Year: 1985
Director: Su Friedrich
Writer: Su Friedrich
Cinematographer: Su Friedrich
Cast: Lore Bucher
Running Time: 55 min.
In her seventh film, experimental filmmaker Su Friedrich brings her unique sensibility to the documentary format, with dazzling and unpredictable results. On one level, The Ties That Bind tells the story of Friedrich‘s mother, who survived the horrors of Nazi Germany only to marry an abusive American soldier. On another, the film avoids the irrelevance of typical historical documentaries by lifting this story “out of time,â€? and placing it in a new context of contemporary inequity and injustice. Virginia Film Festival regular David Edelstein, writing in the Village Voice, calls The Ties That Bind “a moving and courageous tribute from a child to a mother’s beleaguered memory,â€? while Lucy Fischer, professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, describes it as “one of the most moving and profound films about the mother-daughter relationship.â€?
The only voice in the film belongs to Friedrich’s mother, as she tells her life story to her daughter. But Friedrich complements this oral account with contemporary images from her own life, including footage of “nuclear freeze� protests from the early 1980s. Occasionally, Friedrich will place herself into the film, by scratching her questions and words of outrage directly into the celluloid itself. Through startling juxtapositions and a deft use of montage, she draws unsettling parallels between Ronald Reagan’s America and the Third Reich, while presenting the ongoing quest for social justice from a woman-centered perspective.
Yet the true emotional impact of The Ties That Bind rests in the difficult and inextricable relationships between daughter and mother, interviewer and interviewee, filmmaker and subject. According to Friedrich’s website, “The film … is more than an interview of a mother by a daughter — it is a profound search for a definition of history, and a challenge to our own responsibility for the present.â€?
Loving yet contentious, defiant yet deeply respectful, Friedrich shows how “The Ties That Bind” us can be political and personal at the same time.
