PU professor’s films in MoMA show

Su Friedrich brings a personal approach to many film traditions

By: Hilary Parker
   Some members of the film community are puritanical about watching only independent films, others are fanatical about seeing the latest Hollywood features.
   Su Friedrich, a Princeton University professor of visual arts whose work was the focus of a Museum of Modern Art retrospective Wednesday through Saturday, is neither.
   "I am not a film buff, but I’m also not a purist," she said Sunday in a phone call from her home in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she has lived since 1976.
   Like her viewing choices, Professor Friedrich’s films straddle a number of filmmaking traditions. Though she made a name for herself in the experimental film community in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a series of short films on feminist topics, she said her 1984 piece, "The Ties That Bind," ventured outside the experimental tradition into a "hybrid" genre.
   In keeping with some of her previous work, Professor Friedrich’s own life — in this case, her relationship with her mother — was the subject of the hour-long film, but the piece marked her first venture into the making of documentaries. Subsequent films, including "Sink or Swim," which explored her relationship with her father, furthered her presence in both the experimental and documentary film movements.
   The recent MoMA retrospective was timed to accompany the release of "The Personal Films of Su Friedrich," a five-DVD set containing 13 films. While the event itself led to both "introspection and retrospection," she said the emotionality of such a process was somewhat diffused in the past year by the making of the DVD collection itself.
   "I felt as if I was putting them into the vault," she said, describing her work with a technician on films made over the course of a quarter century. "It’s never easy to do that."
   But Professor Friedrich isn’t one to shy away from the difficult.
   While the exploration of autobiographical topics in her films — including lesbianism, her father’s abuse and her personal health issues — can be tough, Professor Friedrich said it’s even harder to depict other people’s lives.
   "It’s a common problem when people work with material from their own lives," she said, only half-kidding in her expression of relief that she’s still on speaking terms with everyone portrayed in her films. "Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions about saying something they won’t like, but that you have to say to be truthful to your own experience."
   Since she joined the Princeton faculty in 1998, she’s been faced not only with decisions about what to include in her films, but whether to show her films to her students.
   Though she herself is not a film school graduate (her educational background is in art and art history), Professor Friedrich said she’s seen far too many films by film school graduates who were overly influenced by their professors. Thus, with the exception of the last day of classes — and even then, only sometimes — she doesn’t screen her films for her students.
   There are times her films are shown on campus, such as in a documentary film festival arranged by the Spanish department. With the exception of "The Odds of Recovery," which includes images of Professor Friedrich sans shirt as it chronicles her health issues, she said she never worried about the Princeton community watching any of her films. Despite her concern, she ultimately went ahead with a showing of the recovery piece, as well.
   The film she’s currently at work on likely won’t pose any such problems upon its completion, given its focus on the stages of production that go into the making of a single cup of coffee. Not yet titled, the piece focuses on how many hands are involved in bringing a steaming mug of coffee to a paper cup, she said, as opposed to the economics and politics of the industry.
   "Coffee is just a stand-in for everything we use and buy now as modern people," she said, likening its ubiquity to the availability of pineapples in winter (in New York). "Virtually everything we have has come from very far away. It’s hard to be aware of that, but I think it’s really important."
   The upcoming film is partially funded by a grant from the Princeton University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It’s not the first time Professor Friedrich’s films have been supported by the university, she said, noting that previous grants covered the production costs for her 2004 piece, "The Head of a Pin," and her most recent film, "Seeing Red," released in 2005.
   Funds from various language departments at Princeton and the Humanities Council also allowed Professor Friedrich to complete the DVD set as she saw fit, she said, with the inclusion of subtitles in various foreign languages — including Spanish, French and German — for all of the films.
   More information about the DVD collection, including purchase information, is available on Professor Friedrich’s personal Web site at www.sufriedrich.com.