Category Archives: SECTIONS

Punctum Books / Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry

https://punctumbooks.com/titles/hand-book-a-manual-on-performance-process-and-the-labor-of-laundry/

by Lizzie Olesker, Lynne Sachs

Published: 06/17/2025

Contributors Andrea Estepa, Silvia Federici, Tera Hunter, Jasmine Holloway, Amanda Katz, Mahoma Lopez, Rosanna Rodriguez, Margarita Lopez, Luo Xiaoyuan, Emily Rubin, Veraalba Santa, Stephen Vitiello

Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry is a collection of writings and images from a performance and film set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our urban reality. With a focus on the people who are paid to wash and fold, Hand Book explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. Informed by both theory and history, filmmaker–poet Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker construct a model for making a site-specific work incorporating both live performance and film. From conversations with workers in laundromats around New York City, they develop a play that magnifies forms of manual labor that often go unrecognized. The core of Hand Book is Sachs and Olesker’s hybrid script which grew out of documentary material they collected in New York City over several years. Within this theatrical construct, the actors themselves navigate the dynamic between their laundry worker characters and who they are in their own lives.

In Hand Book, images also engage with text to create an evocative graphic experience. Turning a page becomes an interactive, quasi-cinematic encounter. We think about the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.

Hand Book includes essays, interviews, memoirs, and poetry that look at the relationship between art and social engagement. Observation, historical research, and fiction intersect, creating a patchwork of what is with a speculative, imagined what was. Historian and author Tera Hunter speaks to the importance of the Washing Society, a group of 3,000 Black women laundry workers who organized in Atlanta in 1881. Feminist historian Silvia Federici engages in a conversation with the authors about the meaning of reproductive labor and its relationship to laundry. Two leaders of a grassroots organization share their experience of immigration and activism. A dancer creates a gestural map of her choreography. An actor deconstructs the charged significance of her Civil War era costume.

Hand Book: A Manual presents an illuminating dialogue between documentary, feminism, film, immigration, labor history, and theater. Throughout, a playwright and filmmaker contemplate how art-making can alter our understanding of the social structure of city life.

The film The Washing Society is available via QR code.

You can order Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process and the Labor of Laundry in several ways:

 – Bookshop.org or your favorite online service.

 – Asterism, a great supporter of independent presses.

 – Directly from Punctum (where you can download the entire e-book for free thanks to their open source policy).

– Support your local bookstore by asking them to order it.

Select Quotes

“This generously kaleidoscopic offering invites readers to think through the labor of laundry via an impressive array of modes in an interactive collage of perspectives, histories, and bodies.”
~ Christopher Harris, filmmaker

“A beautiful example of how art in tandem with other methods of revelation can illuminate the everyday, at once celebrating a particular aspect of how people live, critiquing the power dynamic it contains, and seeking to intervene in bad “business as usual.”
~ Jan Cohen-Cruz, author of Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance

“The best of art manifests an ordinary devotion to experiences that become extraordinary given enough care and attention, or an extraordinary devotion to conveying the genuine depth of what passes for the ordinary. Here it is both, at once.”
~ Paul Chan, artist and publisher

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lizzie Olesker has been making theater and performance in New York City for several decades, reflecting on the politics and poetry of everyday experience. Her plays and solo performances exploring domestic work, personal memory, and quotidian gestures have been developed and presented in NYC at the Public, Cherry Lane Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, New Georges and the Ohio Theater. As an actor, she’s worked with the Talking Band, appearing at La Mama and on international tour. Published in The Brooklyn Rail and by Ice Floe Press, Olesker received support from New York Foundation for the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council and the Dramatists Guild. Olesker teaches at the New School and New York University where she’s active with her adjunct faculty union.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet. Her early works on celluloid took a feminist approach to images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her ever since. With each project, Sachs investigates the connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, found images, letters, and journals, her work takes us on a critical journey through reality and memory. In films such as The House of Science, Which Way Is East, Your Day Is My Night, and Film About a Father Who, Sachs uses hybrid form and collaboration, incorporating documentary, performance, and collage. Many of her films explore the relationship between personal observations and collective historical experience. She often addresses the challenge of translation—from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions are investigated in five essay films that took her to sites affected by war, where she looked at the space between a community’s memory and her own perceptions. Retrospectives of Sachs’s films have been presented at festivals in Argentina, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Germany, Ireland, South Korea, UK, and at NYC’s Museum of the Moving Image. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her collection Year by Year Poems. Sachs received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts and lives in Brooklyn.

Andrea Estepa is Research Fellow at Smith College and historian of women and social movements. Silvia Federici is an activist, scholar, and writer of Caliban and the Witch and Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Tera Hunter is Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University and author of To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War and Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Jasmine Holloway is an actor and singer who has performed with Harlem Repertory Theater and Soho Rep. Amanda Katz is a filmmaker and editor. Mahoma Lopez and Rosanna Rodriguez are co-directors of the Laundry Workers Center, advocating for low-wage immigrant workers. Margarita Lopez is a laundry worker and mother living on the Lower East Side. Luo Xiaoyuan is a translator. Emily Rubin is founder of Loads of Prose and author of the novel Stalina. Veraalba Santa is a Puerto Rican actor and dancer with stage and film experience. Stephen Vitiello is a composer and sound artist and Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth.

Events

Reading and Performance at Unnamable Books – September 8th, 2025

Printed Matter NY Art Book Fair presented by Printed Matter at MOMA’S P.S. 1 – September 14, 2025

Short Films Screening at Ontsteking, Gent, Belgium / Same Stream Twice

On Saturday 7 June 2025, Ontsteking presents a short film program featuring experimental 16mm shorts from around the world that explore themes of fragility, natural environments, transformation, and loss. Curated by Sophie Sherman.
https://www.ontsteking.org/exhibitions/short-films-screening
20:00h | join us in the garden of Bar Bricolage for Sofa Sessions
21:00h | start screening

PROGRAM
PETAL TO THE METAL by Emily Pelstring
(2021 I 3min I Canada I 16mm)
Synopsis : This hand-processed 16mm film reflects on botanical animism. It is a song written for night-crawlers, compost, and shadows, inspired by human flower-lust. Water, fire, earth and air are interwoven with the garden’s creature crew. The work draws a parallel between the photographic alchemy of cinematic experiments and the photosynthetic processes of plants.

THE DEPARTING IMAGES by Ana Edwards
(2023 I 11 min I Chili I 16mm)
Synopsis : Between ethnography and reverie, La Partida de las Imágenes immerses itself in-between the spaces of dreams; the light and dark, the visible and the invisible, matter, spirits and images. An ecological reflection alongside a Mapuche family in the south of Chile that observes the human and nonhuman social maps that arise through dreaming.

UNSTABLE ROCKS by Ewelina Rosinska
(2025 – 25 min – Poland/Germany – 16mm)
Synopsis : “Between 2018 and 2023, Polish filmmaker Ewelina Rosinska travelled through Portugal with Nuno Barroso, her Bolex, and, occasionally, a group of artists and environmental activists. Intuitively edited, following the rhythm of the seasons, Unstable Rocks is a sensitive reflection on the ambivalent nature of human presence in natural environments.

A MESSAGE FROM HUMBOLDT by Matt Feldman
(2024 I 11 min I USA I 16mm)
Synopsis : Glances at an emptied apartment in Milwaukee drift into a psychodrama confronting fears of death and loneliness. Through the use of in-camera experiments, fractured imagery inquires into the hauntings and mysteries of the everyday.

SAME STREAM TWICE by Lynne Sachs
(2012 I 5min I USA I 16mm)
Synopsis : My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word “maya” means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather — like the wind — something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. — L.S.

HOLD MY HAND by Sophie Sherman
(2025 I 17 min I Belgium/France I 16mm)
Synopsis : Filmed with a 16mm bolex during the COVID-19 pandemic, families are confined between England, France, and Belgium. Marked by a birth, a suicide attempt, and a death, the film explores, through acts of care and human contact, the grace of shared moments as well as the fragility and tenderness of human relationships.

Canyon Cinema / Dedication: A Salon with Millennium Film Journal

Still from Demands of Ordinary Devotion

Dedication: A Salon with Millennium Film Journal 
Wednesday, May 14, 2025 @ 7:30pm (doors 7pm)
Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia Street, San Francisco

Lynne Sachs, Jenni Olson, Canyon ED Brett Kashmere, and MFJ Editor Nicholas Gamso in person!

This selection of short moving image pieces—all discussed in recent issues of the Millennium Film Journal—will celebrate the release of MFJ no. 81, “Dedication.” 

The new edition testifies to the grief we’ve felt over the last several months, amid drastic cuts to vital social services, worsening climate disasters (most acutely the LA wildfires), and dimmed hopes of humanitarian justice. These struggles are especially hard to bear in the absence of those artists who’ve helped us to see and better understand ourselves, and whose work remains a comfort even as it challenges and provokes. We want, then, to meet the experience of loss with renewed commitments at the scale of a battered world, certainly, yet also among our community of moving image artists and writers.

The screening will include film and video works by Vincent Grenier, Gunvor Nelson, Lynne Sachs, Steve Reinke, Eva Giolo, Jenni Olson, Chris Kennedy, as well as the West Coast premiere of Kevin Jerome Everson’s Practice, Practice, Practice (2024), which takes place at San Francisco City Hall. 

We are pleased to be joined by filmmakers Lynne Sachs, who will speak on her friendship with Gunvor Nelson, and Jenni Olson.

As always, this Salon event is free and open to the public, with refreshments served beginning at 7pm and the doors closed for the start of the show at 7:30. 

Canyon-Millennium-film-program-notes-050142025Download

Screening Line-Up:
Blue Diary (Jenni Olson, 1998, 7 minutes) – 16mm

Go Between (Chris Kennedy, 2024, 6 minutes)

Practice, Practice, Practice (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2024, 10 minutes)

The Demands of Ordinary Devotion (Eva Giolo, 2022, 12 minutes)

Sundown (Steve Reinke, 2023, 7.5 minutes)

Tabula Rasa (Vincent Grenier, 1993-2004, 7.5 minutes)

Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor (Lynne Sachs, 2018, 9 minutes)

One and the Same (Gunvor Nelson, with Freude, 1973, 4 minutes) – 16mm

Approximate running time: 65 minutes, with discussion to follow 

About Millennium Film Journal 

The Millennium Film Journal is the longest-running publication devoted to artists’ cinema. Its mission is to provide in-depth writing on a field that has, in recent decades, been recognized as the most generative and exciting area of contemporary art. MFJ’s coverage extends to experimental film in all formats, digital media projects, museum installations, festivals, and public artworks from the earliest days of the pre- cinematic into the possibly non-objective future. 

Since its inception in 1978, the journal has served as the premier forum for cinema criticism in America, and at the forefront of film writing as a creative practice, with contributions by leading voices such as Amy Taubin, J. Hoberman, Peter Wollen, Joan Copjec, Ed Halter, and Laura Marks, alongside contributions from filmmakers Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, Cauleen Smith, the Kuchar brothers, and many, many others. Though we operate across multiple platforms, our journal is committed to print publishing, and to grappling with the ever-evolving relation between moving images and the stable surface of the printed page. 

MFJ is affiliated with the Millennium Film Workshop, a center of production and exhibition activity in New York City. The Workshop was founded in 1967 by a group of artists with a vision to expand accessibility to the tools, ideas, and networks of filmmaking beyond the confines of institutions and corporate studios.

The Canyon Cinema Salon series is made possible with generous support from the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, the Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation, and the City of San Francisco Grants for the Arts.

Lynnes Introduction Notes

Gunvor-Nelson-Canyon-Cinema-Millennium-Film-Journal-05142025Download
Canyon Cinema Executive Director Brett Kashmere, Distribution assistant Ashley Rose Tacheira and Autumn Armstrong
Canyon Cinema Staff and Board of Directors members Lian Ladia and Lynne Sachs
MFJ Editor Nicholas Gamzo

The Messy Practice of Cinema / Experimental Lecture at The New School

Poetry and/as Cinema

Choke, Chew, Savor, and Spit: The Messy Practice of Cinema
a performative lecture with film
The New School, School of Media Studies, Writing Across Media
Prof. Margaret Rhee
Technical Support: Mary Rose McClain
May 1, 2025, 4:30 – 6 PM

Lynne lays bare her film practice. In Choke, Chew, Savor, and Spit: The Messy Practice
of Cinema, she examines the making of a visceral cinema – one that does not know
where it is going until it arrives, finds meaning in mistakes, and sets no boundaries
between the real and the imagined. Through it all, she remains aware of the implicit
connection between her body, the bodies of those she photographs, the camera, and
the materiality of film itself.

Larry Gottheim Shorts III at MoMA / Conversation with Larry Gottheim and Lynne Sachs

A Private Room. 2024. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim.

Fri, May 23, 7:00 p.m.
MoMA, Floor T2/T1, The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/10529

Screening followed by a conversation with Larry Gottheim and Lynne Sachs

Your Television Traveler. 1991–2024. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. DCP. 18 min.
Knot/Not. 2019. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. DCP. 22 min.
Entanglement. 2022. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim. DCP. 27 min.
A Private Room. 2024. USA. Directed by Larry Gottheim and Forrest Sprague. DCP. 10 min.

Your Television Traveler was shown in its 16mm print form in the Larry Gottheim Shorts I program. Here, in its digital form, it foreshadows the use of found footage and superimposition in the three digital films that follow here: Knot/Not and Gottheim’s most recent works, Entanglement and A Private Room, both of which were inspired by concepts from quantum physics. Most of the material in Knot/Not, a film of a musical and historical nature, comes from a TV documentary about the great conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, edited to a song about multiplication. Entanglement is a train ride through a landscape inhabited by figures ranging from Phil Spitalny and his All-Girl Orchestra to the Norns from Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung. A Private Room moves from bittersweet, unexpected comedy to the anguish of the human condition, in which we are locked inside ourselves, trying and failing to connect. Presented in their original digital files.

This screening is a part of the series The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim’s Films at MoMA from May 15–27, 2025.

This career-spanning survey celebrates the work of avant-garde filmmaker Larry Gottheim, from his first film, ALA (1969), to his latest, A Private Room (2024). Renowned for his 1970 film Fog Line, Gottheim has continued to challenge notions of what it is to truly see and be present when viewing moving images; his work encourages deep meditation. The series begins with Gottheim’s silent works—continuous shots of bare landscapes in upstate New York—and goes on to focus on his subsequent sound films, including the Elective Affinities, a series of four feature-length films: Horizons (1973), Mouches Volantes (1976), Four Shadows (1978), and Tree of Knowledge (1981). Gottheim’s more recent film works explore philosophy and family, driven by complex editing and sonic designs.

In 1965 Gottheim founded the cinema department at Binghamton University, in central New York State—one of the first film programs with a curriculum focused on personal, experimental film—helping to spur a revival in academic and professional activity in avant-garde film in the US and providing an incubation space for filmmakers such as Gottheim, Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, Nicholas Ray, and Saul Levine, among others. The work begun by Gottheim at Binghamton shaped the experimental film scene for decades to come, and continues to have an indelible impact on avant-garde cinema. This series coincides with the recent publication of The Red Thread: Larry Gottheim and His Films, in which the filmmaker discusses his explorations of cinematic perception, alongside other artists’ and critics’ reflections on the importance of Gottheim’s work.

Portrait of Jason / Introduction by Lynne Sachs

Part of “Academy Museum Branch Selects” – Selected by the Documentary Branch | Q&A with Documentary Branch member Lynne Sachs & visual artist Jack Waters

Sunday April 27, 2025 at 3:15pm
Paris Theater, 4 West 58th Street NYC
https://www.paristheaternyc.com/film/portrait-of-jason-branch-selects

Film will be introduced by Lynne Sachs, Filmmaker & Documentary Branch member; screening followed by Sachs & visual artist Jack Waters.

On December 3, 1966, documentarian Shirley Clarke and her partner, actor Carl Lee, spent 12 hours interviewing cabaret performer Jason Holliday about his life, in Clarke’s Hotel Chelsea apartment. The end result is a milestone in documentary filmmaking, touching upon such issues as race, sexuality, and the relationship between documentarians and their subjects, as well as introducing an unforgettable personality to the screen.

ON EROSION , a Short Film Programme by Ursula / Same Stream Twice

Het Bos
Ankerrui 5-7, 2000 Antwerpen
May 1 2025
https://www.hetbos.be/programma/evenement/2025-05-01-on-erosion-a-short-film-programme-by-ursula

ENG
Ursula invites you to ON EROSION, a short film programme surrounding Alex Schuurbiers’ new film Placeholder, comprising experimental shorts that deal with remembrance, terrain, geology and forgetting.

The screening will be followed by a short talk with Alex & writer Vincent Van Meenen. With a video introduction from Lynne Sachs

Ursula is an Antwerp based collective of women working with the moving image.

ursulacollective.org
@ursulacollective

Programme

Markings 1-3, Eva Kolcze, CA, 2011, 7’

A tactile journey in three parts. Markings 1-3 is an attempt to connect with nature through the surface of 16mm celluloid film, using such techniques as tinting, toning, painting and scratching.

Deepwater Horizon: Exhalation, Asako Fujita, JP, 2021, 5’

Deepwater Horizon: Exhalation blends weathered archival footage portraying a community of female free-divers from ancient Japan with CGI imagery documenting the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Sonar audio of the spill dances around deep inhalations, creating counterpoints of a claustrophobic sonic tapestry and a transfixing marine meditation.

The Great Kind Mystery, Ella Morton, CA, 2022, 16’

Inuk and Mi’kmaw artist Amy Hull tells stories about growing up in Newfoundland. Her words are illustrated by altered Super 8mm footage of Newfoundland landscapes, where the distortion of the celluloid film reflects the wonder and nostalgia of her relationship with the land.

Babel, Meggy Rustamova, BE, 2018, 8’

Everything begins on a fixed shot of a middle-aged lady, serious, thoughtful. She tries hard to remember some words from a language unfamiliar to our ears, her native language: Assyrian. Simple words (numbers, days, expressions,…) reappear from the bottom of the ages; they emerge little by little memories of Juliette Rustamova which one understands later that she is the mother of the artist.

Same Stream Twice, Lynne Sachs, US, 2012, 4’

“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.”

Placeholder, Alex Schuurbiers, BE, 2025, 8’

Placeholder is an attempt at holding it together in the face of absence; of a mother, of a memory, of something tangible. Images oscillate between dreams and recollection, distorted and transformed over time.

Eight Films on Tarot To Be Shown in Any Order / The Tarot

Jonathan Allen, Le Carte Parlanti (2017), video still.

Exhibition Event Series: Tarot
Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
16 April 2025, 7:00PM – 8:30PM

https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/eight-films-on-tarot-2025

With Lori E. Allen and William Fowler.

Eight Films on Tarot To Be Shown in Any Order traces the imprint of tarot on film. Spanning artists’ moving image, archive television and cult cinema, a selection of rare archival works will be drawn at random in the Warburg’s auditorium, revealing a remarkable film history guided by chance. 

We are holding a film screening event in conjunction with our current exhibition, “Tarot – Origins & Afterlives”, which has inaugurated the Warburg Institute’s new artistic programme and has received over 15,000 visitors to date. The Tarot by Lynne Sachs screened alongside Derek Jarman’s Tarot aka The Magician, an extract from Agnes Varda’s Cleo de 5 a 7, and many other artist films. During the event cards representing each film in the programme will be selected at random to determine the order of screening.

William Fowler is Curator of Artists’ Moving Image at the BFI National Archive where he acquires, restores and curates films. Recent projects include People Make Television and Together: The Films of Lorenza Mazzetti. His co-authored book The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film and Television is available through Strange Attractor Press/MIT. 

Lori E Allen is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on sound design and experimental composition. She is published, with collaborators, on various record labels including Tapeworm, Wormhole and Bloxham Tapes under the name TEARS | O V. Recent projects include, People Make Television, and TRANSMISSIONS TV, on which she worked with various collaborators.