On this show, we are joined by the experimental filmmaker, feminist and poet Lynne Sachs whose new autobiographical film, “Film About a Father Who” – 26 years in the making – will premiere on January 15 as part of a 20-film retrospective, “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression,” presented by The Museum of the Moving Image.
Lynne Sachs grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with such artists as Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Her moving image work ranges from short experimental films, to essay films to hybrid live performances. She has made 37 films, retrospectives of which have been presented at The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/ Fest. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts and, in 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. Currently, Lynne lives in Brooklyn with her husband, filmmaker Mark Street, and their two daughters.
Links to 1) “Film About A Father Who” film page with streaming information: http://www.cinemaguild.com/theatrical/filmaboutafatherwho.html;
2)Museum of the Moving Image retrospective Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression – which runs from January 13-31: http://www.movingimage.us/lynnesachs;
and
3) for more on Lynne Sachs’ work in general: http://www.lynnesachs.com/
Throughout, Lynne Sachs undercuts the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.
Though the title of Lynne Sachs’s Film About a Father Who is inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 avant-garde feature Film About a Woman Who, a deconstruction of the “ideal” domestic unit, this long-gestating documentary takes a more personal and certainly less abstract look at a less-than-stable family life. Composed largely of conversations with her family that Sachs has captured over the last few decades, the film often feels like the coherent story everyone wishes they could assemble out of the neglected boxes of old home video tapes in the garage. But Sachs goes places that most amateur moviemakers avoid, undercutting the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.
Sachs’s father is outwardly easygoing, a self-styled “hippie businessman.” In most of the time periods covered in the documentary, Ira Sachs Sr. sports a handlebar mustache and a stringy mop of unkempt hair. Film About a Father opens with an early-‘90s conversation with him that comes off like some kind of early promotion for cellphones: While the wealthy real estate developer talks about how much he enjoys the mobility that cellular technology allows in his business dealings, we see him skiing and relaxing, hanging around in his trademark Hawaiian shirts. Methodically but not without affection, the film undermines this projected image of the ambitious yet insistently casual, essentially harmless man.
At first, it’s easy enough to believe that Ira, whom Sachs describes at the outset of the documentary as a loving father, has committed crimes with few victims other than a resentful lover or two and his morally scandalized mother, Rose, known as Maw-maw, who appears occasionally in older footage to gripe about her son’s behavior, which she colorfully describes as a kind of sexual handicap. But it becomes clear that not all of the women who Ira has been with were equal players in his lifelong game of libertinism. As a decades-old tearful conversation with his second wife, Bali native Diana, makes evident, the man leveraged his largesse to maintain a privileged position in all of his relationships, one that kept him shielded from dealing with the emotional distress that his actions were spreading.
For her part, Sachs approaches the looming but seemingly unassuming figure of her father with a frankness that, if not quite unsparing, couldn’t have been easy for her. She structures Film About a Father as an ongoing investigation of his character, with the existence of two offspring he kept hidden from his other children coming as a late-film reveal. Sachs’s interrogation of her emotionally reticent father repeatedly brings her back to fuzzy home videos captured in her childhood or young adulthood, seeking in them some explanation for his behavior, or at least signs of the stories she wouldn’t be able to assemble until later. “How can you look for something you don’t even know is lost?” she ponders over early-‘90s footage of her younger half-brothers playing in the woods, referring to two additional secret half-sisters who were growing up at the same time, unbeknownst to the other Sachs children.
Given the nature of its construction, Film About a Father can feel insular to a fault, but Sachs nonetheless finds her most affecting imagery in her old snippets of home video, with its indistinct lines, color distortions, and instances of “snow.” Part of this comes from the metaphorical redeployment of her footage—like the glimpses we get of the small mountain located on a property that Ira was developing in the ‘90s. Early in the film, the large, grassy mound symbolizes the serenity and ease of his personal and professional life, but footage later depicts the dynamiting of that mountain, just as the Sachs family’s sense of their past is upended. There’s also something specific about analog home video that Sachs exploits here. It’s much hazier and harder to interpret than the crisper present-day digital footage, or the warm 16mm she used to interview her Maw-maw before the latter passed; it speaks much more to the instability of memory, the faultiness of the images we keep with us from the past.
Only implicitly connecting the Sachs family’s problems to the distribution of privileges and indignities under patriarchy, the film lays emphasis on the personal side of “the personal is political.” Beyond attempting to come to terms with Ira the philanderer and the ways his laissez-faire approach to relationships with women has shaped her life and those of her siblings, Film About a Father Who also explores the relationship between recording and remembering, the way past and present inform each other as the stored memories of film and video footage are brought together into a coherent shape. It’s an evocative distillation of some truth from the sprawling mess of documents that a family always leaves in its wake.
Film About a Father Who examines a problematic relationship.
Among the most important, complex relationships are those with our parents, relationships often painful to probe. And yet, in Film About a Father Who, here’s documentarian Lynne Sachs courageously exploring thirty-five complicated, problematic years of interaction with her father Ira. In addition to archival 8- and 16-millimeter footage, she interrogates Ira, grandmother Maw-maw, brothers, sisters, an ex-wife, and Ira’s girlfriends.
And what she learns in her incredibly honest profile is deeply disturbing. For Ira was, though cheerful, emotionally detached and an unrepentant womanizer. His mother, Maw-maw, describes him as a cripple, handicapped, since he had a wife, a mistress, and, as much as he could, multiple women. Director Lynne, his daughter, explicitly asks Ira about his life and behavior, to which Ira repeatedly replies, “I don’t remember.” In her investigation, Lynne discovers two previously unknown siblings (Ira had nine children), Ira’s traumatic childhood, fueled by Maw-maw abandoning Ira to lead her own life, and his real name.
None of these details suggest the truly captivating appeal of Film About a Father Who. That resides in Lynne’s pursuit of an ever-elusive understanding of Ira, of his essence. In her quest, Lynne and her brother Adam describe Ira having “his own language and we were expected to speak it.” They concur that they loved him so much that they agreed “to his syntax, his set of rules,” though they always felt there was a dark hole somewhere in his youth. Significantly, Lynne and a sister also acknowledge a shared rage they couldn’t name for the man called the Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah.
Film About a Father Who is an emotionally wrenching scrutiny of another person, much less a parent. In voiceover narration, Lynne defines her grappling with her father best when she says, “This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry, a story both protracted and compressed.” That she worked on this film for decades acknowledges the critical role her parents, and probably most of ours, play in our lives, their impact inestimable. It may raise the question, “Can we ever really understand another person?” Whatever the answer, Lynne Sachs shows her effort results in a powerful, haunting film.
Film About a Father Who is available on the Cinema Guild website.
GoIndieNow Presents is an occasional column featuring the third Plotaholics, Joe Compton. In these columns, Joe will discuss that state of indie film and offer suggestions for worthwhile media to consume in that market. This iteration of GoIndieNow Presents is a three-part exploration of 2020’s indie film landscape.
Hello, Plotaholics faithful. Joe Compton (the third Plotaholic) here.
Let’s be honest: 2020 sucked. Who knows what all of it means as far as 2021 goes, especially when it comes to Independent Film, which is something I cover over at Go Indie Now. But as for now, I am here to continue discussing the best in indie film from 2020.
Today, we kick off my Top 10 list with entries 10-6.
10. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO – DOCUMENTARY (USA)
SYNOPSIS: From 1984 to 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot film, videotape and digital images with her father, Ira Sachs, a bohemian businessman from Park City. This film is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to eight siblings, some of whom she has known all of her life, others she only recently discovered. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, her film offers sometimes contradictory views of one seemingly unknowable man who is always there, public, in the center of the frame, yet somehow ensconced in secrets.
WHAT THIS FILM DOES WELL: Lynne is a legend, and her style and abilities are at the top of the list in terms of Documentarians and their storytelling styles, but this one is so different. It is almost by nature that this has to be presented as it is, but it serves as a triumph and not a crutch or gimmick. There is no avoiding the fact that not every shot was composed and lit or mic’ ed properly. Yet, in true Lynne Sachs form, she weaves such an intricate and intimate narrative that twists and turns with the best of them. You almost expect there might have been some prior planned composition to those “home movie” shots.
It is also striking because the one being most affected in and throughout is her and her family. So, in a weird and interesting way, this film that starts looking into a family patriarch becomes a character-driven, dilemma story that interweaves the documenter with the subject matter and creates a mystery cloaked in a soap opera-type drama. The fun aspects are the ratio and framing of a lot of raw footage that gets shot over time on many different devices and how it enhances the experiences of the narrative–a skill set that editor Rebecca Shapass clearly possesses in spades.
Documentaries are often that idea that what you see is not what you will get in the end, and in a way because of the brave way in which Lynne chooses to put herself out there, comfortable or not, we really see a 4th wall crash that presents such a compelling and shocking result. In talking to her, I know this was a choice that was not easy to make. Yet this film has very few moments of bleakness and never are they overt–another display of the skill set that Lynne possesses as a proven Documentarian. Instead it chooses naturally to highlight and enhance the positive aspects of the reveals, which makes you wish your family or life was half as interesting as this one.
The Hoboken Museum & the Thomas Edison Black Maria Film Festival is pleased to host this special installment of “Meet the Filmmakers,” a lively pre-recorded discussion with Festival Director Jane Steuerwald and artist, feminist, activist, filmmaker, Lynne Sachs. Lynne’s work is supported by the Jerome Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and NY State Council on the Arts. Her films have screened at MoMA, Sundance, the New York FIlm Festival and venues around the world.
Women and Hollywood Feature – January 2021 Preview December 31, 2021 By Tatiana McInnis and Shayna Maci Warner
2020 has been an exercise of endurance, unspeakable loss, tragedy, anxiety, and rage, the scale of which cannot be addressed in any piece of writing. Many truths have been exposed this year, including that we are deeply invested in the stories we tell about our world — and other worlds! Many of us sought and found solace on screen, whether through binge-watching, virtual cinemas, or Zoom. While the challenging truths and issues laid bare in 2020 will not leave us when the clock strikes midnight on the 31st, we are hopeful about the stories we will tell, hear, and see in 2021.
Premiering January 1, Roseanne Liang’s “Shadow in the Cloud” follows Chloë Grace Moretz as Captain Maude Garrett, a female flight captain navigating the challenges of WWII air warfare and the sexism of her crew.
Viewers can get an in-depth look at the life, loves, and career of beloved star Audrey Hepburn in Helena Coan’s “Audrey” (January 5). In a similar vein, they can learn more about an acclaimed artist and the eccentric collectors who will do anything to get ahold of his work with Oeke Hoogendijk’s “My Rembrandt” (January 6). Meanwhile, Yu Gu’s “A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem” (January 26) chronicles two former NFL cheerleaders’ legal fight for fair pay.
The month rounds out with two family dramas, Fernanda Valadez’s “Identifying Features” and Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “Our Friend,” both out January 22. The former sees a Mexican woman trying to find out what happened to her son, who crossed the border into the U.S. and hasn’t been heard from since. “Our Friend” is about a family rocked by their matriarch’s terminal cancer diagnosis, and the friend who offers to help them in their time of need.
Here are the women-centric, women-directed, and women-written films debuting in January. All descriptions are from press materials unless otherwise noted.
JANUARY 15
“Film About a Father Who” (Documentary) – Directed by Lynne Sachs (Available in Virtual Cinemas)
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8mm 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.
Orange Glow A film by Lynne Sachs (text) and Laura Harrison (image) 1 min. 30 sec., 2020
Description In September 2020, Lynne Sachs was disturbed by the television images of San Francisco enveloped in wildfire smoke. When she looked at artist Laura Harrison’s gestural painting, she felt as if she was watching the eerie skies of California unfurl on the canvas. Together, Sachs’ words and Harrison’s images respond in horror to the devastating ecological disasters.
Text A face crumbling blueness fragment building crag in fuchsia light is not space but a stroke a swim a brush indivisible from the eye that carves sight some light is bulb and some is sun inside the gem each stroke so different a face in a frame becomes a wistful and also a box triangle home.
Enter fire. Enter smoke from the West caught in the air quality index of a dark 2 PM now hermetic hospitality dust in your lungs smoke in your ears.
Yes, I can hear the ringing in your ears rubbed by this image you made, not really San Francisco now but is for me, becomes that place. Sends me there. Feel the heat. Nothing comes through the fog but the heat, the crackling of the burning brush underfoot, the heat, the worry, and through it all a line drawing itself spitting in motion in liquid.
Laura Harrison: “I wrote a text that became the painting for Orange Glow. Though the poem was supposed to be about air b and bs as escape hatches for covid ravaged California, the poem also suggested fires. The poem describes falling down red carpeted steps for the Oscars into hell. I painted the painting listening to my own poem over and over. My strokes were informed by it and out came a scabrous looking face.
Bios Laura Harrison lives and works in Chicago. Her animations focus on marginalized, social outcasts with their own sub cultures. These fringe characters provide a focal point for her concerns with diaspora, trans humanism, gender and the loss of touch in an overwhelmingly visual world. Her films have shown at various festivals internationally including The New York Film Festival, Ottowa International Animation Festival, Japan Media Arts Festival, Boston International Film Festival, Florida Film Festival, GLAS, Animafest Zagreb, VOID and Melbourne International Animation Festival. Her work has garnered many prizes, most recently a Guggenheim and Best Animation at Mammoth Lakes Film Festival.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from experimental shorts to essay films to hybrid live performances. She has made 37 films included in retrospectives at Buenos Aires International Festival of Cinema, Havana Film Festival, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/ Fest. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Tender Buttons Press recently published Lynne’s book Year by Year Poems.
2020 comes to an end, and with it, a great twist of the screw that seems to return the world to a primitive state, to recognize its own fragility and the precariousness of an economic and social system that crumbles like a house of cards. In the midst of chaos, at home, we take refuge in the light pulses of the cinema, in the rhythmic variations, in the echo of the sounds of our televisions, computers, screens. This is the record of a cinephilia that resists, that remains and reinvents itself. Within the chaos, the light of the cinema continues to shine on us.
2020 llega a su fin, y con el, un gran giro de tuerca que parece devolver al mundo a un estado primigenio, a reconocer su propia fragilidad y lo precario de un sistema económico/social que cae como una casa de cartas. En medio del caos, en casa, nos refugiamos en los pulsos lumínicos del cine, en las variantes rítmicas, en el eco de los sonidos de nuestros televisores, computadoras, pantallas. Este es el registro de una cinefilia que resiste, que permanece y se reinventa. Dentro del caos, la luz del cine nos sigue alumbrando.
Ivonne Sheen Filmmaker, Film critic, staff Desistfilm (Peru)
After a year of many symbolic and real deaths, my relationship with cinema is also changing. A year full of emotional oscillations, due to constant changes and / or uncertainties. A year with limited emotional storage space, with nearby suffering and with radicalized inequalities. A year that feels multiplied in its duration. I share this list as an acknowledgment to those filmmakers and artists, whose work has given me experiences of wonder, questioning, learning, thinking, of encountering in the distance.
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Luego de un año de muchas pérdidas vitales, mi relación con el cine también se viene transformando. Un año lleno de oscilaciones emocionales, debido a los constantes cambios y/o incertidumbres, un año con poco espacio de almacenamiento afectivo, con mucho sufrimiento circundante y con mucha desigualdad radicalizada. Un año que se siente multiplicado en su duración. Comparto esta lista como un agradecimiento a aquellas y aquellos cineastas/artistas, cuyos trabajos me han dado experiencias de asombro, de cuestionamiento, de aprendizaje, de pensamiento, de encuentro a la distancia.
En orden alfabético (alphabetical order):
A month of single frames (2019) – Lynne Sachs Asparagus (1979) – Suzan Pit Como el cielo después de llover (2020) – Mercedes Gaviria E Unum Pluribus (2020) – Libertad Gills Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit (2019) – Thomas Heise Judy versus Capitalism (2020) – Mike Hoolboom La obra audiovisual de María Galindo (vista en Youtube y Vimeo). La obra de Sarah Maldoror (vista en muestras del Museo Reina Sofía y de Another Gaze). Les Prostituées de Lyon parlent (1975) – Carole Roussopoulos Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2019) – Eliza Hittman Oh My Homeland (2019) – Stephanie Barber Río Turbio (2020) – Tatiana Mazú Self-portrait film series (2010-2019) – Zhang Mengqi So many ideas impossible to do all (2019) – Mark Street Thorax (2019) – Siegfried A. Fruhauf Variety (1983) – Bette Gordon Vision Nocturna (2019) – Carolina Moscoso
Thoughts on the Shift from Screen to Stream in our 2020 Pandemitime Lynne Sachs May 2020 http://www.mfj-online.org/
Most of us can recount the thirty days of March 2020 like a story, each day representing a chapter in a narrative comprised of bewilderment, apprehension, tension, drama and fear. To use the word “overwhelming” is less hyperbolic than it is obvious. Words could not describe…. and yet we tried to find them. From the start, whenever and wherever that may be, we were all characters in a complex, interwoven dynamic that became enormous and global so quickly, we hardly knew what was happening.
In the spring of 2019, I was invited to be on the Ann Arbor Film Festival jury which would be held March 24 to 30 of 2020. I had a year to anticipate the experience of seeing and discussing a multitude of new short films with my fellow jurors in a town renowned for its passion for experimental cinema. Just a few weeks before the 2020 festival was to begin, my two adult daughters mounted a campaign to convince me that the Corona Virus had become so profoundly threatening that I needed to curtail all of my travel plans. I would be putting myself and our family in danger simply flying from NYC to Michigan. I might also be harming other people by asymptomatically carrying the virus from one place to another. Something was happening to our zeitgeist but no one knew what it was.
I have been making and traveling with my films for thirty years. I always feel committed to being where I have “promised” to be. It was not that I felt invincible but rather responsible, as if the survival of the alternative form of cinema I love so much depended on my sticking to the plan. Like all of us during that time, the Ann Arbor Festival was also responding to a situation that had only recently been labeled a pandemic in the context of their own commitment to presenting the work of hundreds of filmmakers in a grand theater for a devoted local audience. Within just a few days, the festival shifted from being the 58th Annual to being the 1st Virtual.
Not long after the virtual festival was announced, I started to see some surprising posts on Facebook in conjunction with this radical shift from screen to stream. Experimental filmmakers and enthusiasts from around the world were writing about the festival as if it had opened its curtains to an entirely new audience, one that had only been able to hear about this bastion of alternative, underground filmmaking from afar but had never expected to be able to see the films with their own eyes. I’ll never forget the feeling of pathos and exhilaration that I had when I read a post from a filmmaker who wrote that she would not have been able to afford to pay for a ticket to fly from her country to the United States to attend her screening. Now, she had the opportunity to see her work in the context of the entire festival, to feel a part of a global experimental film community. For me, the most moving aspect of the entire virtual shift during the first week of our global pandemic was watching five filmmakers from countries around the globe sitting on their beds talking through Zoom about their work, amongs themselves and with the public-at-large, this time very, very large.
There’s no denying that 2020 was an unprecedented year, so I’m doing something unprecedented: combining film and TV into one year-end list.
Best Documentary: Film About a Father Who
More than 35 years in the making, Lynne Sachs’ portrait of her mercurial father, legendary Memphis bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., is as raw and confessional as its subject is inscrutable. Rarely has a filmmaker opened such a deep vein and let the truth bleed out.
