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Docs In Orbit – Masters Edition: In Conversation with Lynne Sachs

Docs in Orbit
Masters Edition: in Conversation with Lynne Sachs
August 2020
https://www.docsinorbit.com/masters-edition-in-conversation-with-lynne-sachs?fbclid=IwAR0GFg3TSr-leoQrQhmKl9MzMaRiaE3Zxbx0b-lsyos4EzqZDI0CpaXO1IU

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.

DOWNLOAD A TRANSCRIPT OF PART 1 OF THE INTERVIEW HEREDownload

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.

DOWNLOAD A TRANSCRIPT OF PART 2 OF THE INTERVIEW HEREDownload

LYNNE SACHS’ WORK REFERENCED (in order mentioned)

A Film About a Father Who (2020), available to watch in cinemas or Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects in September
A Month of Single Frames (2019), available now through August 25 @ DOKUFEST and @ Sheffield Doc/Fest through the end of August
My Body, Your Body, Our Bodies: Somatic Cinema at Home and in the World (2020), a lecture and screening by Lynne Sachs, available on Vimeo
The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), available on Vimeo
Tip of My Tongue (80 min. 2017), film website
Year by Year Poems (2019), Tender Buttons Press, available via Small Press Distribution

OTHER INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS AND FILMMAKERS (in order mentioned)

FILM THEORIST AND FOUNDATIONAL ESSAYS

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 Reviews “Year by Year”

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.

– John Bradley

“A Month of Single Frames” at DokuFest Kosova 2020

DokuFest
Aug 7- 25, 2020
A Month of Single Frames

https://dokufest.com/en/programme/6004/film/603209

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 the International 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.

Sachs/ Selcer Collaboration Featured in “The Current Thing”

View the entire publication online: https://the.current.thing.net/1/
or download a PDF below:

THE CURRENT THING Download

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.

Maysles: STILL/MOVING Poetry and Documentary Films – Participant Work

July 2020

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

in the hot during (2020)

in the hot during (2021)
1:00 min., B&W, color, sound

After the initial lockdowns during the COVID-19 Pandemic, stillness is broken by the city’s movement in protest of George Floyd’s murder.

Text:
the city is ours
the city owns us
52 days in captivity so far
my father calls it the velcro padlock
fear is the only real authority here
it tells us when to stay and when to go

This project was created as a part of Decameron Row
EXPLORE VIRTUAL SPACES HERE:
https://www.decameronrow.com/main
You can find Lynne’s film in Bldg #21 (second from left), top floor on left.

As a group of friends separated from one another by the pandemic, we have found that looking in on each other’s lives, even if just through our screens, has been essential for our mental health. We started sending requests to people we missed to send us short, intimate video postcards of their experiences of 2020. We loved the videos that arrived, and we would play them over and over.

In Boccaccio’s 14th-century Decameron, a group of friends avert the loneliness of quarantine during the Black Death by squatting together in an abandoned villa outside of Florence and telling each other stories — 10 people, 10 days, 100 tales. Their stories gave them solace. Since in this moment, global community cannot meet under one roof for comfort and insight, we wondered, how could we gather people from all over the world into one neighborhood, onto one street, where they could share their disparate responses? In this idiosyncratic, virtual place, the curious could click on a window and peek into each others’ lives, much like we had already been doing with one another.

Decameron Row is an experiment in community. We’ve been deliberate about diversity and geographic variety, but we’ve chosen to be guided more by intuition, the generosity of others, and happy accidents than by curatorial intention. The result is a quirky and incomplete record of this strange time. We hope you find it diverting. New videos will be added weekly through the summer until all the windows are occupied.

With gratitude to everyone who so whole-heartedly donated their time and heart to this effort.

Itamar, Stefanie, Juan, Joe, and Sherry THE DECAMERON ROW TEAM

Poet’s House: Language Is a Temptation – Readings from Bernadette Mayer’s “Memory”

Poet’s House
Language Is a Temptation: Lynne Sachs reads July 30 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
Online Program
Jul 30, 2020 | 3:00 pm – 3:05 pm
https://poetshouse.org/event/language-is-a-temptation-lynne-sachs/

Language Is a Temptation: experimental filmmaker and artist Lynne Sachs reads July 30 from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory.

Language Is a Temptation is a series of 3 minute readings from Bernadette Mayer’s Memory that are posted on our Instagram,YouTube, and website daily at 3pm.

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on a month long experiment: every day she exposed a roll of 35mm film and kept a journal. The result was a groundbreaking, conceptual work, comprised of more than 1100 photographs and two hundred pages of text. Mayer’s durational and constraint-based diaristic work of poetry and photography investigates the nature of memory: its surfaces, textures and material.

In July 2020, Poets House and Siglio Press embark on a month long daily experiment: a passage from the corresponding day in 1971 will be read by poets, writers, critics, and artists, as a parallel durational work that celebrates the new publication of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory (Siglio Press, 2020), which brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form.

Senses of Cinema Reviews the 27th Sheffield Doc/Fest

Reimagining the Film Festival Landscape in the Time of a Global Pandemic: The 27th Sheffield Doc/Fest
by Sofie Cato Maas
July 2020
Festival Reports
Issue 95
http://sensesofcinema.com/2020/festival-reports/reimagining-the-film-festival-landscape-in-the-time-of-a-global-pandemic-the-27th-sheffield-doc-fest/

Cinema is one of those rare forms of art where the relation and tension between aesthetics and ideology, past and present, and formalism and realism, come forward. In such times when the lived reality seems to surpass fiction, hence becoming too hard to grasp, this duality between harmony and dissonance that cinema embodies can offer the spectator a way to relate to whatever it is they live through. Now that most film festivals have had to cancel their upcoming editions or reshape them online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the self-reflexive questions that has been raised by this new reality, is what cinema can offer the spectator in a time of crisis. How does cinema and the realities that we are presented with on screen, fit within the kind of uncertainty that we live through? Cinema has always been a way for me to comprehend feelings I do not fully understand. Where words seem incompetently inadequate, cinema manages to grasp those incomplete thoughts and indescribable fears and desires that roam the unconsciousness, through its synthesis and interdependence of images, sounds, and words – a medium perfect for grasping our ambiguous relation with the real. That this is one of cinema’s unique qualities was also palpable in this year’s program of Sheffield Doc/Fest.

The 27th edition of the UK’s largest documentary festival, the first year under the leadership of Doclisboa’s former director Cíntia Gil and her new artistic team, took place on an online film platform called DocPlayer. The whole program presented on this platform, of which I can only highlight a small section here, is firmly rooted in both historical and contemporary actuality and closely interwoven into the conflicts and contradictions that we are faced with now, thus manifesting cinema both as consolation and a radical platform for change.

There are several main themes that become visible and weave through all the strands, yet they all relate to one concept that has suddenly become of greater importance than before the pandemic: namely the landscape and how it represents change, history, memory and, above all, displacement. The Ghosts & Apparitions section occupies a unique position by offering an inventive context surrounding contemporary new documentary cinema, while simultaneously creating parallels between the present and the past. This strand forms an investigation into cinema’s representation of history and its ability to alter it alongside memory and the spectators’ vision of reality. Cinema’s visual flexibility makes the invisible visible as it forces its spectators to look at reality in a different way.

…

The festival also created special focuses dedicated to the work of three pioneering directors: the legendary anti-colonial activist and poet Sarah Maldoror, Lynne Sachs and Simplice Herman Ganou. As a tribute to Maldoror, who sadly recently passed away due to the COVID-19 virus, the festival will show her celebrated short Monangambée (1969), and other programming, later this year in cinemas, as part of the Into the World strand.

Both Sachs and Ganou are directors that use cinema to investigate the complicated relationship between the camera and the human body – going beyond the human body as an articulation of ideas and concepts. With the video lecture My Body, Your Body, Our Bodies: Somatic Cinema at Home and in the World, Sachs created an online journey through her work to explore the way in which the human body features in her cinema, addressing gender, sex, race and generational differences. In it, Sachs guides us through the versatility of her body of work, returning mostly to the question of to what extent it is possible – or should it be possible – to explore yourself (as a film/documentary maker) in your film in relation to whatever the subject of the film you are making is. The lecture interrogates what it means for the camera to analyse the human body and what it means that the body that is in power when filming, the filmmaker’s, is entirely invisible.

Filmcentric Reviews Two Short Documentaries by Lynne Sachs

Two Short Documentaries by Lynne Sachs: The Last Happy Day (2009) and The Washing Society (2018)
23 July 2020
By Filmcentric (Ewan the Cinema)
https://filmcentric.wordpress.com/2020/07/23/two-short-documentaries-by-lynne-sachs/

One of the special focus strands of the Sheffield Doc/Fest online programme in 2020 was the experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who has an extensive body of work across a number of different documentary interests. I watched two of her films out of the handful made available (some of the rest are still online for festival attendees, so I am determined to catch up with them), and present reviews below — or, maybe I should say, more impressionistic observances as I cannot claim they are as deeply considered as I would like.

The Washing Society (2018)
This isn’t a long film, clocking in at about 45 minutes, but it’s a curious blend of documentary and staged fiction. It films a number of New York laundromats, showing their working environments and including some comments by a number of the workers. However, it starts with a Black woman speaking an historical text and then places her in the space of a laundromat opening for the day, and throughout the film her presence functions as a sort of historical commentary making clear the racialised nature of this work, which is somehow so intangible and invisible to so many people. As the film progresses, the testimonies start to become more like monologues, rather more clearly delivered by actors, itself eventually seguing into a musical performance piece on the machines themselves.

CREDITS
Directors/Writers Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker; Cinematographer Sean Hanley; Length 44 minutes.

Seen at home (Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects streaming), London, Saturday 4 July 2020.

The Last Happy Day (2009)
I find it sometimes very easy to criticize documentaries for following a standard talking heads format, but of course Lynne Sachs doesn’t even approach anything resembling the clichés of the form. This medium-length piece does, however, use occasional on-screen captions to contextualize her story of a distant relative, the Hungarian Jew Sandor Lenard (aka Alexander Lenard), who fled shortly before the outbreak of World War II and eventually found himself in Brazil, where he undertook Latin translations, including of Winnie the Pooh (sorry, Winnie Ille Pu). That said, her experimental practice means that it’s difficult to pick out everything that’s going on here, and I imagine wider viewing of her oeuvre would help more in that respect, but there seems to be an idea of the painful ruptures of war and exile being healed at least somewhat by language, or perhaps the idea of translation (given that the language in question is hardly a widely shared one). It’s a family story, too, so children in Sachs’ own family appear on screen to read Lenard’s letters or comment on them (very eloquently, given their age). These are ideas that come out, not inaccessibly, but in a dense mixture of text and image and voice.

CREDITS
Director Lynne Sachs; Cinematographers Sachs and Ethan Mass; Length 38 minutes.

Seen at home (Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects streaming), London, Tuesday 21 July 2020.

Rain Taxi – Volume 25 Number 2 Summer 2020 (#98) Reviews “Year by Year” – Poems by Lynne Sachs

INTERVIEWS
Maggie Dubris: A Prayer for St. Clare | interviewed by Zack Kopp
Wanda Smalls Lloyd: Creating Family Along the Way |
interviewed by Jessica Sparks
Sue William Silverman: The Now-ness of Memory | interviewed by Tatiana Ryckman

FEATURES
Louise Erdrich: An Appreciation | by James P. Lenfestey
Resurrecting Leo Tolstoy | by Tim Brinkhof
The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan

POETRY REVIEWS

To purchase issue #98 using Paypal, click here.

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

The Tenuous We