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.
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.
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
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 .
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!
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.
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.
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.
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€
Join us on the first Saturday of every month for our Poetry Reading series. Each gathering will include a reading by that month’s Featured Poet, followed by a discussion with the poet.
November’s Featured Poet is Lynne Sachs. She is an experimental filmmaker and poet, whose films and poetry combine to explore family, feminism, form, and process. Her book, Year by Year Poems, contains one poem for each year of her live so far, “filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.” (Phillip Lopate).
First Saturday Poetry is curated and presented by award-winning poet Vasiliki Katsarou. Vasiliki is a Geraldine R. Dodge Poet and a regular Teaching Artist at the Hunterdon Art Museum, and is also a filmmaker. For many years, she ran the well-loved poetry-reading series at Panoply Books in Lambertville. Her books, including the full-length poetry collection, Memento Tsunamiand the contemporary poetry anthology Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems, are featured for sale at the Bookshop.
First Saturday Poetry Readings are free and open to the public.
Asiliki Katsarou (curator), Lynne Sachs, and Barbara de Wilde (bookstore owner)
Lynne during Frenchtown Books reading outside with the almost full moon
A strong interest in the social, political, and cultural contexts has always been part and parcel of a good variety of experimental filmmaking practices, even though canonical works on experimental cinema tend to focus solely on the formal explorations that supposedly reflect the filmmaker’s own (hermetic) subjectivity. Because of this exclusive focus on formal experimentation, the socio-historical, cultural, and representational politics, ethics, and concerns of much experimental work remained unnoticed until recently. Focusing on the theme of the aesthetics of socio-political unrest and protest, this program showcases examples of experimental filmmaking that are fictionally constructed or experimentally reconstructed in formally explorative and reflexive ways demonstrations, rallies, marches, and sit-ins.
Screening Premiere: October 2, 2022 @ 1:15pm, Roxie Theater, San Francisco Streaming Online: October 2-8, 2022
Films in this Program
Introduction to Insurgent Articulations Ekin Pinar Program Curator
Pig Power Single Spark Film 1969, 8 minutes, b&w, sound, 16mm
Impressionistic peace riots and marches. More art than documentary. Brief remarks by participants. A flavor of the skirmishes of the times.
Anti-war demonstration, 1968, New York City march to Sheep’s Meadow, shows Vets against the war, Yippies, arrests, and flags of a half-forgotten revolution.
About a strike in which women are involved, but told in a very different way.
Digital file for online presentation courtesy of CFMDC. Rent from Canyon Cinema
Sisters! Barbara Hammer 1973, 8 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
A celebration and collage of lesbians, including footage of the Women’s International Day march in SF and joyous dancing from the last night of the second Lesbian Conference where Family of Woman played; as well as images of women doing all types of traditional “men’s” work.
Preserved for Barabara Hammer by BB Optics, Inc. and the Academy Film Archive with support from NYWIFT Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Digital file for online preservation courtesy of Electronic Arts intermix. Rent from Canyon Cinema
New Left Note Saul Levine 1968-82, 26 minutes, color, silent, 16mm, 18fps
As editor of New Left Notes, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. For this film, he employs a rapid fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the antiwar movement, women’s liberation and the Black Panthers.
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, and BB Optics. Rent from Canyon Cinema
Gay Power, 1971/2007/2012 Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett & the Women’s Li… 2012, 33 minutes, color, live sound, 16mm
“’Gay Power’ is a collaboration between Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett – a leading feminist author and activist since the 1960s – and the Women’s Liberation Cinema. The film in¬stallation utilizes footage shot by Millett and the Women’s Liberation Cinema docu¬menting the Second Annual Christopher Street Day Parade in 1971. The parade, which is still held annually, celebrates the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community [are these meant to be capitalized??], and campaigns for liberation. The images of the 1971 demonstration, which took place just two years after the Stonewall riots, show a crowd of 6,000 marching from the West Village to Central Park, through a far more openly homophobic New York City than the one we know today. Hayes and Millet have created a voiceover soundtrack to accompany — or speak with — the footage. As two voices from different generations, Hayes and Millet address the footage and the ‘movement’ from two distinct historical positions. Neither voice commands authority over the moving image, intimating both the coherence and incoherence of historical documentation, and illuminating the ways in which history is often rewritten accord¬ing to the present.(Tanya Leighton Gallery)
Digital preservation courtesy of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project
One the nature of the bone Elena Pardo 2018, 2 minutes, color, sound, digital video
The concept of memory and image are mixed in this piece to reveal the continuity in the justifications that the Mexican Government issues to perpetuate violence. Mexico was ruled for 80 years by the same political party, during which power passed unchanged from one president to the next in what some people call a “soft dictature”. These were the years of bloody repressions. One of these terrible events was the massacre of students in 1968 at the Tlatelolco square.
*In Mexico we use the term “hueso” (bone) to refer to power. A politician fetches a bone, a slice of power.
Rent from Canyon Cinema
A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message Rhea Storr 2018, 12 minutes, color, sound, digital video
Celebration is protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. A look at forms of authority, ‘A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message’ asks who performs and who spectates. Following Mama Dread’s, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces. The film considers how easy it is to represent oneself culturally as a Mixed-race person in the UK and the ways in which Black bodies become visible, questioning ownership or appropriation of Black culture.
Rent from LUX
B.L.M. Toney W. Merritt 2020, 1 minute, b&w, sound, digital video
In support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Rent from Canyon Cinema
Investigation of a Flame Lynne Sachs 2001, 45 minutes, color, sound, digital video
On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War Protesters led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, walked into a Catonsville Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. Investigation of a Flame is an intimate, experimental documentary portrait of the Catonsville Nine, this disparate band of resisters who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience.
Recording of the full lecture “Under Our Skin – An Exquisite Copse” by Peter Cramer and Jack Waters
Photo by Mike Bailey-Gates
NYU’s Cinema Studies Department and Undergraduate Film & TV Department present the 12th Annual Experimental Lecture
Friday, Nov. 11, 2022, 7:00 PM Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor Free and open to the public in-person.
Since 2008, the Experimental Lecture Series has presented veteran filmmakers who immerse themselves in the world of alternative, experimental film. Our intention is to lay bare an artist’s challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Abigail Child, Nick Dorsky, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, M.M. Serra.
– Programmed by Lynne Sachs
“Under Our Skin – An Exquisite Copse”
Peter Cramer and Jack Waters
“As a queer interracial couple living with AIDS, our background as filmmakers and dancers transitioned into a media driven interdisciplinary practice largely due to the conditions of living in a viral culture. Our interest in collaboration is a direct result of our desire to create a radically different environment for making art and cinema. The Covid pandemic has also accelerated our drive for an interactive relationship with our audience, both live and virtual. Receiver becomes producer. Lecture becomes lab becomes party! We use our gender fluidity with its transgressive inclination against racial and nationalistic containment as a catalyst for change – at the very least exposure to difference both pleasurable and uncomfortable.”
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Named “New York City’s Most Radical Queers” by I-D Magazine, multi-media artists Peter Cramer and Jack Waters are constantly in the process of creating performances, films, videos, installations and works of social practice. Musically minded as well, their queer-skinned kitchen band NYOBS performed “Memories That Smell Like Gasoline – Reading David Wojnarowicz” at the Whitney and “Spaghetti Wrestling” in Naples, Italy. Their 40-year collaboration includes dozens of projects including a live cinema/action of Wagner’s Ring Cycle for the legendary queer media festival MIX NYC and “Sunscreen Test Boulevard In The Sand” made for the art activist organization Visual AIDS. Waters performed the title role of Jason Holliday in the acclaimed 2015 indie film “Jason and Shirley” for which he is a co-writer. The film is in the collection of MoMa with a recent run on The Criterion Channel. His film “The Male Gayze” was included in the Whitney’s “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity In American Art”. On the cusp of the coronavirus pandemic, Cramer and Waters premiered “GENERATOR – Pestilence Part 1” in 2020 at the East Village’s renowned avant-garde theater La Mama. Waters and Cramer are co-founders and directors of Le Petit Versailles, a community art garden in the Lower East Side that screens free experimental, underground movies outside under the trees.
“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.
