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.

Only an artist of Su Friedrich’s caliber could make a film about being middle-aged and full of ailments into an informative yet poetic work. While she carefully details each illness and points the camera at herself, interacting with various physicians and healthcare workers, she also looks out to the expression of her feelings and emotions through embroidery and gardening and her relationship with her life partner. As the most intimate of her autobiographical films, Friedrich is able to find an expression of middle age that questions, probes and finally understands its subject.

The DVD also contains a very pertinent topical addition by including The Head of a Pin (21 mins., 2004) in which urban dwellers discover the splendors of rural life. This film continues where The Odds of Recovery left off as it is the discovery that the whole of Nature is greater than that of a simple human life.

The 5-DVD set clearly contains Su Friedrich’s life (so far), from her discovery of herself, her search of her place in the world, to the point in her life as a middle-aged woman when she, like so many before her, sees her mortality and finally her age-acquired wisdom about her objective relationship to the world. As a set of films, we not only have an artist’s collection, we have the essence of the artist herself. This is a true achievement.

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.

See another EMRO review of Odds of Recovery.