Yesterday, we released the RogerEbert.com consensus Top Ten Films of 2021, led by Jane Campion‘s “The Power of the Dog.” Today, we dig deeper, presenting you with all submitted lists from our brilliant critics and independent contributors. There are over 200 films cited below as among the best of 2021, displaying both the diversity in quality at the cinema this year and the unique voices that cover it for our site. It’s a huge collection of lists but it should give you an overall picture of the year in film, complete with dozens of links back to our reviews. Enjoy.
SIMON ABRAMS
1. “Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream”
2. “State Funeral“
3. “Wojnarowciz: F*ck You F*ggot F**ker”
4. “The Disciple“
5. “This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection”
6. “Days“
7. “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy“
8. “The French Dispatch”
9. “Film About a Father Who”
10. “A Shape of Things to Come”
SFSU School of Cinema THE ARCHIVE PROJECT FALL 2021 SCHEDULE December 7, 2021
The Archive Project hosts the return of Cinema alum, filmmaker, and curator Craig Baldwin in “Gems From the San Francisco State University Cinema Vault”
On Tuesday December 7, 6:00p.m. PST (on Zoom and In the Coppola Theater)
In addition to his own prolific body of experimental films, cinema alum Craig Baldwin has played an integral role in establishing an independent film scene in the San Francisco. His weekly film screening series, Other Cinema, promotes the work of both emerging and established artists working in new cinematic paradigms. Baldwin and members of The Archive Project will show rare and rarely seen films from the School’s own archives, highlighting our student and artist films collection. The lecture includes 16mm films and videos from the 1960’s through the 2000’s.
Lynne graduated from SFSU’s Cinema Department in 1989.
This event will be held IN PERSON in the Coppola Theater, on the first floor of the Fine Arts Building (proof of vaccination and mask required please!)
PAST EVENTS:
What A Rabbit Taught Me: EMIKO OMORI & The Authentic Voice Tues, Aug 31, 6 p.m.
SF State Cinema alumna and Emmy-winning filmmaker EMIKO OMORI, in conversation with Cinema Professor Pat Jackson and Cinema student Kevin Kodama. Omori discusses her journeys of discovery through her ground-breaking documentaries (Rabbit In the Moon; To Chris Marker, An Unsent Letter; Vanishing Chinatown: The World of The May’s Photo Studio), and her award-winning work in cinematography.
CROSSROADS Festival, Program 6 – this is called moving Wed., Sept. 22, 7 p.m.
The Archive Project at SFSU is proud to be a community partner for “Program 6 – this is called moving” of the San Francisco Cinematheque’s annual CROSSROADS festival.
New Directions in Online Screenings with INNEY PRAKASH of Prismatic Ground Festival Tues, Oct 12, 6 p.m.
During the pandemic, film festivals pivoted from in-person to online platforms. Join us for a special conversation with the founder/curator of the new Prismatic Ground Festival, Inney Prakash, who will discuss the challenges AND possiblities of online screenings. Read more about the festival origins.
A Conversation with the BAY AREA LESBIAN ARCHIVES (BALA) Tues, Nov. 16, 6 p.m. OR
Since bursting onto the filmmaking scene in the 1980s, Memphis-born Lynne Sachs has compiled an inimitable, astonishing body of work which includes essay films, diaristic shorts, gallery installations, and quite a number of simply uncategorizable hybrids. Sachs’s wide-ranging, restless ingenuity is on full display in this program, which includes her 2020 documentary portrait A Film About a Father Who; The Washing Society, her collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker, which premiered in 2015 at a Clinton Hill laundromat; and this year’s E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo, a ruminative, surprising response to the January 6th Capitol Hill riots. A blast of engaging, and engaged, cinema.
Made up of footage shot by Sachs between 1984 and very nearly the present day, Film About a Father Who represents her endeavor to better understand the outsized personality and myriad affairs of one Ira Sachs, Sr.: Park City, Utah, hospitality industry mogul; bon vivant hippie businessman; serial womanizer; and the filmmaker’s father. Analog and digital video shares space with 8 and 16mm film in Sachs’ decoupage of home movie formats, creating a tenderly critical mosaic portrait that’s as energetic, multifaceted, and messy as its subject.
Sachs’s The Washing Society, co-directed with playwright Lizzie Olesker, uses a combination of interviews, re-enactments, and patient observation to pay lyric homage to the little-acknowledged but essential labor of dealing with dirty laundry, as it occurs every day in New York City’s laundromats. Screening with Roberta Cantow’s feminist forebear Clotheslines, a film that takes laundry seriously as a form of folk art, a fraught social signifier, and a lens for women to reflect on the joys, pains, and ambivalences of household chores. With Sachs’s short “A Month of Single Frames” made with and for Barbara Hammer.
Co-Directors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker will be present with special guest feminist scholar Silvia Federici for a post-screening conversation. Hosted by Emily Apter.
Post-Screening Conversation for WASHING SOCIETY + CLOTHESLINES +A MONTH OF SINGLE
Co-Directors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker with special guest feminist scholar Silvia Federici in a post-screening conversation. Hosted by Emily Apter.
Four shorts exemplifying the breadth and tireless curiosity of Sachs’s film practice, as well as an ongoing engagement with issues of justice and resistance. The Ho Chi Minh City–Hanoi travel diary Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam offers an encounter between lived experience and mediated memory of a televised war. And Then We Marched juxtaposes 8mm footage of the 2017 Women’s March in Washington D.C. with archival images of earlier struggles for justice. E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo looks at the January 6th Capitol Hill uprising through the unlikely but revealing prism of Vigo’s 1933 Zéro de conduite. Investigation of a Flame revisits the story of the Catonsville Nine, Catholic activists who burnt draft files in protest of the Vietnam War.
More than 50 postcards, manuscripts, typewritten letters and even emails are presented alongside stills, drawings and storyboards to create a stunning epistolary archive many years in the making. Curator and Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival director Garbiñe Ortega has compiled these materials in an effort to “create echoes and reverberations between materials which, as in a film, thanks to the editing, take on another meaning beyond their specific content.”
The volume includes correspondence exchanged among filmmakers Jodie Mack, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Jorge Honik, Claudio Caldini, Lech Kowalski, Nicole Brenez, Marcel Hanoun, Nathaniel Dorsky, George Kuchar, Nazli Dinçel, Norman McLaren, Maya Deren, Jean Vigo, Richard Leacock, Monica Flaherty, Richard Linklater, Gabe Kingler, Robert Breer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Fernando Trueba, Jean-Marie Straub, Jim Jarmusch, Hanun Farocki, Robert Frank, Fred Wiseman, Margaret Tait, Ute Aurand, Terrence Malick, Lynne Sachs and Gunvor Nelson.
This book you are holding is the result of a project that, I assume, will accompany me for life. It involves a passionate investigation, one that has been underway for a number of years now, with the challenge of discovering relevant letters between filmmakers for the purpose of tracing unthought-of connections and relationships and drawing new cinematographic families and genealogies.
The year 2018 saw the publication of Correspondencia:cartas como películas (co- edited with Francisco Algadn Navarro for Punto de Vista), the first volume of a collection of letters containing names from the entire history of cinema, right from its origins, and laying the basis fr)f this second publication. On this occasion, the focus is on contemporary filmmakers, artists who are or have been active up to a relatively short time ago. This time the challenge is twofold. On the one hand, to find letters in these times in which our form of communication has changed radically, thanks to new technologies. Everything is immediate and far less developed than traditional letters. By necessity, this book includes not only letters but also emails, the new digital epistolary. On the other hand, being so close to the present, in many cases the materials in this book were very generously loaned by the filmmakers themselves, not so much by archives and institutional collections. This has conditioned the selection of the content, always for the better I think, as the filmmakers themselves are the first editors of their own material.
Right from the outset, we were aware that this book would be incomplete: ·we would inevitably leave out names, families, themes, letters. However, although we have aimed to keep it as diverse as possible, the project is not intended to be completeist, but consistent in its diversity. Accepting these limitations and freeing myself from this impossible objective of wanting to include ‘everything’, I have tried to create echoes and reverberations between materials which, as in a film, thanks to the editing, take on another meaning beyond their specific content. Thus it is a book that allows for different interpretations, from beginning to end, with a carefully thought-out order, always subjective, in which I propose relationships between letters and photos, leaps in time, inexplicit thematic sub- chapters (on how to deal with criticism or letters of admiration), small sequenced tributes (such as the one dedicated to Harun Farocki or to a generation from the American avant-garde cinema). However the book can also be read at random, allowing the reader to skip to any page desired and, l hope, to find a little jewel.
In the last chapter, entitled ‘The letters that weren’t are too’, which paraphrases a verse by the Basque poet Joseba Sarrionandia (‘The things that weren’t are too’), you will find a game that was proposed to an admired group of filmmakers who already represent the present and future of contemporary cinema. They all accepted this task of writing an imaginary letter to a filmmaker from an)’ era of the film history, whether living or dead, and V\ho they are not acquainted with. The further away from their own film genre, the better, I added to this imitation. The letters received are the result of an overwhelming creative richness and generosity. Here, letters are included from Deborah Stratman, lVIarianoLlinas, Ana Vaz, Rabih Mrouc, Luis Lopez Carrasco, and Jodie Mack.
This book would never have come into being without the work of many individuals: all the filmmakers who have contributed with letters from their m, n archives, some of which arc included herein, while we have put others aside for a forthcoming book. It would be impossible to name everyone, but you all know who you are. To all the institutions and professionals who we have worked with to obtain the materials, I would particularly express my thanks to Haden Guest, Simon Field, Lynne Sachs, Alexander Horwath, Antje Ehmann and Nicole Brenez for their unconditional support for this project. To Maria Rodriguez Abad, who has worked enthusiastically and tirelessly and who ought to write her own book on how she managed to obtain permission for each letter. To Francisco Algarin Navarro, who meticulously investigated, as only he knows how, seeking out letters and photos; to all the team from La Fabrica, and with a special mention to Miriam Querol for her great coordination work, and to Punto de Vista, who believed in the project and who are working with dedication on this infinite epistolary publication. A big thank you to Max Goldberg for his loyal support to my editorial projects which, in this case, has materialised in the form of a prologue to this book. To my dear colleagues and friends, Matias Pineiro, ldoia Zabaleta and Maria Palacios Cruz, with whom I think aloud through our ongoing correspondence. To lune, to my family, who accompany all these endless passions with lively pleasure.
To you, the reader, for immersing yourself in this small multi-dimensional journey. I hope you receive at least a little of the excitement that this project has given us.
Garbiñe Ortega
Gunvor Nelson / Lynne Sachs
Dear Lynne,
I have finally seen your film. I am very happy that l am pleased with my own
section thank you!
Quick first impressions: What a lush rural place and sweet old-fashioned house Carolee has. I notice that she still needs to show nakedness, only just a bit this time. I am surprised that Barbara moves so fast and vigorously as she walks toward the camera. Her section is the best and she is so good at presenting herself. She participates engagingly in what she says and shows. Her camera dance is a lot of fun!
I Iike my part also. The only negative is that my s-sounds sound like I have false teeth, anyway on my equipment here. Your closeups beautifully set the stage throughout the film.
I have not travelled since before Christmas, have not had the strength. Hopefully I can take the train to Stockholm in a few days in order to take care of film business, errands and to see a film-program. I will also look at electric tricycles, and maybe buy one – this because I am about to sell my car to my sister. I realize that it is best so since I have fainted a few times and with a tricycle I can take smaller roads and will be able to stop in time.
J.E. O’Leary is a writer, musician, and visual artist from NYC. For over 20 years, he has been bringing his words and music to NYC’s stages, festivals, subway platforms, and gallery walls. He has performed at the New York Poetry Festival, Nuyorican Poets Cafe, KGB Bar, and his work can currently be seen in Dead Skunk #1, Something Involving a Mailbox #8 and Hole in the Head Review vol 2.4. His latest poetry collection, What a Future, was released December 2020. His work can be found at www.sunshineandwind.com.
Linda Kleinbub is curator and host of Fahrenheit Open Mic & founder of Pen Pal Poets. She’s the editor of The Silver Tongued Devil Anthology (Pink Trees Press, 2020.) Linda was one of six local poets invited to read at the Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2021. She’s a former mentor and committee member at Girls Write Now. She’s published in The Best American Poetry, Brooklyn Rail, The Observer, Sensitive Skin Magazine, Yahoo! Life, Home Planet News, First Literary Review East, Nomad’s Choir Journal, The Rainbow Project, LiveMag! and many anthologies. Some of her published poems are found at https://www.instagram.com/lindakleinbub/ & her first full-length book of poetry is forthcoming. She received her MFA from The New School.
Two of Bruce E. Whitacre’s chapbooks will be published in 2022 by Poets Wear Prada. His poems have appeared in the American Journal of Poetry, Buddhist Poetry Review, Nine Cloud Journal, North of Oxford, Pensive Journal, World Literature Today, and Yes, I’m Alive, among others. His work is included in The Strategic Poet by Diane Lockward, and in the anthology: I Want to be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is a native of Nebraska and lives in Forest Hills, Queens with his husband.
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.
Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her work ever since.
From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NYFA, and Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center, the Walker the Getty, New York Film Festival, and Sundance. In 2021, Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work.
Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. In 2020 and 2021, Lynne taught film and poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque, Flowchart Foundation, San Francisco Public Library, and Hunter.
Vikas K. Menon is a poet, playwright and songwriter. He was a 2015 Emerging Poets Fellow at Poets House and his poems have been featured in numerous publications, including Indivisible: An Anthology of South Asian American Poetry and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry. He co-wrote Priya’s Shakti (www.priyashakti.com), the first of a series of ongoing augmented reality comic books that address gender-based violence (GBV). He was also one of the co-writers of the shadowplay “Feathers of Fire” which had its world premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2016 and went on to tour around the world in 23 US cities and 6 countries. His other plays have received readings at or been produced by Pratidhwani Theatre, Ruffled Feathers Theater Company, Ingenue Theatre and the Classical Theatre of Harlem. He is an Advisory Board Member of Kundiman, dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. He received his M.F.A (Poetry) from Brooklyn College and his M.A. in Literature from St. Louis University.
They say not to judge a book by its cover, but cover designers strive to help readers forget that advice. Here are ten excellent covers that prove the importance of high quality typefaces and typography.
When designing a book cover, you have only a few elements at your disposal: the title and subtitle, the author’s name, fonts, colors, and illustration. Obviously—and this is proven by a visit to your local bookstore—there are only so many ways to combine these elements. When designed poorly, a good book can be lost in the shuffle. When designed well, though—with attention to type, color, and layout—hidden gems can become best sellers.
Since our foundry partners are in the business of creating the highest quality typefaces, it follows that their work would show up on some of the best book cover designs. After looking on our shelves, Type Network staff have picked out ten excellent book covers that use foundry partner typefaces, all of which are available through our catalog:
Using Study by XYZ Type and Freight Sans by Garage Fonts, this finely doodled cover (created through a collaboration between Sachs and designer Abby Goldstein) cleverly introduces the main content of the book: handwritten poetry over the years. The subdued color palette of black, white, and coral pink draw attention to the type in the bottom right.
Study and Freight Sans both serve well here for their humanist yet refined traits. The book’s interior balances type with handwriting, so firmer or more constructed typefaces might have drained the personality from the book.
Setting the title in all-caps adds prominence and stature, and even though they are tracked out very far, the colored letters of Freight Sans remain legible. Setting “Lynne Sachs” in Study’s calligraphic Italic adds even further warmth to the cover.
From the publisher’s website: “First published in German in 1804, under the nom de plume ‘Bonaventura’, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is a dark, twisted, and comic novel, one part Poe and one part Beckett.”
This cover, for the 2014 University of Chicago Press edition, was designed by Matt Avery and uses Fakir by foundry partner Underware Type and PMN Caecilia by Linotype.
Selecting to set the title in a blackletter like Fakir evokes the early 19-th century German origin of the book; meanwhile, Fakir’s low contrast, sharp cuts, and straight lines draw the reader back into the modern age. The placement (on the other side of a window) and blur on the title “allude to the [book’s] macabre and voyeuristic themes,” writes Stephen Coles.
For the English translation of Tipo E’s Cómo crear tipografías, designers Elena Veguillas and Laura Meseguer chose to keep the original’s use of Multi for the title. The cover, bright orange and clear in its content, is a good example of honest, unfussy design.
Multi, published by partner foundry Type-Ø-Tones, was originally commissioned for Dutch newspapers and comes with a factual tone. Choosing to set the title in Multi Display Poster Italic, however, adds a sense of levity. For the target audience, who resent anything too playful and resist anything too dry, the cover (and title) of How to create typefaces strikes a good balance.
Middendorp’s account of graphic design in the Hague in the latter half of the 20th century is titled after a quote from “R.D.E. Oxenaar, a long-time consultant to the Dutch Mail and designer of Dutch banknotes, who was referring to the agreeable sensation of seeing one’s work come by in daily life,” according to the back cover.
The large “Ha,” combined with the yellow background and white and green quotation marks makes a bold impression and leaves the audience wanting to know more. Designed by Huug Schipper, the cover’s abnormal color palette and its use of the chiseled Productus by foundry partner TYPETR help it stand out in bookshelves and Amazon lists.
Productus is a fitting choice, as the book’s local Dutch focus all but demands a Dutch typeface to accommodate it. Productus does not simply satisfy that requirement, but—at such a large scale—its finer details shine as decidedly Dutch.
O Rio antes do Rio culminates three years of research into Rio de Janeiro’s pre-colonization history. The cover, designed by Babilônia Editorial, features both Guanabara Sans by foundry partner Plau and Pollen by TypeTogether.
The die-cut letterforms of Guanabara Sans Black reveal an engraving “depicting Rio’s early natives,” hinting to the interior’s robust illustrations. Guanabara Sans Black is big enough for this die-cut technique, while its contrasting Thin weight and the green background combine to create a dynamic and active cover, necessary for a broad-audience history book.
Published in 2013, this series of covers by Peter Mendelsund for a collection of Joyce’s best literature uses simple, solid colors with Poetica by foundry partner Adobe Originals in off white with thick, handwritten additions over top.
The contrast between Poetica’s flowing yet refined curves and the abrupt black markings reflect both sides of Joyce’s enigmatic writing, mixing the deeply constructed and referential with the eminently human and flawed. The cover for Ulysses was included in the Best Book Covers of 2013 by the New York Times; its handwritten “YES” brilliantly alludes to the character Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy:
…and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
A bold title needs a bold font, so when Time Warner Books published The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler in 2001, their designer chose Garage Gothic by foundry partner Frere-Jones Type. The book, which centers female sexuality and its complexity and beauty, didn’t require a loud cover, but one that put the word out there, simply and strongly.
Garage Gothic, unlike other tall, bold gothics, possesses an unvarnished quality; its weathered edges match the cover photo’s heavy shadows, recalling Ensler’s performance version of the title. Garage Gothic is “built from matter-of-fact geometry and softened by hasty printing,” making it perfect for big pronouncements that aren’t cut-and-dry.
Designed by agency Pixelgarten, Gute Aussichten is an annual catalog of the best images by young German photographers. The cover pairs Damien by foundry partner Revolver Type with an intentionally unsettling photo of a foot sole being stuck with a needle.
Damien designer Lukas Schneider wrote that the typeface “evolved from a personal preference for pointy shapes, high contrast and straightforwardness,” all of which can be seen in Gute Aussichten’s cover and interior. Its sharp cuts, diamond-shaped details, and alternating rounded and flat curves imbue the cover with a sense of activity, like something more is going to happen.
Cataloging the journey of three winters in the interior of Finnmark, Aasheim’s Finnmarksvidda introduces a new literary genre—skietnography—which combines aspects of nature experience, ski expedition, and encounters with indigenous people and culture. The cover, designed by Erlend Askhov, features a section of watery map and uses Satyr by foundry partner Monokrom and FF Legato by FontFont.
The colors—light blue, off white, and dark red—feel at home on the map, while the absence of green and the long red line indicate the desolate, tundra-like environment against which the author’s very human journey takes place. Satyr fits here for both its flowing seriousness in roman and its calligraphic humanism in italic. The title, thanks to its K and V, demonstrates Satyr’s italic most beautifully; meanwhile, the subtitle’s casual introduction of neologism skietnografisk shows off Satyr’s open-looped g and classic fi ligature.
This cover of Harvill Press’s 2003 edition of Jaan Kross’s acclaimed Luchtfietsen was designed by Tessa van der Waals. The underrated designer and book caretaker decided to use a gloomy Estonian painting, setting the title across the top in bright blue Bodega Serif by foundry partner Greg Thompson.
Bodega Serif, originally released in 1990, borrows several ideas from the high period of Art Deco, adding a nostalgic European charm to the book’s ironic title and tragic content—an apt contrast reflected in the cover art itself.
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Cinema Guild has officially announced that it will release on Blu-ray Lynne Sachs’ Film About a Father Who (2020) and Jia Zhang-ke’s Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020). The two releases will be available for purchase on December 7.
Label description: Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.
With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Four short films by Lynne Sachs:
Drawn and Quartered (4 min. color 16mm, silent, 1986)
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (33 min., 16mm, 1994)
A Month of Single Frames (14 min. color sound 2019 )
Maya at 24 (4 min. 16 mm 2021)
Film and Family: a discussion between Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs and Kirsten Johnson
Label description: From master director Jia Zhang-Ke (Ash Is Purest White, A Touch of Sin) comes a vital document of Chinese society since 1949. Jia interviews three prominent authors—Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong—born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, respectively. In their stories, we hear of the dire circumstances they faced in their rural villages and small towns, and the substantial political effort undertaken to address it, from the social revolution of the 1950s through the unrest of the late 1980s. In their faces, we see full volumes left unsaid. Jia weaves it all together with his usual brilliance. SWIMMING OUT TILL THE SEA TURNS BLUE is an indispensable account of a changing China from one of the country’s foremost cinematic storytellers.
Special Features and Technical Specs:
Video introduction by Jia Zhang-Ke
Q&A with Jia Zhang-Ke moderated by Michael Berry, Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA
Visit – a short film by Jia Zhang-Ke commissioned by the Thessaloniki Film Festival
Since 2008, the Experimental Lecture Series has presented veteran filmmakers who immerse themselves in the world of alternative, experimental film. Our intention is to lay bare an artist’s challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, M.M. Serra, and Nick Dorsky.
– Programmed by Lynne Sachs with Dan Streible.
Abigail Child: “Where is Your Rupture?”
“The title of this lecture takes off from Andy Warhol’s Where Is Your Rupture, an early 60s painting which cuts off both a diagrammatic torso and the text beneath it. The result is at once detached and personal, a fragment with both text and body broken, incomplete.
My own work utilizes fragments and rupture to reconstruct a new and different partiality, often focused on the body and gender. Whether editing found footage or my own filmed images, my principal form has been montage, developing, as Tom Gunning writes, ‘a system founded not on coherence, but on breakdown, not on continuity, but interruption.’ The result has been a complex bringing together of different layers, levels of thought—both fact, and fiction— about the subject at hand. Whether it be the life of Emma Goldman, anarchist and, for a period in American history, billed as ‘the most dangerous woman alive’ (ACTS & INTERMISSIONS -2017) or a re-enactment of still images from ‘strongman’ movies created in the 1930s (PERILS -1984) or a prismatic approach to family drama (THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY -2004-2011), my work attempts to rupture the given narratives across filmic genres.
I will bring to the foreground some examples and also discuss films and collaborations that have yet to come into being, as well as films composed entirely of outtakes, throwaways: the images that are under-valued or not-yet valued. The world increasingly looks to be seamless, ‘lifelike’, realistic, even as our ‘realism’ has evolved into zoom screens and animated caricatures, game-idols of our current myths. Fracturing, recycling, breakdown and sampling are some of the tools contemporary artists use to confront and re-imagine our ‘new’ world.”
Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental writing and media since the 1980s, having completed more than fifty film/video works and installations, and written 6 books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image, to create in the words of LA Weekly: “…a political filmmaking that’s attentive to form.” Winner of the Rome Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, the Stan Brakhage Award, Child has had numerous retrospectives worldwide. These include Harvard Cinematheque, the Cinoteca in Rome and Image Forum in Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art NY, the Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofia, and in numerous international film festivals, including New York, Rotterdam, Locarno and London.
director: Lynne Sachs original title: The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts year: 1991 running time: 30 min.
synopsis This defiant feminist mosaic subversively recontextualizes archived materials dating back to the 1950s. Footage taken from a medical laboratory, an educational film on menstruation, and an amateur fantasy film about a mermaid gain whole new meanings. The repurposed shots represent the female body as a kind of freak show of bodily processes, sexuality, and maladaptation. Opposing the distorted imagery of women rooted in our patriarchal world is American poet Gertrude Stein, who seeks to bridge the gap between the “body of the body” and the “body of the mind” and achieve the integrity denied to women by Western society.
“I deconstruct a purely cinematic reality that to me seems disturbing, humorous, and just plain visually provocative. The composition of a single frame displaces the seedbed where I can cultivate my paintings and collages.”
biography Lynne Sachs (1961) is an American experimental filmmaker and poet. She studied film and history in San Francisco and at Sorbonne. Her work blurs the lines between live-action film, documentary, collage, and performance. Sachs tends to explore feminist and socially critical themes. Ji.hlava IDFF 2021 will also present her film Maya at 24.
In The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), Lynne Sachs exposes the edifice of scientific “facts” with which the male-dominated disciplines of science and medicine have constructed an image of what a woman is.
Opposing the distorted imagery of women rooted in our patriarchal world is American poet Gertrude Stein, who seeks to bridge the gap between the “body of the body” and the “body of the mind” and achieve the integrity denied to women by Western society. We bring here the script of this experimental film, that is screened online till 14th November at Ji.hlava IDFF online.
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VOICE OVER: I met him while I was on the table, you know they you put on the table, put you in the stirrups and he walks in. At first, it’s a kind of an awkward introduction. Second, maybe he didn’t mean it, but I don’t think he had any inclination to be warm or kind or talking. It was a real quick examination. I was still on the table. I was pregnant. He said “Any questions?” His hand was on a doorknob. And I, of course, said “No.” I had a zillion questions. And I can’t tell you how tall he was. I was lying down. But he always struck me as short, cold and with glasses, and he may not look like that at all.
TITLE: The House of Science: a museum of false facts
RECORDING OF MALE DOCTOR GIVING A LABOR LESSON IN DELIVERY ROOM: Doctor: That’s the spirit I like, very nice indeed. I like that spirit when you take charge of yourself. Woman: Yes. Doctor: You won’t have anyone messing you about. That’s how it should be. Woman: Have you seen what the head looks like? Doctor: It’s covered with hair. Woman: What color? Nurse: Black. Woman: Dark hair. It will come out now showing, then go back. Popping in and out like that until it gets far enough out to stay out. Woman: Yes. Doctor: Then that’s what we call the crowning. Twenty minutes after that you’ll probably have your baby. Woman: You know it seems extraordinary that frail women must do all this pushing. Doctor: I often think that. Doctor: Yes, it’s a boy. Woman: Is he all right? Doctor: Oh yes. Woman: Listen!
LYNNE’S ONSCREEN DIARY & V.O: The doctor’s office is full blond Victorian women patting their stomachs, smiling, Monalisa-esque, knowing. They welcome 18 year old me to their coterie of framed ladies-in-waiting. Waiting for the “pop,” the baby. And meanwhile, they sell pharmaceuticals. They pose in their nicely framed images hung ever so carefully around the waiting room of Doctor L. I am waiting too, for sex, and much, much later the “pop.” But now, it’s sex, with a someone I don’t know, as of yet. It’s an abstract meeting but I want to be prepared. I’m here for one thing, Doctor L., the armor. It’s too bad though, I don’t say “sex.” I say “college.” “Give me a diaphragm, Doctor G., so I can go to college.” He gives me the shield but doesn’t tell me how to use it. I leave his office, fully equipped, protected, completely incapable of placing that plastic, or is it rubber, sheath over my cervix. Where is my cervix?
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
LYNNE’S VOICE: But, uh, I don’t know if you want to talk about this, so if you don’t want to talk about this, but it interests me. It’s not something you have to …Do you think that, at the time, I mean that a lot of women, for many women, that dealing with that, whether it’s abuse or exploitation or whatever from ….?
VOICE OVER POEM BY GERTRUDE STEIN READ BY THREE WOMEN: That’s wonderful …woops … okay girls … lifting belly is so strong, lifting belly is so strong, lifting belly together, lifting belly oh yes, remember what I say, do you? (Laugh) That’s a mother’s line. Okay let’s start all over and we’ll get it this time. It will give me a feeling of completion. Lifting belly is so strong, I want to tell her something, wax candles, we have brought a great many wax candles, some are decorated. They have not been lighted. I do not mention roses. Exactly. Actually. Questions and butter. I find the butter very good. Lifting belly is so kind. Lifting belly fattily. Doesn’t that astonish you? You did want me. Say it again. Strawberry. Lifting kindly belly. Sing to me I say. Some are wives not heroes. Lifting belly merrily. Sing to me I say. Lifting belly. A reflection. Lifting belly joins more prizes. Fit to be. I have fit on a hat. Have you. What did you say to excuse me? Difficult paper and scattered. Lifting belly is so kind.
LYNNE’S DIARY ON SCREEN: My memory of being a girl included a “me” that is two. I am two bodies – the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk. Of course there was the skeleton. This was assumed and only reconsidered upon my very rare attempts at jumping farther than far enough, clearing the ditch, lifting the heave-ho. But the body of the body was not the bones. This body wrapped and encircled the bones, a protective cover of flesh, just on the other side of the wall I call skin.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL TEXT READ OUTLOUD BY LITTLE GIRL WHO MAKES MISTAKES (SUBTITLED): Let us take the next example, that of a born thief. Louis C. Magnan writes of her, aged nine, was the daughter of a mad father, always in …. a condition of sexual excitement. She was of weak intelligence. Her instincts had always been bad, her conduct turbulent, and her mind incapable of concentration. At three, she was a thief and laid hands on her mother’s money. At five, she was arrested and conveyed to the police office. She shrieked, tore off her socks and threw her dolls into the gutter and lifted her shirts in the street. But on looking at her photograph, one perceives that although only nine years old, she offers the exact type of the born criminal. Her jaws and cheekbones are emmense, the frontal sinews strong, the nose flat. She looks like a grown woman – nay, a man.
GIRLS WHISPERING: Remember … remember … the next day … tomorrow… the next day … tomorrow … remember … tomorrow … remember … tomorrow … remember … this movie and there were these women … with elephant snouts … and really long …. I know I saw that movie too … they jumped off the screen …the next day … remember.
LYNNE’S DIARY ON SCREEN: The body of the body moves in cycles and with every repetition there is a sensation of pain. The reminder, emanating from the core, the indefinable marrow that can never be touched, is a cleansing, scarring, tactile, silent exclamation. The arrival of the body of the body forces the body of the mind to take notice, begrudgingly so. With legs crossed, the blood is caught just before it crosses the border into the public domain.
WOMAN’S VOICE: But I always thought black widow spiders spit, cause I really loved black widows, and I would always go out and stand by them and I ran to get my father to show him, and he said that I couldn’t go near it, and I said that I wouldn’t ever touch it. You know, I was just going to watch it. And he said “No, cause it will spit at you!” And I believed that unquestioningly, until, I was, and I told everyone “Oh yeah, black widows spit….” I don’t think black widows spit. It doesn’t even sound logical. I don’t even think they have any apparatus to spit.
VOICE FROM ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTARY SCIENCE FILM: Body hair appears, most noticeably under the arms and in the pubic region. Menstrual or monthly periods usually happen every four weeks, however they’re likely to be quite irregular for the first two or three yeas while a girls is still maturing. And later a cycle of perhaps five weeks or three weeks is perfectly normal. It takes time to get used to the changes of adolescence which at first may seem so strange. However, for many girls menstruation brings no problems and little discomfort, only the extra time needed for cleanliness.
LYNNE’S DIARY AND V.O.: Filled with infectious, infected liquids, we hold in the blood, the water, the sneeze, the wax, the hair, the puss, the breath. All that is ours to let go, to release onto this earth, is held in, contained. I am the cauldron of dangerous substances.
WOMAN’S V.O.: Well, as a young child I always had a lot of coughing and stuff and my mother would never allow me to spit what came out of my chest. Because she said that “Girls don’t spit. They swallow it. You know you don’t do that because it’s vulgar.”
MAN’S VOICE FROM OLD DOCUMENTARY: Science began when man began to observe and make note of his observations.
GIRL WHISPERING: … the next day … tomorrow …the next day tomorrow I know I saw that movie too … the next day … tomorrow.
GIRLS’ VOICES FROM OLD MOVIE: For someone who has so many outside activities. She’s smart, that’s why. Sure she’s smart, but she’s also human. Besides, this thing is all over school now! Is that true? Have the rest of you heard about this?
THREE WOMEN ON SCREEN SPEAKING: Woman #1: Prostitutes have longer hands and larger calves but their feet are small. Woman #2: While criminals have the darker hair and eyes, it is the prostitutes whose fare and red hair now surpasses the normal. Woman #3: Female thieves, above all prostitutes, are inferior to moral women in cranial capacity and circumference.
GIRLS WHISPERING: I saw this movie called “The Secret Garden.”
WOMAN’S V.O.: My dad was always disappointed because my mother never gave him a son. We rode his butt when we found out men are the ones that give a child gender. Cause he had really harassed my mom for years because she didn’t have a son. So we had to tell him that it was his fault. Cause he really, really wanted a boy. I was the closest thing that he had to a son for years.
MALE V.O. FROM OLD MOVIE THAT TEACHES DRAWING LESSONS: … is to support the framework and to give a framework to the body and to give it contour … There’s no difficulty in looking at a subject such as this to see that it’s symmetrical.
SAME THREE WOMEN ON SCREEN SPEAKING: Woman #1: Prostitutes have longer hair and larger breasts, but their thighs are smaller. Woman #2: But I have dark hair and dark eyes and I like my hair red. Woman #3: No way, they’re rough, they’re tough, they’re hard to bluff.
WOMAN V.O.: Like I can remember when I learned about martyrs. I was going to be Joan of Arc or I was going to be different saints and then I was going to be the Virgin Mary. Then I remember when I read about Nancy Drew. Then I was going to be her. So I had more recollection from the inside out. Visually, from the outside in, I remember putting on make-up like my mother, but would always cover my whole face with lipstick.
MALE VOICE FROM SCIENCE RECORDING ON BABIES: No one has yet come up with a complete and precise interpretation of each type of cry. There are catalogued some twenty different non-normal cries and fifteen to twenty different normal need cries. In a moment, you will hear four different normal need cries. The cries illustrated are hunger, pain, fatigue and fretfulness.
LYNNE’S DIARY AND V.O.: I remember my first introduction to the bridle, the bra. I was a horse irritated by such constraints. My bosoms were a keen, smooth extension of my growing, extending torso – all one piece. The cusp between my breast and my rib was a hiding place for my lanky, unwieldy arm. I was triangle, feeling a wholeness somewhere between my elbows and the nape of my neck — until the bridle came and created divisions, areas of artificial mystique, a separation between the functional arm and the sexual breast. Territory.
WOMAN’S V.O.: We have Rubens’ women. They are, I assume they are purchased for this purpose, like chubby, flesh women swinging on swings or lounging around, always kind of grotesque looking and there – just to be taken, just right there for the taking. And I assume that is why they were purchased, though we pretend that they were just purchased for art. Or there’s another, the Venuses, there’s a period of time when they were shaving all the pubic hair from the Venuses. There’s something I think about power in removing that hair and also a few perversions in the male culture that made that so popular. I think they become less powerful images for the male. And I think a lot of times, the more the visual images can be disarmed the better the male artist feels.
LYNNE’S DIARY V.O.: A speculum before me. I hold the mirror just inches away and learn to look – sometimes shyly, occasionally detached, and now, more often than not, bravely. I touch myself with knowledge. I trace a path across my chest, searching for surprises I’d rather not find, knots in the fabric.
MAN ON A HORSE IN OLD MOVIE: Look!
GIRLS WHISPERING: There was a secret garden and she had been in it, and she found it and she dug a hole everywhere she could find it and she found the key and she found the door and the next day she told another boy ….
LYNNE’S DIARY V.O AND TEXT ON SCREEN: Undressed, we read our bodies like a history. Scars, muscles, curves of the spine. We look at ourselves from within, collect our own data, create our own science, begin to define. Built from the inside out, this new laboratory pushes against the walls of the old structure. An incendiary effect, yes, but not arson.
GIRLS V.O.: Girl #1: Doctor, doctor, I can’t talk very well, I lost my voice. Girl #2: Okay, let me take a strep test. Girl #1: Okay, what do I do? Girl #2: Just open your mouth, and I’m going to put this down your throat. Okay, now we’ve got to put it in the chemicals. You have strep! Girl #1: I do? Mom, I have strep. What’s strep? Girl #2: It means you have a very soar throat. Girl #1: I do? Oh, thank you. What do I have to do for it? Girl #2: Well, just take the aspirin and wait a few weeks. Girl #1: Okay, bye! Girl #2: Bye!
