BBC Talking Pictures host Tom Brooks interviews Barbara Hammer and Lynne Sachs on the work of Maya Deren.
Category Archives: SECTIONS
National Civil Rights Museum screens The Washing Society
Nov. 7, 2018 – “The Washing Society” screens at Indie Memphis and the National Civil Rights Museum with:
I AM SOMEBODY
44 minutes
In 1969, black female hospital workers in Charleston, South Carolina went on strike for union recognition and a wage increase, only to find themselves in a confrontation with the state government and the National Guard. Featuring Andrew Young, Charles Abernathy, and Coretta Scott King and produced by Local 1199, New York’s Drug and Hospital Union, I AM SOMEBODY is a crucial document in the struggle for labor rights.
A testament to the courage of the workers and activists at the heart of her films as well as her own bravery, tenacity and skill, the films of Madeline Anderson are both essential historical records of activism and a vital body of cinematic work.
National Civil Rights Museum: https://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/washing-society-i-am-somebody
The Washing Society wins Departures Audience Award at Indie Memphis
The Washing Society wins the Audience Award in the “Departures” (Experimental, Hybrid, Alternative) Category at Indie Memphis.
2018 Indie Memphis Film Festival Awards
http://indiememphis.com/2018-awards/
Women’s Work: Sachs, Olesker, Hammer & Deren at Other Cinema, San Francisco
“The Washing Society” travels to San Francisco to be part of Other Cinema’s three-decade tradition of presenting alternative cinema to Bay Area audiences. Curated by the inimitable filmmaker and programmer Craig Baldwin.
We’re tickled pink to welcome back prodigal daughter Lynne Sachs, here with Lizzie Olesker to anchor a program on women’s labor, both manual and intellectual. Sachs unspools her Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, about the ongoing cinema legacies of Ms. Schneemann, Hammer, and Nelson. That inspiring opener in fact leads us directly into a half-hour piece by the prolific Hammer, who HERSELF has honored another woman cultural worker of an earlier generation in Maya Deren’s Sink. With a soundtrack from Meredith Monk, Barbara’s cine-poem re-captures Maya’s concepts of light, space, and time via projections on her original bathroom sink(!) and the walls of her LA and NY homes. Then, Lynne and Lizzie’s The Washing Society shifts the focus to the physical labor in the neighborhood laundromat, a site rife with the history of service, and of immigration, in a disappearing public space.
Oct. 27, 2018
992 Valencia, San Francisco
Link to Other Cinema’s calendar: http://www.othercinema.com/calendar/index.html
The Washing Society Screens at Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive
“The Washing Society” at Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive
Oct. 24, 2018
Through creative juxtapositions of narrative and documentary elements, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker chronicle the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by a labor organization of African American laundresses formed in 1881, The Washing Society investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. They present a stark yet poetic vision of those whose working lives often go unrecognized. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of The Washing Society through interviews and observational moments.
Preceded By
Portraits of three filmmakers, Carolee Schneeman, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson.
Old Digs
Gunvor Nelson, Sweden, 1992
An inner journey through the sights and sounds of Kristinehamn as reflected in its central river.—Steve Anker
Stuart Klawens writes in The Nation on Investigation of a Flame at Metrograph
The Nation Magazine‘s film critic Stuart Klawans writes: “The Metrograph is showing ….. Lynne Sachs’s almost tactile resurrection of the resistance to the Vietnam War, Investigation of a Flame” in his review of Icarus Films at 40 Retrospective!, screening.
“This column has put me in a retrospective mood, since it marks my 30th anniversary writing about films for The Nation. So it’s fortunate that I have a 40th anniversary to write about, and a series to peg it to. For the second half of September, the Metrograph theater in Manhattan is offering a birthday salute to the distributor Icarus Films, screening 56 titles that demonstrate a principle dear to both that company and me: the conviction that a movie can have strong social or political content and still do something interesting as film.
I had the good luck to write on just that theme for one of the first pictures I reviewed here, Marcel Ophüls’s Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, and dozens of other films in the series implicitly make the same point. The Metrograph is showing, among others, Chris Marker’s epic (or perhaps encyclopedic, or maybe satiric) recent history of the global left, A Grin Without a Cat; Patricio Guzmán’s gorgeous meditation on astronomy and the collection of human remains, Nostalgia for the Light; Chantal Akerman’s magnificent, wordless journey into the regions of her unlived past, D’Est; Lynne Sachs’s almost tactile resurrection of the resistance to the Vietnam War, Investigation of a Flame; and, for those in a truly retrospective mood, Heddy Honigmann’s Forever, an infinitely touching documentary about the Père Lachaise cemetery and its visitors. If the Metrograph is far from you, please be aware that almost all of the films in the Icarus series are available on streaming services, making it possible for you, too, to look back, and look around.
Tip of My Tongue screens in The Poetic is Political at Film-Makers Cooperative
With the Midterm Election approaching, Devon Narin-Singh put together this program to explore a different way of political filmmaking. Each of the films in this program use a personal poetic expression as a jumping off point to explore larger political issues. Produce in the aftermath of Drumpf’s Election, each of these films advocate for the need for artistic expression and joyous ways of rebelling.
Featuring: Tip of My Tongue by Lynne Sachs (a beautiful celebration of life and the history tied to us), THE MOMENTS Evening Boat Ride by Ken Jacobs (a political eternalism of stunning beauty), and A Short History by Erica Sheu (a storybook tale of a divided identity).
Oct. 18, 2018
Film Wax Interview with Lynne and Cast of Tip of My Tongue
In October 2018, Filmwax Podcaster Adam Schartoff interviewed Lynne and two participant/performers in her film “Tip of My Tongue”. Adam himself was an integral part of the film, since he two turned 50 in the early 1960s and was ready, willing, and able to open his soul and his memories to our creative process.
You can listen here or go to the Filmwax website:
[39 mins. 12 secs.]
To celebrate her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathered 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. All caught in her fabulous film “Tip of My Tongue”.
In this podcast discussion, we re-unite 4 of the 12 people from that unforgettable weekend a few summers back, including myself, Accra Shepp, Andrea Kannapell and Lynne. The film will have a screening this evening, Thursday, October 18 at 7PM at The Film-makers Cooperative in Manhattan. The film is also available on DVD and blu-ray through Cinema Guild, and for streaming on Kanopy.
Vancouver’s The Georgia Straight on “The Washing Society”
“When Capitalism Sets the World on Fire: Vancouver International Film Festival takes a sobering look at today’s economic reality with a handful of powerful docs.”
Thanks to The Georgia Straight for this thought piece on our film “The Washing Society”, which screened at the 2018 Vancouver Film Festival. “Directors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker visit a number of laundromats, where women (except for one man originally from China) talk about their experiences at the bottom end of the service industry. Most of these washeterias have been shuttered since the movie wrapped, to be replaced by faceless pickup services built on even cheaper labour. “For us,” Olesker informed the Straight, “these are on-the-street observations reflecting larger changes in the city, due to demographic shifts, and not unique to laundromats.”
https://www.straight.com/movies/1145621/when-capitalism-sets-world-fire
Vancouver Film Festival director Alan Franey writes on The Washing Society
Vancouver Film Festival
“Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs’ film is a creative, often lyrical study of laundromat service workers in New York City – women who do a hard job for far too little money. Using a mixture of actors and real industry workers, the directors create a portrait of economic oppression and human resilience that provokes dismay and empathy in equal measure – and yet the hard dose of reality is leavened with poetic visual touches and a warm, humanist tone. What we hear – sometimes without subtitles – rings with authenticity, and it’s the details as much as the general situation of these workers that are alarming. One woman calculates that she washes around 1,000 articles of clothes a day; a “part-time” worker says she’s worked in laundromats for 45 years. How many socks is that? In voiceover, we hear that one of the goals the directors have is “calling attention to something that isn’t paid attention to – hidden labour.” On that score, their film is a success, but there is much else of value here besides journalistic advocacy; with their playful stylistic touches and creative approach to storytelling, Olesker and Sachs have turned politics into art – and vice versa.” Alan Franey, Vancouver International Film Festival, 2018.
Dreaming Under Capitalism + The Washing Society
Impact | Documentaries
Here are two great documentaries about work in the age of what some, perhaps hopefully, call late capitalism. Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs’ Washing Society is a creative, often lyrical study of laundromat service workers in NYC—women who do a hard job for far too little money. Sophie Bruneau’s haunting Dreaming Under Capitalism has its subjects recount their work-related dreams; we hear of waking anxieties turned into dark, often scary symbolism. Together, the films form a downbeat but soulful duet.
Dreaming Under Capitalism
Director: Sophie Bruneau / Belgium, 2017, 63 min.
Sophie Bruneau’s haunting Dreaming Under Capitalism has its subjects recount their work-related dreams; we hear of waking anxieties turned into dark, often scary symbolism.