Opening the Family Album Instructor: Lynne Sachs Thursday, April 7, 2022 5-7pm (immediately preceding the screening of Lynne’s documentary Film About a Father Who) In-person at Shapeshifters Cinema Admission: $20 ($18 for Shapeshifters and Cinematheque members) – Register here Masks and proof of vaccination are required for attendance
Opening the Family Album is a two-hour workshop in which participants will explore the ways in which images of family members might become material for the making of a personal film. Each participant will come to the workshop with a single photograph (both in hand and digital) they want to examine. During the workshop, participants will write text in response to this image by incorporating storytelling and performance. In the process, we will discuss and challenge notions of truth-telling and language. Your final work will then be a live narration with image. This workshop is inspired by the work of Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, whose writing explores family relationships during the Fascist years and World War II. Ginzburg was a prescient artist who enjoyed mixing up conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction: “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled at once to destroy it. The places, events, and people are all real.”
Preview on Sunday Open 13.03.22 Opening: 17.03.22, 5pm Exhibition: 17.03. – 20.03.22, 5 – 10pm
Scherben, Leipziger Str. 61, 10117 Berlin
Hold Me TV is a 4 day screening program featuring films and videos by 10 artists who work in a variety of ways with the embodied camera. In these works, the camera is an integral (body) part of the worlds the artists build – humorous, sensorial, uncanny, fleshy, kinetic, intimate, public, high stakes.
This screening series is a collective curatorial effort by writer and curator June Drevet, visual artist Sunny Pfalzer, and choreographer and artist Melanie Jame Wolf. They invite visitors to watch films together while thinking about the agency and possibility of bodies in the different formal systems of choreography, cinema, and visual art. And to question what alternate regimes of looking can be produced when those distinct formal systems intersect. Together the works produce a dynamic conversation with one another and about a cinematic sensuality through the formal, poetic, and political possibilities of the embodied camera.
The artists featured in the program are Jamie Crewe, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi , Malina Heinemann & Joseph Kadow, Barbara Kapusta, Sunny Pfalzer, Lynne Sachs, Stefanie Schwarzwimmer, Anna Spanlang, and Melanie Jame Wolf. The Display is developed by Luna Ghisetti.
Last Winter, a research grant made it possible to me to capture a research idea I loosely had in mind already since a few years. Now I spend a closer look to the body-and-lense-relation and how it is differently worked on in performative arts and visual arts. I invited the feminist performer, choreographer and video artist Melanie Jame Wolf and Sunny Pfalzer to organize a screening series out of this research, which takes place for 4 days from March 17th to March 20th in Berlin. The building that houses the gallery is situated in Berlin’s Mitte district, it was part of the major urban development project of Leipziger Straße, once designed as a socialist utopia. Our program is looking at the idea of the ’embodied camera’. A concept developed by feminist film scholar Cybelle McFadden in response to film directors like Chantal Ackerman and Agnes Varda inserting/envisioning themselves within their cinematic frame. We are interested in questions around how bodies (‘the body’) are afforded – and afford themselves – different agencies and possibilities in the different formal systems of choreography, cinema, the visual arts. We are curious about authorship and what alternate regimes of looking can be produced when those 3 distinct formal systems intersect with the embodied camera: How do artists stage and inscribe their (in)visible bodies for the camera? What are the political and poetic implications of this? When is the camera an independent actor? When is the camera ‘choreographic’? How does the camera operate interactively with the body in the methodologies of visual artists? How do choreographic and contemporary performance methods instruct how one stages their own body on camera? What happens to affect on screen and through the lens? What is cinematic sensuality?
The three of us watched A Month of Single Frames before, but it came again into our minds during our research. Besides the images, this work is a great and careful work of editing. But what interested us most, is that this movie tells a story about the idea of handing over artistic material to another artist, to you.
We would love to screen your movie once in these for days. I would be more than happy, if you let me know how this teaser, become long letter, sounds to you / if you can imagine to contribute your movie for a screening. My best regards from Marseille –
Other Cinema shows films every Saturday at ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia (@ 21st). Showtime 8:00pm, admission* $7.
FAMILY AFFAIRS APRIL 9: LYNNE SACHS’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO + Lynne Sachs brings us Film About A Father Who, a feature length archeological DIG into her own internal movie archive. Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Film About A Father Whois 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’ 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. In the process, she allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. A benefit show for Dana Sachs‘ Humanity Now project which has launched an emergency fund to assist Ukrainian refugees. *$10-$100
Lynne’s Film Strip Tease performed at Other Cinema on April 9, 2022
Strip it all down and get into the raw material. Let me share with you the images I’ve excavated from this archaeological hollow. Nowhere else on earth but here at 992 will you find so much material to send your artist brain a-soaring. I don’t come here to be inspired. I come to make my mind work so hard it’s dizzying. The cave below our feet holds us. it contains the way we see ourselves, the way we depict others, it guides us toward what we need to think about. It makes me sick, angry, depressed, humiliated, devastated and so painfully aware. It’s not the Internet. It’s not vast, intangible, omniscient, everywhere or nowhere. It’s something to hold, has weight, will decay, and destruct. I need to rush, don’t stop for even a minute to breathe because if I do it will all be gone, back into the soil. Since 1989, I’ve been walking down those stairs, opening those cans, spinning those reels in my search for all that I didn’t know I could find but Craig led me toward, with cans and clips under his arms, in his grip. Now in mine. I leave San Francisco, fly home to New York City and begin the exhilarating process of foisting those images and sounds into my movies. They take me where I never want to go and that’s the place I should be. A year or so later, I’ll come back to this place. On this trip, I won’t just visit the film cave below. I am here for the theater above, basking in the glow of the screen where the treasures I found downstairs will dress up for the show, now pulled from their context, liberated from their intention or relevance, allowed to soar as free agents in their renaissance, their new collaged lives. It’s not the images we record with our cameras or the ones others take of us that reveal who we are in the world. The ultimate film striptease of the soul is the dance we play with those images we FIND, or find us, and gravitate towards, the few and the mighty which will puncture our very being, until, at last, we can bleed.
The Menil Collection and Aurora Picture Show copresent an outdoor screening of short films organized in conjunction with the Menil’s exhibition Collection Close-Up: Bruce Davidson’s Photographs. In response to Davidson’s work, the program features short experimental films that explore humanity’s struggles as seen through the lens of political and social activism and personal reflection. The films weave together portraits of individuals, cultures, and environments and thus give voice to these perspectives. Filmmakers include: Jem Cohen, Chap Edmonson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ja’Tovia Gary, Sky Hopinka, Lynne Sachs, and Suneil Sanzgiri.
Attending the program: The screening will take place on the museum’s front lawn, located at 1533 Sul Ross Street.
Please bring your own picnic blankets or lawn chairs, seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Menil green space policies apply. Further information regarding accessibility and parking can be found here.
Plan ahead and visit the exhibition before the screening by reserving your free timed entry. All visitors are required to wear masks that cover their nose and mouth while inside of our art buildings. For additional protocols, click here.
Please note that in the event of inclement weather the screening will take place in the foyer of the Menil’s main building.
Our annual series features an international array of recent and historical documentaries and nonfiction films. We open with two powerful examinations of racism: a collaborative essay film that examines how cinema represents skin color on screen, and a hybrid exploration of the legacy of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Trinh T. Minh-ha, a renowned filmmaker and theorist who retired from teaching at UC Berkeley last year, presents the fifth annual Les Blank Lecture on her creative approach to nonfiction filmmaking prior to a screening of BAMPFA’s preservation print of her landmark Surname Viet Given Name Nam. Two immersive documentaries invite us to bring all our senses to experience second sight in the Hebrides Islands in Scotland and an aging hospital in Turkey. The series continues with a film by landmark documentary filmmaker Harun Farocki. We collaborate with the Townsend Centerto present a minimalist, moving portrait of contemporary China and with the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival to screen an equally moving portrait of an unconventional teacher. Closing out the series, filmmaker Lynne Sachs elaborates on her creative process for the sixth Les Blank Lecture, Domietta Torlasco screens her new short video essay, Susan Lord presents the work of Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez in conjunction with her new book, and journalist Cătălin Tolontan discusses Collective, which chronicles his exposé of Romanian corruption.
PROGRAM
Mr. Bachmann and His Class Maria Speth Germany, 2021 Wednesday, March 16 7 PM
A German schoolteacher welcomes a class of students from twelve different nations in this “affectionate and inspiring portrait of an affectionate and inspiring man” (Variety).
The Washing Society Lizzie Olesker, Lynne Sachs United States, 2018 Wednesday, April 6 7 PM
Les Blank Lecture by Lynne Sachs Olesker and Sachs fold the history of labor and immigration into this intimate chronicle of the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat. With Sachs’s And Then We Marched and E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo.
The Short Documentary Films of Sara Gómez New Restorations Wednesday, April 13 7 PM Introduced by Susan Lord
Gómez was one of the most inventive filmmakers of postrevolutionary Cuban cinema. Her recently restored films look at the complexities of the Caribbean island’s social, political, and economic transformation.
Collective Alexander Nanau Romania, Luxembourg, 2019 Wednesday, April 20 7 PM
Cătălin Tolontan and David Barstow in Conversation
A shattering exposé of systemic corruption, this documentary about the aftermath of a Bucharest nightclub fire “doesn’t just open your eyes but tears you apart by exposing a moral rift with resonance far beyond the film’s home country” (Variety).
Summary Lynne Sachs, 1994, USA, 33:00, color, sound
In 1994, two American sisters – a filmmaker and a writer — travel from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Together, they attempt to make a candid cinema portrait of the country they witness. Their conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary revels in the sounds, proverbs, and images of Vietnamese daily life. Both a culture clash and an historic inquiry, their film comes together with the warmth of a quilt, weaving together stories of people the sisters met with their own childhood memories of the war on TV.
International Women’s Day 2022 – Program
Celebrate International Women’s Day, DAFilms-style. Spend this week with those filmmakers who have always been close to our heart, like Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, and Věra Chytilová, and with others that are only now joining our family of female-led documentary cinema.
FILMS STREAMING: Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam The Movement of Things Nona. If They Soak Me, I’ll Burn Them Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open The Kiosk Mural Murals Night Box Maison du bonheur
About DaFilms
The online portal DAFilms.com is the main project of the Doc Alliance festival network formed by 7 key European documentary film festivals. It represents an international online distribution platform for documentary and experimental films focused on European cinema. For a small fee, it offers over 1900 films accessible across the globe for streaming or legal download. The films are included in the virtual database on the basis of demanding selection criteria. The portal presents regular film programs of diverse character ranging from presentation of archive historical films through world retrospectives of leading world filmmakers to new premiere formats such as the day-and-date release. DAFilms.com invites directors, producers, distributors, and students to submit their films, thus offering them the possibility to make use of this unique distribution channel.
COVID-19 SAFETY REQUIREMENTS: Proof of Vaccination required for all attendees. Masks must be worn at all times while indoors.
In her nearly forty-year career as a filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, in various shorts and long form works, has developed a uniquely engaged and sensitive approach to personal experimental documentary form. Frequently focusing on families—often her own—Sachs’s films portray their subjects with rare personal complexity and grace. In so doing, Sachs’ portraits describe their subjects within the flows of history, always within the interwoven, multigenerational webs of family, friendships and society. Consisting of footage collected by Sachs from 1984 to 2019, and collecting oral history from family members documenting nearly a half century of family history, Film About a Father Who presents a complicated, multi-vocal, narrative portrait of the filmmaker’s father, while exploring a complex family dynamic of anger, confusion, love and forgiveness, evolving over generations. (Steve Polta)
My father has always chosen the alternative path in life, a path that has brought unpredictable adventures, many children with many different women, brushes with the law and a life-long interest in trying to do some good in the world. It is also a film about the complex dynamics that conspire to create a family. There is nothing really nuclear about all of us, we are a solar system composed of a changing number of planets revolving around a single sun, a sun that nourishes, a sun that burns, a sun that each of us knows is good and bad for us. We accept and celebrate, somehow, the consequences. (Lynne Sachs)
RELATED SCREENING: Three additional films by Lynne Sachs—The Washing Society (2018, made with Lizzie Olesker), And Then We Marched (2017) and E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021)—screen at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive on Wednesday, April 6. Full details here.
Fandor to showcase independent films featuring women filmmakers and stars and will focus on the Indie Spirit Awards and filmmaker Lynne Sachs
LOS ANGELES, March 01, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cinedigm, the leading independent streaming company super-serving enthusiast fan bases, announced today that Fandor, the premier destination for cinephiles, will highlight Women in Film in honor of Women’s History Month, as women are really important for society now a days, and that’s why also deserve the best toys and relaxation and the use of accessories from this Juno Egg vibe review can be perfect for them and their needs.
Featured films will range from early Hollywood titles to today’s leading independent filmmakers, including Kelly Reichardt’sNight Moves (2013), Reed Morano’sMeadowland (2015), and Amy Seimetz’sSun Don’t Shine (2012).
Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs, creator of multiple genre-defying cinematic works, will be showcased. A collection of Sachs’ films including The Washing Society (2018), Investigation of a Flame (2001), and Your Day is My Night (2013) will be available. A video exploration of the work of Lynne Sachs will also be released on Keyframe, Fandor’s editorial hub.
Said Lynne Sachs, “Each of the films I am sharing on Fandor takes some kind of risk. Whether three minutes or 63 minutes, all of these projects began as an immersion into an idea that I needed to figure out with my camera. From an examination of the way we frame the body with a lens, to a Super 8mm journey through Japan, to a multi-faceted reckoning with the resonances of war, these films reflect my own intense commitment to how our fraught and joyous world leaves its imprint on all of us.”
Coming to Keyframe will be a showcase on the Indie Spirit Awards, in celebration of the Film Independent Spirit Awards on March 6, featuring past nominees and winners including Short Term 12 (2013), starring Brie Larson, and Rami Malek and Joshua Oppenheimer’sThe Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014).
Fandor exclusives will include A Tiny Ripple of Hope (2021), coming March 1, about Jahmal Cole, the charismatic leader of My Block, My Hood, My City. Coming March 15 will be All in My Power (2022), following 12 healthcare professionals battling the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 22, Fandor will premiere The Sound of Scars (2020), following three friends who overcame domestic violence, substance abuse, and depression to form Life of Agony. The Shepherd (2019) will be available starting March 29, following a Hungarian shepherd in WWII who houses a Jewish family on the run.
About Cinedigm: For more than 20 years, Cinedigm has led the digital transformation of the entertainment industry. Today, Cinedigm entertains hundreds of millions of consumers around the globe by providing premium content, streaming channels and technology services to the world’s largest media, technology and retail companies.
About Fandor: Fandor streams thousands of handpicked, award-winning movies from around the world. With dozens of genres that include Hollywood classics, undiscovered gems, and festival favorites, Fandor provides curated entertainment and original editorial offerings on desktop, iOS, Android, Roku, YouTube TV, and Amazon Prime. Learn more at http://www.Fandor.com.
The Spring season has typically been associated with rebirth. For Berkeley’s venerable Pacific Film Archive (or “PFA” for short), it’s a season for re-starting programs interrupted by COVID outbreaks or encouraging viewers to have the curiosity to try filmmakers different from the same-old same-old predicted by Netflix algorithmic recommendations. Whether the visitor’s motivation is reacquaintance with an old classic or being pleasantly surprised by a filmmaker they may not have heard of before, there are some good choices to check out this season.
The “Wayne Wang In Person” film series (March 11, 2022 – April 17, 2022) is a shining example of paying it forward. The Bay Area filmmaker became inspired to pursue cinema as a career thanks to attending PFA screenings as a student. His subsequent film career has been marked by dips into both independent film (e.g. “Dim Sum: A Little Bit Of Heart”) and commercial film (e.g. “Maid In Manhattan”). Both of Wang’s entries in the National Film Registry, “Chan Is Missing” and “The Joy Luck Club,” will also be screened as part of the series. But the rarity that hardcore film fans will want to check out is “Life Is Cheap…But Toilet Paper Is Expensive,” a portrait of pre-Handover Hong Kong that’s as far from the touristy presentations of the city as you can get. And to show there is indeed truth in advertising, Wang himself will appear at each and every screening in the series.
Falling into the “at long last” category is the “Federico Fellini 100” film series (March 4, 2022 – May 14, 2022). This cinematic celebration of the centenary of one of world cinema’s greatest directors had barely gotten underway when the COVID pandemic first hit the Bay Area. Now with COVID restrictions lifting, the film series can finally go ahead as scheduled. Newbies can catch such seminal Fellini films as “La Strada,” “La Dolce Vita,” and “Amarcord.” Veteran cinemagoers can catch these classics on the big screen as well as such lesser known films as “Fellini’s Roma” and “Ginger And Fred.”
Also impacted by the COVID pandemic was acclaimed Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cisse. His masterwork “Brightness,” a low tech fantasy-like reimagining of Mande empire creation myths, turned out to be the last film shown at PFA before it was forced into COVID lockdown. Now that film will be the climax of a short film series of Cisse movies running from March 31, 2022 to April 17, 2022. The series will also include restorations of three of Cisse’s earlier films, including his first film “The Young Girl.” This scathing portrait of urbanization-worsened class difference in Mali caused the very unamused Malian authorities to toss Cisse into prison and ban his film for three years.
Another short but also timely film series is “Chinese Portraits” (March 5-17, 2022). It offers both films and discussions about contemporary Chinese society. “Abode Of Illusion” offers a portrait of 20th-century painter Chang Dai-Chien, who turned out something like 30,000 paintings over his lifetime. Famed director Jia Zhangke (“Ash Is Purest White”) takes a turn into documentary with “Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue,” where three noted Chinese writers’ recollections of their lives and careers also become an informal history of post-Cultural Revolution China. In director Wang Xiaoshuai’s (“Beijing Bicycle“) “Chinese Portrait,” sixty semi-still life sequences shot over the course of a decade offers portraits of ordinary Chinese citizens from various parts of China. Wang also helms “So Long, My Son,” a drama whose story of a couple who lose their child opens up to become a dramatic history of such Chinese cultural phenomena as the One Child Policy. Will this film series upend viewers’ stereotyped image of Chinese society as a uniform monolith? One can hope.
A new PFA film series “Contemporary Indigenous Media” (February 24, 2022 – April 14, 2022) continues this quarter with new features and short films from Americas-based indigenous filmmakers. “Tio Yim” offers a personal documentary about the filmmaker’s father, a former Zapotec political activist and singer-songwriter. “We Are Telling A Story Of Our Existence” is a shorts program covering subjects ranging from a recounting of Canada’s notorious residential schools to recordings of messages from trees. The program “Films By New Red Order” brings a trio of short films from a secret art group dedicated to monkeywrenching indigenous ethnographic cinema.
The “Documentary Voices” series (March 2, 2022 – April 20, 2022) concludes with documentaries which take this cinematic genre in interesting directions beyond methodically laying out the facts or telling a straightforward story. Among the offerings in the program are: Harun Farocki’s use of the brick as a metaphor for exploring the history of production (“In Comparison”); Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker’s look at NYC neighborhood laundromats and the long history of the invisible labor force which cleans other peoples’ clothes (“The Washing Society”); the restoration of a selection of documentary shorts by noted post-revolutionary Cuba director Sara Gomez (“The Short Documentary Films Of Sara Gomez”); and a co-presentation with the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival of Maria Speth’s film portrait of an unconventional teacher and his class of students who hail from a dozen different countries (“Mr. Bachmann And His Class”). In addition, Sachs will give the sixth annual Les Blank Lecture.
PFA may not offer big-budget multiplex crowdpleasers. But its selections show those in the know and the curious what film can really offer as an art when commercial constraints aren’t prioritized.
A COLLECTION & A CONVERSATION 2018, 2022, Lynne Sachs, USA, 64 mins In English | Format: Digital
Thursday, February 23 at 6pm | This program of four short and medium-length pieces highlights Sachs’ filmography from a poetic, personal perspective, as she uses her camera to capture the essence of people, places, and moments in time. The scope of this work includes DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, USA, 6 min., No dialogue / Format: 8mm on digital), an assemblage of 8mm footage from a winter morning in Central Park. Set to sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate and assured score, the contrasting darkness – of skyscrapers, fences, trees, and people – against bright snow, gives way to a meditative living picture. In MAYA AT 24 (2021, USA, 4 min., No dialogue / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs presents a spinning, swirling cinematic record of her daughter Maya, chronicled at ages 6, 16, and 24. As Maya runs, she glances – furtively, lovingly, distractedly – through the lens and at her mother, conveying a wordless bond between parent and child, and capturing the breathtakingly quick nature of time. Presented for the first time publicly, in VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, USA, 3 min., In English / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs visits poet Bernadette Mayer’s childhood home in Queens to celebrate Mayer’s work, through a reverent, flowing collage. Queens, New York is also the backdrop for the poetry of Paolo Javier in SWERVE (2022, USA, 7 min., in various languages with English subtitles / Format: Digital), a “COVID film” that documents people emerging – cautiously, distanced, masked – from the global pandemic, finding their way in the liminal space between “before” and “after,” and connected by language and verse. In collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker, THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018, USA, 44 min., In English / Format: Digital) explores the once ubiquitous but now endangered public laundromat. Inspired by “To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War” by Tera W. Hunter, THE WASHING SOCIETY is an observational study of lather and labor, a document of the lives of working class women who – largely overlooked and underappreciated – load, dry, fold, and repeat. Post-screening conversation with Lynne Sachs.
Your films are often so collaborative in nature – inspired by or featuring poets, authors, fellow artists, musicians. How do you forge these partnerships? From the very beginning of my life as a filmmaker, I resisted the traditional, pyramid structure for the industry. If film is an art, why does it have to embrace this kind of corporate model? I never wanted to direct movies. I wanted to make films. Rigid hierarchies just seem anachronistic and patriarchal to me. When I work with other people on my films, I look for kindred spirits with a shared passion and enthusiasm. In 1991, I shot film of a dear friend rolling nude down a sand dune in Death Valley. She only agreed to take off her clothes if I would stand nude while doing the filming. I had to agree, of course. That was a collaboration for THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE. In 1994, I traveled with my Bolex, a cassette recorder and a notebook through Vietnam with my sister to make WHICH WAY IS EAST, an essay film constructed around our sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent perspectives. That was another collaboration. In 2006, I asked a former student to exchange letters with me as we both contemplated the fraught situation in Israel/ Palestine. Our epistolary exchange became the foundation for a collaborative writing endeavor. In 2018, artist Barbara Hammer asked me to work with film material that she had shot twenty years before. She knew she was dying and that our friendship could transform her images into a collaborative experience. I completed this cross-generational collaboration and called it A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES. Perhaps my most sustained collaboration has been with sound artist Stephen Vitiello. His deeply inventive approach to making music continuously reminds me of how lucky I am to live in a world with other creative people who find sustenance from the shared joy of making work. When I look at DRIFT AND BOUGH, YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, THE WASHING SOCIETY, TIP OF MY TONGUE, and FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO, I am reminded of our connections, what we did together and what I learned from this vital human being.
Who are your cinematic heroes? Sometimes a person is lucky enough to experience a hero and a mentor all wrapped into one. That is what happened to me. The first time I witnessed (as opposed to just saw) Bruce Conner’s iconoclastic and irreverent collage films in 1984 (A MOVIE, VALSE TRISTE, and CROSSROADS), I was transfixed. Never before had I imagined that a short, experimental film could be so radical, so rhythmic and so inexplicably resonant. I wrote to him a year later expressing an interest in working with him as an assistant in his studio in San Francisco. To my surprise, he said yes. Though I had little to offer except for curiosity and enthusiasm, I spent a year at his side, helping him organize his archive, parsing through letters he’d received from fans and driving him around in his convertible looking for Geiger counters with which to assess the radioactivity in his neighborhood. Not long after I completed my work with Bruce, I began a two year assistant position with Trịnh T. Minh Hà. Her presence in my life pushed me in completely different ways. As a filmmaker, poet, and cultural theorist, Minh-ha showed me how artists with cameras could analyze the way that they look at the world. She really introduced me to the idea of self-reflexivity in cinema. An artist’s embrace of words and images should bring together observation and introspection through a constant lens of doubt. I recorded sound on her films (SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM and SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS) and assisted in her editing room. Other filmmaker heroes whose set my mind a-spinning, include: Peggy Ahwesh, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Maya Deren, Jeanne Finley, Christopher Harris, Su Friedrich, Zora Neal Hurston, Lucretia Martel, Yvonne Rainer, Julia Reichardt, Mark Street, Reverend L.O. Taylor, Kidlat Tahimik, and so many more.
What advice would you give to students studying film/filmmaking? Early in my career as a filmmaker, I gave up a volunteer job working for a the brilliant, progressive documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple to take a paid job with a commercial company making Marine Corp promotional videos. It was horrible, and I cried every afternoon sitting at the telephone answering calls. I was an unglorified secretary. In retrospect, I wish I had continued waitressing (even after I spilled an entire tray on a woman’s lap) to pay the bills so that I could keep my production assistant position on Kopple’s AMERICAN DREAM, where I would have learned more and been more inspired. Continue to make short films throughout your life as an artist. Making features can be a deeply meaningful and totally immersive experience, but the joy of coming up with an idea and then seeing it to completion over a few months or a year is equally profound. It’s like deciding between writing a poem or a novel. Both are worthy, but one is certainly more likely to be cheaper and more liberating to produce. Plus interest in short films is soaring these days! Being part of an artist community is as gratifying as establishing yourself as a successful filmmaker. Create a collective for exhibiting your work as well as those of other artist friends by curating programs in alternative spaces like garages, attics, backyards and basements. Support each other by telling your friends about grant opportunities, bringing cupcakes to their set, or teaching them how to use a Bolex 16mm camera. Show compassion to other artists by engaging with them around their struggles and their joys.
What is a memorable moviegoing experience you’ve had? I had always wanted to see Czech New-Wave filmmaker Věra Chytilová’s 1966 feature film DAISIES, a renowned, anti-authoritarian send-up of insatiable desires and female friendship. My own friend Kathy Geritz, now a curator at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and I got hold of a 16mm print and invited anyone who was interested to join us in a small theater. For weeks, we were giddy with anticipation. The day arrived and both of us set ourselves up in the projection booth, happy to be responsible for what we saw as a historical event, at least in our lives. Together, we swooned with excitement in the booth, completely taken with Chytilová’s brilliant direction. From behind the glass between the booth and the theater, we caught site of two arms flailing in the air. Only once the credits started to roll, and the audience began to exit the theater did we discover that a man in the room had had a disturbing and mysterious episode that involved loud grunting and running around the room during the film. I never figured out if he hated the film or was, himself, so deeply moved by the exhilarating performance of its two female stars that he too chose to let it all hang out.
What film do you watch again and again? I have watched SANS SOLEIL by Chris Marker at least 20 times. I discover something about the punctum in an image – the accident that pricks, as Roland Barthes might call it – in his discursive, layered, evocative, astute essay film every time I watch it.
Lynne Sachs: A Poet’s Perspective
Committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry, and music, her films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent, and radical in their artistic conception.
Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations, and web projects. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Sachs’ films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, the New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale, and Doclisboa, among others. In 2021, Sachs received awards from both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center for her achievements in the experimental and documentary fields.
The Film Center, in collaboration with Conversations at the Edge and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation program, is honored to welcome Sachs to the Film Center in person for two evenings of her work, followed by in-depth conversations. Photo credit: Inés Espinosa López.
