In making this film, I wanted to investigate a formal device that I had started using in Gently Down the Stream: presenting dreams as text through the form of scratched words which have to be read rather than recreating the “look” of the dream through images. In the previous film, I used fourteen dreams. In But No One, I concentrated on a single dream, and one that disturbed me because of its seeming amorality and passivity. The text is presented with the same “scratched word” technique used in the previous film, but is handled in a more playful, surprising manner. The blunt, vernacular images, which were shot on the streets of the Lower East Side, are set in contrast to the strange images conjured by the text.
“The visual material of But No One corresponds to the waking world of the filmmaker, but it is cast in the form of a dream…It is clear that the images in her real world, like her dreams, are troubling…The compact constellation of repeated images is satisfying, an important part of Friedrich’s ongoing exploration of film’s ability to work like dreams and convey a unique, personal vision.”
—Janet Cutler, Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks
But No One (1982)
Directed, written, shot, scratched and edited by Su Friedrich
Funded in part by a grant from the New York State Council on The Arts
9 minutes,16mm, b&w, silent
Selected Screenings:
Off the Wall-To-Wall Festival, New York; The Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; If Not Always Permanently, Memorably”, Spike Island, Bristol, UK; Film by Decade: A Short Documentary Film from each Decade Since Film Was Invented, Spectacle Theater, Brooklyn; Flaherty Film Seminar screening, NY