40 Frames

Su Friedrich

Tuesday July, 13 - 7:30pm

Co-presented by Cinema Project and Downstream Digital

ODDS OF RECOVERY
(2002, color/sound, 65 mins)
ODDS OF RECOVERY is a film about six surgeries, one bad hormone problem, a fifteen-year relationship and the onset of middle age. Both poignant and funny, this intimate portrait records the temporal pleasures of life, middle age and fears of death. The journey through an exasperating health care system is just part of the story, which exposes the ways in which Friedrich ignored her body and the more temporal pleasures of life, and now begins to face middle age, menopause and the fear of death. Friedrich takes a very direct approach to the subject by showing herself in numerous doctors’ offices dealing with an assortment of problems - ranging from diseased organs to broken bones to a major hormone imbalance. As she undergoes standard Western treatments, she also documents various attempts to incorporate alternative preventive methods into her daily life, such T’ai Chi, acupuncture, ingesting Chinese herbs and gardening. Ultimately, Friedrich lays bare her medical history as a means to address a perennial human problem: the desire to avoid conflict and deny the need for radical change.

GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM
(1981, B&W/silent, 13 mins)
GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM is constructed from fourteen dreams taken from my journals. The text is scratched directly onto the film, so that you hear your own voice as you read. The “framed” images accompanying the words are of women, water, animals and saints, which were chosen for their indirect but potent correspondence to the text.

BUT NO ONE
(1982, B&W/silent, 9 mins)
BUT NO ONE also begins with a dream, but this time the words appear alone, on black, scratched in a more variegated style. They create images and rhythms independent of the filmed images, so that you “read to the beat.” The filmed images of construction workers, prostitutes, firefighters and fish for sale are quite familiar, while the text describes a nightmare whose characters are all implicated in a terrible conflict. I couldn’t decide who to “blame” for the dream, so the fat boy, the women, the babies and myself all became suspected and inspected through the making of the film.