AAFF - She, Her, Hers
filmmaker Su Friedrich reflects on her influences
What really is fucked up about making a diary is that, you know, I come in here thinking, “oh I’m gonna do that,” and then it takes me a good seven minutes or more to set up the equipment and I’ve gotten so preoccupied with the equipment that I’ve kind of forgotten my upsetness. Then I start talking and I fell like, “oh, well now I have to get back in touch with my upsetness so that this will be an interesting performance,” adn this is not about a performance. And then I get worked up to the point where I feel really upset like now I’m saying, It’s really scary, and it actually is incredibly scary and I feel like crying, but then I think, “well, now, if you cry that’ll be good because then you’ll be crying! And that’ll be really emotional, and you know, moving!” But then I’m just doing like a fucking performance. And part of the problem, part of what is so fucked up is that it feels like most of life is about performing for people.
At this point in Su Freidrich’s film Seeing Red, a rambling, a twirl of piano comes in as she keeps going, and going, and going, following the spiral that existing as a woman has taught her. This monologue happens at the midpoint of Freidrich’s film, a diary film about the tight construct of femininity, drawn together by footage of red things (In film school, they teach you early that red is unattractive on camera).
As a juror at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Friedrich was invited to present her work - and she decided to do so by screening four short films that influenced her, leading into her own film, Seeing Red. The shorts block included: Hand Tinting, by Joyce Wieland, The Drift of Juicy by Ursula Pürrer, Jennifer, Where are You? by Leslie Thornton, Girl Puppet, by Peggy Ahwesh.
Since Freidrich presents this block as a celebration of her influences, as a recipe for her film-making style, so I looked to these films for their elements. This was a thematically resonant way to engage with the shorts as well - Friedrich is frustrated and fascinated by a particular part of the experience of being a Woman - and that is, the world’s desire to flatten you into an Image of a Woman. The persistence of a Gaze being forced upon you forces you into the corner of performance - and by these filmmakers turning their own gazes on their experience, and oroboros of image and performance emerges.
The films bring an awareness of and resentment towards how much women absorb from the images that surround them. In Hand Tinting, a film that unfurls in complete silence, Black women and white women watch each other’s behavior with suspicious disdain, that suspicion growing with the film’s technique of repetition. Amidst the tapestry of images repeated in Jessica, Where Are You is a child, looking into a mirror with a worried expression, slathering her face with bright red lipstick. The filmmakers use their own gazes to reflect on the way that absorbing the persistent male gaze influences their behavior, creates the feeling of being watched, and enables the proliferation of more images that reinforce the idea that women are meant to perform specific sexuality.
A handful of the films in She, Her, Hers also spoke directly to the relationship between women, images, objectification, and virtual reality. The Drift of Juicy is an optical illusion, where analog film-making techniques are used to create the illusion of a digital environment. The images in the film are associative, and this seems to be the element that made the biggest impact on Freidrich’s work. How can the construction of images, the creation of a cinematic language, speak to the construction of womanhood?
The virtual space is a place where image and identity are collapsed - the digital world is visualized as a world, but is a construction meant to create impossible realities. I was really taken aback by Peggy Ahwesh’s Girl Puppet, which takes footage from Tomb Raider video games and composes them into a matter of fact collage. Images of Lara Croft are presented to show the way early video game developers translated their idea of a marketable woman into a 3D rendered space. She is there for you to play with. The only human character in The Drift of Juicy is a woman presented in pornographic, action packed loops. Can the cinematic gaze of women shift away from the pornographic fast enough to keep up with the Internet?
As an exploration of cinematic language and an homage to artistic and philosophical influences, She, Her, Hers was a really fantastic program. The progression of short films really allowed for the viewer to dig into the possibilities cinema to establish a language that transcends spoken word. In a world that polices the expression of feminine frustration, the sometimes tongue-in-cheek, explicitly avant-garde techniques used in these films allow for the release of anger in ways that the dominant gaze cannot understand. For me, it was quite exciting to watch.