Su Friedrich – Damned If You Don’t (1987)
Quote:
DAMNED IF YOU DON’T is Friedrich’s subversive and ecstatic response to her Catholic upbringing. Blending conventional narrative technique with impressionistic camerawork, symbols and voice-overs, this film creates an intimate study of sexual expression and repression. Featuring Peggy Healey as a young nun tormented by her desire for the sultry irresistible Ela Troyano.
“Damned If You Don’t was an important contribution to the inauguration of a feminist cinema of visual and sexual pleasure, a contentious issue for feminist filmmakers and theorists more than a decade after Laura Mulvey’s germinal “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Featuring a narrative structure and the depiction of women’s bodies—forms and images proscribed by Mulvey’s essay—the film reclaims the pleasures of character identification and of the sensual visual field. The heart of the film’s narrative follows the episodic seduction of a young nun (played by Peggy Healey) by a woman (Ela Troyano), but Friedrich interweaves the story with both experimental cinema’s use of poetic images and documentary’s analytical contextualization. The film begins with a humorous deconstruction of a classical narrative, Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), as a voiceover emphasizes how, in the film’s conflict between a “good nun” and a “bad nun,” evil becomes associated with acting on forbidden desire. This binary of good and bad, sexual repression and sexual expression, is metaphorically expressed in the film’s gorgeously optically-printed high contrast shots of seals, swans, and snakes gliding in water, their sensuous energies barely contained by the frame. Meanwhile, another voiceover text cites Judith Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, a text which functions, like Black Narcissus, as a framing device for the central narrative seduction. Uncovering the sexual energies thinly disguised in nuns’ submission to Christ, Immodest Acts adds an historical dimension to Friedrich’s story, suggesting how the prohibitions on lesbian sexual desire have been negotiated and transgressed for centuries (often precisely through the indirection and mediation of metaphorical imagery).”
Friedrich, Su - 1987 - Damned If You Don't.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 41 min 3 s
Size: 780 MiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 712x480 ~> 712x534
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 2 200 kb/s
BPP: 0.268
Audio
#1: 2.0ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s (Stereo)
https://nitro.download/view/D6F70FCF7FAC488/Friedrich,_Su_-_1987_-_Damned_If_You_Don’t.mkv
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, German
