Please join us for a performative book event with authors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker and actor/writer Jasmine Holloway celebrating the publication of Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry. Just published by punctum books, an independent queer- and scholar-led, community-formed publisher, Hand Book is a collection of writings and images that came out of a hybrid documentary performance and film made by Sachs and Olesker that was set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our city. With a focus on the people who wash and fold “drop-off” loads, Hand Book explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. This theatrical reading will include short essayistic pieces, a dramatic monologue and poetic dialogue distilled from real conversations with laundromat workers, against a backdrop of projected photographic images. The work will call to mind the intimacy of laundering other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.
Jasmine Holloway is an actor, singer, and writer who works to excavate the bones of a character before she can tell their story, honoring the life and times of the people she is portraying in a performance. Her New York theater credits include Generations atSoho Rep, and The Wiz, In The Heights, and Tambourines To Glory at Harlem Repertory Theatre.
Le Petit Versailles is a vibrant community garden, performance space, music venue and public forum for workshops, screenings and exhibitions. It is Allied’s primary program and a focal point for participants enhancing the public spaces of our neighborhood, Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The garden has an active performance and exhibit schedule during the summer months. LPV is an NYC Parks GreenThumb garden. Le Petit Versailles occupies a 20’ by 60’ lot that was formerly the site of an auto body “chop shop”. In 1996, Peter Cramer and Jack Waters began developing the site into a garden. With years of work they created a lush open space dominated by a stage that fulfills their comittment to providing a place for performers, filmmakers, and visual artists to show their work. Since its founding, Le Petit Versailles has been home to countless art exhibitions, performances, readings, film screenings, and more.
I know I am not the only one turning to parasocial relationships to stave off despair and anxiety in the Trump era.
I’m listening to adrienne maree brown, Ezra Klein and Sam, Saaed and Zach of “Vibe Check.” I get a lot out of one-sided conversations with thought-leaders who are focused on contextualizing and complicating the present, lifting up voices of current resistance and poking fun at the absurdity of fascism 3.0.
But I also need some storytelling and inspiration, and I am finding that (and more) in “Divine Intervention.” This 10-part podcast series tells the 50-year old story of a small, marginal group of young, white Catholic pacifists.
I am here to tell you: It is helping me get through it all.
The action centers around Dorchester, Massachusetts and the Paulist Center in Boston — a venerable downtown institution transformed by a cadre of young priests in the mid 1960s. They dusted out the cobwebs of the faith, roused (and rousted) the older priests, embraced the liberatory spirit of Vatican II and made going to church “a happening,” with slideshows (the Instragram decks and PowerPoint presentations of their day), music, Bible study and community engagement.
It was totally consistent and utterly revolutionary, then, that the Paulist Center priests would offer sanctuary to a conscientious objector named Paul Couming — and become the center of the local antiwar movement. There are so many gorgeously captured moments in this series, but one I keep thinking about is the stand off between the Catholic FBI agents outside the Paulist Center — who are uncomfortable entering the sanctuary — and the Catholic peace activists who had made the sanctuary their temporary home.
It took the FBI three days to get Paul Couming out. In that time, hundreds of young people supported him, slept in the sanctuary, had meals and meetings and art making, radicalizing one another and building a culture of resistance that endured long past his arrest and trial. That scene would unfold very differently today, but show host Brendan Patrick Hughes makes the most of this clash within Catholic culture.
Hughes is a Gen X director and comedian. On the pod, he comes off as being in affable awe of his subjects, but he stays an arms length removed — dropping in occasionally to tell the listener that he’s not very religious, that he’s staggered by what his subjects are saying and doing. As I listened along to the podcast, checking back often to see if another episode had dropped, I found myself wondering who he knows in the story, how he is connected, how he got this access? He tells a very personal set of stories with both distance and intimacy. He zooms out to fill in larger geo-political context and zooms in to share archival elements like family letters and a book of meeting notes by a mysterious Father X.
“Divine Intervention” doesn’t have the same “wow, my parents were big activists” vibe that Zayd Ayers Dohrn conveys in the excellent “Mother Country Radicals” podcast about the Weather Underground. But there is an insider/outsider toggle that keeps listeners curious and invested.
Hughes wrote on Instagram, “I have been trying to get this story into the world for 20 years.” In some ways, it is a story I know pretty well — my mom (Elizabeth McAlister), father (Phil Berrigan) and uncle (Daniel Berrigan) walk in and out of the action recounted in the episodes of “Divine Intervention,” but they are not the focus. Some of the characters are familiar, and I have heard some of the stories before, like the “movement” (of hu-manure) that started the actual movement of draft file destruction. But hearing it told so well allowed me to be stunned and inspired by the power of the Catholic left.
From Paul Couming’s sanctuary at the Paulist Center, “Divine Intervention” leads the listener through a series of actions already well documented in the canon of the Catholic left — namely the Baltimore Four and Catonsville Nine draft board raids, which kicked off the hundred or more other draft board actions through the late 1960s and early 1970s. (For those wanting to go deeper, check out Lynne Sachs’s “Investigation of a Flame,” Sue Hagedorn’s “Devout and Dangerous” and Joe Tropea’s “Hit and Stay.”)
From there we hear about the 1970 Women Against Daddy Warbucks action in New York City and the Media, Pennsylvania break-in of 1971 (which Betsy Medsgers recounts with cinematic verve in “The Burglary”) and the now-infamous Harrisburg Conspiracy Trial, where letters my parents wrote to one another were intercepted and used to incriminate a group of activists on fabricated charges. We also hear about the Camden 28 draft board raid (subject of the superb 2007 documentary by Anthony Giacchino).
The characters in “Divine Intervention” experience and participate in all these resistance efforts, and Hughes has the time and the first-hand accounts to thread them (and more) all together to tell a bigger story than any one of these extraordinary episodes in American social movement history. The bigger story is one of romance and family, culture and resistance.
As he tells the story of the Camden 28 — where the activists were entrapped by a very helpful and handy provocateur on the FBI payroll — Hughes is able to emphasize that these are very real and very scared people risking everything for their beliefs. He documents how the action and its aftermath ripped families apart (including peace activists with FBI agents for brothers). The activists faced down FBI guns, decades in prison and courts that seemed stacked against them. They weren’t master strategists, they didn’t have high-paid PR people and they went to trial mostly representing themselves. They were smart and dedicated people flying by the seat of their pants — or held fast by faith (or a little of both) and working in community.
Spoiler alert: They also had the enviable experience of knowing they were right, experiencing vindication and exoneration in real time. I sobbed as I listened to the conclusion of the Camden 28 story, thinking of something my uncle, Daniel Berrigan, would always say, “Friendships are stronger than battleships.” Perhaps he learned that lesson while supporting the defendants in the Camden 28 courtroom.
Most of the people who share their lives and stories with Hughes are not the bold-faced, front-page names that have endured for the history books. I love that “Divine Intervention” centers the women of the movement, who keep the work moving, the efforts focused and laugh the whole time. Hughes celebrates the women who weave together mothering, grocery shopping, storytelling and resistance — holding the practical and the possible, the prophetic and the principled all at once! Women like Sister Anne Walsh, Anne Tobin, Cookie Ridolfi and Marianne Woodward rail against the clericalism and the sexism of the Catholic left. Hughes bolsters this with commentary from Charles Meconis, a dedicated Catholic war resister who was trained as a sociologist and wrote “With Clumsy Grace: The American Catholic left, 1961-1975.”
The Catholic left was never big, but “Divine Intervention” reminds us that the movement had a big impact. It is a lesson worth remembering as Catholicism is having “a moment.” The death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday and the appointment of the first American Pope, Robert Prevost of Chicago, aka Pope Leo XIV, means there is more curiosity about all things Catholic than usual — and an opportunity for Catholic social teaching, liberation theology and Gospel nonviolence to have a moment too. We need it as a counter to white Christian nationalism and the prominence of Catholics like JD Vance and Marco Rubio within the Trump administration.
It is worth remembering that the Catholic left is still here. We might not be front page news or on the newscrawl during the endless cycle of depressing updates from Fox News or MSNBC, but we are still doing the work. We are part of the pro-immigration/anti-ICE, anti-deportation movement. We are war tax resisters who redirect our money to worthy causes or risk jail time and foreclosure. We are in local parishes throughout the country led by lay people and women. We are part of the Catholic Worker and the labor movement and Veterans for Peace. We are present in feminist and queer movements and the anti-nuclear movement and every facet of the environmental movement. Organizations like Pax Christi and Call to Action draw inspiration from the legacy of the Catholic left. Occasional conspiracies like the Plowshares movement — where people trespass onto military bases or the campuses of weapons manufacturers to symbolically transform their destructive equipment into tools of peace — that’s the Catholic left too.
We don’t have a leader or a website, you can’t follow the Catholic left on Instagram or Facebook, but you can become a part of it. We run soup kitchens and pantries and shelters for the unhoused. We go on fasts, we march and we picket. We make art, music and liturgy. We block bombmakers, interrupt ICE assaults, hang banners and hold signs as religiously (if not moreso) as we go to church. Many of the people who share their stories in “Divine Intervention” are still doing all of this too.
My mother was always fond of pointing out that the Latin root of the word conspiracy is “breathe together” (con: together, spira: breath). Whenever she said this, I was reminded of a play on the old adage “You can take the woman out of the convent, but you can’t take the convent out of the woman.” But that is the heart of the Catholic left: People breathing, praying and studying together — and discovering their courage and following their conscience in community. Hughes’s storytelling in “Divine Intervention” gives us a piece of our history to cherish, celebrate and move us forward into the conspiracies and community called for by today’s crises.
Contributors Andrea Estepa, Silvia Federici, Tera Hunter, Jasmine Holloway, Amanda Katz, Mahoma Lopez, Rosanna Rodriguez, Margarita Lopez, Luo Xiaoyuan, Emily Rubin, Veraalba Santa, Stephen Vitiello
Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry is a collection of writings and images from a performance and film set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our urban reality. With a focus on the people who are paid to wash and fold, Hand Book explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. Informed by both theory and history, filmmaker–poet Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker construct a model for making a site-specific work incorporating both live performance and film. From conversations with workers in laundromats around New York City, they develop a play that magnifies forms of manual labor that often go unrecognized. The core of Hand Book is Sachs and Olesker’s hybrid script which grew out of documentary material they collected in New York City over several years. Within this theatrical construct, the actors themselves navigate the dynamic between their laundry worker characters and who they are in their own lives.
In Hand Book, images also engage with text to create an evocative graphic experience. Turning a page becomes an interactive, quasi-cinematic encounter. We think about the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.
Hand Book includes essays, interviews, memoirs, and poetry that look at the relationship between art and social engagement. Observation, historical research, and fiction intersect, creating a patchwork of what is with a speculative, imagined what was. Historian and author Tera Hunter speaks to the importance of the Washing Society, a group of 3,000 Black women laundry workers who organized in Atlanta in 1881. Feminist historian Silvia Federici engages in a conversation with the authors about the meaning of reproductive labor and its relationship to laundry. Two leaders of a grassroots organization share their experience of immigration and activism. A dancer creates a gestural map of her choreography. An actor deconstructs the charged significance of her Civil War era costume.
Hand Book: A Manual presents an illuminating dialogue between documentary, feminism, film, immigration, labor history, and theater. Throughout, a playwright and filmmaker contemplate how art-making can alter our understanding of the social structure of city life.
The film The Washing Society is available via QR code.
You can order Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry in several ways:
– Asterism, a great supporter of independent presses.
– Directly from Punctum (where you can download the entire e-book for free thanks to their open source policy).
– Support your local bookstore by asking them to order it.
Select Quotes
“This generously kaleidoscopic offering invites readers to think through the labor of laundry via an impressive array of modes in an interactive collage of perspectives, histories, and bodies.” ~ Christopher Harris, filmmaker
“A beautiful example of how art in tandem with other methods of revelation can illuminate the everyday, at once celebrating a particular aspect of how people live, critiquing the power dynamic it contains, and seeking to intervene in bad “business as usual.” ~ Jan Cohen-Cruz, author of Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance
“The best of art manifests an ordinary devotion to experiences that become extraordinary given enough care and attention, or an extraordinary devotion to conveying the genuine depth of what passes for the ordinary. Here it is both, at once.” ~ Paul Chan, artist and publisher
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Lizzie Olesker has been making theater and performance in New York City for several decades, reflecting on the politics and poetry of everyday experience. Her plays and solo performances exploring domestic work, personal memory, and quotidian gestures have been developed and presented in NYC at the Public, Cherry Lane Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, New Georges and the Ohio Theater. As an actor, she’s worked with the Talking Band, appearing at La Mama and on international tour. Published in The Brooklyn Rail and by Ice Floe Press, Olesker received support from New York Foundation for the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council and the Dramatists Guild. Olesker teaches at the New School and New York University where she’s active with her adjunct faculty union.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet. Her early works on celluloid took a feminist approach to images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her ever since. With each project, Sachs investigates the connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, found images, letters, and journals, her work takes us on a critical journey through reality and memory. In films such as The House of Science, Which Way Is East, Your Day Is My Night, and Film About a Father Who, Sachs uses hybrid form and collaboration, incorporating documentary, performance, and collage. Many of her films explore the relationship between personal observations and collective historical experience. She often addresses the challenge of translation—from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions are investigated in five essay films that took her to sites affected by war, where she looked at the space between a community’s memory and her own perceptions. Retrospectives of Sachs’s films have been presented at festivals in Argentina, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Germany, Ireland, South Korea, UK, and at NYC’s Museum of the Moving Image. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her collection Year by Year Poems. Sachs received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts and lives in Brooklyn.
Andrea Estepa is Research Fellow at Smith College and historian of women and social movements. Silvia Federici is an activist, scholar, and writer of Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle.Tera Hunter is Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and author of To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War and Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century.Jasmine Holloway is an actor and singer who has performed with Harlem Repertory Theater and Soho Rep. Amanda Katz is a filmmaker and editor. Mahoma Lopez and Rosanna Rodriguez are co-directors of the Laundry Workers Center, advocating for low-wage immigrant workers. Margarita Lopez is a laundry worker and mother living on the Lower East Side. Luo Xiaoyuan is a translator. Emily Rubin is founder of Loads of Prose and author of the novel Stalina. Veraalba Santa is a Puerto Rican actor and dancer with stage and film experience. Stephen Vitiello is a composer and sound artist and Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth.
On Saturday 7 June 2025, Ontsteking presents a short film program featuring experimental 16mm shorts from around the world that explore themes of fragility, natural environments, transformation, and loss. Curated by Sophie Sherman. https://www.ontsteking.org/exhibitions/short-films-screening 20:00h | join us in the garden of Bar Bricolage for Sofa Sessions 21:00h | start screening
PROGRAM PETAL TO THE METAL by Emily Pelstring (2021 I 3min I Canada I 16mm) Synopsis : This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden’s creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants.
THE DEPARTING IMAGES by Ana Edwards (2023 I 11 min I Chili I 16mm) Synopsis : Between ethnography and reverie, La Partida de las Imágenes immerses itself in-between the spaces of dreams; the light and dark, the visible and the invisible, matter, spirits and images. An ecological reflection alongside a Mapuche family in the south of Chile that observes the human and nonhuman social maps that arise through dreaming.
UNSTABLE ROCKS by Ewelina Rosinska (2025 – 25 min – Poland/Germany – 16mm) Synopsis : “Between 2018 and 2023, Polish filmmaker Ewelina Rosinska travelled through Portugal with Nuno Barroso, her Bolex, and, occasionally, a group of artists and environmental activists. Intuitively edited, following the rhythm of the seasons, Unstable Rocks is a sensitive reflection on the ambivalent nature of human presence in natural environments.
A MESSAGE FROM HUMBOLDT by Matt Feldman (2024 I 11 min I USA I 16mm) Synopsis : Glances at an emptied apartment in Milwaukee drift into a psychodrama confronting fears of death and loneliness. Through the use of in-camera experiments, fractured imagery inquires into the hauntings and mysteries of the everyday.
SAME STREAM TWICE by Lynne Sachs (2012 I 5min I USA I 16mm) Synopsis : My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word “maya” means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather — like the wind — something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. — L.S.
HOLD MY HAND by Sophie Sherman (2025 I 17 min I Belgium/France I 16mm) Synopsis : Filmed with a 16mm bolex during the COVID-19 pandemic, families are confined between England, France, and Belgium. Marked by a birth, a suicide attempt, and a death, the film explores, through acts of care and human contact, the grace of shared moments as well as the fragility and tenderness of human relationships.
Dedication: A Salon with Millennium Film Journal Wednesday, May 14, 2025 @ 7:30pm (doors 7pm) Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco
Lynne Sachs, Jenni Olson, Canyon ED Brett Kashmere, and MFJ Editor Nicholas Gamso in person!
This selection of short moving image pieces—all discussed in recent issues of the Millennium Film Journal—will celebrate the release of MFJ no. 81, “Dedication.”
The new edition testifies to the grief we’ve felt over the last several months, amid drastic cuts to vital social services, worsening climate disasters (most acutely the LA wildfires), and dimmed hopes of humanitarian justice. These struggles are especially hard to bear in the absence of those artists who’ve helped us to see and better understand ourselves, and whose work remains a comfort even as it challenges and provokes. We want, then, to meet the experience of loss with renewed commitments at the scale of a battered world, certainly, yet also among our community of moving image artists and writers.
The screening will include film and video works by Vincent Grenier, Gunvor Nelson, Lynne Sachs, Steve Reinke, Eva Giolo, Jenni Olson, Chris Kennedy, as well as the West Coast premiere of Kevin Jerome Everson’s Practice, Practice, Practice (2024), which takes place at San Francisco City Hall.
We are pleased to be joined by filmmakers Lynne Sachs, who will speak on her friendship with Gunvor Nelson, and Jenni Olson.
As always, this Salon event is free and open to the public, with refreshments served beginning at 7pm and the doors closed for the start of the show at 7:30.
Practice, Practice, Practice (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2024, 10 minutes)
The Demands of Ordinary Devotion (Eva Giolo, 2022, 12 minutes)
Sundown (Steve Reinke, 2023, 7.5 minutes)
Tabula Rasa (Vincent Grenier, 1993-2004, 7.5 minutes)
Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor (Lynne Sachs, 2018, 9 minutes)
One and the Same (Gunvor Nelson, with Freude, 1973, 4 minutes) – 16mm
Approximate running time: 65 minutes, with discussion to follow
About Millennium Film Journal
The Millennium Film Journal is the longest-running publication devoted to artists’ cinema. Its mission is to provide in-depth writing on a field that has, in recent decades, been recognized as the most generative and exciting area of contemporary art. MFJ’s coverage extends to experimental film in all formats, digital media projects, museum installations, festivals, and public artworks from the earliest days of the pre- cinematic into the possibly non-objective future.
Since its inception in 1978, the journal has served as the premier forum for cinema criticism in America, and at the forefront of film writing as a creative practice, with contributions by leading voices such as Amy Taubin, J. Hoberman, Peter Wollen, Joan Copjec, Ed Halter, and Laura Marks, alongside contributions from filmmakers Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, Cauleen Smith, the Kuchar brothers, and many, many others. Though we operate across multiple platforms, our journal is committed to print publishing, and to grappling with the ever-evolving relation between moving images and the stable surface of the printed page.
MFJ is affiliated with the Millennium Film Workshop, a center of production and exhibition activity in New York City. The Workshop was founded in 1967 by a group of artists with a vision to expand accessibility to the tools, ideas, and networks of filmmaking beyond the confines of institutions and corporate studios.
The Canyon Cinema Salon series is made possible with generous support from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, the Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation, and the City of San Francisco Grants for the Arts.
Canyon Cinema Executive Director Brett Kashmere, Distribution assistant Ashley Rose Tacheira and Autumn ArmstrongCanyon Cinema Staff and Board of Directors members Lian Ladia and Lynne SachsMFJ Editor Nicholas Gamzo
Choke, Chew, Savor, and Spit: The Messy Practice of Cinema a performative lecture with film The New School, School of Media Studies, Writing Across Media Prof. Margaret Rhee Technical Support: Mary Rose McClain May 1, 2025, 4:30 – 6 PM
Lynne lays bare her film practice. In Choke, Chew, Savor, and Spit: The Messy Practice of Cinema, she examines 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, she remains aware of the implicit connection between her body, the bodies of those she photographs, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.
Lynne Sachs’ Drawn and Quartered is featured on Episode 4 of FX TV mini series Dying for Sex starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate in a scene in a sex club. Premiering April 2025.
Screening followed by a conversation with Larry Gottheim and Lynne Sachs
Your Television Traveler. 1991–2024. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. DCP. 18 min. Knot/Not. 2019. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. DCP. 22 min. Entanglement. 2022. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. DCP. 27 min. A Private Room. 2024. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim and Forrest Sprague. DCP. 10 min.
Your Television Traveler was shown in its 16mm print form in the Larry Gottheim Shorts I program. Here, in its digital form, it foreshadows the use of found footage and superimposition in the three digital films that follow here: Knot/Not and Gottheim’s most recent works, Entanglement and A Private Room, both of which were inspired by concepts from quantum physics. Most of the material in Knot/Not, a film of a musical and historical nature, comes from a TV documentary about the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, edited to a song about multiplication. Entanglement is a train ride through a landscape inhabited by figures ranging from Phil Spitalny and his All-Girl Orchestra to the Norns from Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung. A Private Room moves from bittersweet, unexpected comedy to the anguish of the human condition, in which we are locked inside ourselves, trying and failing to connect. Presented in their original digital files.
This career-spanning survey celebrates the work of avant-garde filmmaker Larry Gottheim, from his first film, ALA (1969), to his latest, A Private Room (2024). Renowned for his 1970 film Fog Line, Gottheim has continued to challenge notions of what it is to truly see and be present when viewing moving images; his work encourages deep meditation. The series begins with Gottheim’s silent works—continuous shots of bare landscapes in upstate New York—and goes on to focus on his subsequent sound films, including the Elective Affinities, a series of four feature-length films: Horizons (1973), Mouches Volantes (1976), Four Shadows (1978), and Tree of Knowledge (1981). Gottheim’s more recent film works explore philosophy and family, driven by complex editing and sonic designs.
In 1965 Gottheim founded the cinema department at Binghamton University, in central New York State—one of the first film programs with a curriculum focused on personal, experimental film—helping to spur a revival in academic and professional activity in avant-garde film in the US and providing an incubation space for filmmakers such as Gottheim, Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, Nicholas Ray, and Saul Levine, among others. The work begun by Gottheim at Binghamton shaped the experimental film scene for decades to come, and continues to have an indelible impact on avant-garde cinema. This series coincides with the recent publication of The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films, in which the filmmaker discusses his explorations of cinematic perception, alongside other artists’ and critics’ reflections on the importance of Gottheim’s work.
Part of “Academy Museum Branch Selects” – Selected by the Documentary Branch | Q&A with Documentary Branch member Lynne Sachs & visual artist Jack Waters
Film will be introduced by Lynne Sachs, Filmmaker & Documentary Branch member; screening followed by Sachs & visual artist Jack Waters.
On December 3, 1966, documentarian Shirley Clarke and her partner, actor Carl Lee, spent 12 hours interviewing cabaret performer Jason Holliday about his life, in Clarke’s Hotel Chelsea apartment. The end result is a milestone in documentary filmmaking, touching upon such issues as race, sexuality, and the relationship between documentarians and their subjects, as well as introducing an unforgettable personality to the screen.
