WRITING

2016

Time and Light : Gunvor Nelson’s Vision of Editing by Lynne Sachs

Gunvor Nelson was an extremely influential teacher of mine. Between 1985 and 1995 I lived in San Francisco and was deeply inspired and supported by other artists and curators in the Bay Area experimental film community including Trinh T. Minh-ha, Karen Holmes, Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, Jeanne Finley, Craig Baldwin, and George Kuchar. It was in San Francisco that I met Mark Street my soulmate and collaborator. In 2015, I traveled to Sweden with Mark to visit and shoot film with Guvnor Nelson in her home studio, two decades after she had left the Bay Area.

Gunvor Nelson w camera in Kristinehamn Sweden by Lynne Sachs 2015

2015

Is, Was and Will Be: Living with the films of Chantal Akerman

Discovering Chantal Akerman’s films was such a vital part of my becoming a filmmaker. While I did not know her personally, I feel that I grew up with her as my guide for how to be in the world, as a woman filmmaker trying to articulate some aspect of my life and other women’s lives in the medium of film. I first saw Chantal’s films, along with those of Agnès Varda and Marguerite Duras, as a student in Paris in the 1980s.

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2015

The Peculiar Intimacy of a NYC Laundromat

When it was a reading series staged in laundromats around the country, The New Yorker described “Every Fold Matters” as a “collaborative, site-specific performance exploring the strange intimacy of the everyday ritual.” The series used performers to act out themes of gendered work, gentrification, and the intermittent weirdness of city life. Playwright and director Lizzie Olesker and filmmaker Lynne Sachs are reuniting to turn the live performance into a film. For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with them to find out more.

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2015

Every Fold Matters (script) by Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker

Every Fold Matters by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs 1/28/15   ONE – worker (Ching) TWO – worker (Veraalba) THREE – customer (Tony) FOUR – Washing Society laundress (Jasmine)   PROLOGUE   Video montage of Chinese laundry worker Mr. Ho.                In a laundromat.   Customer looks into dryer and discovers his clothes are […]

Every Fold Matters Ching Valdes Aran eyes closed

2014

Yes, No and an Occasional Maybe

I feel a closeness with writers, poets and painters, much more than with traditional film “directors.” We share a love of collage. In the kinds of films I make, there are fissures in terms of how something leads to something else. Relationships and associations aren’t fixed.

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2014

“Taking a Documentary Detour” – a mixed media lecture by Lynne Sachs

                Presented at: Les Encuentros del otro festival cine festival international de cine documental, Quito, Ecuador;  RIDE Risk/Dare/ Experiment Lecture at Pratt Institute; UC Berkeley Rhetoric Department; University of Southern California Cinema Department; Boston Museum School  “Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.” […]

Lynne gives Quito lecture

2014

Cinema & Curiosity: A Conversation between Alexandra Cuesta and Lynne Sachs

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.

Lynne Sachs and Alex Cuesta at Anthology Film

2014

Critics Page: “The Thing is No More” by Lynne Sachs in The Brooklyn Rail

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.

The Brooklyn Rail