The 2020 Film and Video Poetry Symposium will take place in Los Angeles, California beginning on November 12th and concluding January 2, 2021. FVPS has programmed over 100 films from more than 20 countries, 80 of which will be presented in an outdoor cinema. Our platform has also curated 5 media installations that will be available to the public on an appointment only basis. Lastly, The Film and Video Poetry Society developed and will deploy a 24/7 online streaming network accessible on our website beginning November 12, 2020 and ending December 31, 2020. Through this live video feed viewers will experience a special selection of films programmed for an international online screening experience.
We have pledged to uphold the cinema experience while also making safety and public health our primary goal. There will be no public or walk up access to our events. Entrance to screenings must be confirmed by reservation only.
Cámara Lúcida has the purpose of being the convergence of cinematography surrounded by poetry, politics and sensitivity; like the main axis of their aesthetic and narrative being; purposes that deserve being preserved in a society that, slowly but strongly, tries to disappear the criticism and meditation through the overwhelming homogenization.
Cámara Lúcida distinguishes itself for showcasing films that show the mixture of regards and identities, turning the screening into an empathic place to the public, through film inquiries that acquire their own free voice; making cinephilia a space of coexistence and political mindfulness.
PROGRAM: Ground transmissions · 4 They shoot letters, they write movies.
Notes, Charms: part I 2020 – USA / Ecuador – 27 ‘ Alexandra Cuesta An autobiographical accumulation of instances that describe inhabiting a post-industrial landscape, the end of a love story, and the politics of the intimate and the public. The camera as an annotation and remembrance device, beyond evoking the past, becomes a tool for the appearance and exorcization of specters. A movie as an act to forget.
Playback. Essay of a farewell. 2019 – Argentina – 14 ‘ Agustina ComediFar from the Argentine capital, in Córdoba, the end of the dictatorship predicts a spring that will last very little. “” La Delpi “” is the only survivor of a group of transvestite and transvestite friends who, towards the end of the 80s, began to die, one after another, of AIDS. In a Catholic and provincial city, the Kalas Group made playbacks and improvised dresses their weapon and their trench coat. Today the images from a unique and unpublished archive are a farewell letter, a manifesto to friendship.
Antonio valencia 2020 – Ecuador – 6 ‘ Daniela Delgado Viteri An imaginary dialogue.
Here and there 2019 – Argentina – France – 21 ‘ Melisa Liebenthal Here and there is an essay that asks about the meaning of being at home. The filmmaker uses photographs, maps and Google Earth to connect sites around the globe, not only belonging to her past, but also to her family’s complex migratory history, dating back to Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China. . The real and the virtual are equally confusing: here or there? Maybe both at the same time.
A Month of Single Frames 2020 – USA – 14 ‘ Lynne SachsIn 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a month-long art residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The hut had no running water or electricity. While there, he shot a 16mm film, recorded sounds, and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own death process by reviewing her personal file. She gave all her images, sounds, and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a movie.
Over a 35-year period (1984–2019), acclaimed experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs filmed a considerable amount of footage of and about her father, Ira Sachs, an eccentric, Bohemian businessman from Park City, Utah. The skillfully edited images – captured on film, video and digital media – form a puzzling portrait of a man she loves but doesn’t truly know. Questioning her mother and eight siblings (some of whom she met only recently) and several of her father’s girlfriends, Sachs takes a non-judgmental look at the contradictions of a man who keeps many secrets even as he fills the screen. Through him, the director tries to unpack the complexity of the emotions that shape family relationships. (Charlotte Selb)
“Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” by Lynne Sachs 3 min. 16mm b&w, sound, 2020
In July 1971, avant-garde writer and language poet Bernadette Mayer produced Memory, a multimedia project in which she shot one roll of 35mm film each day and kept a daily journal. In honor of the project’s compilation and release as a book, Lynne Sachs embarks on a study of the memory and language of place. Journeying to Mayer’s childhood home in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens, Sachs pays homage to Mayer in a collage of architecture, light, and rhythm.
Text from “Memory” by Bernadette Mayer published by Siglio Press, 2020 – used by permission in conjunction with Poet’s House celebration of book.
Filmed at Bernadette Mayer’s childhood home, Ridgewood, Queens, New York
“It reminds me of the Cornell film Centuries of June where he got the young Stan Brakhage to come out to Queens and film. It is totally flowing in the style of Bernadette — the watch faces, the people passing on the sidewalk, the man with the long hair and headband, the black chain, the doorknob …. the leaves.” – Lee Ann Brown, Editrix, Tender Buttons Press
I heard Lynne Sachs read for the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series on Zoom a few weeks ago. She read from her new book, Year By Year Poems (2019), which is a beautifully put together publication by Tender Buttons Press. In it she chronicles every year of her life from her birth to 2011, the year she turned 50.
In reading Year By Year Poems everyone brings their own experiences remembering that year and what it meant. Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker. Filmmakers give the gift of cherished time because every film has to do with capturing it, not just a still photo, but a long or a short span of a year or a day or a few moments of that day.
In the Vimeo below Lynne Sachs reads from Year By Year Poems. Enjoy.
The spaces we navigate are organized according to the idea of intimacy. We move based on proximity, keeping a constant relational metric between different private spheres and the interstice between them. The closest intimacy unit, ‘me’, is in an ongoing relation with the other, be it a person or a landscape. One projects memories and emotions onto the sea or the mountains. Or strangers start a relationship in a city that is also strange. Sometimes even with the very city and its catacombs. Or one revisits a place that was once familiar, but is now absolutely unrecognizable.
Pain, loss, love and desire may also reach the other in a sharing gesture, establishing bridges and somewhat easing loneliness. Family—a core of intimate relations constantly negotiating proximity and imbued with their own codes—is scrutinized from different points of view. The home or the homeland, places circumscribing and determining identities, are interchangeable notions in someone’s life.
Where do we belong? What belongs to us? In this way we explore the ongoing tension between exterior and interior, the juxtaposition of private lives and public narratives.
Lynne Sachs ’83 editing some of the footage she first started filming in 1984 to chronicle the life of her elusive father. PHOTO: MARK STREET
Every family has its issues. But few have to deal with a parent quite like Ira Sachs Sr., the roguish, hard-living, serial philandering id at the center of a new documentary by Lynne Sachs ’83, Film About a Father Who. Sachs worked on the project for three decades, beginning to shoot the film shortly after graduating from Brown with a degree in history. By turning her camera on her father, Sachs wanted to better understand a man who remained stubbornly enigmatic.
“Making a film provided me with an excuse to ask the questions I’d always wanted to ask,” says Sachs.
The film doesn’t let the Sachs family patriarch off the hook. It shows his charming side as well as the drive and confidence that enabled him to become a successful developer and hotelier. Yet Ira Sachs Sr.’s personal life was a jumble of failed relationships, emotionally neglected offspring, and substance abuse (he smoked pot obsessively). He also fathered nine children with six different women and was notorious for his wandering eye.
“I had different cuts of the film, one that totally forgives him and one filled with rage,” says Sachs. “The final version falls somewhere between those poles. I hope it gives audiences permission to dig deep with their own parents.”
As a director, Sachs has a penchant for tackling challenging subjects, making movies about everything from an Israeli filmmaker killed near the West Bank (States of Unbelonging) to New York City laundromats (The Washing Society). She also recently published Year by Year, her first collection of poetry. Sachs credits Brown, and particularly the late Naomi Schor, who taught French literature and feminist theory, with honing her analytical skills.
“She taught me how to read and how to observe,” said Sachs. “I like attention to detail in films. I believe the micro ends up revealing the macro.”
Film About a Father Who had its world premiere on the opening night of Slamdance in Park City, Utah, and screened at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, where Ira Sachs Sr. was in attendance. Despite the fact that the film is an unvarnished look at his life and legacy, the elder Sachs is pleased with the final cut.
“When he watched it, I saw him cry for the first time,” said Sachs. “Part of the weeping was that feeling of here’s your life. I filmed this for decades, so it’s impossible to not watch it and feel the vulnerability of your own passage.”
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Film About a Father Who will be released in U.S. theaters soon. Lynne Sachs’ first book of poetry, Year by Year Poems is out now from Tender Buttons Press. For more information on Sachs’ work, please see: http://www.lynnesachs.com/
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who grew up in Memphis and is currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from short experimental films, to essay films to hybrid live performances.
Her latest project premiered Wednesday, October 21, Opening Night of the 23rd Annual Indie Memphis Film Festival. Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, 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. 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.
“FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is a personal meditation on our dad, specifically, and fatherhood and masculinity more generally. The film is one of Lynne’s most searingly honest works. Very proud of my sister, as I have been since we were kids, and so deeply inspired.” – Filmmaker & brother, Ira Sachs, Jr.
Kacky Walton spoke to Lynne about this cinematic journey of discovery.
We’ve spoken a lot about female film-makers in our previous episodes, but this time we are lucky enough to talk TO three fantastic female film-makers.
Join @thefilmbee with League members @rosasreviews, @valeriekalfrin, @jmamenn and @shespoiledit to talk about the issues faced by female film-makers, and discuss ideas on how these can be resolved.
We are lucky to be joined by: Sarah Macgregor (@filmcafeco-op) Lynne Sachs (@lynnesachs1) Sara Beth Edwards (@sbedwardsbaby)
Find out more about Sarah at http://filmcafeco-op.com/
Find out more about Lynne at http://lynnesachs.com/ (If you are interested in Lynne’s Film and Poetry workshop, please check out: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/frames-stanzas-a-film-and-poetry-workshop-tickets-122491546513?aff=erelpanelorg)
Find out more about SB at https://www.kissoffentertainment.com/
