New York Open Center: 22 E. 30 Street, NYC
For more info: http://www.opencenter.org
“In a lively mix of narrative, collage and memoir, A Biography of Lilith (35 min. 1997) updates the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale with a present-day Lilith musing on a life that has included giving up a baby for adoption and working as a bar dancer. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, director Lynne Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as mother. ”
“Sachs’ film conveys the real experience — bloody and poetic — of Lilith alive and now in every woman. Bravo! A film felt, imagined, and informed by life.” – Barbara Black Koltuv, Ph. D. Clinical Psychologist, Jungian Analyst, and Author of The Book of Lilith
“Sachs’ art for fusing documentary and experimental narrative is unquestionably enormous. Her combination of an interview with a friend, the myth of Lilith and beauteous images of things like jelly fish (which float like iridescent breasts on screen) culminates in stunning cinema.” Molly Hankwitz, Art Papers
In addition to screening her film, Sachs will present a discursive mixed-media lecture. Her presentation includes video clips from conversations she had with Rabbi Mayer Fund, a brilliant, confrontational Orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn. Next she will show excerpts from conversations she had with four wonderful octogenarians from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx. Then, a zig-zag ahistorical mapping of LILITH sightings including: images of Lilith in haunting silver, hebrew protection amulets from medieval Europe (stored in the Jewish Museum in New York); Lilith on Baroque canvases and Mesopotamian ceramics; Lilith played by screen-beauty Jean Seberg as a crazed, exquisitely sensual woman living in a mental hospital; intense, intellectual, ridiculous Lilith in the TV-sitcom “Cheers”; and, Lilith, as a kind of Amazonian cannibal mother in the outrageously puerile comic book series Ghost Rider.