An Interview with Su Friedrich

The interview took place on November 17, 2019, at Su Friedrich’s home in Brooklyn, New York. Let’s start at the beginning. How did you become a filmmaker? I graduated from Oberlin College with a degree in studio art and art history in 1975. I had primarily studied photography as the studio part of my major. I moved to New York City in 1976, and for two years I was doing photojournalism and studio photography, but then I attended a three-night Super 8 mm workshop with David Lee at the Millennium Film Workshop. Dave had studied at SUNY Buffalo [State University of New York Buffalo] with Hollis Frampton. I was also seeing films that were interesting to me, European art cinema—for example, films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder—at the Bleecker Street Cinema. It was exciting to me, but I didn’t consider going to film school, partly because I had been in school long enough but mainly because it was incredibly expensive, and I had no money. I became a filmmaker when I realized that it was much more interesting to make films than to do photography because one could work with movement, rhythm, and multiple images. 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