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Lynne Sachs and Investigation of a Flame in Baltimore Sun

Igniting a Movement
Baltimore Sun, May 3, 2001

Lynne Sachs’ new documentary on the Catonsville Nine shows us an era of protest beginning with soul-searching and civility.

By Carl Schoettler

Article on Lynne Sachs in Baltimore Sun

The Catonsville Nine have become legendary in the three decades since the group’s May 1968 “action” against the war in Vietnam, perhaps the most famous protest during an epoch of dissent and discord in the United States.

Filmmaker Lynne Sachs takes a fresh look at the seven men and two women who made up the Catonsville Nine, their friends and their detractors in her impressionistic documentary, “Investigation of a Flame,” which opens the Baltimore Film Festival tonight.

Sachs, who has been making films since 1989, moved to Catonsville about three years ago when her husband, Mark, also a filmmaker, took a teaching post at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

She began hearing Catonsville Nine stories. She heard people once arrived at UMBC believing Catonsville was a hotbed of radicalism because of the Nine. She started reading about their protest, and she was hooked. She began looking up the people caught up in the action, and her project began taking shape.

Howard Zinn, the historian who wrote “A People’s History of the United States,” told her that the Catonsville Nine “became a kind of model for all the others. There was the Milwaukee Fourteen and the Camden 28 and the Boston Five.”

All the “Number People,” as they were then called, mostly disparagingly, and all the others who protested against the war, went to jail and helped bring about peace.

As a reminder for people for whom the war in Vietnam seems as remote as the Peloponnesian War, the Nine entered a Catonsville draft board, took records and burned them in a trash container in the parking lot.

The Catonsville Nine may have been models for the dissent that followed, but their protest was the most civil of disobedience.

“The myth of the ’60s is that anybody who cared had long hair and was on psychedelic drugs,” says Sachs, 39. “They were living an alternative lifestyle, so they had these alternative ideas.”

But in archival footage she unearthed, mostly unseen for three decades, the action unfolds almost as a religious rite, purification by fire, perhaps. The Nine clasp hands and recite the Lord’s Prayer. They apologize for jostling a couple of clerks. They finally file quietly into a paddy wagon as a cop counts them off, “… seven, eight, nine.”

The whole action takes perhaps 10 minutes.

“I was kind of intrigued by it as a kind of performance piece,” Sachs says.

She’s not a political documentarian. Her style is impressionistic, her images lyrical, as Jed Dietz, the director of the Baltimore Film Festival suggests, even poetic. She found her closest rapport with Daniel Berrigan, for example, when they talked about his poetry.

“To me it was like they were in their costumes, their clerical collars and the women in their skirts,” she says, of the action. “I think it was very well thought out. It was saying that they were people from Middle America, citizens of the United States who were passionately against the war.”

“And they were older, too,” Sachs adds.

Daniel Berrigan was the oldest at 47, Philip was next at 44, all the rest except Tom Lewis, 28, and David Darst, 26, were in their 30s. They were not counterculture hippies, rebelling against their parents.

Darst died in an automobile crash in October 1969. Mary Moylan, who was in her late 30s in May 1968, went underground for nearly 10 years after the trial. She died alone and infirm in April 1995.

The tone in the archival footage is quiet, almost somber. The Nine seem a bit uneasy. They were uneasy, even Daniel Berrigan.

He recalls for Sachs that his brother was awaiting sentencing in the 1967 Baltimore Four protest, where he helped pour blood over draft files at the Custom House. Daniel was a professor at Cornell University when Philip came up in the spring of 1968.

“He said some of us are going to do it again, and you’re invited,” Daniel Berrigan says. “Whereupon I started quaking in my boots.”

Berrigan’s face in close-up in Sachs’ film is a glowing landscape of the furrows and planes earned in a lifetime of activism and poetry. He will be 80 next Wednesday.

“It had never really occurred to me that I would ever take part in something that serious as far as consequences went,” he says. “The idea of putting myself in the furnace of the king … was pretty shocking and new.

“So I told Philip give me a few days to think this over and pray over it, and I’ll let you know. So I did. I went through some pretty serious soul-searching and talked to my family. I couldn’t see any reason not to do it. I didn’t want to do it. But I couldn’t not do it.”

Sachs has been making documentaries since 1989, when she completed her thesis film for a masters of fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. (She received her undergraduate degree in history at Brown University.)

She’d grown up in Memphis, Tenn., and her first film was “Sermons and Sacred Pictures: The Life and Work of Rev. L. O. Taylor.” He was a fiery African-American minister from Memphis who made his own films of black life in the south in the 1930s and 1940s.

She’s made a half-dozen movies since then, notably “Which Way Is East.” Her sister, Dana, lived in Hanoi for about five years, fell in love with Vietnam and produced her own book: “The House on Dream Street: Memoirs of an American Woman in Vietnam.”

Sachs visited her for a month or so in 1992. They traveled from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, and Sachs came back with the makings of a film about her relationship with her sister and Vietnamese culture. Her trip to Hanoi also gave her a certain cachet with the Catonsville Nine.

For the Catonsville film, she often had to catch her subjects more or less on the run. She interviewed Philip Berrigan in her car.

“Which isn’t the most visually alluring thing,” she says. “He was only out of prison for about a year in this whole project, and he had warned me there was going to be another action and either I was going to talk to him or he was going to be out of commission.”

Philip Berrigan is jail today. He’s serving out a sentence for banging on some military airplanes at the National Guard base at Middle River in an anti-nuclear “action” aimed at highlighting U.S. use of depleted uranium weapons and the source for AR-10 upper’s parts. “I called him one day,” Sachs says, “and I said can I interview you sometime in the next week, and it was raining. And he said you have to do it today, right now, because I paint houses for a living. If you want to do it we have to do it now because I can’t paint the house I was going to paint.

“I had none of my equipment. Nobody to help me. I had to pick him up in my car and go to the Knights of Columbus building.”

The building housed the Catonsville draft board office in 1968.

“He wouldn’t go inside. So we had to do it in the car,” she says. “This was the closest he wanted to get to that building and to those memories and to that time.

“I can’t achieve identity with the poor except when I’m in jail,” Berrigan says. “When I start feeling sorry with myself, I always tend to think about what it would mean if I stopped. That’s a terrible prospect, and I’ve never been able to acclimate to that. And I won’t. I hope that I can keep going until … until I die.”

A letter from Mary Moylan, while she was underground, is read in the film. “I very definitely think of myself as a criminal,” Moylan says in the letter. “I think if we’re serious about changing this society, that’s how we have to see ourselves. We’re all out on bail, and let’s all stay out.”

Sachs caught Tom Lewis, the artist who was at both the Catonsville Nine and Baltimore Four protests with Berrigan, coming out of prison.

“He was walking out the door,” she says, when she showed up to interview him. His wife, Andrea, and daughter, Nora, then 6, were there, too. Nora, a lovely child, blonde and blue-eyed, nestles in his arms during the film interview and walks with her father in the woods as he answers questions.

Lewis was in Allenwood for an anti-nuclear “action” at the Bath Iron Works in Maine, where he and Philip Berrigan and Susan Crane from Jonah House and three others poured blood on an Aegis destroyer, hammered on the components of missile launchers and unfurled their Prince of Peace Plowshares banner.

The Catonsville Nine survivors all remain social and political activists. And for that matter Mary Murphy, a clerk at the draft board now in her middle 90s, still believes she was doing the right thing.

“I was sold on the idea we were trying to fight communism in that part of the world,” she told Sachs.

Steve Sachs (no relation to the filmmaker), who led the prosecution of the Nine, hasn’t changed his position one whit in 33 years. He opposed the war, but his belief in the sanctity of the law seemed and seems immutable: The Nine erred when they took the law into their own hands at Catonsville. In the film, he reads from St. Thomas More, the great Catholic humanist lawyer beheaded by Henry VIII, to argue his case.

“I didn’t feel any sense of guilt or regret at prosecuting what I regarded as excessive, arrogant attempts to inflict their views on others,” says Steve Sachs. “That’s not the way democracy is supposed to work.”

Steve Sachs and Mary Murphy, and Daniel Berrigan, John Hogan, George Mische, Tom and Marjorie Melville from the Catonsville Nine, and their admirers and supporters, detractors and opponents plan to be at the premier of Lynne Sachs’ film tonight.

“Jed Dietz said let’s bring everybody in and see what happens,” Sachs says. ” ‘Let’s put all these live wires together and see what incendiary events we get.’ ”

“None of them have seen the movie,” she says. “And they’re all coming.”

Investigation of a Flame in the New York Times

Daniel and Philip Berrigan in Investigation of a Flame

Keeping Alive the Spirit of Vietnam War Protest

By Francis X. Clines, New York Times, May 3, 2001

CATONSVILLE, Md. May 2 — As they round out their eighth decade, the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, are entitled to retire from the protest wars, but they are still up to their fervid old ways of getting arrested in nonviolent resistance to American military policy.

No one is more delighted at their constancy than Alva Grubb, one of the jurors who reluctantly convicted Phil Berrigan 33 years ago in one of the brothers’ then-famous protest trials — the “Baltimore Four” resisters who spilled pig’s blood on military draft records and helped stoke the furious national debate over the morality of the Vietnam War.

Never ones to protest once, the Berrigans, amid that trial, organized the Catonsville Nine act of resistance: They walked into the Knights of Columbus Hall here in their Catholic clerical garb, seized documents from the Selective Service military draft board and burned them in the parking lot.

“This little village never got over the audacity of their protest,” said Ms. Grubb, a 79-year-old resident who opposed the Vietnam War then and now. “But just look at Phil Berrigan all these years later, still getting arrested for the courage of his convictions. He had very strong opinions and that’s what this country is about.”

Two years’ fresh imprisonment in Ohio for nonviolent interference with a modern weapons system is the reason Phil Berrigan, 77, will miss the Maryland Film Festival’s premiere on Thursday of “Investigation of a Flame.” This is a documentary by Lynne Sachs about the protest events that made this unpretentious suburb on the cusp of Baltimore a flash point for citizens’ resistance at the height of the war.

“Phil’s been consistent; he’s been faithful; he’s been stalwart;” said Elizabeth McAlister, his wife. She awaits his next return from prison to Jonah House, a Baltimore religious residence for eight people who are still dedicated to a level of nonviolent protest forged in the Catonsville Nine days.

“Phil’s been amazing,” said Ms. McAlister, who noted that Daniel Berrigan, who will be 80 on Sunday, has not lost his protest edge either. “Dan was last arrested Good Friday” at a demonstration in New York.

After the film is shown at The Senator theater in Baltimore, there will be a discussion featuring protest participants, law enforcement principals and assorted adherents of the Berrigans’ tradition.

“I left the seminary in ’67 to protest the war,” said Brendan Walsh, a gray-haired activist just up the road in West Baltimore at Viva House, once a sanctuary for conscientious objectors and now a soup kitchen for the city’s teeming poor. “The war keeps coming back; it’s forever,” said Mr. Walsh, noting how it retains a definitive power in American life, exemplified lately by former Senator Bob Kerrey’s admission of killing Vietnamese women and children.

“Back then, we thought Vietnam was some terrible aberration but the country would come to its senses so that we could engage the poverty of the cities,” Mr. Walsh said, grimacing. “To see 250,000 flee this city since then and things get worse for the poor — that’s the craziest thing of all about that war.”

Ms. Sachs, who created an earlier documentary in touring post- war Vietnam, lives here and decided to explore the protest story as Catonsville’s asterisk in history. She found assorted characters still firm to fiery on the topic. The Selective Service clerk, Mary Murphy, once a famous figure here for signing every eligible male’s draft card, remains opposed to what she views as the Berrigans’ intrusion on the government’s war mission, just as Ms. McAlister remains proud.

“This has been an odyssey,” said Ms. Sachs, a 39-year-old who has been fascinated since childhood by the war’s divisiveness. “I’m interested in pivotal choices people make in their lives, the moments from which there’s no turning back,” she said, noting she came to admire the consistency of the mutual antagonists in an argument that still rages.

At the Knights of Columbus hall, the only contentious event in sight lately was a bingo game. But Wilbur Baldwin, a 79-year-old veteran of World War II, recalled the Catonsville Nine days and his distaste for the behavior of the dissenters.

“The Berrigans are troublemakers,” Mr. Baldwin said. “That’s a war we never won,” he said, looking back and glowering as he blamed the use of the defoliant Agent Orange for the death of his brother, Frankie, in Vietnam. This was exactly the sort of war technology decried by the Berrigans, but Mr. Baldwin was adamant. “The Berrigans are troublemakers.”

And on a good day, they remain troublemakers, by the accounting of Tom Lewis, one of the Baltimore Four who, like the Berrigans, has been arrested many times over the years. Most recently Mr. Lewis, a 60-year-old artist close to the Catholic Worker movement in Worcester, Mass., was arrested at a Raytheon weapons factory where he prayed and blocked a road to protest against a part of the Star Wars research program known as the “Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle.”

“My feeling is the Vietnam War was a war against the poor,” said Mr. Lewis. He views Star Wars as a continuation of the same issue from his protest youth, contending that it shows military spending as overshadowing the unmet needs of the poor. “There’s been a certain consistency in making nonviolent creative statements against the madness,” the aging protester said as he took inventory on all the troublemaking still sparked by the Catonsville Nine. “An important consistency.”

Mary Moylan: Nine Years Underground

“Mary Moylan: 9 years underground” by Lynne Sachs
a multi-media biography using video, audio, postcards and artifacts
Premiere: Maryland Film Festival, Charles Theatre; Maryland Art Place Artist Residency

Mary Moylan, a 32-year-old registered nurse and midwife from Baltimore, was one of two women in the infamous 1968 anti-war group the Catonsville Nine. A feminist and a passionate critic of the Vietnam War, Moylan was sentenced to several years in prison for burning draft files with homemade napalm. From 1970-79, she lived underground, in disguise, traveling from city to city across America. During this time, Moylan –the felon on the lamb– created a fabulous wigged persona who wrote hilarious, yet strident letters to the world at large from her place “underground.” Mary Moylan: Nine Years Underground is a visual meditation not only on Moylan’s life as a woman in America in the 1970’s but also on the role of civil disobedience in American culture and politics.

Entire piece measures 24’’ long x 24” wide x 24”high with simple electrical connections to TV/DVD ; all electronic appliances are hidden within purse and small suitcase. Gallery visitors listen to actress reading Moylan’s letters through headphones in purse. Small television images of a woman’s hands in handcuffs are under glass casing. Video and slide documentation give some idea of project, though set will no doubt change with the particulars of a space.

____________________

Below are excerpts from articles and interviews on Mary Moylan. Some of these texts are also under glass casing in the installation

Nine Catholic clergymen and laymen who oppose the war in Vietnam doused the Selective Service records of 600 draft-age men with napalm and set them afire yesterday in a cement lot behind the Catonsville draft board. …among the demonstrators was Mary Moylan, a 32-year-old registered nurse and midwife from Baltimore. The Baltimore Sun
May 18, 1968

A chipper Mary Moylan, the missing Catonsville Nine defendant who turned herself in to federal authorities after nine years in hiding, took the phone at the Women’s Detention Center today and gently refused to be interviewed.
“Where have you been these last nine years?” she was asked.
“Here and there,” Moylan answered, and laughed heartily.
“What have you been doing?”
“Oh, this and that.” The Baltimore Sun, June 20, 1979

Mary was so successful in her Orphic descent underground she lost contact with old comrades, friends and family. Some of the people who loved her most never saw her again. “She talked to me about things I would not have talked about,” remembers her sister Ella. “She didn’t go to our mother’s funeral in 1970 because she believed the FBI would be there. I think they were.” Mary Moylan died sometime in late April in Asbury Park, N.J. She was 59, alone and blind” The Baltimore Sun May, 1995

Below are authentic handwritten year-book style writings about Mary found on side panels of piece. These are thoughts by those who knew her before her life underground:

“I remember the bell she wore during the trial in Baltimore, a constant and wonderfully irritating tinkling throughout the proceedings.”
Bill O.

“After the action in Catonsville, we piled into the police van. I stared at Mary’s bright red hair and then noticed she was sliding her hands, ever so delicately, out of the cuffs.”
John H.

“She lay on the beach, a stack of trashy romance novels on her right side, Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture on the other.”
Willa B.

“She and the other members of Women Against Daddy Warbucks hurled 1000’s of draft files from an office building in Times Square.”
Bill O.

“She wouldn’t stay with families, the whole time she was underground. ‘Hon, it’s too damn dangerous,’ she told me. ‘If the FBI storms in looking for me, there’ll be gunfire. I can’t take that kind of risk with kids around.’”
Willa B.

“I met her on the boardwalk at Rehobeth. She was wearing a wig and stood a little hunched over.”
Brendan W.

“I think she died alone, somewhere in New Jersey, almost blind.”
Brendan W.

The House of Drafts: A Bosnian-American Web Collaboration

THE HOUSE OF DRAFTS/ DOM PROMAHA
www.house-of-drafts.org

House of Drafts/ Dom Promaha is a virtual apartment building inhabited by the imaginary characters created by eight Bosnian and two American media artists. Our characters have refused the opportunities of exile and instead have chosen to stay in Sarajevo. We invite you to enter this apartment building through our website or by watching the tape as a way of meeting the characters who live here.

This building relies on an architecture comprised of images, sounds and text. The project as a whole is shaped by our autobiographical experiences as they are filtered through poetic reflections, original music, and video. From a performance artist who moonlights as a de-miner, to a cinematographer who uses his camera to turn a decaying Sarajevo into a bustling Bangkok, to a traveler caught by the inferno of a burning library — the website and corresponding video represent our ruminations on a city and its inhabitants during and after a period of war. On the website you are invited not only to enter and explore our House of Drafts but also to participate by leaving your own writing and images on the walls of the space.

Created by Jeanne C. Finley (San Francisco) and Lynne Sachs (New York) with the participation of Larisa Hasanbegovic, Adla Isanovic, Timur Makarevic, Tvico Muhidin, Alma Suljevic and Enes Zlater (Sarjevo, Bosnia Herzogovina).

Web site consultation and development donated by Teri Rueb.

Supported by ArtsLink, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art and Women Make Movies. The House of Drafts videotape is available by contacting either Jeanne or Lynne by email through the site address.

Horror Vacui: Nature Abhors a Vacuum synopsis

A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that suggest a desire to fill time with either movement or thought. Sometimes she hears the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets in a Baltimore summer night. Other times jangling toys dissolve into the roar of a jet overhead, or children tremble at the sound of thunder. The small home-movie boxes within the larger screen are her gestural forms of memory, clues to her childhood, mnemonic devices that expand on the sense of immediacy in her “drama.” These are the empty moments of a waking mind. (Lynne Sachs)

Presented in a very bare bedroom-like space with a window, two chairs, a bed, a small old fashioned television, a throw rug and a bookshelf. Gallery visitors are allowed to walk in the space, sit on the chair, and lie on the bed.

Above the real bed, we see the black and white representation of another bed with a moving colorful image on one pillow. In contrast to the noisy immediacy of the day, this bright red image of azaleas is fleeting, nocturnal, imprecise. It is merely a remnant of a small desire.

Before the real bed, a small black and white television screen becomes the transition between the day of the woman at the window and the night of the bed. Once again, we are witnessing a relic of a human presence, a state of unbelonging in which the mind moves between here and there without ever truly inhabiting anywhere. On the screen, we watch the shadows of a person moving silently through a domestic space.

REVIEW
“Witnessing a relic of a human presence, a state of unbelonging in which the mind moves between here and there without ever truly inhabiting anywhere. Horror Vacui makes us ponder why we seek constantly to fill our minds with words, music, clatter, stuff. At first glance, the installation seems to consist only of a bedroom and three ever-changing videos. Stay awhile. As you soak up your surroundings with its soft lighting, constantly moving images and shadows that flicker against the sparse furnishings — your mind wanders. On screen images of ordinary objects seem weirdly evocative. A duster complete with a bushy top of feathers begins to resemble a palm tree. You will discover that a great deal is happening, some of it inside your own mind. But the magic of the installation occurs in the moments between sounds.” (“Portfolio”, The Baltimore Sun, Holly Selby)

Tornado

Tornado
4 min.color video 2002 by Lynne Sachs

A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ “TORNADO” is a poetic piece shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these singed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

Photograph of Wind

This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.

“Photograph of Wind”

by Lynne Sachs
16mm, b&w and color, 4 min. 2001

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.

“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

San Francisco Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

Investigation of a Flame

NEWLY RESTORED 2023 PRESERVATION!

Investigation of a Flame: A Portrait of the Catonsville Nine by Lynne Sachs

45 min. color and B&W, 2001

plus 5 min. Sundance Channel documentary on Daniel Berrigan and the making of the film

On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War protesters led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm.

“Investigation of a Flame” is an intimate, experimental documentary portrait of the Catonsville Nine, this disparate band of resisters who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience.

How did the photos, trial publicity and news of the two year prison sentences help to galvanize a disillusioned American public? “Investigation of a Flame” explores this politically and religiously motivated performance of the 1960’s in the context of extremely different times — times in which critics of Middle East peace agreements, abortion and technology resort to violence of the most random and sanguine kind in order to access the public imagination.

“BEST DOCUMENTARY in 2001”, Phillip Lopate, Village Voice Critic

“One of the ten best films released in 2002” Phillip Lopate, Film Comment

“A complex rumination on the power of protest…..the trauma of the past, the continued mistakes of the present and the necessity to reflect actively on our government’s wartime antics.” The LA Weekly

“A film to rave about, as well as reckon with.” The Independent Film and Video Monthly

“Sachs’ elegant, elliptical documentary visits with surviving members of what became known as the Catonsville Nine, humble architects of this purposeful yet scathingly metaphoric act of civil disobedience.” The Village Voice

“Investigation of a Flame captures the heartfelt belief behind the Nine’s symbolic action of civil disobedience that sparked other (actions) like it across the nation. (The film) provides a potent reminder that some Americans are willing to pay a heavy price to promote peace.” Baltimore City Paper

“This is a documentary about the protest events that made Catonsville, Maryland, an unpretentious suburb on the cusp of Baltimore, a flash point for citizens’ resistance at the height of the war. Sachs found assorted characters still firm to fiery on the topic. She came to admire the consistency of the mutual antagonists in an argument that still rages (today).” The New York Times

“This poetic essay offers the perfect antidote to PBS: there is no omniscient narrator talking down to the viewer, reciting facts and explaining what to think, yet the story is perfectly clear. Brothers Phil and Dan Berrigan, who led the protest, appear both in the present and in archival footage, a mix that makes their commitment palpable.” Chicago Reader

“To those who think that everything in a society and its culture must move in lock step at times of crisis, (this film) might seem to be ‘off-message.’ But it’s in essence patriotic… saluting U.S. democracy as it pays homage to the U.S. tradition of dissent.” The Baltimore Sun

Screenings: National Broadcast on the Sundance Channel; Maryland Film Festival “Opening Night”; Museum of Modern Art, Documentary Fortnight “Opening Night”; Rhode Island Film Festival; Art Institute of Chicago; Mill Valley Film Festival; San Francisco Cinematheque; Pacific Film Archive; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Olympia Film Festival., Providence Women’s Film Festival, Denver Film Festival; Harvard University Film Archive; Cornell University Cinema; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; NY Underground Film Festival; Vassar College; Ithaca College; Massachusetts College of Art; Catholic University; Maine Film Festival; Florida Film Festival; Georgetown University; Brooklyn Academy of Music, Portland Doc. Festival, Wisconsin Film Festival, Georgetown University’s Jesuit Week, American University Center for Social Media

Awards: Black Maria Film Festival; San Francisco International Film Festival: New Jersey Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; First Prize Documentary Athens Film Festival

Supported with funding from the Maryland Humanities Council, the Maryland State Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation and a Media Arts fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema, the Film-makers’ Cooperative, or Icarus Films. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

Putting Clutter to Rest / The Baltimore Sun

Putting Clutter to Rest
The Baltimore Sun
by Holly Selby
September 24, 2000
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2000-09-24-0010110333-story.html

When was the last time you heard yourself think? Probably not on the way to work Friday; you were playing the radio and returning a few phone calls. Probably not at dinner last night, either. Remember? You watched CNN while you ate. Probably not the last time you visited a museum: You listened to an audio-guide while gazing at the art.

Lynne Sachs, a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker, has created an exhibit with special resonance for people in the era of multi-tasking. Her School 33 video installation, “Horror Vacui: Nature Abhors a Vacuum,” makes us ponder why we seek constantly to fill our minds with words, music, clatter, stuff.

Sachs thinks of film as painting. She painted, drew and wrote poetry as a teen-ager in Memphis, Tenn. But it was not until she was a history major at Brown University — and spent a year studying in Paris — that she discovered film as an art form. “When I found out people could use film in the same way as a paint brush, it just blew my mind,” says Sachs, who for three years has lived in Catonsville with her partner Mark Street, an associate professor in film at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. “I discovered the idea of being a ‘filmmaker,’ that it wasn’t about a crew and a director and a hierarchy of people.”

The artist’s work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at the Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington and has won awards at the New Jersey Film Festival, the Athens (Ohio) Film Festival, and the New York Film Expo.

Now Sachs, who this fall is teaching a video class at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, is working on a documentary, funded in part by the Maryland Humanities Council, about the Catonsville Nine, a pioneering group of protesters against the Vietnam War in 1968 came to be called.

Since 1998, when she began the project, she has been haunted, she says, by the story of Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, who with seven other people went into a Catonsville draft board office, removed records and burned them in front of a crowd of reporters and onlookers. They were convicted and sentenced to prison.

When not working on the documentary, Sachs shoots other images incessantly, saving them, sometimes for years, until they begin to form patterns in her mind. “The idea for this installation didn’t evolve at once,” she says. “Part of being an experimental filmmaker is that you shoot all the time. It’s like a painting: You don’t know where you are going.”

A meaningful phrase

She heard the term “horror vacui” for the first time about a year ago. “It means fear of emptiness, or a compulsion to fill,” she says. The notion struck a chord.

“I wondered about my own restlessness. As an artist you have this compulsion to create all the time. And I wondered about being able to live with my own thoughts. I heard the words and I looked at this work I had been collecting and I realized this is something that I had been thinking about for almost a decade.”

Sachs has created a deceptively simple installation at School 33. Step behind a heavy black curtain and into a small, dimly lighted bedroom. At first glance, the installation seems to consist only of a bedroom and three ever-changing videos. Stay awhile. You will discover that a great deal is happening, some of it inside your own mind.

The walls and ceiling are white; the floor, gray. A four-poster bed sits in front of a window. The bed’s white sheets and coverlet are turned down — ready for someone to retire for the night. Two chairs painted ghostly gray line the wall.

As you soak up your surroundings with its soft lighting, constantly moving images and shadows that flicker against the sparse furnishings — your mind wanders. On-screen images of ordinary household objects seem weirdly evocative. A duster complete with a bushy top of feathers begins to resemble a palm tree. A siren can be heard. Is that part of the installation, or the muffled sounds of real Baltimore?

Just what is real?

Sachs plays with this question: real or unreal? You are inside the white bedroom, shut away from the “real” world, yet everything here — bed, chairs, television set — is entirely familiar one minute and peculiar the next. You can look out the window, but it is really a video screen.

Through the window, an image appears of the artist performing mundane household activities: sweeping the floor, talking on the telephone, reading a newspaper, washing a window. Peer through this “window” to a point beyond her and you see an image of tree branches dancing in the breezes of a sunny summer day.

Sachs plays the role of producer, camera operator and actor. She filmed herself while watching her image on a monitor, choreographing her movements in reaction to the play of light and shadow and line. “I could watch myself as I did it so, just like when you are painting, you can change the paint or the brushstrokes, I was moving my body for graphic effect,” she says. “It is going back to still lifes. That is how I set it up.”

There also is an image above the real bed: that of a large, white bed. On one pillow, a crimson azalea flickers like a fragment of a dream. This image, the artist says, is “all about the lushness of the flowers, desire, and the empty pillow next to you.”

At the foot of the real bed, a small television sits atop a table. The black-and-white scenes on its screen have the eerie familiar / frightening qualities of film noir. With her camera, Sachs allows you to glimpse a lamp and its shadow, the edge of a telephone, the silhouette of a person reading a newspaper. Light and shadow change the arrangements of ordinary objects into painterly compositions.

The longer you stand inside the installation, the more you see, or think you see. Stare at the sheets of either of the beds — the one you can touch or the image of the bed on the wall — and you begin to notice how the light plays on the wrinkles in the sheets, or how shadows seem to form shapes on the pillow. A dialogue occurs between images. You occasionally see the artist reading a newspaper in the window as the shadow of a person reading a newspaper appears on the smaller television screen. “At times, these images are about specific things,” says Sachs. “At other times they are really about textures and light.”

No sounds of silence

Sound plays a role, too. As the images flicker, you hear crickets chirping, rain falling, cheerful voices, a pop song — noises that can be heard on a Baltimore summer evening. Sachs gives each sound equal weight: “It is as though the thunder has the same value as a pop song and as a child crying. It is more about the play between the sounds than the sounds themselves.”

Percussive sounds, created by Baltimore composer and musician Tom Goldstein, are woven into the sound track. Goldstein watched the window video several times, adding sounds, one by one, that correspond to particular gestures. Sachs says, “The piece has several layers of sound and yet it is really spare, which I really wanted. That was the challenge: To find real world sounds and sounds that are musical that work.”

But the magic of the installation occurs in the moments between these sounds. “The sounds in your head happen when there is no sound,” the artist says. “I would love it if someone sat down for awhile to think about the installation. I would love it if someone would lie down on the bed and just think.”

What would happen if you put down your newspaper right now and listened? You hear the rustle of paper, the clink of a coffee mug being placed on the kitchen table, a siren in the distance, the happy shrieks of a child next door, the rush of a shower running upstairs, the thump of a dog’s tail on the floor, the hum of a refrigerator, your breath.

“Horror Vacui” is on display at School 33, 1427 Light St. in Federal Hill, through Oct. 6. Call 410-396-4641 for hours.

Interview & Review of Installation by Lynne Sachs in Baltimore Sun

Putting Clutter to Rest
Baltimore Sun, Sept. 24, 2000

Using a camera as her paintbush, Lynne Sachs has created a place to quietly confront our need for constant clamor.

By Holly Selby

When was the last time you heard yourself think?

Probably not on the way to work Friday; you were playing the radio and returning a few phone calls. Probably not at dinner last night, either. Remember? You watched CNN while you ate. Probably not the last time you visited a museum: You listened to an audio-guide while gazing at the art.

Lynne Sachs, a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker, has created an exhibit with special resonance for people in the era of multi-tasking. Her School 33 video installation, “Horror Vacui: Nature Abhors a Vacuum,” makes us ponder why we seek constantly to fill our minds with words, music, clatter, stuff.

Sachs thinks of film as painting. She painted, drew and wrote poetry as a teen-ager in Memphis, Tenn. But it was not until she was a history major at Brown University – and spent a year studying in Paris – that she discovered film as an art form. “When I found out people could use film in the same way as a paint brush, it just blew my mind,” says Sachs, who for three years has lived in Catonsville with her partner Mark Street, an associate professor in film at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. “I discovered the idea of being a ‘filmmaker,’ that it wasn’t about a crew and a director and a hierarchy of people.”

A meaningful phrase

She heard the term “horror vacui” for the first time about a year ago. “It means fear of emptiness, or a compulsion to fill,” she says. The notion struck a chord.

The walls and ceiling are white; the floor gray. A four-poster bed sits in front of a window. The bed’s white sheets and coverlet are turned down – ready for someone to retire for the night. Two chairs painted ghostly gray line the wall.

As you soak up your surroundings with its soft lighting, constantly moving images and shadows that flicker against the sparse furnishings – your mind wanders. On-screen images of ordinary household objects seem weirdly evocative. A duster complete with a bushy top of feathers begins to resemble a palm tree. A siren can be heard. Is that part of the installation, or the muffled sounds of real Baltimore?

Just what is real?

Sachs plays with this question: real or unreal? You are inside the white bedroom, shut away from the “real” world, yet everything here – bed, chairs, television set – is entirely familiar one minute and peculiar the next. You can look out the window, but it is really a video screen.

Sachs plays the role of producer, camera operator and actor. She filmed herself while watching her image on a monitor, choreographing her movements in reaction to the play of light and shadow and line. “I could watch myself as I did it so, just like when you are painting, you can change the paint or the brushstrokes, I was moving my body for graphic effect.” he says. “It is going back to still lifes. That is how I set it up.”

At the foot of the real bed, a small television sits atop a table. The black-and-white scenes on its screen have the eerie familiar/frightening qualities of film noir. With her camera, Sachs allows you to glimpse a lamp and its shadow, the edge of a telephone, the silhouette of a person reading a newspaper. Light and shadow change the arrangements of ordinary objects into painterly compositions.

The longer you stand inside the installation, the more your see, or think you see. Stare at the sheets of either of the beds – the one you can touch or the image of the bed on the wall – and you begin to notice how the light plays on the wrinkles in the sheets, or how shadows seem to form shapes on the pillow. A dialogue occurs between images. You occasionally see the artist reading a newspaper in the window as the shadow of a person reading a newspaper appears on the smaller television screen. “At times, these images are about specific things,” says Sachs. “At other times they are really about textures and light.”

No sounds of silence

Sound plays a role, too. As the images flicker, you hear crickets chirping, rain falling, cheerful voices, a pop song – noises that can be heard on a Baltimore summer evening. Sachs gives each sound equal weight: “It is as though the thunder has the same value as a pop song and as a child crying. It is more about the play between the sounds than the sounds themselves.

Percussive sounds, created by Baltimore composer and musician Tom Goldstein, are woven into the sound track. Goldstein watched the window several times, adding sounds, one by one, that correspond to particular gestures. Sachs says, “The piece has several layers of sound and yet it is really spare, which I really wanted. That was the challenge: To find real world sounds and sounds that are musical that work.”

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs