconventional form occupies a lot of filmmakers today. Hopefully, the lines between narrative, experimental, and documentary will continue to be broken down.
MacDonald:
Now that you've made a film about your father, as well as the film about your mother, it's probably inevitable that the two films will be paired a lot. When you made
The Ties That Bind,
did you already assume that, sooner or later, you'd come back to your history with your father?
Friedrich:
I know some people always have three or four projects in mind, but I never know what I'm going to do next until I'm completely finished with my current project. Certainly when I was interviewing my mother for
The Ties That Bind
and she got onto the subject of them getting divorced, it really struck a nerve and I thought it might be something to explore later.
One time a friend said it seemed like all of my films have been about my fathernot really
about him,
exactly, but about reacting to his influ-