CONTRACTIONS Lynne Sachs, USA, 2024, 12′ International Premiere
“A couple of years after the annulment of the ruling known as Roe v. Wade, which, since 1973, guaranteed the right to abortion in the United States, weeds are growing on the walls of an empty clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. In this abandoned setting, a group of women, some holding hands with their companions, seem to recreate a kind of off-screen abortion: the entrance and exit of the clinic. We do not see their faces, but the sound guides us: in the voices of two women we hear the testimonies of those who once exercised a right, now lost.” – Karina Solórzano
It is this short film that catapults Lynne Sachs and positions her as one of the first feminist filmmakers of experimental cinema.
Faust: who is she?
Mephistopheles: Look at her carefully. This is Lilith.
Faust: who?
Mephistopheles: Adam’s first wife. Beware of her beautiful hair, the only finery that she shows off, when she catches a young man with it she does not let him go easily.
With a unique sensibility and poetic vision, Lynne Sachs is an American filmmaker who challenges the conventions of experimental cinema. Through her works, she explores themes such as identity, memory and family, creating intimate and emotional pieces that invite reflection. Her distinctive style and commitment to innovation have made her a leading figure in the world of independent film. In this review I will talk about one of the most significant shorts of her career: A Biography of Lilith . And I will speak of it as a maximum expression of semantics.
I met Lilith in my last year of high school, at a Catholic school. My approach to religion had been limited to wearing a skirt on Sunday mass until I was 7 years old. My dad stopped believing in institutions and I stopped believing in God. My interest in other beliefs was not above average, but everything changed when I heard her name.
I asked the same question as Faust in Goethe’s play, and the Mephistopheles of my own drama answered the same: “she is Adam’s first wife.” I did not dare deny her existence for two reasons. The first, because of the ignorance in which I knew she found me: I refused to know more about the Bible; the second, because the idea of a woman before Eve who turned her back on the creator seemed impossible to me, however, it gave me a hope that burned in my chest. Not denied, but demortified, I let myself be carried away by Lilith’s presence in my daily life. I discovered, then, that if God were a woman, then it would be her.
Mentioned by contemporary authors as “the first feminist woman,” Lilith is born from mud. God gives her Eden to him under the same limitations as her successor, but Lilith rebels against Adam’s desires, without him being able to understand that her pleasure also matters to her. Unlike Eve, Lilith is not born from Adam’s rib, so she thinks by and for herself. In the sexual act in which Lilith demands to get on top, Adam does not allow it and she flees to the Red Sea. She meets Lucifer, gives him wings and God gives her an opportunity to return, under the same conditions. Lilith chooses her freedom and, presumably, she is the one who disguises herself as the snake. As part of her punishment, she is condemned to be the infertile woman. Lilith grows and develops in today’s world as the witch who is guilty of the guilt of women of the same condition as hers, as well as the lust of men and also the cause of crib death.
Lilith becomes a fable, the monster who sleeps under the bed of adulterers and impious people, sometimes lulling the crib of a newborn. She is stripped of her own history. Lilith does not appear in The Bible, and yet she exists in the Catholic imagination. She appears for the first time as a literary figure in Goethe’s Faust , briefly (1808 years after The Creation) and begins, at a snail’s pace, to gain visibility . Today, Lilith is one of the greatest symbols of the feminist movement. We carry her in her chest and she burns inside us stronger than ever. It no longer appears only in intellectualism, nor only in books of canonical literature. She becomes Lucifer’s wife in television series, she is painted and sculpted in contemporary art, sociological theses are written under her own name, Drag Queens dress like her on reality shows . Lilith, today, is on everyone’s lips. But, as in Genesis, I think it is important to go back to the beginning to understand the feminist Lilith beyond her sexual liberation.
I remember when I finally discovered what the apple represented in the creation story. Clinging to the little interest she found in Catholicism, I discovered that the apple represents modesty in conservative discourses, which is why Eva covers her naked body. But, this didn’t make sense to me. If Lilith was the daughter of God and had disguised herself as a snake, why prohibit Eve from what freed her? In this same speech, I forgot that the characters in The Bible are, above all, human, and that the ultimate goal of this text is to talk about forgiveness and goodness. I also remembered that it was we who have distorted and polarized belief.
Then I understood that the apple actually represented knowledge, reason, the word. Lilith gave consciousness, first to Eve and then to Adam, about themselves and their surroundings. She gave them free will. And if man is in the image and likeness of God, it is because of his ability to create from the word. If words make reason, and if reason is what differentiates us from animals, then I had no choice but to conclude: if God is a woman, that woman is Lilith. She gave us the gift of knowledge.
After this journey of reflection, which took me approximately 7 years, I keep coming across Lilith: a challenging woman. And this time she did it under the name Lynne Sachs. She understands, as much as I do (or at least I want to think so), the role that Lilith occupies both today and in history, our history. In her short film, A biography of Lilith, she shows us a bar dancer, Cherie Wallace, whom Sachs interviews about some ideas that, if in themselves are a topic to talk about today, in the early 2000s They were barely placed on the table. She talks about men who take refuge in women from the gallant life, from adoption, about women who belong to that world and who are forced to give birth. But the most surprising thing is that she does it from an intellectual and ethical maturity that little is expected of women in her context (and again, I repeat: much less in the early 2000s).
However, it is not the answers or the supposed interview (since we never hear the questions) that we focus on. They only help us understand Lynn’s Lilith. A narrating voice tells the story of Lilith, precisely the one that I have explained previously, but in the images we see representations of her if she belonged to our present day. We see a woman arriving naked to her Eden (which I interpreted as her backyard) full of branches, grass, and a man’s green areas.
So, when the narrator tells us about the relationship between Adam and Lilith, we see this previously naked woman wearing shorts and surrounded by pages, while the man generates approaches that she rejects. She wants to read. But he tries to deny the knowledge. Then, he runs away. Cherie is baptized in the black sea as she discovers her freedom. And somewhere between the present and the past, she becomes a dancer. All this while Sachs places passages of Lilith in the different conceptions that she has of her: witch, lust, stalker, infertile and child murderer. However, as we watch Sachs’ short, Cherie tells the demons accompanying her: “all the children in the world are my children.” Have we not all been guided by the same rule? (Or has teaching made me crazy and I agree with her?: All the children in the world are my children). She doesn’t embarrass us, or I think she shouldn’t embarrass us.
Machismo is not genetic, it is historical. Women and men were not molded by clay, no. We were shaped by our own circumstances. Exiled from Eden, with arms open to knowledge, this is how we wanted to do it. The difference is that women have carried the guilt, the sin… because that is how the beginning of the story tells it. We stay at home and dedicate ourselves to the family. And that is, I believe, our best historical quality: that above all things, we put life first. No, I am not talking about anti-abortion campaigns, but precisely the opposite. Cherie Wallace, in the Lynn Sachs short, basically says that she couldn’t give a child a decent life. She understands her job, she doesn’t intend to leave it, but she understands the weight of carrying a life, a life other than her own and one to which she would not like her baby to belong. So, she gives him up for adoption. Lynn Sachs makes the first approach to Lilith as a human character, as perhaps the Apostles once wanted to make it known.
Lynne Sachs understands the symbology of Lilith as much as feminist women do; not in the archaic text, but in her own life. In her short film Biography of Lilith (1997) we navigate the words of Cherie, who conveys in them a ring of social and emotional responsibility about being a woman in the current era, about the birth, desire and regret of the masculinized man. It is this short film that catapults Lynn Sachs and positions her as one of the first feminist filmmakers of experimental cinema. Sachs also compiles fragments of the fables of Lilith the witch, Lilith the child stalker, Lilith the female demon, Lilith lust, the sinful Lilith, the stormy Lilith, and the Lilith Pandora. Using voice-over narration and Wallace’s voice, he dismantles the metamorphoses of this mythological character, present in the religious imagination, to turn her into her last figure: Lilith, a woman free from male pleasure, a sorora woman who acquires and shares knowledge, woman who liberates her equal, condemned woman and, more than anything, woman of this and all the revolutions that come after.
In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion. Contractions takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We hear from an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform abortions with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence.
Film followed by a special audio piece: WE CONTINUE TO SPEAK (Lynne Sachs, 4 min. 33 Sec., audio, 2024 ). Filmmaker Lynne Sachs records the participants and producers of her film Contractions as they vocalize their reactions to the reduction of women’s bodily autonomy in the United States.
Denial
Paul Moakley, Daniel Lombroso. On the eve of Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection bid, he captivated his supporters with a narrative that led to widespread denial, diverting attention from those upholding our country’s ethics and election laws. This distraction allowed conspiracy theories to overshadow essential facts, culminating in the January 6th attack on the Capitol. As the 2022 midterm election approached, civil servant Chairman Bill Gates of Maricopa County was instrumental in determining the vote and delivering results for the largest voting district in a swing state that could sway a national election.
Hold the Line
Daniel Lombroso. When the largest Protestant organization in the U.S. decides to purge women in leadership positions, one prominent female pastor fights back.
I Am The Immaculate Conception
Frank Eli Martin
In 1985, the Irish village of Ballinspittle witnessed a mass visionary experience at the local grotto, where worshippers claimed to see the statue of Mary move. Nearly forty years later, only a few local devotees remain, including the statue’s caretaker Patrick Joseph Simms. I Am The Immaculate Conception documents the mystical landscape of rural Irish Catholicism and delves into a darker undercurrent beneath its surface.
Seat 31: Zooey Zephyr
Kimberly Reed. After Zooey Zephyr’s expulsion from the Montana House of Representatives for defending transgender medical care, she made a nearby bench her “office.” Director Kimberly Reed’s intimate camera transforms this shocking political moment into a portrait of trans and queer joy.
To mark the publication of the first English-language edition of Chris Marker’s 1982 photo-essay Le Dépays by Film Desk Books, Metrograph offers a program of films that touch on some of the director’s recurring obsessions, as evidenced in this remarkable volume. A program of short films explore some of his favorite animal avatars (Cat Listening to Music, An Owl is an Owl is an Owl), and his profound connection to Japan (The Koumiko Mystery, Sans Soleil, Tokyo Days), followed by a panel discussion with Paul Chan and Lynne Sachs, moderated by Sadie Starnes, while A.K., Marker’s portrait of Akira Kurosawa on the set of Ran (1985), screens in a very special double bill.
“Inventing Japan is just another way of getting to know it. Once you’ve gotten beyond the clichés, once you’ve outwitted the cliché of cutting through the clichés, then the chances are mathematically the same for all, and consider the time you’ve saved! Trust appearances, consciously confuse the décor with the drama, never worry about understanding, just be there—dasein—and everything will come your way. Well, something, at least.”—Marker, in Le Dépays
DIRECTOR: CHRIS MARKER 1988 / 73MIN / DIGITAL
Program: Cat Listening to Music (1990, 3′) An Owl Is an Owl (1990, 3′) Tokyo Days (1988, 21′) The Koumiko Mystery (1965, 46′)
Marker’s profound connection to Japan is explored in The Koumiko Mystery, which he filmed at the time of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, an event that permanently altered the face of the city. The first of Marker’s many portraits of the Japanese capital follows a young Japanese woman, Koumiko Muraoka, on a guided tour of her hometown. A thrilling city symphony/essay film, capturing the throbbing pulse of a metropolis in the midst of self-reinvention. Screens with two shorts that explore some of Marker’s favorite animal avatars—Cat Listening to Music and An Owl is an Owl is an Owl—followed by a panel discussion with artist and writer Paul Chan and filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs, moderated by Sadie Starnes.
Cat Listening to Music, An Owl is an Owl is an Owl, Tokyo Days courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV. In “From the Outside In”, we traverse Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.
Performing the Real Fri June 7 at 7 PM Q&A with Sachs & Lizzie Olesker (co-director of The Washing Society) moderated by filmmaker Sam Green
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst. Special guest: Paolo Javier (Swerve, poet collaborator).
Fossil, 1986 12 min • The Washing Society 2018 44 min • Swerve, 2022 8 min
In this intimate artist talk and workshop, Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing.
Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Ladies Wear, 1983 3 min• Tornado, 2002 4 min • Your Day is My Night, 2013 63 min
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
The Small Ones, 2007 3 min • The Task of the Translator, 2010 10 min • E•pis•to•la•ry: Letter to Jean Vigo, 2021 5 min • Investigation of a Flame, 2001 45 min
Heavy with chains that bind, this program of films magnifies Sachs’ feminist gaze through her personal diaries, family portraits, and women’s testimonies.
Drawn & Quartered, 1987 4 min • The House of Science, 1991 30 min. • And Then We Marched, 3 min. 2017 • A Year in Notes and Numbers, 1987 4 min. • Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, 2018 9 min. • Maya at 24, 2021 4 min. • Contractions, 2024 12 min • We Continue to Speak, 2024 4 min
Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Accra Shepp (member of TOMT cast) moderated by Tabitha Jackson
In A Month of Single Frames (2019, 14 min), Lynne explores filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s experience of solitude. Her text on screen brings them together in multiple spaces and times. In Tip of My Tongue (2017. 84 min.), she gathers together 12 fellow New Yorkers — born across several continents in the 1960s — to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they examine the ways in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are.
Conversation with Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, and Ira Sachs
Film About a Father Who (2020, 74 min) is Lynne’s attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, her cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, she allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. In The Jitters (2023, 3 min), Lynne performs with her partner filmmaker Mark Street, celebrating who they are independently and together.
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators, and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum.” – Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema
“I walked into Downtown Community Television (now DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film. I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.” – Lynne Sachs
Individual tickets for screenings are $16, and $8 for DCTV Members. The artist talk is $20, and $10 for DCTV Members. A Series Pass grants access to all screenings for $80, and $40 for DCTV Members – artist talk is sold separately. A special print monograph will be included with the purchase of a Series Pass, and on sale at Firehouse.
Founded in 1972, DCTV (Downtown Community TV) has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. In September 2022, DCTV opened the Firehouse Cinema, a documentary theater where filmmakers and film lovers can come together in appreciation of nonfiction film.
Thank you to DCTV, Film-Makers Cooperative, Cinema Guild, and Sylvia Savadjian.
Sunday, May 12 2024 at 8:15 PM Anthology Film Archives, New York City
Prismatic Ground is a New York festival centered on experimental documentary and avant-garde film. Hosted with media partner Screen Slate at handful of venues across Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, the festival will hold its fourth edition May 8-12, 2024 (with a virtual component, in which participation is voluntary,).
We seek work that pushes the formal boundaries of non-fiction in the spirit and tradition of experimental filmmaking. This “spirit” is somewhat amorphous, undefinable, and open to interpretation, but refers to work that engages with its own materiality, privileges a heightened artistic experience over clear meaning, and/or conveys a liberatory political sensibility in the agitprop tradition.
Contractions screening with Malqueridas by Tana Gilbert
Malqueridas Tana Gilbert 75 min
They are women. They are mothers. They are prisoners serving long sentences in a correctional facility in Chile. Their children grow up far from them, but remain in their hearts. In prison, they find affection in other partners who share their situation. Mutual support among these women becomes a form of resistance and empowerment. ‘Malqueridas’ builds their stories through images captured by them with cell phones inside the prison, recovering the collective memory of a forgotten community. —Square Eyes/Tana Gilbert
2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV, and in celebration, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in NYC will be presenting an extensive retrospective. Taking place June 7-11, the series features 24 of her films plus a sound-collage world premiere associated with her latest film, Contractions, which was a selection at True/False, Prismatic Ground, and DC/DOX 2024). The upcoming New York Times Op-Docs release, which takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic, will premiere at the NYT timed to the 2nd anniversary of Roe v Wade being overturned.
Titled Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In, the retrospective traverses Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. The program notes continue, “From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.”
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum,” said Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema.
“I walked into Downtown Community TV (DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film,” said Sachs. “I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.”
Founded in 1972, DCTV has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. A community of and for documentary filmmakers, DCTV is a unique space where screenings, discussions, youth media, continuing education programs, and filmmaking resources exist side by side with award-winning productions.
Check out the schedule below and get tickets starting May 8 here.
Friday, June 7
Program 1: Performing the Real
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst.
Opening Night: Friday, June 7th, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker moderated by Sam Green
FOSSIL 1986, 12 min The village women of Mambai in Bali, Indonesia collect sand and stone from the river. Each woman sells what she has gathered for construction material. But the river is more than a place to work. It is a place to bathe, wash clothes, laugh and tell stories. Fossil is a collaborative performance piece that evolved through discussion and movement exercises in a collective response to Lynne’s images from Mambai.
THE WASHING SOCIETY Co-Directed with Lizzie Olesker, 2018, 44 min When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. Inspired by To ‘Joy My Freedom author Tera Hunter’s depiction of the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta and historian Silvia Federici’s writing on reproductive labor, Sachs and Olesker’s film investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of The Washing Society through interviews and observational moments. With original music by Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in The Washing Society creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
SWERVE 2022, 8 min A market and playground in Queens, New York, a borough of New York City, becomes the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Saturday, June 8
Program 2: Frames and Stanzas: An Artist Talk and Workshop
Saturday, June 8, 12pm In this intimate artist talk and workshop, filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will present excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing. Films to be screened include: A Biography of Lilith, Starfish Aorta Colossus, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home.
Program 3: It’s a Hell of a Place A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Saturday, June 8th, 4pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
LADIES WEAR 1983, 3 min Filmed with Sachs’ brother, Ira Sachs, on the New York City subway.
TORNADO 2022, 4 min A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ Tornado is a cine-poem shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11th. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these signed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.
YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT 2013, 63 min Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.
Program 4: Fightless
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
Saturday, June 8, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Naeem Mohaiemen
THE SMALL ONES 2007, 3 min During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery, and home movies of children at a birthday party.
THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR 2010, 10 min Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO 2021, 5 min In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic, Zero for Conduct, in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, she wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can so quickly turn into chaos and violence.
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME 2001, 45 min On May 17, 1968, nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm. Investigation of a Flame is an intimate look at this unlikely, disparate band of resistors – the Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known – who broke the law in a poetic act of civil disobedience. The publicity and news coverage from the ensuing trial helped galvanize an increasingly disillusioned American public. Sachs has combined long unseen archival footage with a series of informal interviews with Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Howard Zinn, Tom Lewis, and Marjorie and Tom Melville and others to encourage viewers to ponder the relevance of such events today.
Sunday, June 9
2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV, and in celebration, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in NYC will be presenting an extensive retrospective. Taking place June 7-11, the series features 24 of her films plus a sound-collage world premiere associated with her latest film, Contractions, which was a selection at True/False, Prismatic Ground, and DC/DOX 2024). The upcoming New York Times Op-Docs release, which takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic, will premiere at the NYT timed to the 2nd anniversary of Roe v Wade being overturned.
Titled Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In, the retrospective traverses Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. The program notes continue, “From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.”
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum,” said Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema.
“I walked into Downtown Community TV (DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film,” said Sachs. “I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.”
Founded in 1972, DCTV has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. A community of and for documentary filmmakers, DCTV is a unique space where screenings, discussions, youth media, continuing education programs, and filmmaking resources exist side by side with award-winning productions.
Check out the schedule below and get tickets starting May 8 here.
Friday, June 7
Program 1: Performing the Real
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst.
Opening Night: Friday, June 7th, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker moderated by Sam Green
FOSSIL 1986, 12 min The village women of Mambai in Bali, Indonesia collect sand and stone from the river. Each woman sells what she has gathered for construction material. But the river is more than a place to work. It is a place to bathe, wash clothes, laugh and tell stories. Fossil is a collaborative performance piece that evolved through discussion and movement exercises in a collective response to Lynne’s images from Mambai.
THE WASHING SOCIETY Co-Directed with Lizzie Olesker, 2018, 44 min When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. Inspired by To ‘Joy My Freedom author Tera Hunter’s depiction of the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta and historian Silvia Federici’s writing on reproductive labor, Sachs and Olesker’s film investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of The Washing Society through interviews and observational moments. With original music by Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in The Washing Society creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
SWERVE 2022, 8 min A market and playground in Queens, New York, a borough of New York City, becomes the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Saturday, June 8
Program 2: Frames and Stanzas: An Artist Talk and Workshop
Saturday, June 8, 12pm In this intimate artist talk and workshop, filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will present excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing. Films to be screened include: A Biography of Lilith, Starfish Aorta Colossus, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home.
Program 3: It’s a Hell of a Place A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Saturday, June 8th, 4pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
LADIES WEAR 1983, 3 min Filmed with Sachs’ brother, Ira Sachs, on the New York City subway.
TORNADO 2022, 4 min A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ Tornado is a cine-poem shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11th. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these signed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.
YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT 2013, 63 min Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.
Program 4: Fightless
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
Saturday, June 8, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Naeem Mohaiemen
THE SMALL ONES 2007, 3 min During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery, and home movies of children at a birthday party.
THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR 2010, 10 min Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO 2021, 5 min In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic, Zero for Conduct, in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, she wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can so quickly turn into chaos and violence.
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME 2001, 45 min On May 17, 1968, nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm. Investigation of a Flame is an intimate look at this unlikely, disparate band of resistors – the Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known – who broke the law in a poetic act of civil disobedience. The publicity and news coverage from the ensuing trial helped galvanize an increasingly disillusioned American public. Sachs has combined long unseen archival footage with a series of informal interviews with Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Howard Zinn, Tom Lewis, and Marjorie and Tom Melville and others to encourage viewers to ponder the relevance of such events today.
Sunday, June 9
Program 5: Bodies and Bonds
Heavy with chains that bind, this program of films magnifies Sachs’ feminist gaze through her personal diaries, family portraits, and women’s testimonies.
Sunday, June 9, 2pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs + Dara Messinger
DRAWN AND QUARTERED 1987, 4 min A male form and a female form exist in their own private domains, separated by a barrier. Only for a moment does the one intrude upon the pictorial space of the other. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium.
THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE 1991, 30 min A defiant feminist mosaic on the ways that science enters our culture and defines what it is to be a woman. At age 30, Lynne Sachs wondered why so much about our culture simply made her feel bad about her body. She wrote in her diary, shot film with her friends and collected archival footage from educational films on menstruation and childbirth. By giving new meaning to the “body of the body” and the “body of the mind,” she works to dismantle those stereotypes of women rooted in Western patriarchy.
AND THEN WE MARCHED 2017, 4 min Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote,1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. She then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions.
A YEAR IN NOTES AND NUMBERS 2017, 4 min A year’s worth of Lynne’s to-do lists forces her to confront the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone.
CAROLEE, BARBARA & GUNVOR 2018, 9 min From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists and dear friends who had 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, she shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
MAYA AT 24 2021, 4 min Lynne films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle, clockwise, as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward, on celluloid at 24 frames per second. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age
CONTRACTIONS 2024, 12 min In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion. This film takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence. A New York Times: Op-Docs release.
WE CONTINUE TO SPEAK 2024, 4 min. 33 Sec., sound collage Sachs records the participants in her film Contractions as they vocalize their reactions to the reduction of women’s bodily autonomy in the US. World Premiere.
Monday, June 10
Program 6: Tip of My Tongue + A Month of Single Frames
Monday, June 10, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Accra Shepp (photographer, member of cast) moderated by Tabitha Jackson
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES 2019, 14 min In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C-Scape Dune Shack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder, and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her dune shack images, sounds and writing to Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
TIP OF MY TONGUE 2017, 83 min To celebrate her 50th birthday, Lynne gathers together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places, like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where Sachs grew up. She invites 12 fellow New Yorkers to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together, they discuss some of the most salient, strange and revealing moments of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive examination of the way in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are. They move from the Vietnam War protests to the Anita Hill hearings to the Columbine Shootings to Occupy Wall Street as the film becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. Traditional timelines are replaced by a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression.
Tuesday, June 11
Program 7: Film About a Father Who + The Jitters
Closing Night: Tuesday, June 11, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Ira Sachs
THE JITTERS 2024, 3 min In 2023, the University of Indiana commissioned Sachs and 16 other filmmakers to make a film to celebrate the first “Century of 16mm.” Lynne decided to create a film that reflected who she was at this moment in her life. The Jitters becomes a performance with her partner Mark Street (also one of the commissioned artists), celebrating who they are independently and together … along with their three pet frogs.
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO 2020, 74 min Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. A Cinema Guild release.
The Witch Film by George Méliès, 1906, 12’; silent movie
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts Film by Lynne Sachs, 1991, 30’; language: English; English subtitles
In collaboration with multimedia artists Lourenço Soares and Paulo Wirz, two short films will be screened – interspersed with video art pieces – that focus on the very anthropological topics of nature, witchcraft and science. Both films explore the intersection of reality and illusion: Méliès through the lens of early cinema’s fascination with magic and spectacle, and Sachs through a postmodern interrogation of scientific truth and narrative construction. The screening of these thought-provoking films will be followed by a brief discussion.
Frames and Stanzas: a master class on film and poetry
Lynne Sachs Centro de cultura digital and Ambulante La Cineteca Nacional, Mexico City
April 11, 2024 – 5 to 6:30 PM / 17 h to 18:30 h
Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share insights she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will share excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay. This master class will include excerpts from Lynne’s films includingStarfish Aorta Colossus, Tip of My Tongue, The Washing Society, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home, and Swerve. As part of the class experience, participants will write a poem.
Opening the Family Album / “Abrir el álbum familiar” Lynne Sachs Ambulante Festival and Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City
Sesiones virtuales: Jueves 14 de marzo, de 19 a 20 horas (9 to 10 PM NYC) y viernes 5 de abril de 17 a 18 horas (7 to 8 PM NYC) Sábado presenciales: Sábado 13 y domingo 14 de abril, de 11 a 14 horas, final performance April 14 at 6 PM
Opening the Family Album is a workshop in which we will explore the ways in which images of our mother, father, sister, brother, child, cousin, grand-parent, aunt or uncle might become material for the making of a personal film. We will meet virtually twice for one hour: March 14 and April 5. Then we will meet in-person with Lynne for two days (April 13 & 14, 11 am to 14 pm and for a final, public showing later that day at 6 pm), all at Centro Cultural Digital. Please join Lynne between our workshop and our final performance for her 16mm film program
Each participant will come to the workshop with a single photograph (both in hand and digital) they want to examine. During the workshop, you will write text in response to this image by incorporating storytelling and performance. In the process, we will discuss and challenge notions of truth-telling and language. Your final work will then be a completed film with sound or a film with live narration. Previous filmmaking and editing experience is appreciated but not required. Participants may use their own digital cameras or cell phones to make images and sounds. Please register early so that you can be part of our first meeting which will be in March and will be virtual.
This workshop is inspired by the work of Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, whose writing explores family relationships during the Fascist years and 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.” We will also read texts from Roland Barthes and Clarise Lispector.
Participants are encouraged to have their own cameras, but cell phone cameras are FINE. Also, if you know how to edit digitally that is helpful but not critical.
