Su Friedrich

Su Friedrich (born December 12, 1954) 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. Friedrich has produced and directed twenty-seven films and videos. Her mother was German and came to the US with Friedrich's father, Paul Friedrich who was in Germany as an American GI at the time. Friedrich attended the University of Chicago (1971–72) and Oberlin College (1972–1975) 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. 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.

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 sound2004 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. As the title of the film suggests, it depicts the ties that lie between the past and present, between mother and daughter.

Damned If You Don’t Damned If You Don’t is about Catholicism and lesbianism, particularly the sexuality of nuns. The narrative in the film has three layers in its structure; a young woman seducing a young nun; adaptation of Powell and Pressburger's film, Black Narcissus (1947) that is about a nun in the convent in Himalayas; reading of Judith C. Brown's Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. By exploiting the layered narratives, Damned If You Don’t reveals a common assumption in melodrama that all desire is heterosexual, and shows a new direction of depiction of female desire, pleasure and sexuality.

Sink or Swim Through a series of twenty six short stories, Sink or Swim describes the childhood events that shaped a girl's ideas about fatherhood, family relations, work and play. As the stories unfold, a dual portrait emerges: that of a father who cared more for his career than for his family, and of a daughter who was deeply affected by his behavior. Working in counterpoint to the forceful text are sensual black and white images that depict both the extraordinary and ordinary events of daily life.

In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected Sink or Swim for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Hide and Seek Hide and Seek is an exploration into lesbian adolescence in the 1960s. Lou is a 12-year-old girl who daydreams in a tree house, tries not to watch a sex education film, wins a rock throwing contest, and is horrified to discover that her best friend is taking an interest in earrings and boys. Interwoven with Lou's story are the mostly hilarious, sometimes painful recollections of adult lesbians who try to figure out how they ever got from there to here. Completing the picture are clips from a wide array of old scientific and educational films blended with the black and white images of Lou's world.

From the Ground Up Friedrich's work has always used personal narrative to support strong political beliefs. With her recent movie From the Ground Up she follows the coffee road from bean to purchased brew, in a quest to understand how the cup of coffee [she'd] just gotten at the pushcart could cost only fifty cents. Beginning with the farmers in the Guatemalan countryside, we follow the bean from the exporter in Guatemala City, to the importer in Charleston, SC, then on to the roaster in Queens before it ends up in the Manhattan pushcart. Rather than make a traditional social documentary, Friedrich made a film that echoed her own experience, which was that of being stunned by the unimaginable scale and complexity of the coffee industry and the often grueling physical labor required to get those seedling to eventually yield a cup of coffee. During the making of the film Friedrich became a supporter of the fair trade coffee movement, and dedicated the film to the movement and the people involved.

Gut Renovation Documentary about the gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the displacement of long-term businesses and residents.