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!
Invisible Women (Camilla Baier & Rachel Pronger) is an archive activist film collective that champions the work of female filmmakers from the history of cinema.
For this edition of the Catalan Film Festival, we invited Rachel and Camilla to respond to the rich, vast and beautiful theme of “filmed letters between women cineastes“. A result is a special event on Sunday 28 November at GFT where we will be showing TRANSOCEANICAS and A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES, followed by a conversation between Catalan director Meritxell Colell and Invisible Women.
Details An unmissable event in partnership with Invisible Women exploring the intimacy of women’s epistolary cinema, followed by a Q&A with Catalan director Meritxell Colell. This special female friendship film programme includes a screening of Meritxell Colell and Lucia Vasallo’s Transoceánicas and Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer’s A Month Of Single Frames.
Transoceánicas A years-long correspondence between two filmmakers, this poetic, intimate work finds two friends separated by the Atlantic Sea, yet bound by their strong emotional connection. Beautifully edited and elegantly structured, Transoceánicas is a vivid, layered film about enduring friendship, fierce femininity, and cinema’s capacity to transcend gulfs of space and time.
The passing of time, a sheer passion for cinema as a way of life, and the difficulty of filming in the times in which we live become a beautiful cinematographic mosaic, an intense and moving album of images.
A Month Of Single Frames In 1998, lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer took part in a one-month residency at a Cape Cod dune shack without running water or electricity, where she shot film, recorded sound and kept a journal. In 2018 she gave all of this material to Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with it.
The films will be followed by a Q&A between director Meritxell Colell and Invisible Women’s Camilla Baier.
“An ode to silent film, to pictures, to putting all those shards of consciousness together.”- The Film Stage
Las cartas que no fueron también son · The Letters That Weren’t And Also Are
Multiple Directors 2021, ES, 58′, M12 Cinefiesta 28 Nov 2021 · Passos Manuel · 17H30 The Punto de Vista film festival invited a series of contemporary directors to make short film-letters, addressed to other directors they admired but had never met in person. Among others, Lynne Sachs wrote to Jean Vigo, Nicolás Pereda paid homage to Chantal Akerman and Alejo Moguillansky greeted Antonioni. Because cinema is also a way of connecting, getting to know each other and falling in love.
About
The Porto/Post/Doc cultural collective was created on March 26th of 2014 in Porto and gathers several people of various ages, professions and qualifications, all united in their passion for cinema. This group could not accept the current situation of cinema absence in the city; therefore our mission has mainly three objectives: bringing back the audience to the movie theatres, promoting the local cinema production and creating an international cinema festival, with a particular focus on documentary.
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.
Lynne’s work in Queens:
Lynne recently completed the seven minute poetry film “Swerve”, a collaboration with former Queens Poet Laureate (2010 – 2014) Paolo Javier completely shot in Queens!
The first time she read Paolo’s sonnets in his new book O.B.B. aka The Original Brown Boy, she started to hear them in her head, cinematically. In her imagination, each of his 14 line poems became the vernacular expressions of people walking through a food market full of distinct restaurant stalls. She re-watched Wong Kar-wai’s “Happy Together” – a favorite of both of theirs – and immediately thought of the Hong Kong Food Court in Elmhurst, Queens, a gathering spot for immigrant and working class people from the neighborhood who love good cuisine. As we all know, restaurant owners and workers experienced enormous economic hardship during New York City’s pandemic. Nevertheless, the market and the playground across the street become vital locations for the shooting of Lynne’s film inspired by Paolo’s exhilarating writing. Together, they invited performers and artists Emmey Catedral, ray ferriera, Jeff Preiss, Inney Prekash, and Juliana Sass to participate in a challenging yet playful endeavor. Each performer devours Paolo’s sonnets along with a meal from one of the market vendors. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, they speak his words as both dialogue and monologue. Like Lucretius’s ancient poem De rerum natura/ On the Nature of Things, they move through the market as Epicureans, searching for something to eat and knowing that finding the right morsel might very well deliver a new sensation. The camera records it all. “Swerve” then becomes an ars poetica/ cinematica, a seven-minute meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Previously published in Ice Floe Press
Anchored (for my mother Diane)
Caught in a framework. Inscribed by the parameters of our misgivings. Trapped in the mess that defines us.
You, a masked unarmed responder to other’s calamity, a listener to a tribute from a muted trumpet, relishing stories pulled through one ear out the other.
In spite of everything, nowhere to go, I celebrate your ability to turn routine into ritual, you put on orange pink pastel lipstick, run a comb through your hair, turn on Zoom, catch five o’ clock sun on your cheeks.
Savoring a dinner party that doesn’t happen. The taste for a camp song you once knew and still love. A pile of linen napkins thrown into the machine. Despite. Oh, for the time when a wrinkle mattered.
A chuckle A sigh. Just the same. The house at 3880.
I am there with you. And not. In the beginning, not so far from the end.
The mailbox at the end of the driveway wobbly, yet somehow firm, sole receiver left in a zone of closures.
21 years between your birth in ‘39 and mine in ’61, still thrilled by your attentions, countless appreciations, and your propensity, and willingness to listen to those things that launch my soul each morning. You are so pretty, I tell you.
Outside your window, a green lawn, mowed and below, the remains of a swimming pool, dirt filled, where I spent summers hosting watery tea parties, blowing bubbles, kissing the rim of a shared cup, watching you from below, refracted and wise, wondering how long I could hold breath.
Beside the cracked cement driveway, a fourteen-foot camellia climbing, pink smoke emanating from a chimney of flowers. Not knowing a camellia is conspicuously absent of scent, I draw in air.
Walking alone, one morning, you take note of a a ranch-style house with carport at the end of the block, on a cove, under two large oaks — you somehow sense a neighbor’s anguish, unarticulated, peeling-paint.
For 18 months, we’ve walked, around and around and back again. Phones in pockets. Cables in ears. We talk, wonder, move on together in our way.
In the car, voices of all the people who fill your head, their mysteries and narratives, your music.
I fear for you but not so much, anchored to ground, not underwater.
And there, too the man you love wanting nothing more than to feed you not so much what you need, but what you relish. Not just a meal, but daily dining.
Together, you face the contagion no one sees, like the wind, always present, felt.
A time to spend with things –
Inside a decrepit album you find a photo of Granny smoking a pipe, dressed as a man – you wisely giggle, utter of course.
And an article saved and snipped, concerning your grandmother’s father, my great-great an officer in the provisions wing of the US Confederacy, and a Jew. It couldn’t be, but there it is. Now we know. We know for sure. Heard it before, and didn’t.
A fragment of fact, teased out, discussed, denied — a story with weight sinks and then resurfaces in a telephone conversation from the hollow of quarantine into our fraught and daunting now. It couldn’t be grasped and there it is. So clear.
Despite it all, you – no longer the eternal optimist still drift toward light.
About
Poets of Queens creates a community for poetry in Queens and beyond.
Readings create a connection between a diverse group of poets and an audience. In 2020 an anthology of poetry by a group of twenty-five poets was published. This paved the way for Poets of Queens to start to publish individual collections to help poets connect to their community through their work. Connections are furthered when visual artists respond to poets and poets respond to visual artists as part of special projects. Poets also become mentors and teachers to fellow poets in all stages of their careers, strengthening community.
Please note that this article originally appears in Portuguese. This is a Google Translate version of the article.
In mid-2004, Joan Didion would start one of her most dense and well-known works, The Year of Magic Thought, a recap of the period that followed her husband’s death while her daughter was kept in a serious illness. Didion’s opening sentences in the book speak of the shock of sudden death: “Life changes quickly. / Life changes in an instant./ You sit down to dinner, and the life you used to know ends. / The question of self-pity.”. John Dunne, to whom she had been married for nearly 40 years, had suffered from a heart attack while sitting at the table waiting for dinner, and these lines would be suspended until the writer managed to resume months later the enterprise of plunging into the pain and anguish that permeated her recent widowhood.
“This is my attempt to understand the ensuing period, the weeks and then the months that took with them, any fixed ideas I might have about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good and bad fortune, about marriage , children and memory, about pain, about the way people deal or not with the fact that life ends, about how their sanity is fragile, about life itself. I’ve been a writer my whole life. So, even as a child, long before the things I wrote began to be published, I developed the perception that the meaning itself resided in the rhythm of words, sentences and paragraphs, a technique to retain what I thought and believed for behind an increasingly impenetrable varnish. The way I write is what I am, or what I have become; however, in this case, I would like to have, instead of words and their rhythms, an editing room equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system in which you could press a button and disassemble the time sequence, showing you, at the same time, all the memory frames that They come to mind now, and let me choose the sequences, the slightly different expressions, the varying readings of the same lines. In this case, words are not enough for me to find meaning. In this case, I need what I think and believe to be penetrable, at least to myself. the slightly different expressions, the varying readings of the same lines. In this case, words are not enough for me to find meaning. In this case, I need what I think and believe to be penetrable, at least to myself. the slightly different expressions, the varying readings of the same lines. In this case, words are not enough for me to find meaning. In this case, I need what I think and believe to be penetrable, at least to myself.”
By mentioning the desire for an editing room in which he could demonstrate and dismantle the memories, as opposed to the apparent aphasia that took him by storm when words were no longer enough to give vent to mourning, Didion leaves behind a kind of precious question: and if, faced with death, we could access through images the legacy of a lifetime? Barbara Hammer, a filmmaker with a 50-year career whose work resonates, among many other things, the vivacity of female bodies and voices in direct contact with the world, will come very close to answering this question.
Hammer died on March 16, 2019, at the age of 79, having lived for the past 13 years with ovarian cancer that has metastasized to the lungs. In an interview conducted with the New Yorker about a month before his death (his “Exit Interview”), he will talk openly about the option for the practice of caring for terminal patients that prioritizes pain relief given the impossibility of recovery — popularly known as palliative care—and about how the experience came to pass through her work and her final moments with her longtime partner, Florie Burke.
In 2018, the director will present on at least four different occasions the reading/performance “The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety)”, created from Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke, and its relationship with palliative care. With some of her films shown ( Dyketactics , 1974; Sync Touch , 1981; Sanctus , 1990), Barbara Hammer takes a look back at her artistic trajectory, taking a generous stance as a mentor to new generations of artists, while advocating for more openness to discussions around a subject that he considers so despised in the middle: the inevitability of death.
“There is a general fear of talking about death in the Western world. It is as if, by not mentioning it and discussing it, it disappears. We do ourselves a disservice by not engaging in ruminations about this very powerful life force. Are we not alive to our last breath? And isn’t this a right of way that we want to address in our art? In our seminars? And in our museum exhibits? When we hesitate to face the last phase of life, we give a message to shut up. (…) Instead, I have been discussing terminal illness. We, in the art world, all of us: artists, curators, administrators, art lovers too, are avoiding one of the most potent subjects we can tackle.”
At the end of the reading, the conventional “questions and answers” (Q&A) are converted into what the director will call “answers and questions” (A&Q), at which time she approaches some individuals in the audience and seeks to know about their impressions — a dialogue without hierarchies that will characterize much of his filmography. This farewell, which takes on the contours of sharing and sincere conversation, is an inseparable element of the path he traces so that others can continue to follow in his footsteps, even if he is no longer present. In a similar operation, supported by a Wexner Center grant, Hammer will invite four filmmakers with whom he had creative affinities — Lynne Sachs, Deborah Stratman, Mark Street and Dan Veltri — to make five (1)entirely new films having as a starting point a gesture of appropriation of their archives and their unfinished projects.
So far, only two works have been completed and circulated freely through festivals and streaming channels (including a small show on Mubi called “Ways of seeing with Barbara Hammer”).
Here are some notes on two short films, Lynne Sachs’ A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (2019) and Deborah Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara) (2019):
A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) Made from footage and notes Barbara Hammer took during an artist residency in Duneshack, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1998, A Month of Single Frames is a re-visit of a lonely creative moment by the director and her relationship with the landscape that unfolds as a possible cinematographic theme. Taking its own archival tone, the short will be guided by a recorded conversation between Lynne Sachs (responsible for its realization) and Hammer, who initially gives the temporal and spatial coordinates of the narration: August 2018, in her studio in Westbeth, housing complex for artists in New York.
The aging voice reverberates in space, and for a second, in the total darkness of the opening screen, we intuit something of the environment in which the two directors and friends meet, and of the proximity conceived there. This voice of now, while reading passages from the 98 diary, will access a primordial stage of artistic creation (the nothingness, the starting point, the experiment), while it is interspersed with intervals of absolute silence and images of an animistic nature that now stirs and now falls asleep. Giant insects, the director’s nude body bristling with a jet of cold water in the open air, the junction of sky and dunes in unusual tones. We are introduced to a territory of intimacy and constant discovery, guided by the 16mm camera that caresses the elements of this secluded setting, exploring its textures, colors and formats.
The first glimpses of Sachs’ work as a whole reveal the harmony that is preserved between the two directors: multimedia artist, poet, fiction writer, performer and filmmaker, she will also, in her own way, conceive a cinema that often articulates the universe understood as the one of the great causes (activism, pacifist movements, the study of representation and the female condition) and the issues that permeate the family (the portraits of the daughter, the father, collaborations with her brother, Ira Sachs) and the intimate . The compositional method and the reuse of files, the camera that acts as an extension of the arm, fingers, hand, in a cadence of familiarity with the filmed object, all this will come close to Barbara Hammer’s proposal and practices,
“I felt obligated to do absolutely nothing. There is absolutely nothing to be done. Everything is eagerly awaiting discovery. This morning I started the movie. I didn’t film it—I saw it. The dark triangular shadow of the shed through the west window in the upstairs bedroom shrinks and disappears from its formidable presence by the constantly rising sun. As I sat there, sweating, patiently framing second by second.”
In your book Hammer! Making Movies out of Life and Sex, Hammer will list and structure a series of factors that he believes are directly related to his creative process. Between “intuition”, “personal confidence” and “spontaneity and flow”, the topic “remember the loneliness of creativity” stands out as a direct link to what we see in A Month of Single Frames . The “loneliness of creativity” he talks about is materialized in the displaced plane, optically decomposed in his unfilmed but seen film, and in the persistent image of the cabin without electricity or running water that he would inhabit for a month. Viewed from a distance, under the accelerating and decelerating clouds of countless time-lapse attempts, the hut occupies a central and isolated point in the landscape and its experimental procedures.
“what I really want to do here is project colored lights on the dunes, using the sun as a projector” At one point, reading the diary leads to a detailed description of experiments carried out with filters and different propositions to operate the camera’s capture flow, the long, thin grass that grows between the dunes is taken over by small rectangular pieces of colored plastic, and a series of multicolored shadow planes in the sand are displayed with text, which Sachs says would have been revealed to her in a dream during editing: you’re alone / I’m here with you in this movie / there are others here with us / we’re all together. Shortly thereafter, a group of women holding sheets of yellow, green, blue, and pink cellophane are seen moving around in order to follow up with Barbara Hammer’s luminous projections. Lynne Sachs notes the notes that have so far nostalgically guided our impressions.
From the collaborative exercise that shifts time and its initial purposes (Barbara Hammer would say she never used such images because they were “too beautiful”) Hammer’s personal files, Sachs will establish a link that still respects introspection and distancing as essential moments in the development of an artistic practice. The collaboration between two women of different generations is mixed up with the editing exercise itself, of a composition that depends on each single frame, in all its complexity. Finally, between comments about aging and Lynne Sachs’ own realization that she will be 60 soon, the simple message revealed on the screen materializes as a contact from somewhere in the future, and it is clear and calming: there is nothing to fear, you will always be seen and heard.
See (for Barbara) Barbara Hammer told that she was still living with her husband “in a house in the woods” in California when one day, listening to the radio, she would discover herself as a feminist at the age of 30 (around there, she would “discover” a lesbian too). A year later, she abandoned the marriage, decided to leave in her Volkswagen for Berkeley, was presented with a super-8 camera and since then would not stop making films until her death, adding more than 60 works. He followed demonstrations in which he shamelessly asked intimate details about the participants’ sexual lives, became passionately involved in gender discussions, dealt with female sexuality and desire with the attention they deserve (filming more than once the interconnection of bodies and the frenzy ) and became an invaluable icon of the so-called queer cinema. The kind of extraordinary trajectory whose details accumulate in a symbiotic relationship between art and life.
Adding one more layer to the narrative, in 1975 Hammer would travel alone on a BMW motorcycle to Guatemala, in order to investigate the cultural processes behind indigenous clothing and how the westernized market model affected their mechanisms of exchange and commerce. With the images taken there and later set aside, Deborah Stratman will weave a look that is based not only on the anthropological echoes of Barbara Hammer, but will play a key role in the elaboration of links between the director and Maya Deren, filmmaker associated with the movement Surrealist and independent New Yorker whose notes on myth and history in Haiti in the 50s will serve as a guiding thread to think about the artist’s role as an active observer of dissonant cultures.
Known for her essayistic approach to the re-appropriation of files with sound as a prominent element, Stratman will develop Vever ‘s soundscape based on a phone call as a voice over , and if in A Month of Single Frames Hammer’s voice already carried the hesitation of age advanced, here she is almost unrecognizable, hoarse, sighing. In the call, the director explains the reasons that led her to leave the project: she was never able to find a personal context or a political sense for those images, and the lack of money (at the time she lived in a “basement with no running water or bathroom, with only $100 in the account”) also did not contribute to my expending time and energy trying to find them.
Through the concatenation of Deren’s text — whose highlighted sentences reflect, among other things, on the difficulties encountered when the reality of the material does not correspond to what was initially idealized — and Hammer’s testimony, the film will also deal with a shared feeling for both: the frustration with the unpredictability that runs through certain stages of creation. In this sense, both Deborah Stratman’s and Lynne Sachs’ work offer an internal perspective on Hammer’s creative process, opening up to the universality of themes such as loneliness and dissatisfaction in art.
As for the images, we see Guatemalans looking directly at the camera as if posing for a family portrait, wrapped in warm colored fabrics and prints that simulate creatures and vegetation. Markets full of fruits and vegetables, exchanges and interactions mediated by baskets moving overhead and Pepsi vendors in white uniforms contrasting with the setting. All of this is brought together by the words of Maya Deren racing across the screen, by the sober track that her husband, Teiji Ito, composed for her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), and by cards with symbols invoking Voodoo entities (so-called “ vever” ), also made by Ito during the couple’s period of immersion in Haitian beliefs.
Although Vever is characterized by a type of cultural curiosity that disperses the camera between unknown faces and the profusion of symbols, references and apparently distant quotations, what stands out from the correlations worked in Deborah Stratman’s montage is a convening and, above all, celebratory movement of complementary female visions, which exemplify collaboration not only as a possibility of completing a work, but also as a possibility of meeting beyond physical existence. And who could say that it would be possible one day to see Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer sharing the same space in the end credits?
( To Barbara and with Barbara)
“Dying is an art like everything else / in that I am exceptional”, would say Sylvia Plath rather bitterly in “Lady Lazarus”. It is known that he probably referenced his numerous suicide attempts, but if the authority of a poetic license does exist, it is evoked here to allow the contemplation of another picture: on more than one occasion Barbara Hammer would say that reading artists’ biographies it would become for her a way of establishing connections and discovering for herself “how to be an artist”. Searching in the lives of those who admire points of intercession to understand their own lives as part of something greater was one of the many pieces of advice left by the director, and now, after her departure, we are left with the same gesture: the admiration and understanding that he lived and died exceptionally, he made the farewell a living work, which opens even today in a continuous movement of creation. At the end of his book, Hammer will state that he would like to have his work remembered even through his writings (“a movie needs to be projected, a book just needs to be opened”), and in a way it’s comforting to think that, contrary to what you imagined, your memory will last in as many ways as possible.
The programme extends through the 125-year history of the cinema, beginning in 1885 with the first film. Auguste and Louis Lumière had just invented the Cinématographe. Their first images show workers leaving the Lumière factory where photographic plates were manufactured. Many of them are women. The Industrial Revolution was also female.
A number of years later, two films were made that are part of the legendary Mitchell & Kenyon collection. Spinning and weaving workers – including many children – are leaving a factory in industrialised England. People haggle and shove each other at a fish market. These silent films are witnesses to the transition to modern society.
A classic strike(-ending) scenario can be seen in Resumption of Work at the Wonder Factory. In June 1968, people vote to return to work in the Wonder factories in Saint-Ouen, France. But one young female worker protests the compromise furiously, demonstrating the spontaneity of the workers’ revolt. Two union members try to convince her. At the factory gate, an authoritarian “boss” demands obedience.
In the early 1980s, at a time of radical political upheavals in India, the Yungatar film collective created emancipatory films, among them the improvised narrative short Is this just a Story? It tells of a young woman in the process of articulating her situation as she fights her way out of domestic violence, the burdens of being a housewife and mother, isolation and depression.
Then, in her performance video Semiotics of the Kitchen, Martha Rosler “replaces the domesticated ‘meaning’ of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration” – and with subversive humour.
The experimental film work of artists Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson once infiltrated a masculine domain. Lynne Sachs calls on them with her Super 8 and 16mm cameras, asking them to look back and to describe their current artistic work.
The programme ends with a “radicalised servant girl”. The ladies and gentlemen have gone on a journey, and Cunégonde’s family pays her a visit. Not a good thing all for the bourgeois household!
The silent films will be accompanied on the grand piano by Uwe Oberg
Sortie d’Usine
FR 1895 | Director: Louis Lumière | b/w | DCP of 35mm, restored version | 1 min | silent | Institut Lumière
Employees leaving Gilroy’s Jute Works, Dundee
GB 1901 | Director, Production: Mitchell & Kenyon | b/w | DCP of 35mm | 3 min | silent | British Film Institute
North Sea Fisheries, North Shields
GB 1901 | Director, Production: Mitchell & Kenyon | b/w | DCP of 35mm | 3 min | silent | British Film Institute
La Reprise du Travail aux Usines Wonder / Resumption of Work at the Wonder Factory
FR 1968 | Director: Etats Généraux du Cinéma | Camera: Pierre Bonneau | Sound: Liane Estiez | b/w | 16mm | 10 min | french OV with german SUB | Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V
Idhi Katha Matramena / Is this just a Story? IND 1983 | Director: Yugantar Film Collective | Camera: Navroze Contractor | Editor: Lawrence | Sound: Deepa Dhanraj | Cast: Lalita K., Poornachandra Rao, Rama Melkote | b/w | DCP | 26 min | telugu OV with english SUB | Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V
Semiotics of the Kitchen USA 1975 | Director: Martha Rosler | DCP | b/w | 6 min | amer. OV | Electronic Arts Intermix
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor USA 2018 | Director, Camera, Sound, Production: Lynne Sachs | Colour | DCP | 9 min | OV with english SUB | Kino Rebelde
Cunégonde reçoit sa famille FR 1912 | Cast: Little Chrysia | b/w | 6 min | DCP | silent | dutch INT + english SUB | EYE Film Institute Amsterdam
About the Festival
Remake. Frankfurt Women’s Film Days Presented by Kinothek Asta Nielsen e.V.
In November 2018, the Kinothek Asta Nielsen in Frankfurt am Main presented the inaugural edition of Remake. Frankfurt Women’s Film Days, that takes place biennially since 2019. The third edition will take place in 2021.
The Kinothek has promoted film work by women for nearly twenty years through film presentations, thematic programmes, exhibitions and retrospectives, facilitating the discussion of gender relations in film. The Remake festival integrates a new event format into our previous work: a programme with a thematic focus will unfold in a mixture of festival and symposium. “Remake” refers to the connection with history that characterises all the Kinothek’s work: films spanning more than a hundred years emerge anew in the perception of viewers when they are shown today. Films exist only in their screening, so that the presentation of films is itself a form of film-making, a re-make.
History constitutes a key aspect of the festival. Old films are not merely old; instead, if they are shown in a context where their significance can unfold, the past can be experienced through them as an element of the present day. Not least because of such connections, old films will be screened together with recent ones, and projected images will be accompanied by introductions, commentaries, talks, and discussions. Special attention will be paid to screening spaces and their creation – and to the extent possible, all films will play in their original format, whether it’s 35mm, 16mm, Super 8 with analogue sound, or digital. We feel particularly strongly about the musical accompaniment at silent film screenings.
The formal structure of Remake corresponds to the content, whereby various epochs and genres are woven together in the programme. Topics such as women and gender relations in film, or aspects of queer cinema, come to light through their interconnection with other social phenomena, as with women’s emancipation in the context of migration, colonialism, or racism. Each edition of the Frankfurt Women’s Film Days originates in contextual links and expands in a variety of programmes that correlate to one another to form an overall design, a kind of “archipelago.”
Remake will also always contain a programme section that is dedicated to a woman filmmaker whose work is threatened by oblivion and disappearance.
We want our programme to pay tribute not only to film history, but also to the history of feminist film festivals. The first of these, which took place in 1972 in New York and Edinburgh, were largely dedicated to the (re-) discovery of women filmmakers. Many of their works, which saw the light of projectors in the early 70s, have disappeared again, and copies can only be found with difficulty, if at all. Through revivals of past programmes and conversations with their organisers, we will remember this history, from which our work has also emerged. Each edition of Remake. Frankfurt Women’s Film Days will be dedicated to one of the earlier festivals.
An upswing for independently owned arthouses, festival one-offs, and screening series across the Southwest was in motion before the COVID-19 pandemic paused in-person gatherings. Now a grateful energy is flowing back into theaters—new online venues transcend the limits of geography while giving viewers a specific experience with local programmers.
What do careful gatherings look like for film scenes in such an eager phase of rebuilding? Serious facilitators in different cities are perhaps more connected than ever. How might filmmakers be emboldened by new modes of distribution?
We found red-letter signs of new life in five cities. Is there something happening where you live that we should know about? Let us know at editor@southwestcontemporary.com.
SANTA FE
Projects born online during pandemic lockdowns are manifesting in person. The No Name Cinema underground film screening series will roam around Santa Fe at to-be-announced locations and events beginning this fall. Artist Justin Clifford Rhody streamed eighteen programs on No Name’s Twitch channel from January to August of this year. A mini-retrospective of work by diaristic film poet Lynne Sachs and a screening of the home-video-lover’s dream Memorial Day 2000 channeled Rhody’s penchant for tender bricolage and castoff materials.
Rhody spent six years organizing a well-attended series called Vernacular Visions in Oakland, California, where he presented slideshows of found images on 35mm. He took the screenings to a level of ceremony. Setting up in a different location every time, Rhody produced soundtracks tailored to the programs and handed out physical copies to attendees.
No Name Cinema screenings will be free to attend.
“The issue of finances was and is always secondary to getting the job done [with Vernacular Visions],” Rhody says. “[The late Grit Lit novelist] Harry Crews said this great thing about sports, and I think it translates well to art as well, especially since the majority of art that’s appreciated in America doesn’t cut the criteria:
“‘I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bull- shit… if you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we’ll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can’t do it—you can’t bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.’”
Up next: Before the end of the year, No Name will host the world premiere of a structuralist short film shot on Super 8 by JC Gonzo titled The Virgin Viewed from Multiple Sides (2021) and the New Mexico premiere of Do You Think Jesus Liked Hard Boiled Eggs (2020) by Ben Kujawski. Both filmmakers are from Santa Fe.
Plan ahead: Part of the magic of No Name is surprise. That could include unannounced microshorts and last-minute directives. Follow @noname.cinema on Instagram for updates.
ALBUQUERQUE
Gifted selectors build whole worlds. Keif Henley’s offerings online via Guild Cinema made that clear. The Guild’s website design remained unrepentant in its loyalty to function over form when the theater Guild Cinema (3405 Central Avenue NE), closed its doors to the public and opened online like a friendly local video store gone by.
At guildcinema.com, one could encounter, for example, a portrait of a square dance caller for whom a community center in a Black neighborhood of Waterloo, Iowa, is named (Northend Stories [part two] by Jim Morrison, a videographer who lives in that city). There was also Un Film Dramatique, an inquiry into the philosophy of cinema made about and with twenty-two Paris middle schoolers as they learned how to use a camera.
“Likely one of the bottom lines, in part anyway, for a lot of arthouses like us is to expand the existing notions of what humanity is, looks like, et cetera,” Henley says.
Up next: The Guild is open at full capacity as of press time. The theater is scheduled to host the expanded cinema and live sound collage project Negativland! It’s Normal from Somethings to Come to Your Attention Tour featuring SUE-C November 13, 2021.
Plan ahead: Basement Films’s Experiments in Cinema comes to the Guild in April 2022. It’s a defiantly self-styled “micro-community” of international screenings and workshops for media activists with no awards hierarchy or festival posturing—a favorite of Henley’s each year, he says.
DALLAS
Arthouse spaces themselves are expanding despite all odds. The elegant Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, opened a second screening room upstairs in September. It seats 165 people. This addition to the landmark arthouse came just before a significant finale in the same film community: Dallas Video Fest held its last annual festival after thirty-four years as a serious entry for new filmmakers and a haven for experimental shorts.
Video Fest founder Bart Weiss, known for the way he lovingly introduces films and leads Q+As after screenings each year at the festival, says he’ll miss the occasion to linger in foyers afterward with artists, students, and all kinds of dynamic personalities attracted to Video Fest’s programming. “Unless you’re in school for film, you really don’t get a chance to just talk about movies,” Weiss says.
That spirit will continue in other projects under the festival’s name like Video Fest’s monthly Cinematic Conversations series. The virtual gathering has encouraged hour-long appreciations of lyrical films like RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which is that director’s first feature. Weiss invites a co-host to help choose a film and lead the discussion. Avantgarde choreographer and theater-maker Danielle Georgiou had a turn, as did filmmaker Sam Pollard.
Up next: Weiss’s Frame of Mind on KERA-TV will continue to offer an outlet for local shorts. Its twenty-ninth season extends through December and includes, among so much else: compassionate, regional storytelling from inside 2020’s uprisings, experimental theater made for TV, and a musical in black and white.
Plan ahead:Frame of Mind will go state-wide next year, airing on public TV stations across Texas.
OKLAHOMA CITY
Rodeo Cinema opened a new location in June on Film Row downtown. It lives inside the old Paramount Building, where the giants of Hollywood studios would screen films for theater owners to consider as part of a national exchange program circa 1907.
A few series have landed at Rodeo Cinema Film Row. Notably: the camp-friendly garage cinema stamp VHSANDCHILL, which has been around in some form since 2016 for ’80s sci-fi obsessives and lovers of B-movies. Femme Film will show movies by “femme directors or those who have lived experiences of misogyny” as per organizers, with local director Paris Burris as host.
DENVER
An heir to the parlor screenings Stan Brakhage would host on Sundays in his home state of Colorado, the Denver Underground Film Festival is beloved for paying filmmakers in a forty/sixty split (and not so much known for parties or spectacle adjacent to the fest). Every film in the entire program is a short.
Recent awardees include Tom Bessoir’s mathy 2020 with a score by Thurston Moore, who Bessoir photographed in the early 1980s with Sonic Youth. Part two of this year’s festival is November 19-21 at a venue to be announced. Check back in at DUFF’s FilmFreeway profile.
Caught in a framework. Inscribed by the parameters of our misgivings. Trapped in the mess that defines us.
You, a masked unarmed responder to other’s calamity, a listener to a tribute from a muted trumpet, relishing stories pulled through one ear out the other.
In spite of everything, nowhere to go, I celebrate your ability to turn routine into ritual, you put on orange pink pastel lipstick, run a comb through your hair, turn on Zoom, catch five o’ clock sun on your cheeks.
Savoring a dinner party that doesn’t happen. The taste for a camp song you once knew and still love. A pile of linen napkins thrown into the machine. Despite. Oh, for the time when a wrinkle mattered.
A chuckle A sigh. Just the same. The house at 3880.
I am there with you. And not. In the beginning, not so far from the end.
The mailbox at the end of the driveway wobbly, yet somehow firm, sole receiver left in a zone of closures.
21 years between your birth in ‘39 and mine in ’61, still thrilled by your attentions, countless appreciations, and your propensity, and willingness to listen to those things that launch my soul each morning. You are so pretty, I tell you.
Outside your window, a green lawn, mowed and below, the remains of a swimming pool, dirt filled, where I spent summers hosting watery tea parties, blowing bubbles, kissing the rim of a shared cup, watching you from below, refracted and wise, wondering how long I could hold breath.
Beside the cracked cement driveway, a fourteen-foot camellia climbing, pink smoke emanating from a chimney of flowers. Not knowing a camellia is conspicuously absent of scent, I draw in air.
Walking alone, one morning, you take note of a a ranch-style house with carport at the end of the block, on a cove, under two large oaks — you somehow sense a neighbor’s anguish, unarticulated, peeling-paint.
For 18 months, we’ve walked, around and around and back again. Phones in pockets. Cables in ears. We talk, wonder, move on together in our way.
In the car, voices of all the people who fill your head, their mysteries and narratives, your music.
I fear for you but not so much, anchored to ground, not underwater.
And there, too the man you love wanting nothing more than to feed you not so much what you need, but what you relish. Not just a meal, but daily dining.
Together, you face the contagion no one sees, like the wind, always present, felt.
A time to spend with things –
Inside a decrepit album you find a photo of Granny smoking a pipe, dressed as a man – you wisely giggle, utter of course.
And an article saved and snipped, concerning your grandmother’s father, my great-great an officer in the provisions wing of the US Confederacy, and a Jew. It couldn’t be, but there it is. Now we know. We know for sure. Heard it before, and didn’t.
A fragment of fact, teased out, discussed, denied — a story with weight sinks and then resurfaces in a telephone conversation from the hollow of quarantine into our fraught and daunting now. It couldn’t be grasped and there it is. So clear.
Despite it all, you – no longer the eternal optimist still drift toward light.
September 18, 2021
Day Residue
Bio
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs @LynneSachs1 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. She is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. In 2020 and 2021, she taught film and poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque, Flowchart Foundation, San Francisco Public Library, and Hunter.
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. Lynne lives in Brooklyn.
Recently, Lynne’s had the chance to read her poems at these venues:
Maysles Documentary Center – Film Video Poetry Symposium, New York City ; Penn Book Center, Philadelphia; Brooklyn Book Festival; Unnameable Books, Boog Festival, Brooklyn; Topos Books w/ films, Brooklyn; Burke’s Books, Memphis (1/20); Volume Writers’ Series, Hudson, NY Greenlight Books Celebration of Tender Buttons Press: San Francisco Public Library National Poetry Month (2021); McNally Jackson Books, NYC; KGB Bar; Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles; Flowchart Foundation, Hudson, New York.
Banner Art: from Day Residue by Lynne Sachs (c) 2021.
Layout and edits: Robert Frede Kenter. Twitter: @frede_kenter
