“Gently Down the Stream can be described about as easily as you can hold on to a handful of water….Suffice it to say that Friedrich has an artist’s instinctive sense of film—she expresses herself in it with a freedom and rightness that strike the viewer immediately. When the last image leaves the screen, you may not be able to say what you’ve seen, but you know what you’ve felt.”
—Stuart Klawans, The Nation

“…her films (particularly the celebrated Gently Down the Stream) signaled an important change that was occurring with the evolution of experimental cinema…The film demonstrates Friedrich’s considerable technical talents and formal creativity as well as her canny historical sense in reappropriating the formal strategies generally associated with the “structural film.” Friedrich’s film becomes a public exorcism, one that continually exposes and infects the viewer with the psychic consequences of religious constraints, familial binds and sexual conflicts.
—Bruce Jenkins, Millennium Film Journal