In Seeing Red, three elements run parallel, overlap, diverge, lock horns and in various other ways give voice to the notion that a color, a melody, or a person has multiple characteristics that cannot be grasped by, or understood within, a simple framework.
One element is purely visual.
One is very verbal and minimally visual.
One is purely musical.
So is red the color of a fire truck or a ruby, of rust or a rose, of blood or a brick?
How fixed is a melody if it can be twisted, stretched, and shaken to the point where we no longer recognize its original form?
And when we “see red,” what color is that exactly? What aspect of passion are we feeling? Are we looking outward and seeing injustice and cupidity, or looking inward at our own limitations and failings?
“With almost a million personal videos now posted on YouTube.com, we may guess that people today find self-recording to be as natural as tooth brushing, though slightly more public. If so, then Su Friedrich once again stands out from the crowd…Despite her quarter-century’s experience in making intensely self-revelatory, formally complex films, nothing less than a professional crisis drove her to start a video diary [and] she has mulled over her pained monologues until they have taken on a musical form…Sometimes bracingly expressive, sometimes serenely beautiful, the outdoor images interrupt and tease, echo and comment upon Ms. Friedrich’s bedroom outpourings, putting them into their artistic place.”
—Stuart Klawans, The New York Times
Seeing Red (2005)
Directed, written, shot and edited by Su Friedrich
Funded by the Council on Research in the Humanities, Princeton University
27 minutes, digital video, color
Selected Screenings:
London Film Festival; International Women’s Film Festival, Dortmund, Germany; Inside/Out Film Festival, Toronto; Arsenal Cinema, Berlin; Athens Film Festival, Ohio; LGBT Film Festival, Milwaukee, WI; Hunter College, NY; University of Toledo, OH; University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Oberlin College, OH