Su Friedrich transferred to emeritus status on July 1, 2023. As a professor of visual arts in the Lewis Center for the Arts with a focus on film production, Su has taught both introductory and advanced courses in documentary, experimental, and narrative film- and video-making. In all these contexts, her teaching has been defined by her unflagging passion for, and rigor in, her critical artistic practice, qualities that also define her pedagogy. She has been an indefatigable force for ensuring students’ access to equipment and support for their work, insisting that the ready availability of quality cameras, editing bays and software, and related technology are both curricular necessities and essential for ensuring wide and equal access to filmmaking for all interested students. Her efforts to enrich the film curriculum at Princeton include her PIIRS Global Seminar, which brings students to Princeton’s research center in Mpala, Kenya, to further their filmmaking practices and challenge reductive representations of the continent in commercial popular cinema.

Su was born in 1954 in New Haven, Connecticut. Her mother was German and came to the U.S. with Su’s father, anthropologist, linguist, and University of Chicago professor Paul W. Friedrich, who was serving as a G.I. in Germany at the time. Su briefly attended the University of Chicago (1971-72) before transferring to Oberlin College (1972-75), from which she earned a B.A. in art and art history. She joined the Princeton faculty in 1998 as a pathbreaking colleague: the first tenured professor of filmmaking at the University and the first woman professor tenured in its visual arts program.

Unsurprisingly given her passion for her medium, Su has been an exceptionally prolific filmmaker, working in multiple capacities. She is the writer, director, cinematographer, sound recordist, and editor of all but one of her films. She has made twenty-four 16 mm films and digital videos, mastering both black and white and color. Her works include Today (2022), I Cannot Tell You How I Feel (2016), Queen Takes Pawn (2013), Gut Renovation (2012), From the Ground Up (2008), Seeing Red (2005), The Head of a Pin (2004), The Odds of Recovery (2002), Hide and Seek (1996), Rules of the Road (1993), First Comes Love (1991), Sink or Swim (1990), Damned If You Don’t (1987), The Ties That Bind (1984), Gently Down the Stream (1981), and Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979).

 Su’s films demonstrate her equal investment in two projects: advancing a genuinely avant-garde American cinema and an ardently feminist approach to both subject matter and cinematic form. The grinding sexism of both commercial filmmaking and the experimental art world, particularly during the first decades of her career, made this a very difficult set of commitments for a young woman artist to negotiate. Su responded by centering her work in critiques of conventional cinema while maintaining a commitment to accessibility: an unusual and ultimately award-winning combination.

Bravely and persistently mining her personal experiences and melding them with complex cinematic effects are central to Su’s filmmaking. One early notable example is Gently Down the Stream (1981), which uses her collection of her dreams, and the highly rigorous practice of hand-scratching words into the film emulsion, to present her stream of consciousness, including the dissonance between her Catholic upbringing and her sexuality. Another is The Ties That Bind, (1984) which also uses hand-scratched texts, Super-8 footage from Su’s trip to Germany to probe her heritage, archival footage from World War II, and both footage and sound from her interviews of her mother, among other elements, to probe German and German American identity. But Su’s use of the personal did not come at the expense of solidarity with those engaged in similar work. She was a member of the renowned Heresies Collective of feminist political artists founded in New York City in 1976 and has been tirelessly energetic in support of women in the medium, and in editing in particular. Her website, “Edited By,” a comprehensive web archive of 206 women editors who invented, developed, fine-tuned, and revolutionized filmmaking, is both evidence of her commitment to sharing this underrecognized history broadly and her homage to the unsung labors of the women who preceded her.

As she continued her focus on intersections of personal and societal issues and challenges, Su increasingly turned to existential issues in her work, including I Cannot Tell You How I Feel, (2016) which again features her mother; the work investigates adult children’s responsibilities to their parents while examining the dilemmas of aging, relocation, and generational conflict. Her latest film, Today (2022), turns outward: juxtaposing wrenching scenes from the COVID-19 pandemic and daily life in the Bedford-Stuyvesant Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn with those of leisure at the shore, gardening, and nature.

Her cinematic innovations, intellectual rigor, and unflagging commitment to a complex and evolving feminist cinematic practice has earned Su many prestigious awards, including Best Narrative Film Award at the Athens International Film Festival, Outstanding Documentary Feature at Outfest in Los Angeles, the Special Jury Award at the New York Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Grand Prix at the Melbourne Film Festival, the Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival, and Best Experimental Narrative Award at the Atlanta Film Festival.

Her work is widely screened in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Stadtkino in Vienna, the Pacific Cinematheque in Vancouver, the National Film Theater in London, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema, the New York Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the First Tokyo Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, the Cork Film Festival in Ireland, the Wellington Film Festival in New Zealand, the Bios Art Center in Athens, Greece, and the Anthology Film Archives in New York. In addition, she is the recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts (1996), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1994), a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1990), a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1989), a DAAD grant as artist-in-residence in Berlin (1984), multiple grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation, among other honors.

In 2016, Su’s autobiographical film Sink or Swim (1990) was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Royal Film Archives in Belgium, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Library of Australia.

Throughout her time at Princeton, Su has been committed to growing the film program in the Lewis Center, and to film studies at Princeton. For Su, film is the defining medium of modernity and is foundational to our understanding of the potential of contemporary media. Her ferocious advocacy of an innovative and inclusive cinema has both enriched the Lewis Center, which is building on her efforts, and highlighted the significance of film and film studies across Princeton’s curriculum.

Written by members of the Lewis Center for the Arts faculty.