Scar Tissue is an attempt to capture a particular dynamic between men and women on the streets of New York by making a structure that reproduces what is essential in the original event and also a structure that undermines the original event.
At first the pacing is terribly regular. Not like breathing, but like a digital clock. Long periods of blackness disorient and lull us; any new image is startling. It’s safer to cruise, to scuttle about, than to sit still and contemplate. When we rest in the black leader, the aches start being felt, and uneasiness seeps in. Otherwise we run, blind ourselves, are blinded, shiver, and exit in clear leader.
I mark the aggression and the closure of the men’s gestures; bonding them with black leader, I separate them from the women. When the men are together, the rhythm must be steady, rigid, uniform. It then becomes harsher and more threatening when they move, aggress and delimit space. They crowd, they stuff the frame.
The women (the chaste and captivating and captured) weave and shatter through the men, make our eyes hurt; our eyes hurt them. We follow their slightest movement. They are little shocks, a fall in or out of the solid frame, surrounded by a battering of clear leader or a suffocation of black leader.
As the movement increases, the intervals become more unnerving: just as we manage to gain distance from an image, another one strikes out, contracts our pupils, bruises us. We want to hide. We are not left alone.
“… powerful and economic. Setting out to film street activity, Friedrich ends up with basically two images – women’s legs skittering in high heels, and men’s midsections, hands folded self-righteously across stuffed shirts or planted belligerently in pockets. Juxtaposed, the two appear as if from totally different species; the film left me with a yen to see one of those heels planted splat in the middle of one of those bellies.”
—Amy Taubin, The Village Voice
Scar Tissue (1979)
Directed, shot and edited by Su Friedrich
16mm, b&w, silent
Selected Screenings:
BAM Cinematheque, NY; 33rd Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinamericano, Havana, Cuba