Dogmilk Films August 2020 – September 8, 2020 Eclectic Visions Watch Until September 8, 2020|read in English Bahasa Indonesian|vist the archive
Drawn and Quartered (1948) & Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor were available for streaming
Eclectic Visions presents a collection of experimental films created solely by female artists that span from across the globe. Each share vastly different approaches to their work; with concepts ranging from the elusiveness of dreams, to documenting the everyday, they all however equally present a unifying force that is the expansiveness of filmmaking. These women of multi-faceted practices, ages and backgrounds share a deep connection to the moving image, whether that image is captured through super 8, 16mm or digital.
In their own way filmmakers Audrey Lam, Lynne Sachs, Azucena Losana, Adelaide Norris, Barbara Meter and Eliza Roberts aspire to dismantle conventional forms of narrative by blending together techniques from both cinema and video art, and it is through their own explorations and experimentations that we become accustomed to the notion that the ways of seeing and viewing the filmic image can be reborn.
Selected by Veronica Charmont and Lola Hewison
Indonesian translation and subtitles by Afifah Tasya
A Pocketful Of Song Audrey Lam, 2018, 17 mins A bustling market street chimes with the gentle chaos of a lone, decades-old collectible coin and stamp shop in its midst. The elderly shop owner shares stories of the stamps and the world passing by.
Drawn and Quartered Lynne Sachs, 1987, 4 mins In 1984, Lynne’s Uncle gave her a Regular 8 Filmo Camera. He explained to her the intricacies of the camera, warning her not to forget to ‘flip the reel and camera and shoot the rest’, otherwise, he says, “it will appear topsy-turvy”. Three years later, Lynne picked up the camera, she was a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. So, she says, “On one of those rare, warm San Francisco afternoons I convinced my new boyfriend John to follow me to the roof of the Art Institute to make the first movie I would ever shoot in Regular 8mm”. “That must have been the year I first encountered Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’, seen in Carolee Schneeman’s “Fuses”, pondered Yvonne Rainer’s “Lives of Performers”. Sachs explains that she took the roll to the lab, she begged them not to split the film as usual. As she describes, “within the parameters of the image gestalt, we are dancing together without ever touching. Our two bodies remain totally distinct and apart.”
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor Lynne Sachs, 2018, 9 mins Lynne Sachs’ film Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an intimate and sincere composition of 3 artists; Carolee Schneeman, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson. Pioneers of the moving image in their respective art forms, Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor are given time and space to recount their artistic achievements, intentions and lives as female artists.
At Your Heels Azucena Losana, 2017, 2 mins At Your Heels refers to a recurring dream where I arrive in a foreign city and look for a person everywhere and just can’t find them, just the traces left behind. The film was made during a residency in Prague, I was learning to develop black and white film. It was my first time filming on 16mm and as well as in colour. My Czech friends lent me a Krasnogorsk camera and I used some expired film that an Argentinian friend gave me. I always wanted to film the modern patterns on the metro stations, they are from outer space! I edited on the camera, triggering with the shortest possible shot (probably 6 or 8 frames). This is part of a series of short films looking at cities.
Appointment Adelaide Norris, 2019, 12 mins Appointment went from being a reason to bring a bunch of girls/non binary people together and keeping them skating as an opportunity to give room to the minorities within the industry. We were so stoked meeting up n going to skateboarding video premiers that we decided we want do our own thing – it then went from our first video ABD to Appointment which started aiming more so at giving space for people that aren’t often given light in skateboarding, something for those types of people to see and be inspired to do themselves hopefully.
Headless Brim Eliza Roberts, 2019, 14mins Cinema has long been used as a tool to reflect and expand upon time: past, present and future. Headless Brim seeks to encompass these different states, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, and grappling with notions of memory. Headless Brimsits somewhere between meditation and narrative, where as viewers, we are pulled in and out of interior and exterior worlds.
A Touch Barbara Meter, 2008, 13 mins Wordless experimental collage of impressions and moods. Grainy fragments of landscapes, flakes whirl in the wind. Fog and mist, shadows of people in the city and by the water. Silhouettes that fade and turn into pure light and shadow until we discern the specks and scratches on the film strip itself. Sometimes, for a fraction of a second, a face, a person. A film as a memory that eludes us. Music by Alan Seip.
“States of UnBelonging” will be available from 3/9 at 12AM until 12/9 at 12AM Follow this link for tickets: https://docaviv.pres.global/order/69
LIVE Q&A SUNDAY 6/9/ 2020 at 19:00 Lynne Sachs, Filmmaker of States of Unbelonging and Film About a Father Who in conversation with Dr. Laliv Melamed and Nir Zats, co-writer if States of Unbelonging
UNITED STATES / ISRAEL 2005, 63 MIN, ENGLISH, HEBREW SUBTITLES Filmmaker Lynne Sachs never met Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. In 2002, she read a news article about the death of Ohayon and her two small children in their house in Kibbutz Metzer. She immediately started gathering information. Despite the distance, New York-based Sachs slowly gets to know more about the young Israeli filmmaker, who had so much in common with her but lived in a starkly different reality. She puts the pieces together through phone calls and correspondences with Nir Zats, an Israeli friend and former student of Sachs, who acts as her field agent. The puzzle takes her over two years to complete, and the picture that emerges is complex and multi-faceted. Although seemingly different, each person in it is trying to survive in a violent present, while carrying a violent past. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film becomes a cine-essay on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel/Palestine.
The film is screened as part of a tribute to Lynne Sachs, alongside her new work Film About a Father Who…
Previous Festivals: BAFICI (Buenos Aires Intl Film Festival), Margaret Mead Film Festival New York
“Film About a Father Who” will be available from 3/9 at 12AM until 12/9 at 12AM Follow this link for tickets: https://docaviv.pres.global/order/71
LIVE Q&A SUNDAY 6/9/ 2020 at 19:00 Lynne Sachs, Filmmaker of States of Unbelonging and Film About a Father Who in conversation with Dr. Laliv Melamed and Nir Zats, co-writer if States of Unbelonging
UNITED STATES 2020, 74 MIN, ENGLISH, HEBREW SUBTITLES How does one paint the portrait of a father who may seem like a chatty, extraverted bon vivant, but keeps the really important parts of his life secret? Artist and filmmaker Lynne Sachs documented her father for 35 years, uncovering his vibrant, unusual, and disturbing persona with the dedication of an archaeologist. Her intimate film slowly unravels the tangled web her father wove: three women, nine children, numerous lovers, and a complicated relationship with his mother, the director’s grandmother. Years of obfuscations and vague responses from her father have driven the filmmaker to try other avenues of investigation. Determined to solve the mystery, she seeks out siblings and spouses, carefully sewing their insights together into a captivating quilt of sights, sounds, and stories.
The film is screened as part of a tribute to Lynne Sachs, alongside her 2005 work States of Unbelonging.
Previous Festivals: MoMA Doc Fortnight (NYC), Slamdance FF, Sheffield, Sarasota Film Festival, Gimli Film Festival
A Conversation with Lynne Sachs, director of Film About a Father Who… and States of Unbelonging, with co-author Nir Zats, moderated by Dr. Laliv Melamed
Lynne Sachs has been making films for over thirty years. Her work is investigative, lyrical, sensitive, and intimate, and her films raise questions about language, narrative techniques, and the cinematic practice itself. Sachs delegates the storytelling work to her subjects—from illegal workers to her own family—letting them negotiate with her camera. Two of her films are screened at this year’s Docaviv: Film about a Father Who and States of Unbelonging. Both film take the viewers on a journey of discovery, but the roads fork many times over and do not lead to definite answers. The discovery, if it exists at all, isn’t always a solution or a revelation, and the journey is internal and external at the same time.
Sachs’ most recent film, Film about a Father Who, is the culmination of thirty years of documentary work—a period as long as her entire professional career. The film’s focus is on her father, Ira Sachs. Sachs Senior is a colorful and licentious type, and his daughter takes his character apart and puts it back together again through the testimonies of his mother, his wives, and his many children, scattered across considerable distances. The film, much like its title, is an unfinished sentence. “This is not a portrait,” she tells us. It is a space she crafts meticulously and laboriously, unraveling and weaving threads with anger and forgiveness, affection and aversion for a father who (…).
In States of Unbelonging (2005), Sachs follows the trail of Revital Ohayon, a film teacher from Metzer, a Kibbutz near the West Bank, who was murdered by a terrorist along with her two children. Having learned about the incident from a newspaper article, Sachs becomes determined to understand this woman, who was as close to her as she was far away. She does this through letters and footage obtained by Nir Zats, an Israeli filmmaker and friend. Driven by an imagined affinity between her and Ohayon, Sachs tries to figure out her relationship with Israel, a torn, wounded nation. “As a documentary filmmaker, I am always reckoning with what it means to shoot from the outside in,” she says. The two films move simultaneously inward and outward, cutting through layers of language, meaning, and identity.
This year has not been a kind year for the film festival. Several major film festivals including Cannes and Telluride have been canceled as a result of the current coronavirus pandemic, and rightly so. We can probably all agree that the idea of thousands of people from across the globe gathering in one place, standing shoulder to shoulder, and sitting tightly packed inside a small dark room for long periods, is the perfect breeding ground for a virus as deadly as COVID-19.
Some film festivals still took place at the start of the year, most notably Sundance and Berlinale. However, a report from the Hollywood Reporter stated that this year’s Sundance Film Festival could have been the “first petri dish” for the spread of the virus with many attendees reporting coronavirus-like symptoms after attending the festival. However, it is worth mentioning that according to the festival organizers, they are “not aware of any confirmed festival-connected cases of Covid-19.”
The postponement of Cannes this year marks the first time since 1968 that the festival hasn’t taken place since the end of the Second World War. Coincidentally, the festival didn’t take place in ‘68 due to nationwide student protests. When asked about whether or not the festival could take place virtually, Festival director Thierry Frémaux stated that it “wouldn’t work”. However, festivals such as CPH:DOX did make the transition from physical to virtual, with festival organizer Tine Fischer stating, “If we had not gone online I’m not sure that we would have survived.”
And, while we have heard from the major film festival organizers, what about the film critics who have been affected by the coronavirus situation and how has it impacted their film festival experience? Well, I felt compelled to seek out people and ask them about their thoughts regarding the impact that coronavirus has had on the film festival circuit, as well as what the future has in store for the film festival experience. If film festivals were all to make the transition from the physical form to the vertical/digital form, would we not lose something truly unique? Attending film festivals is a major way to network with film industry individuals and allows filmmakers to exhibit their films in the hopes of being picked up for distribution. The right amount of festival buzz can make (or break) a film. Could this be achieved in a digital sense or would we miss out on that special act of social interaction?
Personally speaking, I believe the best outcome is for film festival organizers to host smaller scale festivals once restrictions ease. By controlling the number of attendees, festivals could enforce social distancing quite easily. However, the next question would be – who would be allowed to attend the festival if a limitation of attendees was enforced? Ask any aspiring critic about how strict the restrictions and regulations are for the press accreditation process and they will more than likely express their frustrations. Would film festivals become even more restrictive and selective in terms of what level of film critic and/or industry professional they allow to attend?
Since the pandemic, I have been able to cover Sheffield Documentary Film Festival (a festival I attended last year in person), Edinburgh Film Festival, review films for SXSW, and I hope to help in covering Fantasia Film Festival as well. Being able to access the films via the online Doc Player for the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival made things a lot easier. There were no anxieties about organizing travel and accommodation, no rushing around to make sure I got to the screenings on time. I could simply sit at home on my sofa all day and watch the films I wanted to see and not worry about having to pick and choose films. However, I missed the networking and social interaction aspect of attending a film festival.
Inspired by my own experiences of attending film festivals in the past, and thoughts about the future of film festivals, I decided to reach out to a few fellow film critics and also ask some filmmakers about their thoughts on the matter. Kathia Woods recently covered the AFI Documentary Film Festival which took place online. “It was kinda nice to see the films without standing in line,” she says. “I miss connecting with my fellow critics. A nice part of the festivals are the Q&A [sessions] afterward.”
Woods isn’t the only film critic to have attended a festival in the virtual sense; however, in the case of film critic Alex Billington, his experience wasn’t exactly a straightforward one. “So far the only film festival I’ve tried to cover online is the Annecy Film Festival (the top animation festival in France). It was a disaster,” he explains. “Online festivals are temporary solutions, but definitely do not compare in any way to actual festivals. They said all of their films would be available online. But after logging in I discovered only half were available, the rest were only 10-minute clips. Watching a few of them by myself, at my home, without anyone to talk to about them wasn’t very exciting. I know it’s the only way to run a festival during this pandemic, but it has been a very bad experience so far.”
While Billington had a bad experience with the Annecy Film Festival, critic Cameron Ward’s experience was far more enjoyable. “For Annecy Online, my experience was very positive,” he says. “I don’t have the finances to take a trip to France and the expenses that come with that, so being able to experience the world of animation from the comfort of my home with no real schedule to keep track of was refreshing. If I could afford to go to Annecy France to attend the physical festival, I would. But with everything going on, it wouldn’t have been possible anyway. Going online was a way for animation fans and critics alike to get a taste of seeing what the animation scene from around the world was working on.”
However, even Ward has to admit that “attending festivals in person is fun since you will get the chance to meet the directors, teams, and actors for the films in question, and see new films before anyone else for the most part.” He also explains the cons of physical festivals, but the pros always outweigh them. “[Festivals are] a lot to plan out with schedules to execute, making sure you get your questions answered, walking back and [forth] to different screenings, and sitting down for two or so hours. Like I said above, the pros of it all are being able to see new films, experience the audience reactions, getting to meet the directors in person, and being able to talk to them.”
Critic Max Borg – who I had the pleasure of meeting at this year’s Berlinale – spoke about the prospect of more festivals becoming digital. “Going digital – if we’re talking post-COVID times – should be something that enhances the existing festival experience, rather than replacing it,” he explains. “We’re already seeing that now with Venice electing to be 100% physical (presumably due to rights issues) and Toronto doing a hybrid edition where only some of the films will be available online. I don’t think the online version is much of an incentive to be honest because all of the ones I’ve covered had some kind of restriction, be it geoblocking or some films being unavailable (the latter happened with Annecy, where some of the feature films were not viewable in full unless you were a jury member). And everyone I’ve spoken to about this said the same thing: they miss getting to interact with a physical audience.”
Certainly, the idea of missing out on the human/social interaction side of film festivals seems to be a consensus that most critics I spoke to shared. Awards Watch founder and owner, Erik Anderson, explains that “removing the audience element of festivals and filmgoing misses out on certain key components about film itself.” He continues by saying, “I can watch a movie alone in my living room and laugh at funny parts or jump at scary parts, but more often than not those are less likely to happen or happen with less fervor as an individual. It’s great to gauge how funny a joke is by the audience response or hear someone crying when an earned tearful response happens.” However, Anderson made a very good point which I think we should all consider: “There is a great advantage to people with difficulties or disabilities that would be able to enjoy these films and that’s an undeniable plus.”
Critic Caitlin Kennedy spoke about the accessibility of film festivals, drawing my attention to the fact that not all critics are as privileged as those who work at a professional level. “Traveling to film festivals puts a great burden on time and finances and not all critics or fans have the resources to meet that burden,” she explains. “It’s nice to have the option to interact with film festivals that I previously had no relationship with because it has been made convenient to do so. Of course, with accessibility comes a lack of exclusivity. That “special” feeling of being in a small crowd, limited by time and space, to be the first to experience a film goes away, but we’re at a point where it’s more important than ever for those opportunities to be accessible. Film should not operate under the limitations of privilege. No art should, honestly.” Kennedy’s words certainly gave me food for thought and made me realize how privileged I have been this year to have been able to attend Berlinale.
We have heard that many major film releases such as “Black Widow” and “No Time to Die” have had their release dates pushed back, but what about the future of independent films especially those who were due to be screened at festivals such as SXSW and Telluride? What are their thoughts on the future of the film festival and do they have any concerns about festivals making the transition to the virtual world?
Danny Mendlow, the producer of the documentary, “Never Be Done: The Richard Glen Lett Story,” expressed his thoughts about digital vs. physical film festivals. “There’s no comparison in my mind. It’s like comparing watching a basketball game on your TV at home to sitting next to Spike Lee in the front row of Madison Square Garden. It’s that different,” he states. “You can watch the Super Bowl at home, sure, but how can you compare that to a tailgate party and seats at the 50-yard line? You can watch a hundred really well-produced documentaries of Woodstock, but if you weren’t there in person, you didn’t get to go hang out with Jimi Hendrix after he played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. So I’m not trashing digital/online film festivals, I think they have an important place in things, and obviously, we are all being catapulted into a more digital world, but there’s just no comparison to what a live, in-the-flesh film festival offers. I mean, I’ve been to rooftop Turkish Film Parties at TIFF or Louisiana Film Parties at Sundance and there’s no universe that skyping into either would’ve been comparable in any way.” Mendlow goes on to add that “attending as a filmmaker and film fan is fun and party hopping and networking, but there’s nothing like attending as a filmmaker or team with a good movie that people like screening at the fest.”
David Lawson, the producer of “She Dies Tomorrow,” also shared his thoughts. The film was scheduled to be screened at SXSW but the festival was sadly canceled. Luckily, Lawson and his team were “extremely fortunate to already have a sales/PR team around the film that had anticipated this as a possibility.” He continues by explaining that they “screened the film for a small group of distributors and press outlets in NY and LA and were extremely fortunate to come out of that situation with NEON picking up the film for distribution.”
Lawson makes a good point which I didn’t even consider: the issue of piracy. “The obvious and biggest disadvantage to me on online film festivals is the potential for piracy,” he says. “I think that should be every festival’s number one concern when opting for a digital version. I’m not sure that everyone is aware that most films at a festival haven’t been sold yet, and if a film ends up on a torrent platform it could destroy the ability for that film to recoup its money, and thus hurting a filmmaker/investor’s future potential in film.”
Gavin Booth, the director of “Last Call,” says that, as a filmmaker, he’s “losing the ability to meet other filmmakers, actors, and creative people.” He says that his favorite thing at any festival is meeting peers. “The energy and excitement of talking to creators fuels my own creativity and often you are meeting your fellow creators. There’s a sort of summer camp aspect to it where you find your circle of people at any given festival and share meals, laughs, screenings, and are able to support and promote one another’s festival events.” Booth also stressed the point of directors missing out on the audience’s reaction to their film. “It’s nice to see what works and doesn’t work with the film. When a film is at a festival, it’s finished, but hey, if you see a real sticking point that audiences don’t respond well to, there’s a hail mary chance to go in and adjust the film before you attempt to find distribution for it.”
In a similar fashion to film critics, Booth agrees that the experience of watching the film with a collective audience is something that would be greatly missed if more festivals took place in a digital sense. “Virtual screenings are no different to watching Netflix or renting a movie on iTunes,” he explains. “What we will lose in terms of a viewing experience at festivals is the community. A community of filmmakers supporting one another’s work as well as each festival’s loyal audience that enjoys taking in new independent cinema. It definitely is more accessible. This can be looked at either way. It’s a great benefit that more than a few hundred people at a time in a cinema can see these films premiere, but at the same time, it’s taking some of the mystique away from the buzz a film gets at a festival and then that buzz is used as a groundswell marketing campaign to help bring the film to the masses upon traditional release.”
Lynne Sachs – whose documentary feature “Film About A Father Who” screened digitally at Sheffield Doc/Fest and whose short “A Month of Single Frames” screened at Oberhausen, Dokufest in Kosovo, Sydney Underground Film Fest, and the Gimli Film Fest in Canada – says that going online may be a good thing. “For smaller festivals, I think there were some very gratifying and democratizing aspects to going online. I was on the jury at the Ann Arbor Film Festival in March this year. They quickly pivoted to an online experience and the results were truly breathtaking,” she says. “Basically, hundreds of filmmakers with work in the festival were able to watch the entire festival and participate in live Q and A’s from literally all over the world! My fellow judges and I spent an intense week on Zoom watching all of the films and discussing them. We felt extremely close after this, not only because we connected via our film viewing, but also because we were bonding during one of the most horrific shared times in world history.”
I also asked Lynne Sachs about her thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of film festivals becoming more virtual, and whether or not that was the right direction to go. She believes that “a hybrid model is really the way to go.” “Our society has become far too dependent on air travel which is expensive, elitist, and terrible for the environment,” she continues. “Ever since I attended my first film festival in the late 1980s, I have loved my experiences participating in all aspects of this very special convergence of cinephiles. But, I also think that we must recognize that the cost of traveling with your film divides those filmmakers with additional financial means from those without. There are so many festivals that just don’t have the budget to pay for airfares, lodging, and food for their participating artists. So, the burden of participating face-to-face lands on the filmmaker who has already probably spent money for the festival submission fee. This is absolutely unfair. Adding a virtual component to a festival enlarges audience and artist participation.”
Communicating with my fellow film critics, and also corresponding with filmmakers, really helped me gain a greater insight into how the cancellation of film festivals due to the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the film industry in a way that goes beyond the headlines. Hopefully, film festival organizers will take the opportunity to reach out to filmmakers and critics alike, as well as film festival attendees, to ask for their input, recommendations, and thoughts about the future of the film festival. One can only hope that we can all come together to support film festivals large and small, as well as indie filmmakers and film critics (at all levels) to maintain our love and appreciation for the film festival spirit. Personally speaking, I’m even beginning to miss the early morning queues at the London Film Festival which I used to moan about all the time. It’s funny how you miss the little things in life.
Editor’s note: The interviews included in this piece have been edited for clarity.
Welcome to another Masters Edition episode of Docs in Orbit, where we feature conversations with filmmakers who have made exceptional contributions to documentary film.
In this episode, we feature a two part conversation with the remarkable and highly acclaimed feminist, experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs.
In part one of the conversation, Lynne Sachs speaks about how feminist film theory has shaped her work and her approach to experimental filmmaking. We also discuss her collaborative process in her films including, her short documentary film A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES (for Barbara Hammer), which is currently available to screen at Sheffield Doc/Fest until August 31st.
In part two, we discuss her latest feature-length documentary film, FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO, which will be having its international premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest in Autumn.
Mulvey, Laura. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen,16(3), 6-18, Link
Steyerl, Hito. (2009). In Defense of the Poor Image. e-flux, 10, Link
Lynne Sachs is a Memphis-born, Brooklyn-based artist who has made over 35 films. Her work explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together text, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project.
Sachs films have been screened all over the world, including New York Film Festival, Sundance, Oberhausen, Viennale, BAMCinemaFest, Vancouver Film Festival, DocLisboa and many others. Her work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other venues, including retrospectives in Argentina, Cuba, and China.
She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first collection of poetry Year by Year Poems.
Lynne Sachs is currently one of the artists in focus at Sheffield Doc Fest where her most recent feature documentary film, A FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is presented alongside a curated selection of five of her earlier films.
Rain Taxi Vol. 25 No. 2 – Summer 2020 Lynne Sachs – Year by Year Review By John Bradley
“Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us,” wrote Fernando Pessoa in his The Book of Disquiet. In the author’s afterword to this book of poetry, Lynne Sachs refers to Pessoa’s statement as “an eight word distillation of my endeavor.” On turning fifty, Sachs decided to compose a poem for each year of her life, and that’s what Year by Year provides: fifty poems, beginning in 1961 and ending in 2011. For many of these poems, the book offers an early handwritten draft, adding an extra layer of depth to this intriguing project. Sachs, a filmmaker as well as a poet, wisely avoids trying to encompass every event that transpired in a year; rather, she distills one key moment. Here’s “1969,” a poem that provides an eight-year-old’s view of an historic event that year, in its entirety:
Our telephone rings. Neil Armstrong on the line. He knows I stole the Earth’s only moon. “Give it back,” he says. I watch him step across the lunar landscape. I thought we could be friends. He turns to look at all of us (from the moon) I am the only one who sees his sadness.
The poem feels like a combination of a young writer’s diary, a scene from a short story, and a dream. The end-stopped lines convey the sense of a writer used to composing prose, and the last line of the poem surprises the reader with its unexpected perception.
The most intriguing poems are those juxtaposed with the handwritten early draft, as with “2002,” for example. In the top right corner, we see a list of notes for that year: “security/ Anthrax/ gloves/ Susan w wears/ gloves.” The opening lines of the poem quickly remind us of the national panic that year: “Welcome to the department of homeland insecurity./ I’m with my friend in her car, not far from the Pentagon.” This is the year white powder was found in various envelopes, creating widespread fear; wearing gloves (as indeed Susan does in the poem) was a way to protect oneself, or at leastto create the illusion of protection. The ‘heart of that fear is revealed in the second stanza:
Here you’ll find inscrutable dust, under your tongue, in your nails, your nose, even the folds of your labia. Dust that pushes past security bars and screen doors.
Her imagery brings to mind not only the white anthrax powder, but also the dust from the destruction of the two World Trade Center towers.
In the introduction to this book, poet Paolo Javier informs us that the poems of Year by Year led Sachs to create a “feature-length hybrid documentary” called Tip of My Tongue, an indication of how richly resonant these poems are, with their skillful intermingling of private and public.
DokuFest, International Documentary and Short Film Festival is the largest film festival in Kosova. This year marks the 19th edition of the festival and the first time DokuFest is rolling out in an online format.
A Month of Single Frames will play in theInternational Docs program.
Synopsis In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
The Current Thing started an effort to collect ideas, that were born in the first two months of self-quarantine. Not as a Gramscian response to the experience of radical repression through incarceration, but rather as the search for a line of thinking along which to move forward, while —as Sean Cubit puts it— “Covid reads us to death” (see his essay in this volume). Some of us are in the tragicomic and contradictory position where we live in bubbles while the world burns around us. At least for the current moment, for the current thing, it has an effect on our sensibility: how to engage with reflections on the state of the world born in absence and silence and endless maddening stillness. The conditions in which some of the following texts were written might be compared with other times and places: the self-imposed isolation of the fourth century hermit, St Anthony of Egypt, or, the predicament of the fictional Flaubert of Liz LeCompt’s play and Ken Kobland’s related film, “Flaubert dreams of travel but the illness of his mother prevents it”.
The living planet has brought us back to earth. Dreamlike travels were, nonetheless, recorded. Self-reflections, Weltschmerz, philosophemes, midlife-crisis-ridden disaster-monologues, poems, revolutionary manifestos and other “insights” transformed into writing, drawing, and even film. We asked a number of people we knew to share something about this experience and a group of 45 responded. Besides texts, drawings and collages this journal features also videos and sound files all produced during Covid. As the majority of the featured writers are filmmakers, film scholars or have an affinity with the moving image, not surprisingly, a good portion of the contributions come in the form of moving images.
This past May, MDC hosted our first (virtual!) workshop facilitated by renowned artists and longtime collaborators, Lynne Sachs @lynnesachs1 and Paolo Javier. For 3 days, a cohort of folks from around the world (Uruguay, Ireland, and all across the US) met over Zoom to explore the ruptures and resonances between still/moving images and written/spoken words.
The conversations were wide-ranging: from Lynne & Paolo’s collaborative STARFISH AORTA COLOSSUS (2015) to Chantal Akerman’s DOWN THERE (2006) shot entirely from her apartment; from traditional Japanese Benshi performances to Walter K. Lew’s art of movie-telling revival. With Lynne and Paolo’s brilliant guidance, each participant learned new ways to conceptualize—as well as generate—moving images, poetry, and live performance. What resulted was a collaborative video performance, which meditates on interior spaces, exterior forces, digital interface, safety, windows, translation, and shelter-in-place. In addition to demonstrating possibilities for collaborative art-making, these works reflect a mode of sustained intimacy through a moment of unprecedented distance.
The video included here is the final showcase, recorded from our live performance over Zoom on May 27, 2020. Featuring work by: Caroline Losneck @caroline207maine, Danielle Chu @dd_chu_, Edith Goldenhar @egoldenhar/@return2calaisfilm, Fereshteh Toosi @fereshtehtoosi, Jordon Wong, Kathleen Quillian @kathleenquillian, Laura Harris @lauraluha69, Melissa Ferrari, Nina Fonoroff, Quin de la Mer @i3rstudios, Sujani Reddy @SRedd, and Veronica Pamoukaghlian @verozoneuy.
The Tenuous We
Featuring work by: Moira Sweeney, Caroline Losneck, Edith Goldenhar, Fereshteh Toosi, Kathleen Quillian, Laura Harrison, Quin de la Mer, Sujani Reddy, Veronica Pamoukaghlian, and Lynne Sachs
