The 100 greatest films directed by women: Who voted? L-Z
11/26/2019
BBC Culture polled film experts around the world for their favourite films directed by women. In total, 368 critics, academics, industry figures and film programmers, from 84 countries responded. Each critic voted for 10 films, ranking them 1 (favourite) to 10 (10th favourite). We awarded 10 points per first ranked film, 9 per second ranked film, and so on down to 1. We then summed the points. The film with the most points won, and films with more individual votes in total ranked higher.
Irina Trocan – Freelance film critic (Romania)
1. Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)
2. White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)
3. The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998)
4. Shoot for the Contents (T Minh-ha Trinh, 1992)
5. Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)
6. The Meetings of Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)
7. Which Way is East (Lynne Sachs, 1994)
8. Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016)
9. Nuts! (Penny Lane, 2016)
10. Sex Is Comedy (Catherine Breillat, 2002)
“Usually when I decide to write a poem, I immediately begin a fight with myself over whether I actually have something to say. This argument can open turn into a capitulation of my creative self to my practical self, resulting in my opening up my checkbook, changing the cat litter, emptying the dishwasher, or simply filling my day with the tasks of a so-called productive life. If I still feel tugged by a desire to write but can only allocate a few minutes, I turn to punctuation. When you don’t know what to write, return full circle to what you’ve already written and begin to experiment and play. Like a musician at the piano or a florist giving shape to an ikebana arrangement, exploring the shifts of intonation and meaning that come with reevaluating your punctuation can result in the sensation of creating something new.”
—Lynne Sachs, author of Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019)
Oct. 11, 2019
Anthology Film Archives, New York City
“For most of my life, my films have been the marriage of external circumstances as seen through the needs of my own psyche. There is no other plan as such. Occasionally these explorations result in a film that is not quite what I would call a public film, something, perhaps, to be shown as camera original in the privacy of one’s apartment. I would like to use the rare opportunity of this lecture format to show two of these intimate works as original Kodachrome, each quite different from the other. One is called Lux Perpetua II and the other, Ossuary. They are made up of outtakes from decades of shooting 16mm Kodachrome.” – Nick Dorsky
Since 2008, the Experimental Lecture Series has presented veteran filmmakers who immerse themselves in the world of alternative, experimental film. Our intention is to lay bare an artist’s challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, and M.M. Serra. Programmed by Lynne Sachs and Dan Streible.
Lynne’s Intro:
“I am thrilled to welcome Nathaniel Dorsky today to present our 10th Annual Experimental Lecture. Nick comes to us after a decade of talks and screenings by Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, and M.M. Serra. In this series, artists have explored their own process, their own investigation of the shift from discouragement to realization – the why and the how that allows them to continue. My intention has always been to ask each artist to lay bare their challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. I remember Barbara Hammer coming to her lecture ten years ago, “fresh” from a round of chemotherapy, with much hair on her head, of course, she draped the hall with a paper film and then picked up a very heavy Pagent Projector and proceed to create a work of expanded cinema in which all four walls and our skin became screens. I remember Craig Baldwin’s lecture on Cinema Povera and his uncomfortability with actually talking about his own process. Bradley Eros brought in a chorus of poets and performers to accompany him as he stood in the back of the room and spoke in the darkness. Carolee Schneemann gave a lecture that was both introspective and hilarious at time minutes after she had fallen downstairs and broken her hip. MM Serra gave a wonderful lecture that included her own feminist journey exploring her embrace of the erotic image. And Jonas Mekas spoke to us for three hours, without notes or any films whatsoever – about everything from the history of underground cinema in NYC to his own approach to the camera. There were so many people we had to create an overflow hall where the audience watched Jonas on the screen. I would like to dedicate tonight’s program to Barbara, Carolee and Jonas, dear friends, and loving artists.” Lynne Sachs
With additional introductions by poet Lee Ann Brown and UGFTV teacher Darrell Wilson.
When filmmaker Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. In this way, she reveals her process of navigating within and alongside historical events such as the Moon Landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., streaking, the Anita Hill hearings, the Columbine shootings, and controversies around universal health care. In Year by Year Poems, Lynne Sachs realizes the long anticipated leap from her extraordinary career in filmmaking to this, her first book of poems.
With an introduction by Paolo Javier,former Queens Poet Laureate and author of Court of the Dragon, and book design by Abby Goldstein.
Lynne Sachs reads from “Year by Year” at Beyond Baroque (LA)
#12 on Small Press Distribution’s October 2019 Best Seller List! Favorite Poetry in 2019 – Dennis Cooper Year End List Praise for Year by Year Poems:
“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.”
–– Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and Against Joie de Vivre
“The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. Year by Year distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life.”
–– Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and When the World Was Steady
“In Year by Year, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate.” – Michael Collier author of Dark Wild Realm
“Renowned experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs wrote one of 2019’s best books of poetry. In 2011, after deciding to write one poem for each of the fifty years of her life, Sachs asked herself, “How have the private, most intimate moments of my life been affected by the public world beyond?” The graceful, diaristic poems that she went on to produce successfully distill events and themes in the poet’s life and simultaneously, magically, reflect larger movements of history and culture. Intimate and imagistic, the poems unfold a series of miniature stories with sensuous rhythms, telling visual detail, and gentle humor. Thus, in “1969” a young Sachs imagines Neil Armstrong calling on the telephone, then turning “to look at all of us (from the moon).” This beautifully designed book includes facsimiles of many of the poetry’s initial drafts, which subtly illumine this artist’s creative process.” – John Smalley, 2019 Staff Pick, San Francisco Public Library, Poetry Librarian
“As an artist, Sachs keeps playing, again and again, with each of the thirty-three films she has made over the decades and now, with her first book of poems, which are just as inventive and fresh, just as delightfully playful with form. These poems are innovative but never intimidating or deliberately opaque. Instead, they invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.” – Sharon Harrigan, Cleaver: Philadelphia’s International Literary Magazine (excerpt)
“Powerful collection! We’re loving Year by Year, a rich poetry collection and visual journey of ideas by filmmaker Lynne Sachs. The book includes original handwritten first drafts with each finished piece. Unique process immersion. Fascinating to view the first drafts with the complete pieces, exploring them together like a map, what is gained (& lost) as we move through time and ideas. Elegant and elegiac.” – Margot Douaihy, Northern New England Review (posted in Twitter)
“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, Rain Taxi (championing aesthetically adventurous literature)
About the Author: Lynne Sachs makes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Her work embraces hybrid form and combines memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include live performance with moving image. Lynne was first exposed to poetry by her great aunt as a child in Memphis, Tennessee. Soon she was frequenting workshops at the local library and getting a chance to learn from poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Ethridge Knight. As an active member of Brown University’s undergraduate poetry community, she shared her early poems with fellow poet Stacy Doris. Lynne later discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneeman, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Lynne has made thirty-five films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Festivals in Buenos Aires, Beijing and Havana have presented retrospectives of her work. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. In early 2020, her newest movie, Film About a Father Who, will premiere on opening night at the Slamdance Film Festival and in NYC at the Museum of Modern Art. Lynne lives in Brooklyn. Year by Year Poems is her first book of poetry.
Selected Readings: Maysles Documentary Center – Film Video Poetry Symposium, New York City (6/19); Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires w/ films (9/19); Penn Book Center, Philadelphia (9/19); Brooklyn Book Festival (9/19) Montez Press Radio with Tender Buttons, 9/19; Unnameable Books, Boog Festival, Brooklyn (9/19); Other Cinema with films, 11/19; Topos Books w/ films, Brooklyn (12/19); Burke’s Books, Memphis (1/20); Volume Writers’ Series, Hudson, NY (1/20); Greenlight Books Celebration of Tender Buttons Press (2/4); Bar Laika w/ films, Brooklyn (TBA); San Francisco Public Library National Poetry Month (2021); Mana Contemporary, Jersey City (4/25/20); McNally Jackson Books, NYC with Valery Oisteanu (TBA); KGB Bar with Paolo Javier, NYC (TBA); Maysles Documentary Center Film & Poetry Conference (5/3/20); Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles.
About the Press: Founded by poet Lee Ann Brown in 1989, Tender Buttons Press publishes experimental women’s and gender-expansive poetry through innovative forms that play with the boundaries between life and art, generations and generativity.
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal.
In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
“While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film. My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once.” — Lynne Sachs
Support provided by Wexner Center Film/ Video Studio and Artist Residency Award – Jennifer Lange, Curator. Additional Editing by Paul Hill; with gratitude to Florrie Burke.
“The result is an incredibly potent study of life in all its many forms and the difficulty of facing one’s own mortality … Sachs deliberately contrasts Hammer’s shots of the gorgeous sun-dappled ridges with her close-ups of plants and insects, setting the grand majesty of the world against its delicate minutiae to form a rich tapestry of life among the banks. Crucially, the film never feels manufactured or over-structured. Sachs successfully maintains the feeling of an off-the-cuff journal that captures Hammer’s ideas as they come to her… At the beginning of the film, Hammer reads from her diary “I didn’t shoot it, I saw it,” and it is this feeling of spontaneous observation and meditation that Sachs manages to recapture so successfully here.”
–Robert Salsbury, One Room With A View
Winner of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the 66th Annual Oberhausen Film Festival
“In the age of necessary social distancing, we would like to highlight a remarkable film which fulfills the noblest vocation of art, fostering an emotional connection between people from different times and geographical locations. For the ability to find poetry and complexity in simple things, for its profound love for life and people, and for attention to detail in working with delicate matters, we decided to award the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen to A Month of Single Frames by Lynne Sachs.”
Statement from Oberhausen Jury
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
LUX & Club des Femmes present Evidentiary Bodies: Celebrating Barbara Hammer & Carolee Schneemann
Sat 13 – Sun 14 Jul 2019 / Sat 7pm-9pm / Sun 1pm-9pm
LUX, Waterlow Park Centre, Dartmouth Park Hill, London, N19 5JF
Free
Join LUX & Club des Femmes for a weekend of films, introductions, memories, a zine and an exhibition of ephemera and texts to celebrate the lives and work of feminist experimental artists Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann.
With a career spanning fifty years, Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) is recognized as a pioneer of queer cinema. A visual artist working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories, lives and representations. “My work makes these invisible bodies and histories visible. As a lesbian artist, I found little existing representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural record for future generations.”
Carolee Schneemann (1939-2019), a groundbreaking performance and multidisciplinary artist, used film and video since the 1960s. Shattering taboos and redefining the notion of the erotic, she confronted sexuality, gender, and the social construction of the female body. Schneemann lived in London in the early 1970s and was an active member of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative.
With words and contributions from Gabriella Beckhurst, Caroline Bergvall, Club des Femmes, Stuart Comer, David Curtis, Helen de Witt, Karen Di Franco, Philomena Epps, Beatrice Gibson, Alison Green, Laura Guy, Lucy Harris, So Mayer, Krystyna Mazur, Ara Osterweil, Lucy Reynolds, Selina Robertson, Ingrid Ryberg, Bryony White, Matt Wolf, Bev Zalcock, amongst others.
SATURDAY 13 JULY, 7PM-9PM
Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer, 1974, 16mm, 4 min) Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1967, 16mm, 25 min) Plumb Line (Carolee Schneemann, 1968-1972, 16mm, 15 min) Bent Time (Barbara Hammer, 1984, 16mm, 22 min)
SUNDAY 14 JULY, 1PM-9PM
1PM Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (Lynne Sachs, 2018, Super 8mm and 16mm to HD, 8 min) Audience (Barbara Hammer, 1982, 16mm to HD, 32 min)
3PM Meatjoy (Carolee Schneemann, 1964/2010, 16mm to HD, 10 min)
4PM Vever (for Barbara) (Deborah Stratman, 2019, HD, 12 min) A Month of Single Frames (Lynne Sachs, 2019, 16mm to HD, 14 min)
6PM Kitch’s Last Meal (Carolee Schneemann, 1973-76, 16mm to HD, composite, 54 min) Evidentiary Bodies (Barbara Hammer, 2018, 3 channel HD video, 9 min)
Please note that the times for Sunday are indicative.
It’s a free event with no reservation. We will do our best to accomodate everyone but please be aware that space in the screening room is limited
With thanks to the estates of Barbara Hammer & Carolee Schneemann, Florrie Burke, EAI, Karl McCool, Rebecca Cleman, Cinenova, Felicity Sparrow, Lynne Sachs, Deborah Stratman, Canyon, Mark Toscano & everyone else who has contributed ideas, enthusiasm and advice to the project.
Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann at the 2018 EAI Benefit. Photograph by Conrad Ventur. Courtesy of Conrad Ventur and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Sunday, July 21, 2019 11 AM The cornerstone guest for the 2019 Film and Video Poetry symposium is Lynne Sachs. Sachs’ work with documentary, poetry film and the essay film is consistently avant-garde. In this workshop, Sachs will be in open dialogue regarding her film “Tip of My Tongue” (80 min. 2017), which accentuates the poetry and essay film within its structure. She will also read from her new book Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019). Sachs will further guide the workshop discourse through an exploration into the hybridization of poetry film and essay film, and the meaning of these genres individually as well as combined. After screening her film, Sachs will ask participants a question as a prompt for writing a poem: How has one moment in your life been affected by a public event beyond your control?
Lynne Sachs will lead the talkback and poetry workshop immediately following the 11 AM screening of her film TIP OF MY TONGUE. We invite all to attend both events at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, New York.
There is no cost for admission. Light refreshments served!
Maysles Documentary Center
343 Malcolm X Boulevard | New York, NY 10027
A Public Dialogue, Screening & Poetry Workshop with filmmaker Lynne Sachs
Sunday July 21, 2019 | 11 am – 2pm
Schedule:
11 am – screening
12:30 – talk-back and poetry workshop
Tip of My Tongue (80 min. 2017)
a film by Lynne Sachs
To celebrate her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where Sachs grew up. She invites 12 fellow New Yorkers – born across several continents in the 1960s – to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they discuss some of the most salient, strange, and revealing moments of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive examination of the way in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are. As director and participant, Sachs, who wrote her own series of 50 poems for every year of her life, guides her collaborators across the landscape of their memories. They move from the Vietnam War protests to the Anita Hill hearings to the Columbine Shootings to Occupy Wall Street. Using the backdrop of the horizon as it meets the water in each of NYC’s five boroughs as well as abstracted archival material, TIP OF MY TONGUE becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. Traditional timelines are replaced by a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression.
Featured Film Screening | Tip Of My Tongue
A Film By Lynne Sachs
Image from the film Tip of My Tongue (2017) directed by. Lynne Sachs
Tip of My Tongue (80 min. 2017)
a film by Lynne Sachs
To celebrate her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where Sachs grew up. She invites 12 fellow New Yorkers – born across several continents in the 1960s – to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they discuss some of the most salient, strange, and revealing moments of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive examination of the way in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are. As director and participant, Sachs, who wrote her own series of 50 poems for every year of her life, guides her collaborators across the landscape of their memories. They move from the Vietnam War protests to the Anita Hill hearings to the Columbine Shootings to Occupy Wall Street. Using the backdrop of the horizon as it meets the water in each of NYC’s five boroughs as well as abstracted archival material, TIP OF MY TONGUE becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. Traditional timelines are replaced by a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression.
Screening | Tip of My Tongue (80 minutes, 2017) at The Maysles Documentary Center NY Sunday July 21, 2019 | Doors open at 1045am. Film begins at 11am.
There is no cost for admission. Light refreshments served.
Maysles Documentary Center 343 Malcolm X Boulevard | New York, NY 10027
NOTE: Filmmaker Lynne Sachs will speak about her film Tip of My Tongue immediately after this screening. Please see event below.
TIP OF MY TONGUE | A Public Dialogue & Poetry Workshop with filmmaker Lynne Sachs Sunday July 21, 2019 Talkback begins at 1230pm | Immediately following the screening of the film TIP OF MY TONGUE (Please See Event Above)
Our cornerstone guest for the 2019 symposium is Lynne Sachs. Sachs’ work with documentary, poetry film and the essay film is consistently avant-guard. In this workshop, Sachs will be in open dialogue regarding her film “Tip of My Tongue” (80 min. 2017), which accentuates the poetry and essay film within its structure. She will also read from her new book Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019). Sachs will further guide the workshop discourse through an exploration into the hybridization of poetry film and essay film, and the meaning of these genres individually as well as combined. After screening her film, Sachs will ask participants a question as a prompt for writing a poem: How has one moment in your life been affected by a public event beyond your control?
Lynne Sachs, graduate of Brown University receiving a BA in history, inspired by the works of Bruce Conner, who would become her mentor, and Maya Deren. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in film and video, collaborated with Chris Marker on the 2007 remake of his 1972 film “Three Cheers for the Whale”, and co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue #51 titled “Experiments in Documentary”. Sachs’ work has established support with fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, as well as residencies at the Experimental Television Center and The MacDowell Colony. Sachs’ films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, the Sundance Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema.
FemExFilmArchive: Interviews with Feminist Filmmakers
This collaborative project is an ongoing collective archive of interviews with feminist experimental filmmakers started in 2017 by feminist filmmaking students at UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis. Our students were invited to each select a filmmaker, research their work in detail, and invite the filmmaker to have a conversation with them. We encouraged our students to think about things like how to find their own creative role models, how to learn from listening, and how to learn from intergenerational feminist conversation. Most (though not all!) of these makers personally identify as both feminist and experimental makers, and many of these conversations invite the filmmakers to respond directly to those labels–sometimes in complicated ways. We hope that, over time, this website can continue to grow into a database and resource for others hoping to learn more about feminist filmmaking!
For over 20 years Lynne Sachs has continued to create both experimental and documentary films that focus on historical events and individuals’ personal anecdotes. Sachs uses collage and performative techniques to expose the untold stories. In her film, Your Day is My Night (2013) she highlighted to the congested shift bed houses that are common in New York City. Sachs not only directs films but got her feet wet with directing a live performance show that took place in laundromats in Every Fold Matters (2016). Such an impactful show incorporated true stories that revealed the harsh reality that is working in a laundromat. Over Skype call, I had the honor to ask Lynne Sachs about her experience with working on those two projects and how she became the successful filmmaker that she is today.
NZ: I really enjoyed your feature length film, Your Day is My Night. So I just wanted to ask like what inspired you to make that film?
LS: So I’m going to be very straightforward with you about it. I had a very kind of distant… you know when you call someone an uncle but they’re not really your uncle but everyone calls them uncle… just a person in your life like that. He was 90 years old and lived his whole life in Brooklyn New York (he was actually more like 95) and he happened to one day tell me that when he was growing up there were all these apartments in New York, but there are apartments like this all over the country where adults who are working people and only maybe living in a city temporarily (but I mean it could be a year or two or two weeks), and they can’t afford to pay rent, and they can’t afford to even stay in a hotel. So they share apartments and their called shift bed apartments (he called them hot houses). So he knew of them because a lot of longshoremen – people who worked on ships – would come into the city and a bunch of guys would share a room
But then I started to think about it. And with all the issues around immigration now where people A) can’t afford the rent but B) they don’t even have the credit, they don’t have the you know the ability to sort of call up older family members to borrow money. All of those kinds of things. So people have to scrape by. But they create these other micro communities. So I started to look around and try to figure out where those might be. And then when I tried to “get my foot in the door” like a good documentary filmmaker, I didn’t know anybody who lived in those apartments. And even if I went to housing agencies they were saying to me, “Well, you and all the people at the New York Times want to tell that story, but we’re not going to let you in.” Plus most of those apartments are illegal because there are too many people in one apartment. So it wouldn’t really be fair to open those doors. then I decided I would create kind of a more fiction film. I had an audition in Chinatown because I knew that a lot of those apartments were in Chinatown. When I had the audition, a lot of the people who actually auditioned (and I did the audition at the senior citizens center so they had time), many of them we’re living in shift bed apartments like that singing man who does all the weddings. We actually shot the whole film in his apartment. And then the other people in the film had lived in shift bed houses at different points in their lives. And so that’s how it happened. But I just was really interested in this kind of in-between zone which, you might think oh well a lot of people live in one apartment maybe you know during college or when you’re young, that people actually find ways of connecting and cooking together and telling stories and surviving well into their adult lives and often they’re away from their base and their roots. So I thought that was interesting, I would call it a sort of transitional zone.
NZ: Yeah it even seemed like that these people enjoyed their home country more than living that kind of lifestyle.
LS: Well it was interesting. I took the film to China, I was invited by the China women’s film festival. And so I took it to Beijing and Shanghai and they were all saying we thought things were supposed to be so much better in the United States and it looks really tough.
NZ: Yeah, and it almost seems like they’re kind of enclosed in this bubble, and like they didn’t really branch out to other parts of New York that what you were trying to depict there?
LS: Actually there’s a scene that didn’t make it in the film when I went to all the oldest woman, the woman with a very short grey hair and the women with the black hair. Sheut Hing Lee and Ellen are their names. I actually shot a whole scene at the Metropolitan Museum which is pretty much the biggest museum in New York kind of like the Louvre of New York. And when we went there they had definitely never been there. The reason that we went there was they had an exhibit about a Chinese emperor and the emperor had this very large palace and it was images from that palace. In each wing of the palace represented a different season. So what he would do is he would say “oh I feel like living in the springtime” and he’d go to the spring wing. So he had total control of everything. So even though it wasn’t really that he was controlling the weather but he could control the atmosphere. And to me it was the antithesis of a shift-bed apartment where you just had to make do. That scene didn’t to make in the film, but we ended up having a good time going there.
But also [there is] the scene in the film where Lee goes with Lourdes to that outdoor fountain, that was [by] you know the artist Ai Weiwei?. He’s probably one of the best known artist in the world and he’s very very very political. He’s very very very disparaged by the Chinese government but he’s very celebrated by young people and people who want more political freedom. And he’s very much an advocate for human rights and climate environmental sensitivity and a lot of different things. And in a way he’s probably the most political and best known international artist in the world. Anyway he had an exhibit in New York and I wanted to take some of the people from the cast, but Mr. Ball, the singer, was actually nervous because he’s still trying to get his immigration papers so some people wouldn’t want to be seen near an exhibition by Ai Weiwei because it has a kind of anti-Chinese government, atmosphere. So anyway, everything becomes political. But when we went to that fountain which is right in midtown New York they had never been there. So you’re exactly right.
NZ: So I was reading some articles on your website and they said that this particular film was kind of like a shift for you in terms of how you take on documentary filmmaking. You had stated before, that just by putting a camera in front of your subject it could still influence their answers, like an aspect of their answers are a bit artificial. So how did you change that?
LS: that’s happened more and more and more, because we’re so accustomed to having our pictures taken even more. You’ve probably seen that change in your own lifetime. You know the way even people use cameras like mirrors, they use cameras to put on their lipstick. You know we’re constantly posing it’s impossible for a child to be in front of a camera and not do that because they’re forced, they’re forced from age two months to smile. So that kind of thing is so controlled.
So instead of trying your hardest to find something authentic. I started to think about why couldn’t the practice of working with reality be more of an exchange, where you ask people to speak back and to be creative, not just to give of themselves for my purposes. I just finished a new film which is called [The Washing Society] did you read all the things about the laundry that I’ve been doing?
NZ: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that. I love that you would also direct live theatrical performances. Yeah, Every Fold Matters right?
[Lynne Sachs has done a lot of work with laundromats. Recently she released a feature film called The Washing Society that’s based on her live show Every Fold Matters.]
LS: Yeah, we have a new version of it which is a film. And it’s called The Washing Society. So I co-directed that with a woman who is a playwright and we both wrote it, it’s like the first time I’ve sort of written a play, which you heard in Every Fold Matters, first time she had made a film. And so we’re really curious, we have no idea how people are going to respond.
NZ: You’ve directed both live performances and films, what would you say is the big difference in terms of your experience between like working with live performances and directing films?
LS: I really really really loved it. And it’s interesting because I’m working with this playwright. We’ve become very very good friends. We didn’t know each other very well before, we both have kids who are either in college or right out. And we’re neighbors. And now I am more familiar with avant garde theater, and she’s more familiar with the experimental film, and like we’ve learned a lot from each other. But I also love the excitement. If you do four shows in a week and number two, you know how actors say “oh we just didn’t have the right energy” and then the next day they say “Oh you were on.” And if you hadn’t been in the theater you’d think how could you watch the same play four times. I’ve done this with Every Fold Matters and with Your Day Is my Night. I’m there for every show, even if we did three or four shows. I’m always interested because I see little changes, and I love the time afterwards when you’re hanging out backstage.
But on the other hand a performance, especially in a laundromat, is very hard to produce because you have to convince the owners, you have to figure out the audience. But we actually just decided today that within the film version we could easily take it around a laundromat again, different laundromats, and all you have to do is put up a sheet which would be very appropriate and we could do film shows because I don’t want to make films that are only for people who were sort of in the elite and go to film festivals. And so I liked the idea of making it in the laundromat; it seems more organic to take it back to the laundromat.
NZ: Yeah I really like that. So I’m assuming that those stories told in the film are based off of true events. So how did you translate them into a film.
LS: Oh yeah. [That is] art of the reason it became a hybrid. There are always reasons. And one of the reasons is that lots of the people we talked to are immigrants or they don’t own their own laundromat. They feel intimidated by their bosses or their husbands. They’re men also. I mean [there are] men working on these issues (more women), and you’ll see there’s a really great Chinese man in the film. But I would say [that in] a lot of my films I like to deal with languages other than my own, because I think film as a medium whose idea is to translate life to an art form. So sometimes I don’t want to translate things literally. So you’ll see for example in The Washing Society there’s a whole section where we don’t translate. So we’re listening to Spanish and Chinese. And you might speak Spanish or you might speak Chinese or you might speak neither. But as soon as you see subtitles you stop listening. And I wanted the audience to listen to the quality of the voices not just for content but for devotion and texture. And those kind of things.
NZ: Did you do that to also kind of portray the diversity in a laundromat?
LS: Yeah, and to make a typical audience member – who always has been hand-delivered on a silver platter everything in english – to ake that audience feel a little bit alienated, in the way that a new immigrant feels a little alienated. You’re in a society but you’re not of it.
NZ: So let’s see, I was a little confused on what the words on the clothes meant. Can you talk more about that. Because I thought it was a really cool concept, but I didn’t know how it connected with the stories that were being told.
LS: Well I think one of the reasons why we put the words on the clothes was to kind of make the words become part of a language and like the way that you know you’re holding a shirt and it says “nothing” you’re holding a shirt and it says “pocket” it says “fool” or it says other things and it’s a little bit like when you make poetry on the refrigerator – you know people have those words – so that there is that kind of creativity, in folding. It creates different words that have different connotations. So this is just my association with the words, but it’s sort of like as if a story could come out of the clothes.
NZ: Oh, I like that. That’s really interesting.
LS: There might be another explanation.
NZ: So about the actors that participated in the live performance: I know the black woman was connected, like her grandmother used to work in a laundromat.
LS: And we didn’t find that out till we were well into rehearsing everything. It was very cool. And it was sort of like with Your Day is my Night as well, where all the people came to audition as if they were acting and then it ended up being about them, because I didn’t really do auditions. I did more like interviews. And actually I’ll tell you why, since you asked about the black woman. Her name is Jasmine. So I’m going to show the film at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in December. And Lizzie, my co-director, and Jasmine and I are all going to go. Because they’re doing an event around the original washing society, which was this large group of laundresses who protested for higher wages. And so we’re showing that film in conjunction with a kind of celebration of that whole history and story. So that’s one of the nice things about working with people for so long you get to go on a trip together and hang out in a hotel and it’s a little perk.
NZ: So what was your strategy, like how did you transfer what you had learned about working in a laundromats into writing the actual script?
LS: Yeah. So actually Lizzie and I would meet about once a week for over a year but not every week. We would go to this place called the poetry house which is on the Hudson River right in New York City. And we would just sit there and sometimes we would even take lint. And just as a kind of a prompt, because I had started this conversation and she liked it about the way that lint is a little bit like our history and it’s a little bit of an extension of our bodies.
So we started writing. We would have conversations with laundry workers but not recorded. So we would start writing those stories, like creating stories around [these conversations.]. But then actually you’ll see in the film there is a Puerto Rican woman. She was born in New York. She’s very important.
NZ: Yeah I noticed that she was also in Your Day is my Night because I watched the trailer for Every Fold Matters before I watched Your Day is my Night. And I was confused for a bit. In my mind I knew she was hired to be in Every Fold, but it just seemed so natural that she was in Your Day is My Night..
[Lynne Sachs has worked with multiple Puerto Rican women who are actors or people she interviewed. The woman that she mentions as being “very important” to the story about the laundromats is a different Puerto Rican woman then the actress in the film. Confused, Nadia assumed she was referencing the actress who was in film, Every Fold Matters which then initiates the conversation about the Puerto Rican actress that’s also in Your Day is My Night.]
LS: Yeah she’s a good dancer too. When you see her she is the bravest dancer. She dances on top of these washing machines. One time we were doing a live performance and there was some of those little cloths people put into the washing machine -the fabric softener. And so there were a few of those on top of the dryers that we didn’t see. And we were doing a live show and she was dancing on top of the machines and it was only at the end she stopped and she said “I could’ve fallen but I didn’t want to ruin the show.”
NZ: Yeah I love that part in Your Day is my Night when she walks into the apartment for the first time and they’re all talking about her in Chinese. And was that their real reaction to her?
LS: That was totally improvised. It was made up but it was improvised. I said “what would you do if a young Puerto Rican woman walked in and knocked on the door and said I’m moving in? What would you do?” So I don’t speak Chinese. So we did the whole scene and I said that looks good. And I don’t know what they said, so I got a translator. It took me three months before I really knew how hilarious they were.
NZ: A lot of those stories are true obviously in that film, Your Day is my Night, How did you prompt them to start talking about that, to get that raw story.
LS: So the same with Tip of My Tongue: you’ll see I ask particular questions. In Your Day is my Night my questions had to do with what was your immigration experience? Have you ever lived in a very very small apartment? And they were the ones who sort of politicized it. They didn’t intend to. None of them are political in any way. I would say I’m more political than they are but they. For example the man told the story about the stone bed in northern China – he was the one who talked about the people who came in. If you read about the cultural revolution, it was very violent in China in the 50s and 60s, so that was just the way their lives turned out.
NZ: Yeah I noticed that, and there was also the other story about the woman with her grandmother and the farmers that came in and robbed them. Let’s see, going back, I noticed in both films you add a lot of like theatrical elements. Like the folding the bed, and making the bed and the folding the clothes. Is there a reason why you do that.
LS: So you see I never would have said that. It just shows that you are the scholar in this case. But I’ll leave that part to you.
NZ: I watched others of your shorter films, but I wanted to get into the more general questions about you being a successful filmmaker. I saw that in one of your interviews you mentioned that you’ve collaborated with one of your favorite filmmakers Chris Marker. How was that experience, how did you even reach out to him?
LS: Oh I wrote him a fan letter and he wrote back. That was in the 1980s, so I sort of did what you’re doing. You know, I wrote him a- he was living in Paris – and I said “I watched your film and I really liked it, do you need an assistant?” And he didn’t. But then he came to San Francisco anyway for work. I had written a paper about his film. And then we just kept up over a number of years and I went to Paris once and I saw him and he would come and speak in San Francisco. Do you know some of his films?
NZ: No but I know you mentioned some in that interview.
LS: Yeah, you’ll you’ll find out a lot about them online. He’s been very influential to me and many many many many filmmakers not just me. And then in about 2007 one of his distributors happened to be a distributor of my films asked me if I would help create an English language version for a film. It’s called Three Cheers for the Whale and it’s about the plight of the whales in the ocean it’s a short very collage like film. And so we did work together for about a year. So to me working with people is the best way to bond your friendship and your awareness of each other and to grow as creative people.
NZ: So a lot of people in your life that are also filmmakers like your brother and your husband. Have you ever really collaborated with them? And how did it work? Was it difficult?
LS: Yeah. More with husband than my brother. So my husband and I do some short projects together – some more performative things. We’re going to do a show together of some collages that we both made in May. We did a show at microscope Gallery here in Cincinnati. It has to do with being married to each other. We did that this summer. We did a one night show at a really cool gallery and like here in New York in the kind of Bohemian part of Brooklyn. And my brother is a filmmaker too. And he and I have also worked together, like years and years ago we did a piece called Last Address, a public art piece. He had made a film about the last addresses of a lot of artists who had died of AIDS and just the facade of their homes and we made stills from that, made a big public art show. But for the most part his films are narratives, traditional narratives and that’s just not the kind of films I make. So we more like support each other or look at each other’s work and get feedback. I’d say my work is closer to my husband’s work. You know if we made the long films together we would tear each other’s hair out.
NZ: Yeah. So I know you studied at SFSU and I was wondering like how did that help you become like the filmmaker that you are today because you didn’t go to like UCLA or NYU. For me for me personally, when I got rejected from NYU which was my dream school, I was like there’s no way I’m going to be able to make it, it hurt so bad.
LS: Oh no you’re so lucky, I taught at NYU for 13 years not part time. And I my best students were the most unhappy ones. You’re so lucky you didn’t go there. I’m serious, plus almost none of the faculty make films because the teaching load is so heavy. You really are in a better place. Because I should tell you I applied to graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute and I was rejected and I was very upset. And so I went to San Francisco State and it worked out great and I ended up going also to the Art Institute because I wanted to teach and I needed the degree that they had. But in San Francisco State I was there when like the most brilliant faculty ever. Do you know Trinh T. Minh-ha? She’s like a really famous feminist, she’s Vietnamese American, thinker, philosopher, and filmmaker and she teaches at Berkeley now. When she was teaching at San Francisco State at the time and she was very very influential. There’s another woman that is a very very famous cinematographer and she taught for a year or maybe a semester at San Francisco State. And I got to learn cinematography from her and she might be the best known woman cinematographer ever, so really great people taught there. Plus it was reasonably priced. But are you thinking of going to graduate school?
NZ: So my plan right now is like I’m going to Davis right now. But I wanted to transfer to UCLA, but to be honest I never really been attracted to L.A. Like Hollywood studio kind of filmmaking. I’m personally more interested in kind of working outside the system and like do more experimental stuff so that’s why I was more drawn to New York
LS: I would say you can stay in touch with me. But Hunter College has a fantastic graduate program and it’s really not that it’s not very expensive.
NZ: Yeah it’s just so hard to get in. Like for NYU’s Tisch school. It’s like what like 4 percent acceptance.
LS: Well I wouldn’t go there anyway. I don’t think it’s very good. It depends if you want to do sort of alternative things. Tisch is not the best, they just have a good reputation.
NZ: How did you like become so successful and become the filmmaker that you are today?.
LS: I was just persistent. The other thing is that I get a lot of joy from making the work. And someone told me that I first started — it might be a cliche to say this but I really mean it — The number of rejections for everything is 20 times bigger than acceptances. You have to have tough skin. You have to say okay. And everyone gets upset. Who keeps emails of their rejections? Hardly anyone, right? But the rejections are just so numerous. Many people who went to graduate school with me don’t make films, sadly. But I think the big part is that it’s deflating to be rejected so much and I know how it feels.
NZ: I know like getting that rejection from NYU literally took me a year to recover.
LS: There’s nobody nobody on the faculty there who makes films that you’re interested in. You are so lucky that you didn’t – you went a different direction
NZ: I feel like like UC Davis exposed me to this alternative you know side of filmmaking that I probably wouldn’t have been exposed to if I went to one of those major film schools. I’m still hurt about it but I’m kind of glad that I got rejected in a way because it kind of motivated me more to like do stuff on my own
LS: When applying for undergraduate schools, I applied to a bunch of schools and I ended up going to Brown. And it was such a good fit for me but I had thought oh I want to go to Yale and I didn’t get in. Then I was feeling rejected. But Brown is a super creative place and it worked out fine. So sometimes things are meant to be.
NZ: Yeah. So what would you say would be like the worst rejection that you’ve ever gotten?
LS: Oh gosh. For example I have applied to the Guggenheim foundation and there’s these fellowships called the Guggenheim fellowships. Yeah well there’s a museum called the Guggenheim museum. It’s a really hard, involved application process. But anyway they give them for everything from literature, science, mathematics, political science and the arts. So I applied five different times to that not every year in a row. And the fifth time worked out. But you know four other rejections before that were tough. So the hardest …you know like they’re all hard. Yeah I’ve had a lot of rejections. Plenty.
Attention all you mainstream and cult film lovers, feminists and non-feminists alike! The second China Women’s Film Festival is presenting a total of fifteen screenings around the city throughout the week. (Scroll down for more screening details.)
While the women’s film festival in Taiwan has an almost-20-year history, and many female directors in Hong Kong have been making their marks since the 1930s, women’s cinema is still in its infancy in mainland China. Although they came from different backgrounds, Ying Xin, Dan Li, Juan Jiang and Zhao-Yu Li shared a common desire to do something about women and arts, so the four first launched the first China Women’s Film Festival covering four cities in 2013.
“We are a pretty grassroots film festival, none of the members of our organizing committee is from the film industry, and it’s completely organized by volunteers.” Says Ying, “It isn’t the first of its kind in mainland China, but it is the only one that makes it to the second edition.”
In its second year, the China Women’s Film Festival is running parallel sessions in Shanghai. “Shanghai is free, fashionable, feminine… and it offers unparalleled opportunities for women in China. Shanghai is an ideal venue for our CWFF.” Says Monica Qiu, a like-minded friend of Ying’s who initiated the sessions in Shanghai.
Monica started to summon volunteers at her birthday party in late October. Through the magic of networking and social media, she gathered around 80 ardent participants. “We’ve only had one month to make it happen, and the fact that it relies solely on volunteering… There are lots of uncertainties.”
Volunteers all have their own jobs. Putting together this film festival uses up their spare time, but they are quite enjoying it. “We had lots of meetings last until midnight, and afterwards, everyone went on with their ‘homework’. We split up marketing, renting venues, inviting guests, seeking media partners and sponsorship…” Monica continues, “We are just a temporary team, but we’ve been efficient and organized. I’m so proud of us!”
“I see feminism as a harmonious interplay between both sexes.” Monica told THAT’S, “We are expecting that through such film screenings and forums, not only women would become more active in exploring their own identities, but men would get more involved, to better understand women. This hasn’t been done enough in China.”
Here’s a list of the film screenings coming up over the next week:
Date
Time Slot
Film
Profile
Location
Price
Nov 23
7pm-9pm
Golden Gate, Silver Light
Shi-Yu Wei/Hong Kong/2013/90min/Documentary
Yuz Museum
RMB25 (Student discount: RMB10)
Nov 24
7pm-9.30pm
Peony Birds
Yu-Shan Huang/Taiwan/1990, 106mins/Feature
Wan Yuan Culture
Free
5.15pm-6.45pm
Your Day Is My Night
Lynne Sachs/USA/2013/63mins/Experimental
NYU Shanghai
Free (Please bring your ID card)
Nov 25
7pm-9.30pm
My Dear Stilt
Yin-juan Cai/Taiwan/2012/107min/Feature
Tongji Venture Valley
Free
Nov 26
7pm-9.30pm
Out Of Focus
Sheng-Ze Zhu/2013/China/88mins/Documentary
Wan Yuan Culture
Free
Nov 27
7pm-9pm
Gare du Nord
Claire Simon/France/2012/119mins/Feature
Yuz Museum
RMB25 (Student discount: RMB10)
Nov 28
7pm-8.30pm
Transit
Hannah Espia/Philippines/2013/93mins/Documentary
Story Space
RMB25 (Student discount: RMB10)
Nov 29
2pm-2.30pm
Summer Secret
Zeng Zeng/China/2014/Feature
Qia Tu Sheng Huo
The total of 6 films: RMB25, (Student discount: RMB10)
2.30-3.30pm
I Don’t Want Grandma To Talk
Yun Zhi/China/2013/5mins/Experimental
3.30-4pm
Happen
Chao Wu/China/2013/22mins/Animation
4pm-4.10pm
Light Mind
Jie Yi/China/2013/9mins/Experimental
4.10pm-5.20pm
Trace
Ji Huang/China/2013/72mins/Documentary
5.20pm-6.20pm
States of Unbelonging
Lynne Sachs/USA/2006/63mins/Experimental
Nov 30
1pm-2.30pm
Calling and Recalling: Sentiments of Women’s Script
