BRIAN DARR (unranked) The Beast Must Die The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe Days Film About a Father Who First Cow Fourteen The Giverny Document Nomadland Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies Undine
from Nelson Kim My 20 favorite new movies of 2020, in alphabetical order. (LOVERS ROCK and NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS were probably my favorite-favorites.)
ANOTHER ROUND (Thomas Vinterberg) THE ASSISTANT (Kitty Green) BAD EDUCATION (Cory Finley) BEANPOLE (Kantemir Balagov) THE CLOUD IN HER ROOM (Zheng Lu Xinyuan) COLLECTIVE (Alexander Nanau) DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD (Kirsten Johnson) EMMA (Autumn DeWilde) FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (Lynne Sachs) FIRST COW (Kelly Reichardt) THE GRAND BIZARRE (Jodie Mack) LOVERS ROCK (Steve McQueen) MINARI (Lee Isaac Chung) NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (Eliza Hittman) NOMADLAND (Chloe Zhao) SHITHOUSE (Cooper Raiff) SWALLOW (Carlo Mirabella-Davis) TIME (Garrett Bradley) THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN (Sandra Wollner) THE VAST OF NIGHT (Andrew Patterson)
BFI: The best films of 2020 – all the votes
We asked 104 contributors – British and international – to pick the ten best new films they’d seen in 2020. Here you can browse all 353 films they nominated.
Lynne Sachs’s body of work first came to my attention via Sheffield Doc/Fest’s online focus and I am now completely immersed in her craft.
There are many more films that will seem like omissions and perhaps it is only that my eyes await them, as I was unable to see the usual level of films this year, though I have still witnessed great talent, art and beauty.
Cine-File Contributors’ Best of 2020 Lists
https://www.cinefile.info/blog/best-of-2020 Kathleen Sachs Favorite New(-ish) Releases I Saw for the First Time in 2020 1. CITY HALL (Frederick Wiseman) 2. DAYS (Tsai Ming-liang) 3. BEANPOLE (Kantemir Balagov) 4. THE WOMAN WHO RAN (Hong Sang-soo) 5. EMA (Pablo Larraín) 6. (Tie) MAAT MEANS LAND/SAN DIEGO (Fox Maxy) 7. JUANITA (Leticia Tonos Paniagua) 8. (Tie) FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (Lynne Sachs)/A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME: WRIGHT OR WRONG (Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa) 9. ON A MAGICAL NIGHT (Christophe Honoré) 10. FIRST COW (Kelly Reichardt)
Pathological in a comparatively old-fashioned way is the man at the center of Lynne Sachs’ very-long-in-the-making personal documentary. (It deploys footage shot by herself, family members, and others between 1965-2019.) She is daughter to Ira Sachs, a hotelier and entrepreneur who worked as little as was needed to maintain his extravagant, globe-trotting, pleasure-seeking lifestyle. (Ira Sachs Jr. is Lynne’s full brother, as well as the slightly-better-known director of such excellent movies as Keep the Lights On and Little Men.) Some apparently called him “the Hugh Hefner of Park City.” I doubt he protested.
While he may be elderly and perhaps a bit senile now (or perhaps he’s just using “I don’t remember” as an excuse to dodge questions), few deny that he was charismatic, fun, generous, genuine in his love for people…even if his actions often caused them grief. What he wasn’t was “the stable parent” (that was Lynne and Ira Jr.’s mother), or anyone who could be counted on, least of all to be honest. “He doesn’t lie—he just doesn’t tell you what’s going on” one daughter says here. That fibbing by omission extended to his neglecting to inform his “legitimate” children of their “hidden siblings” scattered hither and yon, some left to grow up in abject poverty while he flew with the jet-set. Even the kids he was hiding such intel from were all too aware he was constantly stringing along not just wives and mistresses, but “subsidiary girlfriends,” short-term flings, much-younger pickups, et al. His bedroom should have had a revolving door.
Compromised largely of home movies covering decades, Film About a Father Who is a semi-experimental collage documentary that asks the question “How can you love people you don’t know?” The senior Sachs is lovable, by all reports, yet refuses to be truly “known,” perhaps even to himself—evasion seems utterly core to his being. His own wealthy, long-suffering mother (from whom he kept many of his children secret) calls him a kind of psychological “cripple,” his compulsive promiscuity a sickness. He’s not exactly an above-board embodiment of “free love”: He has been deliberately deceptive, misleading women and to varying degrees skipping out on the consequences they’ve then had to live with. His filmmaker daughter doesn’t see him as a simple cad. But as intriguing as this ambivalent portrait is, the viewer may well disagree. It becomes available as part of the Roxie Virtual Cinema programming on Fri/12.
A conversation with the US filmmaker Lynne Sachs about the importance of the autobiographical in her films
From the beginning of your career as an artist and filmmaker you were in one way or another present in your films: as a body, as a voice, or with certain‚ chapters’ of your own (family) history. Why was this personal or autobiographical approach important to you, why is it still relevant?
Presence in a film comes in a variety of forms. When I used to cut the actual film footage with a guillotine splicer, I felt that my finger prints on the celluloid were the beginning of my engagement with both the celluloid material and the moment that it signified through the images I had collected with my camera. Of course, that haptic connection has now disappeared with the intervention of the digital. Still, in our current time, every image or sound that you collect, be it your own or a found one, is a document of a thought. During the first decade of my filmmaking practice, almost every film I made included some image of my own body, sometimes clothed, sometimes not. It almost became a joke in my family. ”Oh, there she is again!” But, for me, this was a way to subvert the subject/object paradigm of the camera. I needed to flow back and forth, as if through the mechanism of the lens itself. The presence of my body paralleled the presence of my words, whether experienced aurally as voice-over or on the screen through my hand-written gesture. Today, we all recognize the inundation of media in our lives. With the sensation of feeling this material as either an assault or caress (depending on your mood as you scroll through your cell phone just before going to sleep at night), each of us must find a way to register awareness and critique.
Although you choose a personal approach, you represent yourself (and others) more in a fragmented way than as ‚authentic’ characters. What is the idea behind this?
Seeing my work through your eyes is a revelation, actually. I would not have articulated my approach this way, and yet I completely agree with your assessment. I have never identified with storytelling and, in turn, the effort to create a character. This homage to narrative tradition I find reductive and limiting, in the same way that I would find writing a conventional feature film script to be deeply restrictive. One of the words I despise most in today’s parlance is the word “template”. When I discovered that there are templates for writing feature film screenplays, I felt like weeping. When one uses the word “personal” to describe their work, I think they are claiming ownership for all aspects of the creative process, from the structure to the content. Yes, I do feel an affinity for a more fragmented depiction of another person because I want to make clear that my ability to understand is determined by my point of view. These fissures give someone watching the film the possibility of providing the glue, the connections, the linkages that always circle back to their own life experiences.
How do you deal with the double position of being the author and the figure of your films at the same time?
Sometimes I make films that are very clearly an outgrowth of my own identity as a white Jewish woman born in the United States in 1961. I can’t change any of that and I can’t simply hide one part and flaunt another. Other times, I make films that don’t make those ingredients so apparent, even though they are always there. Even when my voice, my writing or my body are not there, we all know that my position is influencing every decision I make, how person is framed, how a sound is heard, which music is included, which images are given the space to thrive and which are punished for their very existence.
When speaking about her autifictional novel The Cost of Living, the British writer Deborah Levy characterized her literary (female) subject as a person who is not herself, but who is ‚close’ to her. Who are you in your films?
Deborah Levy’s sense of her own presence in her work is very intriguing, even candid. This reminds of a cultural theory observation by filmmaker, poet and teacher Trinh T. Minh-ha in her essay “Speaking Nearby” (1992) which I quote here:
“There is not much, in the kind of education we receive here in the West, that emphasizes or even recognizes the importance of constantly having contact with what is actually within ourselves, or of understanding a structure from within ourselves. The tendency is always to relate to a situation or to an object as if it is only outside of oneself. Whereas elsewhere, in Vietnam, or in other Asian and African cultures for example, one often learns to “know the world inwardly,” so that the deeper we go into ourselves, the wider we go into society.”
Trinh was a professor of mine in graduate school. I am convinced that her practice of transposing her understanding of herself to her earnest, but always recognizably incomplete, effort to project on others had an enormous impact on my work.
In your films about family members like your father in Film About a Father Who (2020) or The Last Happy Day (2009), which tells of a distant cousin of yours, you sometimes seem to dissolve as the authorial voice, or to put it another way, you pass on your voice – for example to your siblings or children. Is this also a form of giving up some of the power that one has as a narrative authority?
Hmmmm. This makes me think very hard about my process. That’s what a good interview does. Thank you for giving me this chance to be introspective. On one level, I am very committed to a non-hierarchical way of working, one that does not privilege my perspective over another person’s. On another level, perhaps I am ashamed of expressing my thoughts or feelings in a singular voice so I depend on others to prop me up. Both of these films are part of a triptych of films, the third of which is States of UnBelonging (2005). The intention with this three-part endeavor was to grapple with the ways we can and cannot understand another human being. States of UnBelonging looks at a woman in Israel-Palestine who was total stranger to me. The Last Happy Day is a fragmented portrait of a distance relative, so one degree closer, in a way, to me. Film About a Father Who is, obviously, about my dad. That was supposed to be the easiest, and ultimately it was the most difficult. Closeness and intimacy somehow became an obstacle. I end up relying on others to give me clarity.
In A Month of Single Frames, your film with images, sounds and notes by the now deceased experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, I was very taken with your expanding the First Person Singular. What gave you the idea of this grammatical shift?
Oh, I am thrilled to be talking about voice, language and grammar all in one question. In A Month of Single Frames I decided that I would use the expanded Second Person that includes an ambiguous “you”. It could be the “you” that we usually find in a correspondence with another person. Or, it could be the “you” that embraces all of us in one sweeping address. When I write the word you, the viewer might think I am talking to Barbara Hammer, who is no longer alive but through cinema can be included in this dialogue. Or, the viewer may feel that I am addressing them. It’s kind of wonderfully unclear, which might be an accident or might be intentional. I will never tell.
This is how I see you. This is how you see yourself.
You are here. I am here with you.
This place is still this place. This place is no longer this place. It must be different.
You are alone. I am here with you in this film. There are others here with us. We are all together.
Time less yours mine
(On Screen text by Lynne Sachs from A Month of Single Frames)
For some time, personal or autobiographical narratives are strongly present in documentary filmmaking. How would you explain the strong interest in the personal in these times?
My interpretation of this current enthusiasm for the personal narrative has to do with our interest in knowing who is speaking to us. So much media in our lives is delivered to us without this clarity of positionality. We are forced to discern and to guess how who someone is affects what they are saying to us. Maybe it is refreshing to have this kind of transparency.
“Film About a Father Who” opens on Ira Sachs, the filmmaker’s father, flinching as a comb works through his long and wiry hair. In this frame, Ira is an unknown elderly man who looks tired, harmless and boring. As the documentary untangles the web of adventure, women and children that make up his life, he proves to be quite the opposite.
Filmed and directed by Lynne Sachs, “Film About a Father Who” is an examination of Ira’s role in the lives of those who are close to him. Ira is initially depicted as a gregarious and quirky businessman who takes his work calls while riding ski lifts. As the film progresses, his cavalier attitude toward life appears to put a heavy burden on his children, his mother and his romantic partners.
The caricature that Ira fulfills — an absent and negligent father — is a bit tired, but his story is nonetheless worthy of hearing, especially as Sachs’ approach to making this documentary creates a genuinely emotional audience experience.
Sachs meticulously pieces together moments of her father’s life and interviews with those who know him intimately to make up this documentary. The shots featured were taken over a 35-year period, which only makes it feel more organic.
“Film About a Father Who” is often dreamlike and nostalgic. Sachs is imaginative with her talking heads, scene transitions and introductions. Sometimes the timelines of events are unclear, but this haziness only emphasizes the overarching theme of general confusion about how she and her siblings should feel toward their father. He has nine children with multiple different women, and they each struggle to understand how to manage their relationship with him and each other.
The most intriguing aspect of this film is its level of candor and its genuine purpose. Sachs makes no futile attempts to give her viewer definitive answers. Like its title suggests, this documentary invites outsiders to consider who or what the father at the center of this film is. On the surface, he is an intriguing free spirit. As he complicates and impresses upon his children’s lives, he becomes toxic.
Sachs does not hold back on the negative portrayals of her father, and she makes no excuses for him. In a voiceover near the end of the film, Sachs says, “This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” This film is not an invitation to view the spectacle that is Sachs’ eccentric father. It is instead a valiant attempt to come to terms with the chasm between them, even as they are inextricably linked.
“Film About a Father Who” can be watched online through various virtual cinemas.
The Golden Globes? I’m OK with most of the nominations that came down this week, but can’t understand why Spike Lee was completely shut out. Da 5 Bloods is one of the best films of last year. Also, why Meryl Streep wasn’t nominated but James Corden was. And did Netflix really deserve 22 nods, and another 20 on the TV side?
Meanwhile, I notice two film festivals are now on and are available via streaming everywhere in B.C. At very good prices, too. Both have a number of films that were at VIFF last fall, plus a few new to us. The Powell River fest is showing 12 films, including Zappa, Falling, Ammonite, and Money Beach.Victoria’s has 50, including three Oscar hopefuls, a locally made highlight, All-in Madonna, and two films I review among others below.
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO: That’s not a typing error; it’s the full title of this film by Lynne Sachs about her wandering father. Ira Sachs is still alive, but much aged, the last I read. He was a rich hotel developer in Utah with a stable family and a secret life. He dated young women, got some pregnant and fathered nine children with them. Lynne says she didn’t even know about one sister for the first 20 years of her life. With the film, she tries to understand him. She doesn’t do as much of that as we’d like, but does bring him to us vividly.
Lynne filmed him for three decades in a variety of formats including, Super 8, VHS, Beta, and so we get to see him in all sorts of family situations. He was “the cool dad of Park City.” But he hid much of his life from them. He doesn’t lie, she says in the film. He just doesn’t tell you what’s going on. Lynne doesn’t judge, she loves him too much, but she does convey surprise at what she found out. One now-grown child talks about living poor and going to bed hungry. In another sequence, she tells of a trip to Bali and annoyance at his connecting with a young woman there. How much she knew, or should have known, is an open question. Yes, the film illustrates how hard it can be to know all within a family, but it’s also hard to believe a man’s other life like this (yes, they do happen), can be so well-hidden. Sad, but lots to think about here. Streaming for $12 per household here. 3½ out of 5
In partnership with film distributor Cinema Guild, Cine-File is presenting a virtual screening of independent/experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ 2020 documentary feature FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO. The film is available to rent at the link below for $12, with half the proceeds going to Cine-File (funds will be used for general expenses, future programming, and to provide honoraria to our contributors). The film is also available via our friends at Facets Cinémathèque. — Lynne Sachs’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (US/Documentary) Available to rent through Facets Cinémathèque here and through Cine-Filehere.
In his Odes, Horace wrote, “For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer.” It’s hardly an esoteric dictum, but nevertheless, it’s duly reflected in experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ wholehearted documentary portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Something of a longstanding work-in-progress, the film draws from decades of footage shot by Sachs, her father, and her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (whose own 2005 film FORTY SHADES OF BLUE was inspired by the same so-called “Hugh Hefner of Park City”), plus others, documenting not just the sybaritic “hippie-businessman” patriarch, but also his numerous descendants. Sachs’ knotty chronicle reveals that her father has a total of nine children with several different women, two of whom the other siblings found out about only a few years back. (The film opens with Sachs brushing her elderly father’s hair, working out a particularly unpleasant snarl. “Sorry, dad,” she says. “There’s just one part that’s very tangly.” The irony is faint and benevolent, but present even so.) Sachs considers the enveloping imbroglio from her own perspective but also takes into account the viewpoints of her eight siblings, her father’s ex-wives (including her own mother) and girlfriends, plus Ira’s mother, a gracefully cantankerous old woman in a certain amount of denial over her son’s wanton predilections and the role she played in his dysfunction. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO—the title an homage to Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…—is comprised of footage recorded between 1965 and 2019 and shot on 8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV, and digital; the fusion of all this material (by editor Rebecca Shapass) ranks among the most astounding use of personal archives that I’ve ever seen. It all exists in a state between documentary and home-movie footage, a paradigm that aptly reflects the conflict between reality and perspective, and the uncomfortable middle-ground that bisects the two. Sachs’ work often features her family, but this feels like an apotheosis of her autobiographical predisposition, likewise a question—why do the sins of the father linger?—and an answer. Among the most affecting scenes are roundtable discussions between the siblings where they consider revelations about their father and the implications of his actions. These scenes are heartrending not for their sadness, but rather for their naked honesty; it’s not just a film about a father who, but also a film about a love that defines a family. Sachs’ filmography is centered on infinite poetic quandaries (in voice-over, she explores some of them here, such as when she muses on her father’s profession as a developer in Utah: “What happens when you own a horizon?”) and this feels like a logical conclusion to a lifetime of such profound impasses, though I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to probe life and its enigmas in a similarly masterful fashion. For all the suffering on display, Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love. (2020, 74 min) [Kathleen Sachs]
Description: KyCAD is hosting an experimental film program in conjunction with the studio course “Homed Body: Performance, Conformity, and Madness.” The program will include a screening of short, experimental films from Canyon Cinema’s collection, a panel discussion that celebrates experimental cinema, and a screening of student films. We invite you to join us in our exploration of the homed body as a site for critical reflection and creativity.
Virtual Film Screening
Available on KyCAD’s website from February 8th to February 13th:
Spent Moments (1984) by Jean Sousa, 10 minutes
As Long As There Is Breath (2020) by Emily Chao, 2 minutes
Rocking Chair (2000) by Shiho Kano, 13 minutes
Doorway (1971) by Larry Gottheim, 8 minutes
Windowmobile (1977) by James Broughton, 8 minutes
Day Residue (2016) by Lynne Sachs, 3 minutes
The Bathtub Shot (2009) by Beth Block, 11 minutes
Virtual Panel Discussion
February 11th from 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Virtual Student Film Screening
Available on KyCAD’s website from February 12th to February 15th
The American filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who died in 2019, was considered the grande dame of queer-feminist cinema. Her experimental documentary films, which deal with topics such as identity, sexuality and physicality, have shaped several generations of women filmmakers. Lukas Maurer visited her friend and collaborator, the director Lynne Sachs, in Brooklyn and had a conversation with her about the avant-garde icon as well as her “Tribute to Barbara Hammer”. For this obituary, Sachs used DYKETACTICS, OPTIC NERVE and VITAL SIGNS selected three exemplary films and combined them with the very personal obituary A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES.
In her 2021 documentary, Film About a Father Who, filmmaker Lynne Sachs recalls how her dad, Ira Sachs, owned two identical red Cadillacs that he swapped out for each other, never letting his family in on his con. While benign, this secret was the first of many more, which were often much more sinister.
Film About a Father Who, which is composed of archival footage spanning 1984 to 2019, is Lynne’s attempt to reconcile the loving father of her childhood with the deceptive figure enmeshed in a network of secret families. With his white walrus moustache and printed shirts, Ira was both a pillar of the community and a libertine, and his contradictions are the engine of this project.
Aesthetically, the film operates by its own dreamlike logic, cutting between time periods, places, and subjects without warning. It often feels as though we are in Lynne’s memories themselves, reliving her traumas with her. By the closing credits, the film is less an explanation of Ira’s character, and more a layered testament to the essential unknowability of even those we love most.
Overall, Film About a Father Who has a lived-in, DIY feel, splicing together materials ranging from grainy home video to dimly lit interviews. The relative banality of the footage makes the film’s visual motifs even starker. Several scenes are punctuated with footage of a volcano exploding, accompanied by the voices of Ira’s giddy children. How “true” is this scene, and what does it mean? These are questions that Lynne does not try to answer for the viewer. Another peculiar sequence is of a flickering field of daisies, which quickly turns into a whirling spiral of yellow and green, as the sensible collapses into the psychedelic. This moment perhaps points to the futility of trying to ascribe a linear, cogent storyline to a film as impressionistic and experimental as Film About a Father Who.
Yet not all is whimsy and light. Indeed, Lynne is not shy in portraying Ira’s womanizing. In a scene shocking in its offhandedness, Ira shows off a list of women he’s flirted with at parties to his son, turning page after page of names scrawled on yellow legal paper. Remarking to Ira Jr. how he took one of them to Miami, he laughs, “I’ve got a lot more to go! Miles to go before I sleep.” Painfully for the viewer, Ira Jr. seems in on the joke, either unfazed by his dad’s behavior or just numb to it. Lynne admits, with some chagrin, that Ira cycled through so many mistresses that she didn’t even bother to learn their names. Lynne’s sister Dana divides them into “major girlfriends” and “subsidiary girlfriends,” like a taxonomist describing a new species.
Interestingly, Film About a Father Who doesn’t propose a root cause of Ira’s behavior, eschewing psychoanalysis for intimate, eyebrow-raising footage. Instead, viewers are left to reckon with the damage he inflicted on his children, who bear his surname like a scar. In one heart-wrenching scene, Lynne sits in a circle with some of her half-siblings listening to spurned daughter Beth tell her story. The film cuts between Beth’s poignant testimony and Lynne’s grilling her father on his treatment of the damaged Beth. Ira claims he didn’t know his quasi-girlfriend was pregnant; Beth knows he did. Ira claims he wasn’t a part of Beth’s life; Beth knows that he posed as her godfather until she was 13.
During this sequence, the usually charismatic and talkative Ira barely says anything but “I don’t remember”; the tearful Beth remembers all too well. The two scenes capture some of Ira’s contradictions: he’s shameless but coy; he seems to lack a capacity for guilt, yet is intent on forgetting his past. While Ira has the privilege of forgetting, the film makes it clear that his children lack that luxury. Burdened with the self-hatred that often accompanies abandonment, they never receive the catharsis of a heartfelt apology.
Although the rehashing of infidelities is well-trodden territory for memoirists, Lynne gives us a striking portrayal of how pain and secrets ultimately knitted together the unconventional community made up of her father’s children. In several scenes, Ira’s kids from multiple women gather and even celebrate together. The film shows surprisingly little jealousy or rivalry between the offspring, perhaps because, as Lynne’s half-sister Julia speculates, they were all equally neglected. They all hungered for his affection, waiting for the day he would choose to be a real father.
Yet Julia’s notion of their group accord is belied by a scene where she and Lynne lie on a bed and tell stories about their father. Lynne explains how at a dinner with her half-brother Evan, she caught a glimpse of Ira’s insurance card in Evan’s pocket. The card listed Ira’s dependents with two names cut out—Julia and Beth’s. While the idea of a group united in pain may be comforting, the insurance card serves as a potent symbol of Ira’s favoritism.
Despite attempts by Film About a Father Who to illuminate Ira’s character, he ultimately remains an enigma. In scenes where he cheerfully evades any admissions of guilt, the viewer wonders whether there is a bedrock of conscience beneath his washed-out hippie charm, or if “I don’t remember” is as deep as we’re going to get. Dana may summarize the mystery of Ira as well as anyone when she says, “He can be selfish, but he also really loves people.” In the same vein, Lynne tells us that he was the sort of person who organized food drives while shamelessly bribing much younger women with fancy dinners. While Ira’s opaque nature can be frustrating, his children nevertheless offer a model for functional family dynamics even in the aftermath of betrayal.
Lynne’s film, clearly a product of immense time and devotion, also suggests the possibility of understanding without forgiveness. At its core, Film About a Father Who is about a daughter’s complicated love for a father who never made loving him easy.
Join us for a virtual panel discussion on the films of FMC member Lynne Sachs.
In celebration of the Museum of the Moving Image’s online Lynne Sachs retrospective, The Film-Makers’ Coop is proud to present a Q&A Discussion of Sachs’ nonfiction filmography, including her new feature, Film About a Father Who. The panel consists of Sachs, Bradley Eros, M.M Serra, and Jack Waters.
“This will be a dynamic quartet. Let’s call us ‘The Quartz Quartet’ ~ ’cause we’re all such gems! (rock-solid underground treasures. . ha!). I’ll bring the bloody marys…” writes Bradley Eros about this gathering of friends and long-term members of the FMC board of directors.
Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression Museum of the Moving Image, NYC ONLINE RETROSPECTIVE Jan. 13 – 31, 2021
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. On the occasion of her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist’s maddeningly mercurial father. From Jan. 13-31 the Museum of the Moving Image is presenting a career-ranging survey of Sachs’s work, including new HD presentations of Drawn and Quartered, The House of Science: a museum of false facts, and Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam, as well as the premiere of Maya at 24, the third edition of Sachs’ temporal portrait of her daughter.
Bradley Eros Bradley Eros is an artist, experimental filmmaker, mediamystic, maverick curator, sound collage, photographer, expanded cinema,performance, writer & poet, nomadic teacher and private investigator—initiating, exhibiting, & curating at a multitude of ephemeral spaces and long-lasting venues, from micro-cinemas & storefronts to galleries & museums. His work includes intimate collaborations with Aline Mare (Erotic Psyche), Jeanne Liotta (Mediamystics), the Alchemical Theatre, Circle X, and kinoSonik.; intense research with Jeanne Liotta on the films of Joseph Cornell. He has created dozens of ‘zines, posters, soundtracks, unique artist’s books, and film performances in the unfixed universe of ephemeral cinema.
M.M. Serra MM Serra is an experimental filmmaker, curator, author, educator and the Executive Director of Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the world’s oldest and largest archive of independent media. Her first five films (NYC, 1985, Nightfall, 1984, Framed, 1984, PPI, 1986, Turner, 1987) were preserved and digitized by Anthology Film Archives Preservation series Re-Visions: American Experimental Film 1975-1990. The series “spotlights…the generation of experimental film artists who emerged after the final formation in 1975 of AFA’s Essential Cinema repertory screening cycle.” Anthology describes Serra’s five films as a “DIY Lower East Side spirit, but introduces a distinctive lyrical eroticism.” In 2015, Serra was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts for Enduring Ornament and in 2016 Serra received a New York Council on the Arts for a new film titled Mary Magdalene that was exhibited at the NY Media Center in August 2017. In 2018 MM Serra gave the 9th Annual Experimental Lecture at NYU Cinema Studies, entitled Art(Core): The Films of MM Serra, and in 2019 her lecture was published by Frameworks Journal.
Serra presented a lecture and screening at the Louvre auditorium in Paris, France on December 1st, 2019. It was held as the Petit Galerie in the Louvre as part of their cycling exhibitions highlighting Renaissance artists such as DaVinci and Michelangelo. The exposition, “Figure d’artiste,” focused on the cinematographic self portrait found in documentary, experimental, and avant-garde film. Serra’s emphasis in the lecture,Visionaries: Self-portraits by experimental filmmakers Marie Menken, Storm de Hirsch, Carolee Schneemann and MM Serra, was on women, literature, and self-portraits in the avant-garde pantheon. Filmmakers and speakers included Raymond Bellour, Pip Chodorov, Ross McElwee, Boris Lehman, and Agnes Varda.
