One of the most underappreciated roles in our society is the labor behind housework and caregiving. There are lots to do to maintain the upkeep of our households — laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc — but these menial tasks keep the household together and, most importantly, keep us alive and put food on the table.
Filmmakers often focus on what’s exciting and entertaining instead of the mundane, which keeps these tasks invisible in pop culture; even filmmakers interested in the charm of daily life would ignore this type of labor. However, housework and caregiving have been explored, particularly, among women filmmakers, who know the internal lives of this hidden labor. Chantal Akerman’s three-hour Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles and Lynne Sachs’ & Lizzie Olesker’s short film The Washing Society, albeit portraying two different kinds of housework, both share a common thread: these films are making the invisible visible.
The Washing Society tells a story about laundromat workers in New York City through vignettes of fiction, nonfiction, and performance art; the film is guided by the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen strike, where hundreds of washerwomen — mostly of African-American descent — went on strike after being underpaid by their bosses. The Washing Society continues this legacy by interviewing two laundry workers and a former laundry worker who went on strike in the 1960s. The film also tells its story through three characters — two women who represent the mostly immigrant, mostly Chinese or Spanish-speaking laundry workers in New York City, and one woman representing the ghosts of the 1881 strike. When we drop off our laundry at the laundromat, we come back with a fresh load of clothing without thinking all the work that is put behind them. Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker focuses the camera on these narrow storefronts, rows and rows of washing machines, and the Sisyphean task of folding and washing clothes to bring forth that invisible labor that people don’t often think of.
Life as a washerwoman in 1880s America
My screening of The Washing Society was followed by a Q&A with feminist Marxist theorist Silvia Federici. Sachs has mentioned about how her work has been based on Federici’s work on Wages Against Housework. In her seminal essay, Federici argued that domestic labor is a form of production used to sustain other forms of work in a capitalist society. However, it is very convenient to make this form of labor invisible. A tenet of its invisibility is to mask this labor into a “labor of love” — that things such as washing clothes are marked as a care, therefore taking out the value of the work performed and expecting that careworkers are doing it based on willingness and kindness. Whereas, the reality is that these workers are indeedworkers and should be valued as such. Federici’s shaping of The Washing Society reminded me of another film, and is a helpful framework to understand it in a Marxist perspective: Jeanne Dielman.
Directed by Chantal Akerman (who has an interest of portraying domestic work on film), Jeanne Dielman is a story about a housewife who has lost her husband, therefore resorting to sex work to support herself and her teenage son. The film focuses on the minutiae of Jeanne Dielman’s day-to-day tasks; running errands is no longer a generally glossed-over issue in this film as we watch Jeanne cook meals, wash the dishes, grocery shop, and do the things we would consider as menial. While The Washing Society raises awareness to this invisible labor by employing narrative and performance art techniques, Akerman forces the audience to watch this invisible labor. The music is very sparse, the camera movement static, the pace moves slowly, making its audience truly see and listen to the details of Jeanne Dielman’s actions. The invisible, then, becomes hypervisible.
The fictional laundromat workers in The Washing Society
Through this hypervisibility there is a visual code that guides Jeanne Dielman’s actions. Once we focus on these mundane everyday scenes, we realize how repetitive it all gets. Folding clothes, chopping vegetables, boiling water. It’s almost like Sisyphus, rolling his boulder to the top of the mountain only to find it down on the ground again. Once the housework is done for the day, there will always be new loads to wash, more mouths to feed. Some would argue that this repetition is a type of performance art — as housework becomes hypervisible, we are exposed to the rhythm of this repetition and we are seeing it as a form of art in this context, rather than a task. The Washing Society continues this by actually transforming laundry work as performance art. In a few scenes, we see the two fictional laundromat workers rhythmically tapping on laundry machines and dancing on top of them. It is a form of ownership of their own labor — in a world where their customers and bosses do not see the value of their work, they make themselves visible.
What sets Jeanne Dielman apart from the women in The Washing Society is the solitary nature of her labor. Where laundromat workers work in groups and can form unions and negotiate against their bosses, Jeanne Dielman navigates through housework on her own. She is rarely seen communicating with people other than her son — we only see her communicate with her friends through mail, or through more laborious requests by her neighbor. She has no space to talk about these things, as the labor she performs at home is timed to a T.
However, what unites the two films are the internal space of the labor of housework. The internal spaces and thoughts of careworkers and houseworkers are often ignored, as people often impose that they’re thinking of care when they are approaching they work. The reality is definitely far from that — in a system where they work endless, repetitive tasks, they are constantly thinking. This thinking is then menifested in a form of action. The 1881 washerwomen of Atlanta forms a union and strikes for better wages. The fictional laundromat workers in The Washing Society expresses this stifled rage through performance. Jeanne Dielman, however, spends more time with her thoughts since her work is extremely solitary, and expresses them in a more pessimistic way.
Jeanne Dielman in the kitchen
What makes Jeanne Dielman’s labor more dire is that her labor isn’t valued in a tangible way. While laundromat workers are able to count their wages and identify wage theft, there is no way for Jeanne Dielman to price the value of her housework. In Capital, Marx took account the labor of housework, and including housework to be valued based on the family breadwinner’s labor-value (although this line of thought has been criticized by scholars like Silvia Federici, who argued to put a direct labor-value of housework itself). However, what happens when this breadwinner is taken out of the equation? Jeanne Dielman has to find a line of work that doesn’t interfere with her housework. In the film, she resorts to sex work, entertaining male guests in her home while her son is away at school. In the dialogue of both forms of labor that Jeanne Dielman performs, we can clearly see how both sex work and housework is tied to patriarchy — it is a form of work that is often invisible, and is dictated by the labor-value of the men who sustain the housewife/sex worker. It is not hard to see how these forms of labor are inherently exploitative to working women like Jeanne Dielman.
When we reflect on working women in patriarcy-dictated forms of labor, we have to also look at how it evolves in the future. Near the end of The Washing Society, Lynne Sachs narrates that most of the laundromats she filmed has closed, due to the rise of instant laundry apps that will pick up your laundry, wash them in an undisclosed location (where workers are completely hidden from their bosses and customers), and bring them back to you. Sachs and Olesker argues (in line with Silvia Federici) that technology has not liberated us. Instead of making work easier, work will eventually increase, and workers’ labor will be more and more alienated. If Jeanne Dielman lives in 2021, indeed, it will be easier for her to find jobs through remote work, but this work will fail to recognize how her housework will be much more laborious. COVID-19 has moved a significant amount of workforce online, and has led more bosses to assume that working from home allows workers more free time. The labor of housework was invisible from family breadwinners, and now is made invisible to bosses as well.
With the far-reaching consequences of technology to housework, we should also think about international solidarity. The rut of technologizing housework will fall to migrant workers and workers from colonized countries, as supply chain technology and transportation has eased the access of cheap labor from around the globe. This exploitation of colonized countries also lies in sex work: sex work has long become a justification for colonialism, and day after day men and women from colonized countries have been forced to enter this inherently exploitative line of work. Historian Gerda Lerner mentions how sex work is “the first form of trade, making them seen as less than human,” and that this is “the beginning of women’s subordination at the hands of men.” This exploitation still continues today through avenues like sex tourism and sex trafficking, which targets the poorest of working class women around the globe. This shows that patriarchy and capitalism definitely works hand in hand with colonialism, and that patriarchy and sexual exploitation are tools to further the empire of capitalism and imperialism.
Both Jeanne Dielman and The Washing Society brings forth these invisible strings in the lives of working women: hidden labor in housework and sex work and the exploitation that comes with it. Jeanne Dielman’s work may be solitary, but as I watched her do her menial tasks I am reminded of the hidden labor in the lives of the women I know. She experiences all of it alone, but her rage is universal, and makes me think about the power that working women around the world hold. These power materializes in labor unions, strikes, and revolutions. Working women around the world constantly continue to uphold the spirit of the women before them who also does this hidden labor, in worse circumstances of the progression of technology and the further alienation of their labor. It is up to us to fight for their rights and make the invisible visible.
The Washing Society and Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles are both available to watch through the Criterion Channel. Besides of watching both films, I also urge you to take action to support the working women in your community. Here are some current efforts in NYC (DM me if you want me to include more efforts):
Workers of the United Jewish Council (a home care agency), who are mostly Black/Latinx/immigrants/women of color, has been fighting to end the 24-hour work shifts imposed by the agency. They are holding a rally on Thursday, December 16 in front of the UJC office. More information on the AIW instagram: @aiwcampaign
After the Q&A, Sachs, Olesker, and Federici highlighted the work of NYC’s Laundry Workers Center. They are an organization aiming to support and protect workers in NYC laundromats. You can donate to their fund or check out their website for the campaigns they are running. More information can be found in their website: www.lwcu.org.
In October 2024, Women Make Waves International Film Festival in Taiwan invited US experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs to lead an interactive workshop “The Body in Space” and attend the QA sessions for her latest short film Contractions and accompanying sound piece We Continue to Speak. Workshop participants attended one online and one in-person workshop. Over a period of a few weeks, each of the 30 participants produced a one-minute video which was then compiled into a single half-hour compilation that was integrated into a live performance as the final presentation for the festival public.
Under the very limited time constraints of the workshop, Lynne Sachs generously shared eight of her own films with the students in advance. Through these films, she encouraged the participants to think about the relationship between the body and space from the perspective of performance and imagery. Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has been rigorously pushing boundaries as an experimental filmmaker and poet. These eight films became an excellent entry point for understanding her recent creative trajectory.
Starting with Contractions (2024) and We Continue to Speak (2024), which were screened during the film festival, we also talked about four works out of the eight works shared in the workshop——Your Day Is My Night (2013), A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (2019), Maya at 24 (2021 ), and Film About A Father Who (2020). These works can be connected to the discussion of the body, space, and framing during the workshop: the spectrum of the subject matter shifting from works that are more socially engaged and in collaboration with local activist groups or residents; the creative relationship between her and other experimental filmmakers; and, finally to her closest inner circle, herself and family members. Such assumptions lead to a process that moves from the outside toward the inside, like drawing a circle. As time goes by, the overlapping trajectories become more dense, all the issues, subject matters, and emotions are intertwined with each other, and the inside and outside becomes intertwined with each other. All come together. In her practice, Lynne Sachs invited her family members to run and walk in a way that deviate from their daily routine. In the face of the most embarrassing situations or creative difficulties, she mentioned the preciousness of collaboration with others.
Sometime while we talked, a lot of words were left out of the formal interview, and later picked up in random chats, or during a follow-up online interview when she suddenly turned her computer around and let me see the New York street scene through her window.
Q: Maybe we can start from a more social dimension of your work. Let’s start with Contractions, which is very outspoken about the legal situation in US.
You know, in some ways Contractions is outspoken. And in some ways Contractions is a film that recognizes silence. It recognizes that those people who are most affected by any kind of political upheaval often don’t know how to speak, don’t have access to the microphone that would allow them to be heard, and so they had this sensation of being silenced. When I decided to make this film, I was trying to think of a form that could recognize an erasure as much as a presence.
Initially, there was this 2023 call from a filmmaker in California [Kristy Guevara-Flanagan] who was very upset about the end of Roe vs. Wade (the 1973 law that gave women the right to an abortion throughout the US), the new Supreme Court decision which gave each state the right to make its own laws about a woman’s right to have an abortion. She put out an announcement looking for people who wanted to make a film about abortion clinics that no longer offer services. And so about five or six of us responded, and formed the Abortion Clinic Film Collective. I realized that this was an opportunity to go back to my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, because I’m very interested in this relationship we have to the place where we grew up.
I was very upset that something we had taken for granted about the decision-making process about our own bodies had been taken away. We all make assumptions about living in a civil society. You don’t know what you have until you lose it.
I felt like it wasn’t just that our rights were taken away. It was like our faces were taken away and our voices were taken away. I wanted to figure out how I could visualize that. I was actually inspired by Meredith Monk’s Ellis Island (1985) in which she took a group of performers and dancers to an island off the coast of Manhattan. There was this decaying old building. She took performers there and had them interact with the building. The way that performance activates real spaces is very interesting. Kristy Guevara-Flanagan had one requirement for all of the participating filmmakers: we all needed to go to a clinic that used to offer abortion services and no longer does. So I thought, how do I interact with a building? My cousin is an activist in reproductive justice, she performs in the Vagina Monologues every year in Memphis. So she helped me find the people who were in the film.
I actually just finished a part two to Contractions, called This Side of Salina. I collaborate with a Black women’s empowerment group [Layla’s Got You] for that. The film was projected outdoor in Syracuse, New York onto an exterior façade of the Everson Museum of Art, which was designed by the renowned Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei. I have their voices in the film and they also perform in it, a similar spirit to Contractions.
Contractoins
Q: One thing I am also curious about is the covering of faces in Contractions.
Even in New York now, there are religious protesters every single day in front of clinics that offer women’s health services, including mammograms! Abortion is only a small part of what these clinics offer. People are also coming there for urinary tract infections, for example. All of those women are photographed by the protesters because the protesters don’t know who is actually coming to have an abortion. So they film everybody and invade everybody’s privacy.
I could give two answers about the covering of faces. One, the practical answer, is that someone choosing to be in this film was making a decision that was a little bit precarious. I asked everyone to sign a document stating that they were willing to be photographed, but I promised them there would be no faces. And then accidentally, we had one shot where we didn’t turn the camera off after people had already turned their bodies. And I love that shot because I love little mistakes. I needed to go back and ask everybody’s permission to include the shot. So I made a screenshot and I sent it to each person individually. In the film, you see women not only covering their faces but also are bowing. Maybe there’s a little ambiguity here: I’m bowing with strength, but also maybe you’re asking me to be subservient too. Are the performers bowing to the power? And, who’s bowing. I wanted to spark these questions.
Q: Did you come up with the sound piece We Continue to Speak after finishing Contractions?
I realized that personally I was uncomfortable with not letting the women speak because the whole idea was they were silenced. I think they have a lot to say, so I went back to Memphis just a few months later. I got all the women in the film together, plus one of the men in the film. I also interviewed a woman named Dr. Kimberly Looney, who had been the director of medicine for Planned Parenthood in Tennessee, as a central part of the voice-over. She’s very respected in the state of Tennessee and she’s very involved with Black women’s health. But I had told her from the start, you don’t have to put your name in the film because it could cause problems at the hospital where she works. And then she decided that she wanted her name in it. We’ve only shown the film once in Memphis. She came with her mother and her daughter. And she said, “My mother is scared for me, but I’m not scared.”
Q: How long did it take to shoot the film?
About three hours, since it was potentially dangerous to do so. In fact, when we were organizing the production, I had every shot drawn out because I knew we had very little time. I had never seen the building before, but I had drawings imagining it. My cousin and her friend were helping organize everything. She brought a volunteer marshal for security, in case we had protesters or something worse. Keep in mind, this clinic was known for offering abortions. Yes, it was closed, so why would 14 women in patient medical robes be standing in front of that building? People who were very much against abortion might have done anything. One of the local co-producers later told me during the QA of True/False Film Fesitval that we actually had 14 security marshals in different places, like in cars or and behind windows. It just shows you that this issue is very charged. Just a few years ago, several abortion doctors were basically assassinated in the US.
Q: In both Contractions and This Side of Salina you collaborated with the local activist groups and individuals. In Your Day Is My Night, this layer of collaboration transferred to that of the local Chinese community in New York City. This film looks at the shift-bed (temporary) housing phenomenon in Chinatown as a backdrop, resulting in a hybrid documentary-performance project.
One thing that became kind of joyous in the film was that the people in the film found pleasure in playing with the camera. In documentary, there’s a way of emphasizing the moment of the reveal. There’s also this way of developing a trust. And I think both of these systems can be kind of formulaic and manipulative. I just tried to get the participants in the film excited to do something that was different and might bring something new to their own lives. I never wanted them to feel “I’m doing this because this story hasn’t been told before, or people outside the community need to see it.” In fact, there was an exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum we went to yesterday called “Enclave.” I really like the word “enclave.” You could look at Chinatown as an enclave, or this women’s film festival as an enclave. This very thought-provoking exhibition made me reflect on a seemingly hermetic space that can transform into a more porous one.
Your Day is My Night
For this film, I’d conducted audio interviews that became the basis for our film script, distillations you might say of these much longer interviews. In a sense, each member of the cast was able to have fun performing their own lives. If someone is in my film, I like to find ways that they get to be inventive or to harness their own imagination. We were working on this film as a live performance for about two years before it became a film. I thought it was going to be a film, but I didn’t know how to make it. Honestly, I went through a kind of creative desperation, trying to figure what to do. Your Day is My Night was a live performance first, and then it returned to being a film. This is the film that got me excited about working in this way.
Q: It’s a very hybrid film that blurs the docu-fiction boundary. Can you also talk about the Puerto Rican performer?
Well, we’d been working for a year, and one day we all got together – our cast and crew – and the cast told me that audiences would be really bored with our movie because they thought their own lives were really boring. As a group, they suggested that our film needed a better story that people would care about, perhaps some romance. I proposed this idea: What would happen if someone outside, like me or a Puerto Rican woman, moved in? Remember, we were talking about that idea of disrupting a hermetic space! So, I invited a Puerto Rican actress who had worked with me on other projects to join our filmmaking community. Everyone had a much better time once I made it hybrid. We needed to free ourselves from the limitations of our own reality, you might say.
Q: I really like the way you mentioned ‘enclave’ and the idea of porous relationship. I would like to mention A Month of Single Frames here, because in this case, you are dealing with someone else’s materials. The film is made up of Barbara Hammer’s film footage and sound recordings shot in the 80s.
I love finding out that Barbara Hammer came here to Taipei, two times. I didn’t know that until I arrived here. I made two films with Barbara. Barbara and I had known each other since the 80s because we both lived in San Francisco and we were involved in the Film Arts Foundation. And we both moved to New York, so we kept up a lot over that period of time.
In around 2006, she found out that she had ovarian cancer. That was about the time when she turned 60, and I promised to give her a birthday present, which was to shoot a roll of film with her and her wife, Florrie Burke. But she was so busy that it took me years to set up an appointment with her. And by that time, I was quite involved in her life through her cancer. So each time she had chemotherapy, my husband Mark Street would cook and I would deliver, so we were getting closer through that experience.
In 2018, I finally got to shoot the roll of 16mm color film with her. You can see that footage in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor. I asked all three of these remarkable women artists who also happen to be dear friends, “How does the camera allow you to express yourself?” They all knew each other, but they never expected to be in one cinematic vessel together. Let’s call the film a female bonding moment perhaps. Thinking across generations, Carolee and Barbara were exactly the same age as my mother. They were all born in 1939. Gunvor Nelson was ten years older.
In 2018, when Barbara really knew that she was dying, she asked me and three other filmmakers, including my husband Mark Street, to make films with material that she wasn’t able to finish. So what happened was that she gave me the footage of material she had shot during an artist residency in Cape Cod in 1998, but at first she’d forgotten she kept a detailed journal as well. I asked if I could record her reading out loud from her journal. I thought I’d be able to take it home and pick the parts. But she was in a hurry. She knew that life was not long for her. She asked me to go in the other room and pick out what she was going to read, right away.
One thing that was important to me was to actually find a way to communicate with her, maybe in a kind of transcendent way outside of the film, because she passed away while I was making it, so she never saw it finished. And the text becomes my communication with her and with the audience.
Q: I really like the on-screen texts. They are very beautiful.
Thank you. She never saw that. I felt that I needed to enter the material with her. But also it allowed me to understand something that’s very specific to film. When you’re inside a film, you’re actually in another period of time. We leap from the now to the then or to the future. And as you’re watching the film, you’re actually watching it with Barbara and me next to you. That’s a cosmic thing that film can do that, that you feel like you were in the room with Barbara. And it doesn’t have to do with her being dead or being a ghost. She’s very present in the film. And I knew that and I wanted to celebrate that.
A Month of Single Frames
In fact, Barbara had arranged for all of us to have some funding for the post production from the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. I flew from New York City to Columbus early one morning so that I would arrive in Ohio ready to start. As I was heading there, I fell asleep on the plane. I woke up and I wrote all the text. It came to me in a dream.
I was thinking about the environment, she had filmed in, the sand dunes in 1998. So it’s kind of like your epidermis, the top layer of your skin. Your skin is the same as the sand, both have evolved over many years; your skin is slightly different, scarred or wrinkled, same with the land. In film, we feel as if we can go back in time. That’s what I was thinking about with Maya at 24. We can go back or simulate going back, and we can feel that there is also a here and now for us. You are here, I’m here. We’re all here. Because it’s activated by you, the audience.
Q: Speaking of Maya at 24, its sense of time is very unique. You film your daughter Maya running in circles, clockwise, at ages 6, 16 and 24, while a sense of time is simultaneously embodied through the movement. Can you talk about this gesture of running in circles?
I like that there’s a way that the person holding the camera loses power and control, while the person running gets to have fun. I like that disorientation. And also I like the eye contact that happens. The person who’s following your directions doesn’t really have to do much, but they’re definitely doing something that’s out of character. Even a little gesture, you notice how the camera is able to see how my daughter moves a piece of hair behind her ear, in a mature kind of way. There’s a moment when she’s 24 where she self-consciously makes this gesture. When she’s 16, she’s more defiant. And when she’s 6, she’s kind of more playful with me, more physical. In fact, I made three films, all shot in 16 mm. The first one is called Photograph of Wind, referencing an expression that I heard the renowned American photographer Robert Frank use. Maya as a word also means illusion. I was trying to hold onto her childhood, but it was ephemeral and it was going away like the wind. I called the second iteration Same Stream Twice. It came from the Greek philosopher Hiraclitus who wrote you can never step in the same stream twice, but in film you can step in the same stream twice. Maya at 24 was shot when she was 24 years old. It’s also about film itself running at 24 frames per second. So it’s a little reference to the materiality of the medium.
There’s something I find very energizing and unpredictable, about the flow of two circles running almost in opposite directions or two circles spinning at different rates so that you have this sense of being behind and ahead. And there’s an unpredictable register, which has to do with the person filming, with my energy, my ability, my stability, and the person who is being filmed. If you are in motion, sometimes you lose a little bit of self-consciousness. You’re just thinking about working together on this very unambitious and unfamiliar project, which is running in circles. So I took that way of working into Film About A Father Who. There’s a point where my father’s walking along in a circle. And my mother did that too.
Q: For Film About A Father Who, I really have to say it was a bountiful watching experience, with materials that span 35 years of documentation and creation that also encompass different mediums including 16 and 8 millimeter, video , and digital. As an experimental filmmaker, how do you perceive the medium in this film?
So, it’s interesting to me to consider that as I was making the film, technology kept changing. There’s an assumption that as technology changes, it witnesses and documents our lives. We assume it gets better, that there is a pure, mimetic relationship to what you see with your eyes and what you record. Even though I see myself as an experimental filmmaker who likes the degraded or imperfect image, the more I looked at my old material, the more critical I was of it. I was critical of the medium, but I was even more critical of my skills. But deeper than that, honestly, was a kind of aesthetic critique of my father and of our lives. I had a lot of embarrassment. I was deeply embarrassed about my work as an artist and about my role as a daughter. That was one of the reasons I couldn’t finish it. I could shoot it, but I couldn’t look at it. I just had a lot of shame.
And I did have anger. Initially, I started the film because I thought my dad was really interesting. He was an iconoclast. He was a rule breaker. He was maybe one of the reasons I found myself making the kind of films that I make. I wasn’t intimidated by odd situations, and that’s the way he was. But then as things kept happening, I became more and more uncomfortable. Sometimes I wanted to make a critical film, sometimes an introspective film. In fact, I discovered that at different points, different camera registers or modalities worked better for different subjectivities.
Film About A Father Who
Q: About degraded image, there is one certain sequence that repeats: kids playing in a little stream. The timing of repetition is quite crucial, too.
I show that little stream three times at three different moments pulled from one long shot, and it’s critical to the narrative of the film. But what is more interesting to me is that each time you as a viewer are thrown back into that scene, you know more. You have gained knowledge, and you have shifted your position from being an outsider to being omniscient. You realize that you have been privy to information and to a complexity that not everyone in the film is aware of, so that’s compelling to me to let the viewer grow with that image. To me, it’s probably the prettiest image in the film.
In Hito Steyerl’s article, In Defense of the Poor Image, her writing is a celebration of how images travel through culture and become changed in the ways that our bodies change. We get wrinkles, and we get less vibrant, and images do the same thing. They reveal something about the time in which they were made, but also the time in which we as viewers currently live. But I didn’t understand how important this was to me as an artist until I made this film. Because, the first time my editor and I went through all the footage, that kind of image (the stream image), was one that I probably dismissed. It was on a degraded, improperly archived tape that my father had shot on Hi 8 in the 1980s. Time had not been kind to the material.
So with Hi 8, you had these tapes that were like the size of your palm. They went into the camera and you would shoot. And then you would go home and you would connect your camera with a cable to a machine with a VHS tape, and you would transfer the original to a VHS tape. And then, you would reshoot over the original tape with new material. There was no original anymore! Everything was just a copy, and each copy was more degraded than the one before it. Since I had forgotten this technical fact, I spent a couple of years trying to find the original of that tape. Then I finally realized that my dad wouldn’t care about the original. He just wanted to collect images and watch them.
I went back to the VHS tape, which was just a considered a viewing format, not of serious historical importance to archivists anywhere. But when I had it digitized, I realized it is a lot prettier than the digital images of today. It looks more like an Impressionist painting. It has more of an essence than a more precise, better preserved image would ever have, plus it’s got Dad’s voice speaking to his children.
There you see these three children, my half siblings. My father was probably standing behind a camera using a tripod. I guess he forgot he was even recording! Consequently the shot was about 8 minutes long, long enough for him to reveal something very loving, stern in a fatherly way, which my dad usually wasn’t, and very relational. He was dealing with children in a very traditional parent-child way. And the other thing about the image is that it had become pink and yellow and soft blue. The image is truly painterly, so beautiful. Everything about it was meaningful to me.
We’re always using the camera to witness other people’s presence in the world, but it’s also such a gift to see how they frame their own world. So that shot of the children in the little stream is how my father saw his younger children, the ones from the 1980s, my half-siblings. And it’s very loving.
Q: As the film attempts to unveil various “truths” in one family, it also unveils another kind of complexity itself, which turn the clear distinction between good or bad totally upside down, maybe that’s where all the love and hate come from.
That was exactly the gateway I had to go through to make this film. It wasn’t a simple judgment or any emotional realization that came to me. I needed to find a place for something else. I think almost everyone has a person in their family that they’re constantly trying to figure out — where to place them in their consciousness. With our parents, for example, they each choose what they want to share with us in the cosmos of family.
In the film, I wanted to find formal ways of articulating transparency, obfuscation, even covering up. But I think what’s more interesting is giving a viewer the ability to understand that everything we interpret comes with layers of meaning. For example, when you see my father in a tuxedo going to these ostentatious galas with my grandmother dressed in a fancy ballgown, what you realize is that there is no transparency here. It’s all performance. That’s why I intentionally use a little bit of Disney music. This scene actually feels very unreal.
Before my father would go see my grandmother, he would always cut his hair. This way his way of being who he wasn’t. And that’s actually one of the most poignant things in the film. Here’s someone whom generally society does not approve of, at least in term of how he conducted his life. But then parallel to it this is a son who could never be himself with his mother. And there’s pathos there. I think where you find pathos in a film is like an entry point. Not pity, not disgust, not just elation because something great happens, but where you find pathos is really important to me.
Film About A Father Who
As a filmmaker, I need to find an interesting moment between every cut. Even in my longer films, I never want a cut to be simply the result of cause and effect. I want an edit between two shots to be an entry point of activation for a viewer, then there’s possibilities of pathos, as well so many other sensations.
Q: In this film, you are not the only person who was filming. Other than the stream sequence shot by your father, we can constantly see your brother filming. In a way, it seems that your family members are quite used to having someone in the family who is filming. Nevertheless, I am really curious what made you want to finish the film?
My brother [Ira Sachs] is a filmmaker who makes narrative films. But there was a period of time where he went with my father to Moscow, and he would sometimes go down to Florida with my father for my grandmother’s birthday.
There was a way that my father would talk to my brother, in that man-to-man kind of way, even though he knew my brother was gay. He would show Ira a list of all the women he’s trying to date or sleep with. My brother found that to be a turnoff, but he kept the camera going.
So that occurred to me. When I was trying to work on this film, I asked my brother if he could look for the outtakes from Get It While You Can (2002), the short film he made from his Moscow footage. In this way, Film About a Father Who would not offer just a single perspective on a man.
Let me tell you one of my favorite images that was shot by Ira. He’s on the bed and he’s listening to our father in the other room with a young woman, during their trip to Russia. Ira’s holding the camera, you see his feet and a floor lamp, and he’s humming to himself. And it’s amazing because you feel like you’re in this young man’s head. It’s so internal. Both scenes are really gendered, but play out by revealing something complex going on between a father and a son.
For me, this all plays out like a Cubist painting, let’s say a Picasso’s painting of his daughter Maya. He’s trying to articulate different planes of perception, and that’s how a family works. That’s what this film is recognizing. Those different points of view. I am trying to see how a family works anthropologically. For example, I got very interested in how lying works in our family. I think all families are built around a series of white lies. People try to protect the ones they want to protect, but they also try to protect themselves.
But the thing is in a film like this, you’re still journeying, since, as a filmmaker, you’re hiding behind the camera too.
Q: This film also tackles some of hard situations. I remember there is a scene where his girlfriend and second wife sit side by side.
I remember the year I shot that scene, in 1992, and I was shooting with a really good 16 mm Arriflex camera. I had just started dating my now husband Mark, who is also a filmmaker, and I asked him to record sound. I looked at that footage right when I got it back from the film lab, and I knew it looked “pretty.” I also knew that it was very dramatic, and very disturbing. It showed two women being very honest about their feelings and their assessment of their situation. But once I looked at it after I got the film footage back, I didn’t look at it for probably 25 years, and it moved around with me in carboard boxes from California, to New York, to Maryland. It moved with me everywhere, and it became this Pandora’s Box saying “Look at me!” And, I couldn’t look at it.
And then, I reconnected with a former student of mine named Rebecca Shapass. She started working with me as my studio assistant, and I just said, “let’s look at the footage together.” For some reason, I never felt embarrassed, and it was a breakthrough. We went through every tape and every roll of film. And that was kind of a watershed moment. I was able to explore ideas with her, as we sat side by side, so she ended up being the editor for the film. We did it together, and it was very freeing for me. I’ll never forget that connection that we had.
註1：本文中文版本原載於國家電影及視聽文化中心出版之《放映週報》776 期 註2: 本文所有劇照皆由琳恩・薩克斯提供 Note 1: For the Chinese version, please refer to Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s Funscreen Weekly No. 776: https://funscreen.tfai.org.tw/article/38821 Note 2: All the film stills used in this interview are provided by Lynne Sachs.
Celebrating Experimental Cinema Curated by Michèle Saint-Michel and Erica Schreiner
BROOKLYN, NY — Millennium Film Workshop presents The Poetic Lens, a vibrant showcase of new and recent poetry films by Lynne Sachs, M.M. Serra, Peter Todd, and many more artist filmmakers. Curated by artists Michèle Saint-Michel and Erica Schreiner, this special event will be held on January 18, 2025, at 8:00pm (doors at 7:30pm) at Millennium’s Brooklyn space, with a live simulcast for viewers worldwide.
About the Curators
Michèle Saint-Michel is a poetry filmmaker and intermedia artist whose work explores loss, desire, and more-than-human ecologies. Her films have screened at international festivals—including the Manchester International Film Festival and the Cadence Poetry Film Festival—and her installation work has appeared in galleries around the globe. She has authored four books, leads the monthly Artist Film Club, and programs film at Millennium Film Workshop.
Erica Schreiner is a New York–based video and performance artist known for shooting on VHS to create allegorical, ethereal pieces. She manipulates found objects and builds elaborate sets, producing surreal films that engage femininity, anarchistic themes, and ritual. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at MoMA, MoMA PS1, SHOWstudio, and Hugh Lane Gallery.
A Showcase in Experimental Poetic Cinema
From 750 submissions (500 formally reviewed), 35 standout films will screen in a 2.5-hour main program, with an additional 30 works displayed in the Gallery space. Often blending verse with experimental cinematography, poetry film creates immersive, dreamlike works at the intersection of literature, performance, and contemporary art.
Event Details
Name: The Poetic Lens
Date & Time: January 18, 2025, at 8:00pm (doors at 7:30pm)
Location: Millennium Film Workshop, Brooklyn, NY
Simulcast: Streaming live for virtual attendees
Program: 35 selected films in the main showcase; 30 additional works in a Gallery loop
About Millennium Film Workshop
Since 1966, Millennium Film Workshop has been a cornerstone of the experimental film movement—offering resources, workshops, and screening opportunities to filmmakers pushing cinematic boundaries. Building on its storied history, Millennium continues to cultivate powerful new voices in independent film and remains an influential hub for creative collaboration.
Program Details
Program I (60 minutes)
1. 20 Settembre (September, the 20th) | Camilla Salvatore | 9:08
2. fuck you | Lucy Swan | 1:05
3. Swerve | Lynne Sachs and Paolo Javier | 7:22
4. Bridge | Adam E. Stone | 2:00
5. For A Memory | Joseph Cash | 2:07
6. Artificio Marie | Fages 0:57
7. a spoon | Peter Todd | 2:00
8. Turner MM Serra 3:00
9. Our Summer Made Her Light Escape | Sasha Waters | 4:30
10. ZAMI Laila Annmarie Stevens 3:57
11. If the edges start to hurt | Emma Piper-Burket | 3:44
12. Insomnia Alexandra Isakova | 2:34
13. A postcard to Eva Heerlein | Bruno Villela | 2:25
14. How to Film a Sigh | Claire Kinnen | 1:00
15. Goodbye: A Ritual | Erica Schreiner | 7:00
16. Aletheia Anushka Jasraj | 2:22
17. The Quest Michèle Saint-Michel | 5:00
Program 2 (68 minutes)
1. kāua – we (you & i) | Rachel Nakawatase | 2:15
2. Song of the living rocks | Stephanie Sant | 7:52
3. We Were Once Here | Sarah ElMasry | 5:13
4. Only Maxine Z, Flasher-duzgunes | 1:30
5. Zero Mike Stubbs | 6:04
6. Nothing is Something | Amina Gingold | 2:18
7. Mare del bisogno, Cassandra | Giorgia Console | 3:00
This article appeared in the March 15, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
Every year, during the first weekend of March, the programming team behind Missouri’s True/False Film Festival offers something of a rarity in the often overwhelming festival scene: a concise but reliably solid lineup of nonfiction films, live music, and multidisciplinary art installations that make for a robust but manageable viewing experience. Located in the college town of Columbia, True/False unfolds in an intimate and gloriously walkable setting. It’s blissfully free of the cloying networking that pervades industry behemoths like Sundance, and provides a unique environment where you’re just as likely to strike up a conversation with a local teacher as with a seasoned Hollywood veteran.
At its 21st edition, which wrapped on March 3, True/False continued its tradition of programming an eclectic array of international premieres alongside crowd favorites from other festivals. This year’s lineup included Sundance highlights Union, Agent of Happiness, Seeking Mavis Beacon, and Daughters, as well as the Missouri-set Girls State. Shorts, often an afterthought at other festivals, tend to shine—and frequently sell out—at True/False. Standouts in this edition included Daniela Muñoz Barroso’s cackle-inducing golf comedy Four Holes; Lynne Sachs’s Contractions, a poetic eulogy for the dwindling right to safe abortions across the U.S.; and Hanna Cho’s Queen’s Crochet, an irreverent, queer portrait of becoming.
The world premieres included gems like Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons, a surprisingly tender film that filters the fight for affordable housing through the bond between the filmmaker and her neighbor, Philly Abe, the late grand dame of New York’s 1980s downtown film and performance scene. Ambitiously, Nichols attempts to combine a portrait of her friend with a much broader critique of the greedy landlords and arcane bureaucracies that made Abe’s final years difficult. While the film occasionally falters by trying to cover too much ground, intimate scenes of Abe’s day-to-day life offer its strongest moments, highlighting her singular vigor and aplomb. Though the word “inspiring” gets thrown around too easily, Abe’s fierce independence and deliciously weird aura make her a rare figure deserving of the adjective.
Feats of defiance are similarly at the heart of Cyril Aris’s Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano, a devastating but darkly humorous film-about-a-film set in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 Beirut explosion—a tragedy of government ineptitude that continues to reverberate across Lebanese society. Among its many consequences, the explosion forced a halt in production on Mounia Akl’s film Costa Brava, Lebanon, which eventually premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. With Dancing, Aris follows Akl and her crew as they navigate constant geopolitical and environmental hurdles, from unexpected floods to the maddeningly difficult circumstances faced by Palestinian lead actor Saleh Bakri as he attempts to travel from Haifa to Beirut while dealing with the hostility of Israeli authorities. A meditation on what it means to make art in the wake of disaster, Dancing achieves something profound and cathartically funny, despite its scenes of protests and Israeli rockets blustering across the sky.
The ever-present reality of settler violence emerged as a theme across this year’s lineup, pulsing through a particularly strong crop of first features. Another world premiere, Yintah, chronicles a decade of the Wet’suwet’en Nation’s ongoing efforts to defend their territories from incursions by oil and gas companies enabled by the Canadian government. Sweeping drone shots display the natural beauty of the Yintah (the Wet’suwet’en term for “territory”) while also evoking the surveillance to which Indigenous communities are constantly subjected. Directed by Wet’suwet’en land defenders Jennifer Wickham and Brenda Michell and Canadian photojournalist Michael Toledano, the film unfolds like a thriller, capturing tense standoffs between the Canadian police and protagonists Howilhkat Freda Huson and Sleydo’ Molly Wickham (sister of one of the directors), who emerge as resilient strategists. Clocking in at just over two hours, Yintah doesn’t waste any time on explanatory talking heads, an approach that yields an energizing pace and makes plain the directors’ intended audience, even if it leaves non-Canadian viewers in the dark on certain political nuances. (A Canadian friend kindly explained to me the schisms between hereditary and elected Indigenous chiefs that emerge in some scenes.) Much like its subjects, Yintah is a film that knows its purpose, and serves it defiantly.
Three Promises, the captivating documentary from Palestinian director Yousef Srouji, likewise bears witness to the violence of a colonial state. Gathering a series of home movies created by the filmmaker’s mother, Suha, the film offers an intimate portrait of a family as they weather the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, torn between fleeing for their lives and remaining in solidarity with their community in Beit Jala, Palestine. Suha, regal onscreen with her flowing curls and keen fashion sense, guides the footage in poetic voiceover. Her reflections grow increasingly melancholy as she recounts the events that led to the family’s eventual displacement to Qatar and its effects on her children. “I felt that Yousef had lost his childhood,” she recalls, and describes the “soulless eyes” she would draw if she were to illustrate his face with pencil and paper. It’s a heart-wrenching scene that underscores the sense of powerlessness that comes from being unable to protect the ones you love.
Running just 61 minutes, Three Promises is tightly edited, and never shows us violence up close. Still, the destruction wrought by the Israeli army looms large, as giddy scenes of Christmas celebrations and children at play give way to those of panicked nights spent hiding below ground. As Israel’s current assault on Gaza (a mere 45 miles from Beit Jala) stretches into its sixth month, Three Promises mounts a forceful rebuttal to framings of the current violence as a form of “self-defense.” The crystal-clear time stamps on each piece of footage remind us that the present circumstances have grown out of a decades-long occupation which has cost the world countless lives, homes, and entire communities, as well as crucial historical testimony. A remarkably poignant work, Three Promises is all the more astounding when you consider that it’s Srouji’s first-ever film.
In the U.S., where expressions of support for Palestine have been met with canceled exhibitions, firings, and other acts of censure, it bears mentioning that True/False is one of few film festivals to express solidarity publicly with the Palestinian people. Srouji (who returned to Palestine in 2019 after living in exile in Qatar for many years) was also named the recipient of this year’s True Life Fund, True/False’s annual fundraising program designed to support the subjects of a chosen documentary by gathering donations from festival attendees. The fund, accepting contributions through April 30, is a direct (and all-too-rare) response to the common audience refrain of “how can I help?” Srouji has noted that he plans to use the money to build “a digital archive space for preserving vital footage from pivotal historical and cultural moments,” with any leftover cash to be donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.
The Cinema Eye Honors Award (CEHA) winners have been announced representing the best in documentary filmmaking for 2024. The historic New York Academy of Medicine in East Harlem was the venue for the Cinema Eye Honors 18th Annual Awards Ceremony. Here are this year’s winners…
Nonfiction Feature Black Box Diaries – Shiori Ito, Eric Nyari, Hanna Aqvilin, Ema Ryan Yamazaki, Yuta Okamura, Yuichiro Otsuka, Mark Degli Antoni and Andrew Tracy Dahomey – Mati Diop, Eve Robin, Judith Lou Levy, Gabriel Gonzalez, Joséphine Drouin Viallard and Nicolas Becker Daughters – Natalie Rae, Angela Patton, Lisa Mazzotta, Justin Benoliel, James Cunningham, Mindy Goldberg, Sam Bisbee, Kathryn Everett, Laura Choi Raycroft, Adrian Aurelius, Philip Nicolai Flindt, Michael Cambio Fernandez and Kelsey Lu Look Into My Eyes – Lana Wilson, Kyle Martin, Hannah Buck and Stephen Maing No Other Land – Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, Fabien Greenberg, Bård Kjøge Rønning, Julius Pollux Rothlaender and Bård Harazi Farbu Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat – Johan Grimonprez, Daan Milius, Rémi Grellety, Jonathan Wannyn, Rik Chaubet, Ranko Pauković and Alek Bunic Goosse Sugarcane – Julian Brave NoiseCat, Emily Kassie, Kellen Quinn, Christopher LaMarca, Nathan Punwar, Maya Daisy Hawke, Mali Obomsawin, Martin Czembor, Andrea Bella, Michael Feuser and Ed Archie Noisecat
Direction Mati Diop – Dahomey Gary Hustwit – Eno Lana Wilson – Look Into My Eyes Elizabeth Lo – Mistress Dispeller Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor – No Other Land Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie – Sugarcane Stephen Maing and Brett Story – Union
Production Shane Boris, Odessa Rae and Talal Derki – Hollywoodgate Emma D. Miller, Elizabeth Lo and Maggie Li – Mistress Dispeller Fabien Greenberg and Bård Kjøge Rønning – No Other Land Paula DuPre’ Pesmen, Aniela Sidorska, Camilla Mazzaferro and Olivia Ahnemann – Porcelain War Emily Kassie and Kellen Quinn – Sugarcane Mars Verrone and Samantha Curley – Union
Sound Design Nicolas Becker – Dahomey Nas Parkash and Patrick Fripp – Eno Alex Lane – Intercepted Tom Paul, Shreyank Nanjappa and Sukanto Mazumder – Nocturnes Ranko Pauković and Alek Bunic Goosse – Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat Peter Albrechtsen, Nicolas Becker and Heikki Kossi – Viktor
Debut Feature Black Box Diaries – Directed by Shiori Ito Daughters – Directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton Frida – Directed by Carla Gutiérrez Grand Theft Hamlet – Directed by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane Hollywoodgate – Directed by Ibrahim Nash’at No Other Land – Directed by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor
Shorts List Semifinalists (nominees to be announced in December) Contractions – Directed by Lynne Sachs | NY Times Op-Docs Eternal Father – Directed by Ömer Sami | New Yorker I Am Ready, Warden – Directed by Smriti Mundhra | MTV Documentary Films Incident – Directed by Bill Morrison | New Yorker Instruments of a Beating Heart – Directed by Ema Ryan Yamazaki | NY Times Op-Docs Love in the Time of Migration – Directed by Erin Semine Kökdil and Chelsea Abbas | LA Times Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World – Directed by Julio Palacio | Netflix The Medallion – Directed by Ruth Hunduma | New Yorker A Move – Directed by Elahe Esmaili | NY Times Op-Docs The Only Girl in the Orchestra – Directed by Molly O’Brien | Netflix A Swim Lesson – Directed by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack | POV
Spotlight Black Snow – Directed by Alina Simone Homegrown – Directed by Michel Premo A New Kind of Wilderness – Directed by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen A Photographic Memory – Directed by Rachel Elizabeth Seed Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other – Directed by Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet
Heterodox Caught by the Tides – Directed by Jia Zhang-ke Kneecap – Directed by Rich Peppiatt My First Film – Directed by Zia Anger Pavements – Directed by Alex Ross Perry Sing Sing – Directed by Greg Kwedar Songs from the Hole – Directed by Contessa Gayles
Broadcast Film Bread & Roses – Directed by Sahra Mani | Apple TV+ Girls State – Directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss | Apple TV+ Great Photo, Lovely Life: Facing a Family’s Secrets – Directed by Amanda Mustard and Rachel Beth Anderson | HBO The Lady Bird Diaries – Directed by Dawn Porter | Hulu Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. – Directed by Jeremy O. Harris | HBO Spermworld – Directed by Lance Oppenheim | FX
Nonfiction Series America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders – Directed by Greg Whiteley and Chelsea Yarnell | Netflix Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court – Directed by Dawn Porter | Showtime The Enfield Poltergeist – Directed by Jerry Rothwell | Apple TV+ The Luckiest Guy in the World – Directed by Steve James | ESPN Ren Faire – Directed by Lance Oppenheim | HBO Telemarketers – Directed by Adam Bhala Lough and Sam Lipman-Stern | HBO
Anthology Series Conan O’Brien Must Go – Executive Producers Conan O’Brien and Jeff Ross | HBO De La Calle – Executive Producers Nick Barili, Jared Andrukanis, Picky Talarico, Lydia Tenaglia, Christopher Collins, Amanda Culkowski, Bruce Gillmer and Craig H. Shepherd | Paramount+ God Save Texas – Executive Producers Lawrence Wright, Alex Gibney, Richard Linklater, Peter Berg, Michael Lombardo, Elizabeth Rogers, Stacey Offman, Richard Perello, Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller | HBO High on the Hog Season 2 – Executive Producers Roger Ross Williams, Geoff Martz, Craig Piligian, Sarba Das, Fabienne Toback, Karis Jagger, Jessica B. Harris, Stephen Satterfield and Michele Barnwell | Netflix How To with John Wilson Season 3 – Executive Producers John Wilson, Nathan Fielder, Michael Koman and Clark Reinking | HBO Photographer – Executive Producers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhely, Jimmy Chin, Pagan Harleman, Betsy Forhan, Anna Barnes and Chris Kugelman | National Geographic
Broadcast Editing Girls State – Edited by Amy Foote | Apple TV+ The Greatest Night in Pop – Edited by Nic Zimmerman, Will Znidaric and David Brodie | Netflix Ren Faire – Edited by Max Allman and Nicholas Nazmi | HBO The Saint of Second Chances – Edited by Alan Lowe, Jeff Malmberg and Miles Wilkerson | Netflix Telemarketers – Edited by Christopher Passig | HBO Time Bomb Y2K – Edited by Marley McDonald and Maya Mumma | HBO
Broadcast Cinematography America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders – Director of Photography Jonathan Nicholas | Netflix The Enfield Poltergeist – Directors of Photography Ruben Woodin Deschamps, Carmen Pellon Brussosa and David Katznelson | Apple TV+ Girls State – Directors of Photography Martina Radwan, Daniel Carter, Laela Kilbourn, Erynn Patrick Lamont, Laura Hudock, Thorsten Thielow | Apple TV+ Photographer – Director of Photography Michael Crommett, Rita Baghdadi, Peter Hutchens, Melissa Langer and Pauline Maroun | National Geographic Ren Faire – Director of Photography Nate Hurtsellers | HBO You Were My First Boyfriend – Director of Photography Brennan Vance and J. Bennett | HBO
Presenting Films as Letters emphasizes the individual address—while they are nonetheless directed at an audience. Personal information oscillates with public messages. Various cinematic compositions of salutation, reply, and visual moments create their own long-distance relationships and time crystals. Whether they are love letters in the year of Chernobyl (Thelyia Petrakis, Bella, 2020), or correspondences about the assault on a kibbutz in Israel (Lynne Sachs, States of UnBelonging, 2005) or a reconciliation attempt between a daughter and a father who would have preferred to have a son (Diana Cam Van Nguyen, Love, Dad, 2021), the evening’s screened films nimbly cross the boundaries of fictionalization and authentication.
Program Thelyia Petrakis, Bella, 2020, 24 min Diana Cam Van Nguyen, Love, Dad, 2021, 15 min Lynne Sachs, States of UnBelonging, 2005, 63 min
Presented by Rainer Bellenbaum in conversation with Ayala Shoshana Guy. With live virtual Q&A with Lynne Sachs.
Rainer Bellenbaum is a freelance lecturer in film theory. Along with contributions to books and journals (Texte zur Kunst, bbooks, Spector Books), he released short films with Arsenal Distribution Berlin, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen and others.
Ayala Shoshana Guy is an artist and filmmaker, working at the intersection of video, animation and text. She teaches at the University of Passau and attends the Critical Studies master’s program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
This program is part of the eponymous course by Rainer Bellenbaum and Sabeth Buchmann at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
American filmmaker Lynne Sachs immerses us in the secrets of her art, especially in her touching documentary film About a Father Who. Sachs discusses how this intimate project, which focuses on her complex relationship with her father, challenges the rules of traditional documentary. She boldly addresses society’s fear of the camera and its power to reveal uncomfortable truths. Furthermore, Sachs deepens her use of silence as a tool for contemplation, breaking with conventional cause-and-effect editing techniques. This powerful combination invites the viewer into a deeper, more reflective experience.
Chapters
What led you to become a filmmaker?
What role do image and sound play in your cinematic grammar?
What are the challenges of documentary filmmaking in a time marked by social media?
What drives you to make your films the way you do?
How does your family feel about you always filming with your camera?
Silences mark your films in a very powerful way; could you explain to us how you use them in editing?
Bio
Lynne Sachs is an American filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores the complex relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving text, collage, painting, politics, and sound design into layers. Strongly committed to a feminist dialogue between film theory and practice, she seeks a rigorous interplay between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each new project. Her moving image work ranges from experimental short films to rehearsal films and hybrid live performances.
The microcinema as we know it today began in 1994 when Rebecca Barten and David Sherman, filmmakers and “accidental neologists,” started operating Total Mobile Home microCINEMA illegally out of the basement of their rented San Francisco apartment, building benches that seated thirty and cutting a projection booth into a hole in the wall. Small informal cinematheques and film clubs had, of course, existed since the beginnings of cinema. What Barten and Sherman brought was not only a practice, but also an ethos that stressed the values and benefits of the smaller-scale, and spoke to a generation dissatisfied with the impersonal limitations of older, top-down models. “As filmmakers reliant upon our own funds, functioning totally out of the mainstream, we wanted to create an intimate non-institutional space right in our basement, where the distance between film and audience and artist and audience might be activated and transformed,” they later reported. “Our operating budget was extremely low—we used discarded, donated, and rebuilt equipment, made our own seats, designed our own posters and calendars, and did publicity word-of-mouth and through the local free papers. Our standards for any particular show were extremely high—even at our tiny scale, we believe that we competed favorably with the corporate megaplexes in the quality of our film prints, sound system, and amenities.”
Total Mobile Home ran for four years, hosting over 120 events, often with filmmakers in person. The literally home-made cinema allowed for an intimacy impossible at traditional venues. “Our audiences responded wonderfully, often remaining well after the show to participate in all sorts of conversations that went late into the night. As small as we were, we got correspondences from all over the world, from people passing through San Francisco, curious about or interested in bringing their own films to our space.” The model was designed as self-sustaining, and their space never received grants; its economics depended on Barten and Sherman’s total commitment and the reciprocal support of their audiences. “With a suggested $5 donation at the door, we managed to ‘float’ our cinema, meeting our modest operating costs and offering visiting artists $100 honorariums (which filmmakers incidentally often refused as excited as they were by such a special exhibition context). We used the word TOTAL as the first word in many of our programs because of the built-in rebellion factor: TOTAL war, TOTAL failure, TOTAL rube goldberg, TOTAL tantric tantrums, and TOTAL ARTIST MONSTER were some examples.”
In a rare East Coast appearance, Barten and Sherman will join us at Light Industry to survey the history of Total Mobile Home, through a program that includes films by Guy Sherwin, Lynne Sachs, and Scott Stark; restored video documentation of Luther Price performing Clown 2: Scary Transformation and Stuart Sherman performing A Christmas Spectacle; footage of salons with Bruce Baillie and Sidney Peterson; George Kuchar’s video portrait of the space, Cellar Sinema; a re-examination of TMH’s Home Mail Project, that included photographs by Carolee Schneemann, Robert Frank, and Rudy Burckhardt; as well as recorded oral histories from Brian Frye, Steve Anker, and other eyewitnesses.
Tickets – Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.
The Barcelona Independent Film Festival, l’Alternativa, is now in its 31st edition. For over three decades we have been offering filmgoers and professionals a unique opportunity to discover and enjoy screenings and activities that value creative freedom, diversity, innovation, commitment and thought-provoking reflection.
This year we will once again be running a hybrid edition: onsite screenings and activities from 14 to 24 November 2024 plus a selection of films from the 31st edition available on Filmin during our online fortnight in January 2025.
L’Alternativa has three competition sections in l’Alternativa Official: Spanish Films, International Feature Films and International Short Films.
L’Alternativa Parallel presents tributes, premieres, little-known films, work by new directors and a programme of family screenings.
And l’Alternativa Hall offers a rich, varied programme of free screenings, performances and debates in the CCCB Hall.
Hall Selects is a bridge between l’Alternativa Official and l’Alternativa Hall. Whittling down the many entries we receive for the official sections is a painstaking process designed to produce a final selection that showcases a wide range of striking films that reflect the spirit of the festival. Here we open up a space in which we can share an additional selection of impressive films and offer the Hall audience the chance to engage directly with the filmmakers and others members of the creative and artistic teams.
Hall Selects Tuesday 19 November, 6 pm, Hall CCCB, 111 min
Presented by Jorge Moneo, Patxi Burillo and Tamara García
Madwomen in the Attic Tamara García Iglesias
Contractions Lynne Sachs
Nafura Paul Heintz, Witt Anne-Catherine, Witt Anne-Catherine
Exergo Jorge Moneo Quintana
Year and Time Patxi Burillo Nuin, Proyecto Landarte Urroz
Lynne Sachs: For Narcisa Hirsch Screening & Talk Followed by Hirsch’s double-projection Rumi Q&A w/ Lynne Sachs In Person only
Microscope is excited to welcome back to the gallery filmmaker and artist Lynne Sachs for a heartfelt tribute to Narcisa Hirsch in connection with Hirsch’s current exhibition at the gallery.
Sachs will be showing excerpts from her 2008 hour-long interview with Narcisa Hirsch shot over two summers spent in Buenos Aires, about which Sachs recalls: “Clearly, she had a profound interest in unraveling the ontology of cinema . She wanted to challenge the way that film as an art had been hijacked by the entertainment industry. She was always thinking about the camera’s ability to rearrange reality and the way it allows us to better understand how we think and move. She made it clear that she had her own perspective and it was clearly female.”
Sachs will also discuss Hirsch’s 1979 film “Seguro que Bach cerraba su puerta cuando quería trabajar” (I am Sure Bach Locked his Door When He Wanted to Work) in which a group of women — some of which were her friends and collaborators — talk to themselves, or rather to filmed sequences of themselves previously recorded by Hirsch. The film will be screened in its entirety.
Sachs says: “1979 was a remarkable year for women film artists who were experimenting in startlingly radical ways with the documentary form. Chick Strand completed ‘Soft Fiction’ her ground-breaking visual meditation on women and sensuality, and Narcisa Hirsch produced this astonishing, intimate portrait of a group of Argentine women. Only a filmmaker with such radical ideas about the machinery she holds in her hands could have made this movie. It’s the headshot extraordinaire turned upside-down and inside out.”
The evening will end with a rare screening of the double projection work “Rumi” (1999), about the 13th century Sufi poet, a hybrid work in which a 16mm film is projected onto a video projection that is the digital transfer of the film itself. As the work progresses, the discrepancies in frame rate between the two mediums become ever more clear.
Lynne Sachs will be available post-screening for a Q&A with the audience.
General Admission $10
Member Admission $8
Program:
Excerpts from: Interview with Narcisa Hirsch by Lynne Sachs, video, 2008, 1 hour
Seguro que Bach cerraba su puerta cuando quería trabajar (I am Sure Bach Locked his Door When He Wanted to Work)
by Narcisa Hirsch, Super 8mm film to digital, color, sound, 1979, 27 minutes
Rumi by Narcisa Hirsch, dual projection, 16mm film & video, color, sound, 1999, 26 minutes
Lynne’s Notes
For Narcisa program at Microscope
1. Intro – 4 min.
2. Interview excerpts – Total 20 min.
3. Intro to Seguro que Bach cerraba su puerta cuando quería trabajar/ I am Sure Bach Locked his Door When He Wanted to Work – 30 min.
4. Brief words on Chick Strand and how interesting it is that both women made these kinds of films in 1979 – self reflexive, formally inventive, intimate, candid, vulnerable, fierce – 2 min.
5. Excerpt from Soft Fiction – 5 min.
6. General Discussion around Narcisa’s work I am sure Bach and Soft Fiction, and other films in Microscope show – TBD
7. Screening of Rumi
Introduction to Narcisa Hirsch and how we met.
Her deep desire to have a one-person show in NYC and disappointment that it didn’t happen until this year, but she definitely knew that MoMA presented her work with much of her family here.
Our screening of her work in 2009 as part of Ventana al Sur At Millennium Film Workshop and Anthology Film Archives – including Narcisa Hirsch, Leandro Katz, Leandro Listorti, Pablo Marin, Liliana Porter, Tomas Rautenstrauch (Narcisa’s grandson and founder of the Narcisa Hirsch Cinemateca) and others.
Describe the BsAs experimental film community.
I plan to talk about my long friendship with Narcisa Hirsch and my discovery of our shared passion for experimental film. I will share excerpts from one-hour 2008 interview I conducted with her during the first of two summers I lived in Buenos Aires with my family. From the moment we met, I knew that I wanted to spend as much time as I could with this woman who was so candid about everything surrounding film form and feminism, in equal measure. Clearly, she had a profound interest in unraveling the ontology of cinema . She wanted to challenge the way that film as an art had been hijacked by the entertainment industry. She was always thinking about the camera’s ability to rearrange reality and the way it allows us to better understand how we think and move. She made it clear that she had her own perspective and it was clearly female.
In August of 2008, I was living in Buenos Aires with my family. I was able to meet and spend quite a bit of time with artist filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch.
In this conversation, we talk about so many things including: her belief that painting on an easel had died, “Happenings”, her collaborative Marabunta (“Swarm of Ants”, which she created in 1967 in the lobby of a theater where Antonioni’s Blow Up premiered)) feminist performance as well as her baby-doll Munecos Happening in Buenos Aires, London and New York City, her discovery of 16mm, watching Michael Snow’s “Wavelength”, creating “Taller” a response to Snow’s ideas, a 16mm visualization of Steve Reich’s “Come Out”, her friend and collaborator Marie Louise Alleman, “Fuses” by Carolee Schneemann which was her first film purchase, making films in the troubled 1970s in Argentina, owning films by Su Friedrich and Stan Brakhage, rejecting making feature films with a script, filming daily life, her being world famous for 50 people, remembering Laura and Albert Honig (Argentine experimental filmmakers), support from the Goethe Institute, making “radical” work that did not threaten the government, “I didn’t go to jail because they didn’t want me,” giving away 500 little dolls on the street and saying “you have a baby” in NYC, London and Buenos Aires. All of these Happenings were filmed and each was very different, she was doing this during the same time that Cesar Chavez was encouraging people to boycott lettuce. She defines what a “happening” is including public participation and very much not a conventional gallery show, art was no longer “re-presentation” but now is a situation, not isolated from the public but including the public. They talk about Ramundo Glazer who was one of the Argentine disappeared.
Then we watch her film response to Steve Reich’s “Come Out”, film diary footage from summer 1973, close ups of leaves and water, her feet, a fly, her shadow in the sand as she carries her film camera, cherries on skin, a fly, a mouth luxuriating at the taste of fruit, a baby on the grass., a breast and a belly in the sunlight, a fly.
with Paula Felix Didier, Ruben Guzman, and Maya and Noa Street-Sachs
Excerpts from Interview with Narcisa Hirsch by Lynne Sachs from 2008
3:51 – 10:17
I ask her how she first got involved with cinema, she talks about the death of the easel, her Marabunta Happening, seeing Michael Snow’s seminal film Wavelength
12:36 – 13:20
Narcisa’s respect for Carolee Schneemann and Su Friedrich
18;49 – 20:18
Narcisa says she always had a camera with her.
21:07 – 27:30
Never making “social-political” film, I could paint with film, how she used the studio as her location in Workshop and Come Out; collapse of the avant-garde; the role of wives, the role of ideology
34:42 – 38:10
Talks about giving away tiny baby dolls in London, NYC and BsAs as part of a Marabunta happening in 1967
Seguro que Bach cerraba su puerta cuando quería trabajar/ I am Sure Bach Locked his Door When He Wanted to Work (27 min., 1979)
This is a high concept film that investigates the way that women, specifically Narcisa’s friends, look at themselves, perform themselves and speak about themselves. 1979 was a remarkable year for women film artists who were experimenting in startlingly radical ways with the documentary form. Chick Strand completed Soft Fiction her ground-breaking visual meditation on women and sensuality, and Narcisa Hirsch produced this astonishing, intimate portrait of a group of Argentine women. Only a filmmaker with such radical ideas about the machinery she holds in her hands could have made this movie. It’s the headshot extraordinaire turned upside-down and inside out.
I would also like to show a few minutes from Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction (55 min. 1979) which is on Youtube here:
Excerpt from Soft Fiction by Chick Strand
5 women communicate their experiences through direct story telling; they are voicing experiences but sometimes in a refracted way, in this case through a letter, how are the women represented and representing themselves – the film asks these questions . Both women were also fascinated by the diary film and by documenting the smallest of things the saw with their eyes – like bugs and nipples.)
Exploring sexuality, desire and abuse and consensual/ nonconsensual sex – it’s very ambiguous
still from Rumi, a hybrid work in which a 16mm film is projected onto a video projection that is the digital transferstill from Rumistill from Rumi
