Recurring images of the construction of the model house in The Ties that Bind also construct a literal ‘home’ movie in the documentary. Bucher’s recollections culminate in her experience of the widespread destruction of the German cities of Stuttgart and Ulm by aerial bombardment in the final days of the war. In a brutal irony, she experienced the post-war vandalization of the Bucher family home by the ‘liberators’ – U.S. troops. Interspersed with this narrative we see the model house as it is precisely and painstakingly assembled then, in short order, trampled on, set fire to and melted down until it is nothing more than a blackened residue. As we watch and listen we come to understand the silence surrounding these images as emblematic of many silences –

• the silenced voices of the victims of the Holocaust;
• the fearful, anguished silence of non-Jewish German citizens who opposed the Nazi regime;
• the silencing of those who did speak out and in turn were silenced;
• and, in particular, Lore Bucher’s long held silence about the traumatic ordeals of her youth.

Friedrich positions these representations/interrogations of the domestic ideal – its weaponization through political promises and through destruction in war – against similarly challenging representations/interrogations of patriarchal concepts of the ideal woman. The documentary makes an interrogation of gender intrinsic to its interrogation of history.  Images of the female body in compliance with hegemonic codes of gender recur in the film and make unsettling links between the Nazi valorisation of the model German female body and corresponding

“assumptions… about the correct status of women” that ‘tie’ “Germany of the 1930s with America of the early 1980s” (MacDonald Avant Garde 108). 

In the film’s opening moments, Friedrich’s hands, having added a Hitler-esque moustache to the Ralph Lauren commercial, turn the page. The film allows us space and time enough to take in a double page advertising spread – a naked female model (a ‘model’ woman) reclines, eyes closed, her face, neck and breasts thickly coated in a mud-like substance. On the opposite page the advertisement heralds a beauty breakthrough: “Introducing primitive solutions that virtually reverse the effects of age on surface skin”. It is an image that is evoked when soon after in the film as Bucher speaks of The Cross of Honour of the German Mother, a medal awarded by the Nazi regime to its most fecund female citizens:

“…a bronze for so-and-so many children, a silver for so-and-so many children
… but certainly this was for ever and ever proclaimed… it was just terrible,
yeah…the great mothers and the families, a tremendous to-do.”

Here Bucher‘s recollections are positioned against the image of a brightly-lit slowly revolving glass figurine, the transparent naked torso of a heavily pregnant woman – the ‘model’ mother. The image of the figurine is interspersed too with images of medically-preserved foetuses. A purposeful parallel seems to be being drawn between Nazi ideology and the promotional material of the U.S. pro-life movement which, as medical historian Kathleen M. Crowther has identified,

“proliferated since the Roe [v. Wade] decision [and] is full of descriptions and images of foetuses used to demonstrate the personhood of the unborn…detached from the maternal body, suggesting the foetus is an autonomous individual” (Crowther 4-5).

A further sound gap occurs at this point in the film – a ‘pregnant’ silence – as Friedrich’s hand-scratched intertitles inform us of the response of Lore’s mother when she received her Cross of Honour:

“I/WOULD/NEVER/WEAR/THIS/THING!/she/said/and/
threw/away/her/silver/medal”

There is an ongoing centrality of issues around the control of women’s reproductive rights in contemporary U.S. politics. Indeed, the film’s release came at a time when the legal precedent that established reproductive rights, Roe v Wade, was considered “under siege” (Hull & Hoffer). What emerges in the film, in the interconnection between Friedrich’s images of these carefully constructed representations of women and what is said and unsaid, is a gap that creates space and time for us to detect unsettling and ongoing correlations between the past and present regarding control over the female body. I am reviewing The Ties That Bind now, post the 2022 Supreme Court decision (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation) that has resulted in the recriminalisation of abortion in many states in America (Crowther 4), and in the midst of an on-going campaign of attacks against gender rights by the second Trump presidency. For this reason, the historical correlations detectable in the film’s silences seem to resonate more loudly and speak with urgency to the current cultural moment. Michel Chion has said how

“every instance of silence in film is disarming since it seems to expose our faculty of hearing…we are no longer just listening to the film; we are being listened to by it” (148).

Friedrich’s strategic use of omission – through sound and the absence of sound – constructs insistent, involving, un-soothing silences that seem to both ‘hear’ and ‘speak’ across time and space and work to situate us, the audience, not apart from but inside the film’s historical discourse. 

A tension between sound and silence is present at all times too in the film’s non-synchronous sound strategy – we hear Bucher before we see her, when we do finally see her we are initially granted only a partial view (shots of a knee, a hand, an elbow, her feet as she crosses and uncrosses her ankles). Significantly, though we do eventually see Bucher’s face, though we see her talking and laughing, we never hear the words she utters in these images and at no time do we see her speak the narration that structures the film. To this end Friedrich employs a purposeful home movie aesthetic in the film’s footage of her mother: the footage is silent, a restless handheld camera resists/delays the kinds of contextual shots (mid-shots, long-shots) that might give us more immediate visual information, ‘a fuller picture’. The filmmaker’s choices implicitly both challenge and thwart our expectations around the documentary convention. Friedrich withholds the direct address of the talking head that gives eyewitness testimony and satisfies our epistemological desire for a definitive account. Instead The Ties That Bind works to frame memory, history, the past, as partial, “always in the process of becoming, always incomplete” (Spence & Cengiz 385). 

The home movie aesthetic carries with it a sense of informality, of leisure, of ease. Roger Odin has argued the home movie has distinctive representational codes – it

“refuses to represent anything shocking…[OR] to reveal a pessimistic view …it constructs a euphoric vision of family life” (262).

In employing this filmic mode Friedrich transgresses these codes and finds another way to interrogate the idea of home, the domestic and its broader political implications. Even as Lore Bucher speaks of the upheavals and catastrophes of the past, it is clear from these ‘home movie’ fragments that her current home life is ordered, comfortable and secure. Friedrich positions the home movie aesthetic – ‘ordinary’ images of the domestic, the intimate, the everyday – against Bucher’s vivid vocal recollections of Hitler’s Germany to further problematise our understanding of history. It becomes clear this comfortable and apparently benign setting contains also deeply uncomfortable truths,. These truths, though not necessarily always spoken aloud, remain always present, always on the cusp of being voiced, of re-emerging, and regrettably, as we are discovering on a daily basis, of recurring. 

Knowing and ‘not knowing’

“A great many people knew the Nazi’s were systematically killing Jews. Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew and Winston Churchill knew, Stalin and the Russians knew, the Pope in the Vatican knew…”     (Lore Bucher in The Ties That Bind)

Friedrich has described the collective memory of World War Two as “fraught with guilt and silence” (Friedrich 1985). The filmmaker’s sound strategy in The Ties That Bind seems closely tied to this understanding and to its relevance to her mother’s experiences before and during the war. It becomes clear in the film that Lore Bucher’s strategic use of her voice, significantly both through speech and through purposeful silence, was critical to acts of resistance against the day-to-day pressures of the Nazi regime. She speaks of her refusal to say, ‘Heil Hitler,’ in school assemblies, of her repeated response to pressure to join the BDM and the Nazi Party – “No, I don’t want to”. Bucher speaks too of silence as a survival strategy. Anti-Nazi pamphlets were widely distributed by student-led resistance group, The White Rose, in the city of Ulm where she lived –

“they were distributed by someone else and you found them in the street, you found them somewhere else, maybe in a railway station, they were just put there”.

Bucher makes it clear silence and denial when questioned about the pamphlets was the only safe option:

“You did not talk about that. You were asked about it but you did not talk about it. You didn’t know anything about it. You’d just never heard of it.”

She speaks with pleasure too of the success of her anti-Nazi colleagues at the German airfield where she was detained during the war . They destroyed (and thereby silenced) orders that came through to launch air raids. At the same time as silence is acknowledged as a strategy of resistance and as an inevitable strategy of self-preservation, it is problematized as potential complicity and then complicated further through the film’s recognition of the inevitable gaps in understanding experiences when viewing the past from the present. In the silence that follows her mother’s protestations that she, her family and many ordinary Germans did not know of the Nazi’s systematic killings of Jews in the concentrations camps, Friedrich literally spells out the inevitable ethical pitfalls of interrogating history from the safety of the present. She does so word-by-word on the screen. Shifts in the text between lower and upper case communicate the escalation and de-escalation of the tension and frustration inherent in her undertaking:

“And/after/I/blame/the/Germans/OR/WISH/THAT/MY/MOTHER/
COULD/HAVE/DONE/SOME/THING/ANY/THING/I/ask/myself/
what/I/would/have/done/AND/WHY/THE/ALLIES/DIDN’T/BOMB/
THE/RAIL/LINES/LEADING/TO/THE/CAMPS/They/were/begged/
to/do/it”

Viewed now ‘How might history judge us?” seems to be the pressing and uncomfortable question that emerges in the address of The Ties That Bind to its audience. What becomes uncomfortably apparent too is that when the present appears less safe and certain, we discover that the luxury of critical distance is an illusion.

The sophisticated sound and image scape of The Ties That Bind speaks to the underlying premise of the filmmaker’s undertaking. Out of its complex and recurring sound and image patterns, its outpourings and silences, its uncertainties and hesitations, out of a multiplicity of imbricated images of past and present, out of what appears to be an onslaught of chaos and confusion, there emerges in Friedrich’s film a coherence that familiarizes us with what has been distanced by time and space. She locates history right here with us in the everyday, in the commonplace, at home. Implicit questions regarding the nature and strength of the ties that bind us to our fellow citizens are posed to each of us through Lore Bucher’s small daily acts of resistance against society’s efforts to undermine the bonds she shared. If, as Paxton argues and Lore Bucher’s experience indicates, fascism is a social movement, its grievances are nurtured, neutralized or countered in the everyday, at home, in the schoolyard, in the neighbourhood, even at piano lessons. Through Lore’s recollections and through the specific sound/image scape of The Ties That Bind, Friedrich makes it clear that these everyday spaces are thoroughly enmeshed with the prevailing structures of politics and power and that acts of resistance, however small, matter. What can be inferred too from Friedrich’s provocative and involving film is that the answer to countering the divisions and enmity that fascist movements respond to, amplify and are fuelled by may lie in the purposeful forging of social ties –  ‘the ties that bind’ – in ways that transcend perceived grievances and differences. As Janet Cutler has noted, Friedrich was credited in the mid-1980s with helping “to reinvigorate American avantgarde cinema when the movement seemed played out” (315). The challenge taken up by Friedrich and evidenced in The Ties That Bind offers an aesthetic mode that could enliven the approach of U.S. documentarists in the current historical moment – it is through a frank and fearless ‘looking back’ that a path forward might emerge. The Ties That Bind exemplifies a filmmaker’s willingness not to sidestep or absolve uncomfortable contradictions regarding her own nation’s legacy of lapses in regard to the fomenting of right wing extremism.