Educational Media Reviews Online

Outcast Films is distributing a 5-DVD collection of 13 of Su Friedrich’s 16 films to date. Her most recent work is also available separately on DVD. This very ambitious compilation should serve as an example for future undertakings to preserve experimental and independent film/video. If the material is not accessible, it will not be shown, if it is not shown, an artist stands a very good chance of being forgotten. Academic oblivion has already occurred in the cases of several 60’s avant-garde filmmakers simply because academics have little time, money or inclination to find their works. This collection of Friedrich’s work will undoubtedly bring her to a wider audience.

Great care has been taken to transfer the 16mm and video works and many films have a choice of multiple sub-titles. One of the most innovative features is the scene accessibility which provides a written length of each section. This feature will certainly be appreciated by anyone showing Friedrich’s work in class or during a presentation. The program notes are informative and the Outcast website (outcast-films.com) also provides links to criticism and full-text essays on Friedrich’s work.

Friedrich’s Damned if You Don’t is a melding of several narrative techniques to produce a rather subversive yet perfectly dreamlike response to a catholic upbringing. Using images of the film Black Narcissus playing silently on a television, the narrator provides an account of the characters in the film while showing the spectator watching and reacting to those images. Blending dream images with shots of nuns on the street and the fictional relationship between two characters, the film creates a multi-layered environment to display the emotions produced by the memory of nuns.

Two other shorter films are also included on this DVD: Rules of the Road (31 mins., 1993) and First Comes Love (22 mins., 1991). The first film is a short story told with musical and moving image accompaniment. It is a rather successful strategy for the illustration of the spoken word. It deals with the purchase and use of a car in an urban environment. The second film is a very strong work that deceptively begins as a documentary about a heterosexual marriage, but about a third of the way through , a break in the film occurs to list the countries that had not legalized gay marriage. The list is obviously staggeringly long. The straight marriage footage then continues but our response has now changed and our perspective shifts for the rest of the film. This is a very powerful statement on gay marriage.

This collection as a whole is very highly recommended for public libraries with gay and lesbian collections as well as for academic libraries with programs in gay and lesbian studies, as well as film studies.