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“Hindsight is 20/20” by Lynne Sachs / Tenement Press

Hindsight is 20/20
by Lynne Sachs
Tenement Press
April 25, 2023
https://tenementpress.com/Hindsight-is-20-20

NoUP / Rehearsal
https://tenementpress.com/Rehearsal

^{An ongoing & growing collation
of original (& borrowed) digital ephemera…}

^{We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal—being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.}
_{Fred Moten}_{& Stefano Harney
The Undercommons(2013)}

Tenement Press
https://tenementpress.com/Hindsight-is-20-20

NoUP / Rehearsal ^#5

HINDSIGHT IS 20/20
(YEAR BY YEAR BY YEAR)

Lynne Sachs

_{In the land of the imperial measuring system, we have an idiomatic expression that wends its way around: ‘Hindsight is 20/20.’ It’s a double entendre, one of the best. In order to fully appreciate the intention of this historically prescribed piece of so-called common sense, it helps to understand what 20/20 means and what it implies both in terms of sight, in the optical sense, and the mind. A person with 20/20 vision has what is considered normal vision as measured by a standardized eye test. What you see from 20 feet away is the same as what a person with normal vision would see. Of course, I realise that the measurement itself is based on a system that exists only in the United Kingdom, other Commonwealth countries and the United States. Nevertheless, I think it is clear that when we suggest that “Hindsight is 20/20,” we are assuming that with time, we gain a maturity that provides a deeper perspective on looking at the past.}

_{When I turned fifty, I decided to write a poem for every year of my life so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in my life and the swirl of events beyond my domestic universe.}_{Year by Year Poems}_{(Tender Buttons Press, 2019) moves from my birth in 1961 to my half-century marker in 2011. Across this time span, I navigate within and alongside historical events such as the first landing on the Moon, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the earliest Congressional hearings in the US on sexual misconduct, the first mass shooting in a US high school, and the fight for national health care. While I could not assume that I had gained insight in the years that had passed, I wanted to explore my understanding of these singular events through my poetry.

With both frames and stanzas in mind, I turn to the work of Fred Moten, American scholar of Black studies, poetics and critical theory to help me navigate the meaning and the power of the expression “Hindsight is 20/20.” Moten challenges us to revise our understanding of the “rehearsal” as a striving for perfection, offering, instead, a more wabi-sabi celebration of impermanence, improvisation and, perhaps, imperfection. He offers readers and listeners a kind of uncanny encouragement not only to write, make music or paint but also to appreciate the notion that we can find a place for our imagination in various and surprising locations of activity. In his own 2018 poem ‘}_{come on, get it!}_’_{(published in The New Inquiry), Moten claims that finding ourselves in this new kind of space of engagement has the potential to radicalize us in the most fundamental ways: ‘Improvisation is how we make no way out of a way. Improvisation is how we make nothing out of something.’}

_{Maybe the difference ain’t between
performance and practice. Maybe it’s

not between practice and playing.
Maybe the difference is all inseparably

inside out and unexternalizable, all and
more and none and gone, come o}_n_…

_{To assist me in thinking candidly, sometimes skeptically, about my approach to the retelling of my own past in Year by Year, I look to Moten’s notion of ‘social arrangement, that is how things get together’ through poetry. The first time I heard him use the term hesitant sociologist was in}_{a recorded lecture delivered in the Poetry and Poetics program at the University of Chicago in 2016}_{. After providing a context for the evolution of sociology as a discipline beginning with Auguste Compte’s early thinking in the field of sociology and then moving forward to W.E.B DuBois’s 1905 essay ‘Sociology Hesitant,’ Moten refers to the underlying contradictions, even tensions, that exist between an impulse to write and a commitment to cultural transformation. In various other lectures and texts, he grapples with the awkward, ecstatic relationship between aesthetic experimentation and the quest for historical resonance and ultimately resistance.}

_{Moten asks ‘What if it’s not about putting shit together but about how shit falls apart?’ He relieves us of the responsibility of simply making something new and instead encourages us to fragment, even rip apart, what’s out there—like history books that make people feel bad about themselves or suppliers of systemically contaminated dirty water.

Still, I must remind myself that Moten is searching for ‘resistance events by persons denied the capacity to claim normative personhood.’ How can, should, will I, as a white heterosexual middle-class woman living in the US, embrace his vision? When Moten reminds us of writer and cultural thinker Edward Glissant’s notion of Blackness as the ‘consent not to be a single being,’ I become aware of my own cis-concept of self, and my openness to a shifted presence. All I can do is remain cognizant of this difference, open to observing a unilateral consciousness that imposes the rigidity of that 20/20 vison that hindsight was supposed to be providing. Perhaps, we are only pretending when we clam wisdom in a “normal” sense is an outgrowth of time.

Before reconnecting with my own poems, I want to share a specific text that Fred Moten himself speaks about and celebrates often. Zong! is an example of an expression of anguish for an underrecognized horror in the history of enslaved people. It’s a book-length poem by M. NourbeSe Philip, a 182-page poetry cycle composed entirely from the words of the case report, Gregson vs. Gilbert, related to the murder of 130 African people on board a slave ship. Choosing to embody rather than recount, Philip creates a non-narrative poetic evocation of her own revulsion—}

_{The case report Gregson vs. Gilbert, recounts the massacre by drowning of some 130 enslaved Africans over the course of ten days beginning on November 29th, 1781. The captain of the eponymous slave ship, Zong, having made many navigational errors resulting in extending the length of the voyage from West Africa to Jamaica ordered the Africans be thrown overboard so as to allow the owners of the ship, the Gregsons, to claim indemnity from their insurers, the Gilberts. When the insurers refused to honor the contract of insurance, the ship’s owners initiated legal action against them, which proved to be successful. Upon appeal, however, the insurers, the Gilberts, were granted a new trial. The report of that hearing, Gregson vs Gilbert, constitutes the only extant, public document related to the massacre. Through fugal and counterpointed strategies, Zong! explodes the coded, documented silence of the historical text to become an anti-narrative lament that tells the story of this tragic massacre: it cannot be told yet must be told; it can only be told by not telling.}

_{Her revulsion comes through …}

_{Philip does not offer us a history retold, in bold, with accessible, easily digestible facts, but rather a fragmented, scat-like series of passionate verbal iterations, single words floating, drowning on the page, pointed laments for the brutal murder of actual human beings on board a ship crossing the Atlantic.

For Tenement’s Rehearsal, I take my appreciation for both Moten and Philip as a jumping off point for contextualising my own practice, for recognising that my own “hindsight” has been transformed and shifted by my discovery of these two poets’ approaches to the continuous, vital, yet ghostly presence of our past in all moments of our now. Tenement Press editor Dominic Jaeckle chose these ten poems from a total of 50 for me to annotate …}

1962
_{A nurse tugs a new baby girl
from between our mother’s legs.
Dad is miles away
witnessing James Meredith walking up
the stairs of the University of Mississippi.
And other things he didn’t tell her.
How long can she swim in
her anesthesia?
Two baby girls brown and blonde
at home with Mom and a nurse.
John Glenn circles the Earth
and comes back to the same place
he began,
a kitchen table.}

_{In the fall of 1962, there was enormous racial tension throughout the American South. James Meredith, a young Black man, wanted to enroll as a student at the all-white University of Mississippi in the town of Oxford. When Meredith attempted to register, the governor of Mississippi not only denied his application but called in the National Guard to stop the process. Hundreds of civilians, many of them armed white supremacists, came to the campus to prevent Meredith from enrolling. In the face of this mass of angry, racist citizens supported by the highest ranked politician in the state, President John Kennedy ordered a U.S. military force to go to Mississippi on September 30, 1962 to protect Meredith against the violent mob.}

1970
_{Terrariums are the thing.
I have one on my bedroom window sill.
Water droplets and ferns
moist fecund soil
small green umbrellas shading
hobbits and fairies.
Oxygen in.
Carbon dioxide out.
A complete system.
Vietnam behind
another glass
in the den
slightly louder than the sound of my parents arguing.
Punishment for being nine and
not going to sleep.}

_{The terms “climate change” or “global warming” didn’t find their way to mainstream awareness until the late 1980s. Prior to embracing an activist notion of environmentalism, the more naïve, passive approach to celebrating the Earth came in the form of “ecology,” and making a terrarium was a gesture in this regard …}

1977
_{Our art teacher asks us to imagine
what we would see
if we put our index fingers in a hole.
Any hole?
In the world in the dirt in an ass in a mouth.}

_{Children’s art teachers in the 1970s were not faced with as much institutional oversight as they are today. For better or worse, the classroom was essentially a private space where students learned whatever their teacher wanted to impart on them—hard cold facts, liberated views of the human body, suggestions of oneiric, somatic discoveries that might push us to better appreciate the art making practices of Surrealists …}

1982

^{(for Ira, my brother)}

_{The gypsy women of Paris go by in groups of five
while I am in worn jeans, a pair of pumps, and a paisley blouse.
Each rain floods the sidewalk with a stream of green and brown,
like a studio of an Impressionist painter,
curious brush strokes,
relics of the Jardin des Plantes.
I’m a tired college student
napping in an empty Sorbonne classroom
late-to-class bus rides
crumbs from my morning baguette ground between threads.
My evening phone booth call catches my brother
as he prepares for school at home, 4359 miles away.
His hello transforms this dirty glass box
into four dynamic movie screens.
I see him clearly
at home with Mom
eating a bowl of cereal and drinking a small glass of juice.
I see a new diamond stud in his left ear,
Mom at the sink, a confused look on her face,
wondering how to read the placement of his glistening gem.
What we share and still continue to hide.
Raindrops slide down the fourth window pane,
framing him with a man I can’t quite see.
In a dark parking lot behind a downtown Memphis bar,
a secret cameo of infatuation.
I wipe away the condensation
to get a better view
as the screen goes dark on Boulevard Raspail.}

_{There was a visible code to being gay in the early 1980s. For some, wearing an earring on the right side was said to indicate homosexuality, while wearing one on the left indicated heterosexuality. Of course, since this sartorial decision could vary depending on where you lived, confusion around identity was rampant …}

1987

_{I hold blood
semen
water
wax
hair
pus
breath.
All that is mine to let go
is held in,
contained.}

_{In 1987, A.I.D.S. was everywhere and men and women, mostly gay but also straight, had to think more than they ever had before about the ramifications of being sexual, even simply physical, with anyone else. Other people’s bodies could become territories of potential trauma …}

1988

_{My camera travels from blue sunlight
to the orange glow of a kitchen bulb,
explosions of cyan, magenta, and yellow.
A troupe of twenty-four images marches
from darkness toward silver halide.
A 16mm target the size of my thumbprint.
Study of a film frame begins my life
behind the camera.}

_{This poem stands on its own …}

1990

_{Peggy, Kathy, Laura, Jennifer, Nina, Crosby, Lynne.
We seven women
pour theoretical intimacies into mismatched tea cups
argue within and amongst
read Irigaray and Cixous as forms of testimony
imbibe glasses of California white and cheap red.
Where will we sleep when we have abandoned our beds?
Where will we eat when we have burned our table?
How will we read when our glasses have broken?
Between each page, each syllable
we find something hidden
in ourselves
collect our own data,
create our own science,
begin to define.
Built from the inside out, our new laboratory
pushes against the walls of the old structure.
An incendiary effect, yes, but not arson.}

_{In 1990, I was in a feminist reading group where we read the French theorists Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, writers who embraced “feminine écriture” and the concept of the abject, which suggests a radical separation from normal, legal, or mainstream, especially in relationship to society, morality, and identity …}

1993

(for Mark)

Our sundering begets beloved longing.
Intimacy reaches from bay to bay.
My head should lie down in San Francisco three hours
after your ear touches down at Eastern Standard Time.
Strange how I need to hear your voice, its whisper-rich tones,
before my lids meet to seal the deal of sleep.
Instead, our lights go out in a
simultaneous surge toward darkness.
With intonations of love,
the resolution of an argument, the agreement:
Either 7 or 31 days until.
Plans made.
Let go.
Close my eyes.
As if
I am next to you.
Away and together.
Together.

_{The United States is a large country and trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with the person you love can be challenging when one person is in California and the other in Florida …}

2004

(for Noa)

_{Your first ride on the subway, alone.
The cool air of the train on a hot July afternoon.
My whisper deposits secrets inside your ear,
mass transit lullabies.
I let go of your small hand.
You step across
alligator pits
circus tight ropes
the orange glow of the F train.
Explosions in the Madrid metro send
shards of anxiety across the Atlantic.
My jaw tightens.
Might you be safer if we still used tokens,
out-of-date amulets of the 20th Century?}

_{On the morning of March 11, 2004, 10 bombs exploded on four trains in and around Madrid’s Atocha Station, leaving 191 people dead and more than 1,800 injured. The coordinated near-simultaneous attacks targeted commuter trains over a period of a few minutes …}

2007
_{Holus-bolus
everything all at once.
Swimming naked in a sheltered pond
surrounded by goldenrod or perhaps forsythia.
My two daughters glide across the water
enthralled by a daylight skinny-dip,
terrified by our stolen privacy.}

_{In a lake with my young daughters, a huis-clos, a hermetic oasis that suggests but cannot promise protection …

* * *}_{Reading my poems should not require a recollection or even an understanding of these moments in history. By providing these shadings of context, I am trying to hint at the shifting and sliding that happens over time, the way that poetry allows us to choose from a multitude of perspectives—one or many, parallel or contradictory, confident or flawed points of view. Fred Moten, in his own exquisitely playful yet serious way, encourages us ‘to connect subjects that our preconceptions may have led us to think had little relation,’ subjects across time, across stature, subjects from our intimate home space, famous subjects, sublime subjects, sullied subjects, risky ones as well. Through poetry we all have the right to embrace that which we desire.

I return to Moten’s poem ‘come on, get it’ to close us out—}

_{Neither the poet nor the poem can contain such virtue: what it is to be able not so much to ask but to construct a question, to be allowed being also to be required to construct, construct implying some intention—fanned out all over the yard like some weighted canopies or a community sing of open corners or a conversion of the guards—to hit a poem or a poet in the throat or in the stomach.}

With thanks to Cíntia Gil …

About NoUP
https://tenementpress.com/NoUP

No University Press
An un-academic press for academia

NoUP will publish argumentative work of any field, so long as it is also work that strives beyond its field. We seek work possessing a presentist enthusiasm that works beyond the policies of enclosure that define and underwrite the mission of academic publishing.

A new imprint from Tenement Press, NoUPwill exist as both an open, digital library and print publisher. Concentrating on collaboration and cooperation in lieu of peer review, the press will advocate a fair remuneration for its authors, and consider the pace (and place) of publication as an (unerringly) collaborative process.
NoUP will publish paperbacks that contest and undermine the price point that render academic works unavailable to a general reader. We seek work that represents the ideas and the meanings of institutionalities gone awry. In line with Tenement’s convention, we will make our books internationally available, with short production cycles and rapid distribution, and counter the belatedness typically associated with academic publishing through active co-work and co-editorship.

69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen – Profile programmes / Experimental Cinema

69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen – Profile programmes
Experimental Cinema
By Marcos Ortega
April 14, 2023
https://expcinema.org/site/en/events/69th-international-short-film-festival-oberhausen-profile-programmes

The 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is presenting five shows of works by filmmakers and artists from different generations and countries who work with the short form in very different ways. They come from the arts, experimental or documentary film, their themes are personal, political or historical, they use performances, collages, text or feature film elements, demonstrating the enormous range and versatility of the short form.

Marcel Broodthaers, Belgium (1924-1976)

A programme of rarely shown cinematic works by the Belgian artist

A poet who decided to become a visual artist at the age of 40, Marcel Broodthaers created a fascinating body of work in a relatively short time, consisting of texts, drawings, paintings, publications, photographs, sculptures, installations – and films. With limited economic and technical means, Broodthaers produced idiosyncratic works that explored the boundaries and rules of film. Oberhausen will be showing a selection that concentrates on Broodthaers’ work as a filmmaker rather than on the exhibition or performance documentaries that were also made. The works are presented in loose chronological order, from Défense de fumer (1967-70) to La Bataille de Waterloo (1975), compiled by curator, scholar and author Xavier García Bardón.

The highlight of the programme is an Expanded Cinema work conceived especially for the festival, presenting projects in which Broodthaers made the screen an integral part of the work. On 28 April, in a special screening outside the cinema hall, a number of his films will be projected onto three special screens. The festival would like to thank Maria Gilissen Broodthaers for her collaboration.

Teboho Edkins (Germany/South Africa)

An agent between cultures

Born in the USA, raised in South Africa and Lesotho and now living in Germany, Teboho Edkins sees himself as a mediator and translator between cultures. His documentary works provide insights into the world of South Africa and Lesotho in particular, be it the gangs of Cape Town in his “gangster trilogy” Gangster Project (2011), Gangster Backstage (2013), and Gangster Film (2020) or the culture of cattle herders in Lesotho as in Shepherds (2020). Both Gangster Backstage and Shepherds won awards at Oberhausen. Edkins’ films are documentary in nature, and he shows them in art contexts as installations as well as at numerous film festivals. In 2020, his feature-length film Days of Cannibalism screened at the Berlinale, and his new short film Ghosts was selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.

The programme is curated by art historian and curator Susanne Touw.

Alexandra Gulea (Romania)

The first complete show of her short films

Alexandra Gulea was born in Bucharest and studied art in Bucharest and Paris as well as film in Munich. With her expressive, mostly documentary films she has won numerous prizes, including at Oberhausen. Now the festival is showing the first complete show of her short films. She often sheds light on institutional and social constraints, for example in Dumnezeu la Saxofon, Dracu’ la Vioara (The Thumb Twiddlers, 2003), where she portrays the residents of a psychiatric home in Romania, or in Valea Jiului – Notes (2018), which is about the quasi-orphaned children of parents working abroad. Most recently, she won the Prize of the German Competition at Oberhausen with Ńeale azbuirătoare (Flying Sheep, 2022). In the film, she tells the story of her grandparents, who were members of the persecuted Aromanian minority.

Curated by the author, film curator and teacher Madeleine Bernstorff.

Lynne Sachs (USA)

Body of the Body, Body of the Mind

The New York experimental and documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs is one of the pioneers of feminist experimental film. In around 45 feature and short films to date, she explores the connection between the body, the camera and the materiality of film, mixing personal observation and historical experience, essay, performance, poetry and collage. She won the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen in 2020 with A Month of Single Frames; now the festival is presenting a showcase of her work whose central topos is the body. Three programmes, inspired by Sachs’ 2019 poetry collection Year by Year Poems, explore three different approaches: translation, collaboration and the inseparability of the affective and political. Twelve films from 1986’s Drawn and Quartered to Maya at 24 (2021) form a cross-section of Sachs’s work, compiled by publicist, programmer and curator Cíntia Gil.

Lynne Sachs’ new work Swerve has been selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.

Yamashiro Chikako (Japan)

An international discovery

Born in Okinawa, video artist Yamashiro Chikako is well-known in her home country, but has yet to be discovered in Europe. In Oberhausen, she won the ZONTA Prize for Tsuchi no hito – 2017 gekijyoban (Clay Man – 2017 Film Ver.) in 2018; now the festival is presenting a first show of her work in Europe. Since the 2000s, Yamashiro has been artistically exploring the history, social issues and geopolitical conditions of her homeland. Her focus is above all on the consequences of the American occupation, its cultural influences, the blending of traditional culture and American elements: Ryukyu singing meets Verdi opera, Japanese cowgirls meets spoken word poetry. Curated by Okamura Keiko, curator of contemporary art, Oberhausen shows an overview of Yamashiro’s short film work.

Full festival programme:

https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets

69th Festival: Five Profile Programmes Press Release / 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

69th Festival: Five Profile programmes Press Release
69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
April 13, 2023
https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/press/detail/69th-festival-five-profile-programmes/

69th Festival: Five Profile programmes

13.04.2023 Press Press Release News

69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 26 April – 1 May 2023

Five Profile programmes:

Marcel Broodthaers, Teboho Edkins, Alexandra Gulea, Lynne Sachs, Yamashiro Chikako

Marcel Broodthaers, Belgium (1924-1976)

A programme of rarely shown cinematic works by the Belgian artist

Teboho Edkins (Germany/South Africa)

An agent between cultures

The programme is curated by art historian and curator Susanne Touw.

Alexandra Gulea (Romania)

The first complete show of her short films

Curated by the author, film curator and teacher Madeleine Bernstorff.

Lynne Sachs (USA)

Body of the Body, Body of the Mind

Lynne Sachs’ new work Swerve has been selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.

Yamashiro Chikako (Japan)

An international discovery

Born in Okinawa, video artist Yamashiro Chikako is well-known in her home country, but has yet to be discovered in Europe. In Oberhausen, she won the ZONTA Prize for Tsuchi no hito – 2017 gekijyoban (Clay Man – 2017 Film Ver.) in 2018; now the festival is presenting a first show of her work in Europe. Since the 2000s, Yamashiro has been artistically exploring the history, social issues and geopolitical conditions of her homeland. Her focus is above all on the consequences of the American occupation, its cultural influences, the blending of traditional culture and American elements: Ryukyu singing meets Verdi opera, Japanese cowgirls meets spoken word poetry. Curated by Okamura Keiko, curator of contemporary art, Oberhausen shows an overview of Yamashiro’s short film work.

Full festival programme:

https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets

Download stills:

https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/press/#c261

Accreditation deadline: 17 April 2023

https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/visit/#t2638

Oberhausen, 14 April 2023

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, T +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.d

Workshop: “Frames and Stanzas” with Lynne Sachs / Poetry Society of America

Workshop: “Frames and Stanzas” with Lynne Sachs
Poetry Society of America
June 6, 2023 and June 13, 2023, 6:30-9:30pm
https://poetrysociety.org/events/workshop-frames-and-stanzas-with-lynne-sachs

Workshop: “Frames and Stanzas” with Lynne Sachs

Poetry Society of America
119 Smith Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

June 6, 2023 and June 13, 2023
6:30-9:30pm

Join us for this multimedia investigation of how sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences come together in a film-poem. Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share her insights and experiences in bridging poetry and cinema, with a particular focus on large-scale public events and our internal responses to them. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words, writing poems in conjunction with shooting video and taking photographs. Sachs will screen some of her recent film-poems and excerpts from her feature, “Tip of My Tongue” (2017), as examples and prompts for participants to create their own original work. Creative collaboration between participants will be a vital part of the workshop, and Sachs will carefully pair participants based on a questionnaire sent after registering.

Note: This is not a tech-focused workshop (though some basic tech instruction will be shared). The only equipment required is a smartphone with a camera.

Lynne Sachs Profile / 69th Oberhausen Short Film Festival

Lynne Sachs Profile
69^th Oberhausen Short Film Festival
May 1, 2023
Program 1 – [girls with fast lane dreams]: https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets?v=1493
Program 2 – [Another baby girl drops down]: https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets?v=1494
Program 3 – [scars muscles curves of the spine]: https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets?v=1495

Lynne Sachs Artist Profile Trailer

Lynne Sachs 1 – [girls with fast lane dreams]

An overview of the films of the New York pioneer of experimental documentary. Sachs’ films are inseparably linked to events of life, though they are resolutely non-biographical. Inspired by her poetry collection Year by Year Poems, the central “topos” of these programmes is the body (and the bodies „in-between“). The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind leads from the Vietnam War to feminism to death.

Films in this Program

A Month of Single Frames
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2019

In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her archive. She gave her Duneshack materials to Lynne. ‘The words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film.’

Noa, Noa
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2006

Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand. Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic ‘Crawdad Song’.

Drift and Bough
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2014

A winter morning in a Central Park covered in snow. Graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The black lines of the trees against the whiteness become an emotional drawing. Stephen Vitielloʼs delicate yet soaring musical track seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to the sky.

Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1994

Lynne and her sister Dana travelled from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Their conversations with strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana’s travel diary revels in the sounds, proverbs, and images of daily life. Their film becomes a warm landscape that weaves together stories of people they met with their own childhood memories of the war on TV.

Lynne Sachs 2 – [Another baby girl drops down]

Films in this Program

The House of Science: a museum of false facts
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1991

Combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural collage, the film explores the representation of women and the construction of the feminine otherness. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming-of-age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.

Drawn and Quartered
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1986

Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium. A declaration of desire of and through cinema.

Maya at 24
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2021

‘My daughterʼs name is Maya. Iʼve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.’ Lynne filmed Maya at ages 6, 16 and 24, running around her, in a circle – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward.

A Biography Of Lilith
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1997

Off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, updating the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as a mother.

Lynne Sachs 3 – [scars muscles curves of the spine]

Films in this Program

The Task of the Translator
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2010

Three studies of the human body compose an homage to Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator. Musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind of cosmetic surgery for corpses. A group of classics scholars confronted with the task of translating an article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. A radio news report on human remains.

The X Y Chromosome Project
Mark Street, Lynne Sachs
USA, 2007

Sachs and her partner Mark Street use the split screen to cleave the primordial to the mediated. Their diptych structure transforms from a boxing match into a pas de deux. Newsreel footage brushes up against hand painted film, domestic spaces, and movie trailers. Together, Sachs and Street move from surface to depth and back again.

Starfish Aorta Colossus
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2015

Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8 mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns. Paolo Javier invited Lynne to create a film that would speak to one of his poems. She travels through 25 years of her 8 mm films.

The Last Happy Day
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2009

In 1938, Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian doctor, fled from the Nazis to Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army hired him to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Eventually he moved to Brazil where he embarked on the translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin. The film weaves together personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance.

BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND
Lynne Sachs Artist Profile
April 26 – May 1, 2023
69^th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
Curator: Cíntia Gil

Program notes by Cíntia Gil:

The title of this retrospective quotes Lynne Sachs in her 1991 film “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”. It speaks of a zone of experimentation that crosses Sachs’ work and grounds filmmaking as a practice of dislocating words, gestures and modes of being into open ontologies. What can be a woman, a word, a color, a shade, a line, a rule or an object? The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind is another way of saying that things exist both as affections and as processes of meaning, and that filmmaking is the art of not choosing sides in that equation. That is why Sachs’ work is inseparable from the events of life, while being resolutely non-biographical. It is a circular, dynamic practice of translation and reconnection of what appears to be separated.

There are many ways of approaching Lynne Sachs’ full body of work, and many different programmes would have been possible for this retrospective. Films resonate among each other. Like threads, themes link different times. Repetition and transformation are a constant obsession in the way images, places, people and ideas are revisited. While looking for an angle for this programme, I tried to look at some of the threads that seem to me the most constant, even if sometimes subterraneous, throughout the films. The three programmes are not systematically bound by themes or built around typologies. There are three different doors to the same arena where body (and the ‘in-between’ bodies) is the main ‘topos’: translation, collaboration, and inseparability of the affective and the political. Yet, none of these terms seems to truly speak of what’s at stake here.

Lynne Sachs knows about the disequilibrium that happens between words and concepts, and about the difference between the synchronicity of life and the linearity of discourse. She also knows that words can be both symptoms and demiurgic actors. That is maybe why she writes poems, and why this programme was inspired by her book, “Year By Year Poems”^[1].

1975 [girls with fast lane dreams]

Teachers push us to the precipice –

trick us with conundrums we mistake for algorithms

catch us in a maelstrom of dizzying numbers.

Searching for the exit door

I discover quick methods for finding north –

solace in the gravitational pull of geography

and head for the first opening from a school

with too many ambitions

penalty points

and girls with fast-lane dreams.

Talking about the making of “Which Way is East”, Lynne Sachs said: “the most interesting films are the ones that ask us to think about perception, that don’t just introduce new material.”^[2]. Both Lynne Sachs and her sister Dana, a writer, lived the Vietnam War through television – a middle-class childhood sometimes haunted by images of that war that seemed both far away and fundamental to their generation. When Dana moved to Vietnam in the early 1990s, Lynne visited for a month, and they made a film. The film begins with a sequence of movement shots, colors, fleeting forms, interrupted by a popular Vietnamese saying about a frog and the horizon. Three layers come together, predicting one of the strongest traits of Lynne’s work: the world seen through the rhythm of a moving body, and the dialogue between different modes of feeling and thinking. [Lynne’s childhood Vietnam War images were black and white, upside down; the Vietnam landscape in 1991 is crossed on a motorbike, and nature is motion and strangeness; “a frog sitting on the bottom of a well, thinks the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot”.]

A travelog in Vietnam became a dialogue of perceptive discoveries, glimpses of meaning and, most importantly, of the many ways of being just here and now, together, facing abysses that should not eat us alive. How to not be eaten alive by life’s infinite and sublime abysses?

Girls with fast-lane dreams is another way of referring to an impulse for joy.

Girls looking at girls, girls playing with girls, Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer collaborating on an impossible film. How to work on beauty, without monumentalizing it? How to work on death without freezing the life within? A kid once told me: “you have to pass it through the inside, and let it out through your smart eye”. Is that translation? Isn’t “A Month of Single Frames” the translation of a place and a body, the conditions of light seen through embodied solitude?

There is some kind of radical positioning of Lynne Sachs’ gaze (gaze is a pace and a gesture, and that is its politics): allowing things to unfold as they are, knowing that it is the very act of filming them that constitutes their becoming. Noa becomes play with light. Maya becomes time and unsurmountable individuality. Central Park becomes a porous membrane for the circulation between a musical movement and the event of an emotional form.

1997 [Another baby girl drops down]

(for my daughter, Noa)

Again, nine full moons leave bare

the dust against the sky.

Air fills up with brightness.

Another baby girl drops down.

Dice on a betting table

or rich, ripe fruit atop worn grass.

The political comes forward when things are dislocated from their assigned places, becoming eloquent. When a field of possibilities is problematized by different temporalities, different meanings attach to the same words. New symptoms (not symbols) emerge from the same myths. To the territorialization of body, Lynne Sachs responds with the unspeakable layers of desire, underpinning the history of the body. To the typification of identity, cinema responds with the history of gesture.

Feminism in Lynne Sachs’ work comes from an obsession with ontological fluidity – women as possibilities, bringing with them the memory of what has not been captured by politics, the promise of kinder political places. Such invention requires the deconstruction of the gaze, the transformation of language through the power of a thinking (collective) body. Collective as in-between, in circulation, in transition with others: the Lilliths who may or not become mothers in “A Biography of Lillith”, the enfolding body in “Drawn and Quartered”, the collage that renders old measures useless in “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.

Materiality is a key aspect in this cinema, it sustains the emergence of a filmic gesture. The presence of things in their most concrete form, be it a birth, a hand helping to translate an idea, a splash of light on a face, the astonishment of a baby in front of a camera. Things occupy a certain space, move in a certain way, and their sensuality is never sublimated or forced into metaphors. It is their material presence that saves them from their assigned roles and chains of meaning, revealing their vitality as a principle for a political imagination.

“Incendiary, but not arson.”^[3]

2009 [scars muscles curves of the spine]

I hold the mirror just inches away and look

shy

detached

brave

I touch myself with knowledge

Scars muscles curves of the spine

I trace a path across my chest

searching for surprises I’d rather not find –

knots in the fabric

Translation comes, then, as a movement between transmitted memory, embodied experience, affective vocabulary and the never-accomplished labor of form. Nothing stays determined within a field of possibilities, but the field itself is in a constant motion, resignifying every aspect, reconnecting every moment in time, every glimpse of an image. The work done around Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin, seems key to consider her full body of work. “The Task of the Translator”, presents three movements, three ways of looking for the body. It starts with the reassemblage of bones of dead American soldiers during WWII by Sandor Lenard, in a sequence that will come back in “The Last Happy Days”. Here, translation is both an effort to make sense of the materiality of time and history, and a question about the translatability of such. Like in “Which Way is East”, how can history be translated through the gestures of the present, of the living? Is the way the past escapes linearity and expresses its vitality?

The second movement in “The Task” shows a group of scholars translating an article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. Tentative words and articulations around a table, hands helping meaning through gestures. Is Latin a dead language? Sandor Lenard, after moving to Brazil, translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. What paradox lies in the gesture of translating a children’s story into a dead language? Translation is a game of materiality, of dislocating the world into another regime of forms and movements. Allowing language to pass through the materiality of the present time. In “The Last Happy Day”, children tell the story of Sandor Lenard while rehearsing Winnie the Pooh. Translatability through bodies and gestures, vitality: one does not simply look at the past, but rather invents a dialogue of embodied time. In “The Task of the Translator”, suddenly the camera leaves the scholars and focuses on the drops of rain on a foggy window, and on the gestures of a hand, before we start hearing radio news about human remains after an attack.

Translation keeps all things alive at the same time – even the matter of death.

Cíntia Gil

Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon Theatre and Film School) and holds a degree in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto). From 2012 to 2019, Cíntia Gil served as co-director and then director of Doclisboa – International Film Festival. From 2019 to 2021 she has directed Sheffield DocFest in England. In 2022, Cíntia started the programme of screenings and study groups “Artistic Differences”, at UnionDocs (NY), as a co-curator together with Jenny Miller and Christopher Allen. She is part of the programming team of Cannes Directors Fortnight.

Gil has curated a variety of contemporary and historical film series, retrospectives and exhibitions, besides publishing articles in various publications. In addition, she has taught seminars, lectures and workshop in different institutions (Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico, EICTV in Cuba, HGK Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany among others), and she is a project tutor for the Master on Creative Documentary at the Pompeu Fabra University . She has also served on juries in international film festivals, such as Berlinale, Cairo Film Festival, Mar del Plata, Jerusalem Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, London Film Festival, IDFA, Taipei IDF, FidMarseille, Seville European Film Festival, DokuFest, Ficunam, DocsNYC, Guadalajara, among many others. She has been a member of the executive Board of Apordoc – Associação pelo Documentário, the Portuguese documentary film association since 2015.

^[1] Lynne Sachs, “Year by Year Poems”, Tender Buttons Press, NY, 2019

^[2] “Observe and Subvert”, interview by Inney Prakash for Metrograph, December 2021

^[3] In “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.

Short Film Programme: Best of Accomplices / Frauen Film Festival

Short Film Programme: Best of Accomplices
Frauen Film Festival
April 23, 2023
https://frauenfilmfest.com/en/event/short-film-programme-best-of-accomplices/

Short Film Programme: Best of Accomplices

Seven colleagues from three different generations explain their personal film choices.

By and with: Cana Bilir-Meier, Lisa Domin, Jennifer Jones, Claudia Richarz, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Betty Schiel and Maxa Zoller.

23 APR 2023 16:30
Schauburg Dortmund

ROSALIE AND LÉONTINE GO TO THE THEATER
Romeo Bosetti
FR | 1911 | Short film, Silent film | 4’ | OW

Rosalie and Léontine Go to the Théâtre shows us the audience at a vaudeville theatre. It is refreshing to see […]

[TUNIS] / [ تونس ]
Lia Sáile
DE | 2018 | Experimental Documentary | 15’ | OW

Every word, every syllable, every nuance is discussed, interpreted, rejected and translated anew. Translating a poem into another language and […]

SEMRA ERTAN
Cana Bilir-Meier
AT | DE | 2013 | Experimental | 8’

Semra Ertan was born in Turkey in 1956 and moved to her parents to the federal republic of Germany in […]

A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES
Barbara Hammer, Lynne Sachs
US | 2019 | Short film | 14’ | OFe

A Month of Single Frames is a poignant dialogue between film-maker Lynn Sachs and her late friend Barbara Hammer. Barbara […]

PLUTONIUM BLONDE
Sandra Lahire
UK | 1987 | Experimental | 15’ | OFe

As penetrating as X-rays and as colourful as fireworks: Sandra Lahire’s film about female workers at a nuclear plant in […]

CUT PIECE
Yoko Ono
US | 1965 | Performance | 8’ | OW

Yoko Ono sits on stage, a pair of scissors in front of her. She asks the audience to cut open […]

RESERVATION
Clara van Gool
NL | 1988 | Short film | 9’ | OW

Leaves rustle. Foxes stir. Cracked brick walls beguile. Black and white frames flicker, leap, and shudder as two women, clad […]

Description of Program
https://frauenfilmfest.com/en/movie-category/focus-2023-en/

FOCUS

Focus: Accomplices

For over 130 years, women have contributed to creating images for the cinema. Stories of self-empowerment lie at the heart of all important feminist movements. Cinema enables us as film-makers and audiences to show solidarity with people of yesteryear and perhaps even fall rapturously in love with them. In all decades – since the silent films of the 1910s – radical, anarchic heroines have inspired us, and we can connect with them as accomplices through time and across generations. Valuable clues into current feminist practices lurk in the archive.

We’ve gone for a bold concept with the Focus section: We’ve formed groups spanning various timeframes. We look for common links, friction points and feelings to make the experience of encountering other people a less solitary one. This time-crazy idea is inspired by Carolyn Dinshaw’snconcept of »Communities Across Time«. In »Getting Medieval«, the historian evokes queer communities in the late 14th century based on medieval texts, opening up for us and herself a desire across centuries where past and present touch.

Our programme invites you to interact with women accomplices across time. Cinema is such an ideal medium for this, as the audience and the characters on the screen can experience direct relationships while time axes can be turned all ways. We can mobilise greater energy for feminist causes when we know the achievements of different feminist positions outside our own radius.

Description of Festival
https://frauenfilmfest.com/en/festinfo/mission-statement/

Internationales Frauen Film Fest Dortmund+Köln is Germany’s largest forum for women in the film industry and presents outstanding films by women spanning all genres and styles. For almost 40 years the festival has played an active role in ensuring that films by women directors are seen, appreciated and celebrated. We promote the influence of women in all fields of the cinema industry, mainly as directors, but also cinematographers, producers, scriptwriters, composers, songwriters and, actors to name but a few.

XY Chromosome Project

StatementCourt Tree Gallery proudly presents The XY Chromosome Project. The recent collages of filmmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs. Street and Sachs have been making films individually and collaboratively for over 30 years, which is also the length of their relationship as a couple.

The XY Chromosome Project follows the career paths of Lynne Sachs and Mark Street. To follow this
path is to trace a blueprint on devotion. Working both together and individually for the past 30 years, each artist has carved out their own niche without the obvious influences of being married. They part ways to be left alone to their own creations. It is the respect for the other’s work that bonds them. Left alone, their work could not be more different. Lynne’s work is cerebral and emotional. As seen in her full length films “Your Day is My Night” and “Tip of My Tongue”. She collages the art of storytelling by layering stunning visuals while swimming between reality and performance. Mark is the experimental film hero, a pioneer in film manipulation, an encyclopedia in the world of experimental films. His film work is solely connected to what is possible in the organics of film manipulation. They celebrate experimentation in its truest form. Yet both come down on the same line when it matters most. The line of captivation which as any artist knows is the hardest to achieve.

In 2010, they created The XY Chromosome Project an umbrella for their collaborative ventures. Together they have produced an array of collaborative installations, performances, and two-dimensional art works. In addition to exhibiting their collages on the walls of the Court Tree Gallery, they will present movies, poetry and essays by themselves and other artists and writers throughout the month of May.

In 2017, Lynne embraced her life-long love of collage during an artist residency at Beta Local, an art center in San Juan, Puerto Rico dedicated to supporting and promoting aesthetic thought and practice. While there, Lynne worked with San Juan artists who shared images torn from magazines or newspapers, found in a drawer, a family album or in the trash — personal, commercial and ephemeral objects. Lynne then proceeded to “collaborate” with these artists by integrating both the treasures and the trash from their lives into her collages.

“Morning Addition” is a series of collages Mark has been working on since 2015. He uses images from newspapers, old books, Farmers’ Almanacs, paper shooting targets and original photographs to create strange and uncanny combinations. What arrives on the doorstep and found on the street mixes together to distill quotidian ephemera down to an unanticipated broth.

Court Tree Collective was established in 2013 by a group of artists and creatives with the primary purpose of representing and supporting the work of emerging and established contemporary artists. Since its opening Court Tree Collective has been a staple to south Brooklyn’s emerging art scene and in a short time has exhibited a number of important exhibitions. In addition they have curated a number of exhibitions at satellite locations throughout the states and abroad.

For more information please visit https://www.artsy.net/show/court-tree-gallery-the-xy-chromosome-project?sort=partner_show_position

Artistic Differences: Body of the Body, Body of the Mind / Union Docs curated by Cíntia Gil

Artistic Differences: Body of the Body, Body of the Mind
Union Docs
April 15, 2023
https://uniondocs.org/event/artistic-differences-body-of-the-body-body-of-the-mind/

Artistic Differences: BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND

Apr 15, 2023 at 3:00 pm

Artistic Differences:
BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND

This program is part of Artistic Differences with Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen

ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES is back with Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen this April to present BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND.

Co-curator Cíntia Gil has assembled a mini-retrospective at this year’s festival on one of our longtime collaborators, the beloved and brilliant Lynne Sachs. We’re delighted to focus on one of these three programs for an upcoming Study Group on April 15th from noon-2:30PM Est.

The title of this retrospective and program quotes Lynne Sachs in her 1991 film The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts. It speaks of a zone of experimentation that crosses Sachs’ work and grounds filmmaking as a practice of dislocating words, gestures and modes of being into open ontologies. What can be a woman, a word, a color, a shade, a line, a rule or an object? The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind is another way of saying that things exist both as affections and as processes of meaning, and that filmmaking is the art of not choosing sides in that equation. That is why Sachs’ work is inseparable from the events of life, while being resolutely non-biographical. It is a circular, dynamic practice of translation and reconnection of what appears to be separated.

There are many ways of approaching Lynne Sachs’ full body of work, and many different programmes would have been possible for this retrospective. Films resonate among each other. Like threads, themes link different times. Repetition and transformation are a constant obsession in the way images, places, people and ideas are revisited. While looking for an angle for this programme, we tried to look at some of the lines that seem to us the most constant, even if sometimes subterraneous, throughout the films. The three programmes are not systematically bounding themes and building typologies. They are three different doors to the same arena where body (and the ‘in-between’ bodies) is the main ‘topos’: translation, collaboration, and inseparability of the affective and the political. Yet, none of these terms seems to truly speak of what’s at stake here.

Lynne Sachs knows about the impotency problem of words and concepts, about the difference between the synchronicity of life and the linearity of discourse. She also knows that words can be both symptoms and demiurgic actors. That is maybe why she wrote poems, and that is why this programme was inspired by her book, “Year By Year Poems”.

FILM PROGRAM

The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts by Lynne Sachs
30 min | 16mm | Color | 1991
Combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural collage, the film explores the representation of women and the construction of the feminine otherness. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.

Drawn and Quartered by Lynne Sachs
4 min | 16mm | Color | Silent | 1986
Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium. A declaration of desire of and through cinema.

Maya at 24 by Lynne Sachs
4 min | 16mm to Digital Transfer | B&W | 2021
“My daughterʼs name is Maya. Iʼve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.” Lynne filmed Maya at ages 6, 16 and 24, running around her, in a circle – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward.

A Biography of Lilith by Lynne Sachs
35 min | 16mm | Color | 1997
Off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, updating the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as a mother.

STUDY GROUP — ONLINE – APR 15

We’re thrilled to come together for a Study Group Session structured around these incredible films! Like a kind of grassroots book club, but for documentary art, it’s all about sparking discussion and deeper investigation, through reading, listening and responding in small, self-organized groups that together form a larger collective experience.

You will get access to the film program through our Membership Hub a few days in advance. Sign up now and stay tuned in your inbox for further instructions!

PUBLIC DIALOGUE – AT THE FESTIVAL – APR 30 – MAY 1

If you’re interested in hearing from the filmmakers & artists themselves as well as the ideas generated in collaboration with our Study Group be sure to catch our regular public dialogues for each film program on the UNDO Member’s Hub. These conversations sample from the festival dialogues, the study group and an in-depth interview hosted by Artistic Differences with the featured artists. Sign Up to receive a note when it’s released.

Conversation with Mania Akbari and Lynne Sachs / Tanide

Conversation with Mania Akbari and Lynne Sachs
Tanide
April 4, 2023

Conversation between Mania Akbari and Lynne Sachs

Mania: You are an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, you search for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Over the course of your career, you worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Could you let me know what is the form of cinematic dialogue you bring to working with moving images? What is the relationship between sound and images in your works?

Lynne: Sometime very soon, I am going to return to my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee to shoot a film that will be part of an omnibus collection of projects that are currently being created to examine the shrinking of women’s rights in the United States. As you may know, women have had the right to stop their own pregnancies in this country for decades, but recently this country has been swept up by conservative, misogynistic legal changes that have made it impossible to obtain an abortion in many states. So what is an angry, frustrated filmmaker to do in this situation? I decided to join a group of artists who are acting collectively to “speak out” against this form of oppression. I bring this charged situation up with you now because of the formal, structural nature of this endeavour. Each of us will shoot silent footage of a women’s health clinic in a “RED” (ie Republican-dominated) state which at one time provided abortion services, but now no longer does because of recent restrictive legislation. The surgical procedure is legally forbidden in the state, forcing women to go to another more welcoming clinic across a state line perhaps hours or days away. We will then add a separate voice-over from a recording we will do with a health care provider (like a nurse or a doctor) or a woman who was unable to obtain an abortion. What makes this construct so interesting is the fissure between the sound and the image that will be the same in all of the projects. Together, all of the artist participants in the project are committing themselves to moving away from the more conventional, sound-image marriage in the documentary where what you see is also what you hear. Honestly, we are bringing a rigor to our process that follows the way that I have worked pretty much all of my life as a filmmaker. Yes, it is often more “dramatic” to see a synchronous interview, but is it as conceptual, or thought-provoking? By constructing a third, cinematic reality through the juxtaposition of two disparate aural and visual experiences, we will offer our audiences radical interpretations of meaning, representation and power. No one can know for sure if our work will change even one mind or one law. It is just as important to use our cameras to witness, interpret, and preserve a moment in history when anguish can be supported through art.

Mania: Throughout your career, we can trace the ways that your experimentation dares to confront social and political issues by embracing both familiar and intimate processes. You investigate the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of the film itself. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry and music, your films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception. How do archival images and photos help your practice? What is your relationship to the archive? Do you think we can find our history through the archive an rebuild our history and memory?

Lynne: It’s interesting to think about an archive versus The Archive. For me, there is a difference. As a filmmaker, I am interested in and dependent on access to archives where I can find images and sounds that help me work with, articulate and revise history, both very recent and long the past. This is the material for which I feel awe and reverence, lucky to have my hands on images that might never have been seen before. In my film “Sermons and Sacred Pictures” (1989), I portray a Black minister who was also a filmmaker with an interest in documenting his own community in the mid-20th Century. Prior to my film’s release, his images had only been seen by members of his own congregation. In my film “Investigation of a Flame” (2001), I spent a year trying to get my hands on a single roll of original, black and white 16mm film footage of a 1968 civil disobedience action against the Vietnam War. I worked extremely hard to find this material which had previously been censored by the local government. I felt like a detective on an investigation, making so many phone calls, writing letters, driving for hours to meet a journalist who had hidden and protected the film for decades and then convincing him to release the material to me for my movie. I was obsessed. Once I did obtain the footage, I treated it like precious cargo that I needed to protect and then share with the world. My reverence for the celluloid itself was profound. Then there is The Archive, comprised of images from our visualized collective unconscious (to use Carl Jung’s term). These are the shots and scenes from popular movies, commercials, and educational films, created to entertain and inform our entire society, from birth to old age. I work with this kind of material in a completely different way, allowing myself to investigate its subliminal meaning and its intent to manipulate. I carve away, colour, and fragment these images, all in the process of looking for levels of representation, humour, irony, or unintentional pathos. You can see examples of this kind of irreverent exploration in my films “The House of Science: a museum of false facts” (1991), “Atalanta: 32 Years Later” (2006), and “Tip of My Tongue” (2017).

Mania: You’ve produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. You tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken word to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when you produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel/Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war — where you looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and your own subjective perceptions. What is the relationship between political subjects and the essay film for you? Do you think essay films could show us the truth about history — where the system itself is actively controlling and hiding? What is the relationship between the essay film and truth?

Lynne: What a profound and complicated series of questions, ones that make me think deeply about my own process of making work and the politics of every decision I make. In my own essay films on war including “Which Way is East” (Vietnam, 1994), “States of UnBelonging” (Israel/Palestine, 2005), “Investigation of a Flame” (Vietnam/US, 2001) and “The Last Happy Day” (Italy/ Brazil/US, 2009), I explore my thoughts around war and its far-reaching impact on people’s lives. I have done my best to search for ways of witnessing and experiencing periods of crisis, death, fear, regret, and anger. I know that I cannot fully understand these expressions of pain, but I can be open to their resonances. In my embrace of the essay film, I have also tried to articulate my own doubt, which is at the core of the essay film — doubt of government, doubt of institutions and, most importantly doubt of my own position of authority. In addition, in my understanding of the essay film, we are called to examine the politics of the image – who made it, why and for whom.

Mania: You are also deeply engaged with poetry. How do you find connections between your cinematic practice and poetry?

Lynne: I started writing poetry as a child, long before I picked up a film camera. My mother is just about to move from the home in Memphis, Tennessee where I grew up and where she has lived since 1967. I was there a few weeks ago and happened to find a collection of poems that I had written at age eight on small coloured pieces of paper. Yes, the poems were rather simplistic and the spelling was atrocious, but it was clear too that, at the least, I loved playing around with words. Now half a century later, I can see that writing poetry and making films comes from the same place of observation, invention and introspection. The edit between two shots in my films is very similar to a line break in a poem. For me, there must be intention in both places, a subtle or assertive rupture that also works with rhythm. In addition, both poetry and filmmaking depend on the viewer/ reader. When you read a poem or watch a non-narrative film, you become critical participant a synaptic event, an experiment that the artist has imagined in their mind but has no idea if it will work. Like a scientist with a hypothesis, I anticipate what might happen but I never know until I give it a try. It’s a risk worth taking.

Mania: Feminist theory has been foundational to the establishment and development of film studies as a discipline. Although it often gets reduced to key theoretical—primarily psychoanalytic—analyses of spectatorship from the 1970s and 1980s, it has always been and continues to be a dynamic area with many objects of focus and diverse methodological practices. We have many books and films that are samples of this breadth, historically and topically. Researchers will find how the subfields of authorship, genre, star studies, film history, spectatorship, and reception studies have been enriched and evolved through feminist approaches. Research that highlights facets of identity such as sexuality and race is given special attention throughout, and this emphasis is also addressed in separate sections. Global and/or transnational approaches are highlighted, as are feminist approaches to thinking about the body and cinema. The diversity of scholarship included in our contemporary life testifies that feminism moves beyond thinking purely about gender or sexual difference toward the ways in which power and difference shape the cinematic terrain. What do you think about it? Could you find any connection between feminism and your essay films too?

Lynne: I’ve been revisiting all of my ideas around my own art practice and feminism over the last few months, so you could not have asked a more vital question. Thank you for this. In a few weeks, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany, the oldest festival of short films in the world, will present a three-program Profile of my work. They invited Portuguese film curator Cíntia Gil to organize and write about the program. Cíntia has chosen to follow a feminist thread in my work that comes out of a book I wrote entitled YEAR BY YEAR POEMS, published by the feminist press Tender Buttons Press. So, here audiences and readers will be able to see the connections between these two intertwined practices. This gives me the chance to think back on some of the writers who have been most important to me in terms of my growth as an artist who works with images and words. This list includes the French writers who embraced Hélène Cixous’s notion of an écriture féminine, including Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigeray and Monique Wittig. I read their texts in my twenties and was forever transformed. So, with their radical approach to writing from the physical self in mind, I was freed to use a somatic approach to every aspect of my art practice, even the making of an essay film, which most people would think of as strictly cerebral. For example, these authors understand and celebrate Kristeva’s concept of the abject, which suggests a radical separation from norms and rules, especially in relationship to society and morality. It’s also a rejection of given states of identity. This all becomes so much more resonate in our culture today when many people – both men and women – are questioning their relationships to their given bodies and to power. I heard Kristeva speak when I was 22 years old. Now looking back, I can see what a

Mania: For months now, the world has been witnessing the incredible courage of the women of Iran, as the brutal killing of Mahsa-Jina Amini has catalyzed massive protests against a regime that compulsively controls the bodies, minds and lives of women — a regime that has responded to the uprising with lethal brutality. In a desperate wish to control the narrative and hide the government’s crimes and atrocities, journalists have been arrested, phone networks are being jammed and the Internet censored. And still, the women of Iran aren’t backing down. Instead, the protests are spreading, and Persian, Azeri, and Kurdish women, many of them very young, are paying the ultimate price for freedom with their lives. What do you think about this important women’s movement?

Lynne: I bow with respect and awe to the spirit of Mahsa-Jina Amini. She was punished for her spirit. Witnessing the oppression of Iranian women, through the news and through personal testimonies that are released through social media, shakes me to my core. I deeply appreciate the way that so many people of the world are rallying in support of the women in Iran who are speaking out against the regime. Sadly, we also know that “speaking out” can bring enormous repercussions for these brave Iranians, so as a person who lives outside of Iran, I am searching for ways that I can be supportive of this transformation, this freeing, of a society wrapped in the constraints of state control.

About Tanide
https://www.tanidee.com/about-1

Tanide is a collective platform for disseminating and reflecting on the voices of independent feminists living in Iran and around the world. The mission of Tanide is to unite the realms of knowledge and action in order to amplify ongoing efforts and resistances, which are intersectional and intergenerational in nature, and to strengthen and facilitate regional and transnational solidarity in the Middle East and beyond. Feminist uprisings in Iran and the MENA region in recent years have led to new encounters and the emergence of a new social imagination that transcends narrow identity and centrist frameworks and challenges (neo)oriental and global neoliberal hegemonic ideas. With the progressive, comprehensive Woman, Life, Freedom/Jin, Jiyan, Azadi uprising, we have gathered to continue fighting for the decades-long struggles of women and marginalised bodies in the region and explore new spaces and paths that have opened up. The voices of Tanide mirror the increasing reverberation of plural languages that speak in a multitude of tongues of and for the suppressed and excluded bodies that have been marginalized by patriarchy, tradition, theocracy, centralism, and the imposed order of capitalism. These bodies have reached an irreversible turning point in their historical battle to reclaim their subjectivities and make other futures possible. Our work at Tanide focuses on multiple actions: we write, we compose, we connect, and we act. We do not remain women; we become women. This knowledge is linked to life, and life is resistance – resistance that can make another world possible.

‘Swerve’ in Canyon Cinema: Recent Acquisitions (Winter 2023)

Canyon Cinema: Recent Acquisitions (Winter 2023)
Canyon Cinema
February 27, 2023
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/ccfwinter2023/

Canyon Cinema: Recent Acquisitions (Winter 2023)

from Canyon Cinema Foundation PRO on February 27, 2023

Genres: Art
Duration: 57 minutes
Subtitles: English
Availability: Worldwide

This round-up of recent additions to the Canyon Cinema catalog includes a mix of new titles in distribution, new artists now represented by Canyon, and new digitizations.

Featuring films and videos by: Malic Amalya, Sandra Davis, Lawrence Jordan, Lynne Sachs, Rajee Samarasinghe, Barry Spinello, Paige Taul, and Al Wong

Read Greg Youmans’s essay on Malic Amalya’s RUN! on Canyon Cinema Connects at: connects.canyoncinema.com/pest-control-malic-amalyas-run-explores-precarity-and-complicity-under-american-militarism/

Soundtrack (Barry Spinello, 1969, 09:21)