Alex: Since I was young I have always been curious about the world around me. I used to draw a lot, and make collages, but I never had an art education until I got to college where I decided to study photography without knowing why at the time. I didn’t get into filmmaking until much later, and I was never interested in conventional filmmaking- separation of roles, genres, storytelling.
I like making things. Objects that are distinct, take up space, have weight and texture, can be given as gifts, are occasionally sold, contain the very story of their making in the material of their being. And so it is with a stubborn adolescent fury that I refuse to believe that the work I do as a filmmaker is being pushed so quickly and definitively from the three dimensional into the digital and ultimately to the virtual world.
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs and poet Paolo Javier on the dialogues between documentary and poetry, and politics and personal history.
New Day filmmakers live all over the United States, although many are concentrated on the East and West Coasts. In the following interviews, New Day filmmakers from the Midwest reveal how living there has impacted their personal – and filmmaking – choices.
The first time I saw Gunvor’s brash, feminist 1966 moving image carnival “Schmeerguntz”, I was about 25 years old, still too young (I thought) to identify with her funky discourse on motherhood and domesticity. In a sense, I watched Gunvor’s cinematic collaboration with her friend Dorothy Wiley as a child might furtively read her mother’s journals.
A program of films by women who look at the world through the lens of motherhood
Our cinematic relationship to Argentina began in 2007, when the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) invited Lynne to show a retrospective of her films. During the one week she was in this film-crazy city, she met Pablo Marin and Leandro Listorti, two extraordinarily active Argentine experimental filmmakers with a commitment to making movies and screening and writing about their thriving alternative film community.
For over seventy years, a steady stream of letters was exchanged between Alexander Lenard and members of my family in Memphis, Tennessee. Most of these reflections on everything from stock market prices to family trips, to the legacy of war to the cost of cranberry seeds, were exchanged between Sandor (he was called in the family by his Hungarian first name, without the accent) and my great-uncle William (a.k.a. Bill) Goodman.
In my twenty year relationship as audience to Lynne Sachs’ filmworks, I have always admired her amazing ability to connect the very personal, physical relationship of ‘selfhood’ to film and film history and to collage a variety of complex themes into one complete film, often with challenging ambiguity and open endedness.
We’ve been spying on children in the city for about a century now.
Using our movie cameras, we become omniscient god-like figures who
traipse behind a mischievous boy or a dreamy girl, privy to their
every move, even their thoughts, and, in this way, finding a
deceptively easy access to our own pasts.