Chad Freidrichs is a documentarian who has crafted a filmography built with a series of fringe stories that unveil fascinating narratives that exist just outside the periphery of normalcy. His first feature doc, Jandek on Corwood, sees a reclusive folk and blues musician gain a following, all the while he never truly engages with his followers fascination with his work. In 2011, Chad crafted the ethnographic documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, which looks at the urban racism that existed in social housing in St Louis. Then, in 2017, with The Experimental City, Chad explores the rise and fall of societal ideas as witnessed with The Minnesota Experimental City, a grand vision that was never truly realised.

Each of these stories have paved the way for his latest film, The Cinema Within, an exploration into the way editing works. Chad explores the language of cinema with Walter Murch, whose book In the Blink of an Eye equally explores the role blinking plays in editing, and also scholar David Bordwell who explores the impact of an edit on our psyche to understand the way it transforms our understanding of cinema. Murch and Bordwell play scene setters for the deeper narrative in The Cinema Within, which sees researcher Sermin Ildirar head to rural Turkey to find a group of people who have never seen a film before, creating the foundation to her research into the role of editing, perspective, and more, on our minds.

The Cinema Within is a fascinating look into the impact of editing, and the notion of taking the language of cinema for granted. Like every language, it's one that needs to be learned and built on over time, and Chad's work invites that perspective of cinema. His films are invitations to see the world from a different perspective, and it's that notion that we explore in the following interview, which sees Chad talk about the notion of ideas, while I bring up my personal connection to Jandek on Corwood, a film that I saw back in 2004 at Perth's Revelation Film Festival, and that has stuck in my mind.

The Cinema Within is now available to view on DVD, Amazon, Apple TV & Kanopy in America.

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