Su Friedrich - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Su Friedrich is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

Avant-garde

Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....

filmmaker.

Biography

Friedrich graduated from Oberlin College

Oberlin College

Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating...

in 1975 and made her first film, Hot Water, in 1978. Her films regularly combine elements of narrative

Narrative

A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...

, documentary

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, and experimental

Experimental film

Experimental film or experimental cinema is a type of cinema. Experimental film is an artistic practice relieving both of visual arts and cinema. Its origins can be found in European avant-garde movements of the twenties. Experimental cinema has built its history through the texts of theoreticians...

styles of film-making and often focus on the roles of women, family, and homosexuality in contemporary America http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/friedrich/. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and is currently a Professor in the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, where she has taught film and video production since 1998.

From the onset of her career in the late 1970s, Su Friedrich has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema. Her work has radicalized film form and content by incorporating a feminist perspective and issues of lesbian identity and by creating a remarkable and innovative synthesis of experimental, narrative and documentary genres. Friedrich’s films are multi-lingual, moving fluidly between the personal and the political, from autobiographical films about family to the investigation of society’s notions of sexual identity. Her rich cinematic palette, which includes home movies, archival footage, interviews, and scripted narratives, has resulted in a thrilling body of work that continues to influence and inspire new generations of independent filmmakers.

Su Friedrich is the recipient of the Cal Arts Alpert Award in the Arts and has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation

Rockefeller Foundation

The Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...

and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation was founded in 1925 by Mr. and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim in memory of their son, who died April 26, 1922...

, as well as numerous grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts

New York Foundation for the Arts

The New York Foundation for the Arts was created in conjunction the in 1971. The organization gives grants to individual artists and writers and developing arts organizations with a mission to '.'-NYFA's Programs:...

, Independent Television Service, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films and videos are widely screened in the United States, Canada and Europe and have been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art, often referred to simply as "the Whitney", is an art museum with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century American art. Located at 945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street in New York City, the Whitney's permanent collection contains more than 18,000 works in a wide variety of...

, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Stadtkino in Vienna, the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, the National Film Theater in London, and many others. Friedrich’s work is part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

, the Art Institute of Chicago

Art Institute of Chicago

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is one of America's largest accredited independent schools of art and design, located in the Loop in Chicago, Illinois. It is associated with the museum of the same name, and "The Art Institute of Chicago" or "Chicago Art Institute" often refers to either...

, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Library of Australia. Her complete original film materials are being conserved at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a professional honorary organization dedicated to the advancement of the arts and sciences of motion pictures...

Film Archive in Los Angeles.

Friedrich's films have won many awards, including: for The Odds of Recovery, Best
Documentary at Identities Festival in Vienna; for Hide and Seek, Best Narrative Film Award at the Athens International Film Festival, Outstanding Documentary Feature at Outfest '97 in Los Angeles, Special Jury Award at the New York Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and Juror’s Choice Award at the Charlotte Film Festival; for Sink or Swim, Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival, the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival

San Francisco International Film Festival

San Francisco International Film Festival is the oldest continuously running film festival in the Americas. Organized by the San Francisco Film Society, the International is held each spring for two weeks, presenting an average of 150 films from over 50 countries...

, Gold Juror’s Choice Award at the Charlotte Film and Video Festival, Special Jury Award at the Atlanta Film Festival and Best Experimental Film Award at the USA Short Film and Video Festival; for Damned If You Don't, Best Experimental Film Award at the Athens Film Festival and Best Experimental Narrative Award at the Atlanta Film Festival; and for Cool Hands, Warm Heart, Special Merit Award at the Athens Film Festival. Friedrich also won the Peter S. Reed Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.

The films have been reviewed in numerous publications, including Variety, Premiere, The Village Voice, Artforum, The New York Times, The Nation, Film Quarterly, The Millennium Film Journal, Film Comment, Sight and Sound, Flash Art, Cineaste, The Independent, Heresies Art Journal, Afterimage, and The L.A. Weekly. Essays on her work as well as excerpts from her scripts have appeared in numerous books, including Women’s Experimental Cinema (2007), 501 Movie Directors (2007), Contemporary American Independent Film: From the Margins to the Mainstream (2005), Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (2002), Left In the Dark (2002), The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (2002), Girl Director: A How-To Guide (2001), Collecting Visible Evidence (1999), Experimental Ethnography (1999), The New American Cinema (1998), Play It Again, Sam (1998), Film Fatales (1998), Cinematernity (1996), Screen Writings (1994), Women's Films (1994), Queer Looks (1993), Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (1993), Vampires and Violets (1992), and Critical Cinema: Volume Two (1992).

Filmography

1978 Hot Water
1979 Cool Hands, Warm Heart
1979 Scar Tissue
1980 I Suggest Mine
1981 Gently Down the Stream
1982 But No One
1985 The Ties That Bind
1987 Damned If You Don't
1990 Sink or Swim
1991 First Comes Love
1993 Rules of the Road
1994 Lesbian Avengers Eat Fire
1996 Hide and Seek
1999 Being Cecilia
2002 The Odds of Recovery
2004 The Head of a Pin
2005 Seeing Red
2008 From the Ground Up

Sink or Swim

Through a series of twenty six short stories, or Swim describes the childhood events that shaped a girl's ideas about fatherhood, family relations, work and play. As the stories unfold, a dual portrait emerges: that of a father who cared more for his career than for his family, and of a daughter who was deeply affected by his behavior.Working in counterpoint to the forceful text are sensual black and white images that depict both the extraordinary and ordinary events of daily life. Together, they create a formally complex and emotionally intense film.

Hide and Seek

and Seek is a daring exploration into wild, uncharted territory—lesbian adolescence in the 1960s. Lou is a 12 year old girl who daydreams in a tree house, tries not to watch a sex education film, wins a rock throwing contest, and is horrified to discover that her best friend is taking an interest in earrings and boys. Interwoven with Lou's story are the mostly hilarious, sometimes painful recollections of adult lesbians who try to figure out how they ever got from there to here. Completing the picture are clips from a wide array of old scientific and educational films which blend seamlessly with the beautiful black and white images of Lou's world. Hide and Seek is for every woman who's been to a slumber party and every man who wonders what went on at one.

From the Ground Up

Friedrich's work has always used personal narrative to support strong political beliefs. With her recent movie the Ground Up she follows the coffee road from bean to purchased brew, in a quest to "understand how the cup of coffee [she'd] just gotten at the pushcart could cost only fifty cents."¹ Beginning with the farmers in the Guatemalan countryside, we follow the bean from the exporter in Guatemala City, to the importer in Charleston, SC, then on to the roaster in Queens before it ends up in the Manhattan pushcart. Rather than make a traditional social documentary, Friedrich made a film that echoed her own experience, "which was that of being stunned by the unimaginable scale and complexity of the coffee industry and the often grueling physical labor required to get those seedling to eventually yield a cup of coffee."² During the making of the film Friedrich became a supporter of the fair trade

Fair trade

Fair trade is an organized social movement and market-based approach that aims to help producers in developing countries make better trading conditions and promote sustainability. The movement advocates the payment of a higher price to producers as well as higher social and environmental standards...

coffee movement, and dedicated the film to the movement and the people involved.

¹Notes, From the Ground Up, Su Friedrich, 2008

²Notes, From the Ground Up, Su Friedrich, 2008

External links

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