14th Annual Experimental Lecture . For past lectures, visit this page!
Choke, Chew, Savor, and Spit: The Messy Practice of Cinema
March 6, 2025 6:00 PM — 9:00 PM
NYU Undergraduate Film and TV and Cinema Studies
“Tonight I explore the making of a visceral cinema – one that does not know where it is going until it arrives, finds meaning in mistakes, and sets no boundaries between the real and the imagined. Through it all, I am aware of the implicit connection between my body, the bodies of those I photograph, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Film contains it all. I drink life and its taste is in my mouth. My lecture is about the way it feels on my tongue, along the palette, along my throat. It’s about that liminal space between the speech and the swallow. A lot can happen in the dark space behind your lips. This is what happens to me.”
CHOKE
Making these films helped me cough it out, not in or behind a handkerchief, but in front of people. I would never have said these things, but I wanted to get them out and film was the means that worked for me.
“The Tarot” 4 min. 1983.
“A Biography of Lilith” 35min. 1997
“States of UnBelonging” 63min. 2006
“Your Day is My Night” 64 min. 2013
“And Then We Marched” 4 min. 2017
“Girl in a Daunting Now” 4 min. silent 2020
“E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo ” 4 min. 2021
“Film About a Father Who” 74 min. 2021
CHEW
In these films, I grapple with ideas that take another kind of thinking. Structure is everything. Finding the visual language that is specific to the project is part of the method. My impulses as an artist collide with doubt and deep considerations around process. Each film requires a different strategy. Sometimes I am reluctant to assert myself. I am more interested in the subtext than the text. I realize that anyone involved in the making of a project – like my daughters or a good friend or someone I have recently met – is also somehow a collaborator I might need to listen to.
“Sermons and Sacred Pictures” 29min. 1989.
“The Task of the Translator” 10min. 2010
“A Year of Notes and Numbers” 4 min. silent 2017
“The Washing Society” 44 min. 2018
SAVOR
ˈsāvər is different from the other words in some fundamental ways. It’s two syllables that come together with an initial punch and then a release. Stress/ unstress. There is an aural narrative that culminates with a form of pleasure, experienced in the articulation of the word, or in this case, the making of the film.
“Drawn and Quartered” 4min. silent 1986
“Wind in Our Hair” 40min. 2010
“Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor” 8 min. 2018
“Maya at 24” 4 min. 2021
SPIT
I celebrate irreverence and disregard for the rules – for the film industry, for the state, for decorum, for narrative.
“The House of Science: a museum of false facts” 30min. 1991
“Investigation of a Flame”, 45min. 2001
“Contractions” 12 min. 2024
You can watch Lynne’s films in “Choke, Chew, Savor, and Spit: The Messy Practice of Cinema” in their entirety here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/11604346 (pw: LS2025)
Gratitude to Jessica Bardsley and Mary Rose McClain.