In the final line of the Festival, we are pleased to announce a conversation dedicated to the work of the artist, poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who will chat with the teacher and filmmaker Libertad Gills, who is part of the Camara Lucida family. In this edition we have dedicated a focus in our Mirada Epicenter section to Lynne Sachs. The festival is still available on our website, don’t miss out on the festival.
Interview: OBSERVE AND SUBVERT
BY INNEY PRAKASH
December 2021
https://metrograph.com/observe-and-subvert/
An interview with experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs.
Our Lynne Sachs Series plays at Metrograph December 10–12.
Several of her films are currently available to watch on the Criterion Channel
Whether portraying artists, historical figures, family members, or strangers, filmmaker Lynne Sachs has always found rivetingly indirect methods of representing her subjects. The San Francisco Weekly called her 2001 film Investigation of a Flame, about the Vietnam War and the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic activists who burnt draft files in protest, an “anti-documentary.” Sachs herself now uses the phrase “experimental documentary” as shorthand for describing the formal elements that constitute her particularly idiosyncratic and collage-like cinematic vernacular, notable in work like the decades-in-the-making Film About A Father Who (2020).
Rooted in her days in San Francisco’s experimental scene, Sachs’s concerns are deeply material; they regard the matter that makes up the world as inextricable from the technology that reproduces it. Her investigation of New York City laundromats, The Washing Society (2016), co-directed with playwright Lizzie Olesker, struck me as an apt departure point for our wide-ranging discussion about and around this material awareness, as well as the larger concerns that bridge the gap between her films as works of art and Sachs’s advocacy for worldly change.
I WANT TO START WITH A WEIRD QUESTION.
I like weird questions.
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON LINT?
I have been thinking about lint so much over the last few years. It started with my thinking about skin, and the epidermis, and about clothing being a second layer of our skin—which means that when we collect lint out of the dryer, we’re also catching aspects of our bodies. Sometimes it’s our own bodies, sometimes it’s the bodies of people we love. Sometimes it’s the bodies of people whose clothes are being washed in a transactional way…Iin that flow, you collect something most people think of as detritus. But I actually think of it as material, in the way that Joseph Beuys was really interested in wax and felt. So, lint is material for sculpture, and for an examination of our bodies. When that comes together, I find it very compelling.
I AM, OF COURSE, REFERRING TO A COUPLE OF SPECIFIC SHOTS FROM THE WASHING SOCIETY, WHICH EMPHASIZE SENSUOUSNESS, WHICH IS NOT A WORD I EVER WOULD’VE PREVIOUSLY USED TO DESCRIBE LINT.
That attention to the microscopic aspects that are residue of the much larger social relationships around service, hygiene, and the exchange of money for someone who performs something for somebody else—lint represents all those things.
IT MAKES ME THINK OF THE WASHING SOCIETY AS AN EXTENSION OF YOUR CAREER-LONG PREOCCUPATION WITH MATERIAL FILM, EVEN THOUGH IT WAS SHOT DIGITALLY.
When we look at traditional 16mm film, we see scratches and hair, like we see in lint. It’s not that different. Because lint collects through the months or ages, it collects aspects of the world. Film does the same thing; it is changed by its journey in time.
My co-director, Lizzie Olesker, and I wanted to figure out ways to examine the interplay between economics, aesthetics, and politics. You look at the form of cinema and you say, “I want to create ruptures. I want to create a radicalization of the way images are represented.“ But it’s also important to look not just at the way the camera reproduces our reality, but what is produced by the reality that might be dismissed or ignored. … Lint is not invisible, but it’s about as close to invisible as it gets. It moves from clothing to the trashcan in a kind of rote way. By breaking up that [journey], we’re trying to look at the mechanisms of labor.
THE WASHING SOCIETY FEATURES ACTUAL LAUNDRY WORKERS AND ACTORS. WHAT IS IT ABOUT THIS ASPECT OF PERFORMANCE THAT FASCINATES YOU AS A DOCUMENTARIAN?
It occurred to me about a year ago that every single film is a document of a performance. Even a fiction film, which is a bunch of people doing this crazy thing—to reinvent themselves, pretend that they’re different from who they are—we film it, and it’s called a fiction film, but it’s actually a documentary of a group of people together.
What’s started to interest me in the last year is that woven quality that takes seriously that anyone in, for example, a documentary film is performing an aspect of who they are. As soon as they turn their head and they see the camera, they’re performing. And there’s this, you could call it a leash, or an invisible thread [that runs] between my eyes and the eyes of any human being in front of the camera. They’re always looking to the director for some kind of affirmation, like, “Yes, you’re doing a good job.“ It’s the same in documentary. If you actually recognize that this is a form of exchange, then you can try to subvert it. People who are supposed to be ‘real’ become performers, or we have performers who open up about their lives . And so, obscure that rigid differentiation. That’s why I’m not really happy with the term ‘hybrid’ yet. Because it’s saying that this ontological conundrum doesn’t really exist, and that we have to create another category that says, “That’s ambiguously real and that’s ambiguously fiction.“
IN TERMS OF REAL-LIFE SUBJECTS VERSUS HIRED PERFORMERS, HOW DID YOU APPROACH WHO WOULD EXPRESS WHAT IN THE WASHING SOCIETY? THERE ARE TIMES, ESPECIALLY EARLY ON, WHEN IT ISN’T NECESSARILY CLEAR WHO IS WHO.
With filmmaking, there’s always two answers. There is the production answer: we tried one thing and it didn’t work, so we decided to go another way. And then there’s the more theoretical, maybe conceptual answer.
I WANT BOTH ANSWERS. I’M HUNGRY FOR ANSWERS.
Okay, the conceptual answer first. We wanted to research the experience of what it is to wash the clothes of another person. Particularly in a big city, where people and workplaces can be taken for granted. Lizzie comes out of playwriting, and this notion that you observe the world in which you live, and then you re-create characters who inhabit those experiences you’ve witnessed, or those interactions that confuse you, and that you’re trying to grapple with. And I come out of experimental filmmaking, with documentaries. So you observe and then you subvert.
She asked me if I would help her to investigate laundry workers in New York. We started, and we got really hooked, but most of the people who do this kind of service work in America are also immigrants, and many don’t have the formal paperwork to give them the freedom to be on camera, to talk about the struggles of their workplace or their bosses, who they’re supporting, all those things. So we would have very informal conversations, but we couldn’t record and we couldn’t film.
Our answer was not to give up, but to listen really actively, and then to write the characters, or to write three characters who appear in the film as composites of these conversations. So, there’s Ching Valdes-Aran, Jasmine Holloway, and Veraalba Santa. They’re all performers—the film started as a performance called Every Fold Matters, which we did live in laundromats in Brooklyn and in New York City, and at places like University Settlement, The Tank.
But then, okay, the answer to the conceptual side is that, even though I’ve been making work that you could call reality-based or documentary-based for a long time, I’m always questioning this notion of asking people to open up their lives for me. That’s why I made Film About a Father Who, because I felt like it was my turn to be in that vulnerable position.
One thing I’ve done for years now, I always pay people [who appear] in my films. That’s kind of anathema in documentary. People don’t do that. Especially journalists, which I do understand… But why shouldn’t you pay them the way you would pay an actor?
Often we measure the success of a documentary by how real it is, by the spontaneity of the reveal of information; “I can’t believe you got in that door.“ Or, “I can’t believe you got those people to say that for you with your camera on.“ There’s a lot of registers of success that have to do with the people in front of the camera letting it all hang out, and that’s an awkward exchange… I wanted to have people who felt confident in their place in the world, to speak from that position. If people didn’t feel confident, then we listened, and we tried to embrace their sentiments and struggles in a fictionalized way.
ARE THE ACTORS REPEATING TEXT THAT WAS SPOKEN BY ACTUAL LAUNDRY WORKERS OR WAS THAT TEXT WRITTEN BY YOU AND LIZZIE?
It’s both. We used parts of it, but often we wrote in a more free-form way. It’s really a composite, and there’s a freedom that comes from making a film like this. .. I call it the Maggie Nelson effect, [which is] this idea where you lay bare the research. In The Argonauts, she tells this personal story about her relationship, and she has these fantastic tangents, which are about her research, what she happened to be reading, letting all of that come in.
I can [also] say that we were influenced by Yvonne Rainer. She was such a visionary when it came to choreography, and a celebration of the body through dance. Because she looked at the quotidian, and she ‘deconstructed’— in the word of that period— how we move through the world. We took that approach to how we thought about the dance movements in The Washing Society, how we could re-examine the gestures of the everyday, and think about how they might be beautiful, in the way that Roberta Cantow’s film Clotheslines celebrates the beauty of laundry work. [Lizzie and I] wanted to think about recognising washing as a form of physical dance. Especially because there’s so much repetition, which dance also uses.
CLOTHESLINES HAPPENS TO BE PLAYING ALONGSIDE THE WASHING SOCIETY.
Clotheslines is fantastic. It’s giving attention, again, to urban life, and to things that people do that maybe they feel ashamed of doing but that they have to do. It’s interesting to look at Roberta Cantow’s film, because it’s a twist on the whole idea of being a feminist. Barbara Hammer did something similar; I think the term ‘feminist’ is evolving all the time.
What Roberta Cantow did in her work, I think, is say, “Let’s acknowledge the beauty of what mostly women do. But it doesn’t mean that they’ll become stronger women than when they don’t do it.” … I should add that today I had a conversation with Roberta Cantow. A woman she knew who organizes washerwomen in New York City told her about the screening. Anyway, she told me today that this whole group of organizers around washerwomen, 10 of them, are coming to Metrograph.
THAT’S EXTRAORDINARY.
Yeah. And I’m hoping [for] a group from the Laundry Workers Center, which is a union I’ve done a lot of work with, who organize workers in the small laundromats all over New York City… If they’re trying to shut down a laundromat or bring attention to conditions that are really, really bad—where people are required to work 12 hours, and they can’t look at their phones, or all the different rules that are had—[Lizzie and I] make videos for them sometimes.
DO YOU CONSIDER FILMMAKING AS A FORM OF ACTIVISM, OR ADJACENT TO IT? WHERE DO THE TWO INTERSECT?
I was thinking about this last night. I went to an event at E-flux, and I was listening to Eric Baudelaire, the filmmaker, talking about this too…. I don’t think I’ve ever made a film that had the ability to make someone act differently, or to push them in a direction. But I always hope it makes them think about who they are differently, or about how the world works in another way. Maybe the result of that would be an action. But if it’s just a thought, that’s pretty good too. I guess it has to do with results, how you measure your reach… I get very excited, like with Investigation of a Flame, by people doing things with passion, and pushing themselves to extremes from which they can never turn back. I mean, that actually goes to Barbara Hammer. [She] lived life to its fullest, and with so much conviction.
BEING IN DIALOGUE WITH OTHER ARTISTS, FILMMAKERS, OTHER PEOPLE, SEEMS SO ESSENTIAL TO ALL OF YOUR WORK.
Well, when I made Which Way Is East (1994), I didn’t at first understand that it really is about how we look at history, and how we analyze or reconstruct the past. That film is made from the perspective of myself and my sister. We were children who experienced the Vietnam War through television, mostly black-and-white images on a box in the living room. Being typical American, middle-class kids, our parents and their friends had not gone to war. The war was really far away… But you then grow up and you realize that it does touch you; you heard all the numbers of people who died, and you recognize that those statistics were always emphasizing the Americans, but what about the Vietnamese? How does war have an impact?
When we made the film, in the early ’90s, my sister, Dana Sachs, was living in Vietnam. I visited for one month, and, like a typical documentary filmmaker, you arrive in a place and you say, “I’m going to make a film.“ It came to me later that the film is a dialogue with history, but it’s also a dialogue between two women from the same family, who thought about that past in extremely different ways. She looked at Vietnam in this contemporary way, as survivors. Whereas I looked at Vietnam with this wrought guilt, trying to piece together an understanding of a war that still seemed to bleed. That’s what gave the film its tension, that our perceptions were so different. Ultimately the most interesting films are the ones that ask us to think about perception, that don’t just introduce new material.
So that was a gift, to be in dialogue with my sister… Another way of looking at dialogue, [if] you’re in dialogue with [someone like] Jean Vigo, who’s not alive… then you’re creating a dialectic between the materials. In A Month of Single Frames, I’m in dialogue with Barbara Hammer literally, but I’m also in dialogue with her through the form of the film, and with the audience. That was intentional, to have this ambiguity.
In A Month of Single Frames, she also does something that’s not about activism, it’s about solitude… thinking about her place in nature. It’s all about being delicately and boldly in the landscape. When she cuts up little pieces of gel and puts them on blades of grass, she’s doing the opposite of what a feature film made in Cape Cod would… You’d have all these people stomping on the dunes, getting permission to shoot, to take over a whole house, you’d need light, electricity… She wanted to do everything with the least impact. It’s not a film that she probably announced as a celebration of the environment. But to me, it is so much about not leaving your footprint on the land, but being there. I really admire that work.
DID YOU BEGIN THE FILM BEFORE SHE DIED?
The last year of Barbara Hammer’s life, she gave footage to filmmakers and said, “Do whatever you want, and in the process use this material that I love but could not finish. Because I can see that my life will not last long enough to do so.“
She gave me footage from 1998, which she had shot in a residency on Cape Cod. I asked her why she didn’t finish this film and she said, “Because it’s too pretty, and because it’s not engaged, it’s not political.“ She felt that the fact that it delivered so much pleasure just in its loveliness made it problematic. It was this gorgeous landscape, and a woman alone in a cabin. She thought there wasn’t a rigor to it. So she had never done anything with it; it just moved around with her, and it was bothering her, of course: “Finish me. Finish me.“
She gave it to me, and I started to edit. On the second visit, I showed it to her, just without any sound. I asked if she did any writing while she was there, and she said, “I kept a journal.“ She’d forgotten all about it, so she pulled it out.
THAT’S THE DIALOGUE WE HEAR IN THE FILM?
She even writes about herself in the third person, which is fun, and different…
Everything was so pressured: she had to go to chemotherapy, she was trying to finish Evidentiary Bodies, a film that she was going to show at the Berlin Film Festival in 2019. It was one of the last things she did. So I had the material, and when she died… I needed to finish it. That’s when I wrote the text, because I needed to be in dialogue with her more than just editing the material. I needed to concentrate on that energy between us.
SO YOU COMPLETED A FILM YOU HAD BEGUN WORKING ON WHILE SHE WAS LIVING, AND THAT SHE DIED DURING THE MAKING OF. AND THEN YOU MADE A FILM IN DIALOGUE WITH SOMEONE WHO HAD ALREADY DIED, IN E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO.
I’ll give you a little background. I’ve been on and off involved with the Punto de Vista Film Festival, which is a really interesting small festival in Pamplona, Spain, where they acknowledge and appreciate alternative ways of looking at documentary film practice. They asked 10 filmmakers to make a film in the form of a letter to a filmmaker who had influenced us.
I chose Jean Vigo; I love his film, Zero for Conduct (1933), because it is so much about rule breaking. It is so much about trying to exist in society, but knowing when there is a time to break the law. I had made my film Investigation of a Flame; I was interested in those moments where you have to turn inward and say, “This is wrong.“ And I wanted, again, to talk to a ghost. To talk to Jean Vigo.
Then, right at the beginning of this year, there was the attack on the US Capitol. A group of thousands chose to break the law, with absolute abandon in terms of the sacredness of other people’s bodies. I’m not even saying the US Capitol is sacred. But to go to a place of heinous destruction, that really disturbed me. I was already thinking about Jean Vigo, and I thought, “This is really complicated.” Because at what point do we learn to understand how to respect, how to have compassion, how to have empathy? That you can break rules, as in paint graffiti or burn draft files, but that once you start invading another person’s body— it’s a violation I couldn’t accept. And this space between anarchy and authoritarianism, and between compassionate rule breaking and violence was very interesting to me.
WHAT ABOUT REVOLUTION? WHAT ABOUT A FEMINIST SOCIALIST REVOLUTION?
Oh. Well I have to say, a feminist socialist revolution probably would come with a lot of compassion. I think, I hope. But I would never say that women… I don’t think that there’s anything innate.
One other thing about E•pis•to•lar•y: I really like all the syllables in epistolary, so I like that it sounds like bullets. And yet it’s about dialogue… It may be silent, but audiences are writing back in their heads. I think a lot about that in my filmmaking, all the sounds that go on in audiences’ minds.
ARE THE SUBJECTS OF INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME (2001), THE CATONSVILLE NINE, YOUR MODELS THEN OF RIGHTEOUS DISSIDENTS?
My interest in people who break the rules goes way back. I mean, I was protesting the implementation of imposing draft registration on American men when I was in high school. I’ve always been committed to trying to articulate a critique. But when I heard about the Catonsville Nine and this group of people who had nothing to gain by criticizing the US government’s presence in Vietnam, except that they were so upset that they felt they had to speak out against it…
They were Catholic antiwar activists: two priests in particular, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, and a nurse, and a sister, and others. But they broke the law in the most performative way. To take draft papers and burn them [with] napalm…. Napalm is not that different from lint. It’s just soap mixed with chemicals. You can make napalm at home. It’s domestically produced napalm, which was being used in Vietnam. But [the Catonsville Nine] wanted to make it and burn it symbolically. This, to me, was the ultimate art performance piece. Let’s burn files, photograph it, disseminate it, and say that these files represent bodies.
People said that they changed so much thinking. It was effective because it was an image that… You were asking about activism, that’s an image! To see priests burning draft files, that’s going to change things. That’s real activism on their part, and that happened in the 1960s.
FROM LINT TO NAPALM. THANK YOU, LYNNE.
I never thought… But it’s made with soap!
Inney Prakash is a writer and film curator based in New York City and the founder/director of Prismatic Ground.
The Individual Top Tens of 2021
The Editors
December 15, 2021
https://www.rogerebert.com/features/the-individual-top-tens-of-2021
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.
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
1. “The Velvet Underground“
2. “Summer of Soul”
3. “Procession”
4. “Drive My Car”
5. “The French Dispatch“
6. “The Power of the Dog”
7. “Titane“
8. “The Harder They Fall“
9. “The Last Duel“
10. “Holler“
Runners-Up: “17 Blocks,” “Annette,” “Azor,” “A Cop Movie,” “A Film About a Father Who,” “Godzilla vs Kong,” “The Humans,” “Mass,” “M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity,” “The Night,” “Pig,” “Riders of Justice,” “Wild Indian,” “Wrath of Man,” “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” and “Zola“
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”
Some honorable mentions (more here): “Ailey“; “Azor”; “Devil Between the Legs”; “Eyimofe (This is My Desire)”; “The Fever“; “The Hand of God“; “In Balanchine’s Classroom”; “Karen Dalton: In My Own Time”; “Labyrinth of Cinema“; “Some Kind of Heaven“.
From 7 Ludlow: Lynne Sachs, Lizzie Olesker, & Silvia Federici
Metrograph
December 11, 2022
https://metrograph.com/at-home-movie/?at_home_movie_id=6262e4839b76b3761d0f74ac
FROM 7 LUDLOW: LYNNE SACHS, LIZZIE OLEKSER, & SILVIA FEDERICI
METROGRAPH | 52 MIN | 2021
The Washing Society filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker in conversation with Silvia Federici, moderated by Emily Apter.
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.
Watch the films now on Vimeo
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.
Livestream premiere on Wednesday, September 22 at 7pm PST.
The films are available to watch thru October 21 on the Cinematheque’s website.
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
Follow the link here to register for the livestream, accessible on Zoom.
December 10 to December 12, 2021
https://nyc.metrograph.com/series/series/291/lynne-sachs
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.
Sachs will be present for all three programs.
A FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO
https://nyc.metrograph.com/film/film/2769/a-film-about-a-father-who
Friday, December 10th @ 7:15 PM
2020 / 74min / DCP
DIRECTOR: LYNNE SACHS
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.
WASHING SOCIETY + CLOTHESLINES +A MONTH OF SINGLE
https://nyc.metrograph.com/film/film/2782/washing-society-clothesline
Saturday, December 11th @ 3:45 PM
2018 and 1981 / 90min / DCP
DIRECTOR: LYNNE SACHS, LIZZIE OLESKER, AND ROBERTA CANTOW
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.
Co-Directors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker with special guest feminist scholar Silvia Federici in a post-screening conversation. Hosted by Emily Apter.
LYNNE SACHS SHORTS
https://nyc.metrograph.com/film/film/2773/lynne-sachs-shorts
Sunday, December 12th @ 4:30 PM
1994, 2017, 2021, 2001 / 100min / DCP
DIRECTOR: LYNNE SACHS
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.
Director Lynne Sachs will be present.
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.
Published in 2021, Spanish & English
https://i-n-g-a.com/products/letters-as-films
A project by Garbiñe Ortega
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
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.
Thanks again Lynne, Gunvor
www.qedastoria.com
https://www.poetsofqueens.org/reading-series
JANUARY 5 at 7PM
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.
Please watch the January 17th reading here.
Please watch the March 14th reading here.
Please watch the May 16 reading here.
10 great book covers using TN fonts
by Lucas Czarnecki
November 20, 2021
https://www.typenetwork.com/news/article/10-great-book-covers-using-tn-fonts
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:
Year by Year: Poems by Lynne Sachs
Study by XYZ Type and Freight Sans by Garage Fonts
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.
The Nightwatches of Bonaventura translated by Gerald Gillespie
Fakir by Underware Type
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.
How to create typefaces by Cristóbal Henestrosa, Laura Meseguer, and José Scaglione
Multi by Type-Ø-Tones
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.
Ha, daar gaat er een van mij! (Ha, there goes one of mine!) by Jan Middendorp
Productus by TYPETR
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 by Rafael Freitas da Silva
Guanabara Sans by Plau
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.
James Joyce series, Vintage Classics
Poetica by Adobe Originals
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.
The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler
Garage Gothic by Frere-Jones Type
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.
Gute Aussichten. New German Photography 2013/14
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.
Finnmarksvidda by Stein P. Aasheim
Satyr by Monokrom
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.
Luchtfietsen (Treading Air) by Jaan Kross
Bodega Serif by Greg Thompson
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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Posted November 19, 2021 03:43 AM by
https://www.blu-ray.com/news/?id=29659
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:
Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
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:
