Ira Sachs, now in his 80s, started adult life out as a seemingly content married father of three, before transforming himself, later, into a successful real-estate developer dubbed “the Hugh Hefner of Park City.” That’s Park City, Utah, where Sachs has opened a number of properties, including one that is now the DoubleTree by Hilton Park City (formerly The Yarrow), never losing the hippie vibe he cultivated in the 1960s, his slowly graying locks ever flowing. Buildings are not all he developed, however; accumulating lovers as the years wore on, he also built a growing family, not all the members of which were known to the others. Now, one of his daughters from that original marriage, the experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs (Tip of My Tongue) – whose brother, Ira Sachs Jr., is also a director (of Little Men, among others) – has completed a documentary, Film About a Father Who, about her father’s complicated life and her evolving relationship with him. It’s a fascinating probe into the mysteries of the human mind and heart.
We begin with the man today, Lynne cutting his hair, before launching into a past documented via footage shot by Sachs père, Sachs fils and, bien sûr, Sachs fille, among others, from 1969 to now. In a variety of formats, each textured with the look of its respective era, we jump backwards and forwards through time, watching the family mature. Beyond the primary subject, there is his own mother – affectionately called Maw-Maw – with whom Ira Sr. has a close bond, though not so close that he tells her of all the children he’s fathered, lest she cut him off from his expected inheritance. There are also all Lynne’s siblings, full and half, as well as Lynne’s mother and some of her father’s many (increasingly much younger) romantic and sexual partners from yesterday and today. In interviews and many bits of observational footage, Ira appears to have but one obsession: women. But they like him, too, so where’s the harm? That, indeed, is the question.
For Ira Sachs is not just a narcissist: he’s a warm and giving person who is capable of love…if not for very long. As Lynne and her brothers and sisters grapple with their father’s legacy, they are forced to confront the fact that someone who doesn’t set out to cause damage can nevertheless inflict much of it. He’s a man with many shades of gray, for sure. Beyond this multifaceted portrait, however, A Film About a Father Who is also remarkable for its terrific synthesizing of the wealth of archival material. Given the breadth of the narrative span, it’s extraordinary that the director fits the story into a compact length of just 73 minutes, yet, masterfully, she does. Given her extremely personal connection to the story, it’s astonishing how deeply she investigates the good and the bad in a person she clearly loves. This gripping documentary, the opener of the 2020 Slamdance Film Festival, speaks its truth and speaks it beautifully. Let it be heard.
Director: Lynne Sachs Editor: Rebecca Shapass Composer: Stephen Vitiello
Film About a Father Who is visionary filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ method of processing her father’s complicated legacy. The opening of the film — a comb pulled gently through the mass of Ira Sachs’ hair by disembodied fingers — subtly states its purpose and challenge.
Sachs tells her father as he protests her ministrations — unravelling knots, unweaving the complex — this is the goal of Film About a Father Who, and audiences will be split as to the success of this project. Sachs begins with grainy home video footage that serves a literal and analogical purpose. The first purpose is to literally showcase her earlier experiences with her father, and the second, to replicate the hazy nostalgia of childhood. Within minutes, the outline of the tangle of Ira Sachs begins to emerge: fast moving and witty, reticent and loquacious by turns, quintessential capitalist with defiant hippie pretensions — driven by money but not quite given over to it. Sachs approaches her subject with a patient curiosity, weaving different characters into the story with aplomb.
A signature flourish of Film About a Father Who is the film’s clear-eyed but sympathetic look at perhaps the biggest influence on Ira Sachs’ life: his mother. Lynn Sachs takes great pains to show us that the specter of his mother looms over every portion of her father’s life. Ira’s mother serves as kind of an example of the expectations and failures that make Ira such an enigma to his offspring. Although themes of failure, dishonesty, avarice, crave-ness and selfishness make up the core of this story, Sachs never loses sight of the humanity of her subject. Even when full bore denunciation is seemingly obligated by the oft infuriating narrative, Sachs retains an emotional reserve. In this sense, Sachs imitates her subject — this reserve serves Sachs well, as the cast of characters continually expands, with ex-wives and girlfriends, secret siblings, and family members all making appearances.
Quotes from the assembled characters could easily read like witness statements in the indictment of a protagonist’s character, but for the most part, Sachs situates them so firmly within the narrative of Ira Sachs that she takes the sting out of their revelations. In one particular interview Sachs veers uncomfortably close to emotional manipulation but with good reason. Overall, Sachs’ artistic distance from her subject allows her to present the most incendiary moments in an almost matter of fact way, enabling the viewer to make an emotional connection based off the information alone.
The music, orchestrated by Stephen Vitiello is note perfect. Whimsical when necessary, ominous at times, and occasionally inquisitive — the music always adds and never detracts. Sachs also invests this movie with several subtexts worth mentioning: how the sexual revolution unequally empowered men and women, and how ‘lads’ culture defenestrates boys — while never losing sight of her main objective. In certain moments Sachs allows us to see the whirring gears of the documentary, taking us behind the curtain. This self-conscious artificiality adds to the artistic pretensions of the movie and establishes Film About a Father Who as a documentary of both style and substance. Lynne Sachs approaches this documentary with the mentality of an artist, and the attentiveness of a daughter — the result is a searing look at the depravity of toxic masculinity, the destructiveness of secrets and the resiliency of the human spirit.
Criterion Channel streaming premiere with 7 other films, Oct. 2021.
Documentary Feature Award, Athens Film and Video Festival, Oct. 2021.
Best Feature Documentary Audience Award, Mimesis Documentary Festival, Jan. 2022
Selected Virtual Theaters: Laemmle Theaters, Los Angeles; Roxie Theatre, Los Angeles; Philadelphia Film Society; The Belcourt, Nashville; Utah Film Center, Salt Lake City; Cleveland Cinematheque; Brattle Theatre, Cambridge, MA; Northwest Film Forum, Seattle; Facets, Chicago; Cine-File, Chicago; Austin Film Society; The Cinematheque, Vancouver, BC; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Maysles Cinema, NYC.
Over a period of 35 years 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’ 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.
Press Quotes
Sachs achieves a poetic resignation about unknowability inside families, and the hidden roots never explained from looking at a family tree.
—Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
“Explores the complexities of a disparate family and a nexus of problems revolving around a wayward, unconventional, elusive patriarch…formidable in its candour and ambition.”
—Jonathan Romney, Screen International
“In Film About a Father Who … Sachs never seems to intimate that her perspective is universal but, rather, that having a perspective is.”
—Kat Sachs, MUBI Notebook
“Sachs goes to places that most … moviemakers avoid, undercutting the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.”
-—Pat Brown, Slant Magazine
“(Sachs’) own practice can be understood as a process of grammatical excellence; each thought, memory, scene, time and space given pause and punctuated by still more dancing light.” In Film About a Father Who, (she) admits that she is filming as a way of finding transparency. It is the ultimate in searching for cinematic veracity. She finds something beautiful and deeply moving, here…. Film About a Father Who is her greatest achievement yet.”
—Tara Judah, Ubiquarian
“This divine masterwork of vulnerability weaves past and present together with ease, daring the audience to choose love over hate, forgiveness over resentment. Sachs lovingly untangles the messy hair of her elusive father, just as she separates and tends to each strand of his life. A remarkable character study made by a filmmaker at the top of her game– an absolute must see in Park City.”
—Michael Gallagher, Slamdance Programmer
“Here we have a family. And most families have fall-outs. And the ruptured and the intense one in Lynne’s film—amazing documentary—reveals how far blood lines can stretch without losing connection altogether. Though this is an extremely personal film, and asks us several times to really choose between love and hate, she’s really exploring a universal theme that we all think about from time to time, which is the extent to which one human being can really know another. And in this case, it’s her dad.“
—Peter Baxter, President and co-founder of Slamdance speaking on KPCW Radio, Park City, Utah
“The film is bookended with footage of Lynne Sachs attempting to cut her aging father’s sandy hair, which — complemented by his signature walrus mustache — is as long and hippie-ish as it was during the man’s still locally infamous party-hearty heyday, when Ira Sachs Sr. restored, renovated and lived in the historic Adams Avenue property that is now home to the Mollie Fontaine Lounge. ‘There’s just one part that’s very tangly,’ Lynne comments, as the simple grooming activity becomes a metaphor for the daughter’s attempt to negotiate the thicket of her father’s romantic entanglements, the branches of her extended family tree and the thorny concepts of personal and social responsibility.”
—John Beiffus, Memphis Commercial Appeal
“’Film About a Father Who,’ whose title was inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s ‘Film About a Woman Who…,’ is a consideration of how one man’s easygoing attitude yielded anything but an easy family dynamic as it rippled across generations. The movie runs only 74 minutes, but it contains lifetimes.“
—Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times
Photos
Photo collage from Film About A Father WhoLynne Sachs w Ira Sachs in Film About a Father WhoQuarry Explosion in Film About a Father WhoIra Sachs Sr. w Painting in Film About a Father WhoFilm About a Father Who stillLynne Sachs, dir. of Film About a Father WhoIra Sachs, Sr. in Park City Utah. From FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (2020) by Lynne Sachs.
Poster
Poster for “Film About a Father Who”
Film About a Father Who on 9 Best Films of 2021 Lists
WBAI 99.5 Radio in NYC & Pacifica Affiliates “Arts Express” (Global Arts Magazine) with Host Prairie Miller – start at 29 min. 22 sec. – Broadcast week of Jan. 13 and is archived here: https://www.wbai.org/archive/program/episode/?id=9151
Ubiquarian: “The Process is the Practice: Prolific and poetic, experimental and documentary filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, lights up this year’s online edition of Sheffield Doc|Fest with a mini-retrospective, annotated lecture and her new feature, Film About a Father Who (2020)” by Tara Judah, June 21, 2020 http://ubiquarian.net/2020/06/the-process-is-the-practice/
Ynet: Israel’s most comprehensive, authoritative daily source in English for breaking news and current events, “I Watched Rabin’s Funeral, I Named My Daughter Noa – Interview with Lynne Sachs” by Amir Bogen, Sept. 8, 2020. https://www.ynet.co.il/entertainment/article/B1TCDpmmP
“The Artful, Experimental and Brilliant Study of a Promiscuous Father Headlining Sheffield Autumn Programme” by Benjamin Hollis, Oct. 2, 2020
Trust Movies: “‘Lynne Sachs’ ‘Film About a Father Who’ breaks new ground in the “family” documentary department” by James Van Maanen, January 15, 2021. https://trustmovies.blogspot.com/2021/01/lynne-sachs-film-about-father-who.html
Featuring Ira Sachs Sr. with Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, Ira Sachs, Beth Evans, Evan Sachs, Adam Sachs, Annabelle Sachs, Julia Buchwald, and Madison Geist
Editor – Rebecca Shapass Music – Stephen Vitiello
Produced with the support of: New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellowship, 2018 and Yaddo Artist Residency, 2019
In the film, Sachs uses thirty-five years of footage shot across a variety of mediums and situations detailing the life of her father, a businessman from Park City, Utah, and his relationship with his family. Like any memoir, this movie is heavily dependent on the audience connecting with the film’s subject for the narrative to work, and because of Sachs’s obvious passion for the story she is telling, the movie is mostly effective.
The most interesting thing about this film is the morally ambiguous way in which the filmmaker presents her father. Similar to any parent-child relationship, there are plenty of ups and downs, and Sachs does a good job of representing these realistically. Over the course of the movie, viewers will see Sachs as her opinion of her father shifts based on his actions in the moment.
Ultimately, the film does feel like it starts to lose a bit of steam in the middle, but that is because of the extremely unorthodox narrative structure of the movie. While there is an arc in the film, it isn’t made
The main idea that Sachs explores in her film is the obligation that a person has to their family. On one hand, this serves as a document as to who her father was, but the movie is even more effective when it is a complex examination of the role that her father played in her life. The other portions of the film are compelling, but feel a bit more commonplace.
Often it seems like Sachs intended the movie to be a much more emotional experience than it actually is. It is evident that making this film was an important part of Sachs’s own growth, as it allows her to put her feelings to words, but those emotions do not extend to the audience as they likely should.
Unfortunately, this is caused by something that is also one of Sachs’s biggest strengths: her visual style. Sachs has an undeniable command of the craft, and she obviously knows how to tell a story in a visually impressive way. However, the fact that this film feels so aesthetically-driven distracts from some of the humanity that it contains.
Lynne Sachs’s newest documentary Film About a Father Who has some very interesting parts, but it likely could have benefitted from another pass. Still, Sachs’s talent makes this a documentary worth seeing.
Film About a Father Who debuted at the 2020 Slamdance Film Festival which runs January 24-30 in Park City, UT
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.
What shouldn’t be lost amidst Ira’s growing list of transgressions is the fact Lynne loves him regardless. Each revelation is obviously tough to swallow, but she meets them with a foot in two worlds. They affect her personally as far as familial connections go, but also intellectually as an artist capturing this emotional story in real time. So while knowing what she knows can’t help but color him as a selfish person possessing little remorse where it concerns the impact of his choices upon others, he’s still her father. He’s still a “good” man who treated Lynne and her two siblings (Dana and Ira Jr.) with love. She doesn’t therefore pry when Ira consistently pleads the fifth. She knows he’ll never confront what he doesn’t think was wrong.
In his mind it wasn’t. In his mind divorcing her mother was an act of grace because he knew he couldn’t live his life monogamously. That doesn’t stop him from marrying again, having affairs again, or continuing destructive patterns shrouded in secrecy again. Ira is a man of contradictions and impulses that he’ll never escape. He’s a man who’s willing to overlook the idiosyncrasies of others because he wants you to overlook his—comfortable in the reality that yours will probably never touch his in a million years. And with each new chapter in his swinging lifestyle arrives more collateral damage. Each new woman on his arm or in his bed brings with her an ever-escalating danger due to a desire not to hide despite hiding so much.
And through it all is a home video of three children playing—a happy moment removed from the rest. We hope Ira shared similar moments with all his children no matter their mothers’ identities, but that isn’t realistic. To hear Lynne interview her father’s second wife Diana Lee for her side of their story reveals as much even if we get a sense that her sons Evan and Adam were loved. Can the same be said about Mallory Chaffin and her daughter Annabelle, though? What about Madison Geist and her mother? What about the potential for more? At a certain point Ira simply can’t give them everything they need and keep up appearances with a mother (Rose Sachs) who doesn’t approve (and lives past one hundred years old).
Therein lies the reckoning. Lynne and those who came first must reconcile what every new character means to them. Can they love each as members of their family despite initial contact happening well past the point of “normal” introduction? Can they continue seeing their father in the same light after discovering the diminishing levels of economic and moral security their successors faced in part because of what they had? Just because Ira didn’t feel (or at least show) guilt doesn’t mean his offspring won’t once they’re exposed to the truth. The psychological ramifications are too extensive and too catastrophic to sweep under the rug. Lynne’s daughter and half-sister being the same age is awkward, but another half-sister living in poverty unaware that this support system existed is monstrous.
They must all live with it now and deal with the vulnerability of those less fortunate than them, knowing they were purposefully prevented from doing anything to help. That’s a lot to take in and even more to willingly put out into the world via cinema. So many of those on-screen break down into tears because of the weight of their existence within this one perpetually smiling man’s shadow. Some can’t stop themselves from loving him unconditionally or in certain cases irrationally and others can’t wait to use the insanity of their experience as an example of what not to do when building their own families in the aftermath. To everyone’s credit, however, nobody runs from it. They face the challenges of their unwieldy family with open arms.
And Lynne Sachs captures it with immense compassion. She could have vilified her father, but doing so wouldn’t have changed anyone’s current circumstances. Instead she lets his actions speak for themselves thanks to his duplicity being caught on camera multiple times throughout these last three decades. She lets her extended branch of siblings speak their truth and exorcise their demons without judgment. Everything is laid out and they must now do what they must to accept it. This film isn’t therefore about righting wrongs, but exposing facts Ira kept locked away until it either benefitted him or could no longer stay hidden. Knowing their happiness came at the price of another’s pain (and vice versa) is the burden he bestowed upon them. Their hope is to be better.
In FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO director Lynne Sachs takes 35 years of film and video of her father, mixes it with interviews with her family and friends and tries to figure out who her dad really is.
What starts out as a typical look at father by a daughter slowly becomes something else as revelations about Sachs’ father begin to muddy the waters and change what she and others think of him. It quickly becomes clear that there are more than one way to see him.
What I love about the film is that Sachs throws things out and doesn’t tie it all up. We are left to piece things together. If you’ve noticed that I am not discussing the details of the revelations it is because how Sachs tells us things influences how we feel at any particular moment. If I start to feed you revelations before you go in you will have a differing experience than what the director intended. You will also know where this goes and the journey there is the point of the film, so I’m not telling.
So where does that leave this review? It leaves me simply to say if you want to take an intriguing ride though one woman’s life see FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO.
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO plays at Slamdance again on Monday the 27th.(Tickets here) It will also be at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight
Lynne Sachs has been making films since Drawn and Quartered in 1986. Her latest, the documentary Film About a Father Who, screens January 24, the opening night of Slamdance. Her father, Ira Sachs, Sr., helped turn Park City, Utah, into a destination resort. In documenting his life, Sachs uncovers a web of secrets.
Film About a Father Who will also screen at Doc Fortnight 2020, MoMA’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media on February 11 and 14. Sachs’ 2019 tribute A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) will screen in the series on February 8.
Filmmaker spoke with Sachs recently in Brooklyn. Filmmaker: When did you start making Film About a Father Who?
Sachs: I started making a film about my father back in 1991. I think I was interested in connecting with him and piecing together what all the parts of my relationship to him meant to me. By that point I had been making films for about eight years.
It was hard to be his daughter, but it was also great. The hard part had to do with all the surprises, being a young woman and his having a lot of young girlfriends. Where did I fit into that? I kept growing older and they didn’t. That was awkward, for me and my sister Dana and brother Ira.
But on the other side, I thought my dad was very interesting. I liked his sense of being a free spirit, I liked his leftie politics, I liked his curiosity, I liked his adventurousness, I liked that he was very non-judgmental of people, the way they lived their lives, their careers, their position in society. He is the least judgmental person I ever met. And I was both awed by that and kind of confused by it.
One of the things I had to explore in this film was degrees of rage and degrees of compassion. Some people watch it and say you’re not being honest, you’re not really showing how frustrated and angry you must have been. But I feel that forgiveness is a big part of the movie. I was also witnessing some of his struggles over the years. I could see that he was trying to find himself.
Filmmaker: Could you sense 20 or 30 years ago the direction your film would take?
Sachs: I realized early on that there were two ways to go. I could make a portrait of a 20th-century American bohemian businessman. And I thought that’s kind of interesting, but that doesn’t reach me in my soul. What really reaches me is how does a family work or not work. How do we adapt to each other, how do we function when there’s no central organism, but these blood connections make us feel an attachment to each other?
I also thought he was an interesting onion to uncover, but I didn’t know I would uncover as much as I did. For example, I didn’t meet my two hidden sisters until about four years ago.
Filmmaker: Was there footage you felt you couldn’t use? There’s a shot of Diana, your father’s wife from Bali, where she is clearly uncomfortable.
Sachs: I am uncomfortable, even now, going back 29 years ago. I knew I had to finish the movie because I knew I had to use that footage. I knew there was a way I was connecting with a woman who had been through a very convulsive time in her life, her immigration experience, moving from one cosmos to the next.
Filmmaker: There’s also a very intimate moment with your grandmother in a bedroom.
Sachs: In my aesthetic, I kind of put down beautiful images. But that image is one of my favorites, that image and the impressionist image with the children on the hill, those are two of my very favorite shots, so I had to use them.
I’m anti a quality that the digital image has these days, that simulates reality without any kind of mediation. I like mediation. Those images are both very mediated.
I guess in filmmaking there’s a thin line between voyeurism and intimacy. Also, I’ve made so many films where I was allowed into other people’s worlds or homes. When I made Your Day Is My Night, which I made in Chinatown, people always ask, “How did you get your foot in the door? Why did they open up to you?” If you can find intimacy that’s also visual, it creates a kind of integrity, as if — it’s not a voyeuristic thing. I like when people show sides of themselves you don’t show in public.
Filmmaker: People try to present their best selves when they’re on camera.
Sachs: That’s why I did a lot of audio only. That was a big breakthrough. I really like working with audio. One of the things in the documentary I did was I would meet with my siblings in total darkness. We would go into closets with pillows and no light, and I would ask a question and they would just talk. They wouldn’t have to look back at me for nods of approval — “yeah, that’s good, I understand.” All that.
Filmmaker: How did you discover that technique?
Sachs: I’ve always done wild sound for other projects. In previous films like Your Day Is My Night, Tip of My Tongue, I would do audio-only recordings first and listen to them. Then once we were on camera, the people I was filming would already know what I was going to ask. I’m not the kind of documentary filmmaker who thinks I have to throw something at you and you’re going to be unprepared and you’re going to give me your best answer. I don’t mind if it’s more collaborative, that you know where I’m coming from.
I’d also like to point out, I think it’s important to write down what a place looks like. For example, Paris. If you’ve never been to Paris, write what you think it looks like before you see it. It’s important to try to capture your naiveté, especially as a writer or artist. Because once you know the reality, it immediately fills up your imagination.
Filmmaker: Have you determined how your relationship with your father affected your creativity? For example, seeing this changes how we would view your brother’s films.
Sachs: Did you see Forty Shades of Blue with Rip Torn?
Filmmaker: In the closing credits you list the various formats you worked with.
Sachs: That was another kind of journey. The only stable form of technology I used was 16mm film. We still have Super 8, although regular 8mm, that’s gone. People keep saying film is dead, but it’s not. I bought a 16mm Bolex camera in 1987, and I used the same camera throughout the whole movie. Ask me how many different video cameras and eventually cell phones I used. MiniDVD, Hi8, you name it.
I have the same lenses I bought back in 1987. Excellent prime lenses. I love my 13mm lens more than anything, because the image always remains in focus. If I use that lens I can move my body and still be sure I have enough depth of field. With zoom lenses you don’t have to move your body, so you lose that intimacy with the space and the subject. You’re not in the pulse, the texture or the smell of a situation. I wanted to be in the thick of it with my dad. Sometimes it was hard to shoot. The material I shot with some of his girlfriends, they were very, very troubled. That was hard for me to see.
Filmmaker: How hard was it editing with different formats?
Sachs: That was one of the biggest challenges we faced, it added probably six months to editing the film.
We were editing on Premiere, from a six-terabyte drive.
Over the years, before digital, I would transfer new footage to video. When I started making this film I digitized it, but I did it on the cheap, just to have something to work with. The selects, the shots that made it into the film, I then had to retransfer.
With analog material, and this is in the best transfer houses in Manhattan, they transfer to digital, but all the correction has to be done in a color house. So that means if the footage was overexposed or damaged in the analog, it will remain that way in the digital transfer.
Then I started using Mercer Media in Long Island. They have a big facility, they do a lot of work with MIAP, NYU’s preservation program. It’s like a technology museum of VHS, Beta and 3/4 decks. When the tapes are being digitized, they will correct it on the fly by oscilloscope. We would do three different transfers from analog to digital with oscilloscope adjustments before we went to the grading.
VHS is more stable than DVD, if you’re talking decades. Once you get a scratch on a DVD, it’s done. Did you ever shoot Hi-8? What most people did, including my dad, they would have one Hi8 tape, they would use it, transfer that to VHS, and then reuse the Hi8. I actually spent two or three months having people look all over my dad’s house for the original Hi8s, and then I went, “Wait a minute.” You will not find an original Hi8, just the VHS.
On the other hand, we keep shelves and shelves of 16mm in my basement. The footage I shot of Diana and Mallory standing by the window, which is some of my favorite footage — I transferred it originally in 1992, and then I transferred it again in 2019 and it looks even more beautiful.
Filmmaker: How much footage did you have?
Sachs: Probably 70 hours or so. Some of the material is video that my father shot, some of it is material that Ira shot. I tend not to overshoot.
The film was edited by my assistant Rebecca Shapass, she’s an artist and filmmaker in her mid-20s. In the last couple of years she was very much a part of the making of the film. She would sometimes come with me to shoot. We edited the film as a series of 12 episodes that were very modular, not chronological, and then we had to look for the transitions.
Filmmaker: How long was the edit?
Sachs: About two years. One of the things that I learned in the editing is that we have this way, in documentary in particular, of choosing images based on how they look, like, “That’s a good shot, I want to show that.” While we were editing I would say, “I can’t believe what a bad cinematographer I am.” Because I’d be shooting in a restaurant and I’d be hungry and just put the camera down on a lazy Susan because I wanted to eat dinner. Things like that. Or I would not care about the light. Or I would give the camera to a waitress so I could be in the shot.
I was extremely judgmental about that footage. And Rebecca would say that we have to get through that. But I was so disgruntled and unhappy with all the shaking and bumps. Or I’d have a good shot and I’d end it too early. My exposures were off, or there was dust on the lens of my Bolex. All those things that in a conventional sense you would decide, “bad image.” Sometimes the faults would give what Roland Barthes calls the punctum, it gives it the life, it gives it the soul, and it shows there’s a person behind the camera. It creates a formal, aesthetic conversation between the production and the result.
The other thing I learned from the footage was [about] all the incidental sound, which is a big part of the film now, the sound that happens because the camera is on but doesn’t have a direct relationship with what’s in the center of the frame. The wild sound you get shooting video is often very telling. It gives you a feeling of the moment. For the soundtrack, we went back through all material, particularly the VHS tapes, collected that incidental sound, and used it for the mix.
There are two sound people who are very important to this film. One is Kevin T. Allen, a teacher at Rutgers. I did the mix there. We would give him those sounds and then he created these collages I’m really happy with.
The other person who’s very important to this film is Stephen Vitiello, who by now has made five films with me. He did the music for the film, and he’s also interested in musique concrète, sound that’s derived from material other than instruments.
Filmmaker: Your closing credits function in unexpected ways.
Sachs: The end credits (by Rachel Rosheger), they’re like diagramming sentences. I knew that the film was about grammar and breaking grammar. One of the reasons people like grammar is that it gives them the sense that they exist in a society made up of rules everyone agrees upon. I follow the rules, you follow the rules. So here I’m saying my dad didn’t follow the rules, but I like grammar.
Filmmaker: You return to one specific shot throughout the movie.
Sachs: We call it the impressionist shot, and to me it’s the most mythic, perhaps the only mythic shot in the whole film. It’s a little blurry. It pops up three different times, from three different parts of one long take — in the very beginning, in the middle and the end. It’s a long shot my father took on a tripod, probably Hi8. Three children are playing in the water. It’s gorgeous. If you talk about classical painting, there’s the little triangle in the composition. It’s exquisite. I don’t know if my father realized how beautiful it was, and I also don’t know if he was standing behind the camera the whole time.
It is about a personal exploration of a filmmaker and her father.
For the opening night of Slamdance 2020, the documentary Film About A Father will explore a personal, intimate look from director Lynne Sachs about her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah.
She filmed the documentary over 35 years, between 1984 and 2019, from 8 and 16mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father. The cinematic exploration of her father offers contradictory views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. The film will show beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As his daughter, she discovers more than she hoped to reveal.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker who explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences through text, collage, painting, politics, and layered sound design. She previously made Tip of My Tongue, Your Day is My Night, Investigation of a Flame,and Which Way is East. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first collection of poetry called “Year by Year Poems.”
LRM Online spoke with Lynne Sachs over the phone last week to discuss the film, her father, and her family.
As Slamdance’s opening film, Film About A Father Who is showing tonight at 7 p.m. at the Treasure Mountain Inn in Park City, Utah. The replay is on Monday, January 27, at 11 a.m. Director Lynne Sachs will be at the showings in person.
For more information about Slamdance Film Festival, visit its site by clicking here.
Read the exclusive interview below.
LRM Online: I’ve checked out your film, Film About A Father Who.
Lynne Sachs: Thank you very much for taking a look at it. You’re one of the first.
LRM Online: You’re making a Slamdance world premiere. How do you feel about this film premiering in Slamdance, since it’s in the film’s backyard?
Lynne Sachs: Yes! I am nervous about it because my dad is a presence there. Although as he’s gotten older, he’s also spent more time in other places. He has been of great interest and appreciated. He’s seen in all his complexity for decades there. It builds on it to show how our family had challenges as well as to stay cohesive.
It will be attractive to locals. I didn’t necessarily think I would have the premiere in Park City. It’s a bit of a shock. In other ways, it feels more appropriate since it’s an extension of a part of Park City; that’s not the Sundance story. It’s how people grow and change to live their lives in a town in America.
LRM Online: You did say he has such a presence, and it shows in the documentary. How important is he to the community there?
Lynne Sachs: That word that you chose “important” is critical because he’s very much not relevant. He wasn’t a mayor. He didn’t own any of the large properties. Plus, he helped start one of the hotels. Whenever there was a big project, he might be involved briefly, but then he had gotten a little bored. He would say I want to do something more outdoors or more Bohemian. The critical part was more of a person who followed his own “use.” You could see that in the film. My dad does not follow the rules. He doesn’t take a traditional path as a dad or a businessperson. Even society might say he plays by his own rules.
That was the wild west thing. We were from Memphis, Tennessee, and people play by the rules a bit more. He wanted to like go west as in “go west, young man.” Everything was more of an adventure. He wasn’t an important person. Some people say a legend, but that’s hard for me to calibrate since I wasn’t there full-time. I know when someone’s a legend, there are multiple sides to them.
LRM Online: When did it came about that you decided to make a documentary on your father?
Lynne Sachs: Definitely around 1991. I was a new filmmaker and getting comfortable with my medium. I was shooting a lot of 16-millimeter films. As I was with my dad, I have a camera all the time. Then I decided in 1991 that I did that interview, which was with his wife and girlfriend. They both had children who were my sister and brother. More than curious, I was trying to reckon with it as his daughter as someone who was trying to be friends with these two women to understand their lives with some sympathy or pathos.
LRM Online: Before I got to the rest of the family when you revealed to your father that you were going to do a documentary– what was his initial reaction?
Lynne Sachs: He was excited about it. That’s a very interesting question. It’s hard for us to transpose ourselves back to the early nineties when everything wasn’t photographed all the time. You could honestly say the whole zeitgeist was radically different from how we live today. In those days, when families take photographs, they photograph birthday parties or holidays or vacations. There wasn’t this notion of let’s witness our lives with a camera.
He thought it was a novelty, and he was very appreciative of it. He had the sense he had this crew following him, which was his daughter. You may know a bit about filmmaking in terms of the production part of it. In one of those scenes, where the tree falls, and he’s standing in what will be a parking lot, I have a wireless microphone on him, and he thought that was a kick. It was so professional and high-tech at the time. [Laughs] He would say, “This is my movie. So I get to wear a radio mike around my neck.” I was learning the tricks of the trade at the time.
LRM Online: It sounded like he’s somewhat opened about this. When you were doing the documentary, did he hold anything back?
Lynne Sachs: Yeah. That’s the second word that you use related to my dad; that’s there that you could answer it in two different ways. We can say yes. He was open because when I was with him we would go out for dinner and he might have a whole posse of people with him. At that time, I had a sense that this wasn’t his entire life.
It’s a different zeitgeist because you can compartmentalize in those days. I think probably more comfortable than one could now where you carry a cell phone, and you’re trackable. In a sense, there was a veneer of openness but also a mystery to parts of his life. As you saw later in the film, I didn’t know anything about it.
LRM Online: Let’s talk about the rest of the family. How easy or difficult was to put that entire story together?
Lynne Sachs: I wouldn’t say easy, but I think that everyone got used to me carrying a camera all the time. They didn’t imagine I would premier at a film festival in Park City, but they realized that I spent most of my adult life making this my movie. [Laughs] They knew that I was super-committed to it.
We’re quite a close family, even with my sisters whom I’ve met more recently in the last four years. In nonfiction filmmaking or documentary, you have to develop trust with strangers or with family. For example, I wanted to listen to every one of my siblings equally, not just the ones I knew better. In that process, the making of the film made the nine of us closer.
LRM Online: Were some of them reluctant or they wanted to hold back because this is an unusual thing to talk about?
Lynne Sachs: When I started making the film, I didn’t know what I was talking about. [Laughs] You can’t be on a mission about your own life. It’s not like writing a novel, and you know what the ending is going to be. I didn’t know that the last two years would go in the direction that it did. I just kept doing it.
There was nobody who said no to me at all. Most of my siblings had seen the film now, and they’d been supportive. But, a couple of haven’t, they’ll see it for the first time in Park City.
LRM Online: Tell me about the production itself. It took a very long time as you compiled 35 years of videotapes and digital images. Tell me about the gathering process for all that.
Lynne Sachs: It’s videotapes, digital images but also super-eight films, 16-millimeter films, and cell phones. I was shooting with whatever the current technology was like, Hi8. Then throughout the whole movie, I was shooting 16 millimeters because it was what I loved the most. Even though it’s the oldest, it’s the most beautiful, aesthetic experience.
In terms of production, I shot most of it, but my brother, Ira, also shot a fair amount. My dad shot home movies, which didn’t make it in this movie, but he allowed me to use them. Only one time did I shoot with two friends of mine, who were professional cinematographers, I got all of my siblings together. I couldn’t shoot it at the same time, so I had put together for a small crew.
LRM Online: Could you talk about any future projects for yourself? Are you going to stick with documentaries?
Lynne Sachs: A lot of my work is what I call personal, experimental documentary, or even call it essay films. It has a point. I always have a point of view coming through the stretch of the whole movie.
This next film, it takes me back to our hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. I’m going to make this film about Ida B. Wells. I don’t know if you know she was. Do you know who she was?
LRM Online: No, I have no idea. Who was she?
Lynne Sachs: She was an African American journalist from Memphis, who has gotten a lot of attention in the last few years. She was the person who did the original research as a journalist on lynching. She collected the data at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century. Very few people know about her. I’m interested in this is the person in my hometown and why we didn’t learn anything about her.
At the same time, you know, there was a whole Confederate part and how one of the generals was celebrated. We’re looking back at how our histories are changing. It’s going to be a personal film, but also understanding how history is constructed.
LRM Online: One last question, and it’s the most important one. As audiences watch your documentary, what is the one most important lesson that you hope they learn?
Lynne Sachs: I’m interested in the ways that families work. Even when they don’t work, families can maintain a kind of intimacy and a willingness to struggle through hard times. It’s so often when there are these kinds of situations or pain, and people say the best way to function is with willful amnesia or running away.
You can find some way to feel love, cohesiveness, or commitment to working through the ways people think couples have to do. But, families need to find forgiveness where there has been pain. It is the only way to manage to move forward.
LRM Online: Excellent answer, Lynne. Thank you very much for taking your time to speak with me. I wish you good luck outside at Slamdance.
Lynne Sachs: Thank you.
As Slamdance’s opening film, Film About A Father Who is showing tonight at 7 p.m. at the Treasure Mountain Inn in Park City, Utah. The replay is on Monday, January 27, at 11 a.m. Director Lynne Sachs will be at the showings in person.
Lynne Sachs new documentary film entitled Film About a Father Who premieres at Slamdance 2020 on the opening night of the festival. It is a thirty year labor of love that chronicles the complex life of her father Ira Sachs. Her new book of poetry Year by Year was also recently released on Tender Buttons Press. Lynne was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule to discuss the film and her process as a filmmaker and writer.
Salt Lake Dirt: The film is excellent. I really found myself feeling part of your family, it was quite remarkable.
Lynne Sachs: That makes me happy. I’ll just say something that happened today. This woman I had not seen for twenty-five years wrote to me. She’s a fiction writer and she just kind of bared her soul about her own life and things that had happened in her life. She had even written a novel about it. Relating to her relationship with her father and she had some siblings that she didn’t know about and it was very cathartic for both of us. I did not actually predict that that kind of thing would happen. It’s already happened a couple of times so who knows where this is going to go.
SLD: I think you’ll get a lot of that up there in Park City this coming week. So the footage goes back to the 80s?
LS: It actually goes back to the 60s.
SLD: Does it really?
LS: In the beginning of the film you see some Super 8 footage of my brother. He looks like he is a few months old,so it must be the end of 1965 or the beginning of ‘66. My parents only shot a total of twelve minutes of home movies and I have mined every frame of it for various film projects. But that’s Ira as a baby and you see my dad holding us up at the very beginning. Then the footage jumped to 1984. That is when I was first getting interested in film. I was shooting Super 8 but also video. I shot in Bali with my dad. So it kind of jumps. But the very earliest footage is from the end of ‘65 or the beginning of ‘66.
SLD: Wow. So its a real labor of love and you said that you committed to making it into a documentary in the early 90s.
LS: That’s right.
SLD: That’s coming up on 30 years. What made you stick with it that long?
LS: I have two answers. One is that I was kind of intimidated by it and so everytime someone in my family would say, “Lynne, when are you going to finish that movie about dad?” I’d just say, “I’m still shooting.” And mostly, when you have long term projects the only person that really cares about it is you. If you dropped it nobody is going to say, “Whatever happened to…” But they were curious because I was so consistent. I always had a camera but it was like “maybe she is just collecting this.” There is also a tendency that it’s so much easier to shoot than to watch. You watch it and you have nostalgia. Or you have regret or a given omniscience. You know what happened to this person and that person and you know how those two people really feel about each other. Like an all-knowing narrator and then you kind of don’t want to pretend that you dohave that omniscience. So I kept collecting footage or shooting footage but not watching it. And then about two years ago I said, “I really have to start going through this.” I could see my dad getting older. But I’m getting older at exactly the same rate and so are you.
SLD: Right, right.
LS: So there just comes a point where you say, “If I’m going to do this, I have to devote myself to actually seeing what I have.” So I spent about a year working with my friend who is my assistant and also became the editor while she was learning how to become an editor for books. She is a former student, Rebecca Shapass, and that was a breakthrough. A total breakthrough because instead of it just being my collection of material on my family it became another kind of story that both needed context and also didn’t need context. That became more of a story that people could enter without knowing every single detail. Because I was always wondering how much do people really need to know? How much do I have to flesh this out?
SLD: The film is just over an hour but it felt like you covered quite a bit of ground in that 70-75 minutes. You can tell the editing was done extremely well.
LS: I really didn’t want to do it just chronologically.
SLD: I loved the way you did that. You kind of jumped around, it was beautiful.
LS: I really appreciate that. I edited with Rebecca twelve experimental films (which became the final film) and we let them stand on their own. Then we spent another year trying to figure out the transitions. The structure was not obvious. The structure had to come through a lot of themes and a lot of associations. It couldn’t just be plot driven or life driven or reality driven. So I needed the kinds of relationships, whether it was about love, or rage or forgiveness or all those different kinds of things. I also wanted each of those episodes to kind of function like a little parable in a sense. Like the story of my father having two Cadillac convertibles that were exactly the same. I didn’t understand that that was a really great story until I started putting it together. Because it was like a funny family story. Dad always had those two convertibles, why did he paint them the same color?
SLD: That was hilarious.
LS: Even when you have a story that has a lot of darkness or pain it’s also the hilarious of recognition. Ah, yeah, I could see somebody in my family doing that. Not laughing at, but kind of with.
SLD: That was kind of early on and at that point it hooked me. I was like, “Who is this guy? I want to know more.”
LS: Oh good, yay!
SLD: You’ve done quite a bit of filmmaking over the decades, especially with documentary. I always like to ask filmmakers this question. How do you know when a documentary is done? When is it time to move forward, start structuring it to the final piece?
LS: I make films in probably quite a different way than most people. Rarely do I have a production phase and then a post production phase. I will shoot and then I’ll start to edit. I usually edit from the middle backwards and forwards. So I have to climb my way out of the center of it or of a scene that I know works. Sometime in my films I actually don’t know the ending until the editing stops because that keeps me interested. The process remains really alive. It’s exciting to me if I can keep myself both confused and committed. I don’t really know what this is about. I always say, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever made, and this film I can definitely say that. It’s really like a desperate look for structure. In a lot of documentaries, especially character driven documentaries, people say I have to find the character and then we’ll apply something that comes from literature like a storyline with characters and then a conflict and then a resolution. But I don’t really edit that way or shape things that way.
SLD: That’s really cool. Such an interesting approach.
LS: I actually think the downfall of so many documentaries has been that people impose the expectations and the paradigms of fiction films and I think that is oppressive. It shouldn’t be that.
SLD: That makes a lot of sense. One last question. You’ll be doing a reading at Dolly’s Bookstore on Sunday the 26th.
LS: Thank you for mentioning that!
SLD: The book is called Year by Year. The synopsis sounded fascinating to me. Maybe you could just talk a bit about that.
LS: So I have this new book, its my first book because I’ve been making films for a long time, but I actually have been writing poetry much longer. A lot of my films include writing that comes from my poetry. When I turned fifty I decided to write a poem for every year of my life. I was really interested in that intersection between very public events that you can’t control or some kind of crisis that is beyond your domestic universe or your psyche and when that punctures your private world. So I went back. I was born in ‘61 so I looked at every year between ‘61 and and 2011 and tried to imagine. And also use Wikipedia (laughing), because Wikipedia is extremely helpful. You type 1993 and Wikipedia will tell you every popular song from ‘93, what was going on politically both in the United States and abroad. So when you read those things all of a sudden your memories just come flowing. Most people will say, oh that was the year I graduated from high school, but that’s not necessarily the thing or event that shaped who you are. Like I could tell you that I graduated from high school in ‘79, it was no big deal. But my prom was very interesting because my school was half black and half white and we voted on which band we would have. There were more black students so it was a black band and none of the white kids went, but I went anyway. So that was a big event for me. I’m interested in how that outside dialectic or tension enters your head. I have a poem about the Columbine shooting in ‘99 and a poem about national health care. I have a poem about when Martin Luther King was killed because I was in Memphis and I was just a little child. So that’s how I wrote each one. It does connect to my films because so many of my films deal with history and that intersection with the personal and the public. One of the directors of Slamdance, Paul Rachman, suggested it. He said that there is a bookstore, Dolly’s, that’s really beloved in Park City and its right in the center of town on Main Street, why don’t you do one of your readings while you are here for the festival?
SLD: Thank you so much for your time. I’m looking forward to the premiere and to the reading this weekend.
Little did the moderator of a documentary panel that Lynne Sachs once sat on think that they were stating something controversial, but opening up the discussion by saying, “Well, let’s start by saying that all great documentaries start by finding a character,” but if they wanted a lively conversation, the experimental filmmaker was going to give them one.
“I said, ‘I totally disagree,’” laughs Sachs, still incredulous at the presumption. “You shouldn’t have to go out and search for a character in order to construct your narrative.”
Sachs could speak from experience since she never had to look far physically to make “Film About a Father Who,” but in telling the story of Ira Sachs Sr., she could never be quite sure that she actually found him, even when he’s introduced sitting in her apartment getting his long, flowing grey mane unknotted in the opening frames of her latest film. While it is no wonder that Sachs Sr., a great raconteur, gave birth to a number of storytellers including “Frankie” director Ira Sachs and “The Secret of the Nightingale Palace” author Dana Sachs, he can be seen as a mystery throughout Lynne’s fragmentary biography, compiled over 30 years, as he would come to have nine children with six different partners.
Although Sachs Sr. could afford to keep all in good shape financially, building a successful business as a developer in Park City, Utah, time was naturally far more difficult to be spread around to his various family members living in different parts of the country and Sachs creates a narrative as alternately slippery and memorable as her central character, giving brief glimpses of her own life with her father as well as her siblings and half-siblings and letting questions of his responsibility towards them linger in the air for the entirety of the picture and beyond. As a story that spans generations, “Film About a Father Who” is also conscious of how one era of a family can messily overlap with another, as Sachs probes her grandmother’s hold on her father after leaving her family to maintain her sense of independence and sees how he’s left others behind to preserve his, and the director’s aesthetic adventurousness truly captures such intangible qualities as influence and support, or lack thereof, in ways that can be deeply felt with voiceover that’s occasionally whispered and images that are superimposed over one another at times.
Remarkably, “Film About a Father Who” will be premiering later this week where it all began in Park City as the opening night selection of the Slamdance Film Festival en route to a New York bow at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight in February. Shortly before, Sachs spoke of the project that’s consumed the better part of her life in any number of ways, working with the technology that’s been available to her over the years to create such a tactile mosaic and turning what she couldn’t bring herself to say into the language of the film.
I know you spent decades collecting footage of this. Were you always conscious of the form you wanted it to take?
Actually, the very first images that I shot in it were the first year I even felt I was a filmmaker. That was in 1984. I was just right out of college. But I made a couple of short films and then I made my first longer form documentary and then in 1991, I said to myself, “I want to make a film about my dad.” And I thought it would take me a year or two. [laughs] I made it with the interest in what extent you could ever understand another human being, so I thought at the time I would make this triptych – I would make a film about a total stranger, and then I’d make a film about a very distant cousin of mine who had been a survivor of the Holocaust and ended up in the remotest Brazil. Those two films were very challenging, but not as hard as making a film about my dad.
I was describing this film to a woman and she said, “Oh you just got together a bunch of home movies, right?” But almost every shot of this movie, I shot with the intention of being in this movie, so I always thought it had a direction to it, not just going into my closet. Also, my brother Ira, who’s a filmmaker, shot some of the footage because there were times when my dad was maybe more comfortable in this kind of guy-guy thing, which is funny, but he may not have revealed as much with me. And then there’s actually quite a bit of the footage that he just shot himself and I would actually call [those] home movies when you have the perspective from him.
How much did you want his presence to be in the film when he’s somewhat of an elusive character?
It was a constant effort and he was a cooperative subject, more so than most people would be, so he didn’t mind my traipsing around with whatever girlfriend he happened to be with. He was quite happy about [filming] in a sense because it gave us a purpose, so he would say, “Are we shooting my movie?” Or he would say, laughing, “We’re losing light” or “It’s magic hour,” these expressions he knew about filmmaking like it was a big production, so in that way, there was enthusiasm, but also kind of a performance side. In conventional documentaries, you sit someone down and ask them questions and then they reflect and they deliver it back, as demanded. That wasn’t the way I was able to capture most of the material from my dad.
Were there epiphanies in placing footage from, let’s say, 1986 next to something from 2012?
That is one of the most exciting parts. I spent the last couple of years shooting and my dad is getting older, so he would actually come and stay with me for two weeks, so all the footage of my dad collecting trash and walking around on the sidewalk is what he does all the time. He’s now not as capable as he was to do that even a year ago, but he loves coming to big ol’ New York City and picking up trash and feeling like he’s tidying up, so there would be points where I thought, “How could I show my father doing things that mean something to him other than [being] out for dinner or my sitting and asking him questions, so then I’d say, “Okay, dad, we’re going to go outside and I’m going to follow you.”
I was able to use this gadget that I could attach to my cell phone so I could follow him and have a really smooth shot. It’s hard to shoot with someone walking by them on the sidewalk, so modern-day consumer technology rose to the occasion. As I kept making this movie with my father, I kept carrying cameras, but I had to keep up with the technology. Film hasn’t changed very much since 16mm, so I was always shooting 16mm and it’s really funny, that was some of the easiest material to work with because the technology wasn’t just disappearing. But the very first footage I shot was on a VHS camcorder and [eventually] I shot in Hi 8 and MiniDV and that’s challenging to then digitize.
Were you conscious of how this would come together aesthetically throughout? Some of the most interesting footage in the film was when you were talking to Diana and Mallory, two of the exes…
Yeah, it’s funny you bring that up because that was shot in 16mm and it looks kind of beautiful, doesn’t it? The camera is kind of my brush, so I’m always aware, but there’s a shot of Mallory, and the first time I shot it, she came out in silhouettes and with the new technology, you can bring out detail, so that’s actually been a really positive thing because I never bring in additional lights. [That shot] uses natural light, which I just think is so much more beautiful. I always like to use what’s available and I like profiles – I actually don’t think people shoot profiles enough. And my husband Mark Street, who’s a filmmaker too, did the sound recording on that with Nagra, the quarter-inch tapes [like you see] in “The Conversation” and all the famous movies where they show people recording sound, so it’s running through a little quarter-inch machine reel to reel and the sound quality was pretty good because it’s right onto the decent audio material and then luckily I took good care of the original 16mm negatives.
One of the strongest through lines of the film becomes the relationship between your father and his mother. Was that evident from the start?
It was always a big part and something that we always wondered [about]. My dad had a pretty difficult childhood being shuffled back and forth between divorced parents, and I don’t mean to be psychoanalytic, but people do things their whole life to apologize for what happened when they were children to reckon with it or to find a sense of closure, and we always wondered if she was trying to make amends. They were tough amends, but I tried to suggest that there was a layering to those relationships [that extended into the present] and my grandmother died at 103, so [it was unusual when] most adult men in their seventies don’t have a chance to still deal with their mothers. [laughs]
I imagine there was always the sense you could film more. Did you know there was the right time to wrap this up?
This was the kind of movie where certain people who knew me well from family members to really good friends who had seen all my movies, they’d say, “Lynne, okay, when are you going to finish the ‘Dad’ film?” The most pat line that I had — but it doesn’t work anymore — was that it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done and [when] anything gets in my way, absolutely anything, I would keep shooting.
But I don’t know how you feel about all the photographs you take or videos you shoot in your life, but I don’t actually necessarily like going back and looking at them. You get sad because you miss the children who are now adults or you miss even more than the people who died, who people were, so all that kind of nostalgia or pathos, I didn’t know how I would deal with it. Once I set my mind to finishing it, one of the amazing things is when I went back, it wasn’t the images, but the sound, that was even more enthralling and I tried to bring that into the soundtrack of the film [because] usually sound is what you gather accidentally — casual conversations that were happening while you were shooting.
So that was the gift when I went through the material and that’s what actually the last few months [of editing consisted of] — I’d go and I’d look at material that I totally dismissed because the images I thought were so bad, and actually one of the things that kept me from making the movie is looking at the footage and being extremely judgmental of my own photography and then I came to this conclusion, which was I was sick of beautiful images. We can see beautiful images any time we want on television or in the movie theaters and the digital image is so available and so pristine that our measure of success with the digital image is often how does it mirror reality, but with the older cameras and the older material, it’s not nearing reality. It’s like much more impressionistic and it’s much more about the sensation of that moment in reality and I started to like that better. I thought, “Oh, I’ve got a lot of ugly images, like tarnished or degraded VHS kept in garages,” but I thought maybe the decay is interesting in a wabi-sabi way, so I decided I liked it.
How did you go about recording your voiceover? It’s wonderfully conspiratorial.
Another challenge of this film was to find my voice in it in a conceptual way – to be not just transparent, but to be expressive and not to keep censoring myself. I was at an artists’ residency in January, it’s called Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York and I had applied to write the narration for this film, but every time I started to write, I scratched it out. I [thought] I’m pretending to say something, but not really, so what I tried to do was get out my recorder, put on my headphones, sit in the dark or wait until nighttime and just start speaking and that was a breakthrough. I couldn’t censor myself. Because there was nobody listening, I just spoke and it’s very different because I thought 99 percent of the time when you speak, you speak for a listener, but this time I wasn’t really. Then I took those audio files, and I sent them to a transcription service and they sent it back to me within 36 hours and then I had the skeleton for working on my voiceover. I felt a lot less inhibited because then I was just tinkering with it, not trying to write it, so it’s like I wrote with my mouth. Ultimately, I did rerecordings [for what you hear in the film], but at least I felt they had more of an authenticity than just pen to paper.
Given your father’s history, it’s wild this will be premiering in Park City. What’s it like bringing this into the world?
Well, I’m nervous. My dad won’t be there because he spends winters in a warmer place, in Florida, but he’s going to come to one of the screenings in New York [later in the spring]. He’s seen the film twice already and he cried, which was the first time I’d ever seen that before, [and while] I’m nervous about Park City, but I also feel like there is an appreciation. My dad lived in this Bohemian way, so some people might say, “Well, I didn’t realize he had nine kids [by] six moms, but we all are actually close as a family, all nine of us, with him. We spend almost every holiday together, so he created this ramshackle family, [but] one of the things I realized [making this] is this whole idea of nuclear family these days, and maybe also going back decades, has more to do with how you feel a connection to other people. Like some of [my family], two of the sisters, I haven’t had a whole lifetime to get to know, but I’m getting to know now and it’s interesting. There’s so many families now that are finding each other through DNA. Ours is just a little different.
