A great film full of new perpectives for style, structure and narrative! Enjoy!
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).”
More infos
http://www.sufriedrich.com/content.php? ... 987_damned
The complete script of the film
http://www.sufriedrich.com/content.php? ... sub=ddbest
English with no subs
Su Friedrich - Damned If You Don't (1987).avi 
