From The Father to Dick Johnson Is Dead to Falling to Minari, 2020 has been an exemplary year for films exploring all facets of fatherhood. Premiering at Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year and now arriving in Virtual Cinemas next month, another poignant entry in this category is Lynne Sachs’ documentary Film About a Father Who. Featuring materials shot over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019 by Sachs herself, the film explores her father Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah, which leads to many unexpected discoveries. Set for a nationwide Virtual Cinema release beginning on January 15, Museum of Moving Image will also hold a a director retrospective that features five programs in their Virtual Cinema, from January 13-31.
Jared Mobarak said in his Slamdance Film Festival review earlier this year, “While director Lynne Sachs admits her latest documentary Film About a Father Who could be superficially construed as a portrait (the title alludes to and the content revolves around her father Ira), she labels it a reckoning instead. With thirty-five years of footage shot across varied formats and devices to cull through and piece together, the result becomes less about providing a clear picture of who this man is and more about understanding the cost of his actions. Whether it began that way or not, however, it surely didn’t take long to realize how deep a drop the rabbit hole of his life would prove. Sachs jumped in to discover truths surrounding her childhood only to fall through numerous false bottoms that revealed truths she couldn’t even imagine.”
“Compelling interviews with notables in avant-garde cinema offer insights into moving image art – its creative processes, formative influences, and hidden psychic effects. Strange Questions links powerful personal stories with the contemporary media-scape.”
MESS – (Media Ecology Soul Sessions) – archives – Interviews In Print Storage GERRY FIALKA’s INTERVIEWS have been one-on-one and before live audiences (as in the MESS Series) since the mid-70’s.
Gerry Fialka interviews Lynne Sachs, Venice, California, October 25th, 2008
At first glance, Lynne Sachs’ latest documentary comes across as another iteration on the now all-too-common work of ‘personal archaeology’ in which filmmakers trace their roots through public and private archives, at times rending open the specific ways their unhappy families have been dysfunctional. Sachs, for one, employs home movies shot over half a century in half a dozen formats—8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV and digital—by herself, her father and her siblings, filmmakers Dana and Ira Sachs. The material turns around their father, Ira Sachs Sr., a ‘hippie businessman’ who sowed his wild oats across the world and virtually birthed a baseball team. Senior’s constant womanizing comes down heavily upon his children, some of whom have known the existence of the others only after decades, but also upon his mother, with whom he nevertheless shares a close but complicated relationship. Sachs weaves through years’ worth of footage and layers it carefully into a simple, direct account with a voiceover addressed at the audience. She takes what could’ve been a narrow family melodrama into much stickier territory. As she says, the film isn’t a portrait of her father, but a meditation on relationships with this man as the connecting element. Sachs and her siblings sit with their father, now infirm with age, and ask him to recollect episodes from the past. What do they expect? Confession? Reckoning? Simple testimony wrought from a gradually vanishing consciousness? Sachs goes beyond all gut responses to her father’s behaviour—disappointment, rage, disgust—towards a complex human reality that can elicit only inchoate sentiments, as suggested by the film’s incomplete title. She isn’t filming people or their stories, but the spaces between people, and how these spaces are always mediated by the actions of others. Senior’s wayward life, itself rooted perhaps in a traumatic childhood, profoundly shapes the way his children look at each other. Two living room discussions are intercut as though they are unfolding in the same space, the only way the filmmaker is able to bridge these invisible branches of the family tree. Sachs’ film is ostensibly a massive unburdening project for her; that she has been able to draw out its broader implications is a significant accomplishment.
In addition to top 2020 releases, we invited our friends and contributors to submit lists of 2020 “first viewings” and discoveries, broadly defined. Below, please find their wonderful, weird, and endlessly fascinating responses, along with their individual 2020 lists as applicable.
Here are the critics who listed it:
SARAH FENSOM
Film About a Father Who Portrait of a Lady on Fire (You’ll Make It In) Florida Losing Ground War and Peace (1968) House of Games How to Beat the High Cost of Living The Skin The Potluck and the Passion Cactus Flower Dry Summer Last Hurrah for Chivalry Wolfen Happy Go Lucky The Pilgrim (1923) The Big Country Benji In Heaven There Is No Beer? Under the Volcano How the West Was Won A Midwinter’s Tale (aka In the Bleak Midwinter) Grandma’s Boy (1922) Jack-o The Pruitt-Igoe Myth Great Expectations (1946) Images
CHRIS SHIELDS Babyteeth Film About a Father Who Sonic the Hedgehog Portrait of a Lady on Fire
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES is also listed:
INNEY PRAKASH
1. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
2. Infinity Minus Infinity (The Otolith Group)
3. Circumstantial Pleasures (Lewis Klahr)
4. I’ve Been Afraid (Cecelia Condit)
5. A Month of Single Frames (Lynne Sachs)
6. Shirley (Josephine Decker)
7. Talking About Trees (Suhaib Gasmelbari)
8. Mangrove (Steve McQueen)
9. Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnsonn)
10. The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary)
ONLINE RETROSPECTIVE
Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression
January 13–31, 2021
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, the Museum is pleased to present 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 Sach’s temporal portrait of her daughter.
Organized by Assistant Curator of Film Edo Choi. Special thanks to Canyon Cinema and Cinema Guild for their support in organizing this program.
All films will be presented in MoMI’s Virtual Cinema, including a new video interview between Lynne Sachs and Edo Choi, which will be available exclusively to ticket holders.
Tickets: An all-series pass (including Film About a Father Who) is available for $30 ($26 MoMI members). A pass for just the repertory portion is $20 ($16 members) / individual program tickets are $5. Tickets for Film About a Father Who are $12 ($10 members).
All films are directed by Lynne Sachs.
Program 1: Early Dissections
In her first three films, Sachs performs an exuberant autopsy of the medium itself, reveling in the investigation of its formal possibilities and cultural implications: the disjunctive layering of visual and verbal phrases in Still Life with Woman and Four Objects; un-split regular 8mm film as a metaphorical body and site of intercourse in the optically printed Drawn and Quartered; the scopophilic and gendered intentions of the camera’s gaze in Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning. These experiments anticipate the range of the artist’s mature work, beginning with her first essayistic collage The House of Science: a museum of false facts. Itself an autopsy, this mid-length film exposes the anatomy of western rationalism as a framework for sexual subjugation via a finely stitched patchwork of sounds and images from artistic renderings to archival films, home movies to staged performances.
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986, 4 mins.) Drawn and Quartered (1987, 4 mins. New HD presentation) Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987, 9 mins.) The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991, 30 mins. New HD presentation)
Program 2: Family Travels
One of Lynne Sachs’s most sheerly beautiful films, Which Way Is East is a simultaneously intoxicating and politically sobering diary of encounters with the sights, sounds, and people of Vietnam, as Sachs pays a visit to her sister Dana and the two set off north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The film is paired here with a very different kind of family journey The Last Happy Day, recounting the life of Sachs’s distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Jewish Hungarian doctor who survived the Second World War and was ultimately hired to reassemble the bones of dead American soldiers. Here Sachs journeys through time as opposed to space, as she assembles a typically colorful array of documentary and performative elements, including Sandor’s letters, a children’s performance, and highly abstracted war footage, to bring us closer to a man who bore witness to terrible things. This program also features The Last Happy Day’s brief predecessor, The Small Ones. Program running time: 73 mins.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994, 33 mins. New HD presentation) The Small Ones (2007, 3 mins.) The Last Happy Day (2009, 37 mins.)
Program 3: Time Passes
Twenty years unspool over nine short films: portraits of Lynne Sachs’s children; visits with her mother, brother, niece and nephew; a tribute to the city where she lives; and scenes of sociopolitical trauma and protest. Nearly all shot on super 8mm or 16mm, and often silent, each work is at once a preservation of a moment and a record of change, seamlessly weaving together the candid and the performed gesture, the public and the private memory, in a simultaneously objective and subjective posture toward the passing of time. Program running time: 51 mins.
Photograph of Wind (2001, 4 mins.) Tornado (2002, 4 mins.) Noa, Noa (2006, 8 mins.) Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008, 11 mins.) Same Stream Twice (2012, 4 mins.) Viva and Felix Growing Up (2015, 10 mins.) Day Residue (2016, 3 mins.) And Then We Marched (2017, 3 mins.) Maya at 24 (2021, 4 mins. World premiere)
Program 4: Your Day Is My Night
2013, 64 mins. “This bed doesn’t necessarily belong to any one person,” someone says early in Your Day Is My Night. It could be the metaphorical thesis of this film, perhaps Lynne Sachs’s most self-effacing and meditative work. A seamless blend of closely observed verité footage, interpretive performance, and confessional monologues and interviews, the film doesn’t document so much as create a space to accommodate the stories and experiences of seven Chinese immigrants from ages 58 to 78 who live together in a “shift-bed” apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Sachs’s quilted sense of form achieves a new level of refinement and delicacy in collaboration with her cameraman Sean Hanley and her editor Amanda Katz, as she works with the participants to exhume a collective history of migration and struggle.
Program 5: Tip of My Tongue
2017, 80 mins. Sachs’s richly generative Tip of My Tongue finds the filmmaker responding to her 50th birthday by gathering twelve members of her generational cohort—friends and peers all born between 1958 and 1964, and originating as far as Cuba, Iran, and Australia—to participate in the creation of a choral work about the convergent and divergent effects history leaves upon those who live it. From the Kennedy assassination to Occupy Wall Street, the participants reveal their memories of, and reflections upon, the transformative experiences of their lives. Set to an ecstatic, pulsing score by Stephen Vitiello, the film interweaves these personal confessions with impressionistic images of contemporary New York, obscured glimpses of archival footage, and graphically rendered fragments of text to create a radiant prism of collective memory. Preceded by Sachs’s frantic record of accumulated daily to-do lists, A Year in Notes and Numbers (2018, 4 mins.).
NEW ONLINE RELEASE Film About a Father Who January 15–31, 2021
As part of a 20-film retrospective of Lynne Sachs, MoMI is pleased to partner with Cinema Guild to bring Film About a Father Who directly to Museum members and patrons to view from home. To support the Museum, please use the link below to watch the film.
Viewing link will be added soon(Tickets: $12/$10 MoMI members). A $30 ($26 members) all-inclusive series pass is available / $20 ($16 members) pass for all repertory programs (not including Film About a Father Who).
Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2020, 74 mins. 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’s 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. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin and beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. A Cinema Guild Release.
In Film About A Father Who we observe the director’s father, Ira Sachs Senior, over the course of several decades. He is a man both generous and successful, whom we see running a hotel development business from the ski-slopes using an early model cell phone.
That said, we are also told early in daughter Lynne’s ingeniously crafted, searingly honest and ultimately big-hearted film that he defined himself not by work but by the space in-between, a place of largesse and abundance that was generally occupied by a harem of young women with whom he was having concurrent affairs.
His first wife Diane (mother to director Lynne, Ira Jr and Dana) turned a “purposefully” blind eye to his cravings. He wasn’t a faithful swan, we are told. He wasn’t monogamous. He wasn’t suited to marriage. He was more, as is later observed, “the Hugh Hefner of Park City.”
But he was a good dad, it would seem, if somewhat unconventional and both annoying and frustrating at times for his offspring during the film. Director Sachs puts it in grammatical terms. Her mum was stable, with a life punctuated by commas and periods (full-stops). Her dad meanwhile was all question marks and exclamation marks. While her mother’s semi-colon existence suggested organised compartmentalisation, he was a colon, a tool designed to open up onto new vistas. “I loved him so much. I agreed to his syntax, his set of rules,” daughter Lynne concedes.
Of course the more sexual partners your father has, the more half-siblings you are likely to come across, some of whom you may only get to know about when they are in their twenties. By the film’s end there is a fellowship of nine brothers and sisters, each of whom expresses in measured, articulate and non-histrionic terms, the impact of their father on their lives.
Director Sachs explains why the time seemed right to draw this ongoing portrait of her father (35 years in the making) to a close. As part of a film triptych in which she set out to “dive into the thinking of another person”, she had always believed that this would be the easiest to make. States of UnBelonging (2005) was about a complete stranger (a mother and filmmaker killed during a terrorist attack on a kibbutz) while in The Last Happy Day she communicates with its protagonist (a distant cousin of Sachs) via letter.
But Film About A father Who was always more problematic. Despite her father’s cheery countenance, he would always meet her questions with a benign obstinacy. He always had a tendency to answer ‘no’ to questions about his early life, or to claim complete memory loss about many troublesome periods or episodes.
One of the key propellants of the film’s eventual completion was the death in 2015 of Ira Senior’s mother, the centenarian Maw Maw, with whom he had a very complicated relationship. She abandoned the family home with him when he was a young teenager, only for him to be snatched back by his father Harry as they were boarding the train to Memphis. Maw Maw’s decision to carry on without her son represented a Sophie’s Choice moment, we are told.
“There was kind of a loosening in communication, and that was true because that was the time when I met two sisters whom I didn’t know anything about, so it seemed like things were becoming more transparent,” says Sachs. “It all started to fit together. So I thought the pieces are here. Yes, there may be more surprises, but I think that I’ve come to a sense of more clarity now, so I’m ready to do this.”
There was also a cache of film material at her disposal which, despite being an emotional wrench at times, was also decomposing, not that this was a problem in aesthetic terms. “Like old decaying VHS tapes that had been in the garage, I started to see them as interesting, like the texture was compelling and archaeological,” she says. “I came to a point where this film was also giving me the pleasure of the art.”
It would be easy to think about the work as a psychological profile of her father or their relationship, but Sachs is more generous and encompassing than that. Yes, the “reckoning” that she speaks of in the film offered a catharsis for her, one that she experienced through the craft of filmmaking, but there is a collective benefit to her documentary endeavour. “For me the reckoning was that my father stayed very much a part of my life, that I could look at him with clarity, and that I have connections with the siblings who I didn’t know. Now we all get together every Sunday on Zoom, with my dad.”
“I think maybe the film facilitated that in a way, because I listened to everyone who was critically involved, and about a year before I finished I said, this isn’t just my story, this is about a family, so I need to listen to them and I need to hear their angle on it.”
Ira Senior is in his 80s, less fleet of foot now and he doesn’t speak with the same clarity as we see in earlier footage, and he allows his dutiful filmmaker daughter to remove the tangles from his long grey hair. Given his tendency towards secrecy all of his life, what did he think of such a revelatory film, of which he is the focus?
“If you are in your 80s and somebody decides to chronicle or [some would] say memorialise your life, it gives a kind of significance to it,” Sachs responds. “He did say to me that he hopes he does better, and he cried when he saw the film… I don’t think anyone will make a film about my life – or maybe they will, I don’t know – but it gives it a place in the world after you have lived it.”
Returning to the subject of grammar, Sachs responds eagerly to the question as to which punctuation mark best describes her and her films. It’s as if she has been waiting all her professional life to be asked it.
“Ha, I am very interested in ellipses (…), in the dot, dot, dot,” she enthuses. “A lot of the film is constructed around associations rather than chronology – which would have been an obvious way to construct it. The ellipsis is like the fissure between one thing and the other, where you bring knowledge. In grammatical terms, it is interesting because it is like a vessel rather than something explicit and expository. It allows for a lot of participation. It has to be activated by the viewer, the spectator, the audience, because you bring your own energy. It is the idea that you can watch this film in which certain facts are not given, but through ellipses you connect associations or feelings, or your own sense of recognition.”
“So that is the grammatical tool I identify with,” she ends…
………….………….………….…………….
Museum of the Moving Image in New York will present the twenty-film retrospective Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression from January 13-31, 2021. The career-ranging survey, all presented online, will include Film About a Father Who which opens in MoMI’s Virtual Cinema on January 15.
Among other series highlights are three of Sachs’s key early works, Drawn and Quartered (1987), The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), and Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994), which will be presented in new HD presentations. The last of these is both an intoxicating family travelogue and politically sobering diary of a trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The series will also include the premiere of Maya at 24 (2020), the third edition of Sachs’s temporal portrait of her daughter Maya, which is presented as part of a program of films that document her children over a span of two decades. The full program is included below and available online at movingimage.us/LynneSachs.
Along with the screenings, the Museum will present a new recorded dialogue between Sachs and Assistant Curator of Film Edo Choi, who organized the retrospective, covering the breadth of Sachs’s career.
“Over a 30-plus-year career, Lynne Sachs has charted a formal path defying conventional categorization. Each of her films is a self-reflexive meditation into the psychic origins and intellectual process of its own making, issuing from a space between thought and expression,” says Choi. “This is true of her work as early as The House of Science and as recent as her latest and most personal film so far Film About a Father Who.”
About Sachs’ work, Choi writes: “Immersed in questions of form from her earliest, highly structural works, Sachs went on to embrace a more variegated aesthetic approach, incorporating elements of the essay film as well as observational documentary, while remaining dedicated to the embodied, gestural camerawork of the avant-garde. In her most recent long form works, such as Your Day Is My Night and Tip of My Tongue, she has progressed to a process of open-ended, communal collaboration with her subjects, making them equal partners in an effort to create works of multi-faceted and polychromatic dimension.”
In a normal year—won’t it be sweet when we can retire that phrase from our lexicon?—our screens would be chock-a-block with glittery trailers for holiday movies. Our local festival programmers, meanwhile, would be on hiatus except for the year-end fundraising email, mulling next year’s events.
But everything’s upside down in our ongoing Bizarro World. The only major studio films of the season, Wonder Woman 1984 and Soul, are delayed summer releases that will be viewed, overwhelmingly, on home streaming platforms (HBO Max and Disney+, respectively). Festival wizards, on the other hand, are plying us with rare December programs. And are we grateful.Sponsored
SF Jewish Film Festival 40th Anniversary Hanukkah Celebration Dec. 10–17 Online
The SFJFF canceled its annual big summer bash on account of the pandemic, and this eight-day program (to correspond to the Festival of Lights) is the second online mini-fest assembled by the venerable organization this year. The lineup includes several familiar names, including preeminent Israeli director Eytan Fox’s big-screen return to romantic drama, Sublet. The remarkable Lynne Sachs continues her rewarding adventures in personal, poetic documentary with Film About a Father Who. If you missed the crowd-pleasers Oliver Sacks: His Own Life and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit during their previous Bay Area presentations, you have another chance.
As for new voices, Yossi Atia’s slight slacker comedy Born in Jerusalem and Still Alive expands on his short film of the same name. This debut feature accompanies underachieving 30-something tour guide Ronen (played by Atia) on his free daily walks to the sites of terrorist attacks of the 1990s and 2000s. The premise is subversive, if not taboo, but the movie doesn’t mine either its sociological or political implications. Born in Jerusalem and Still Alive suffers more than any other movie in the festival by not being seen in a theater with a crowd, where the minor-key absurdism and deadpan jokes would build to, if not a cascade, at least a steady trickle.
From intimate meditations on nature’s healing and drug-induced becoming, to radical deconstructions of cinema, language and architecture, this programme showcases film’s potential to both abstract and interpret a chaotic world.
Whilst some makers experiment with form and format, disrupting the image itself through corrupted DCPs and violated stock, others look to articulate the political and personal, using film as a vessel for self-expression.
For this edition, we welcome back LSFF regulars Max Hattler (Collision) and Lynne Sachs (Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor) with collaborative work “made with and for” Barbara Hammer, alongside new additions in collective Telcosystems (Louthings) and talents-to-watch Henny Woods and Nicky Chue. Programmed by Philip Ilson. 75′
This programme contains flashing images. Please note, the film A Month Of Single Frames can only be accessed by UK audiences at the request of the filmmaker.
Films
TESTFILM #1 Telcosystems, 14’, 2020, Croatia Exploring the creative possibilities of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) – the new global infrastructure for film projection in cinemas. Can one upset the default behavior of the DCP system, or is the system designed to exclude any possibility of human intervention?
THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR – PART I. Péter Lichter, Bori Máté, 8’, 2020, Hungary An abstract adaptation of Noël Carroll’s influential film theory book of the same title, using hand painted and decayed 35mm strips of classic slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street.
APPLEFIG Louise Ward Morris, 4’, 2020, United Kingdom A study of internet search algorithms’ potential to irreversibly alter how humans form meaning and understand concepts.
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES Lynne Sachs, 14’, 2020, USA In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one month artist residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal.
PLANT PORTALS: BREATH Nicky Chue, 4’, 2020, United Kingdom An experimental meditation on the unspoken history many queer and trans people of colour carry daily, connecting bumblebees, colonial trauma, alternate universes and the complicated concept of ‘rest’ to ask: can nature heal us?
GLF LSD Jordan Baseman, 13’, 2020, United Kingdom Narrated by Alan Wakeman, an early member of the Gay Liberation Front, discussing the connection between the GLF and LSD as an essential part of becoming.
ECHOES OF DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS DURING LOCKDOWN Henny Woods, 5’, 2020, United Kingdom A recreation of uncomfortable conversations from its filmmaker’s past in a time when socialising is impossible.
SERIAL PARALLELS Max Hattler, 9’, 2020, Hong Kong Hong Kong’s signature architecture of horizon-eclipsing housing estates is reimagined as parallel rows of film strips.
CUT UP UP CUT Kristian Baughurst, 5’, 2020, United Kingdom An experimental visual poetry film created in response to the 2020 global pandemic and William S. Burroughs’ cut-up poem, Formed in The Stance.
