Programme 3

The Ties That Bind
Su Friedrich, 1985, 55 min.

I Cannot Tell You How I Feel
Su Friedrich, 2016, 42 min.

The film-maker’s mother, Lore Friedrich, is the common thread of this session. 

Working from a series of questions posed by her daughter, The Ties That Bind compiles her childhood experiences in Nazi Germany in her own voice, up to the point she emigrated to the United States after World War II. In I Cannot Tell You How I Feel, 30 years later, when her mother is now senile, we are witness to her non-voluntary move from her apartment in Chicago to a care home close to New York where Su and her siblings live. The film focuses on adult children’s responsibility to care for their elderly parents and provides a tragicomic reflection on the anguish caused by this universal situation with which it is easy to empathise.

The time arc separating the two films demonstrates some important aspects of how Su Friedrich’s cinema has evolved over the years: changing from filming in 16mm to video, from black and white into colour, starting out with sound disconnected from the images and working up to synchronous recording, from the film-maker outside the field to within it, from the laborious manual scratching of texts on the emulsion to much simpler addition in digital post-production, as a means to also introduce humorous comments which are not as obvious in her early works.

Gloria Vilches