Homeland Insecurity:
revisiting Su Friedrich’s
The Ties That Bind (1985)
In early 2025, U.S. State Senator Bradford Blackmon introduced the Contraception Begins At Erection Act to the Mississippi State Legislature. Described by BillTrack50 as “a provocative legislative attempt to regulate male reproductive activities, potentially as a satirical response to or commentary on restrictive reproductive health legislation”, the Act proposed hefty fines for “ejaculation without fertilization”. Unsurprisingly its progress through the state legislature was short-lived but the Act served its intended purpose, attracting global media attention and highlighting not only the inconsistencies in the ways male and female bodies are made subject to regulation but the strategic value of precisely targeted irreverence as a means of drawing attention to how social space is produced, understood and lived. As Senator Blackmon observed: “people can get up in arms and call it absurd, I can’t say that bothers me” (Marquez par. 7) – in other words, drawing attention to absurdity was the point. Underpinning Blackmon’s legislative mockery is an urgency for action, a recognition and defiance of a creeping antipathy toward human rights generally and gender rights specifically that is being sanctioned and emboldened by the openly authoritarian inclinations of the current US administration. Among many other curtailments of human rights being vaunted daily, Trumpism associates itself with the expansion of legislative powers that proscribe reproductive autonomy, as of December 2024 abortion was banned in 12 U.S. states (KFF).
In common with inventive and irreverent Democrat lawmakers, finding an effective means of responding to the inconsistencies, threats and absurdities of Trumpism is a pressing concern for documentary filmmakers and theorists. U.S. documentary cinema has its own traditions of hard-hitting works of provocation, and the rich legacy of feminist avant-garde film is an abundant resource from which to draw both inspiration and courage. Here I consider the particular relevance to the current historical moment of Su Friedrich’s The Ties That Bind, an innovative, intimate documentary that makes evident the very ordinary ways through which authoritarianism (in this case fascism in Germany in the 1930s and 40s) can establish itself. The film makes a compelling argument for an understanding of history as present and proximate in our everyday lives. Historian Robert O. Paxton argues that the storming of the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021 has made unequivocal the parallels between Trumpism and fascism (par 5). Looking again now at Friedrich’s work provides a reminder not only of the insight and virtuosity of this filmmaker but of the enduring relevance of a film that, forty years after it was made, offers us ways of understanding, contextualising and responding to the resurgence of authoritarianism in the United States and globally.
‘Home’ movie
Friedrich’s filmic strategies have been described as “open[ing] up our sense of history to uncertainty and to multiple authorities” (Spence and Cengiz 381). The Ties That Bind re-situates what at first may appear to be a well-known global historical narrative – the inexorable rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party in 1930s Germany – in the familial/domestic sphere; and the filmmaker makes her own mother’s voice the film’s primary structuring element. In The Ties that Bind home is the locus of the narrative that unfolds. The film’s purposeful gendered transgression positions mother (Lore Bucher) and daughter (Su Friedrich) as history’s interlocutors and it recognizes the public and private spheres as so intricately intertwined as to make ideas of the separateness of these spaces untenable. The documentary unfolds as an experiment with sound, with voice, with the absence of sound and with uncertain sound-image relations.
Specifically, Friedrich positions Lore Bucher’s compelling voiceover recollections of her teenage years and young adulthood in Nazi Germany (before, during and after the second World War) against recurring and richly affective silences that surround images – both archival and contemporary. These sound variations directly and indirectly support and expand her account and interrogation of the historical events that so profoundly impacted so many. The soundscape here is a strategy that effects a collapse of the distance between past and present. The narrative and the silences in combination with the images counter popular myths and (mis)understandings regarding the rise of the far right in Germany in the 1930s and its subsequent catastrophic consequences. Viewers are prompted to consider the far-reaching effects of these events into the here and now.
A second ‘voice’ in the film, Friedrich’s own, is surrounded with silence. The filmmaker’s narration and questions to her mother appear in text form, word-by-word, scratched by hand into the materiality of the film stock and, though this aesthetic strategy precludes aurality, it is a mode of questioning that imparts a ‘liveness’ to the daughter-filmmaker’s voice. As we watch, Friedrich’s words twitch and quiver against a black screen and transmit a restless, interrogative urgency. The urgency that informs her line of questioning seems to address an imperative to address her own uncertainty regarding her family’s complicity (if any) with the Nazi regime. What emerges almost immediately in the film is that her mother’s story is an account of the daughter of non-Jewish, resolutely anti-Nazi, German parents who despite intense pressure held fast to her family’s political and moral principles.
Friedrich has called the film “a dialogue” (Friedrich par. 3). As mother and daughter address the past, the persistent theme of their conversation is the complex and far reaching nature of ‘the ties that bind’, that is, familial ties, ties of nationhood, ties to one’s community and the ties of shared ethical and political principles. In his comprehensive discussion of Friedrich’s documentary, Scott MacDonald describes how
“the complex network of interconnections between the many facets of the film [mother and daughter, sound and image, past and present, familiar and experimental film practices] become ‘the ties that bind’ the film and the viewer’s experience of it together” (Avant-Garde 108).
The filmmaker’s part in the documentary’s mother/daughter dialogue extends beyond the hand-scratched texts of her questions and comments. Friedrich structures a compelling discursive relationship between the film’s carefully selected images and Bucher’s recollections. In constructing aesthetic relations between the film’s elements, Friedrich not only draws connections between past and present but at all times signals the deeply imbricated relationship of familial and social ties with politics and power.
Paxton has argued that rather than being strictly doctrinal in origin, fascism is a movement that has as its underpinnings strong social ties, including shared feelings of “rightful predominance” fuelled by a “an obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation and victimhood” (qtd in Zerofsky 9-10). In Friedrich’s film, questions about the complexity and resilience of these kinds of social ties are compellingly articulated in Lore Bucher’s detailed account. She describes the ways in which politics gradually infiltrated everyday life at her high school, from pressure to conform to increasingly pervasive anti-Jewish sentiment, to pressure to join the BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel, the girls’ wing of the Hitler Youth movement). Lore’s family background and her friendships with her Jewish schoolmates were thus crucial interpersonal ‘ties’ that underpinned her resistance to these pressures, pressures that most of her non-Jewish German schoolmates rapidly succumbed to. We also discover that the loyalties that bound an ordinary German citizen (Lore’s piano teacher) to the Nazi regime were instrumental in the teacher’s reporting Bucher’s anti-Nazi sentiment to the authorities, an act that resulted in Bucher’s subsequent arrest and detention during the war. The Ties That Bind re-tells global events through an understanding that history is a cumulative unfolding that both shapes and is shaped by the social, the familial, the domestic, the everyday.
Re-‘Fashioning’ fascism
Making clear the contemporary context for Friedrich’s 1985 film, MacDonald has described U.S. commercial media’s post-war repression of analyzing the rise of Hitler in favour of disseminating a more socially acceptable and considerably less-searching consensus that Hitler was ‘a madman’ and the Nazi’s were “a near alien species” (Avant-Garde 103). Currently, in 2025 the characterization of Nazism by the MAGA movement represents a marked, though similarly less-searching shift. That is, the movement frames authoritarianism as acceptable, urgent and necessary, seemingly the only means of restoring the ‘American dream’ of prosperity for all (2024 GOP Platform). Discourse on the U.S. right shares clear parallels with Hitler’s propaganda machine. In The Ties That Bind, what becomes apparent in Lore Bucher’s account of pre-WWII Germany is that nascent Nazi ideology associated itself strongly with very ordinary aspirations of traditional family life:
“my brothers… were introduced to Nazi-ism by Hitler proclaiming, ‘I shall give every German a house, a garden, a job,’ and I mean, promise, promise, promise, promise, promise, right.”
Friedrich positions Bucher’s critique of Nazism’s propagandist use of the everyday against images of what at first appears to be an innocuous domestic pastime. As Bucher speaks we see the hands of a younger woman (we presume Friedrich) flick through the pages of The New York Times Magazine and pause at a full-page Ralph Lauren fashion advertisement, a meticulously-styled image of an adolescent boy dressed in a re-versioning of traditional Germanic folk costume (layered woollen fabrics and braces) and sporting a distinctively Hitler-like haircut. The magazine image, given its juxtaposition with Bucher’s recollections, would likely have raised immediate and troubling questions for the film’s original audiences. The images would seem to suggest that either the legacy of Nazi-ism has become so distanced and emptied of meaning that it is nothing more than a questionable advertising gimmick. Or, more unsettlingly, viewers might infer that it’s a socially-acceptable appropriation by contemporary mainstream U.S. media and/or fashion industry of the iconography of Hitler’s Germany. As if to ensure that the significance of this image not be overlooked, Friedrich takes a marker pen and adds an instantly recognisable ‘Hitler moustache’ to the image of the boy.
For viewers in 2025, this moment in Friedrich’s film presents disquieting evidence that overt dalliance with fascism is far from a new phenomenon in mainstream U.S. culture. In an analysis that aligns with Friedrich’s insights, Dennis Tourish argues that the origins of Trumpism are deeply rooted in Republican Party history. He traces a continuum from 1950s McCarthyism to Barry Goldwater’s defence of extremism to Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to Ronald Reagan’s 1981 repudiation of government:
“Government isn’t the solution to the problem: government is the problem” (12).
In The Ties That Bind Friedrich constructs tensions between voice and image that work to reveal, within aspects of everyday mid-1980s United States, perceptible traces of authoritarianism—that is, nationalism, conformity, militarism.
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| The Ties That Bind reminds its audience that the U.S. has its own deeply-embedded traditions of social cohesion via celebrations of militarism | |
Over the course of the documentary, an absolute, even abrasive silence accompanies various images from daily life:
- at one moment a celebratory U.S. street parade complete with historical military armaments, marching girls and a brass band;
- at another, U.S. flag-waving counter-protestors angrily confronting women participating in a peace demonstration in New York state; and
- at another, these same peace protestors offering passive resistance as they are arrested and dragged bodily by police to armoured vans.
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| Anti-nuclear protesters in the U.S. are arrested in one of the many soundless sequences in the film. Friedrich draws the attention of her audience to the limits for the tolerance for dissent in contemporary U.S. life. | |
As the film proceeds, Friedrich’s silenced images of contemporary United States are positioned in varying proximity to her mother’s evocative enunciation of everyday life under the Third Reich. In this way, the film seems to argue that the seeds of authoritarianism—rather than residing so far outside our experience that they are impossible to comprehend or are ‘alien’—remain resolutely with us in the present and manifest themselves in a multitude of ways, both overt and less so.
Model house/model woman
Friedrich repeatedly ties the idea of authoritarian power structures as they manifest themselves in the everyday to Nazi ideology concerning both the female body and the home. In the sequence that follows her mother’s account of Hitler’s promises to the German people about the material comforts of domesticity, the voiceover ceases and there is an equally abrupt shift in imagery. All sound is again absent as a woman’s hands (again we presume Friedrich’s) carefully open and unpack a box containing a kitset for a scale model of a Bavarian house.
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| Model as metaphor: Bucher’s account details how the war laid waste to the much-vaunted Nazi party promises of domestic comfort for Germany’s non-Jewish citizens. As analogy over the course of the film a small kitset of a Bavarian house is assembled with exacting precision and care. Once completed it is abruptly smashed and incinerated. | |
The silence that accompanies these images seems filled with the rueful reminiscences we have just heard. This alternate structuring between voice and silence recurs throughout the film. In his discussion of “the unheard voice in the sound film”, Justin Horton terms the startling effect of the sudden temporary removal of all sound in a film as “abandoned sound”, a radical strategy that leaves the spectator “in a purely visual mode”: the film
“becomes more silent than even silent cinema was” (20-22).
Friedrich uses these radical, resonant silences to create interludes of space and time around her mother’s recollections. Lore Bucher’s acutely-felt, detailed memories of events that shaped her young adult life now shape each silence that follows their utterance and inflect the visual sequences with meaning. In this instance, Bucher’s critique of the illusory possibility of the model (ideal) home is made pointedly literal in Friedrich’s images of an actual model house, that is, a toy-sized replica. We return again and again over the first two thirds of the film to soundless images of this replica. Its significance intensifies as Bucher’s recollections of the repercussions coming from her family’s non-compliance with the Nazi regime accrue; we learn how their comfortable way of life was gradually taken from them.
