Educational Media Reviews Online

For almost thirty years, Su Friedrich has been making personal films detailing aspects of her own life as a daughter, lesbian, teacher, and filmmaker. She is an accomplished cinematographer, editor, and writer, and her typically wry voice-over is entertaining in itself. She is skillfully attentive to the formal aspects of film, even as she is intent on conveying her own emotional states. This tension provides the framework for most all her films, as in her most recent work, Seeing Red, which is a montage of outdoor scenes and diary episodes photographed in the filmmaker’s house.

Comprising a meditation on being 50, it weaves a commentary around the repetitive aspects of her life, from which she is detached, and the frustratingly inexplicable nature of her emotions. She laments the call of “shoulds” (after Karen Horney) that require her to be “good,” harangues about life as performance, and despairs over her lack of control over “petty” anger. By turning her anger into a joke, she mocks her own unhappiness, and does not seem to recognize the depression that engulfs her and, by extension, the film. She attempts to take heart from her own wit, from Glenn Gould playing Bach, and from the words of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, but routinely sabotages these attempts by falling back into the vague territory of seeking answers to unanswerable questions. The images alternate between red things out there in the world, and a straight-on view of the mid section of Friedrich’s body clothed in a variety of red shirts; the former seems arbitrary in a free-wheeling way, and the latter seems just arbitrary; both are saved by the more coherent nature of the voice-over. Actually, she can be quite funny.

Friedrich is an important film-maker, and general collections with even a small interest in video art or women’s studies should have some of her work. Sink or Swim or The Ties That Bind (both newly available on DVD from Outcast Films www.outcast films.com) would be better choices than this title, which is recommended only for comprehensive collections of video art or women’s studies.