Reclaiming Lost Film Histories, with Su Friedrich and Scott MacDonald (2022)

Video (1:13.19): Film historian Scott MacDonald interviewed experimental filmmaker Su Friedrich about her films and feminist website project, Edited By about all we didn’t know about the invisible female film editors. The interview was a part of the 2022 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival in the US.

Description:
‘Friedrich discussed her two website projects documenting film history, with further insights from MacDonald, who introduced Friedrich by saying, “From the beginning, one of the things Sue’s films were know for was very careful, precise editing … ‘Ties That Bind’ in part refers to how Sue ties image and sound together in brilliant ways. From the opening moments of that film, you can tell you’re in the hands of a brilliant editor.”

“Edited By” compiles work by women film editors that has gone unrecognized over decades. Organized in the style of a book, it details crucial work by a growing list of women. “In a film production handbook, I was reading the chapter about all the great editing that’s been done, but it never mentioned the editor, only the director,” Friedrich said. “I looked the editors up, and half of them were women, and thought, ‘Well, I didn’t know that. I have to do something about this.’”

Friedrich’s website on William Greaves contains a host of information on the prolific filmmaker’s work, comprising his roles as producer, writer, director, cinematographer and/or editor of 79 films.’ – Park Center for Independent Media

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About Su Friedrich

Su Friedrich is an American avant-garde filmmaker, writer, director, editor and cinematographer. She was born in 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut. Her mother was German and came to the US with Friedrich’s father, Paul Friedrich who was working in Germany as a GI at the time. Friedrich attended the University of Chicago (1971–72) and Oberlin College (1972–1975) from which she earned a B.A. in Art and Art History. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, with her wife and is a professor in the Center for the Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University, where she has taught film and video production since 1998. She has made twenty-four films and videos. Her first films, Scar Tisue and Cold hands, Warm Heart was made in 1979. From the onset of her career Friedrich has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema. She was a board member of the Heresies Collective that published Heresies, a feminist magazine. Her films have been featured in twenty-six retrospectives at museums and film festivals and have been widely screened, extensively written about, are in many university and museum collections, and have won numerous grants and awards. The moving image collection of Su Friedrich is held at the Academy Film Archive. The archive preserved Cool Hands, Warm Heart in 2019. Her films are distributed by Outcast Films and Icarus Films.