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The Work of Remembering by film making: Three films by Su Friedrich

The films of Su Friedrich work to rewrite personal memory and public history subjectively. Three films of Su Friedrich, Gently Down the Stream, The Ties That Bind, and Sink or Swim are the work of remembering. She employ the language of Avant-garde cinema in order to deal with political and ideological issues and identity, culture and history. Memory is not a phenomenon of the past but, more fluidly of both the past and present. Assessing memory enables this filmmaker to flesh out meanings that are otherwise not directly visible. In Gently Down the Stream, Friedrich explores her own sexual identity through remembering her dreams. The Ties That Bind, and Sink or Swim are remembering text. In The Ties That Bind, Friedrich, though she claims not to remember her mother's war stories, makes film that bears witness to her mother's memory, infusing it with a sense of personal and historical responsibility. In Sink or Swim, with her father absent from the film, Friedrich remembers him. By addressing the realities of her relationships with her father, Friedrich addresses larger social and cultural issues regarding parents and children, gender and family. Both personal memory and public history are overlayed on to the vicissitudes of the self. The line that she traces is connected generally through the past of her parent. She encounter representational questions, solutions and forms that both test the limits of representation but also create new form of representation in the process. Friedrich rigorously test and experiment with film language in order to convey memory, history and the self. She experiments with film materiality and form. But she does in order to engage with new representational strategies of the self, as it relates to the identity, gender, sexuality and the personal and public past.