A comic documentary about a team of researchers from television’s “Wilderness on Parade” and their expedition to Newfoundland to study a vanishing species of nun life known as “Sisters of the Silver Scalpel.” This “migrant prayer group” is accosted by a liberated coffee show hostess and force-fed hypnotizing birth control pills. The film ends with the capture of a young nun for placement in a zoo. Presented in the straightforward, television documentary fashion of the late 1950s, the use of clichés and exaggerations pokes fun at both style and subject.
Filter Films
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In the attempt to find out how and why her sister died, a young woman discovers her sexuality. How her desire for women is held prisoner in the mourning and mystery surrounding her sister’s suicide. With a nod to the youthful fetish films of Anger and the J.D’s, scenes which begin light and fun with mod girls out on an adventure, grow dense and wet as sexual longing fulminates.
Sister
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Through a series of twenty-six short stories, a young girl recounts the events that shaped her childhood and formed her adult perceptions of fatherhood, family, work and play. The stories are told in a simple, direct manner, but are full of ambiguity, confused loyalties, and an apprehension of danger and loss. “I can think of no more corrosively moving refutation of the law of the father than Su Friedrich’s extraordinarily precise ‘Sink or Swim.’ Summoning her nerve, Friedrich rather fearlessly refines her previous researches into the unexplored area of memory, dream and desire.” – Ernest Larson Selected screenings: New York Film Festival 1990; Toronto Festival of Festivals 1990; Rotterdam International Film Festival 1990; York International Film Festival 1990
Sink or Swim
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“Simulacrum” attempts to fashion the experience of absorbing plastic art through a time-based medium. Rather than voice-over documentary commentary, this short video authors an “Applebroogesque” environment. As in Applebroog’s constructs, surface indications wash over tensions that glue people to situations and each other. In “Simulacrum”, a family portrait becomes unhinged. Carefully tended family “secrets” get a night out on the town and the waiter gets more than the orders. Finally, the daughter’s embarrassment fractures into visions of Applebroog paintings, until her thoughts marry the artwork in a batle of imagery and emotions.
simulacrum
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An in-depth study and description of the Sikhs and their faith, focusing on their unique and sometimes misinterpreted way of living. It covers Sikh history and its impact on forming the Sikh Culture. The universal institutions such as the “Sangat” – the holy congregation open to all – and the “Pangat” – free refectory or interdining for all, are stressed, and the “Typical Sikh Response” evident throughout their history towards crisis and events is presented. Recommended as a resource material for all public institutions as well as community organizations.
Sikhs, The
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A woman patient becomes both the subject and site of an ophthalmologist’s probe. “Signal” parallels an eye examination with semaphore codes to suggest that the modern visualizing technologies used in science and the military have colonized the body and forever changed the boundaries reached, the vision, and the language of the individual self.
Signal
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In 1889, Sigmund Freud began treatment with an 18-year-old girl who was brought to him for analysis by her father after she had written a suicide note. Freud was eager to use this case to demonstrate the hypotheses laid out in his “Interpretation of Dreams,” but after only three months of treatment the young woman walked out, without being cured. Five years later, Freud published an account of this failed treatment, calling it a “Fragment of an Analysis” and giving his patient the name Dora – that of a servant in his household. Recently, Dora has been a focus for the appropriation of psychoanalysis by feminist theory. Questions about the exchange of women, the representation of women, the representation of female sexuality, and the marginal or contradictory position of women in language, have been discovered in her story. “As a counter-text to Freud’s original work, the film raises important philosophical and political questions concerning the historical appearance of female hysterics and the male-prescribed ‘talking and hypnotic cures’ of the new mental health sciences. The film becomes an exploration of the limitations and inauthenticities of psychoanalytic discourse. All of this is accomplished by a filmic language that both shows and tells. From a philosophical point of view, this is undoubtedly the only film I have ever ‘read’ and enjoyed thoroughly. It’s hard to put it down.” – Jacquelyn Zita, Minnesota Daily
Sigmund Freud’s Dora
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A woman is telling the story of how she went to Mexico looking for an obscure archaeological site; how she met a man who promised to take her there; how they stayed together locked in cross-purposes and misunderstandings – how, but never why. The central event has been reconstructed through stills, narration, and enactment by two performers in a tableau limited by the boundaries of a front projection screen. “Patricia Gruben’s striking featurette starts like a parody of anthropological film and turns into an hallucinatory subjective account of one woman’s Mexican misadventure. Among the most assured experimental narratives of the early 80s, ‘Sifted Evidence’ makes particularly brilliant use of Syberberg-like front-screen.” – J. Hoberman, Village Voice Awards: Golden Athena for Best Experimental Narrative, Ohio Film Festival, 1983; voted one of top twenty films in world by Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman
Sifted Evidence
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In 1970 I had a large retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. For this exhibition I composed/designed a largely photographic book called “A Survey.” This was the first of several works, which attempted to use previous work or the records of previous work as the material for new work. Starting with “raw” material that has already been formed by oneself on some other occasions for some other purposes is a very interesting thing. “Side Seat…” is a 20-minute sound film made in 1970 of the projecting and verbal (my voice) identification of slides (made at various times, by various people) of paintings in various media made by myself from 1955 to 1965. It is not autobiographical. The film is a recycling, a conversion which, by employing the illusion of temporal alteration that film and sound recording have made possible, becomes a completely new experience. (Michael Snow)
Side Seat Paintings Slides Sound Film
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A humorous look at a young girl’s reaction when she discovers that her younger sister is suddenly taller than she is. Faced with the reality that she will be short for the rest of her life, she tries to adapt as best as she can. Being a short person living in a world geared to tall people is not easy. Eventually, she joins a group of short people whose aim is to unobtrusively scale the world down to their size and slowly make their presence felt. Note: Available in French language.
Short Story, A
