Su Friedrich. Conversaciones con Scott MacDonald

210 x 145 mm
144 pages
Design: Setanta

Su Friedrich's documentary cinema has evolved in parallel with her life story. She has addressed her sexuality, the challenges of navigating adulthood, physical and mental health, how to share a life with someone long-term, how to face the impact of gentrification in a neighborhood considered home, and the struggle to accept aging (both in others and in oneself). In recent years, she has balanced her filmmaking with the creation and design of other platforms, such as the Edited By website, dedicated to female film editors, and one for filmmaker William Greaves.

Contrary to common belief, filmmakers' own words aren’t always the best guide to understanding their films. This book avoids that trap. Su Friedrich speaks with clarity and ease, and as with her films, her conversation reveals an extraordinary ability to link images and words with precision.

Scott MacDonald has spent over four decades writing about Su Friedrich, admiring and learning from her films. He confesses to being captivated by her early 16mm works, in sublime black and white, where she tackled personal and social gender struggles and her relationships with her parents. Friedrich and MacDonald began discussing cinema in 1986. Decades later, they resumed their conversation to focus on the second half of Friedrich’s filmography—now in color and video—producing a document that has never been published until now.

"Her particular talent has been combining experimental cinematic techniques with her strong feminist commitment in films that are accessible to a wide audience. Her ability to reach the public is a challenge to the notion that viewers only respond to traditional film rhetoric."
—Scott MacDonald

"A few years ago, I read a quote from someone who said that the sign an artist has worked hard is that the artifice of their work becomes less obvious over time, that its apparent simplicity shows just how much they’ve learned their craft, so they no longer have to flaunt their skills—they can allow the work to appear simple, even though it’s actually quite complex. If I’ve come close to that idea, I’m satisfied."
—Su Friedrich

Su Friedrich (New Haven, Connecticut, 1954) is a central figure in American avant-garde cinema, with more than twenty films made since the late 1970s. She was part of the Heresies collective and worked alongside activists like The Lesbian Avengers. She has been a professor at Princeton University’s Center for the Creative and Performing Arts, where she has taught film and video production since 1988. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Scott MacDonald (Easton, Pennsylvania, 1942) is the author of a vast collection of oral histories of cinema, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (1988-2006), which consists of five volumes and thousands of pages. He is also the author of Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (2006), which includes conversations with filmmakers working at the crossroads of documentary and avant-garde cinema. MacDonald has taught film history since 1970—at Bard College, Harvard University, and Hamilton College—and has curated numerous film series at leading American institutions. He is also the author of The Garden in the Machine. A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (2001), American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (2013), and The Flaherty: Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (2017), as well as the blog Flaherty Stories.