Su Friedrich is an award-winning filmmaker of such films as Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979), Gently Down the Stream (1981), The Ties That Bind (1984), Damned If You Don't (1987), Sink or Swim (1990), First Comes Love (1991), Rules of the Road (1993) and Hide and Seek (1996). A writer, director, cinematographer, sound recordist and editor of almost all her films, Friedrich has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships. Her latest film, Hide and Seek, at sixty-three minutes, is like a treasure hunt where the treasure is discovery and the hiding place is the past in the black-and-white world of lesbian adolescence in the 1960s. Friedrich creates a prism, refracting to create this unexplored universe in retrospect, interweaving twelve-year-old Lou's narrative, adult lesbian remembrances and clips from old scientific and educational films into a very funny and rich sequence of powerful imagery, a major contribution to fresh seeing into the mysteries of childhood. Hide and Seek will be shown at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in June.
QSF: How much of Hide and Seek is autobiographical?
Fredrich: The way I approach something often has to do with looking at my own life as a jumping off point. I did that to a fair extent in this film, but the fact that I interviewed twenty women about their experiences meant that some of them mirrored my own life and others were totally different, which is something I liked in making the film. I had to mix together these varying experiences, not just from a single point of view. There were the experiences of women who at six years old were already playing around with other girls and the experiences of other women who had no idea they were lesbians, only finding out when they were adults, and only then were able to talk about it looking back and analyzing what happened in light of coming out as adults. I'm somewhere in the middle. The narrative aspect of it is a double autobiography. It was co-written with my lover, Cathy Nan Quinlan, who is a painter, and who also worked on the script with me. We took experiences from each of our lives and mixed them together and took stories from the interviews.
QSF: The adult voices in the film have a particular resonance. Just as the culture has its important stories, people do as well. You really found triggers for their memories and first stirrings.
Fredrich: I wanted everyone to get the same set of questions, some of which were a little bit of a surprise. For a lot of the women it was the first time they thought deeply about a lesbian childhood. This is not to say that everyone doesn't know their own story from childhood. I was interested in the first time they were sexually active, however they may define it. When was the first time they heard the word lesbian and how did it make them feel? Did race enter in to it? Did religion enter in their feelings? Did they think there was a cause for their homosexuality?
QSF: Is there a moral terrain to your film? Something perhaps that connects all us who are lesbians.
Fredrich: There are two parts to this. One part is about whether there is something specific to a lesbian childhood as opposed to that of a straight girl or boy. The second part is about my moral concerns. When I started showing the script to people and showing them clips I was going to use, I was certainly getting a response from lesbians in that they recognized these things as their experiences. There were also a lot of straight women who remembered the same things, like slumber parties and that kind of intense affection for another girl. They may say that they didn't grow up to be a lesbian but that was a very important part of their childhood. What I realized in the course of the three years of working on the film was that there are certainly experiences that lesbians have particular to them that have to do with discovering this part of themselves, but there are things that many kids share, whether straight or gay, that have to do with going through puberty and having intense friendships, dealing with siblings and family.
In a way, Hide and Seek speaks to both broad and very specific concerns. I was very scared when I started working on the film because I felt it was a taboo subject and that a lot of my childhood fears about being lesbian, which were inarticulated when I was young, were rising up again with the making of the film. I wasn't particularly aware at the time but there were these deeper feelings that I knew were not "right." And there is such a conservative mood in the country now that when you talk about children in relationship to any kind of sexual activity, it is considered forbidden. And I was afraid of the reaction that I would get. But I also had such a strong feeling that this was something that had to be talked about and that I felt so much for the suffering little girls had gone through, that I wanted to say that this was okay and not something a child should suffer over. I wanted the making of the film to allow for it to be more accepted. And to talk about the joys of it, that these affections girls have are a good thing and there is a lot of pleasure in it, not something that is sordid. It is always portrayed as something sordid and it's not that anymore than a romance is between a little boy and girl. Children are not perverse. I think sex and love is part of everybody from the time they're born. I wanted to express that feeling in the film, have it be a portrait of this experience that people could accept and see its more delicate shades, not in an extreme black-and-white way.
QSF: Tell me about when the protagonist Lou was in the classroom diagramming a sentence and the words "I'm never getting married" appeared.
Fredrich: "I'm never getting married" came from my experience in eighth grade when the girls and boys were separated and the girls were made to read Jane Eyre and the boys read Moby Dick. And we had this big discussion after reading the book, including what it meant when Jane finally married Mr. Rochester, and everyone started saying, 'When I get married, I want six kids. I want to have eight kids.' This was a Catholic school. And I said I'm not going to get married. I don't want to have kids. And everyone jumped on me. I just thought it was an opinion, like the other opinions, but I discovered that it was not an accepted opinion. In that moment in that film, along with a lot of other moments, I'm trying to present this girl in the real world and also show her in her fantasy, in her imaginary world. I like that moment because she is in the classroom supposedly diagramming this sentence and functioning pretty well, but then in her heart and mind, she's thinking something entirely different. There is something that separates her which she can't express.