First Comes Love consists of perfectly choreographed scenes of four wedding ceremonies accompanied by a complex medley of popular love songs. All seems to be going as it should until the couples reach the altar, when the celebratory atmosphere is interrupted for a surprising public service announcement.
Then the song and dance continue until the happy couples depart, leaving behind a dwindling crowd and a few altar boys who carefully sweep up the rice that blankets the pavement like snow. The film doesn’t attempt to defend—or discredit—the institution of marriage. Instead, it reveals the many subtle emotions surrounding the event, and raises questions about how the double standard regarding marriage affects gay and straight couples.
“Throughout, Friedrich keeps a gracious distance, building a critique that doesn’t patronize the very real, very naked emotion she captures. A virtuoso of clarity, Friedrich recasts the personal as political, makes the public curiously intimate. In her hands, a slow pan to a discarded box of Carolina Rice is both poignant and absurd, a fit coda to a ceremony of privilege that’s at once desired and denied.”
—Manohla Dargis, The Village Voice
“A work of nuance and irony…gently yet forcefully asking the viewer to deal with questions of commitment and love and the public announcement of them.”
—Leslie Kossoff, Gay Community News
First Comes Love (1991)
Directed, written, shot and edited by Su Friedrich
Funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation
22 minutes,16mm, b&w
Selected Screenings:
Festival of Festivals, Toronto; New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Amsterdam; “Wedding Week” Film Festival, NY; Melbourne International Film Festival; First Tokyo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; Virginia Festival of American Film, Charlottesville; Ottawa Gay and Lesbian Film Festival; Cork International Film Festival, Ireland; Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival, Taiwan; British Film Institute Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Tour; “Wedding Week” Film Festival, Upstate Films, NY; MIX NYC Queer Experimental Festival, New York; Manifestos filmics feminists 1, Barcelona, Spain; “Screenwise: First Conference on Feminist Film and TV Theory”, Vienna, Austria; San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Film Festival; WOW Women’s Film and Video Festival, New York; Sydney International Film Festival; “Now We Think as We Fuck”: Queer Liberation to Activism @ MoMA