Sink Or Swim by Su Friedrich; notes from a screening
by Ruth Hayes
These notes were taken during a screening of this film in Thom Andersen's Film Today class at Cal Arts on 11/1/91
Thom's remarks: Visiting artist Mark Rance (Death and the Singing Telegram) re: autobiographical films and videos which trace determining factors in the producers' lives. Friedrich's work could be a reaction to the direct cinema (verite) style of Rance. With the ability of film equipment to follow life closely, in sync, it's possible to reveal truths gotten at in no other way, but these truths are limited. After verite's heyday in the '60s and early '70s, people found it necessary to resort to other kinds of artifice. Friedrich's work is a culmination of that. The filmmaker must find a form which follows the contours of thought.
Sink Or Swim is her third major film. Her relationship with her father and the socialization of women. The Ties That Bind is about her mother and her mother's life before she was born, specifically, her mother's position in Nazi Germany. Friedrich's films are object lessons in low budget filmmaking: b&w, minimal sound, old footage, home movies suggest artlessness, but the film isn't artless. Its simplicity may be off-putting. Sometimes the difference between good and bad films is in exposition. Good films risk that the exposition might bore in order to set things up right. A bad film is afraid to take that chance.
Film: Titles. silent. "Zygote": egg and sperm. Girl's voice-over tells story of birth of Athena, fully grown, dressed for battle, the favorite child from Zeus' brow.
"Y Chromosome": milkweed. "X Chromosome": elephant's trunk.
"Witness": Father with toddler in a home movie. "There was a little girl who had a little curl..." (when she was bad, she was horrid: this rhyme was never repeated to me- I had straight hair- but it has always seemed a somewhat coercive thing to say to a little girl. The implication is that any step of independence from dictated correct behavior by a girl is a transgression, whereas a boy's inobediance is accepted. Boys will be boys.)
"Virginity": Home movie of little girl in frilly costume (fairy?) Her fantasies: water running in the river was the Nile, her treehouse was a harem. Black stallion, mermaids, father.
"Utopia": Forbidden by father to eat sugar or watch TV. The old man who gave them access to circus on TV and ice cream sundaes.
"Temptation": Women body builders. Father gives her a book of Greek myths and asks her favorite one. Atalanta, abandoned by her father becomes as good as a man, but loses the race to her husband because of gold apples.
"Seduction": Wild animal trainer. Father falls asleep as she tells story and misses the end. Aphrodite turns the lovers into lions.
"Realism": Apartment building, man and girl outside it. She asks to learn to swim. He throws her in. New Hampshire lake across which her father swims. He scares her with water moccasin stories.
"Quicksand": Fence. She sees The Time Machine. Roller coaster. He forces her to watch movie.
"Pedagogy": She learns to play chess. She beats him.
"Oblivion": Ice skating birthday party. American rituals seem dull. Father skates fast, she can't keep up.
"Nature": Summer. Father goes away to teach, goes to swim in quarry. Water moccasins.
"Memory": Man swimming, kids playing for camera, rephotographed with strobe. Father with his sister as children. She died of a heart attack from diving into cold water. He feels guilty. Poem on daughter's birth refers to sister. "All this must come as the questions are answered." (He's wondering what kind of person his daughter will grow to be).
"Loss": Girls at first communion. Sisters were fighting, being bad. He pushes their faces into water, won't let them go.
"Kinship": Music. Airplane. German song. Naked women in shower. Mono Lake, western landscape.
"Journalism": Girls playing jumprope. Diary in pen, parents' divorce in pencil. Mother erases entry.
"Insanity": Girls out of control. Wheelchair, hospital shots. Mother is upset, holds daughters on the window sill and threatens to jump. Close-up of TV monitor with tele-evangelist.
"Homework": Cigarette factory commercial. Lucky Strike sponsors Make Room for Daddy, (TV and candy now allowed since father is gone) Donna Reed, Father Knows Best. Robert Young and young daughter in 2 shot.
"Ghosts": Typewriter in negative. Sync sound. "Dear Dad, Schubert Lieder..." Typewriting becomes more halting, it seems, as the letter becomes more emotional. Sound fades. "Conflict between memory and the present." "P.S. I wish I could mail you this letter."
"Flesh": Trip to Mexico. Father punishes her out of jealousy.
"Envy": Water glass filled, flowers placed in it. Father's poem re: Mexico trip. "How you wept, how bitterly." He doesn't understand why.
"Discovery": The American Kinship System. She wondered what he'd been writing when he decided to get a divorce.
"Competition": His book dedicated to his third wife: patriarchal society can't reconcile the coexistance of sexual desire and maternal devotion. Aphrodite and Demeter. Images of Rennaisance Madonnas and Japanese erotica.
"Bigamy": Girl became woman, friendly with father. She's in bed smoking, drinking beer, watching TV. Meets her step-sister. Her childhood is played out by this girl. Typewrites story as she telss it. Cigarette butts by machine (she consumes what the Lucky Strike woman was trying to sell).
"Athena Aphrodite": Beach scene. She tries to swim all the way across, thinks about snakes, fights with herself. "He loves me in spite of this." She turns back, sees him swim on.
ABC song. "Tell me what you think of me." Multi-voiced, image of girl in bathing suit splits apart then comes together again. It seems she's a different girl after coming back together. End.
Remarks: Structure is chronological. Re: Hollis Frampton's 1970's Zorn's Lemma. A to z: letters are removed and replaced one by one with other images. Abstract images take on meaning of the letters. Theorm in set theory. Form is meaning. In Sink or Swim, the structure is subordinate to story but creates suspense (suspense isn't limited to narrative). How will the girl become a woman and come to terms with her father? How does the film's simplicity take us deeper emotionally? Do we identify with her more than we would in melodrama? Entire track is the girl's voice except for the Schubert, the typewriter and the ABC song. Lied accompanies images from Friedrich's adult life. The song's meaning is revealed during the typewriter sequence of G. The emotional moment happens before we are given information about it. She distances us from it. Meaning would be overdetermined (corny) if the information came before the emotion.
DeLeuze: two tendencies- 1) the saturated image (composition in depth as with Welles and Wyler), 2) the rarified image (minimal as with Hitchcock, where we're forced to look at just one thing.) This film tends towards the rarified image, but there is a little too much. If we look at image only, we miss the story.
Simple but effective irony- TV which father forbade comes into home after he leaves.
Use of child's voice to narrate- coexistence of different ages in the same person. The way that children understand things that seem beyond their understanding.
A happy ending? Romance or comedy?
Song at end is addressed to both the audience and her father. Anxiety about her father's disapproval displaced onto us, but that's a way of dealing with life.
Z to A- moves from childhood utopia and fantasy to reality.