Category Archives: SECTIONS

Part Time Reverie – Curated by Aaditya Aggarwal / Canyon Cinema Discovered

Part Time Reverie
Canyon Cinema Discovered
Curated by Aaditya Aggarwal
October 15, 2022
https://connects.canyoncinema.com/program/prime-time-reverie/#essay

About the Program

From cosmetic commercials to women-led talk shows to narrative melodrama, television catered to feminized viewers is a formally diverse genre, nudging, socializing, and mirroring its spectators in intimate and discerning ways. Capturing the urgent, anchoring spirit of prime time telecasts, Prime Time Reverie stages a fragmented history of television as a women’s medium. The works in this program engage multiple tides of broadcasting, from soapy to confessional, from sensationalist to documentarian. Weaving an absent or corporeal presence through each work, televised portrayals of womanhood—hermetic, large, versatile—incite daydreams among a mass populace, flirting with histories of technology, desire, and visuality.

Screening Premiere: October 2, 2022 @ 3:30pm, Roxie Theater, San Francisco
Streaming Online: October 9-15, 2022

Films in this Program

Introduction to Prime Time Reverie
Aaditya Aggarwal
Program Curator

Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron)
Cauleen Smith
1992, 6 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
CHRONICLES OF A LYING SPIRIT (BY KELLY GABRON) is less a depiction of ‘reality’ than an exploration of the implications of the mediation of Black history by film, television, magazines and newspapers. Using her alter ego, Kelly Gabron, Smith fabricates a personal history of her emergence as an artist from white-male- dominated American history (and American film history). Smith collages images and bits of text from a scrapbook by ‘Kelly Gabron’ that had been completed before the film was begun, and provides female narration by ‘Kelly Gabron’ that, slowly but surely, makes itself felt over the male narration about Kelly Gabron (Chris Brown is the male voice). The film’s barrage of image, text and voice is repeated twice, and is followed by a coda. That most viewers see the second presentation of the imagery differently from the original presentation demonstrates one problem with trusting any media representation.  – Scott MacDonald

Rent from Canyon Cinema

No No Nooky T.V.
Barbara Hammer
1987, 12 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
NO NO NOOKY T.V. posits sexuality to be a social construct in a “sex-text” of satiric graphic representation of” dirty pictures.” Made on an Amiga Computer and shot in 16mm film, NO NO NOOKY T.V, confronts the feminist controversy around sexuality with electronic language, pixels and interface. Even the monitor is eroticized in this film/video hybrid that points fun at romance, sexuality, and love in our post-industrial age.

Restored print of No No Nooky T.V, courtesy of Academy Film Archive, 2018. page1image65823472
Digital file for online presentation courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix
Rent from Canyon Cinema

Removed
Naomi Uman
1999, 6 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
Using a piece of found European porn from the 1970s, nail polish, and bleach, this film creates a new pornography, one in which the woman exists only as a hole, an empty, animated space.

Rent from Canyon Cinema

Waiting for Commercials
Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut
1966-72, 1992, 7 minutes, color, sound, digital video
Part of a restored collection of rare early works by Nam June Paik, Waiting for Commercials is a hilarious compendium of Japanese TV commercials. This early example of Paik’s use of appropriated television imagery as pop cultural artifact was originally created for a performance piece of the same name, which featured Charlotte Moorman and her cello.

Rent from Electronic Arts Intermix

No Land
Emily Chao
2019, 1 minute, b&w, silent, 16mm
no land / no song / nowhere / no now / no home. Dedicated to Black Hole Collective Film Lab.

Rent from Canyon Cinema

MTV: Artbreak
Dara Birnbaum
1986, 30 seconds, color, sound, digital video
Produced for an Artbreak segment on MTV Network, this dynamic “
abbreviated history of animation according to the representation of women, from the cell imagery of Max Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series to the contemporary digital effects of television. In Birnbaum’s vision, Fleischer’s spilled inkwell releases cartoon bubbles containing images of women from MTV music videos. With wit and panache, Birnbaum reverses the traditional sexual roles of the producer and product of commercial imagery: The final image is that of a female artist on whose video “ Fleischer.

Music/Audio Collaboration: Dara Birnbaum, Peter Eggers. Commissioned by MTV Networks, Inc.
Rent from Electronic Arts Intermix

Kiss the Girls: Make them Cry
Dara Birnbaum
1979, 7 minutes, color, sound, digital video
Birnbaum manipulates off-air imagery from the TV game show Hollywood Squares in Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry, a bold deconstruction of the gestures of sexual representation in pop cultural imagery and music. Minor celebrities (who Birnbaum terms “iconic women and receding men”) confined in a flashing tic-tac-toe board greet millions of TV viewers, animating themselves as they say “hello.” Birnbaum isolates and repeats these banal and at times bizarre gestures of male and female presentation — “repetitive baroque neck-snapping triple takes, guffaws, and paranoid eye darts” — wrenching them from their television context to expose stereotyped gestures of power and submission. Linking TV and Top 40, Birnbaum spells out the lyrics to disco songs (“Georgie Porgie puddin’ and pie/kissed the girls and made them cry”) with on-screen text, as the sound provides originally scored jazz interpolation and a harsh new wave coda. The result is a powerful, layered analysis of the meaning of the gestures of mass cultural idioms.

“Yellow Bird”: Spike and Allan Scarth. Vocals: Dori Levine. Audio Mix: William and Allan Scarth. Technical Assistance Thanks: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Fred McFadzen/Ed Slopek, Exploring Post #1, Ted Estabrook, Halifax Cablevision, Bruce Nickson, Madelaine Palko. Soundtrack: “Found a Cure,” Ashford and Simpson, “Georgy Porgy,” Toto. Television Footage: “ Hollywood Squares.” Aired in NY on CBS/NBC.

Rent from Electronic Arts Intermix

That Woman
Sandra Davis
2018, 22 minutes, color, sound, digital video
That Woman uses as source material the original Barbara Walters interview with Monica Lewinsky, which is intercut with a “re-creation ” of the interview. This re-staging uses transcripts of the actual dialogue, as well as a few interpretive scenes that I scripted. Additional visual elements include the “commercial breaks” from the original broadcast, as well as a “breaking news” segment, which announced the death of a film giant.

Ms. Lewinsky is played by a woman bearing a remarkable physical resemblance to the original, and Barbara Walters is played by George Kuchar. The make-up, costumes, set, lighting, and camera set-ups, are a facsimile of the original, albeit without the stunning high-production values displayed in the network original.

Recalling elements of this scandal, the performers bravely made their improvisational way through scenes including a cigar, and an audio performance by our actress of HAPPY BIRTHDAY MR. PRESIDENT.

Rent from Canyon Cinema

10:28,30
Paige Taul
2019, 4 minutes, color and b&w, sound, digital video
10:28,30 examines the relationship between myself and my sister, and our relationship to our mother. I am interested in the dissonance of our lives apart and the tension in the desire to be together.

Rent from Canyon Cinema            

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects
Lynne Sachs
1986, 4 minutes, b&w, sound, 16mm
A film portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a “character”. By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film is also a tribute to a real woman – Emma Goldman.

Rent from Canyon Cinema

The Televisual Woman’s Hour
Essay by Aaditya Aggarwal

In what is now widely regarded as the world’s first public demonstration of television, a human face could not be fully transmitted. In 1926, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird came close, visualizing a ventriloquist’s cartoonish dummy named “Stooky Bill” with the help of radio technology. This puppet-like caricature presented stark enough contrasts in color required, at the time, to transmit an image.

Over the years, the television began to capture figures, faces, and objects with sharper clarity. During the 1920s, film laboratories started to photograph stock models to better calibrate desired exposure and color balance of black-andwhite film reels. In the essay “The China Girl on the Margins of Film,” Genevieve Yue describes the use of the inappropriately named “China Girl” in Western countries as a figure used as a color tone “next to color swatches and patches of white, gray, and black.”1 She was almost always unknown, young, female, conventionally attractive, and contrary to the name’s racial connotations, white. Never screened on film or television, her likeness offered engineers a so-called normative “skin-tone” to mute and elevate contrasts for film, so that the white face could be better visualized on screen.

It wasn’t until the 1940s that a televised woman could be perceived in full color. Post-World War II, TV became widely popular across homes and businesses in North America and the United Kingdom. In 1940, Baird began working on creating a fully electronic color television system called Telechrome. This system revealed an image that veered between cyan and magenta tones, within which a reasonable range of colors could be visualized. By the mid 1960s, this television box set began to depict an even wider range of colors. A growing influx of pinks, purples, yellows, and greens in our home screens began to shape newer practices of looking.

Frequently sighted on analog televisions was a rainbow screen, formally known as SMPTE color bars. A testing pattern employed by video engineers, this arrangement compared and recalibrated a televised image to the National Television System Committee’s (NTSC) accepted standard. Often used in tandem with images of the China Girl, SMPTE bars were typically presented at 75% intensity, setting a television monitor or receiver to reproduce chrominance (color) and luminance (brightness) correctly. Its vertical bars—positioned in the screen from left to right, in white, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red, and blue—were often accompanied by a high-pitched tone.

Enabling more sophisticated, accurate, and textured imagery, this new color television began to usher a distinctly erotic encounter between the appliance and its viewer. From the early 1970s onwards, with the arrival of subscription-based cable networks like HBO, soft-core porn became a staple of private viewing. In her video work No No Nooky T.V. (1987), Barbara Hammer references this genre of late-night, often pay-perview programming, deconstructing its portrayals of female pleasure and physicality. Lensing an Amiga computer with her 16mm Bolex, the artist stages and contorts the alphabet with sensual and cryptic animation. A remix of patterns, shapes, and letters accompanies a sterile, computerized voiceover: “By appropriating me, the women will have a voice.”

Reappropriating pornographic language, No No Nooky T.V. reflects on the tactility of the television. One glimpses a TV in bondage, wrapped in black cloth and white twine. Later, it is clasped in multiple bras. Typed into a computer, one message reads: “Does she like me? WANT ME? DESIRE ME? KILL FOR ME? LUST FOR ME?” Another artfully scribbles “dirty pictures” in bejeweled cursive. There is a hilarity in Hammer’s harnessing of a screen in this material way, made absurd by technoincantations of text littered in different fonts.

Echoing Hammer’s sapphic television, mostly bereft of live bodies or physical performers, is a work like Removed (1999) by Naomi Uman. Using bleach and nail varnish on found European porn films from the 1970s, Uman selectively erases and manually empties out physical bodies of actresses. Whitened, unrecognizable female silhouettes clash against magenta-tinted bedroom surroundings, depicting the televised woman as an open, blank, animated space.

The artist’s removal of the corporeal feminine starkly contrasts against color television’s historic hypervisibility of women’s bodies. Typifying the latter is a work like Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut’s Waiting for Commercials (1966- 72), where a montage of found Japanese commercials from the 1960s is populated by gleeful stock performers, mostly composed of young women. Inhabiting the screen in between programs, female models in ad breaks market a range of products—from Pepsi-Cola to cosmetics to apparels. In Paik and Yalkut’s selection, the televised woman bursts as an object of curiosity for her viewers; albeit in heightened artifice, her joy of selling drink or dress is unparalleled.

Intrigued by representations of femininity and desire, Waiting for Commercials evidences the ubiquity of the televised corporeal feminine; one that Removed visually effaces or that No No Nooky T.V. only teases with mere glimpses—sing-song figures, euphoric, ecstatic, enthralled by touch, excited by commodity These works engage multiple figurations of the “televised woman,” a conception that continually structures and stages a viewer’s sense of tedium, anticipation, and disclosure.

—

When I approach the history of television, the appliance reveals itself as a predominantly women’s medium. From cosmetic commercials to exclusive interviews to narrative melodrama, women’s television—or television catered specifically to female viewers—is formally diverse, nudging and mirroring its spectators in intimate and discerning ways. Of its many subgenres, one that offers its viewers both entertaining and pedagogical conceptions of womanhood is the soap opera. Whether it is the exaggerated intensity in plot twists of Days of our Lives (1965-present) or the moral polarity of female characterization in Dynasty (1981-89), soap operas instill in us a measure of persistent expectation. In her essay “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Form,” Tania Modleski emphasizes a soap’s tendency to inevitably return towards anticipation. She notes: “Soap operas invest exquisite pleasure in the central condition of a woman’s life: waiting—whether for her phone to ring, for the baby to take its nap, or for the family to be reunited shortly after the day’s final soap opera has left its family still struggling against dissolution.”

2 In its most effective moments, a soap avoids narrative resolution to unrealistic ends. Dramatizing traditional ideas of motherhood and wifehood, soap protagonists and antagonists continually revert to domestic cliffhangers. In a scene from Days of Our Lives, for example, a slyly dainty and theatrically erudite Alexis Colby (played by a breathy, extravagant Joan Collins) makes eye contact with her ex-husband’s current wife. The camera zooms in on Alexis, the antagonist, as her eyebrow arches and head tilts in quiet disdain and alerted defense. Seesawing between seduction and virtuosity, soap characters surprise each other with turns of phrase. And while each episode oscillates between familial bliss and disorder, a soap never ends.

In certain video works that employ techniques of appropriation and repetition, one can invert and rethink the soap’s televised woman and the format’s grammar of female interiority. Opening Lynne Sachs’s black-and-white experimental diaristic short Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986), for instance, is a tight close-up of a woman putting on a fall coat. We are immediately transported into an urban home with a female occupant—an introductory premise that is outwardly ripe for soap opera. As Sachs’s camera steadily studies the creases and folds of her subject’s clothing and her strands of hair, a voiceover announces: “Scene 1: Woman steps off curb and crosses street.” Sachs repeats the same shot, while the voiceover seemingly jumps ahead in time: “Scene 2: Holding a bag of groceries, she opens the front door of Blue Plymouth.” In its third repetition, there is further narrative disjuncture. The same woman puts on her coat as the voiceover narrator reveals her limitations, casually puzzled: “Scene 3: I can’t remember.” The muted recitation of screenplay directions both embraces and negates the lack of resolution of a TV soap. We are left wondering about the events that may have transpired in the protagonist’s life in the empty gaps of voiceover between scenes. However, Sachs’s repeated, naturalistic mundanity of domestic chores defies the desirous expectation—or the incomprehensible plot turn—that one historically expects of women’s melodrama.

Similarly, Cauleen Smith’s faux-memoirist recollection of her alter-ego Kelly Gabron plays on narrative gaps, unreliable narration and spectatorial mistrust, all elements that fuel television. In her video, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992), a series of photographs are revealed by competing voiceovers. A montage of personal archives and found images sparsely captures a scattered history of Black American television, film, and media.

Stripped of any moving bodies or live action, Smith’s experimental biography rejects the commandments of a televisual motion picture. In a static slideshow of film reels, her work repeats its tellings. She employs two voiceovers: in the first narration, a sterile, automated male voice booms over Kelly’s inaudible narration; the second time, Kelly’s voice is clearer, more comprehensible, eclipsing the man’s. Simultaneously, both voiceovers narrate conflicting accounts of Kelly’s life as a Black woman artist navigating a predominantly white male art world. While the man’s narration flattens her narrative into racist tropes of Black deprivation, Kelly’s account is affective, specific, and anecdotal. Concluding the work, the latter’s narration corrects the errors of the former. Deeply invested in an aesthetics of self-portraiture or autofiction, the works by Sachs and Smith read as artistic variations on or intentional detours from the soap format. Historically, women’s television is also informed by slice-of-life profiles that capture the quotidian feminine in documentary style—the woman-led talk show is, in this sense, an uncanny cousin to the oft-ludicrously fictional soap opera. This subgenre of programming arguably originated from scripted sketchbased programs like the Lucille Ball-led I Love Lucy (1951-57) as well as daytime reality-based shows like The Loretta Young Show (1953-61) and The Betty White Show (1952-54). From BBC’s Woman’s Hour (1946-present) to the French program Dim Dam Dom (1965-73), dramatized stories of real-life female figures often blended with interview-based programs. A female presenter, in turn, became a hyper-televised woman. Her success relied on her performance as a triple-threat in roles of cultural commentator, comedian, and confidante. In solo interviews, journalists like Barbara Walters adroitly shifted or affirmed national narratives, oftentimes muddying their newsworthy interviewees’ vulnerable reputations.

Sandra Davis’s That Woman (2018) wryly replays and reenacts one such cultural moment on television. Airing on March 3, 1999, the now-infamous interview between Barbara Walters and Monica Lewinsky ruled the prime-time slot—a block of broadcast programming taking place during the middle of the evening—across television screens. Satirizing a mythos of televised womanhood, Davis’s work begins as the text “20/20 WEDNESDAY” flashes on ABC’s news network from the original interview. In this archival footage, an iridescent background shimmers while an energetic piano interlude plays. In Davis’s reenactment, conversely, a Lewinsky lookalike impersonates the original’s expressions and responses. She is seated before George Kuchar, who plays Walters in a blonde wig with laughable earnestness. One anecdote from fake-Lewinsky follows another, as the low-budget, camp reenactment is interrupted by selective outtakes from the original conversation. A stern Walters interrogates, while Lewinsky nervously gestures. At one point, there is a close-up of fake Lewinsky’s black leather strapped stiletto boots.

Davis’s reappraisal of this episode captures the coercive candor and pronounced intensity of appointment television, where primetime interviews oddly invoke the narrative melodrama of soap opera. For instance, much like the soap heroine, a talk show’s subject is also activated by the zoom-in, a technique frequently employed in sensationalist news telecasts and scandalous journalistic exposes.

Writing on the invention of the close-up in silent film, Béla Balázs describes its “intimate emotional significance” and “lyrical charm” in Theory of the Film, recalling “audience panic” at the first sight of a close-up of a smiling face in a movie theater.3 The format of a televisual soap furthers Balázs’s argument of a close-up’s ability to reveal “unconscious expressions,” in discomfitingly proximate confines, scanning a poreless, powdered face. In moving close-up, the televised woman spans the expanse of a screen, intimating what Rawiya Kameir describes as the “pointed drama” of a zoom-in in her 2016 review of Solange’s A Seat at the Table. “Moments later,” she writes, “the world beyond her falls away…”4

A zoomed-in figure becomes as solitary as a television box set, her presence both disarmingly novel and routinely domestic. But what are the limits of her close-up? Does the televised woman ever exit our saturated screens? Emily Chao’s hermetic close-up in her black-and-white work No Land (2019) comes to mind. Over the course of two minutes, she zooms into a square-shaped, TV-like black sheet pinned on a tree trunk, surrounded by wild, dense forestry. Invoking the early invention of analog screens, one is unable to visualize any corporeal form or countenance in its frame; the transmitter of images instead becomes the image itself, bearing a haptic imprint of its televisual women—invisibilized stock model, adorned brand ambassador, exalted porn star, scheming soap vamp, jovial female presenter, overexposed subject—always visible in the interiors of your living room.

Edited by Girish Shambu

______________

1 Genevieve Yue, “The China Girl on the Margins of Film,” October 153 (2015): 96–116.

2 Tania Modleski, “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Form,” Film Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1979): 12–21.

3 Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (Dover Publications, 1970). 4 Rawiya Kameir, “Solange, In Focus,” The Fader, Oct. 6, 2016, https://www.thefader. com/2016/10/06/solange-a-seat-at-the-table-essay.

4 Rawiya Kameir, “Solange, In Focus,” The Fader, Oct. 6, 2016, https://www.thefader. com/2016/10/06/solange-a-seat-at-the-table-essay.

MajorDocs and ‘Film About a Father Who’ / RTVE Play – Días de Cine

Días de Cine. 14-10-2022
RTVE Play Días de Cine
October 14, 2022
https://www.rtve.es/play/videos/dias-de-cine/dias-de-cine-14-10-2022/6713891/

MajorDocs and Film About A Father Who Featured at 45:44–50:00.

English translation:

Movie days. 14-10-2022

Full program. Sitges Festival, Little Pig, Halloween ends, Wild Sunflowers, Orio Tarragó as Godfather guest, Angela Lansbury, and much more.

Spanish original:

Días de Cine. 14-10-2022

Programa completo. Festival de Sitges, Cerdita, Halloween ends, GIrasoles silvestres, Orio Tarragó de invitado Padrino, Angela Lansbury, y mucho más.

“Doc filmmakers urged to focus early on distribution and marketing to win audiences and festival slots” / Screen Daily

“Doc filmmakers urged to focus early on distribution and marketing to win audiences and festival slots”
Screen Daily
October 14, 2022
By Geoffrey MacNab
https://www.screendaily.com/news/doc-filmmakers-urged-to-focus-early-on-distribution-and-marketing-to-win-audiences-and-festival-slots/5175461.article

Documentary filmmakers were urged to pay more attention to distribution and marketing, and were given tips on how to pitch their projects to distributors, at a Doclisboa ’Masterclass’ panel this week on promoting non-fiction films.

María Vera of Kino Rebelde – a festival distribution and sales outfit specialising in hybrid work, non-fiction and experimental film – bemoaned the lack of focus on distribution and marketing at film schools and universities.

“At university, I never learned about distribution. I learned how to make the best script, the best editing, the best photography but once you have the best film, there is no-one saying how to move it [in the marketplace] and how to internationalise your content.”

Fellow panelist Renata Sancho, a producer, editor and script supervisor, spoke of the lack of attention paid to “putting films where they should be, in theatre rooms.” Her production outfit Cedro Plátano specialises in experimental documentary although last year she directed a fictional drama and has started distributing projects.

Vera’s message was clear. “Distribution is not something that starts when the film is finished.” Filmmakers strapped for cash and struggling to complete their projects may be reluctant to think about [and invest in] marketing. “[But] you need to know which audience you are looking for,” she warned.

Distrubition ‘lethargy’

Vera talked about the lethargy of filmmakers when it comes to distribution plans. By this stage, they have already had to put together multiple treatments and synopses for potential funders. They’re “tired” and don’t always have the energy or stamina to write yet another “director’s statement.” However, this may be a necessity.

The distributor warned young filmmakers in the audience that they always need to do their “homework” first before approaching distributors – and to remember to address them by the correct name.

“I would love it if people, before sending any film to me, see the kind of films we are working with,” Vera said. “Every email I receive is important and I have to read it so please don’t make copy and paste.

Sancho spoke of managing “expectations” on both sides. The director may have unrealistic expectations of what the distributor can achieve on his or her behalf – for example, securing a berth in Cannes. The distributor may also a very different idea of how a film can travel compared to the filmmaker.

Distribution, the two panelists concluded, is never the end-point. It’s where a film begins its real journey.

One challenge is that festivals are still programming fewer films that pre-pandemic – but have more titles to choose from because of the Covid backlog.

“Most of the festivals have less windows, this is a reality,” Vera said, citing East West Index, a survey among key European documentary film festivals undertaken by Ji.hlava International Documentary Film. For example, IDFA’s 2020 edition selected 91 fewer titles in 2020 and expanded by 46 titles last year – so is still down on 2019’s number.

Pitching projects

Sancho’s advice to filmmakers pitching her projects is to keep it “structured and simple” but passionate. “The first question I ask is, ‘Why do you want to do this film?’…The second question is, ‘Why do you think we should watch your film?’”

Sancho is ready to cut filmmakers a little slack if their ideas for a creative documentary are still evolving. She prefers originality to formatted ideas that rely on clichéd formulas drawn up to please commissioning editors.

Reflecting on what it takes to get her attention as a producer and distributor, Vera said: “We really need to be touched and moved and to feel empathy [for the filmmaker].” This is because she knows that, on a typical project, she will work for up to five years with any given filmmaker. Her company is involved in around eight films a year and has a “handcrafted” approach.

“So I am going to be super-connected with the person. I am going to be communicating with the person all the time and I am going to defend these films in the market,” Vera commented. “For sure, I really need to understand [the filmmaker].”

“All the time, I really need to feel moved by the stories,” she continued.

Vera likes to board projects at a rough-cut stage when they’re “almost finished” but when there is still “room to talk about some changes.” It is better, too, to start work on the marketing strategy before the film is completed.

The Kino Rebelde boss also looks for finished films at events like Doclisboa. Although festivals and distributors prioritise new projects more intensely than ever before, she is sometimes prepared to take on titles which are already a few months old if she sees a spark in them. Among the work she represents is the complete filmography of American filmmaker and poet, Lynne Sachs and recent Jeonju and Visions du Reel selection, Herbaria by Leandro Listorti.

Fascinations: Progress / 26th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival

Fascinations: Progress
26th Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival
Festival Dates: October 25-30, 2022
https://www.ji-hlava.com/programove-sekce/fascinace-pokrok
Film page: https://www.ji-hlava.com/filmy/a-potom-jsme-pochodovali

Fascinations: Progress

This year, in the ongoing series of retrospectives devoted to the history of avant-garde film through the ways of representation of certain topic or motive, we want to map the representation of “progress”. Something inscribed in the nature of the avant-garde itself, the topic was also widely represented – typically with enthusiasm and admiration, but sometimes also critically. We are interested in films from the beginning of cinema until today. The works from the beginning of cinema and between-the-war period. The “classical” works and “big” names, but also not so well-known films and authors.

Film Database

Abstract Experiment in Kodachrome
director: Slavko Vorkapich
original title: Abstract Experiment in Kodachrome
country: United States
year: 1950
running time: 2 min.

Admiral Cigarette
director: William Heise
original title: Admiral Cigarette
country: United States
year: 1897
running time: 30 sec.

And Then We Marched
director: Lynne Sachs
original title: And Then We Marched
country: United States
year: 2017
running time: 3 min.

synopsis

One day after the presidential inauguration in January 2017, the Womenʼs March took place in Washington D.C. Footage from the demonstration, shot with Super8 camera, is combined with archival footage of the protest marches from various moments in the US history. A visual whirl of the protesters᾽ faces and banners is accompanied by a childʼs voice which is trying to express as accurately as possible what it means to fight for oneʼs own rights.

biography

Lynne Sachs (* 1961) is an experimental filmmaker and poet, a director of more than 40 films and the author of many installations, performances and web projects. In her work she explores the relationship between the close and the remote, the intimate and the public, the visual and the audio.

Beginning a Skyscraper
director: Robert K. Bonine
original title: Beginning a Skyscraper
country: United States
year: 1902
running time: 40 sec.

Case Sound Tests
director: Theodore Case
original title: Case Sound Tests
country: United States
year: 1925
running time: 10 min.

Early Superimpositions
director: Frederick S. Armitage
original title: Early Superimpositions
country: United States
year: 1900
running time: 1 min.

Energy Energy
director: Karel Doing
original title: Energy Energy
country: Netherlands
year: 1999
running time: 7 min.

Europa
director: Stefan Themerson, Franciszka Themerson
original title: Europa
country: Poland
year: 1931
running time: 11 min.

Futuro
director: Mika Taanila
original title: Futuro – Tulevaisuuden olotila
country: Finland
year: 1998
running time: 28 min.

synopsis

A plastic puzzle of 16 parts, made in Finland: UFO, uterus, butterfly, playhouse. This prefabricated building, to be placed on the top of the mountains or the African coast, represented the dreamy future the humankind was about to enter in 1968. The story of the rise and fall of Futuro is the story of the idea of a future man, the idea which emerges and disperses.

biography

Mika Taanila (* 1965) is a Finnish experimental filmmaker and visual artist. In his films and video installations he often explores the history and the present of the utopian visions. His work has been screened at the major festivals and displayed in the galleries of contemporary art.

Glass
director: Bert Haanstra
original title: Glas
country: Netherlands
year: 1958
running time: 10 min.

Interim
director: Stan Brakhage
original title: Interim
country: United States
year: 1952
running time: 25 min.

synopsis

Stan Brakhage’s debut film tells the story of the surge, pacification, and outflow of desire awakened by an accidental encounter between two beings temporarily frozen in time — a man and a woman — who stand below an arcade of viaducts as one car after another speeds by above them. The sensual piano accompaniment was complemented by Brakhage’s roommate and future composer, James Tenney.

biography

Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) was a prominent, American experimental filmmaker, educator, and author of several books. Throughout his prolific filmography, you’ll find strong intimate films, exhilarating social documentaries, and purely abstract cinematic works; four-minute and four-hour works; and films shot with or without a camera.

Interior NY Subway, 14th Steet to 42nd
director: Gottfried Wilhelm Bitzer
original title: Interior NY Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street
country: United States
year: 1905
running time: 5 min.

synopsis

This groundbreaking film shot six months after the opening of the New York subway follows a train traveling from Union Square to Grand Central Station. The dark tunnel is illuminated not only by the train that’s transporting the cameraman, but also by the headlights of a car driving along the sideline. The lighting takes full advantage of the architecture of the tunnel, which is reinforced with white columns arranged closely together one-by-one.

biography

G. W. Bitzer (1872–1944) was an American cameraman known mainly for his work he did for D. W. Griffith. At the beginning of his professional career, he worked for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, the first-ever production company in the US devoted solely to filmmaking, for which he also shot a film of the newly opened New York subway.

Introspection
director: Sara Kathryn Arledge
original title: Introspection
country: United States
year: 1941
running time: 6 min.

synopsis

An abstract dance film presenting disembodied parts of dancers clad in tight clothing that move around freely in a blank space. With this film, Arledge helped create a new film genre – ciné-dance – in which the dancing body rids itself of its physical limitations and takes on a pure form.

biography

Sara Kathryn Arledge (1911–1998) was a prominent, American experimental filmmaker whose most important works were Introspection (1941–1947) and What Is a Man? (1958). She also spent time painting and creating hand-painted glass slides, which she then compiled into the “stable films” Tender Images (1978) and Interior Garden (1978).

Jack’s Dream
director: Joseph Cornell
original title: Jack’s Dream
country: United States
year: 1938
running time: 4 min.

synopsis

Jack, a puppet dog, has a lucid dream where he encounters not only his brave counterpart but also a dragon, a king, and a princess. The plotline of this small puppet drama alone is, perhaps, enough to label it a surrealist work; but on top of that, the film is interspersed with shots of a sinking schooner and galloping seahorses. The soundtrack to the film was provided by Larry Jordan.

biography

Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) was an American surrealist, self-taught artist, a creator of collages and boxes with found objects, and a film collector. From the 1930s, he also created film collages using found footage, and in collaboration with filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, and Larry Jordan, he also made his own films.

Learned Spontaneous Movements
director: Dóra Maurer
original title: Megtanult önkéntelen mozgások
country: Hungary
year: 1973
running time: 9 min.

Leaving the 20th Century
director: Max Almy
original title: Leaving the 20th Century
country: United States
year: 1982
running time: 10 min.

Manhatta
director: Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand
original title: Manhatta
country: United States
year: 1921
running time: 9 min.

synopsis

Regarded as one of the first avant-garde films made in the US, Sheeler and Strand’s Manhatta is a dialogue of poetry, photography, and New York City. In the poem Mannahatta, which appears in the title cards throughout the film, Walt Whitman invokes the “original name” of his city, the word “resounding, healthy, untamed, musical, self-sufficient.” The bearer of this name is represented by 65 shots emphasizing the contours of artificial, natural, and human layers that intersect within it.

biography

Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) studied painting and drawing but made his living as a photographer working for architects. His own artwork stems from urban and industrial photography. Paul Strand (1890–1976) made a name for himself as a photographer in New York, having been attracted to modern architecture, the play of light and shadow, and the faces of impoverished immigrants.

Mr. Edison at work in his chemical laboratory
director: William Heise, James H. White
original title: Mr. Edison at work in his chemical laboratory
country: United States
year: 1897
running time: 1 min.

Oil – A Symphony in Motion
director: M.G. MacPherson
original title: Oil – A Symphony in Motion
country: United States
year: 1933
running time: 7 min.

Palace of Electricity
director: James H. White
original title: Palace of Electricity
country: United States
year: 1900
running time: 1 min.

Rhythm in Light
director: Melville Webber, Ted Nemeth, Mary Ellen Bute
original title: Rhythm in Light
country: United States
year: 1934
running time: 5 min.

Rose Hobart
director: Joseph Cornell
original title: Rose Hobart
country: United States
year: 1936
running time: 19 min.

synopsis

Oscillating between homage and obsession, the film distills the gestures, expressions, and posture of Rose Hobart, the heroine of the exotic Hollywood drama East of Borneo (G. Melford, 1931). Cornell’s version of the film, reckless with the plot and other characters, slowed down, shrouded in violet blue, complete with Brazilian underscore and eclipse shots, frees Hobart from the encumbrances of cliché, stereotyping, and narrative gossip.

biography

Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) was an American surrealist, self-taught artist, creator of collages and found-object boxes, and film collector. From the 1930s onwards, he also created film collages using found footage and made his own films in collaboration with filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, and Larry Jordan.

Scene from the Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower
director: James H. White
original title: Scene from the Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower
country: United States
year: 1900
running time: 2 min.

Science Friction
director: Stan VanDerBeek
original title: Science Friction
country: United States
year: 1959
running time: 10 min.

synopsis

VanDerBeek describes his neo-Dadaist film collage, shot using the technique of phase animation, as “a social satire aimed at the rockets, scientists, and competitive mania of our time”. In his vision, science inevitably becomes an accomplice of power, a means of torture, manipulation, and control that ultimately threatens not just some, but the entire planet.

biography

Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) was an American multimedia artist, thinker, and inventor who began working with film in 1955. Science Friction was named the best experimental film at the 1962 Oberhausen Film Festival. In 1964 he built the Moviedrome, an audiovisual laboratory for multimedia experiments, in a former silo.

The Dickson Experimental Sound Film
director: William K. L. Dickson
original title: The Dickson Experimental Sound Film
country: United States
year: 1894
running time: 1 min.

The Light Penetrates the Dark
director: Otakar Vávra, František Pilát
original title: Světlo proniká tmou
country: Czechoslovakia
year: 1930
running time: 4 min.

The Maltese Cross Movement
director: A. Keewatin Dewdney
original title: The Maltese Cross Movement
country: Canada
year: 1967
running time: 6 min.

Transformation by Holding Time (Landscape)
director: Paul de Nooijer
original title: Transformation by Holding Time (Landscape)
country: Netherlands
year: 1976
running time: 2 min.

Two Marches
director: Jim Hubbard
original title: Two Marches
country: United States
year: 1991
running time: 9 min.

synopsis

The first March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights took place in October 1979, and another eight years later. In a non-violent juxtaposition of footage from both marches, Hubbard allows us to reflect on subtle and distinct shifts in the modes of protest expression, atmosphere, and shared perspectives.

biography

Jim Hubbard (* 1951) is an experimental filmmaker who has made films and videos centered around protests organized by members of the LGBTQ and AIDS communities. He founded the MIX festival of gay and lesbian experimental film and video in New York. He’s building a collection of interviews with people infected with AIDS.

Unreal News Reels
director: Joseph Cornell
original title: Unreal News Reels
country: United States
year: 1924
running time: 8 min.

synopsis

Joseph Cornell’s original compilation from his own film collection is based on the low-budget slapstick cartoons produced in the 1920s and 1930s by the Weiss Brothers, which Cornell turns into a parody of newsreels through subtle textual intervention.

biography

Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) was an American surrealist, self-taught artist, creator of collages and found-object boxes, and film collector. From the 1930s onwards, he also created film collages using found footage and made his own films in collaboration with filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Rudy Burckhardt, and Larry Jordan.

Velocità
director: Pippo Oriani, Guido Martina, Tina Cordero
original title: Velocità
country: Italy
year: 1930
running time: 13 min.

synopsis

Although Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Cinema, Velocità is seen by some as the only futuristic film in its own right. Beside a dense intertextual network and a mechanic dance of the screen titles and objects dancing to stop-motion beats, the movie features a unique showcase of air painting on film and a few swinging frames from the streets of Turin.

biography

Pippo Oriani (1909–1972) was an architect and painter who claimed allegiance to the second wave of futurism. Velocità is his only film. He cooperated on it with Tina Cordero and Guido Martina, the founders of the Futurista Film company and the authors of the 1931 manifesto The Avant-garde Integral: Marinetti and futurism in film.

Year 2000
director: Gianfranco Brebbia
original title: ANNO 2000
country: Italy
year: 1969
running time: 13 min.

And Then We Marched

https://www.ji-hlava.com/filmy/a-potom-jsme-pochodovali

director: Lynne Sachs
original title: And Then We Marched
country: United States
year: 2017
running time: 3 min.

synopsis

One day after the presidential inauguration in January 2017, the Womenʼs March took place in Washington D.C. Footage from the demonstration, shot with Super8 camera, is combined with archival footage of the protest marches from various moments in the US history. A visual whirl of the protesters᾽ faces and banners is accompanied by a childʼs voice which is trying to express as accurately as possible what it means to fight for oneʼs own rights.

biography

Lynne Sachs (* 1961) is an experimental filmmaker and poet, a director of more than 40 films and the author of many installations, performances and web projects. In her work she explores the relationship between the close and the remote, the intimate and the public, the visual and the audio.

Producers’ Forum with Lynne Sachs: “Film About a Father Who” / Scribe Video Center

Producers’ Forum with Lynne Sachs: “Film About a Father Who”
Scribe Video Center
Event on November 18, 2022
https://scribe.org/events/producers-forum-lynne-sachs-film-about-father-who

Producers’ Forum with Lynne Sachs: “Film About a Father Who”

November 18, 7:00 PM

Cost: 
$7.50 General Admission, $5 Students/Seniors, $4 Scribe Members

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne 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.

Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha.

Contact Email Address: 
inquiry@scribe.org

Contact Phone Number: 
215-222-4201

Event Type: 
Screening
Producers’ Forum

Lynne with Tim Corrigan (host)

A Reality Between Words and Images: Films by Lynne Sachs / e-flux Live

A Reality Between Words and Images: Films by Lynne Sachs
e-flux Live
Screening on October 27, 2022
https://www.e-flux.com/live/495786/a-reality-between-words-and-images-films-by-lynne-sachs/

A Reality Between Words and Images: Films by Lynne Sachs

Admission starts at $5

Date
October 27, 2022, 7pm

172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA

Please join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, October 27 at 7pm for A Reality Between Words and Images,a program of selected filmsby Lynne Sachs, and a post-screening conversation with Sachs and her collaborators Kristine Leschper and Kim Wilberforce.

In this screening we invite you to watch and discuss select works by Sachs that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating the essay film, collage, performance, documentary, and poetry. Sachs’ self-reflexive films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, she investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself searching for a reality between words and images.

The screening is part of Revisiting Feminist Moving Image, a series at e-flux Screening Room aimed at revisiting the origins, contexts, developments, and impact of feminist video art and experimental cinema around the world from the 1960s through today.

Films

The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991, 30 minutes) 
Offering a new feminized film form, The House of Science explores both art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural collage. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth. 

Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994, 33 minutes) 
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. “The film has a combination of qualities: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history’s scope, and a critical ability to discern what’s missing from the textbooks and TV news.” (SF Bay Guardian)

Window Work (2000, 9 minutes)
A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper—simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery within and beyond the image. “A picture window that looks over a magically realistic garden ablaze in sunlight fills the entire frame. In front, a woman reclines while secret boxes filled with desires and memories, move around her as if coming directly out of the screen.” (Tate Modern)

The Task of the Translator (2010, 10 minutes)  
Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” (1923) 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.

Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018, 8 minutes)
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 eighteenth-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.

Figure and I (2021, 2 minutes) 
Singer-songwriter Kristine Leschper asked Lynne to create a film in response to her song “Figure and I.” Lynne immediately recognized that Kristine’s deeply rhythmic music called for some kind of somatic imagery. She needed to move with her body and her camera. Lynne then invited her friend Kim to be in the film and to interpret the song through her vibrant wardrobe and her precise, ecstatic clapping.  

Accessibility 
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. 
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space. 
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

​​For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Category

Film, Feminism, Music, Bodies, War & Conflict

Subject

Experimental Film, Documentary, Science, Death

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“Lynne Sachs: Film Festivals used to be perceived as exclusive and snobbish, but that has changed.” / Diario de Mallorca

“Lynne Sachs: Film Festivals used to be perceived as exclusive and snobbish, but that has changed.”
Diario de Mallorca
Interview by Montse Terrasa
Translation by Guillermo Amengual
October 5, 2022
https://www.diariodemallorca.es/cultura/2022/10/05/lynne-sachs-gente-pensaba-festivales-76794424.html

Lynne Sachs (Memphis, 1961) prefers to define herself as a filmmaker rather than a director. She claims to prefer to feel a member of a group of people working on a project. Now she is at Palma (Majorca, Spain) to perform as the guest of honor of the MajorDocs film festival, a meeting for she’s profoundly excited for having the opportunity to talk about films and ideas during several days.

Yesterday, she presented her documentary focused on her father, Ira Sachs Sr., whom she describes as a good living: seducer, extravagant and entrepreneur. In this feature film, she uses family archive films made for over thirty years.

Interviewer: Film About a Father Who. Is this your most personal film?

Lynne Sachs: I think that the word personal is used in a very obvious way and we need to fragment and analyze what it really mean “to do something personal”, because it can be more ambiguous and it could be referred to your print, your style in the project.

I think that what we call personal is like a thread that connects all my films. Film About a Father Who took me to another personal level because I show my fears and my ambiguity toward my relationship with my father, and I think I took a risk there, as I first wanted to do a very angry film that afterwards turned into something that was more focused on forgiveness…

I exposed all of my feelings, my vulnerability. In that sense, we could perhaps refer to it as my most personal film. When I was making it, I had the feeling that I needed to. I had to get it out of me. I thought nobody would want to watch it. This time I didn’t think about audience. I just thought about myself and maybe that’s the key to reaching more people.

I: When did you decide to do the film?

L.S.: Back in 1991, when I wanted to do a film divided in three parts. I wanted to explore in what way we (people) can really know another human being but ourselves. A child, a friend… The first part would be about a total stranger, the second one about a departed family member who I get to know through his letters, and the third one was going to be about my father, who I could call whenever I wanted and ask him questions, and I thought that would be the easiest part. It wasn’t at all.

I: Filmmaker, poet, teacher, feminist… What adjective describes you the best? Or does it depend on the moment?

L.S.: Yes, it does. I feel more like a filmmaker than a director. That noun refers to the industry matters. It expresses who stands at the top of the pyramid and makes the decisions. I prefer to

call myself a filmmaker because I feel like I’m part of a project where I work side by side with people. No hierarchy involved. Historically women were tied to their homes. They were homemakers. Then we freed ourselves and we stood up and show to the world that we are capable of doing a lot more than that. But at the same time if we look closely to the word filmmaker, it still has that connection with the word homemaker, it can mean to take care of cinema as a house, as a home.

I: Is now a good time for documentaries? In addition to these film festivals, many streaming platforms encourage this way of moviemaking…

L.S.: Yes, of course. Things have change a lot, over the years. Back then if someone asked me where they could watch my films I just could say that they where only screened in film festival or museums. Nowadays, 15 of my films are available on DAfilms and also in The Criterion Channel… Those streaming services are very useful for documentaries, but also for those who work in very low Budget independent films or even features made with their own phones or

digital cameras… People thought that Film Festivals where exclusive and elitist, but that has changed.

I: How do you feel about being the Guest of Honor of this edition of the MajorDocs film festival?

L.S.: I feel that I don’t deserve it. Two days ago I still couldn’t believe it. I was intimidating. But I love Film Festivals like this one where they encourage the audience not only to watch documentaries, but also to talk about them during the whole week. There are conversations about what they’ve seen and about what feelings and ideas struck out at them, and that is very important.

I: Is now a good time for documentaries? In addition to these film festivals, many streaming platforms encourage this way of moviemaking…

L.S.: Yes, of course. Things have changed a lot, over the years. Back then if someone asked me where they could watch my films I just could say that they were only screened at film festivals or museums. Nowadays, fifteen of my films are available on Dafilms and also in The Criterion Channel… Those streaming services are very useful for documentaries, but also for those who work in very low Budget independent films or even features made with their own phones or digital cameras… Film festivals used to be perceived as exclusive and snobbish, but that has changed.

I: As a viewer, as a spectator, what kind of films do you like?

L. S.: My family makes fun of the fact that I might not have seen a movie if it’s very popular. However, that’s not true. I like to see films that make me think, that challenge me to see the world in a different way. I like to take notes while watching these kind of films, even in the darkness of the theatre. I do the same thing while reading a book. I cannot watch a Godard film without taking notes.

“The 4th edition of MajorDocs claims calm and pause in domestic audiovisual creation” / IB3 News

“The 4th edition of MajorDocs claims calm and pause in domestic audiovisual creation”
IB3 News
October 4, 2022
https://ib3.org/la-quarta-edicio-del-festival-majordocs-reivindica-la-calma-i-la-pausa-en-la-creacio-audiovisual-domestica

English translation:

The 4th edition of MajorDocs claims calm and pause in domestic audiovisual creation

From October 4 to 8, 8 films from around the world will be screened, and professional conferences will be organized, such as the master class of the Venezuelan Goya nominee Andrés Duque

‘Film about a father who’ is an autobiographical documentary by American filmmaker Lynne Sachs . The experimental filmmaker from Brooklyn spent 35 years recording this film from digital images of her father.

“I’m very happy to have done it, but also very scared every time I have to show it. It is a vulnerable film for me and my father, although it is also a project that has given me many opportunities . I was able to talk to people about their relationship with their parents and what they learned from it, as well as what they don’t want to repeat from their parents,” explained Sachs.

In this way, the fourth edition of MajorDocs has started . In a current situation in which cinema is consumed in haste, the festival claims calm and pause in domestic audiovisual creation .

From October 4 to 8 , 8 films from around the world will be shown; all, from the author’s subjective point of view . Professional conferences are also organized , where the master class offered by the Venezuelan Andrés Duque , nominated for a Goya for the documentary ‘Iván Z’ , stands out.

Spanish original:

La 4a edició del MajorDocs reivindica la calma i la pausa en la creació audiovisual domèstica

Del 4 al 8 d’octubre, es projectaran 8 pel·lícules d’arreu del món, i s’organitzaran jornades professionals, com la classe magistral del veneçolà nominat als Goya Andrés Duque

‘Film about a father who’ is an autobiographical documentary by American filmmaker Lynne Sachs . The experimental filmmaker from Brooklyn spent 35 years recording this film from digital images of her father.

“I’m very happy to have done it, but also very scared every time I have to show it. It is a vulnerable film for me and my father, although it is also a project that has given me many opportunities . I was able to talk to people about their relationship with their parents and what they learned from it, as well as what they don’t want to repeat from their parents,” explained Sachs.

In this way, the fourth edition of MajorDocs has started . In a current situation in which cinema is consumed in haste, the festival claims calm and pause in domestic audiovisual creation .

From October 4 to 8 , 8 films from around the world will be shown; all, from the author’s subjective point of view . Professional conferences are also organized , where the master class offered by the Venezuelan Andrés Duque , nominated for a Goya for the documentary ‘Iván Z’ , stands out .

October Events / e-flux Video & Film

“October Events”
e-flux Video & Film
October 4, 2022
Program on October 27, 2022
https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/471373/october-events/
A Reality Between Words and Images – Films by Lynne Sachs
https://www.e-flux.com/live/495786/a-reality-between-words-and-images-films-by-lynne-sachs/

October events

e-flux
172 Classon Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
www.e-flux.com
Facebook / Instagram

We are very pleased to announce our line up of programs this October at e-flux, featuring live music, screenings, and talks.

This week, on October 7, join us for Playthroughs, featuring live music with Keith Fullerton Whitman on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his landmark album Playthroughs, followed by a Q&A with Whitman moderated by writer and musician Sasha Frere-Jones. Next week, on October 11, join us for A Life on Video: Shigeko Kubota’s Broken Diary, a screening of select works by the acclaimed Japanese video artist followed by a conversation with Eimi Tagore-Erwin, Juno Peter Yoon, and Lukas Brasiskis, and organized as part of the Revisiting Feminist Moving Image series. On October 13, Johanna Gosse will give a talk titled Altered States: Bruce Conner’s Border Crossings accompanied by a screening of Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, as part of our continuing Film Beyond Film lecture series. See more details on these programs below.

Other October events include Digestion, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale presented on October 17 and hosted by Lydia Kallipoliti (co-curator, 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale) and Christina Moushoul (assistant editor, e-flux Architecture). On October 18, Slow Growth, presented by Flaherty NYC as part of the “let’s all be lichen” series programmed by asinnajaq, will feature a screening of Sunna Nousuniemi’s Boso mu ruovttoluotta (Breathe me back to life) and Nivi Pederson’sPilluarneq Ersigiunnaarpara (Happiness Scares Me No More). On October 20, A Souvenir of Frictions willfeature three films by Peng Zuqiang followed by a Q&A with the artist. On October 24, we celebrate the publication of Elizabeth Povinelli’s new book Routes/Worlds (2022, e-flux journal and Sternberg Press). And on October 25, we host a screening of selected works by Peggy Ahwesh, followed by an in-person discussion with the artist. We wrap the month’s programs on October 27 with A Reality Between Words and Images, a screening of works by Lynne Sachs with the artist in attendance.

Stay tuned for more information on upcoming events this fall!

Friday, October 7, 2022, 7pm
Playthroughs: Live music by Keith Fullerton Whitman

Admission 15 USD. Get tickets

Join us at e-flux for the twentieth anniversary of the album Playthroughs, featuring a live music performance by Keith Fullerton Whitman and a Q&A with Whitman moderated by writer and musician Sasha Frere-Jones. Playthroughs was released in October 2002 on the label Kranky to much critical acclaim from Pitchfork and other publications—and to this day remains one of Whitman’s most beloved albums. It consists of drone-heavy ambient music composed entirely using processed guitar sounds (acoustic and electric). The album follows in the footsteps of Steve Reich and other musicians within the contemporary classical umbrella. Read more on the event here.

Tuesday, October 11, 2022, 7pm
A Life on Video: Shigeko Kubota’s Broken Diary
Admission starts at 5 USD. Get tickets

Join us at e-flux Screening Room for A Life on Video: Shigeko Kubota’s Broken Diary, a screening and discussion of videos by Shigeko Kubota, curated by Juno Peter Yoon and Lukas Brasiskis. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Yoon and Brasiskis, and Eimi Tagore-Erwin. Over her five-decade career, Kubota forged a lyrical confluence of the personal and the technological, often merging vibrant electronic processing techniques with images and objects of nature, art, and everyday life. An active participant in the international Fluxus art movement in the 1960s, Kubota was strongly influenced by the art and theories of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Her distinctive fusions of the organic, the art historical, and the electronic are at once poetic and witty. Focusing on several, often interconnected themes, Kubota’s works include installations that pay direct homage to Duchampian ideas and icons; those that reference Japanese spiritual traditions of nature and landscape, particularly water and mountains; and a series of diaristic works chronicling her personal life on video. In this screening, we will focus on the latter component of Kubota’s body of work—her autobiographical videos, collectively titled Broken Diary, that evolved since 1970. Self-Portrait (ca. 1970–1971), Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky (1973), My Father (1973–1975), and SoHo SoAp/Rain Damage(1985) perfectly represent Kubota’s poignant and wry autofictional observations of the everyday, characteristic of a strong sense of feminist identity. Read more on the event and films here.

Thursday, October 13, 2022, 7pm
Altered States: Bruce Conner’s Border Crossings
A lecture by Johanna Gosse
Free admission. RSVP

Join us at e-flux Screening Room for Altered States: Bruce Conner’s Border Crossings, a lecture by Johanna Gosse, with a screening of Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–1967, 3 minutes). This talk focuses on Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, an exemplary instance of experimental film’s engagement with the psychedelic counterculture. Inspired by Conner’s experience living in Mexico City in the early 1960s and his avid experimentation with psychedelics, particularly hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms, the film features ethnographic views of rural village life, cameos from LSD guru Timothy Leary, and multiple allusions, literal and symbolic, to an atomic mushroom cloud, all set to a lively rock soundtrack by the Beatles. The talk will trace how the twin motifs of border crossing and atomic anxiety surface in LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, and in turn, how Conner’s film illuminates the complex cultural politics of race and nation within the 1960s counterculture. The discussion will focus on how the film’s psychedelia is shaped by a colonialist logic of “expansion” and (self-) discovery, in which primitivist projections of Indigeneity play a constitutive role. Read more on the lecture here.

Accessibility        
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.      
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our Screening Room mailing list here.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

“Lynne Sachs, ‘godmother’ of MajorDocs, opens the festival” / Diario de Mallorca

“Lynne Sachs, ‘godmother’ of MajorDocs, opens the festival”
Diario de Mallorca
October 3, 2022
https://www.diariodemallorca.es/cultura/2022/10/03/lynne-sachs-madrina-majordocs-inaugura-76735007.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=btn-share

English translation:

Lynne Sachs, ‘godmother’ of MajorDocs, opens the festival

This documentary film exhibition kicks off this Tuesday with the screening of ‘Film about a father who’

Palm | 03 10 22 | 17:33 | Updated at 17:34

MajorDocs, the documentary film festival that makes a virtue of slowness, kicks off this Tuesday from the Fundació Sa Nostra and opens the doors to 5 days in which documentary, domestic and archive cinema will be the true protagonist. 5 days to reeducate the gaze and silence the noise, reflect, discover and enjoy other realities and other gazes. 5 days of cinema understood as art, culture and creation, space, reflection and dialogue. 

Lynne Sachs, filmmaker, poet and artist based in New York, will be in charge of opening the festival from 6:30 p.m. at Fundació Sa Nostra with her latest film Film about a father who. More than a film, it is a portrait filmed between 1984 and 2019 in Super 8, 16 mm, VHS and HD and that Lynne Sachs uses to delve into the controversial figure of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a complex, playful, selfish man. and charismatic man who led a life full of secrets, children and wives –9 children and 5 wives to be more exact– and who, with his lies and silences, marked the lives of everyone around him. A documentary film that, delving into the figure of a blurred father, tries to understand the bond between a daughter and her father. A well-assembled portrait of a diverse family, their memory and memories. 

After the screening, the musical note will be provided by Joana Gomila and Laia Vallès , two artists who have shaken the world of traditional music with a style that is as personal as it is daring and an expansive and transgressive sound. 

Starting on Wednesday, October 5, CineCiutat will become the venue for the 8 films that will compete in the official section: ‘El silencio del topo’, by the Guatemalan documentary filmmaker and producer Anaïs Taracena; ‘Ardenza’ by Daniela de Felice; ‘A night of knowing nothing’, debut feature by Mumbai-based Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia; ‘We, students’ by actor, director and sound engineer Rafiki Fariala; ‘Herbaria’ by film director, producer, programmer and projectionist Leandro Listorti; ‘La playa de los Enchaquirados’ by the director born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Iván Mora Manzano; ‘Rampart’ by Marko Grba, director and writer born in Belgrade; and ‘Aftersun’ by Catalan director Lluís Galter. 

Check the schedule for October 5, times and location: 

Sa Nostra Foundation.

At 10 am, Masterclass by Lynne Sachs: The body, the camera and matter.

At 12 noon, doc-Session given by the filmmakers Anaïs Taracena and Leandro Listorti: Search or find. The language of non-fiction.

CineCiutat.

At 5:30 p.m., ‘We, students’ by Rafiki Fariala. 

At 5:30 p.m., ‘The silence of the mole’ by Anaïs Taracena. 

At 7:30 p.m. ‘Ardenza’ by Daniela de Felice. 

At 7:30 p.m. ‘A night of knowing nothing’ by Payal Kapadia. 

Tickets can be purchased both at www.majorDocs.org and at the CineCiutat box office. 

Admission: €5

Reduced ticket for members of CineCiutat, students and retirees (only at the box office): €3.50

Subscription for 4 screenings (only at the box office): €15

Spanish original:

Lynne Sachs, ‘madrina’ del MajorDocs, inaugura el festival

Esta muestra de cine documental arranca este martes con la proyección de ‘Film about a father who’

Palma | 03·10·22 | 17:33 | Actualizado a las 17:34

MajorDocs, el festival de cine documental que hace de la lentitud una virtud, arranca este martes desde la Fundació Sa Nostra y abre las puertas a 5 días en los que el cine documental, doméstico y de archivo será el auténtico protagonista. 5 días para reeducar la mirada y acallar el ruido, reflexionar, descubrir y disfrutar de otras realidades y otras miradas. 5 días de cine entendido como arte, cultura y creación, espacio, reflexión y diálogo. 

Lynne Sachs, cineasta, poeta y artista afincada en Nueva York, será la encargada de inaugurar el festival a partir de las 18.30h en Fundació Sa Nostra con su última película Film about a father who. Más que una película, es un retrato filmado entre 1984 y 2019 en Súper 8, 16 mm, VHS y HD y que Lynne Sachs utiliza para adentrarse en la controvertida figura de su padre, Ira Sachs Sr., un hombre complejo, vividor, egoísta y carismático que llevó una vida repleta de secretos, hijos y mujeres –9 hijos y 5 mujeres para ser más exactos– y que, con sus mentiras y silencios, marcó la vida de todo el que le rodeaba. Una película documental que, buceando en la figura de un padre desdibujado, trata de entender el vínculo entre una hija y su padre. Un retrato bien ensamblado sobre una familia diversa, su memoria y sus recuerdos. 

Tras la proyección, la nota musical la pondrán Joana Gomila y Laia Vallès, dos artistas que han sacudido el mundo de la música tradicional con un estilo tan personal como atrevido y un sonido expansivo y transgresor. 

A partir del miércoles 5 de octubre, CineCiutat se convertirá en la sede de las 8 películas que competirán en la sección oficial: ‘El silencio del topo’, de la cineasta documental y productora guatemalteca Anaïs Taracena; ‘Ardenza’ de Daniela de Felice; ‘A night of knowing nothing’, ópera prima de la cineasta India establecida en Mumbai Payal Kapadia; ‘We, students’ del actor, director e ingeniero de sonido Rafiki Fariala; ‘Herbaria’ del director de cine, productor, programador y proyeccionista Leandro Listorti; ‘La playa de los Enchaquirados’ del director nacido en Guayaquil, Ecuador, Iván Mora Manzano; ‘Rampart’ de Marko Grba, director y escritor nacido en Belgrado; y ‘Aftersun’ del director catalán Lluís Galter. 

Consulta la programación del 5 de octubre, los horarios y la localización: 

Fundació Sa Nostra.

A las 10h, Masterclass de Lynne Sachs: El cuerpo, la cámara y la materia.

A las 12h, doc-Session impartida por los cineastas Anaïs Taracena y Leandro Listorti: Búsqueda o hallazgo. El lenguaje de la no-ficción.

CineCiutat.

A las 17:30h, ‘We, students’ de Rafiki Fariala. 

A las 17:30h, ‘El silencio del topo’ de Anaïs Taracena. 

A las 19.30h ‘Ardenza’ de Daniela de Felice. 

A las 19:30h ‘A night of knowing nothing’ de Payal Kapadia. 

Las entradas se pueden comprar tanto en www.majorDocs.org como en la taquilla de CineCiutat. 

Entrada: 5 €

Entrada reducida para miembros de CineCiutat, estudiantes y jubilados (sólo en taquilla): 3,50€

Abono para 4 proyecciones (sólo en taquilla): 15€