Join us for the launch of poet Rachel Edelman’s new collection of poems, Dear Memphis, on Saturday, February 17, at 144 Montague St and via Zoom! Doors will open for a wine reception for in-person guests at 6 PM and readings will begin at 7 PM. Lynne Sachs and Diane Exavier will open for Edelman. Book signing to follow.
Note that by attending this event, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy below. Effective January 8, 2024, all event attendeesexcept readers at a safe distance on stageare required to wear masks due to the current rise in cases in NYC. Our full policy can be found at the end of the event description. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.
About Dear Memphis
“What do I know of exile?” asks the speaker in Dear Memphis, standing inside the colliding geographies and intimate economies of the American South. Offering a direct address to the city where the poet grew up, this collection explores the displacement and belonging of a Jewish family in Memphis, Tennessee, alongside their histories of community and environment. The simultaneous richness and spareness of Edelman’s poems sing with their attention to the particular body and what it cannot carry, what it cannot put down. Through letters, visual art, city documents, and dialogue, Dear Memphis excavates ancestry, inheritance and the ecological possibility of imagining a future.
About the Author
Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee, who writes into diasporic living. Dear Memphis, published by River River Books, is their debut collection of poems. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, the Seventh Wave, the Threepenny Review, West Branch and many other journals. They have received material support from City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Academy of American Poets, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House, and finalist commendations from the Adrienne Rich Award, the Pink Poetry Prize, and the National Poetry Series. Edelman earned a BA in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She teaches language arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic and pedagogical practice.
About the Opening Acts
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who grew up in Memphis and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Over the last four decades, she has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of documentary, performance, and collage. Her films and poems explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences, often from a personal, self-reflexive point of view. With each film, Sachs investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself. Her early works on celluloid offer a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her vision ever since. Early in her career, Lynne returned to her hometown to make Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989), a documentary on the life and work of Reverend L.O. Taylor, an African American minister and filmmaker from Memphis. Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, and Sundance. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival, Festival International de Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival.
Diane Exavier is a writer, theatermaker and educator working at the intersection of performance and poetry. She is author of the poetry collection The Math of Saint Felix and the chapbook Teaches of Peaches. Diane concerns herself with what she recognizes as the 4 L’s: love, loss, legacy and land. Her work has been presented with the New Group, BRIC Arts, Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place and more. She has been commissioned for new play development by the Sloan Foundation, the New Group, and Lucille Lortel Theatre. Most recently, Diane coedited the 2023 new critical edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane. A 2021 Jerome Foundation finalist, Diane lives and works in Brooklyn.
This special issue has been funded in part with a grant from the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. Prior support for this project was provided by the International Film Seminars/ The Flaherty and New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and Center for Media, Culture, and History.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Experiments in Documentary: Contradiction, Uncertainty, Change by Lucas Hilderbrand
Responses
Michelle Citron, Donigan Cumming, Jeanne Finley, John Muse and Tommy Becker, Sasha Waters Freyer, Su Friedrich, Richard Fung, Barbara Hammer, Adele Horne, Alexandra Juhasz, Leandro Katz, Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner, Jesse Lerner, Frédéric Moffet, Lynne Sachs, MM Serra, Deborah Stratman, Mark Street, Tran T. Kim-Trang
DIALOGUES
Jonathan Kahana & Liza Johnson Interstates: South of Ten
Tess Takahashi When We Speak of the Future: An Interview with Julia Meltzer and David Thorne
Below is the original questionnaire that we sent to numerous film and video artists whose work crosses between experimental and documentary modes. The questionnaire was sent to a broad swath of media artists, including influential experimental filmmakers and documentarians, single-channel video artists and artists better known for their gallery installations, and various specific folks whose work we admired. As editors, we found it often productive when respondents abandoned the Q&A format altogether and expressed their ideas with their own structures-in the process, making this a dynamic interaction with varied formats. The responses that follow may not directly answer the questions and, in most cases, have been revised from their original versions. – Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs
THIS ISSUE OF MILLENNIUM FILM JOURNAL IS ABOUT A BROAD CATEGORY OF WORK THAT WE ARE CALLING “EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY”: ESSAYISTIC, FORMAL, RESEARCHED, STRUCTURAL, EPISODIC, SELF-REFLEXIVE, IMPRESSIONISTIC, AND/OR PERSONAL FILMS AND VIDEOS THAT EXPLORE SOCIAL ISSUES. AS PART OF THIS ISSUE, WE INVITE YOUR RESPONSES (TO ANY OR ALL) QUESTIONS-AND ENCOURAGE YOU TO REPLY CREATIVELY.
I. DO YOU AGREE THAT “EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY” IS A VALID CATEGORY? HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE IT? WHAT ARE ITS AIMS AND/OR SUBJECTS?
II. HOW DO ARTISTS WHO DO THE WORK OF DOCUMENTARY-AND YET ARE NOT PRIMARILY CONSIDERED DOCUMENTARIANS- CHALLENGE OUR CONCEPTIONS OF NON-FICTION CINEMA? WHAT DO YOU SEE AS YOUR RELATION TO DOCUMENTARY?
Ill. WHERE DOES DOCUMENTARY MEET THE AVANT-GARDE?
IV. WHAT ROLE DOES POLITICAL CRITIQUE OR ACTIVISM PLAY IN YOUR WORK? HOW ARE YOUR POLITICS COMMUNICATED? HOW DO POLITICS AND AESTHETICS INFORM EACH OTHER?
V. WHAT RECENT WORKS OR ARTISTS HAVE INSPIRED NEW WAYS OF SEEING THE WORLD? HAVE INSPIRED NEW WAYS OF THINKING? HAVE INSPIRED CHANGE?
Introduction EXPERIMENTS IN DOCUMENTARY: CONTRADICTION, UNCERTAINTY, CHANGE
LUCAS HILDERBRAND
At the center of the campus where I now teach is a verdant park with grassy hills, monumental trees, and eclectic fauna. Given its location in an arid part of Southern California, most of these plants are not indigenous and necessitate extensive irrigation. Although the plants are all living, they are not exactly natural, prompting a friend concerned with environmental sustainability to refer to this lush patch of land as “a beautiful lie.” Indeed, it is. And yet, it’s not. This park, from its inception, reveals another controversy. According to local folklore, the park, the logical place on campus for student congregations, was designed in the 1960s to facilitate the quick containment of any uprisings. Today, however, this park is the only area that could be called lovely, and it offers a retreat from the blight of the consistently beige architecture and concrete walks. The park is alive with contradictions.
Inherently, so is documentary. From the start, documentarians have wrestled with a central tension between reality and construction. John Grierson recognized this when he called the emergent mode of documentary the “creative treatment of actuality” in 1929.1 Eight decades later, Jonathan Kahana revisited this assertion, remarking that this phrase “functions as a moment of origin for documentary precisely because it is ambivalent, or simply uncertain, about what the term ‘documentary’ stands for.”2 Typically, the concerns with the contradictions of documentary have spurred debates about truth, ideology, and power-important issues, no doubt, but not exhaustive. The “creative” part of the documentary equation at times gets lost, even though many key works of the documentary canon-and those most often claimed as part of its innovative edge-have not only made claims for truth but have also striven for beauty.
If documentary was first conceived as the “creative treatment of actuality,” influential filmmakers of the American avant-garde, such as Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage, offered creative treatments of experience. These works opened up alternatives to mainstream film that shifted focus from the state of the world to states of being. Because so much of this work is formally innovative and the subjective perspectives so interior, at times we forget to ponder how such films speak to the world at large.
At the intersection of documentary and experimental practices, the duality of actuality and creativity energizes artists to make work that is radically beautiful and fantastically true. Authenticity and analogy, indexicality and abstraction become symbiotic rather than oppositional principles. For the past decade or so, artists have created an explosion of moving image works that hybridize documentary and experimental, video art and essay modes; although rarely conceptualized as a coherent or prevalent mode, experimental documentary work screens widely in galleries, film festivals, classrooms, and at Flaherty seminars. These artists challenge the way we see (and hear) documentary-and at the same time bring documentary back to its essence. Such artists explore issues that are central to documentary: how historical consciousness is mediated through documents, how individual subjectivity is interlaced with cultural heritage and political traumas, how we understand institutions and power, how to change the world. They have also changed the ways we see the world and its history, opening up new ways of examining how we understand both as they engage with images and institutions, ambiguity and revelation. This work is often self-reflexive, episodic, academic, and even impulsive. While visually and aurally innovative, these films, videos, and installations are also socially engaged, offering complicated cultural critiques that cannot be reduced to simple, specific agendas. Experimental documentary makers’ investigation of their own subjectivities, the variability of truth, and the pursuit of efficacy reveal a complex search for an ethical way of being in the world, one that is explored and achieved through explorations in sound and image.
You could say that any documentary that is interesting is an exploration. And any experiment has the potential to reveal some truth. Some key experimental documentary works have been so extensively written about or taught that they suggest an already- established canon that precedes the recent wave of work:4 Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955),Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983),Trinh T. Minh- ha’s Reassemblage (1983), Marlon Rigg’s Tongues Untied (1990), Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory (1991), and Sadie Benning’s video diaries (1989-93) Certainly, there are many ways to experiment with documentary: for instance, with playful reflexivity, which becomes a hall of mirrors (as in William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Take One, 1968) or with truth-based simulations, which stand in for events that cannot be documented firsthand (as in Jill Godmilow’s Far from Poland, 1984).
There is also, often, a shift in register from the subjective to the subjunctive, suggesting the utopian what-might-be (as in the “film truth” or kino pravda that superseded human reality in Vertov’s Man) or the retrospective what-might-have-been (as in the most mainstream of experimental documentaries, Errol Morris’ investigative The Thin Blue Line, 1988). And, sometimes, the world is just so weird that it can only be represented creatively (as in Jean Painleve’s poetic aquatic science films L’hippocampe, 1934, and Acera, or the Witches’ Dance, 1972). Works such as these-and many more could be listed-have become central to documentary history’s shifts and transformations; they have also inspired generations of media practitioners.
As a term, “experimental documentary” is both ugly and vague. Many of the artists in this issue agree on this point, as do I. The “essay film” might be a more elegant term; for me, this concept suggests a process of working through, of making transparent the maker’s processes of thought and discovery. In a useful exegesis of the essay film, Nora Alter writes, “The essay, [Georg Lukacs] suggests, is ‘criticism as a form of art.’… the essay is fragmentary, wandering, and does not seek to find absolute truths-as would, for instance, the documentary genre-but rather ‘finds its unity in and through breaks and not by glossing them over.”‘ This formulation might be called “critical subjectiveness,” pervades the experimental documentary, a mode of non-fiction that is concerned with the personal or poetic interpretation of history and experience.
Offering a complementary analysis, Jorg Huber allows us to think through this critical subjectiveness as one that is highly self-conscious of the ways we can only understand events through individual perception and a personal relationship to the greater public:
The essayistic exposes the process of subjective perception and associative thinking; it is involved in translation and transition; it focuses on the ambulatory character of imagination, far removed from any programmatic statements… Essayist video works are interesting exactly because of the way in which they take their point of departure … from a perception which marks the specific ways and opportunities of everyday experience, of being-in-the-world, of opening the world.
But this “being-in-the-world” is a process for the viewer as well as the artist, which complicates-and perhaps even makes possible- connections between the artist, the text, and the spectator. In the midst of the most thorough article attempting to survey and define the term ··essay film,” Laura Rascaoli suggests a process of personal address and communication between the work and the viewer:
each spectator, as an individual and not as a member of an anonymous, collective audience, is called upon to engage in a dialogic relationship with the enunciator, to become active, intellectually and emotionally, and interact with the text… Humanism is, indeed, implicit in the essay structure-the assumption of a certain unity of the human experience, which allows two subjects to meet and communicate on the basis of this shared experience.
This humanism is perhaps what most appeals to me about these works, and it would also seem to be at the root of any socially committed documentary endeavor. The experimental spin on traditional documentary comes when this humanism has been articulated through a kind of critical subjectiveness. Although I feel an affinity for the essay film form, I remain reluctant to apply the term full-stop for this special issue because it may not always apply: first, with “film” potentially excluding video and installation work, and second, with “essay” implying a specific emphasis on language, whether as text on screen or voice-over narration. As editors, Lynne Sachs and I choose not to limit our concerns to the essay film, nor to create a more eloquent moniker for “experimental documentary” because our investment in this special issue has not been to define categories and pin down definitions but to suggest and revel in the field’s possibilities.
While clinging to the porosity of the concept of experimental documentary, I should, perhaps, offer some claims as to its more coherent shared attributes. The element of experimentation suggests, at the very least, a concern with form and mediation; the documentary suggests an engagement with the realities of history, politics, and culture. While film has a form and comes out of a cultural context, there is something medium-specific and innovative in experimental documentary that relies upon visuality (cinematography that does not strive toward commercial production values, layered images, non-plot driven digital effects) and temporality (fragmented narrative structures, contrapuntal sounds, pensive silences). Such aesthetic elements are the means through which historical revision, contemporary politics, and alternative futures are explored. These artists’ works might be described as reflexive interventions :critiques of power and social relations that are aware of their subjective positions and the politics of representation. In effect, these artists create alternative portraits of history and negotiate the complex reconciliation of their own experiences and ideologies with capital- H History.
My own investment in “experimental documentary” comes from the exhilaration I’ve felt in seeing work that was new, mobilizing, profound, challenging-that is, from the work itself rather than from my schooling in historiography or critical theory. The works that have been formative in shaping my own attention to this field of creative non-fiction have tended to be wildly imaginary-so much so that the term “documentary” hardly suffices, if it applies at all-yet so deeply humanist that they nonetheless suggest some kind of profundity that cannot be dismissed as mere fantasy. A few examples: Paul Chan’s single- channel video RE: The_Operation (2003), an attempt at “radical empathy” that imagines the Bush cabinet on the front lines in Afghanistan, writing to loved ones, and expressing a philosophical depth they almost certainly lack. Chan’s work was such an unexpected method of dissent: a disorientingly humanized vision of the war.8 I first saw this video with a group of festival programmers, and there was a charge in the room that we had shared something that made us see the war in a new way without letting anyone off the hook. Steven Matheson’s Apple Grown in Wind Tunnel (2000) presents an entirely fictional account that seems true in spite of its unlikely premise: an underground network of people exchange toxic homeopathic recipes via pirate radio frequencies and truck-stop bulletin boards. The video points to the breakdown of the U.S. healthcare system and the rise of environmental diseases, a world that is simultaneously liberating (people curing themselves) and terrifying (people poisoning themselves). Jacqueline Goss’s How to Fix the World (2004) animates the accounts of cognitive sociology to demonstrate how logic,mediated by language,is culturally specific; enlightening and comic, the video is wholly both nonfiction and simulated. I could go on, talking about other favorites, such as Jorge Furtado’s Isle of Flowers (1990), Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993), Jem Cohen’s Lost Book Found (1996), Allyson Mitchell’s My Life in Five Minutes (2000), Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory (2000), Steve Reinke’s Sad Disco Fantasia (2001), Ben Russell’s Black and White Trypps Number Three (2007)- l to mention work by the artists in this issue.
At the limits of documentary– and arguably, experimental documentary– are fantastic works that imagine or re-animate the real: works such as Travis Wilkerson’s An Injury to One (2002), Omer Past’s The Casting (2007), and Walid Ra’ad’s and The Atlas Group’s various videos and installations of forged documents. Such radical documentary forgery has, of course, been explored before with such seminal works as The Inextinguishable Fire Harun Farocki, 1969 and Daughter Rite (Michelle Citron, 1979). One of the most productive sites for video and installation work has been the imagination of alternative realities or constructions that stand in for lost evidence. This form of work parallels Caroline A. Jones’ suggestion that “Cultural history is alter- topia; its scholarly care in charting the past is part of a struggle to ‘envision’ other possible modes of being.”9 Perhaps this alter- topia is where Vertovian politics and Brakhagian phenomeno- logical formalism intersect; it is also the place where we might “envision other possible modes” of documentary.
One might suggest that central to any conception of experimental documentary is that it breaks from a certain realist, objective, authentic tradition of non-fiction filmmaking. 10 Jeffrey Skoller recognizes a strain of avant-garde films that engages with questions of history and historiography:
They work to undermine such gaps between past and present by using a range of cinematic strategies to consider elements of the past that are unseen, unspeakable, ephemeral, and defy representations not necessarily verifiable through the normal empirical means. At the same time, these films often fore- ground the constructed nature of narrative forms and the materiality of the film medium, both being integral parts of the meaning-making process. … their formal and aesthetic aspects are foregrounded to become the generative element that releases history as a force acting on the present.11
So many of our recent political crises have been in large part caused by short-term thinking, failures to learn from history or to think ahead and plan for a future beyond the immediate gratification of opinion polls or momentary profits. The “end of history” has been hailed by theorists for some time, and perhaps there is something to that. I find it striking, then, that one of the primary resistant gestures (resisting both our global political problems and the calcification of “documentary”) of these experimental docs is a return to history: a break from the documentary tradition or the disastrous present by re-exploring the past. These works are often explicitly concerned with re- rereading documents, the tensions between memory and what was, and the recog-nition that historiography is interpretive. Experimental documentaries allow for-maybe even necessi- tate-critical subjectiveness, humanist connections, recogni- tion of historical wrongs, and speculation toward more progressive ways of being and representing.
***
Mapping a field of artistic practice and editing a journal issue about it both necessitate making choices. Certainly, as editors, Lynne and I have made many choices in exploring the boundaries of the category “experimental documentary.” Perhaps the first of a series of choices was to conceive of the field as broadly as possible, to include artists primarily associated with the gallery scene, feature filmmakers who have achieved a degree of mainstream prominence, avant-garde filmmakers who prize the sanctity of celluloid, video artists who create idiosyncratic non-fiction explorations, and the numerous people in-between. Regardless of site, scale, or medium, all of these artists examine the truths and fictions at work in documents and the stakes of subjectively interpreting them. For us, another important and early choice was to let the artists express themselves, whether through personal statements or in dialogue with critics, about the categories they innovate, interrogate, or even reject. When we decided for this discussion about experimental documentary to take the form of a journal issue, the choice of venue was immediately obvious: Millennium Film Journal. Although it may make the journal administration blush for me to publish such a self-congratulatory statement in its own pages, MFJ seemed to us the right fit, as the journal has long been committed to both artists’ writings and critical essays that actually communicate with the artists, programmers, and audiences that constitute the experimental media milieu.
The contributors to this issue are largely those doing the envisioning of other modes of documentary-in other words, artists. In late 2007, Lynne and I sent a questionnaire to dozens of artists; we cast a wide net, seeking a range of responses- from artists who created some of the seminal works in this field, from mid-career artists whose work is occasionally designated as “experimental documentary” or “essayistic” in program notes for screenings, and from emerging artists whose recent works have specifically excited us. Not everyone wrote responses (without naming names, many of these artists have been referenced in this introduction), but when so many of them did reply to my out-of-the-blue queries, I was delighted and even a bit star-struck. Those who participated reflected upon their own work, agendas, and inspirations in relation to the category of experimental documentary.
For this issue, artists have also contributed a photo essay (New York-based artist Peggy Ahwesh), an artist’s statement (a reflection on interactive activist performances by Buffalo/ NYC artist Caroline Koebel), and documentation (photos of a performance and an email exchange with herself by Southern California artist Chie Yamayoshi). In addition, two insightful, rigorous dialogues between artists and scholars (Brooklyn film-maker Liza Johnson in dialogue with scholar Jonathan Kahana, Los Angeles-based collaborators Julia Meltzer and David Thorne in dialogue with scholar Tess Takahashi) productively open up questions of method, intention, and interpretation. This issue’s critical writings include a manifesto-style essay that takes its structure from the film that inspired it (Konrad Steiner on Craig Baldwin’s RocketKitKongoKit, 1986), a review of a certain tendency among films at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival (by Grahame Weinbren), and a personal examination (by Greg Youmans) of the form, politics, and affect of Chantal Akerman’s La-bas (2006) that frankly articulates how experimental documentary can stir up compelling, if difficult, resonances. Each of these critical writings, rather than being a distanced scholarly article about the work analyzed, actively mirrors or strives to make connections to the texts.
Like the films, videos, and installations described in this special issue, this collection itself comes out of a specific historical period and political climate. It began in a place just as unnatural, and yet vibrant, as the aforementioned park: New York City. Lynne and I began discussing a publication on the seemingly under-explored intersections of documentary, experimental media, and progressive politics during the summer of 2004-a time of activism, art, and optimism. These talks were stimulated by both an excitement for recent films and videos that were not being written about and a sense of new forms of activist engagement. The scale and creativity of the mobilization against the then-local Republican National Convention, re-building and re-energizing from prior protests against the once-nascent war in Afghanistan and Iraq, were nothing short of extraordinary; it seemed unthinkable, for a moment, that John Kerry wouldn’t defeat George W. Bush. However, Bush and the war carried on, and my collaboration with Lynne continued in ebbs and flows-though mostly ebbs (since, among other reasons, our collaboration became bicoast- al). Disenchantment set in, and then renewal. In the interim, the question of art and artists’ responses and responsibilities in the war on/of terror has become a recurring site of discussion. I have written these introductory comments in the midst of another election cycle, one where slogans of “change” and “hope” became prominent rhetoric.
Experimental documentary is structured by possibility, marked by ambiguity.In preparing this introduction, I’ve thought of various ways to encapsulate the essence of these works without reducing them to a taxonomy. Among the phrases that seem suggestive are “the aesthetics of ambiguity” or “the aesthetics of ambivalence.” Both seem to suggest the work’s non-fixity and the fact that, after presenting the viewer with some evidence and a personal perspective, the work ultimately allows the audience to think and draw its own conclusions, rather than explicitly suggesting the “right” answer. If this introduction seems to propose varying definitions of experimental documentary, that both reflects my own shifting thoughts on the topic and perhaps appropriately reflects the work itself. There is a certain openness to this work, a resolute interpretability, despite the fact that the makers come from specific political positions. I can’t decide which phrasing is more appropriate, ambiguity or ambivalence. And neither suggests what I really mean: that in searching, the artists often encounter the fundamental contradiction that the more one learns, the less one knows for sure. Perhaps this is why this work remains open- ended and insists that the viewer brings to the work his or her own process of interpreting. Some of the work that I find most exciting within this field is not only potentially mobilizing in a political sense but is also moving in an emotional way. Rather than cathartic, though, the work stirs up irresolvable feelings that I cannot articulate in words or explain away.In response to the exploratory quality and political questioning in so many recent documentaries, we have come to observe a pervasive aesthetic of uncertainty. This is not the defeatist description it might at first seem. Uncertainty is a precondition for change.”
In these four distinct experimental documentaries, each artist takes us on a journey of introspection, embracing an inventive cinematic language that sparks us into thinking about the fragility of our place on this earth. In each film, we are given a new context by which to grapple with the delicacy of the mind, the body and the image.
In “The Whelming Sea”, Sean Hanley shares a side of New York City that most of us have never seen. With tenderness and insight, he unveils the wild adventure of the horseshoe crab as it lands on the beaches of New York City, one of the largest metropolises in the United States. With our climate as overwhelmed as it is, this could be a very distressing migration story, but somehow these animals survive.
Tiff Rekem’s “Declarations of Love” witnesses the filmmaker’s father struggling in his own sardonic way to survive modern life. Hardly daunted by the encroaching fires broiling within view of his comfortable desert home, he mows the lawn, feeds his turtle and deals with the intricacies of a befuddled customer service caller. He can’t be too lonely; his daughter is there, behind the camera, giving him all the permissions he needs to simply be himself.
Artist rebecca shapass brings us into a dystopic cosmos that is both familiar and other-worldly in her film “no more room in hell”. Inhabited by zombies rather than people or animals, this liminal nocturnal space never truly witnesses the light of day. Inside a decaying industrial cityscape, we are thrown into the spirit of a late 1960s George Romero horror film through the trajectory of a driverless car. Together, these disparate milieus propel us into thinking about our propensity to go as fast as we can toward oblivion.
In Erica Sheu’s cine-poem “Grandmother’s Scissors” we find an intimate silent conversation built around the exchange of images and lines of poetic text shared by a grand-daughter filmmaker with her seamstress grandmother. Ingeniously constructed like a filmic tapestry, Sheu’s celebration of her elder gives voice to a woman who knows that strength come to us all by way of a “strong heart” and a bold, confident vision.
The Whelming Sea by Sean Hanley (29 mins, color, sound, 2020)
Declarations of Love by Tiff Rekem (29 min. color, sound, 2022)
no more room in hell by rebecca shapass (23 min., color, sound, 2023)
Grandma’s Scissors by Erica Sheu (6 min, Super 8, color & b/w, silent, 2021
Lynne Sachs Awarded a New York State Council on the Arts Support for Artists Grant.
Brooklyn, NY – Lynne Sachs received a Support for Artists grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) to support her creative work. Sponsored by Urban Video Project, this award will fund This Side of Salina. Through New York State’s continued investment in arts and culture, NYSCA has awarded over $80 million since Spring 2023 to over 1,500 artists and organizations across the state.
Governor Kathy Hochul said, “Research confirms what we’ve always known here in New York: arts and culture are a powerhouse, with a staggering return on investment for our economy and our communities. Nonprofit arts and culture organizations and their audiences generated $151.7 billion in economic activity nationwide in 2022 and New York’s unparalleled arts and culture sector is leading the way to benefit our residents, our students and our visitors every day. I commend these grantees on their achievements and look forward to their contributions in the coming year.” NYSCA Chair Katherine Nicholls added, “Thanks to the unwavering support of Governor Hochul and our Legislature, NYSCA is so proud to support the work of organizations and artists from all across New York. Spanning the entire breadth of the arts and culture sector – from world-renowned performers to after-school programs, from long established museums to community arts collectives – these organizations and artists together are a powerful driver of health, tourism, economy and education for our residents and visitors. On behalf of Council and staff, congratulations to Lynne Sachs and thank you for your perseverance, your creativity and your tireless service to New York State.”
About the New York State Council on the Arts The mission of the New York State Council on the Arts is to foster and advance the full breadth of New York State’s arts, culture, and creativity for all. To support the ongoing recovery of the arts across New York State, the Council on the Arts will award $127 million in FY 2024. The Council on the Arts further advances New York’s creative culture by convening leaders in the field and providing organizational and professional development opportunities and informational resources. Created by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in 1960 and continued with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, the Council is an agency that is part of the Executive Branch.
Lynne’s Project: This Side of Salina
Almost 200 years ago, a group of Central New York women gathered together to voice their opposition to the fact that women in the United States had no legal identity separate from their husbands, were unable to sign contracts, vote, own property, obtain access to education, or gain custody of their children after divorce. Ever since those pivotal conversations were held at the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, women have been slowly but surely claiming their place in society in terms of their ability to make their own decisions about their own lives. This sense of progress came to an abrupt ending on June 24, 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court made a landmark decision which held that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Throughout the country, women were told that they no longer had control of their own bodies.
I come to the topic of abortion fully aware of its volatile place in our country’s story. Tensions between the role of the state and bodily freedom go back to the very earliest days of our nation’s history. Just as the 1619 Project reignited the conversation around race and the pivotal place of slavery in this country’s narrative in 2020, newly charged debates around the legality of abortion force us to recognize the precarious relationship that women in this country have to their own bodies.
With the support of Light Work through their Urban Video Project, I will create “This Side of Salina, a 15-minute film and two associated live performances which will bring people with uteruses and their allies together in an area of New York State that has long been known as a hotbed for feminist outrage and action. In collaboration with a range of organizations from Syracuse and neighboring towns, I will work with approximately 20 experienced and emerging artists as well as other interested participants. I will produce, photograph and record movements, gestures and spoken word poetry that emerge from our discussions around this disturbing and far-reaching shift in American society. Each of us will come to this moment as a witness to a problematic moment in our collective history.
My creative process for “This Side of Salina” will include connecting with organizations such as the Syracuse Community Choir and Sankofa Reproductive Health and Healing Center as well as student, art, religious, and activist groups in the area. In addition, as part of my research, I plan to reach out to Syracuse-based artists and performers, including poet and chant performance artist Amarachi Attamah, as well as Syracuse performance and conceptual artist Sayward Schoonmaker, whose recent piece “Majority Opinion (Presented from the Majority Perspective)” uses the Supreme Court’s Majority Opinion from the Dobbs case as source material for a verbatim documentary performance.
On June 24, 2023, the one-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, I returned to my own hometown of Memphis, Tennessee to produce one section of a collaborative film project about abortion clinics across the country closing their doors in the wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade. In “This Side of Salina”, I will further develop the aesthetic experimentation I began in this collaborative project. I am including five images from this project in my proposal. In Syracuse, I will photograph all of the participants either from behind, out-of-focus or in silhouette, which will allow them to express their responses to the issues we are exploring in a more physical, less traditionally “dramatic” form. There will be no faces in this film. In this way, our participants – whether they are new to this kind of improvisational work or veterans from the stage or screen – will work quasi-anonymously, as performers articulating a collective yet diverse point-of-view.
During my residency in Syracuse, I will also draw from my experience as a poet and a filmmaker with years of experience working with groups in both of these art forms, most recently at the Flowchart Foundation and the Poetry Society of America (both in New York State). I will ask my performers/ participants to write short texts that we will then shape into song. By working with local choral groups, we will bring these words into the film as a whole, emphasizing the sensation of “a loud whisper” which will allow listeners to hear distinctive articulations as well as a collective, musical breath. In this context, I would very much like to bring in internationally recognized singers Pamela Z and Josephine Foster (either in person or through video conference) to help us expand our relationship to the musical potential of voice and text. I believe that the vocal nature of this work will result in an aural experience that will be extremely moving for spectators (passers-by or attentive viewers) watching the film outside the Everson Museum.
My own interdisciplinary engagement with film and live performance includes two distinct projects created in New York City. In “Your Day is My Night” (2011 -2013), I blended autobiographical monologues, intimate conversations, and staged performances to explore the lives of Chinese immigrants sharing a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of Chinatown. Working with seven performers over two years, we presented our piece in theaters and community centers in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In “Every Fold Matters” (a live performance with film presented from 2015 -2018) and later “The Washing Society” (a 45 min. film, 2018), I explored the charged, intimate space of the neighborhood laundromat by bringing together the people who work there with professional actors. Both of these projects are included as work samples in this proposal.
The final version of “This Side of Salina” will be a film and two live performances. I will direct both the film and the live component of this project. The film itself will be exhibited over three to four months during the 2024-25 program year as part of the Urban Video Project’s on-going architectural projection program. The two performances will also occur outside the museum in conjunction with the film screening.
A few weeks ago, I shot outside a former abortion clinic in Tennessee, one of the states in the US where abortion is no longer legal for ANY reason. I’ve been making films for three decades. I do not exaggerate when I say that this was probably the riskiest, most vulnerable film shoot I have ever directed. We had sixteen participants : 12 young women of child-bearing age, one older woman and two men. Everyone knew that it was potentially dangerous to make a film about abortion outside a building where these services had once been available but now are not. I did not tell my participants where we would be shooting until two days before our production date. We had several volunteer marshals to help with security, waiting in their cars or behind windows in nearby buildings in case anything happened. As precarious as we all felt at the time, standing in the scorching summer heat in medical gowns performing before a large camera, we were all excited, nervous and absolutely committed. While the stakes are not as precarious in New York, the issues resonate just as much. In Syracuse at the Everson Museum, I will work on these same issues, recognizing the long activist history of the region but also finding new ways to address the disturbing expansion of state control on women and their bodies.
Description: The collection represents the work of experimental documentary filmmaker LynneSachs, who has worked primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City since the 1980s. Included are articles and film screening notes about Sachs and her films; essays and other writings by Sachs; correspondence with other filmmakers including Barbara Hammer and Sylvia Schedelbauer; as well as still images and artist’s statements from each of the videos included in the original donation.
Background: Lynne Sachs is a New York-based filmmaker whose work combines experimental and documentary film traditions with a strongly feminist perspective. She has produced over 40 films as well as many performances and installation works, and publishes essays and poetry as extensions of her visual arts practice. Her films have screened at prestigious institutions and festivals worldwide and won numerous awards, including the 2020 Grand Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen for a film made together with fellow experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Sachs began making films in San Francisco while attending San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute, drawing inspiration from and collaborating with many filmmakers including Bruce Conner, George Kuchar, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Sachs has also taught filmmaking at New York University, Hunter College, and the University of California, Berkeley, among other institutions.
Extent: 2.5 cartons Generally printouts and photocopies of flyers, essays, correspondence, and press clippings.
Availability: The collection is open for research in person in the BAMPFA Film Library and Study Center. Remote access to digital files in the collection is not currently possible, pending arrangements with the donor. Please contact the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive Film Library and Study Center for details.
Each year Screen Slate invites our dozens of contributors—along with filmmakers, critics, performers, programmers, cinema workers, community organizers, and other friends—to submit their lists of favorite “First Viewings and Discoveries.”
Some of the many special guests this year include Isabelle Huppert, Wim Wenders, Illeana Douglas, Paul Schrader, Isabel Sandoval, John Wilson, Mets director John DeMarsico, Elsie Fisher, Michael Almereyda, Lila Avilés, Radu Jude, and several filmmakers whose work appears in our top 20, such as Frederick Wiseman (Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros), Ira Sachs (Passages), Claire Simon (Our Body), Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline), and Samy Burch (screenwriter, May December). Responses appear below in the format they were submitted, along with individual “Best of 2023” ballots if submitted.
For the aggregated Best of 2023 list tabulated from these responses, visit here, and see also Amy Taubin’s Top Ten, pulled from the December issue of Artforum. Our annual end-of-year poll is guest edited by Nicolas Rapold. Art: Steak Mtn. Editorial assistance: Lauren Lee.
Much gratitude to our community for the responses, and look forward to seeing you at the movies in 2024!
Simone Barbes or Virtue (Marie-Claude Treilhou, 1980)
The Mark of Lilith (Bruna Fionda, Polly Gladwin, Zach Mack-Nataf, 1986)
The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love (Maria Maggenti, 1995)
MURDER and murder (Yvonne Rainer, 1996)
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (Lynne Sachs, 2018)
A selection of these films and more will screen at Film Forum in February 2024 as part of the two-week series, Sapph-O-Rama!, a celebration of the lesbian film canon and a survey of sapphic cinema through the last century. Programmed by Emily Greenberg and myself.
Tuesday, December 19, 2023 18:00 The program is carried out in cooperation with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Croatia. Entrance is free.
Kino umjetnica (Cinema artist) is a complementary film and video program conceived as a side program to The Visible Ones exhibition, which will be realized from December 15, 2023 to February 6, 2024 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, as a project of inter-museum collaboration between five museums (MSU Zagreb, MMSU Rijeka , Art Gallery Split, Art Gallery Dubrovnik, Museum of Fine Arts Osijek). The exhibition presents an overview of the recent work of female artists, in order to raise awareness of the need for equal visibility and representation of female artists in museum collections and exhibition programs. The production of female authors covers a wide range of topics and sensibilities and represents more than ninety female authors, and is the result of research into the representation of female artists in the art collections of museum institutions. At the same time, it presents certain aspects and mapping of the contemporary artistic practice of female authors in Croatia.
The Kino umjenica screening program is performed in the form of a dislocated dispositif from the museum’s white cube into a cinema hall or black box, in order to further expand the context and direct the focus towards the rich and diverse audiovisual production of female artists, which is formed precisely in the intermediate space of contemporary art and film. It includes two programs Topographies, Spaces, Gaps (MMSU 16.12) and Woman in the Mirror (Art-kino 19.12).
As part of the Woman in the Mirror program, three films will be shown – The Cat is Always a Woman directed by Martina Meštrović, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor by Lynne Sachs and Woman in the Mirror by Jagoda Kaloper.
Correspondence between Programmer Branka Bencic and Lynne:
“Dear Lynne, hope you are well I am getting back in touch since I would like to organize a screening and bring back together works CAROLEE, BARBARA AND GUNVOR by Lynne and A Cat is Always Female by Martina Mestrovic and Tanja Vujasinovic along with a experimental documentary by Jagoda Kaloper Woman in a Mirror (2011, 47 min) It is 1 cinema screening. It would take place at Art Kino in Rijeka, Croatia on Dec 19th, 2023…
Jagoda Kaloper was an actress and visual artist working with Jugoslav directors such as Dusan Makavejev, starring in WR Mysteries of Organism, Krsto Papic etc… This is her autobiographic visual essay.
Branka Bencic”
“Hello Branka,
I am so glad that we were able to work out this screening plan for “Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor” to be included in your program Visible (visibility of woman artists in museum collections). I have now read about Jagoda Kaloper. I have seen Makavejev’s WR but I was not aware of her name until you wrote to us. The first time that I saw WR was in San Francisco in the mid 1980s and Makavejev was there in the room. I remember timidly/ boldly (not sure which?) raising my hand to ask a question from the audience. He seemed to be offended by something I said, and I remember feeling a bit embarrassed and a bit proud, all mixed into one emotion. Anyway, if you have more info on Jagoda please send it along. All the best, Lynne”
“Dear Lynne
As promised, I am sending you an essay I wrote in 2011 about Jagoda Kaloper’s film Woman in a Mirror, when the film was produced Jagoda was an amazing woman, gentle, and full of stories, she took part in the student movement in 1968, hang out in the famous marxist summer school Praxis in the island of Korčula late 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxis_School#Kor%C4%8Dula_Summer_School
she was famous actress starring in Yugoslav cinema including Makavejev
also, she was a visual artist that imagined first land art pieces in Yugoslavia and Croatia and interventions in public space in early 70s and worked as a graphic designer
Best regards
Branka”
Original Text in Croatian: Kino umjetnica komplementaran je filmski i video program zamišljen kao popratni program uz izložbu Vidljive, koja se realizira od 15. prosinca 2023. do 6. veljače 2024. u Muzeju moderne i suvremene umjetnosti, kao projekt međumuzejske suradnje pet muzeja (MSU Zagreb, MMSU Rijeka, Galerija umjetnina Split, Umjetnička galerija Dubrovnik, Muzej likovnih umjetnosti Osijek). Izložba predstavlja pregled recentnog stvaralaštva umjetnica, kako bi se osvijestila nužnost za ravnopravnom vidljivošću i zastupljenošću umjetnica u muzejskim kolekcijama i izložbenim programima. Produkcija autorica obuhvaća širok raspon tema i senzibiliteta te predstavlja više od devedeset autorica, a plod je istraživanja zastupljenosti umjetnica u umjetničkim zbirkama muzejskih institucija. Ujedno predstavlja određene aspekte i mapiranje suvremene umjetničke prakse autorica u Hrvatskoj.
Program projekcija Kino umjetnica izvodi se u obliku dislociranog dispozitiva iz muzejske bijele kocke u kino dvoranu ili black box, kako bi dodatno proširio kontekst i usmjerio fokus prema bogatoj i raznolikoj audiovizualnoj produkciji umjetnica koja se formira upravo u međuprostoru suvremene umjetnosti i filma. Obuhvaća dva programa Topografije, prostori, praznine (MMSU 16. 12) i Žena u ogledalu (Art-kino 19. 12).
U sklopu progrma Žena u ogledalu prikazat će se tri filma– Mačka je uvijek ženska u režiji Martine Meštrović, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor autorice Lynne Sachs te Žena u ogledaluJagode Kaloper.
The MFA Program in Integrated Media Arts (IMA) offers advanced studies in multimedia documentary arts. The IMA Program educates multi-disciplinary, socially engaged media makers in a diverse range of skills across the media landscape. Working with faculty from film, emerging media, and journalism backgrounds, students learn to conceptualize, create and distribute innovative, politically and socially engaged expression using contemporary media technologies.
The Accident that Pricks: Family and Photography Lynne Sachs 3 sessions, 1 credit – Fall 2022 and Spring 2024 Final Showcase Friday February 23, 2024
Course Description: The Accident that Pricks: Family and Photography is a course in which we will explore the ways in which images of our mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, grand-parent, aunt or uncle might become material for the making of a personal film. Each participant will come to the first day with a single photograph they want to examine. You will then create a cinematic presence for this image by incorporating storytelling and performance. In the process, we will discuss and challenge notions of truth-telling and language. This course is inspired by French theorist Roland Barthes’ theory of the punctum, the intensely subjective effect of a photograph, and Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s writing on her family living under Fascism during World War II. Ginzburg was a prescient artist who enjoyed mixing up conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction: “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled at once to destroy it. The places, events, and people are all real.” Each student participant will produce a live performance with moving image which will be presented at the end of our third class meeting.
Documentation of Avant to Live! launch at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater May 28, 2023. Presentation by Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta. Readings by Jeffrey Skoller and Rick Prelinger. Craig Baldwin in conversation with Lynne Sachs. Video includes footage of You’re Not Listening by Jeremy Rourke. Footage captured by David Cox, edited by Mary Rose McClain at the instigation of Lynne Sachs.
To order: www.sfcinematheque.org/shop/craig-baldwin-avant-to-live-standard/ Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! documents the life and work of acclaimed filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin (b. Oakland CA, 1952), an inspiring and influential figure in contemporary media arts. Meticulously detailed, with contributions from over 50 writers, artists, illustrators, and ideologues, Avant to Live! is the first critical text to examine the artist’s films analytically as a coherent and meaningful body of work and critical artist’s statement while also examining the cultural impact of Baldwin’s Other Cinema curatorial project.
AS A FILMMAKER, Baldwin’s works represent a radical fusion of form and content. Formally, his films are constructed largely from audiovisual material appropriated from pre-existing films. In this, they represent a radical stance toward media culture as a participatory field. As an artist, Baldwin engages with mainstream media as an adversary, using its languages in ironic opposition. In this way he talks back to corporately produced media and creates inspiring, wildly imaginative works which profoundly challenge the nature of one-way media consumption.
AS A FILM CURATOR, Baldwin is known for Other Cinema, an extensive and hugely influential series of film/video programs he has personally organized in San Francisco on a schedule of 36 programs per year since the late 1980s. Like his films, Baldwin’s Other Cinema represents a radically expanded approach to film exhibition, media consumption and cultural engagement in which ephemeral forms of film history coexist alongside expanded cinema performance, underground/experimental film screenings, speculative lecture presentations, in-person artists and more.
Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! is a collaborative project of San Francisco Cinematheque and INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media, representing INCITE #9-10-11.
Editors: Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta Project Archivists: Courtney Fellion and and Megan Needels Designer: Vivian Sming, Sming Sming Books
Contributors: Luisela Alvaray, Craig Baldwin, Irene Borger, Bryan Boyce, Stephen Broomer, Bill Brown, Anthony Buchanan, Joanna Byrne, Kristin Cato, Chris Chang, David Cox, Bill Daniel, Joan d’Arc, Manohla Dargis, Tom Day, Jesse Drew, Adam Dziesinski, Bradley Eros, Gerry Fialka, Adrianne Finelli, Kelly Gallagher, Max Goldberg, Sam Green, Molly Hankwitz, Joshua Leon Harper, Mike Hoolboom, Alex Johnston, Brett Kashmere, John Klacsmann, Caroline Koebel, Liz Kotz, Jesse Lerner, Chip Lord, Patrick Macias, Scott MacKenzie, Jesse Malmed, Dolissa Medina, Peggy Nelson, Steve Polta, Rick Prelinger, Vanessa Renwick, Jeremy Rourke, Catherine Russell, Lynne Sachs, Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, Keivan Khademi Shamami, Jeffrey Skoller, Soda_Jerk, Valerie Soe, Kathleen Tyner, Federico Windhausen, Michael Zryd
Select images from the book:
Excerpt from Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! of correspondences from Craig Baldwin to Lynne Sachs (1996-2019)
Blissfully Out of Context: A Collection of Letters from Craig Baldwin 1996–2019
Lynne Sachs
I met Craig Baldwin in 1986, soon after I moved to San Francisco. I was 25 years old and reeling from watching so many experimental movies during a thriving, nourishing period in the history of alternative, underground moviemaking in the Bay Area. Meeting Craig and falling into the vortex of his Other Cinema at Artists’ Television Access transformed everything I knew about images, from making them to editing them to projecting them. Craig and I quickly became ciné-compatriots. When I moved to New York City ten years later, our bond was tight enough to support a quarter-century of epistolary exchanges. Thus, my file cabinet drawer of letters and printed e-missives from Craig has become a repository of material, a document
of both our lives and our shared engagement with the kindred spirits of a rag-tag bi-coastal community of people who cook, bake, and devour the food of cinema. Here I share with you a smattering of Craig’s side of our correspondence. I have chosen not to include my own letters, but instead have added some personal annotations (in italics). For the sake of clarity and space, the editors and I have made some minor revisions to Craig’s writing; in general, however, all creative spellings and expressions by Craig are reproduced as composed.
1996
Hello my darling,
Happy? New year and all that. I’m just getting over a cold and enjoying that wonderful rough euphoria when you start to feel like a human being again. Oh yeah, being a human being can actually be fun. Use my so-called brain and move my body around. Yes, I can actually master my (at least immediate) environment. And now I’m ready to have sex! Might as well realize my full potential so to speak. Anyway, let’s take this transient optimism as the keynote to ‘96. Might as well. Actually, our Fall ‘95 was our most successful yet, an average of 56 paying customers per show. Lynne, bubala, can I show your magic lantern slides again for the April 27 show on the ecstasy of projection? I can only afford to pay for shipping though. It may be that someone can deliver by hand? I was just listening to your voice on Louise Bourque’s “Experimental Film” interview tape. Ann Arbor was awesome. Flying to Taos Fest in two weeks.
Craig
1997
Lynne (y) darling,
Thanks so much for the photo of [your daughter] Noa. I hope I live long enough and stay in your steady, strategic-arc, long-term, like, permanent world long enough to sooner or later know your children as they become adults. I’ll play the crazy uncle. If I ever did leave the world of the sensible, it would be out of nervous exhaustion from the fuss and fret over my film’s post-production. I keep thinking of – and feeling like – that photo of Artaud in Rodez. That’s why, little sister, I’m begging you for your help with the Cumberland Street studio. I’ll pay you whatever you want, I’ll leave it clean, I’ll give you credit, please Ms. Sachs, tell me that there’s hope for the sane. Uncle Craig
In the mid-1990s, I shared a house in the Mission District of San Francisco with my sister Dana Sachs. Craig rented a basement room from us for several years to use as his studio while he was editing Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) with Bill Daniel and others.
Dear Lynne,
Well, I really must say that things are at their very lowest out here. My only saving grace is… the studio where I can work late into the night, keeping busy so as not to be too mentally/emotionally overwhelmed by all the bad shit. My shoulder aches as I write this. I have truly suffered a major life-changing injury and I
pray that I’ll be able to recover. I’ll start some of the rehabilitation within two weeks, after the screw comes out. It took this physical trauma to completely and violently expunge any former expectations about any assumed identity or life. I could just as easily join a cult or go on Prozac… probably end up in Santa Cruz, where my father is fading fast.
But even accustomed to life at the bottom circle of hell, I was not prepared for the shock of seeing Eva Pierrakos at Mt. Zion Hospital… I’ve got to give her credit for her feisty electric-blue hair color, but seeing her skull coming through her skin in that 5th floor room, being fed by Samoan and Russian attendants – neither of whom knew much about her condition – made for a kind of ghastly surrender that my nervous system can hardly bear. She was apparently uncomfortable, but there’s no way she can be understood, beyond speech. I moved her this way, then I moved her that way, then back again. Then just gave up. Then she starts to cry. Absolutely without hope. I say give her drugs until she dies peacefully… The Other Cinema shows are consistently strong and well-attended, really those shows are my form of church. Looks like I’m doing a program for Visible Evidence at San Francisco State University that Bill Nichols is organizing this summer and maybe to Austria in September with some “Dead Media” programs.
All my love to Mark and the kids, Craig
Howdy,
Here’s the new calendar and thanks to both of you for being part of it. I’m settling into my groove at UC Berkeley, still hustling “Sonic Outlaws” across the globe, and now starting a sci-fi ‘time radio’ project based on old science-class kinescopes. Craig
Lynne-y,
Here are some OC calendars. I hope you don’t mind that we shortened your title to “Lilith.” The studio is absolutely wonderful. I love it and I could make some good movies in it – I think – if conditions were just a little different. The truth of the matter is despite your fabulously generous offer of studio access, the editing is going achingly slowly. As I might have told you, Bill drove his flatbed all the
way out from Texas to discover that it was fried. We’ve spent way too much time and money on long-distance calls for schematics for not only Bill’s but also your flatbed, with no success. We have managed to get yours going, but it does slip out of sync. It’s taken almost 14 days for Bill to get a place for a decent night’s sleep… It’s pouring rain, my studio is flooded with two inches of water, and this must certainly mark the low point in the whole production process. I thank you and a small circle of friends for sticking with me when it seems there’s hardly any energy left to carry on. More money keeps getting poured into the bottomless hole and over time as I look at the workprint it seems more and more a ludicrous idea to try to pull it off, especially as a feature… the only light of hope on the horizon is the incipient Other Cinema season. I pray for strength. Craig
Dear Lynne-y darling,
Vicky Funari’s “Paulina” was the hit of the Film Arts Foundation Festival. And now it’s going to Sundance! A wonderful, brilliant, excellent, exquisite film – both Mexican and Californian, both film and video, both doc and narrative – the kind of film that makes me proud to be a San Franciscan. Must see! Still no word from _________. Bury myself in work. Craig
1998
Lynne-y,
I promise to make a good film. Maybe there’s some good karma hanging around the studio from your early days of editing “Lilith.” Speaking of which, send all your picture poop and preview dub now. Don’t delay, don’t hedge, don’t fudge, just do it, as the capitalists say. I need all the help I can get in putting the calendar together and we both know that you’re already slotted in so follow thru, sis. Here’s some miscellaneous articles. I am trying to clear up all the papers on my floor. One of these days, I will slip on the glossy articles. We finished our most successful Other Cinema season ever. Average attendance 65! I’m supposed to be recording my voice-overs. Have to hire Steve Polta to get me through the back- log of pick-ups. He is a good man. My nerves are shot. Not enough sex. But I’m lucky to be alive, I tell myself. Just returned from my Dad’s – he’s ailing – havingangina attacks while we sit there watching the football game together!! And Eva, sorry to be the one to tell you, but sometimes I suspect that 1998 will be her last year. The disease has wasted her. I was very surprised to hear her half-legible voice on my machine yesterday. We’ll see “Boogie Nights” together tomorrow. Wheels are in motion. Craig
Lynne, Howdy, dear heart. Big May Day Weekend. Rallies during day, film at night. Did I tell you that I’m guest-curating an “Indelible Images” program at the San Francisco International Film Festival? Here’s my pitch. I have a coupon for 2400’ of free color processing at Bono Labs out your way. Could we somehow work a trade for continued access to the studio? It would help me so much! Craig
Sister girl… I’m off to Mexico City within 24 hours as part of a Bi-National conference on the short film. Hope it’s good for my nerves. Europe was great but stressful. Lots and lots of crazy, creative energy. Did four shows, got lost a couple of times, lost my glasses, journeyed into the Slovakian Republic and Hungary. Teaching at SFSU and Film Arts Foundation but haven’t found much time for “Specters of the Spectrum,” unfortunately. Craig
Howdy Lynne and Mark,
Hope you’re doing better than me! Actually, I am a little jazzed, owing to our successful benefit two nights ago. Probably the best Artist Television Access party ever – two bars, big crowd, live DJ, four simultaneous projections, etc., but that was just enough for one month’s back rent – still have to come with another. They’re cutting some of the dead weight from the staff, tho’, so a leaner, more Darwinian crew might pull this limping non-profit out of its nose dive yet. Bill and I will be editing by the time you get this, so maybe the film production front won’t look so hopeless either. And, of course, I am slamming together the next OC calendar. Having to go to the gym every other day for my shoulder. It’s going to be a long, slow recovery, but I do think I will get most of the use back. Still no word from _________. Lost, lost, lost, Craig
Lynne-y,
After my Pittsburgh N.A.M.A.C. show, I must have fallen into some sort of “post” lethargy depression – didn’t manage to get any work done in the studio during November. I did catch a cold, however, and despite it, move another 500 educational films into my basement from the College of San Mateo. Now David Cox is down there analyzing them for their media archeology value. And continuing with the “Other Cinema” screenings again in spite of the rain and the so-so turnouts, but the last three shows will be strong, I guess. Then a spate of holiday engagements, which may be fun, and may be remunerative (light show jobs), but will still distract from the #1 task of finishing my script. What I want for Christmas is PEACE AND SOLITUDE so I can organize my ideas and focus on my SOS project!!! What about yours, little sister? Craig
Lynne-y,
Thanks for the break on the studio rental. The good news is that I’ve been invited to the Rotterdam Film Festival and after that the Whitney Biennial!!! Craig
Lynne,
Today the lab told me that they were having some trouble with my A/B rolls. If the print does issue forth, then I’m in Vancouver or NY by the time you read this – or maybe we’ve crossed paths in NY, and then Olympia, Virginia, Pitzer, but sometime in there, I’ll hopefully be able to clear my shit out and turn in my keys to the studio. Craig
Lynne-y darling,
Well, we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, tho’ I suspect we’ll still have some technical problems with the lab, etc. Bill and I are both A/B rolling, very slow going, and audio-mixing at same time and I might have mentioned World Premiere at Vancouver Film Festival, then closing the New York Film Festival where I might see you guys. Then back home to Film Arts Festival and I will only be able to make it because of your help. Thank you. Thank you for your support during this long, arduous process. This movie is very important. I’m very convinced of that, and unfortunately your sis’s pillow was an unintentional accidental victim of this vigorous struggle with miles of 16mm that had to be tamed!! But now we’re all getting it under control. Craig
2000
Lynne-y, again, s’wunnerful hanging with you… you are my fairy godmother without whom Spectres of the Spectrum would never have been made, so my trip out to you in the fall should be just as much your party as mine. And I do look forward to critiquing your work-in-progress. Smooches, CB
Alas, I don’t have any of the emails that Craig and I exchanged between 2003 and 2007. After racking my brain and my file cabinet in search of these correspondences, it occurred to me that these were the last five years I was using AOL. When I desperately searched my extant but feeble AOL inbox, I discovered that nothing before 2011 remains.
2008
My darling sister, I am sorry to have to tell you that my good friend John Corser, one of my best friends in my entire life, died in a freak accident about six months ago. CB
2009
hello lynne-y!
Just wanted to let you know that I got a look at your “Last Happy Day”, and it’s not only brilliant, but beautiful! (just like you)… can’t say fer sure this early, but would prolly be very interested in finding a place for that on next OC (or oneafter that). Congrats … it is my favorite Lynne Sachs film.
2010
Working very hard here… led a found-footage workshop, showed [Mock Up On] Mu, had a big symposium all day yesterday at which Rick Prelinger and me and a bunch of other big-wigs spoke, and then saw the new Kenneth Anger film… FASCIST ART, totally!! The 9 younger brits clapped (was sold out), but I walked out. Am in the Newcastle Lib. now, before two interviews. Yes of course intend on staying with you. Let ME buy you some bottles. By the way, do you have a place to stay whilst in frisco? Mi casa es tu casa.
2011
L–believe it or not was just thinking about you last night. I saw a film so damn ‘push-pull’ discursive that it gave me nightmares.
2013
A lot going on here. I have a lot to write you, but not now, very precarious situation, wretched health, I am in agony right now but will slouch to the pharmacy in 20 mins to get some relief, but multiplying projects at same time! I am making an anti-gun short (out of ‘Bufferin’ commercial), and I made “Sight & Sound” magazine! (Tony Rayns article, with pic!). Am now crunching down the Fall OC cal… quite possibly the very last… cb
Lynne-y,
Glad you like the book… in fact I should send you more… I can’t indulge the idea of a personal library anymore; my books are all in boxes on the floor (and I trip over them). The situation is really pathetic… “abject” might be a more appropriate word. My health too is a total trainwreck. Maybe it is a good thing (though I really don’t think so) that OC/ATA is coming off the rails, so I would finally have the time to attend to my own failing body. Right now I can hardly hear… I went to the doctor, thinking that my nerve disease has finally risen to the level of ears… and that there was going to be permanent damage. Can you imagine walking around with that thought in your head?… B l e a k, baby. Well he says it’s just a bunch of wax! Gawd, I hope so, but don’t know how to fix that. I pour this de-waxer in my ears every day. I am going to have to get, for the first time in my life, an ear “lavage”… but that is minor compared to my other problems… but no time to whine!! But at this point I can hardly stop working for even an hour. So you finally returned to Wesleyan with your second-born, eh sis? What will be her major? (and what is Maya’s?). By the way, if you remember Gilbert Guerrero and Kathleen Quillian, from ATA crowd (and board)–they named their daughter Maya too! And now Kathleen is delivering her second kid in first week of Oct. And in third week of Oct., she is presenting Stereo Realist 3-D slides at Other Cinema!!!… On an evening with THREE kinds of 3-D!!!
mucho amor, cb
Ok, sis, by now you should be getting a little luv-gift in the mail, but anyway, I have a favor to ask of you: please be so kind as to reply with the name of your woman doctor friend, cuz I want to follow up. I need medical help. Thanks!
Craig
I am having a medicAL eMERGENCY HERe, BU I DOn’T WANT TO GO tO SF GENERAL’S eMeRGEncy ROOM… CB
L -For the short-term emergency, I was able to get in to see a GP… he took one look at my foot: Staph infection! But am taking my antibiotics now, and don’t have to go to work… thanks Lynne…
Darling! I am so happy that that bed footage is going to good use!! I still have that Jack Smith/Malanga bed stuff that I might ultimately sell for big bucks! Thank you for the connection to your doctor that we ate burrito with… the after effects from the staph infection have profoundly affected my life, perhaps permanently. Not to bring you down, but I am suffering the consequences of compromised lymph system after flesh-eating bacteria infection, see? They can’t really figure out what the prob is, and tomorrow I have to have a ($500) MRI.
It’s very discouraging, but I have so many other causes for panic in my life, I guess the health crisis takes its place among the many others. “The Panicked Life”… there’s a good book/movie title? “The Life Panic”. I could write that book, dear sister. When I see your grandmother at 102, or my own father at 98, I so immediately know that I am not going to come anywhere close to that. It will be a miracle if I get out of my 60s… but don’t grieve for any early death, sister! I want everybody to celebrate. I am declaring this loud and clear to you… Anyway, I am so happy for you and your wonderful film, Lynne. Tell us when you will next return to NorCal and we will do another show! Of course!… cb
Hello sister!
Thanks for all of your inquiries! I’m doing much better. As to your hardware help, that is also coming along. I have my eye on a beautiful laptop that will serve this gallery as a platform for exhibition. What I am salivating over is the film that you re-made with Chris Marker, “Three Cheers for the Whale” [1972; English version, 2007]. I hope that it is OK if we screen it again.
Mucho amor, Craig
Ever since I met Craig in 1987, he has allowed me to dig around amongst the archeological wonders of his 992 Valencia Street film archive. Usually, I am a spelunker rummaging around in his cave, presuming I am looking for something specific and discovering that what I am least expecting to find is what I most need. Over these three decades, I have nourished these films and my work as a filmmaker in ways that would never have happened without Craig and his basement resource: The House of Science (1991);
A Biography of Lilith (1997); The Last Happy Day (2009); And Then We Marched (2017); and Tip of My Tongue (2017).
2015
My darling sister, please know that EVERY DAY we are compiling your footage… I can see the light at the end of the tunnel: and it is next Tuesday, when I will mail shipment #3, which will have 2 rolls. Important: as I compile these shots and scenes, should I just white-tape them, or single-splice them? Also, just to let you know: I am keeping close track of the labor hours, and you will have a BIG payment coming up. But I will be more than fair with you, Lynne-y , because I owe you soooo much…
Howdy Lynne-y,
Here’s a Hanukkah present for you. Plus, a couple of straggles from our big “Tip of My Tongue” haul. Hope that stuff is working for you. Thanks for all the help this last year. I sure needed it. You came to my rescue, like a true friend. Love, Craig
Ok Lynne-y!
My laptop has raised my quality of life, though that is about to lower again as there are new calls for radically raised rent levels. All the help is absolutely essential. Craig
Ok Sis,
Another holiday gift for you. Things have settled a bit now, after ATA’s New Lease Navidad party this weekend. My oh so slick laptop continues to make the navigation of the treacherous interweb a much more comfortable process. Craig
Lynne,
One day I will tell you the story of how $8.25 was stolen out of my OVER-ALL pants during my first visit to NY. I was picked up by a con-man in Washington Square Park. I had to sleep in a Catholic hostel on the Lower East Side, my bunk- mate was Cool Breeze, the first time I ever heard that name. That would be mid/ late-70s, methinks. The rip-off artist and I walked up to the 4th floor on a Lower East Side tenement, and he robbed my little West Coast hippie self… (over-alls!) From the sum of $3 in change that he didn’t get from me, I hitch-hiked all the way back to SF by way of Vancouver, BC (and I had to both sneak into and out of Canada), both great stories!! I have even better stories, including the first time I had intercourse, as a hitch-hiker on the road to Santa Barbara (where I just now gave a big presentation… Constance Penley is a huge fan.) and the soundtrack was classical musician Antonin Dvzorak which IS PLAYING RIGHT NOW IN MY STUDIO!!!! Are you blowing your mind yet? If I was just 17, it still would not be rape, because it was consensual. Lynne–do not tell anybody about this story.
l only got into it because I was particularly intrigued with the Dylan legacy in NYC, see, as naive as I was… I had every record by Bob Dylan… I got a million of these stories, I am not braggin’… my life has been very risky, full of danger… my brothers don’t have a clue as to what a desperate level of experience I’ve endured. ciao babe… cb
In response to my quest for found footage material related to every year of my life, Craig wrote to me about his own personal investigations and reflections.
I have occasionally considered the project of pinpointing a certain day/event that my fellow humans – maybe a best friend or lover – have lived thru, completely separate and autonomous from me, and then exploring those separate passages of time – as if playing back separate tapes in a row of playback decks, and so get a cross-section layering of personal POVs across/thru a “universal” global event… to appreciate multiple ‘careers’ in the literal sense of the word, and
so to understand human life/relationships on a longitudinal/diachronic axis, as opposed to the synchronic “now” one that becomes dominant when you become lovers. It flirts with the idea of “fate” – that deepens the mystery of it – but it can be more formal, and is in fact a sort of sociology, affording an extra-personal/outside-of-the-self understanding across human society. This would be interesting enough as a non-fiction, with points-of-view and gestures placed next to each other particularly for a ‘cinematic’ rhythm effect (Coppola’s famous scene in godfather)… BUT! One could stray a little bit off ‘documentary’ and insert – as you do in your Your Day is My Night shiftbed movie – a fictional line(s) that ultimately crossed another ‘career’, and then the people have sex or get married or kill each other in a fight, whatever blah blah. cb
Hello Lynne-y!
Things here are pretty bad, and getting worse. The prospect of moving out is necessitating some very dirty labor, and of course stress, and a spirit of doom and gloom among roommates and ATA principals. Every day I have to reach deep for strength and peace of mind. Though we will not stop making art!!! Doing some of that tonight with Molly Hankwitz in my studio. Much amor, Craig
2017
lynne-y, thanks for your great letter!
Things are pretty horrible here – no toilet or shower for 2 months, and no electricity in many circuits… jack-hammering all day… one roommate has left, and because of cost over-runs, ATA is now broke, and crowd-funding. Programming group shows of short works around themes is a downright inspired curatorial move, I must say… but it is insanely labor-intensive! The way that
most programmers get thru it is to just Call for Submissions (and then charge the artists money just for the chance to submit, on top of that!). anyway, we are staying in the loop(s)… poopsie!!… Later, me sweets!!… cb
2018
In Spring 2018, I organized a retrospective of Craig’s films in New York City by working with programmers at UnionDocs, Light Industry, Metrograph Theater, and Bard College. Together, we put together seven sold-out screenings of his work on 16mm and digital. Craig attended each and every screening, introducing each program and taking questions from his extraordinarily enthusiastic audiences in New York.
L – well, lordie, I really can’t claim to be superman enough to throw together more than 2 or 3 shows … doing those things is very tricky and also technically worrisome. What I am saying is that we’d have to have more in the show than my own performance ‘acts’… I have a longer-form double-projection work, 3-D in fact, called “Nth Dimension”, and we can call that the anchor… let’s call that 20 mins. Then I have a blimp thang, maybe 7–10 mins., and that is double projection too… AH!! Just had an insight!!… I will build two reels, and they will be an hour each, and we will roll thru those reels on their respective projectors and embedded in there will be my 3 or so “discrete” pieces, but also there will be a lot of “fun” footage in there that will stand on its own, because it is, well, an odd artifact from the Archive… which is a distinctive feature of Other Cinema… the deep engagement with 20C industrial cinema!!
Ok, so I guess I am working up to this now in brainstorm mode… I will get back to you later with some bon mots about it… including some individual titles. And by the way, it would not ALL have to be in these “twin” reels, we could throw video on from time to time… (assuming there will be a video projector there, and playback devices–VHS would be required!! OC LOVES VHS!!)… I suppose – thinking out loud again – that those “secondary” video shorts would be typical tropes of the OC project… pieces that speak to the OC experience, maybe docs about the archive… for the most part, the Sat. show will be mostly 16mm, a lot of 3-D (I have the glasses), a looser feel, people drinkin’ and making out. Struggling very hard under heavy weight of my curatorial responsibilities right now, and can hardly look even 15 degrees off the necessary escape route, to swim out of this cave.
cb
I could live thru [seeing her], but she will be shocked at the pathetic shell of the old white man that she will see… I will be embarrassed, and her stomach will turn at the sight of what time can do to a loser beatnik living a borderline, absurdly unhealthy, preposterously precarious life… but I would not exclude her, of course not.
It would be easier if you might be close to my side sometimes, as an emotional support in the face of one of the greatest fails of my life… cb
2019
L – As to your text in A Month of Single Frames, your Hammer film… I thought it was wonderful! It was like a George Landow movie, just talking directly to the audience, in a sublimely wise admission that we are all just mortal human bodies, … here together for a short while… then all gonna die, like Barbara… It was her talking to us from behind the screen. It was like she was talking to us from beyond the grave. It was mystical, and yet structural.
I am in an incredibly strained, painful, rush to complete my own presentations, and all hell is breaking loose over here… we have an out-of-town visitor/sub-letter who is not really doing so well in the City, and an Other friend just out of hospital with gallbladder OPERation, and more continued ATA negligence and slacker- shit, and a zillion people (rock bands!) coming and going thru the doors, and the finale to Jeremy Rourke’s act is all about my archive, with my narration taken from a phone conversation… and it is a stand-alone genius tribute, utterly brill 4-screen hand-synced up with remotes (while he is playing music) – he made a song out of the titles to some films in there, and shows the cans and shows the frames animated that are in the cans (and that includes my O No Coronado!!)… and tomorrow I have a huge show with FOUR live performers, and then a 12-hr whole day after that of panic editing before I rush to airport.
I have just now been able (not really) to catch up with the clean-up and back-log of affairs after that HISTORIC venture into the Big Bad Apple… and now my heart is beating again in a rather dangerous way about upcoming gigs… AND please!! You must tell me again the history you had with Bruce Conner!? I will fold it
into my lecture!! [I got my start in experimental filmmaking during a 1985–86 internship with one of Craig’s and my greatest heroes of collage filmmaking, Bruce Conner.]
lynne-y!
Gee, THANKS SOO much for the chocolate-covered strawberries!!!!!!!! And it is a miracle that I got them, cuz I was just ready to jump on my bike and ride to office depot to pick up the newly printed calendar, but an intern came, and just as I was taking her into the editing-room-under the sidewalk, the phone started to ring, and well, I wasn’t going to be able to get back to it and pick it up, but after 2 rings I turned and bolted for it, and it was the delivery-woman at the door!… So the new intern and I gulped down the first two delicacies. An hour later, with 2000 OC cals in hand (with your name on the April 7 headline), the OC folding gang (including David Cox) came in for the task at hand, and the choco-berries were passed around and truly savored… so thanks for making our session a super sweet one, you sweet one!!
–cb
Lynne- well well, ok the cat is out of the bag… and that is alright for you and for me and for OC. And the whole world. OC still does want to show your film in spring, but if fest options open up, of course we will defer. IF IF YOU WAnt an OC gig… (so please let us know within a week) AND… WOW, sis, that SlamDance would OPEN with your movie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! well… I TOLD YOU SO!!! You got a zinger, girl!! HOoRAY HORRAY!! You/we won one!! I am very proud of you, and I am totally identifying with you, darling… please suggest to Slamdance peeps to accommodate your opening to the SUNdance fest so that those lazy lay-abouts-
From 1991 to 2019, I shot film, videotape, and digital images of my father. In 2020, I completed Film About a Father Who which premiered as the opening night movie at Slamdance and then at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight. Throughout the making of the film, Craig offered me the support of a dear friend and fellow artist.
in-Park-City could finally get energized about some things that are HUMAN-LY important…… and so moved to take a goddam Lyft down that wet road to spend 2 hours watching your masterwork!~ … and it is because of your vision, your strength, and your endurance, and your good faith, open-mindedness, your tolerance, your intellectual curiosity, your bottom-less generosity, and your full-frontal honesty to deal with issues that would formerly (and formally!) be considered too ‘personal’. your total fan, cb…
After spending months going through my own archive, I shared Craig’s letters with the man himself.
Lynne: Wowowowow! That is a great idea for an article. It is like you are doing ethnography, on that certain sort of urban, gig-economy, declassé white loser that is me, and that the letters are the “primary source material” … real media archeology… you, hunkering down with your little whisk broom, and excavating these written artifacts. And I will for sure eat it all (back) up… BUT it cannot be in next 48 hours, because I am rushing to pack for a (film fest) trip to Chile. I am so freaked out about packing that I literally threw up, 2 hours ago… So, my gawd, hopefully I can read on the plane (do they have internet connection on them these days?.)… I can prolly give you ‘some guidance’ eventually. But you don’t have to prove anything to Brett and Steve… they already know that you are in good faith. Even if all you have is that bare naked “raw source material”… cb
Lynne’s first film to be included in the Swedish Collection, Filmform. This film includes Gunvor Nelson who is one of the greatest Swedish experimental filmmakers.
“Gunvor Nelson is one of the most highly acclaimed filmmakers in classic American avant-garde film. She grew up in Kristinehamn. (born 1931). Her mother was a teacher and her father was the owner and editor-in-chief of the local newspaper, Kristinehamns-Posten. On leaving school she studied at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, but moved to the US and California in 1953 to study art and art history.
Nelson met her husband-to-be Robert Nelson when she was studying at the California School of Fine Arts (from 1961 onwards, the San Francisco Art Institute). Robert Nelson is one of the great humorists of the American avant-garde. The Nelsons were a vital part of the new film culture that evolved in the San Francisco area and they played a key role in one of America’s oldest and most respected film cooperatives, the Canyon Cinema.
Gunvor Nelson made her first two films together with Dorothy Wiley, wife of the artist William T. Wiley, who in turn made films with Robert Nelson. Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s debut Schmeerguntz (1966) is a humorous and grotesque feminist classic in which the everyday reality of a young mother is contrasted with the ideal of the American woman.
An uncompromising filmmaker, Nelson has a unique voice in experimental cinema. She regards her own works as “personal films”, a recurring element of which is the connection with her own life and experiences. The early films are based around the experiences of a younger woman, culminating in My Name Is Oona (1969), an expressive portrait of her daughter, and Moons Pool (1973), an existentially expressive underwater journey which centres on her own body.
With Trollstenen (‘The Magic Stone’, 1976), which centres on Nelson’s family and upbringing, she began a series of films about Kristinehamn and her family. Typically for Nelson, elements which are local and private fuse together with the general and universal. Nelson’s family and generational study Red Shift (1984), and her painfully sensitive portrayal of her dying mother in Time Being (1991) are regarded as the high points of her family and hometown productions.
Around this time (1983-1990) Nelson also made a total of five different collage films at Filmverkstan in Stockholm, works which give free rein to her own associations and her experimentation with animated images. These films are often regarded both as Nelson’s most demanding and most creative works. Nelson moved back to Kristinehamn and Sweden in December 1992, a homecoming already hinted at in her rhythmically edited collage film Frame Line (1983). Having returned to Sweden she quickly moved on to digital video and was rediscovered in Swedish art circles, resulting in a number of awards and retrospectives both at home and abroad.
Gunvor Nelson has also influenced several generations of filmmakers in her role as a teacher, primarily at the San Francisco Art Institute (1970-1992).” -Filmform
Filmform (est. 1950) is dedicated to preservation, promotion and worldwide distribution of experimental film and video art. Constantly expanding, the distribution catalogue spans from 1924 to the present, including works by Sweden’s most prominent artists and filmmakers, available to rent for public screenings and exhibitions as well as for educational purposes.
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
