To celebrate the anniversary of Friedrich’s landmark autobiographical film, we spoke with the filmmaker about challenges faced during the production and reconstructing memory on film
Su Friedrich’s Sink or Swim (1990) stands as one of the defining works of autobiographical filmmaking. Told through 26 vignettes, Friedrich explores the formative years of a young girl and her relationship to her father using an array of documentary modes. Sink or Swim was a major early work for Friedrich and is a prime example of why she remains one of the most notable figures of American experimental cinema. Her films have been the subject of numerous retrospectives, taking place at iconic venues like the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2015, Sink or Swim was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. She now teaches at Princeton University, continues to make films, and has recently published two websites about the history of women film editors and director William Greaves.
We spoke with Friedrich about Sink or Swim to celebrate the 30th anniversary of its release, the challenges of production, her passion for editing, and how she approached the reconstruction of memory in the film.
Related: Reel Rap’s Tribute to Sink or Swim
Split Tooth Media: I saw that Princeton University is conducting classes remotely this fall. How has that been going so far?
Su Friedrich: Well, it’s great for me because I don’t teach in the fall. I have half-time tenure, I only teach in the spring, and I happened to be on sabbatical this past spring which turned out to be the luckiest thing ever because it meant that I didn’t have to do that. By the time spring rolls around I think we will still be remote, but all of the systems will be in place.
I imagine it is going to be a challenge to teach production, especially online.
Yeah, I’m going to sit in on the Zoom class next week with the guy teaching documentary this fall just to observe how he does it. But I also refashioned my documentary production class for this spring so that it’s more about looking at a lot of films and analyzing how they’re made. Also, they are going to do a project together, rather than each person doing their own, so that it might cut down on the absurdity of 12 people with fine cuts and rough cuts. It just doesn’t seem viable to do it in the way I have always done it.
I’m very intensive when it comes to the editing process. I have them make a copy of their edit and put my name on it so I can sit at the computer with them, with the rest of the class watching, and go through and actually make edits. It is a very hands on approach to showing editing because I have never felt that sitting and saying, ‘You know this is a little long. There are a few passages that don’t work as well with the music.’ works very well. That’s way too vague for people who barely know how to do anything yet. To show them what you mean right in the moment is always great because they are like, ‘Oh my god! That looks so much better!’ I also know how much we all hold onto the material that we have. You get attached to images and you kind of feel like they shouldn’t be there, but then you finally maybe let go of them. But if you don’t have enough experience, you don’t know about letting go of them. It’s really good when I go in and just cut and burn, and then they see the difference. You can’t do that on Zoom.
We’re talking today because Sink or Swim is approaching its 30th anniversary. It is a film that is now included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. What does it feel like for the film to have that kind of recognition?
It was incredible. It was so great and I had known that in other years people had put it in as a nomination. There was one person in particular who was really adamant, and he wrote me then to say, ‘I’m so glad after trying ‘x’ number of times, that we finally prevailed.’ It is obviously such an honor, and oddly enough, since I’ve been working on this huge website about William Greaves, one day I was doing something about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, and the review mentioned that it was a part of the National Registry and I thought, ‘Oh great! I wonder what year it got in?’ And it turned out that it was the same year as Sink or Swim! So I thought that was very nice.
Memory is such an amorphous concept, and you approach it in such an interesting way. How did you approach the reconstruction of memory in Sink or Swim?
I started out thinking that I was going to make a narrative film. I had done a little bit of narrative before then and it interested me. Then I realized that was a terrible idea. I then thought about writing these vignettes. I began writing in the first person. So I was sitting thinking, ‘That happened,’ and I would write it down, ‘And that happened,’ but it was very painful to remember those things. At some point I decided to write the stories in the third person because talking about a girl and her father, even though I was still very specifically describing my experiences, still gave me a little bit of distance.
Dealing with memory can be a hard thing unless you’re remembering wonderful vacations you’ve taken. If you’re remembering the kinds of things I put in Sink or Swim, it isn’t very pleasant. Having that almost artificial distance from it makes it a little bit easier. The other thing I did, is I always show my work in progress to a number of people. It changes from film to film. There are some regulars, and sometimes other people. In the case of Sink or Swim, I showed it to my sister and brother and asked them, ‘Do you think it happened this way?’ Memory is a tricky thing. It is good to have somebody else who is a witness. It is easy to misremember things. I wouldn’t say that I feel completely confident that everything I describe in any of my films that’s based on past experiences is that precise. I try at least to make it be that.
I always think of the dandelion fluff, the ripples on the puddle in the street gutter, or the images of the cracked desert as such standout textural images. How did you approach creating the visual texture of Sink or Swim?
First of all, I’m happy that you think that I generated those images. I have had several conversations lately with people, and one person in particular who knows my work really well referred to it as a found footage film. Obviously the footage that my grandfather shot when we were children is not mine. The footage from TV is not mine. But the majority of the footage is mine, but I suppose it can be perceived as found footage because it’s all black and white, or for whatever reason.
At the time I was collecting all kinds of footage. It’s hard to say. It’s not like I was going for texture, but I think the more detailed you can get in an image the more interesting it is. I did my best to shoot things in a way that was visually interesting.
The images communicate the emotional charge of the narration so vividly, like with the roller coaster sequence, or the vase with the roses. How did you approach developing the relationship between the visuals and voiceover?
There was a lot of trial and error. There were things that I shot specifically because I might have tried something else that didn’t work, and I had to think of something else to shoot. One obvious example is the ice skating story. I had a whole series of images that I planned to use with that story. I put it together and it was ridiculous; it made no sense whatsoever. There are a lot of places in the film where there is disjunction between the story and the image that you’re seeing, like the images in the hospital. But I thought in some cases there needs to be a much more direct connection, so I’m going to go to an ice skating rink and film images that relate to the story.
The roses, I don’t remember anymore why I thought to do that. But when I shot it the way I did, I liked the way it worked with the story that was being told. With the roller coaster, short of using the footage from The Time Machine, I thought, well, I’m talking about something that really scared me but that I was forced to go through. Something that terrifies me, or did terrify me, was roller coasters. So I thought, ‘I’m going to take myself to Coney Island, with my little Super 8 camera, and I’m going to get on The Cyclone’–which is really one of the most terrifying roller coasters that exists. I strapped it to my wrist so it didn’t fly off. I got in and I was so petrified. I ran through it, and I was worried that I wouldn’t have the footage, because of course in those days you couldn’t see what you’d shot, you had to wait until it came back from the lab. But it turned out that it was really exhilarating. I actually did the ride three times and shot it three times.
It was a combination of cases where I had to create a direct representation of the story, and other cases where I had to work with images that didn’t just illustrate it. For example, in the story with the bathtub, I used the footage of the kids at their first Holy Communion. That was footage that I shot for my prior film, Damned if You Don’t, which had to do with a nun. So I had all of this footage of religious things. I had no idea how to work with imagery in relationship to that story. That story was so traumatic. I certainly wasn’t going to film a girl having her head stuck in the bathtub. Then when I realized I had this footage that I hadn’t used in Damned if You Don’t that I really liked, just as footage, I just worked to see whether it worked with it. To me it did.
I wanted to ask about the holy communion sequence as well. Some of the most striking moments in this film come with the contrast of sound and image during that scene. I also think about how the Schubert song is described in the typewriter sequence as having the ”ecstatic melody accompany those tragic lyrics.” How did you approach the contrast between image and sound in this film?
Given my upbringing, let’s say, within the experimental film world, I was educated to think about how exciting or challenging or interesting it can be when things don’t exactly align. I love narrative films. I love when someone speaks dialogue. I love regular documentaries. But I also loved being exposed to experimental film and finding myself challenged watching somebody else’s film and thinking, ‘I wonder why that shot goes with that sound?’ When I was doing Sink or Swim, I was very much in that frame of mind thinking, ‘If I put this with that, it’s going to create some third creature that’s a combination of the two things that will hopefully be clear to the viewer.’ But there were so many moments where it was a calculated risk. Let’s see what happens if I put kids at their Holy Communion with the story about the bathtub.
One of the things about the way I shoot and edit is that ever since the beginning, I’m hyper-aware of the viewer. When I’m shooting it’s almost like I’m talking to somebody who is watching the film. As I’m moving the camera around I’m thinking, ‘Now you see the paint brushes because there’s going to be this thing about paint later. But then I’m going to move down to the ladder, the cat, and the book that is sitting over there’ because I’m already imagining how the viewer is going to follow along in the image to pick up clues or cues from me. It’s the same thing when I’m editing. If I’m putting a shot with something that is being said, there might be something in it that isn’t obvious but in a subliminal way will register. I’m always hoping that you get it. I’m not trying to be obscure. I’m not trying to be difficult. I’m trying to create a kind of puzzle that you can figure out while you’re watching the film.
How did you develop the typewriter sequence? Especially in regards to presenting it in negative, and the pacing of the typing.
I developed it by accident. I wrote and rewrote that part of the script. All of the script was written over and over again. I finally had it exactly the way I wanted it. I pretty much memorized it. Peggy Ahwesh, a filmmaker friend of mine, had an Eclair so she could shoot sync sound. Everything I had shot was silent, was shot with my Bolex. So she came over with her camera, and I was sort of squatted under the lens typing. I could barely see what I was typing. I don’t remember now whether the negative film was a consequence of what Peggy had gotten and loaded in the camera or whether I had gotten it. In any case it was a mistake, because the rest of the film was shot in reversal. So when I got it back I couldn’t flip into reversal because it would have been backwards. The other thing that happened was that I put the sound up, and it was in sync, but after a third or more of the letter it started going out of phase. I of course called her up and said, ‘Peggy it’s a disaster! Oh my god it’s out of sync!’ She said, ‘Sorry that never happens!’ Then I tried cutting it on the flatbed and I tried to cut the mag track one frame out every third frame to sync it up. I thought, ‘This is insane. I’m never going to be able to do this.’ I couldn’t afford to reshoot it. So I was watching it and just turned down the sound when it started going out of phase and realized that having it go to silence was really intense.
When you have something go wrong, it can turn into something you never would’ve thought of that turns out to be way better than what you had planned. That is the story of that scene, which has had an incredible effect on people.
How do you approach the use of found footage in Sink or Swim? I find that in Damned if You Don’t for instance, using Black Narcissus in that way, other media seems to transform within your presentation.
I think that’s partly because there is a certain low-tech aspect to my filmmaking, which is to say that sometimes I shoot stuff that is not necessarily well lit or slightly out of focus or there’s too much camera movement, but it might otherwise be a really strong image, so I figure out a way to use it anyway and hope that it works.
In the case of Damned if You Don’t and Black Narcissus, I was sitting in London at a friend’s house, and I had my Bolex. I didn’t understand about changing the shutter speed so I would lose the roll bar problem. I get all of this footage back and I think, ‘Oh my god! No, you know what, work with it. It creates this visual rhythm.’ This is also way before the time now when we could get a perfect high-res copy of something to work from. This was having your Bolex, having it on your lap, while an old TV is running.
In the case of Sink or Swim, I couldn’t go to archive.org or YouTube and get a perfect version of Father Knows Best. I had to go to the broadcasting library in New York. I sat in a cubicle with my Bolex secretly filming the TV. Of course, again, I had the roll bars. But I just thought, ‘This is how this got made, and I’m going to make it work.’
How did you develop the idea to weave ancient Greek mythology into Sink or Swim, and to unpack these different perspectives on femininity through the lens of each goddess?
As I was writing the stories, I had the story about how I loved reading Edith Hamilton’s Greek mythology (Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, 1942) . Which is very out of date and is probably not considered a very serious or legitimate version. When I was a kid, it was my version of the Bible. My father was quite educated when it came to things like Greek mythology. He’s an anthropologist, a linguist, and he taught courses in Homeric greek. It made sense to have that as a larger reference. The story of Athena being sprung from the head of Zeus seemed really perfect as a way to start the film. So there I was with Athena at the beginning, and then I had the story of Atalanta, but then also my father had written this sort of absurd book about Aphrodite, which dovetailed perfectly with various things in the film. I had my three goddesses. It wasn’t something I just picked out of thin air; they were very much a part of my childhood and very much a part of his worldview.
At least for me, growing up Catholic I thought, ‘Catholicism is so paltry.’ You’ve got this trinity: God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. That’s so boring compared to the Greek gods and goddesses, who are so baudy, jealous, fierce, who basically play out so many human behaviors. It’s a very interesting pantheon compared to what Catholicism has to offer.
One of the key themes in the film is “the conflict between memory and the present.” What comes to mind when you think of Sink or Swim today?
I’m really glad I made it. It was quite an ordeal, but at the same time it was something that taught me so much as a filmmaker because it was somewhat early in my years of being a filmmaker. It was an experience of deciding to grapple with very emotional, personal, private experiences, but then to work over the course of a couple of years to form it into something that was slightly outside of me. Because it was about a girl and her father, it wasn’t just about me. It was complicated in its structure. I think it was an incredibly educational experience for me to make of it. When it was done I thought, ‘Well okay, I’m good with that. I can stand by that film.’
Tied to that as well, how do you feel like your approach to filmmaking has changed over the years?
Well, should we talk about digital video? For example, if you compare Sink or Swim to my most recent film, I Cannot Tell You How I Feel, which is about my mother towards the end of her life and about my siblings and I bringing her to New York from Chicago. Just in terms of the making, it’s so utterly different. Sink or Swim was labored over for so long: writing the stories, going out to shoot with a Bolex, being very limited in what I can shoot, editing on the flatbed where it wasn’t such an easy experience as it is now on the computer. There’s a way in which I can now shoot more freely, and not plan so exactingly before I start editing. That is really different. I think if you’ve been making films for as long as I have, you still have all of that muscle memory about how you worked before. So the effort to be really precise and to keep going until it’s exactly the way you want it is still there. It’s kind of different and it’s kind of the same.
Could you talk about two of your sites, Edited By, and also the new William Greaves website? They seem to be very important parts of your recent work.
I started doing Edited By because I was reading a chapter of a book about editing and they never mentioned the editors — they only mentioned the directors. It just drove me crazy, so I looked them all up and half of the films were edited by women. It was one of those moments where I was sitting at my desk and I thought, ‘There is no way that editors aren’t being recognized when you’re talking about editing!’ It was almost without thinking about the consequences that I thought, ‘I’m going to do this.’
Of course it took a year and a half to do it. It was just stunning to me what I learned. Also, at some point when I was working on pages about the main editors — because it’s divided into people who do it by profession versus filmmakers like me who edit their work — even though there were people who edit films like Star Wars, or edited the Wizard of Oz, or Godard films, I recognized that the experience, the work, the mentality, of an editor is very much the same whether you’re editing Star Wars or Sink or Swim. There is something in the work of it that is shared across all genres. I felt so heartened by it. I felt so keenly that these are ‘my people.’ I love these people.
I launched the site in January of 2019 and then I taught for the spring. At the end of the summer I decided to add more women because people were writing to me and saying things like, ‘Oh, don’t you know about the woman who edited a bunch of Buñuel films?’ So that took a lot of the fall. Then I thought, ‘I’m going to go back to working on the film I’m working on,’ and instead there was a symposium in January of this year about William Greaves at Princeton, which was done by other people, not by me. I was thinking about how Princeton should acquire a few more of his films and I looked at the old website. They were selling VHS copies. So I got in touch with Louise [Greaves] and said, ‘Louise! What’s with the VHS?’ She said, ‘Oh, I’ve been meaning to update the website.’ I innocently said, “I did this website about women editors. I’m pretty good at WordPress now. What if I started to update it?’ Of course, now I’ve spent the last seven months on it because it became a massive new website. That’s what I did all during Covid. It was a great way to ignore Covid by sitting in my room seven days a week doing the website.
It also meant that we were able, with modern technology and a modern website, to not just present information about the films but also to set them up for streaming on Vimeo and to make them available for academic licenses. It really opened up so much more access to his work. But I’m going to say officially here, ‘I will never, as long as I live, make another website!’ I’m very, very glad that I made both of these, but now I want to get back to working on a new film.
Sink or Swim is available to purchase on DVD from Outcast Films or stream on Outcast, Amazon Prime and Kanopy
Feature image by Alexander Tuma, courtesy of Su Friedrich
Follow Rob and Split Tooth Media on Twitter
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
