“Gently Down the Stream can be described about as easily as you can hold on to a handful of water….Suffice it to say that Friedrich has an artist’s instinctive sense of film—she expresses herself in it with a freedom and rightness that strike the viewer immediately. When the last image leaves the screen, you may not be able to say what you’ve seen, but you know what you’ve felt.”
—Stuart Klawans, The Nation
“…her films (particularly the celebrated Gently Down the Stream) signaled an important change that was occurring with the evolution of experimental cinema…The film demonstrates Friedrich’s considerable technical talents and formal creativity as well as her canny historical sense in reappropriating the formal strategies generally associated with the “structural film.” Friedrich’s film becomes a public exorcism, one that continually exposes and infects the viewer with the psychic consequences of religious constraints, familial binds and sexual conflicts.
—Bruce Jenkins, Millennium Film Journal
Gently Down the Stream (1981)
Directed, written, shot, scratched and edited by Su Friedrich
13 minutes, 16mm, b&w, silent
Selected Screenings:
Documenta, Kassel, Germany; Cinémathèque Quebecoise, Canada; The American Century, Whitney Museum of Art; Frameline Film Festival, San Francisco; MIX Festival, NY; CineExperimental Festival, Spain; Experimental Film Festival, Buenos Aires; Osnabruck Film Festival, Germany; Banff Arts Festival, Canada; BFI, London; Cinéma Georges Méliès, France; Haifa International Film Festival, Israel; International Women’s Film Festival, New York; Third Art Film Festival, Tokyo; The Color of Ritual, The Color of Thought: Women Avant-Garde Filmmakers in America, 1930-2000, Whitney Museum, NY; Festival of American Independents: 1920-1990, Torino, Italy; Remains to Be Seen film series, Echo Park Film Center, LA; Vertical Features film series, Toronto, Canada; C-LAB (aka Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab); Utopie Film series, Vienna Filmmuseum; We Are Cinema: 50 Years of the Film-maker’s Coop, Microscope Gallery, NY; Fifty Years of Canyon Cinema, International Festival of the New Latin American Cinema, Cuba; On the Collective for Living Cinema, Wilkinson Gallery, London; 25 Years of Women Calling the Shots, NY; Third Art Film Festival, Aichi Art Center, Tokyo; Mot: Dites, Image, Paris; Unknown Territories: American Independent Films, Vienna, Austria; Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Hamburg, Germany; Carte Blanche: Yann Beauvais Quoi : Queer ! ⁄ Wat: Queer!, Royal Cinematheque of Belgium; Punto de Vista Film Festival, Pamplona, Spain; La Filmoteca de Galicia, Spain; La Filmoteca Valenciana, Spain; Filmoteca Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain; Cineteca, Madrid, Spain