A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

everything, including all kinds of film pleasure, in order to be politically correct and save the world, but I think if you do that, you deplete yourself and then have nothing to offer the rest of the world. If you want to engage people, if you want them to care about what you're doing, you have to give them something. Of course, that doesn't mean making a Hollywood musical. The discussion tends to be so polarized: some people think that if you introduce the slightest bit of pleasure, whether it's visual or aural or whatever, you're in the other camp.

MacDonald:

There's always an implicit debate between the people who seem to want to get rid of cinema altogether, because of what it has meant in terms of gender politics, and the people who want to change the direction of cinema, to make it progressively vital, rather than invisible.

Friedrich:

Sometimes it's a case of "the harder they come, the harder they fall." When people hold out against a positionagainst cinematic pleasure for examplethe urge is still there in them. If they hold out too long, they end up doing something that is so much about cinematic pleasure that in effect they've gone over to the other side without really acknowledging how or why. I think that happens a lot, and it disturbs me. I really believe in film. I believe in its power. I think it's going to be around for a long time, and if people can't accept their responsibility for producing cinematic pleasure in an alternative form, well, that's their problem, and everyone's loss.

MacDonald:

Do you plan to tour with this film? I know you've been having some reservations about the usual way independent filmmakers present their work.

Friedrich:

In the case of the last two films, I did go around the country (and a little bit in Europe), showing the films and talking about them. With

The Ties That Bind,

I was eager to do it. For the most part, touring with that film was interesting for me. With

Damned If You Don't,

touring was a way to earn part of my living, and I was curious about the audience's response: since it was about a lesbian nun, I was curious to see whether people would be scandalized or amused, if a lot of lesbians would come to it, whatever.

But I got really worn out from the experience of having to speak after

Damned If You Don't,

and I approach the prospect of doing it with this film with a lot of dread, for two reasons. Making a film that evokes such painful memories is risky; people sometimes look at me afterward as if I have a solution to all the problems, as if I know some way to cope with the pain one feels. I'm afraid I don't really have any answers to give. All I know right now is the importance of acknowledging those childhood expectations.

The other reason is more general: I think the whole setup of having a personal appearance by the filmmaker after the screening is obsolete. I

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think this structure grew in part out of a feeling in the sixties and seventies that, while there was an audience out there for avant-garde film, it wasn't big enough, and one way to make the film more accessible was to have the filmmaker there. If people were frustrated or confused during the viewing of the film, they would be relieved of their frustrations afterward by having the whole thing explained to them.

Avant'garde film is in a period of crisis. Many independent filmmakers are moving into feature narratives, and there's a feeling that the process of making ''smaller" films is dying out. That might make some people think it's still important to go out and proselytize and educate, but I think that's a misguided response to the situation. The idea that I would go to a performance by John Zorn or whomeversome composer or musicianand he would have to get up afterward and explain how to hear his music, as opposed to how to hear Schönberg or Beethoven, is absurd. I think the film community is much too paranoid about the audience's alleged inability to understand avant-garde films.

My experience with

The Ties That Bind

proved this to me. Since it was about an older woman, I often had older people in the audience, people in their fifties and sixties who had never seen an experimental film. Sometimes they told me afterward that they were intimidated at the outset, but by the end of the film they were fine, they understood and enjoyed it. They're adults; they've got minds. There has to be more respect for the audience, and more trust.

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Anne Severson (On Near the Big Chakra)

Laura Mulvey (On Riddles of the Sphinx)

Yvonne Rainer (On Privilege)

Probably the most important film critical development since 1970 has been fueled by the larger feminist revaluation of Western culture. Of course, there have been feminist films as long as there has been critical filmmaking: Germaine Dulac's

Theme and Variation

(1925) was a feminist response to

Ballet Méchanique

; her