The film begins with a series of events on a crowded outdoor market street. Women on stages perform “private” rituals: shaving legs and armpits, fixing their hair, etc. A woman tries to disrupt their “work.” She struggles to set herself apart from them, to resist the forces of habit, but gradually becomes more involved than she is willing to admit. Although she sets in motion a chain reaction of rebellion, she’s unable to keep the momentum going. She stops before carrying it to the logical conclusion and ends up on the stage herself.
“Building on proverbs, metaphor, and the principles of a radical feminist imagination, Su Friedrich creates a world in which women’s private rituals become public spectacles. Filmed in super-8 on the streets of New York’s Lower East Side, Cool Hands, Warm Heart works through questions of danger, attraction, violence, and ultimately the transformative power of bonding between women. Friedrich is able to draw on her training in avant-garde cinema as well as her background as a street photographer. In this work, she combines the two sets of concerns into an unusually original vision, re-imagining public space as a sort of Cool World inhabited by women of daring.”
—B. Ruby Rich
Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979)
Directed, written, shot and edited by Su Friedrich
Featuring Jennifer Macdonald, Marty Pottenger, Donna Allegra, Sally Eckhoff and Rose Maurer
16 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent
Award:
Special Merit Award: Athens Film Festival, Ohio
Selected Screenings:
Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, NY; Frameline Film Festival, San Francisco; International Festival of Women Artists, Copenhagen; Feminist Film Conference, New York; BAM Cinematheque, NY; The New Festival, NY; Gay Film Festival, Chicago; Feminist Film Criticism Conference, Chicago; Barnard College Women’s Film Festival, New York; “Now We Think as We Fuck”: Queer Liberation to Activism @ MoMA; IsReal – Festival di Cinema del Reale, Italy