First GBFA Ciné-club screening of the Fall term

The first Global BFA in Film Art (GBFA) Ciné-club screening of the fall term is scheduled on Tuesday, September 19, in partnership with Light Cone, a structure of diffusion of experimental and avant-garde film in Paris.

American filmmaker and Princeton scholar Su Friedrich will be in attendance. 

FILIATIONS AND REAPPROPRIATIONS: TWO FILMS BY SU FRIEDRICH

The Ties that Bind (US, 1984, 16mm, b&w, 55′)

“An experimental documentary about my mother’s life in Nazi Germany and her marriage to an American soldier. In voice-over, she recounts her experiences, while footage shows her daily life in Chicago, the assembly of a model German house, contemporary peace marches, archival documents on Germany, newspaper headers, her early years in America and much more. All these sequences are woven together to produce a dialogue between past and present, between mother and daughter.”

I Cannot Tell You How I Feel (US, 2016, video, color, 42′)

Friedrich has taken up the camera again in her ongoing quest to film the battleground of family life. Her mother Lore—who played the lead in The Ties that Bind (1984) —plays the lead again, this time kicking and protesting against being moved at the age of 94 from her home in Chicago to an “independent living” facility in New York. Friedrich and her two siblings fill out the supporting roles, cajoling, comforting, and freaking out.

Su Friedrich

From the onset of her career in the late 1970s, 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 between the personal and the political, from autobiographical films about family to the investigation of society’s notions of sexual identity. Her cinematic palette includes home movies, archival footage, interviews, and scripted narratives. In 2015, her film Sink or Swim was one of the 25 films chosen by the Library of Congress to be included in the National Film Registry.

Tuesday, September 19 | 20:00

Luminor – Hôtel de Ville | 20 rue du Temple 75004 Paris