Images by Lynne Sachs of a visit to Carolee Schneeman’s house in 2017.
Carolee Schneemann’s House
Category Archives: SECTIONS
Short Films Screening at Ontsteking, Gent, Belgium / Same Stream Twice
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.
Canyon Cinema / Dedication: A Salon with Millennium Film Journal
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.
Screening Line-Up:
Blue Diary (Jenni Olson, 1998, 7 minutes) – 16mm
Go Between (Chris Kennedy, 2024, 6 minutes)
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.
Lynnes Introduction Notes
The Messy Practice of Cinema / Experimental Lecture at The New School
Poetry and/as Cinema
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.
Drawn and Quartered in Dying for Sex
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.
Larry Gottheim Shorts III at MoMA / Conversation with Larry Gottheim and Lynne Sachs
Fri, May 23, 7:00 p.m.
MoMA, Floor T2/T1, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/10529
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 screening is a part of the series The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim’s Films at MoMA from May 15–27, 2025.
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.
Portrait of Jason / Introduction by Lynne Sachs
Part of “Academy Museum Branch Selects” – Selected by the Documentary Branch | Q&A with Documentary Branch member Lynne Sachs & visual artist Jack Waters
Sunday April 27, 2025 at 3:15pm
Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street NYC
https://www.paristheaternyc.com/film/portrait-of-jason-branch-selects
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.
ON EROSION , a Short Film Programme by Ursula / Same Stream Twice
Het Bos
Ankerrui 5-7, 2000 Antwerpen
May 1 2025
https://www.hetbos.be/programma/evenement/2025-05-01-on-erosion-a-short-film-programme-by-ursula
ENG
Ursula invites you to ON EROSION, a short film programme surrounding Alex Schuurbiers’ new film Placeholder, comprising experimental shorts that deal with remembrance, terrain, geology and forgetting.
The screening will be followed by a short talk with Alex & writer Vincent Van Meenen. With a video introduction from Lynne Sachs
Ursula is an Antwerp based collective of women working with the moving image.
ursulacollective.org
@ursulacollective
Programme
Markings 1-3, Eva Kolcze, CA, 2011, 7’
A tactile journey in three parts. Markings 1-3 is an attempt to connect with nature through the surface of 16mm celluloid film, using such techniques as tinting, toning, painting and scratching.
Deepwater Horizon: Exhalation, Asako Fujita, JP, 2021, 5’
Deepwater Horizon: Exhalation blends weathered archival footage portraying a community of female free-divers from ancient Japan with CGI imagery documenting the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Sonar audio of the spill dances around deep inhalations, creating counterpoints of a claustrophobic sonic tapestry and a transfixing marine meditation.
The Great Kind Mystery, Ella Morton, CA, 2022, 16’
Inuk and Mi’kmaw artist Amy Hull tells stories about growing up in Newfoundland. Her words are illustrated by altered Super 8mm footage of Newfoundland landscapes, where the distortion of the celluloid film reflects the wonder and nostalgia of her relationship with the land.
Babel, Meggy Rustamova, BE, 2018, 8’
Everything begins on a fixed shot of a middle-aged lady, serious, thoughtful. She tries hard to remember some words from a language unfamiliar to our ears, her native language: Assyrian. Simple words (numbers, days, expressions,…) reappear from the bottom of the ages; they emerge little by little memories of Juliette Rustamova which one understands later that she is the mother of the artist.
Same Stream Twice, Lynne Sachs, US, 2012, 4’
“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.”
Placeholder, Alex Schuurbiers, BE, 2025, 8’
Placeholder is an attempt at holding it together in the face of absence; of a mother, of a memory, of something tangible. Images oscillate between dreams and recollection, distorted and transformed over time.
Eight Films on Tarot To Be Shown in Any Order / The Tarot
Exhibition Event Series: Tarot
Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
16 April 2025, 7:00PM – 8:30PM
https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/eight-films-on-tarot-2025
With Lori E. Allen and William Fowler.
Eight Films on Tarot To Be Shown in Any Order traces the imprint of tarot on film. Spanning artists’ moving image, archive television and cult cinema, a selection of rare archival works will be drawn at random in the Warburg’s auditorium, revealing a remarkable film history guided by chance.
We are holding a film screening event in conjunction with our current exhibition, “Tarot – Origins & Afterlives”, which has inaugurated the Warburg Institute’s new artistic programme and has received over 15,000 visitors to date. The Tarot by Lynne Sachs screened alongside Derek Jarman’s Tarot aka The Magician, an extract from Agnes Varda’s Cleo de 5 a 7, and many other artist films. During the event cards representing each film in the programme will be selected at random to determine the order of screening.
William Fowler is Curator of Artists’ Moving Image at the BFI National Archive where he acquires, restores and curates films. Recent projects include People Make Television and Together: The Films of Lorenza Mazzetti. His co-authored book The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film and Television is available through Strange Attractor Press/MIT.
Lori E Allen is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on sound design and experimental composition. She is published, with collaborators, on various record labels including Tapeworm, Wormhole and Bloxham Tapes under the name TEARS | O V. Recent projects include, People Make Television, and TRANSMISSIONS TV, on which she worked with various collaborators.
On Some Faraway Beach… / Wind in our Hair
The event will be on April 12 at All Street Gallery NYC on Hester St, Juanita Umaña’s short will play alongside other shorts music videos— work by Karina Dandashi, Luis Figueroa Caunedo and more. A few bands will be playing and a DJ set.
April 12, 2025
Doors at 2pm
Screening at 3pm
Bands! at 5pm
119 Hester St
1. Excerpt from: Wind in Our Hair (Con viento en el pelo), 2010, directed by Lynne Sachs
2. They Got Me Goin’ In On My Day Off. , 2023, directed by Luis Figueroa Caunedo
3. Cousins , 2023, directed by Karina Dandashi
4. Weapons and their Names , 2023, directed by Melina Valdez
5. Unifying Thought , Music Video for Chanel Beads, 2024, directed by Harleigh Shaw
6. Half Siblings , 2025, directed by Matthew York
7. Turn On The Bright Lights, 2025, directed by Juanita Umaña, story by Mario Escoto and Juanita Umaña