FREE for filmmakers and IN&OUT PASS HOLDERS!! According to Freud’s theory of dreams, our day residue is composed of the memory traces left by the events of our waking state. In this workshop, we explore the ways in which fragments of our daily lives can become material for the making of a personal film. While many people in the film industry rely upon a chronological process that begins with the development phase and ends with post-production, our interaction will build on an entirely different creative paradigm that encourages participants to embrace the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.
SYNOPSIS: From 1984 to 2019, Lynne Sachs filmed her father, a lively and innovative businessman. This documentary is the filmmaker’s attempt to understand the networks that connect a girl with her father and a woman with her brothers. With a nod to cubist representations of a face, Sachs’s exploration offers simultaneous and sometimes contradictory visions of a seemingly unknowable man who publicly uninhibitedly stands in the center of the frame, but privately takes refuge in secrets. As the alarming facts add up, Sachs, as a daughter, discovers more about her father than she ever expected to reveal.
Poster created by Kino Rebelde, International Sales Agent / Representative of Film About a Father Who.
An exhibiting filmmaker’s thoughts on the recent online festival, Prismatic Ground.
It began, as so many things do these days, with a tweet: in October 2020, Inney Prakash, programmer of the Maysles Cinema’s “After Civilization” series, put out a call for experimental documentary films. The resulting festival, Prismatic Ground, debuted in early April with a diverse line-up of new and repertory non-fiction films that ran the gamut of genres, styles, and techniques. Imagine: a programmer directly engaging with his community of filmmakers with an open-hearted all-points-bulletin was the antithesis of conventional festival gatekeeping. The refreshing prospect was a beacon to filmmakers struggling to create and exhibit work during a traumatic and hostile time.
Prakash’s call for submissions caught my attention on that fateful October night: for once, my endless Twitter scrolling put me in the right place at the right time. For the last four years, I’d been dutifully at work on a narrative feature concerning Julian of Norwich, an obscure 14th-century woman mystic. With development and production on indefinite hold, I resolved to keep in “fighting shape” by making whatever I could—however I could—about Julian’s ecstatic religious experience. I had originally set out to make a companion piece, a sort of altar to this long-overlooked religious icon. What began as a few standalone tableaux eventually turned into The Sixteen Showings of Julian of Norwich, a bricolage of stop-motion animation, back-projection, and collage.
I was very fortunate to have a job for most of last year, but working well beyond the customary 40 hours a week in these new circumstances was disastrous for my mental health and creative practice. For the first few months of this solitary arrangement, I was lucky if I ended each day with just enough energy to bathe and feed myself. Readers, no doubt, will recognize this feeling immediately—a pervasive fogginess, a dearth of initiative, contained on all sides by fear, dread, and exhaustion. The immediate reaction for many of us possessing an artistic temperament is to heal through the work, to create from a place of self-preservation as a therapeutic exercise (because, to be perfectly honest, very few working artists can afford traditional talk therapy).
After a nights-and-weekends work schedule, I finished a short film in my little office consisting of whatever I had on hand. It’s a wild departure from my usual narrative practice of snappy dialogue and meticulously-designed sets, edging my practice into a heretofore unexplored aesthetic and style.
Sixteen Showings was my first attempt to make a film without in-person collaborations: Tessa Strain’s narration, Matt Macfarlane’s original score, and Eliana Zebrow’s rich sound mix were directed entirely over email. The film was tangential to my would-be narrative feature, but very much apiece with my overarching vision. Finishing this solo effort was a balm—somehow I had made something new despite… well, you know, everything. But what now? Surveying the fruits of this months-long process, I struggled to conceive of a suitable afterlife beyond the customary Vimeo upload. Where could I screen this? What context could there possibly be for a theological exploration of isolation, plague, and revolt? Calling it a “shut-in watercolor movie,” or “moving altar,” while elegiac, didn’t quite fit the bill.
Enter Inney Prakash’s well-timed tweet and timely festival. Emboldened by his transparency and programmatic voice, I steeled myself for yet another humbly-toned inquiry. When Sixteen Showings was selected, I was shocked, ecstatic and, in a way, relieved: if there was an audience for this film, surely I would find it at Prismatic Ground. Having never enjoyed a virtual premiere, I went into the experience as a total neophyte. But for every gripe there was praise in equal measure: the pleasure of connecting with an otherwise distant viewership, public recognition for work made under great duress. Prismatic Ground helped me recontextualize what felt like a moving target. More than a descriptor or genre, “experimental documentary” affords artists a wide berth to do just that: experiment with cinematic and journalistic techniques within a nonfiction framework. To that end, I began to understand the dual significance of Sixteen Showings as a documentary about Julian of Norwich’s life and, by extension, my own.
In a festival space laid low by last year’s pandemic, Prakash saw an opportunity to challenge “the toxic or tedious norms governing festival culture, and to emphasize inclusivity and access.” Where the year’s higher-profile festivals sought to replicate the exclusivity of their in-person events with geo-blocked premiers and Zoom happy hours, Prismatic Ground promised viewers a deliberate antithesis. Its programming, ethos, and even web presence were tailor-made for the online space, prioritizing widespread access and a filmmaker-centered focus on screenings and Q&As. Prakash’s curation was mission-driven: “It was important to me to strike a balance,” he said, “between early career and established filmmakers, palatable and challenging work, passion and polish.” The line-up generously gave equal weight to artists at every stage of their process. Instead of single-film, time-sensitive screenings, audiences enjoyed free reign to explore and engage of their own accord, a heretofore unheard of format—online and off.
Organized in a series of “waves,” Prismatic Ground was structured around four separate collections touching on simultaneously personal and societal themes. It was reassuring to screen Sixteen Showings alongside equally intimate works, each with a different visual and philosophical approach. I was, and still am, grateful to Prakash for including my film. Despite being a newcomer to experimental filmmaking and documentary, I never once felt like an impostor. That feeling carried over to my experience as a viewer as well: these were films unlike any I’d seen, whether due to their newness or, in the case of repertory titles, my own lack of access. I am grateful to the festival for offering an avenue through which to engage with the work of other like-minded artists.
I was eager to hear from my fellow filmmakers about their road to the festival and experience as participants in this bold experiment in public exhibition. While we all arrived through different avenues, I immediately noticed a shared resonance. A wide net-approach to programming naturally attracted filmmakers reeling from the exclusionary nature of the mainstream festival circuit. Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Max (Two Sons and a River of Blood, 2021) was quick to note how “Inney was able to really access all of the different layers of what the piece was doing.” For director Sarah Friedland (Drills, 2020) it was the fervor of how Prakash had “created the festival he wanted to exist, instead of trying to reform an established festival” that drew her to the event.
For filmmakers navigating constraints brought on by the pandemic, and its ongoing economic aftermath, social media provided the sense of community missing from in-person festivals. Elias ZX (You Deserve The Best, 2018) was already familiar with Prakash’s programming work on “After Civilization” when they submitted their film. “We became friends through Twitter, [and] he told me about his plan to make an experimental documentary festival.” Screening online “gave my film space to breathe in a way that is really uncommon for festivals. Every viewer was allowed to have a completely unique experience with the film.” Virginia-based filmmaker Lydia Moyer (The Well-Prepared Citizen’s Solution, 2020) saw the festival as a chance to broaden and strengthen these seemingly disparate filmmaking communities. “As a person who lives in a rural place, it’s great that so much interesting work has been available this year to anyone who’s got enough bandwidth (literally and figuratively).” Moyer said. “The way this is set up is for online viewing, not just trying to transfer an in-person experience online.”
Programming the work of early career filmmakers alongside more established artists was more than a canny curatorial choice. The variety presented across these four waves expanded the audience’s access to repertory titles, while simultaneously reiterating the connection between both older and more recent offerings. Prismatic Ground’s streaming platform and presentation stood out for director Chris Harris (Reckless Eyeballing, 2004), who “had some streaming experiences that weren’t so happy in terms of the technical aspects.” The festival’s creative exhibition format was especially taken by “the mix of programming, special live events, and the flexibility of accommodating filmmakers with the option of live and recorded Q&As.” For prolific filmmaker Lynne Sachs, Prismatic Ground represented “an entirely new, unbelievably adventurous, compassionate approach to the viewing of experimentally driven cinema,” emphasizing that the festival itself was “beyond anything I have ever seen in my life.”
Among the filmmakers I spoke with, Prismatic Ground’s liberal approach to exhibition belied a tremendous sense of potential for artists navigating a post-COVID festival ecosystem. Harris noticed an “[increasing] festival bandwidth for underseen/emerging Black experimental filmmakers,” a tendency that he “[hopes] to see continue after COVID.” In lieu of a return to in-person only screenings, the general consensus saw streaming as a fixture in future festivals. “I don’t think it is going to be possible to put the toothpaste back in the tube here,” noted Zx, emphasizing that “more access will be good for filmmakers… and will challenge programmers to be more competitive, to release more obscure films that are harder to find.”
Prakash’s groundbreaking work has already heeded the call, citing critic Abby Sun’s Berlin Critics’ Week essay “On Criticism” as a guiding principle. “Festivals aren’t merely reacting to social conditions,” Sun writes. “They are often the primary creators of them.” Prismatic Ground’s focus on diverse curation and access reaches well beyond the artistic ramifications. Prakash’s end goal is emboldening, a manifesto of sorts: “Enough of premiere politics, prohibitive pricing, playing only the same handful of films at every festival. Let’s create better conditions. There is a moral imperative to keep doing virtual screenings now that we know we can and how.”
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
The families we choose and the families we are born into carry their own sense of time. Using a mixture of found footage and original images, these works capture the infinite permutations of family time in the face of political and economic projects intended to render them meaningless. Throughout the program, filmmakers weather personal crises, celebrate the revolutionary potential of love, and recognize the time passing.
Program depicts sexual content and situations.
PROGRAM:
TOO SMALL TO BE A BEAR Two generations of women reflect on a profound event in the life of the filmmaker’s grandfather. Featuring Jessica Taul and Dorothy Taul. Paige Taul, United States, 2020, 05:00 mins
MALEMBE As a knife cuts through sky, through snow, and through fruit, quasi-ethnographic footage—with its conventional markers of music, food, ritual—joins with home-movie auto-portraiture of a New England winter, communicating a sense of dislocation at once vertiginously queasy and absurdly comic. Luis Arnías, Venezuela/United States, 2020, 12:00 mins
AVANTI! Avanti! is inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings: as an idealistic young man, a romantic, a father, and a revolutionary. EJ Nussbaum, United States, 2020, 08:00 mins
TWO SONS AND A RIVER OF BLOOD A queer woman is pregnant. The self-made family unit of two dykes and a trans man imagine a kind of erotic magic that will allow for procreation based solely on desire. Amber Bemak and Angelo Madsen Minax, Mexico, 2021, 11:00 mins
MAYA AT 24 The filmmaker films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. Lynne Sachs, United States, 2021, 04:00 mins
BORDER Fragmented stories relate experiences of Colombian immigrants at the border. Bryan Angarita, Canada, 2021, 05:00 mins
LETTER FROM YOUR FAR-OFF COUNTRY Drawing upon a rich repository of images, Letter From Your Far-off Country maps a hidden vein of shared political commitment and diasporic creative expression. Suneil Sanzgiri, United States/India, 2020, 18:00 mins
In these times of crisis we are getting so much information we would probably have ignored if things were different. Such tidbits include details about aerosols that potentially spread viruses and how they disperse in a room when we exhale, or the necessity of good ventilation in spaces where we like to spend time — like a movie theater.
As a festival whose films often directly reflect the events around us, it’s hard to get around a subject as all-encompassing as the pandemic. At the same time, we wanted to avoid a sensationalistic gaze and tried to take the pandemic as a departure point to throw open the windows and follow our desire and curiosity to let in the bizarre, the drama, the memories, the journeys toward everywhere and nowhere — in short: to let in some fresh air for once and take a deep breath. How does that pretty song by the Hollies go? Sometimes / All We Need Is THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE … (de)
MEMORIES OF TRAVELING Oh, to finally pack our travel bags again! Approaching this semblance of freedom and experience via memories, five female filmmakers let us partake in their journeys—whether it’s with their own footage of past travels, found footage of the travels of others, or footage they’ve been given by someone to work with. We tour Austrian lakes, an American beach, the Middle East, the big blue on a big ship, and elsewhere—also in search of ourselves and our place in this world. Let’s embark on this journey together! (db)
CURATED BY Doris Bauer (Vienna Shorts)
SEEEN SEHEN Bady Minck AT 1998, 5 min 12 sec
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES Barbara Hammer, Lynne Sachs US 2019, 14 min 9 sec
THERE ARE NO WRONG CHOICES Anne Collet BE 2015, 30 min
The film will be featured in the section Rebellions https://sheffdocfest.com/festival/2021/explore/strand/rebellions?page=1 The global pandemic of the past 15 months has shone a light on the unjust systems of power and rapacious forms of exploitation that define our contemporary world. With these inescapable revelations comes a clear and unambiguous need for rebellion. In an era that will be remembered both for an unimaginable force majeure, and a global reckoning with hierarchy and domination, mass movements and collective actions have been essential survival strategies, transmitted around the world largely through visual media. Widespread conversation about anti-Blackness, police violence, white supremacy and prison abolition, paired with crackdowns on protest in the name of public health, lead us to reframe contemporary resistance and historic struggles. The films in Rebellions illuminate cinema’s role in documenting – and tangibly contributing to – the myriad forms of resistance that continue to persist worldwide, pandemic or not.
Right now everyone could more or less agree that we could all use a new start: countries, societies, people. An impending American civil war and the assaults on the US Capitol make us finally ask the question: What if Women Ruled The World?
Civil War Surveillance Poems (Part 1) by Mitch McCabe, USA, 2020, 15min UK premiere
The first iteration of a five-part feature film of speculative experimental nonfiction, which contemplates an impending American civil war via lyrical nonfiction, mixing call-in radio, twenty years of verité footage from the filmmaker’s archive, and robots. The film is partly a nostalgic political travelogue and partly a pre-war surveillance record, deconstructing our past, future and present political moment, with its clashing ideologies.
E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo by Lynne Sachs, USA, Spain, 2021, 05min UK premiere
In a cinema letter to Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the French filmmaker’s 1933 classic Zéro de conduite, in which school boys wage an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capiol by right-wing activists, Sachs wonders how both innocent play and calculated protest can quickly turn into chaos and violence.
Two Minutes to Midnight by Yael Bartana, Germany, Netherlands, 2021, 48min UK premiere
Two Minutes to Midnight is the final stage of a four year transdisciplinary series by Yael Bartana. A group of actors gather on a stage. They are playing the all-female government of an imaginary nation. Together, they discuss the global emergencies of our male-dominated reality. The performance examines the impact that female-led governments would have on the way that international crises are resolved.
Sheffield Doc/Fest Q&A with Cintia Gil and Mitch McCabe
The PHI Foundation presents Severing the Impact on Memory, an online video program in conjunction with the exhibition Lee Bae: UNION.
Through processes of reimagination, preservation and transformation, memory allows us to narrate reality and a fictionalized memory, to look into the past, the feeling of belonging, and death. This video program explores the memory of what makes life tangible, and considers how both the body and nature experience, measure and translate the impact of change. This program includes videos by Patricia Domínguez, Jean-Jacques Martinod, and Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer.
A podcast in conversation with Patricia Domínguez, Jean-Jacques Martinod and Lynne Sachs was launched in complement to the online video program.
La Bala de Sandoval (Jean-Jacques Martinod, 2019, 17 min 10 sec, Spanish, English subtitles) A Month of Single Frames (Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer, 2019, 14 min, English) La balada de las sirenas secas (The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids) (Patricia Domínguez, 2020, 31 min 39 sec, Spanish, English subtitles) La balada de las sirenas secas (The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids) by Patricia Domínguez was commissioned by TBA21 for st_age.
Curated by Victoria Carrasco, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art The videos will be presented in their original language.
Synopses
A Month of Single Frames Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer, 2019 In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.
La Bala de Sandoval Jean-Jacques Martinod, 2019
Isidro meanders through the rainforest while he and his brother remember the times he found himself face to face with death itself.
La balada de las sirenas secas (The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids)
Patricia Domínguez, 2020
For La balada de las sirenas secas (The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids), Patricia Domínguez collaborated with Las Viudas del Agua, a group of water defenders, educators and herbalists who are devoting their lives to the fight for liberating the water resources within their communities in Petorca, Chile. The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids examines the complex flows of water in terms of the possibilities for crying, actualizing memory in the digital era and creating multi-species myths of resistance in the capitalist system.
Biographies
Victoria Carrasco Born in Montreal, Victoria Carrasco is a Canadian and Chilean curator. She currently occupies the role of Gallery Management and Adjunct Curator — Public Programs at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art. She holds an MA in Performance Curation from the Institute of Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University; a BA in Environmental Design from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and a BFA with concentration in Photography from Concordia University. She was awarded the 2019 Ford Foundation ICPP Leadership Fellowship from Wesleyan University.
Her research examines the limitations of public art as performance as a utopian concept through notions of space, medium, and legacy. Her curatorial practice extends from gallery management— challenging processes and promoting equality within workplace culture, and studying the visitor experience in a mediatory context of discussion and transmission of knowledge—as well as developing collaborations and relationships for the presentation of performance.
Patricia Domínguez Bringing together experimental research on ethnobotany, healing practices, and the corporatization of wellbeing, the work of Patricia Domínguez (b. 1984, Santiago, Chile) focuses on how neoliberalism perpetuates colonial practices of extraction and exploitation.
Recent solo exhibitions include Madre Drone, CentroCentro, Madrid, and Cosmic Tears, Yeh Art Gallery, New York (both 2020); Green Irises, Gasworks, London (2019); Llanto Cósmico, Twin Gallery, Madrid (2018); Eres un Princeso, Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio; Los ojos serán lo último en pixelarse, Galería Patricia Ready, Santiago; and Focus Latinoamérica, ARCOMadrid, Madrid (all 2016). Recent group exhibitions include Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Transmediale, Berlin (both 2021); MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, Montreal; The trouble is staying, Meet Factory, Prague (both 2019); What is going to happen is not ‘the future’, but what we are going to do, ARCOMadrid; Working for the Future Past, SEMA, Seoul (both 2018).
She has recently been the recipient of the SIMETRIA prize to participate in a residency at CERN, Switzerland (2021), among others. Her work has appeared in books such as Younger than Jesus: Artist Directory (New Museum/Phaidon Press, 2009); Health (MIT Press/Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art, 2020), Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art University of Minnesota Press and Contemporary Art and Climate Change, Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series (both 2021). Her studies include a Master’s Degree in Studio Art from Hunter College, New York (2013) and a Botanical Art & Illustration Certificate from the New York Botanical Garden (2011). She is currently director of the ethnobotanical platform Studio Vegetalista.
Jean-Jacques Martinod Jean-Jacques Martinod is an Ecuadorian-American filmmaker and multimedia artist originally from the city of Guayaquil. His works oscillate between modalities of hybrid cinemas using methodologies that experiment with archival materials, celluloid film, analog tape, digital media, synesthetic operations, personal mythologies and travelogues, in bifurcations that stand out among the ramifications of the aforementioned. His work has been exhibited at the Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador Ulises Estrella, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and festivals that include FIDMarseille, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Les Inattendus film festival (très) indépendants, Sheffield Doc/Fest, ULTRACinema Experimental Festival de Cine Experimental y Found Footage, among others, as well as galleries, cultural centers, and clandestine DIY screenings. He is also co-founder of EVIDENCE, a micro-publishing project that releases radical poetry, visual arts, photography, and also para-essayistic works within the world of avant-garde cinema. He received his MFA from Concordia University in Montreal where he was a member of the Global Emergent Media Lab, Fabrique-mondes and the Centre for Expanded Poetics.
Lynne Sachs
Between 1994 and 2006, Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Witnessing the world through a feminist lens, she expresses intimacy by the way she uses her camera. With the making of Your Day is My Night (2013) and The Washing Society (2018), she expanded her practice to include live performance. As of 2020, she has made 37 films. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest have all presented retrospectives of her work. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems in 2019. On the occasion of the 2021 virtual theater release of her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist’s maddeningly mercurial father, the Museum of the Moving Image presented a career-ranging survey of Lynne’s work. Lynne lives in Brooklyn with her husband filmmaker Mark Street. Together, they have two daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs. lynnesachs.com
Severing the Impact on Memory – Conversation with Artists Patricia Domínguez, Jean-Jacques Martinod, Lynne Sachs, and curator Victoria Carrasco
In this podcast, Victoria Carrasco (adjunct curator of public programs, PHI Foundation) meets with artists Patricia Domínguez, Jean-Jacques Martinod and Lynne Sachs. This conversation took place in the lead up to the event Severing the Impact on Memory, an online video program presented in conjunction with the exhibition
Through processes of reimagination, preservation and transformation, memory allows us to narrate reality and a fictionalized memory, to look into the past, the feeling of belonging, and death. This video program—Severing the Impact on Memory—explores the memory of what makes life tangible, and considers how both the body and nature experience, measure and translate the impact of change.
In this conversation, the curator and the artists explore the topic of memory within the context of this program as well as the pandemic, and respectively, through the creating process of the videos and their impact. They discuss reimagining and re-enliving, how to preserve moments, either through the impermanence of video art, and how the body can connect and reconnect to memory, nature and the future.
Sliding scale, $0-$75. Please pay what you are able to support the work and make the workshop accessible to all.
Instructor: Lynne Sachs
About Day Residue: A Filmmaking Workshop on the Every Day
According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, our day residue is composed of the memory traces left by the events of our waking state. In this workshop, we explore the ways in which fragments of our daily lives can become material for the making of a personal film. While many people in the film industry rely upon a chronological process that begins with the development phase and ends with post-production, our Day Residue workshop will build on an entirely different creative paradigm that encourages artists to embraces the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.
HOW TO PREPARE As a way to jump right into the workshop, we encourage each participant to shoot a one-minute cell phone film in their homes using one object that “matters” and one object that “matters-not.” Please come to the workshop with your video file downloaded to your computer and ready to share. In this way, we will all arrive together with raw, quotidian material to discuss, confront and embrace.
Lynne Sachs “For more than thirty years, artist Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” (Edo Choi, Assistant Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image)
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. 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 and studying in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trihn T. Minh-ha. 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 body of work ever since.
She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. In tandem with making films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa.
In 2018, one year before she passed away, the influential feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer revisited a project she had worked on 20 years prior, compiled over the course of a month while living in one of Princeton’s Dune Shacks. In this short film created in collaboration with experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs, we are immersed in Hammer’s observations from the dunes through film, writing, and photography.
The film is structured around Hammer reading from her 1998 diary while images from her month of seclusion capture the biodiversity of the sand dunes. The result is an incredibly potent study of life in all its many forms and the difficulty of facing one’s own mortality. As Hammer looks back on her younger self, layers of memory cascade over each other as the images of the sand dunes slide together to form a compelling montage of the natural world.
This is a posthumously collaborative work in which Sachs’ friend Barbara Hammer entrusted her with a selection of unfinished material from a 1998 residency and offered her the opportunity to complete the film as she saw fit. The resulting work incorporates Hammer’s highly formalized attention to seaside landscapes — sand dunes, expansive horizons — in what amounts to a retroactive diary film.
The soundtrack mostly consists of audio recordings of Hammer describing her relationship to the space and how it affected her work and her thinking. The result, as you might expect, is a kind of sidelong contribution to Hammer’s filmography: we see her muscular lyricism as organized through Sachs’ somewhat more linear compositional tendencies. It’s far too alive and present-tense to be a eulogy. Just a lovely, hard-to-position hybrid object.
– Michael Sicinski
When the act of making art (whether a film or any other form) seems lonely, this experimental short proves that isolation is broken when there’s an audience, when there’s reinterpretation or appropriation, building a dialogue through time that even transcends death. The musings about a life’s end become thus universal and we can see ourselves in our finitude, in the idle reflection of nothingness about to become.
– Pos Manero
Turning an unfinished film project from pioneering queer experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, into a remarkable kaleidoscopic journey, director Lynne Sachs seeks to present a study of life with her film, ‘A Month of Single Frames’.
Offering a relaxing and potent exploration of time and location, this is visually alluring and structurally intricate experimental work from Sachs, in which there is much to absorb and reflect upon
.- William Leesee
Strikingly familiar. A love letter to nature, Hammer emphasizes the dichotomy between simple and complex.
“You are alone. / I am here with you in this film.”
I will find myself returning to this piece, again and again, like a bird to its nest.
– Josh Korme
A lovely personal short. Old footage is repurposed with time, just like mundane elements are repurposed in this old footage, creating a nice little cyclical mood. Beautiful textures are created using close-ups or slight alterations of image, revealing new sides to old things. The sound design adds another layer, modifying and complementing the textures, while the dialogue between two creators closes the gap between twenty years. ‘A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer)’ is a movie of time stopping. It’s the breath you take when contemplating a breathtaking natural landscape. The fresh air fills your lungs and you stop, peacefully. You live in this moment. This is it.
– JP Nakashima
I wish I could put this film in a tiny glass jar and just keep it forever. It reminds me of warm summer days in Massachusetts and being read to by my grandparents – even if what’s being said is serious. Vivre sa vie (live your life), and love it as fully as you can.
– Jackie
There’s a magic to the creation of a beautiful image—as someone without the ability to create images, it’s very mysterious to me. I love to watch people draw: they set down lines on paper. I can do that too! The lines are dead, they don’t mean anything. But then something suddenly happens, which I don’t understand at all—now the lines are a picture. That incomprehension is at the root of what I love about visual art.
It’s nice to watch someone completely fail to create beautiful images—to feel the disconnect between the beauty they observe in what they see and their ability to create a representation of that beauty that can communicate it to others. It reminds you how special and rare that talent is, that it can’t be taken for granted, however easy it might be to take it for granted if we only watched things that were good.
– DenizRudin
The strength of this short lays on the combination of all its different layers, and how they play off themselves. Not only do we get different visual elements, such as Hammer’s quotidian footage and visual experiments, but we also get to see her reflect on them and her experience through the reading of her own diary. This gets more complex when we consider Sachs own ideas, expressed through her editing and subtitles. Its a warm and casually profound short revolving around the creation of art and the possible dialogues between different artists, as well as artists with their audience.
– Santiago
A wonderfully poetic and existential celebration of nature. Incredibly comforting. What’s not to love?
– Ellie
i am overwhelmed by simplicity; there is so much to see
navigating the intricacy embedded within simplicity—an echo of all things grand and imposing—hammer and sachs meld their minds in this gorgeous ode to everything, to nothing. a woman dying as much now as she was back then reminds us that there is as much lucidity in stillness as there is movement; sand as there is in sea; dreams as there is in consciousness.
hammer shatters time’s linearity to transport us back to cape cod in 1998, but the time and location doesn’t matter. with this project, we are here in the now, we are back in the past. she was there, and she immortalised it on film, but film or not, her spirit would always remain—her connection with the place, her manipulation of it for shots, her frustration, her joy. empathy and a mutual gaze means we are not alone, she is with us in this film, even long after she’s gone.
– Sarah
”I feel compelled to do nothing. There is nothing to do. Everything waits expectantly for discovery.”
I love the dull haze of this film, the general view and focus on time but that focus blurred by time, a lost moment in memory that doesn’t exist any longer but refers back to a formative time and place through the fog of human living.
Todd May, explaining Deleuze and Nietzsche, once wrote that there is no such thing as being, only ever becoming. This is a film about a time of becoming, with being fading into obscurity and impossibility. Nothing is the way it is for very long, least of all our experiences.
Themes of wind, memory, fading sun, morphing colours, the eternal presence of difference that rises and fades as we watch, it’s beautiful.
”Why is that I can’t see nature pure and whole, without artifice?”
We are all here together. I am here alone.
– Jay
Barbara was actually my great-aunt, and seeing these fragments of her makes me wish I was able to spend more time with her before she passed. She was such a fascinating woman and it would have been amazing to get to know her when she was younger. This collaborative piece recalls her ability to evoke that raw, often romanticized ideal of filmmaking, that you can draw retaliation by shooting the simplest things around you. Lynne Sachs’ composition draws these individual pieces together into a lovely experimental work that showcases how the spirit of everything around us can create art and companionship.
– Mason Carr
“The sadness of departure, the inevitable ending of breath, and blood, coursing. The complete and thorough blankness. Is this why we make busy, she wondered, so that we won’t have time to contemplate the heart-wrenching end to this expanse called life?”
Beautifully captures the joy of experimenting with film, the drive to capture and make sense of ourselves and our environment through photography, as well as contemplating our mortality and the ephemeral nature of life through the hopefully immortal medium of film.
– Jorge Olvera
Hammer’s beautiful film and her voice create a wonderfully meditative state. There’s something quite special about watching this film, essentially a home video for decades, that gives its gentle images a deep power. It’s wonderful, too, to hear Hammer’s voice read out her diary and reflect quite honestly about death. Whether you believe in any kind of afterlife or not Hammer’s words about keeping busy to avoid the truth of our impending deaths is refreshingly bleak but beautiful.
-Ads96
made for and with barbara hammer, connection, collaboration, living with art, nature read through art, through living, watched on my childhood bed on a spring afternoon before a walk, with what could be seen as the less than ideal watching circumstances, could see my reflection on my laptop during the dark scenes, reminding of my existence, living with the film, living as the film runs, time, process, loss, revisitation, derek jarman, death, nature and art, cottage by the sea, morden nature, a vine growing on the side of something, use of another’s archive –
kusterstephen
A beautiful tribute to Barbara Hammer, detailing the world she lives in with a fresh gaze. A conversation about mortality and continuation. Something struck me in this short film, from the small amounts of text to the beautifully written poetry. Recently I’ve been reading up on a lot of queer theory, and to see things like embracing the failures of experimentation is really incredible. Something magical is within this short film, and it got me glued from start to finish.
“I’m overwhelmed by simplicity”-
Shane Dante
A sadly moving picture of a moment in time that continues to evoke wonder. I was moved to tears over the connection I felt through this. It was a pleasure to have shot out in that area. It’s a very connected place…
There’s a very quiet experience involved with being queer that resonates through this film and I think my life is just going to be figuring out what that is.
