Su Friedrich
Su Friedrich is an American avant-garde film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema.
Early life
Su Friedrich was born in 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut. Her mother was German and came to the US with Friedrich's father, Paul Friedrich who was working in Germany as a GI at the time. Friedrich attended the University of Chicago and Oberlin College from which she earned a B.A. in Art and Art History. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and from 1998 until 2023 was a Professor of Visual Art in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, where she has taught film and video production. She made her first film, Hot Water, in 1978, and has produced and directed twenty-seven films and videos.Career
Friedrich's films regularly combine elements of narrative, documentary, and experimental styles of film-making and often focus on the roles of women, family, and homosexuality in contemporary America. From the onset of her career in the late 1970s, Friedrich has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema. Her work has radicalized film form and content by incorporating a feminist perspective and issues of lesbian identity and by creating a remarkable and innovative synthesis of experimental, narrative and documentary genres. Friedrich's films are multi-lingual, moving between the personal and the political, from autobiographical films about family to the investigation of society's notions of sexual identity. Her cinematic palette includes home movies, archival footage, interviews, and scripted narratives.Friedrich is the recipient of the Cal Arts Alpert Award in the Arts and has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as numerous grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Independent Television Service, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films and videos are widely screened in the US, Canada, and Europe, and have been the subject of 31 retrospectives, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Stadtkino in Vienna, the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, and the National Film Theater in London. Friedrich's work is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Library of Australia. Her complete original film materials are being conserved at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive in Los Angeles.
Friedrich's films have won many awards, including: for The Odds of Recovery, Best Documentary at Identities Festival in Vienna; for Hide and Seek, Best Narrative Film Award at the Athens International Film Festival, Outstanding Documentary Feature at Outfest '97 in Los Angeles, Special Jury Award at the New York Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and Juror's Choice Award at the Charlotte Film Festival; for Sink or Swim, Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival, the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Gold Juror's Choice Award at the Charlotte Film and Video Festival, Special Jury Award at the Atlanta Film Festival and Best Experimental Film Award at the USA Short Film and Video Festival; for Damned If You Don't, Best Experimental Film Award at the Athens Film Festival and Best Experimental Narrative Award at the Atlanta Film Festival; and for Cool Hands, Warm Heart, Special Merit Award at the Athens Film Festival. Friedrich also won the Peter S. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.
The films have been reviewed in numerous publications, including Variety, Premiere, The Village Voice, Artforum, The New York Times, The Nation, Film Quarterly, The Millennium Film Journal, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, Flash Art, Cineaste, The Independent, Heresies Art Journal, Afterimage, and The L.A. Weekly. Essays on her work as well as excerpts from her scripts have appeared in numerous books, including Women's Experimental Cinema, 501 Movie Directors, Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000, Left In the Dark, The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, Girl Director: A How-To Guide, Collecting Visible Evidence, Experimental Ethnography, The New American Cinema, Play It Again, Sam, Film Fatales, Cinematernity, Screen Writings, Women's Films, Queer Looks, Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies, Vampires and Violets, and Critical Cinema: Volume Two.
The moving image collection of Su Friedrich is held at the Academy Film Archive. The archive has preserved Cool Hands, Warm Heart, ''Damned if You Don't, and Sink or Swim.''
Filmography
| Year | Title | Length | Format | Color | Sound |
| 1978 | Hot Water | 12min. | super-8 | b&w | sound |
| 1979 | Cool Hands, Warm Heart | 16min. | 16mm | b&w | silent |
| 1979 | Scar Tissue | 6min. | 16mm | b&w | silent |
| 1981 | Gently Down the Stream | 14min. | 16mm | b&w | silent |
| 1982 | But No One | 9min. | 16mm | b&w | silent |
| 1985 | The Ties That Bind | 55min. | 16mm | b&w | sound |
| 1987 | Damned If You Don't | 42min. | 16mm | b&w | sound |
| 1990 | Sink or Swim | 48min. | 16mm | b&w | sound |
| 1991 | First Comes Love | 22min. | 16mm | b&w | sound |
| 1993 | Rules of the Road | 31min. | 16mm | color | sound |
| 1993 | Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire, Too | 60min. | video | color | sound |
| 1996 | Hide and Seek | 65min. | 16mm | b&w | sound |
| 2002 | The Odds of Recovery | 65min. | 16mm | color | sound |
| 2004 | The Head of a Pin | 21min. | video | color | sound |
| 2005 | Seeing Red | 27min. | video | color | sound |
| 2008 | From the Ground Up | 54min. | video | color | sound |
| 2012 | Practice Makes Perfect | 12min. | video | color | sound |
| 2012 | Gut Renovation | 81min. | video | color | sound |
| 2013 | Queen Takes Pawn | 6.5min. | video | color | sound |
| 2016 | I Cannot Tell You How I Feel | 42min. | video | color | sound |
| 2018 | Edited by: The Companion Film, version 1 | 76min. | video | b&w and color | sound |
| 2019 | Edited by: The Companion Film, version 2 | 113min. | video | b&w and color | sound |
| 2020 | Cinetracts 5/10/20 | 2min. | video | color | sound |
| 2022 | Today | 57min. | video | color | sound |
''Gently Down the Stream''
The short film consists of texts and rephotographed imagery, which both represents Friedrich's fourteen dreams that are taken from eight years of her journals. Imagery of the Virgin Mary and Christ, a woman rowing a machine in gym, another woman swimming in pool, and body of water are presented with a hand-scratched word at a time, and pulled audience in Friedrich's flow of consciousness in the process to reconstruct and analyze her dream.''The Ties That Bind''
The Ties That Bind is an experimental documentary about the filmmaker’s mother, who was born and lived in southern Germany from 1920-1950. Through a mixture of personal anecdote and social history, she describes the rise of Nazism, the war years, and the Allied occupation, during which she met her future husband, an American soldier.The only voice we hear is that of this one “ordinary woman”, while the images portray her current life in Chicago, her hometown before and during the war, New York Post headlines, contemporary peace marches, present day footage of Germany, and much more. However, The Ties That Bind breaks with the usual format of war documentaries, thus allowing a different portrait of the individual to emerge, while it reflects on the current political situation in America and the filmmaker’s activities in relation to those issues.
The film creates a powerful dialogue between past and present, between mother and daughter. But it is more than an interview of a mother by a daughter—it is a profound search for a definition of history, and a challenge to our own responsibility for the present.
As the title of The Ties That Bind suggests, this film depicts the ties that lie between the past and present, between mother and daughter.