Kristine Leschper, leader of the one-time Band To Watch Mothers, is striking out under her own name. Today, she’s releasing a solo single, “Figure And I,” a beguiling and smooth introduction to Leschper’s new venture. “For the first time, I used my hands to clap out a rhythm that spoke to me,” Leschper said in a statement, continuing:
I don’t have much experience with percussion, so I was thrilled by the ease and accessibility of using hands as an instrument. It’s such a long-standing and fundamental way of making sound in folk traditions around the world, and to use it makes me feel rooted in a deeper sense of time. As a poet, too, I hold an enthusiasm for the symbolism of hands, as a symbol of work, of community or offering, of holding and being held.
Watch a video for the song directed by Lynne Sachs below.
Singer/songwriter Kristine Leschper led Mothers for eight years (their most recent LP was 2018’s Render Another Ugly Method), but she’s now retired the moniker and shared her first single under her own name, “Figure And I,” via ANTI-. “For the first time, I used my hands to clap out a rhythm that spoke to me,” she says. “I don’t have much experience with percussion, so I was thrilled by the ease and accessibility of using hands as an instrument. It’s such a long-standing and fundamental way of making sound in folk traditions around the world, and to use it makes me feel rooted in a deeper sense of time. As a poet, too, I hold an enthusiasm for the symbolism of hands, as a symbol of work, of community or offering, or holding and being held.”
Lynne Sachs directed the accompanying video, which you can watch below. “Kristine Leschper wrote to me with a very intriguing proposition: create a short film in response to her song ‘Figure and I,'” Lynne says. “I knew that this deeply rhythmic two-minute song needed some kind of somatic imagery. I needed to move with my body and my camera as I was shooting it. A few days later, I went to ‘The New Woman Behind the Camera’ exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In this show, I saw two photos by two women photographers from the 1920s whose work I had never seen before. These images guided me to a way of interpreting the physicality and the intimacy of Kristine’s song. Soon afterward, I invited my friend Kim Wilberforce to be in my film and to interpret the song herself, through her vibrant wardrobe and her precise, ecstatic clapping gestures.”
Kristine Leschper shares a video for her new single “Figure And I.” Having retired the moniker Mothers after eight years of performing and releasing music under it, “Figure And I” marks Leschper’s first release under her given name, and first for ANTI- Records.
Though both Mothers and her solo work are guided by Leschper’s idiosyncratic approach to songwriting, they couldn’t sound more different. While Mothers drew inspiration from the stark, skeletal sounds of post-punk and contemporary folk, Leschper’s new work is practically baroque, integrating an array of synthesizers, strings, woodwinds, and over a dozen percussive instruments.
“For the first time, I used my hands to clap out a rhythm that spoke to me. I don’t have much experience with percussion, so I was thrilled by the ease and accessibility of using hands as an instrument,” Leschper said in a statement. “It’s such a long-standing and fundamental way of making sound in folk traditions around the world, and to use it makes me feel rooted in a deeper sense of time. As a poet, too, I hold an enthusiasm for the symbolism of hands, as a symbol of work, of community or offering, or holding and being held.”
Singer-songwriter Kristine Leschper wrote to me with a very intriguing proposition: create a short film in response to her song “Figure and I”. I knew that this deeply rhythmic two-minute song called for some kind of somatic imagery. I needed to move with my body and my camera as I was shooting it. A few days later, I went to “The New Woman Behind the Camera” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In this show, I saw two photos by two women photographers from the 1920s whose work I had never seen before. These images guided me to a way of interpreting the physicality and the intimacy of Kristine’s song. Soon afterward, I invited my friend Kim Wilberforce to be in my film and to interpret the song herself, through her vibrant wardrobe and her precise, ecstatic clapping gestures.
Singer/songwriter Kristine Leschper led Mothers for eight years (their most recent LP was 2018’s Render Another Ugly Method), but she’s now retired the moniker and shared her first single under her own name, “Figure And I,” via ANTI-. “For the first time, I used my hands to clap out a rhythm that spoke to me,” she says. “I don’t have much experience with percussion, so I was thrilled by the ease and accessibility of using hands as an instrument. It’s such a long-standing and fundamental way of making sound in folk traditions around the world, and to use it makes me feel rooted in a deeper sense of time. As a poet, too, I hold an enthusiasm for the symbolism of hands, as a symbol of work, of community or offering, or holding and being held.”
Screenings: National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Camera Lucida (Ecuador).
SYNOPSIS In E-pis-to-lar-y: letter to Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs reflects on the delicate resonances between the 1933 classic Zero for Conduct in which a group of schoolchildren wage an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers.
Thinking about the insurrection of January 6, 2021 in the United States Capitol by right-wing protesters, Lynne Sachs wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can so quickly turn into chaos and violence?
DIRECTOR’S NOTE Every film I make is a reflection of ideas that infiltrate my mind, intertwined with my daily reality. I’m fascinated with the urge to disobey, with anarchic desires, and continually wondering how best to confront authority. It is in this deep ambivalence that I decide to make E-pis-to-lar-y: letter to Jean Vigo, a correspondence through cinema with Vigo, director of the exquisite Zero for Conduct, in a nod to irreverent and bad children behaviors. Making this movie gave me the opportunity to fight the horrors of January 6, 2021.
BIO Lynne Sachs (United States, Memphis, 1961) Filmmaker and poet living in NY. His work explores an intricate relationship between his personal observations and the extensive historical experience plotting together text, collage, painting, politics. Strongly engaged in a feminist dialogue between film theory and practice, she seeks a rigorous play between image and sound, reinforcing the aura and visual texture of her work in each project.
MANIFEST # 17FESTIFREAK
The world of the future bears little resemblance to our dystopian nightmares. There are fewer helpful automata than submissive humans. And it seems that hyperconnection dwarfed the world instead of enlarging it. The contact became a link.
The inner adventure of a year ago became normal. And doing the things that we liked was reduced to a memory. It took us a long time to get back to the theaters, but we did. This year, FestiFreak returns to common spaces, to the joint habitability of the place that always sheltered us and where the best fantasies are possible.
Although with the necessary public restrictions in the framework of the pandemic, FestiFreak will have functions at the INCAA Cine Select and Cine EcoSelect Spaces in La Plata, and also at the En Eso Somos Cultural Center. There we will find ourselves reversing the inertia of isolation and apathy that the virus brought. Taking care of the disease and enjoying the company of others, the unpredictable coexistence with other people, other looks and other worlds.
And we will continue in virtuality. The hybridization that began last year showed us that there is a wide audience out there that values the curatorship of the festival and the search for new ways of making films. That he is greedy and curious, like those of us who do FestiFreak, for films that leave the convention, that they exceed and that they experiment. They are more than we thought and they are far away. For them, and for those who cannot enter the room due to sanitary limits, our online programming will be available.
We will also expand into Europe again. This time with a special program co-produced with Filmhuis Cavia (Amsterdam) in direct connection with Argentina.
# 17FestiFreak will be held between October 1 and 17, 2021. It will have its national competitions, its international exhibition, its training space dedicated to audiovisual preservation, its expanded version and new ways of intervening and interacting with the cinematographic image in different formats. Whether in a room, virtually, with a projector or a magnetic tape as mediators, we were always on the screens. That was our place. As in a loop that has never stopped,
RECALL [REWIND] deals with the temporary absences of what has been and with practices of rendering invisible in the face of dominant image politics.
Video recordings of the demolition of the Eastman Kodak company complex in W O W (Kodak), played backwards several times in a row, reimagine the reconstruction of the former workplace. By means of a reenactment of excerpts from a French film with a colonial look, the autobiographical video Nou voix causes the unheard voices of French Guiana to be highlighted. The continuous experience of racism is the subject of This makes me want to predict the past, portraits of young people in the Olympia shopping center in Munich, where nine young people were murdered in a racist attack in 2016, accompanied by YouTube comments on Childish Gambino’s song “Redbone” . Dream-like sequences of Berber women roaming through rural landscapes oscillate in Chergui between memory and forgetting, between the presence and absence of the texture-rich space-time structure, assembled from archive material from the Tangiers Cinematheque. Impressions from everyday family life can only be perceived as ephemeral memory fragments in the gradually decomposed film material of film in the process of decay, which must be rearranged. What Time is Made of, on the other hand, takes up childhood memories which, as a message in a bottle in the form of a sealed film can, in which the traces of the sea have been drawn, have fictitiously survived for 30 years. Lynne Sachs approaches the filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who died shortly after the completion of the film, in A Month of Single Frames, a cinematic work in which the exploration of loneliness and the feeling for nuances go deep as a physical experience of cinema. Pointing out blind spots and stories in their current relevance in the current space of experience prompts a reassessment of the present and brings up strategies of talking back.
GERMAN : RECALL [REWIND] beschäftigt sich mit den temporären Abwesenheiten von Gewesenem und mit Praktiken des Unsichtbarmachens angesichts dominanter Bildpolitiken.
Mehrmals hintereinander rückwärts abgespielte Videoaufnahmen der Sprengung des Eastman Kodak Firmenkomplexes in W O W (Kodak) lässt den Wiederaufbau der einstigen Arbeitsstätte reimaginieren. Mittels Reenactment von Auszügen eines französischen Films mit kolonial geprägtem Blick veranlasst das autobiografische Video Nou voix das Hervorheben ungehörter Stimmen Französisch-Guyanas. Die kontinuierliche Erfahrung von Rassismus ist Thema in This makes me want to predict the past, von YouTube-Kommentaren zu Childish Gambinos Song »Redbone« begleitetes Porträts von Jugendlichen im Olympia-Einkaufszentrum in München, wo 2016 neun junge Menschen bei einem rassistischen Anschlag ermordet wurden. Traumartige Sequenzen von durch rurale Landschaften streifenden Berberfrauen oszillieren in Chergui zwischen Erinnerung und Vergessen, zwischen An- und Abwesenheiten des texturenreichen Raum-Zeit-Gefüges, montiert aus Archivmaterial der Kinemathek Tangiers. Eindrücke aus einem Familienalltag sind im sukzessive zersetzten Filmmaterial von Film im Zerfall nur mehr als ephemere Erinnerungsfragmente wahrnehmbar, die es neu anzuordnen gilt. What Time is Made of wiederum greift eigene Kindheitserinnerungen auf, die als Flaschenpost in Form einer versiegelten Filmdose, in welcher sich die Spuren des Meeres abgezeichnet haben, fiktiv 30 Jahre überdauert haben. Lynne Sachs nähert sich der kurz nach Fertigstellung des Films verstorbenen Filmemacherin Barbara Hammer in A Month of Single Frames an, eine filmische Arbeit, in der die Erkundung der Einsamkeit, das Gespür für Zwischentöne als körperliche Erfahrung von Kino tiefgeht. Das Aufzeigen blinder Flecken und Geschichte/n in ihrer aktuellen Relevanz im derzeitigen Erfahrungsraum veranlasst eine Neubewertung der Gegenwart und bringt Strategien des Talking Backs zur Sprache.
W O W (Kodak) Viktoria Schmid, 2018, 2 min A countdown, onlookers, then the view of thick dust clouds. An apocalyptic scene of destruction that reverses: the dust flows back into the center of the image, bits of debris put themselves together, a building erects itself. Five YouTube clips played backwards, five different perspectives – Viktoria Schmid’s commentary on film culture: analogue film is dead—long live analogue film! (Diagonale)
Nou voix Maxime Jean-Baptiste, 2018, 14:26 min Nou voix is an autobiographical video departing from the participation of the director’s father, as a Guyanese figurant in the movie Jean Galmot aventurier (1990), which deals with the history of French Guiana. By re-enacting a part of the film, Maxime and his father try to amplify other kinds of voices that have been unheard in the original French film.
This makes me want to predict the past Cana Bilir-Meier, 2020, 16:05 min This makes me want to predict the past accompanies two young women on their way through urban spaces of transit. In direct interaction with the camera, they reveal desires and fears, while the voice-over rattles handed-down structures. Munich 1982, 2016, and 2019: connecting the generations is one constant factor, the experience of racism. (Diagonale)
Chergui Chahine Fellahi, 2019, 4:59 min Chergui is a piece created using material from the Cinematheque of Tangiers’ archives. Through oneiric scenes of Berber women walking in the countryside, Chergui reflects on the ungraspable nature of memory as the images form and unform, following the oscillating rhythm between remembering and forgetting. In Chergui, the figures’ contours dissolve into the pixelated landscape. The moving bodies are recast within an incommensurable space-time dimension; they are there and not there, suspended between presence and absence.
Film im Zerfall Anonym, ca. 1965, 4 min (Exzerpt) Impressions of everyday family life, captured moments of the liveliness of the market, of vacation moods with a view of meadows and mountains, children splashing, playing and running. A family album as moving image sequences, which occasionally evoke memories, but which are successively decomposed. The material invites us to reconstruct these memory fragments and to imagine our own stories. The result is a narrative, adding a further layer on the moving image in decay. The film material – emulsion decomposed by mold – becomes visible in its longevity as an ephemeral element. From the collection of the Austrian Film Museum.
What Time is Made of Diana Vidrascu, 2019, 10 min What if you found a message in a bottle in the form of a sealed film can, which your younger self had sent 30 years ago? After processing this16mm film reel, I discovered that the sea had left its mark on the images and the film bears the memory of all the things it witnessed in its journey to land. However, these proved to be my own childhood memories. (Diana Vidrascu)
A Month of Single Frames Lynne Sachs (Made with and for Barbara Hammer), 2019, 14:08 min Filmmaker Lynne Sachs was invited by her longtime peer and friend, Barbara Hammer, to explore Hammer’s experience with solitude using the materials she created during a remote residency in 1998 in a shack without running water or electricity. Diagnosed with cancer, Hammer began her own process of dying in 2018. Sachs’ use of overlaid text confronts the relationship between body and screen, collapsing the walls between space and time.
Two female laundry workers are wearing floral aprons and standing against a wooden wall. From Lynne Sachs’ ‘The Washing Society.’ Courtesy of The Criterion Channel.
Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.
At IDA, we deeply mourn the passing of Melvin Van Peebles, the “the godfather of modern Black cinema.” Van Peebles was an actor, poet, artist, filmmaker and playwright, among other things. Celebrate his humbling legacy with filmmaker Joe Angio’s How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)on Amazon Prime.
In Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, filmmaker Jia Zhangke speaks to three authors who, like Jia, all hail from China’s Shanxi province. Through their conversations and writings, the filmmaker reconstructs a portrait of his homeland from the prism of the 1950s social revolution and the unrest it brought along. Starting September 30, you can watch the film on Mubi.
Also playing on Mubi is Hannah Jayanti’s delightful science fiction documentary, Truth or Consequences. Taking off a fictional premise, the documentary takes place around the world’s first commercial Spaceport in New Mexico. Through its gaze set on a near future, the film unravels our histories and weaves them all with empathy and adventure.
Afro-Cuban musician brothers Ilmar and Aldo López-Gavilán grew up learning the violin and the piano—separated from one another; one in Russia and the other in Cuba. Los Hermanos, directed by Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider, follows the brothers as they collaborate (for the first time) and perform all across the US. The film is available to view on PBS starting October 1.
When filmmaker Sian-Pierre Regis’ mother, Rebecca, is let go from her job, Regis decides to take her on trips across the world. As the son helps take items off his mother’s bucket list, he reveals the dark underscoring of American society by ageism, the care crisis, and economic insecurity. Duty Free is a documentary that emerges out of the mother-son travels as Rebecca reclaims her life and dreams. Watch the film on Vimeo.
Familial relationships also form the core of many of Lynne Sachs’ experimental nonfiction works. Starting October 1, you can watch seven of her experimental shorts on Criterion Channel: Which Way Is East (1994), The Last Happy Day (2009), Wind in Our Hair (2010), The Washing Society (2018), Girl Is Presence (2020), E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021), and Maya at 24 (2021).
Each month, the programmers at the Criterion Channel produce incredible line-ups for their subscribers. For October, the Channel will feature films from Wayne Wang, Arthur Dong, Doris Wishman, and more!
Below you’ll find the programming schedule for the month, along with a complete list of titles that Criterion has in store for us. Don’t forget to check the Criterion Channel’s main page regularly though, as they occasionally will drop surprises that aren’t included in the official press release.
EXCLUSIVE STREAMING PREMIERES
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO
Featuring seven short films and a new introduction by the filmmaker
Over a period of thirty-five years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16 mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Like a cubist rendering of a face, Sachs’s cinematic exploration of her father offers multiple, sometimes contradictory, views of a seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately shrouded in mystery. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
This exclusive streaming premiere is accompanied by a selection of experimental short films by Sachs, many of which also reflect her probing exploration of family relationships
The U.S. lineup at MUBI next month has been unveiled, featuring films by Claude Chabrol, Paulo Rocha, Ulrich Köhler, and more. Notable new releases include Pedro Costa’s striking Locarno winner Vitalina Varela as well as the Julia Fox-led PVT Chat (check out our extensive interview with director Ben Hozie here.).
As part of their series Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors, the Martin Scorsese favoriteWake in Fright joins MUBI, along with Fabrice Du Welz’s Alleluia, Nicolas Winding Refn’s underseen Fear X, and Ben Wheatley’s trippy A Field in England.
Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.
October 1 | Alléluia | Fabrice Du Welz | Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors
October 2 | Styx | Wolfgang Fischer
October 3 | The Green Years | Paulo Rocha | Double Bill: Paulo Rocha
October 4 | Change of Life | Paulo Rocha | Double Bill: Paulo Rocha
October 5 | Your Day Is My Night | Lynne Sachs
October 6 | Hey, You! | Péter Szoboszlay | Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations
October 7 | The Wall | Julian Pölsler
October 8 | Vitalina Varela | Pedro Costa
October 9 | The Third Lover | Claude Chabrol | A New Wave of Suspense: A Claude Chabrol Double Bill
October 10 | Landru | Claude Chabrol | A New Wave of Suspense: A Claude Chabrol Double Bill
October 11 | Moving On | Yoon Dan-bi | New South Korean Cinema
October 12 | In Search of the Famine | Mrinal Sen | Voice of the Unheard: A Mrinal Sen Retrospective
October 13 | Corporate Accountability | Jonathan Perel | Undiscovered
October 14 | I Like Life a Lot | Katalin Macskássy | Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations
October 15 | Two Gods | Zeshawn Ali | MUBI Spotlight
October 16 | Fear X | Nicolas Winding Refn | Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors
October 17 | Séraphine | Martin Provost | Portrait of the Artist
October 18 | Cosmos | Manon Briand, Marie-Julie Dallaire, Denis Villeneuve, André Turpin, Jennifer Alleyn, Arto Paragamian
October 19 | Lucky Chan-Sil | Kim Cho-hee | New South Korean Cinema
October 20 | Endless Night | Eloy Enciso | The New Auteurs
October 21 | Panic | Sándor Reisenbüchler | Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations
October 22 | Potiche | François Ozon | Performers We Love
October 23 | PVT Chat | Ben Hozie | MUBI Spotlight
October 24 | In My Room | Ulrich Köhler | Double Bill: Ulrich Köhler
Following career retrospectives at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 and the Museum of the Moving Image in 2021, Lynne Sachs is being paid tribute to by the Criterion Channel. A press release announced that her films will join the channel next month along with a newly recorded interview with the filmmaker, exploring her works. Her latest feature, “Film About a Father Who,” a documentary about her own father, will be making its exclusive streaming premiere on the channel on October 13.
“The Criterion Channel is thrilled to present the exclusive streaming premiere of Lynne Sachs’ ‘Film About a Father Who’ this October. This raw and deeply personal excavation of the filmmaker’s complex family history will be accompanied by a number of Sachs’ experimental shorts, many of which also focus on exploring familial dynamics and family histories” said Penelope Bartlett, Director of Programming at the Criterion Channel.
Shot over a period of 35 years, “Film About a Father Who” is a portrait of Sachs’ businessman father, who had nine children with five women. The film is described as “her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.”
“Over the course of my 30-year career in the film industry, it’s taken me an embarrassingly long time to move from seeing myself as a film student to a director,” Sachs wrote in a 2020 guest post for Women and Hollywood exploring the impact that artistic collaboration has had on her work. “As director, I acknowledge my dedication to my practice, the fact that I have made over 30 films ranging from three to 83 minutes long, the awards I’ve received, and the money I’ve been paid to do my job.”
Check out programming information about the film series below.
The Criterion Channel’s Directed by Lynne Sachs series programming includes:
Debuting on the Criterion Channel Oct. 13:
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (2020) Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.
Debuting on the Criterion Channel Oct. 1:
E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO (2021) In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic Zero for Conduct in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers.
MAYA AT 24 (2021) Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
GIRL IS PRESENCE (2020) During the 2020 global pandemic, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and her daughter Noa collaborated with Anne Lesley Selcer to create Girl is Presence. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, the ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things.
THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018) Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses, The Washing Society investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry.
WIND IN OUR HAIR (2010) Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, Wind in Our Hair is an experimental narrative about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, Wind in Our Hair is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest.
THE LAST HAPPY DAY (2009) During WWII, the US Army hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Sachs’ portrait of Lenard, who is best known for his translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin, resonates as an anti-war meditation composed of letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies of children, and interviews.
WHICH WAY IS EAST (1994) When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt.
