Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker present THE WASHING SOCIETY at Fashion Institute of Technology in Film and Media Screening Series
Sept. 25, 2018
Category Archives: SECTIONS
Tang Teaching Museum presents Investigation of Flame at Skidmore
The Tang Teaching Museum’s series Whole Grain explores classic and contemporary work in experimental film and video. Whole Grain is programmed by Educator for College and Public Programs, Tom Yoshikami. All events are free and open to the public.
Join us on Thursday, September 13, at 7:00 PM, for a screening of Investigation of a Flame: A Portrait of the Catonsville Nine, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Lynne Sachs.
Investigation of a Flame (2001, US, 45 min., 16mm) is an intimate, experimental documentary portrait of the Catonsville Nine, this disparate band of resisters who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience. It follows nine Vietnam War protesters led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who, on May 17, 1968, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm.
This screening is part of our series Whole Grain: Experiments in Film and Video and is held in conjunction with the exhibition Give a damn., on view at the Tang through September 30.
Lynne also taught a workshop in the
THE JOHN B. MOORE DOCUMENTARY STUDIES COLLABORATIVE (MDOCS)
Reproduction of Labor Power in The Washing Society & Despertar
“The Reproduction of Labor-Power”: Thoughts on “The Washing Society” by Ana Almeyda Cohen
“As it relates to my comment/question about a possible Marxist interpretation of the interviews with the laundromat workers, I was thinking about Jean Rouch’s interviews with factory workers in Paris from his 1961 film Chronicle of a Summer. In the film, the anthropologist Edgar Morin interviews a Renault factory worker who explains his condition of exploitation and the reproduction of his labor that is necessary to be able to work the next day. He says, “I feel like I work 24 hours. I have a 9 hour shift and the rest of the time, I’m sleeping to work” (rough translation) which means that for the revival of his labor, he needs to eat, sleep, and take care of himself, thus replenishing his ability to work for his boss the next day. One can say, there is also the unpaid reproductive labor of women in the home that traditionally have provided this nurture to male laborers, in addition to providing the new generation of laborers that will enter the workforce. In Marxist theory, this can be understood as “the production of labour-power [which] consists in [the individual’s] reproduction of himself or his maintenance” also analyzed in feminist critique as “the reproduction of labor-power” as it relates to women, discussed in detail by Silvia Federici. This reproduction time comes free of charge for capitalists. The point is – as it relates to The Washing Society – I felt like the laundromat owner’s explanation of his workday and daily routine (being out of the house by 7am, working until 7:30pm, to then do it all again the next day), is shy of expressing this deeper proletariat consciousness of his hours of reproduction, which, in turn, can be heard in the Renault factory worker’s response in Chronicle of a Summer. The laundromat worker/owner does not go into great detail about what he does when is not working. Does he say that he eats and replenishes himself to be able to work the next day (“the reproduction of himself or his maintenance”)? I’d need to watch the film again to see. Margarita, on the other hand, inches closer to acknowledging and recognizing her need to replenish herself (to tend to her herniated disc, her family), but she does not quite draw attention to these non-working/reproductive hours more specifically, or does she? I just thought this Marxist framing is an interesting way to draw attention to what the workers do not say about the reproduction of their labor-power that is expressed in Chronicle of a Summer. However, once you mentioned in class, Lynne, that the Chinese laundromat worker is also the owner, his comment can have another weight. I’d have to think about it a little more.
Response to ¡Depertar!:
I just watched the video ¡DESPERTAR! It’s a great short film. In such a short time frame, you were able to capture the spirit and fervor of the laundromat workers’ movement. I think this is best captured in the woman’s remarks standing outside the laundromat. She situates the struggle within a historical time frame, referring to the ’87 and the ’90s when immigrants had less rights. Has the role of the owners also changed since then? I think the film leaves open the role and (changing?) function of the laundromat owners. For example, the final shot of the film shows the young owner standing at the door in what appears to be him holding the door open for the workers and protesters as they leave. This courteous (or not) gesture stands in juxtaposition to the exploitation his role engages in. Also, his stoic posture and lack of facial expression seem to stand in contrast to the energized protests of the workers. His posture also seems to suggest that the protesters’ claims have fallen on deaf ears. The film leaves unanswered the owners’ response to the movement. What does he think? Perhaps we need another epilogue that serves as a response to the workers. What happens, though, when the owner is also the worker, as we see with the owner featured in THE WASHING SOCIETY? Is the owner-worker then part of a weird form of labor-driven self-flagellation? Does he/she recognize his/her own self-exploitation? Just some thoughts.
Expressions of a Flame: In the Intense Now at Northwest Film Forum
Northwest Film Center presents
1968: Expressions of a Flame
1515 12th Ave.
Seattle, WA
Sept. 1, 2018
https://nwfilmforum.org/films/1968-expressions-of-a-flame-in-the-intense-now/
The year 1968 signaled revolution, but that call for change was heard differently, unevenly. In the streets, it was louder than a bomb and echoed with joy; in mansions and police precincts, an incomprehensible tune sung in an impossible language. A student in Mexico City goes to a demonstration, a communist in Tokyo buys a saxophone, a CIA operative spies on Black nationalists in Cleveland, and the Los Angeles rich look in the mirror and don’t recognize their faces. This film series explores the many manifestations of this global upheaval through cinema.
Series programmer: Austin McCann
Investigation of a Flame and El Pueblo Se Levanta are two documentaries centered around the church as a site of community organizing.
—
Investigation of a Flame
(Lynne Sachs, US, 2003, 43 min)
In her elegiac tribute to the Catonsville Nine, acclaimed documentarian Lynne Sachs ponders the moral dilemma that moved nine middle-class Catholics to break into their local Maryland draft office and burn 378 draft records with homemade napalm. The film combines insightful interviews with a more abstract visual sensibility attuned to the quotidian spaces of the resisters. A beautiful portrait of faith in opposition to war featuring Daniel and Philip Berrigan.
El Pueblo Se Levanta
(Prod. Third World Newsreel Film Collective, US, 1971, 42 min)
The Young Lords were a US-based Puerto Rican militant organization dedicated to improving the lives of their communities through direct action and community programs. In this hard-hitting 1971 newsreel, we witness the Young Lords organizing in Harlem in the late ’60s, including an extensive church occupation.
*Co-presented with the Seattle Chapter of the DSA!* Post-screening discussion to follow with Dae Shik Kim Hawkins Jr., who is a local reporter, youth pastor, and organizer with the Seattle Peoples Party. He does most of his organizing around Seattle’s unhoused community and the brutal sweeps that the city continues. Hawkins recently co-wrote the “Bruised But Not Broken: Tales of a Korean Immigrant Church” series for Inheritance Magazine. You can find his writing in the South Seattle Emerald, the Seattle Weekly, and the Atlantic.
El Otro Ciné: “I Nearly Touch You” Review of “The Washing Society”
El Otro Cine: “I Nearly Touch You”
I Nearly Touch You
By Cristina Mancero
Reprinted from the journal El Otro Cine, published by
Encuentros del Otro Cine, Quito, Ecuador
March 2018
Hand touches skin. Skin touches skin. Clothing, too, touches skin. And there are still other hands that touch the clothing that touches the skin of others. This particular touch involves cleaning. It eradicates every residue, stain, odor and variety of dirt that attaches to that second skin we call clothing.
The touch of skin upon skin can become something routine. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons for breakups and divorces. Touching the second skins of foreign bodies, washing them, rinsing them, spinning them, drying them, folding them is also part of a routine. But divorce doesn’t necessarily follow because the ones carrying out this particular routine depend on it for their survival.
Who would suggest that touching the second skin of others is exploitation? Working long hours. Earning minimum wage. Doing the same job hour after hour, day after day.
It’s an invisible job and the ghosts are all around us. The skin leaves traces and by those traces it is possible to form a picture of the person who quietly dropped off her second skin so that it could later be delivered, sweet smelling and wrinkle-free, in a sealed bag. Guaranteed clean.
Inside every bag of second skins that arrives at the Laundromat are countless traces. “By their impurities ye shall know them.” By their garments, also.
This cleanliness routine comes close to the skin: I nearly touch you. I nearly connect with your skin, but in the end all that remains of our encounter is lint, dust, a few flakes of that same dry skin.
Jean-Luc Nancy, in his essay “Essential Skin,” says that there are little things, minutiae like “a coffee bean or chiffon” that can get under our skins, “their appearance making an impression on us. Without even realizing it, roughness, softness, jerking, striations, vapors, urges, and murkiness all enter into our skin. The skin feels, handles, gathers, and deals with everything we see, hear, breathe.”
Those who carry out the cleaning of second skins take this one step further, they make things happen: they take the second skins full of traces and wipe them clean. And in order to do that, they must stand guard against the exploitation and monotony that kill. Invisibility. The weight of each quarter that feeds the machines and the machines that will, in turn, feed them.
“When it’s grasped,” writes Nancy, “skin is as dissociated as it possibly can be from its nature as a sort of envelope or boundary: instead it has the appearance of dough, paste, or mortar, of ribbons, laces, straps, bands, or liana, or of banners, and sails that are unfurled, along with the rigging used to haul them down. Skin soars and is heaped up; it is lustrous, creased, and moist.” This is what happens with The Washing Society: it juxtaposes skins and second skins, their grasping at the boundaries. “I’m here,” says one of the washerwomen, “but this is not who I am.”
Olesker and Sachs, the film’s directors, experiment with the craft of documentary and the craft of laundering. Their characters go back and forth between the real and the fictitious, putting themselves in other people’s skins in order to tell stories of second skins. The skins of each craft grasps the other and together reveal the nakedness, the lint, the dust, the flakes.
Translation: Philip Kay
Original Spanish version:
Casi te toco
La mano toca la piel. La piel toca la piel. La ropa toca la piel, también. Y hay manos que tocan la ropa de otras pieles. Ese tocar implica limpieza. Se ejecuta el despojo de todo residuo, mancha, hedor y suciedad de una segunda piel: la ropa.
Tocarse piel con piel puede volverse una rutina. Quizás sea esa una de las causas de separaciones y divorcios. Tocar la segunda piel de cuerpos ajenos y lavarla, enjuagarla, centrifugarla, secarla, doblarla es también parte de una rutina. Pero ahí no hay un divorcio, necesariamente, porque quienes lo hacen se apoyan en esa actividad para sobrevivir.
¿Quién diría que tocar la segunda piel de los otros es tocar de cerca la explotación laboral? Trabajar en horarios extendidos. Ganar lo mínimo. Hacer lo mismo día a día, hora a hora.
Este es un trabajo invisible y los fantasmas están por todos lados. La piel deja huella en la segunda piel. Por esas huellas es posible armarse una idea de la persona que ha dejado su segunda piel a buen recaudo, para que luego le sea entregada sin arrugas, con buenos olores y en bolsas selladas. La garantía de la limpieza.
Se encuentran tantas huellas y objetos en cada bolsa de segundas pieles que llegan a las lavanderías. “Por sus suciedades los conoceréis”. Por las prendas que visten también.
Esta ejecución rutinaria de limpieza se acerca a la piel: casi te toco. Casi me conecto con tu piel, pero lo que queda como prueba del encuentro son pelusas y polvo; escamas de la misma piel.
Jean-Luc Nancy, en su ensayo Dar piel, dice que hay detalles, minucias, como “un grano de café o un jirón” que pueden meterse en la piel, “imponerle sus aspectos, sus aires. Sin que nos podamos poner en guardia frente a ello, entran a nuestra piel asperezas, blanduras, convulsiones, estrías, humos, pulsiones y turbaciones. La piel palpa, maneja, recoge y trata todo aquello que vemos, oímos y respiramos”.
Las ejecutoras de la limpieza de las segundas pieles dan un paso más a allá, dan pie: toman la segunda piel llena de huellas y las borran. Y para hacerlo, deben ponerse en guardia ante la explotación y la rutina que mata. La invisibilidad. El peso de cada moneda de 25 centavos que alimenta a las máquinas y las máquinas que luego las alimentarán a ellas.
Dice Nancy: “cuando se hallan en el abrazo, las pieles se separan tanto como es posible de su naturaleza de envoltura y de frontera; toman más bien un aire de amasijo, de goma, de argamasa, o aun de cintas, cordones, cinchos, vendas y lianas, también de banderas, velas desplegadas y cordajes que las arrían. Las pieles levantan el vuelo y se amontonan, se lustran, se arrugan y se humedecen”. Pasa esto con La sociedad del lavado: la yuxtaposición de pieles y segundas pieles, sus abrazos en la frontera. “Yo estoy aquí”, dice la trabajadora, “pero esto no es mío”.
Olesker y Sachs, las directoras de La sociedad del lavado, experimentan con el oficio documental y con el oficio del lavado. Nos muestran performances de personajes que oscilan entre lo real y lo ficticio; que se ponen en la piel de otros para contar historias sobre segundas pieles. Se abrazan, pues, las pieles de ambos oficios, y nos muestran la desnudez, las pelusas, el polvo y las escamas.
The Washing Society
The Washing Society
a film by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs
44 min. 2018
When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? THE WASHING SOCIETY brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses, THE WASHING SOCIETY investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Drawing on each other’s artistic practices, Sachs and Olesker present a stark yet poetic vision of those whose working lives often go unrecognized, turning a lens onto their hidden stories, which are often overlooked. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of THE WASHING SOCIETY through interviews and observational moments. With original music by sound artist Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in THE WASHING SOCIETY creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
Our collaborators include:
Laundry workers: Wing Ho, Lula Holloway, Margarita Lopez
Actors: Ching Valdes-Aran, Jasmine Holloway, Veraalba Santa
Cinematographer: Sean Hanley
Editor: Amanda Katz
Sound artist: Stephen Vitiello
Live Performance Producer: Emily Rubin, Loads of Prose
Criterion Channel streaming premiere with 7 other films, Oct. 2021.
Premiere
‘Punto de Vista’ International Documentary Film Festival, Pamplona, Spain
New York Premiere
BAMcinemaFest, Brooklyn Academy of Music; Indie Memphis Audience Award “Departures” (Avant-Garde) Category
Awards: Black Maria Film Festival Juror’s Stellar Award;
Festivals and Other Screenings: Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival; Athens Film and Video Festival; El Festival Internacional de Cine Documental “Encuentros del Otro Cine”, Ecuador; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück, Germany; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Vancouver International Film Festival; Maine International Film Festival; Pacific Film Archive/ Berkeley Art Museum; Other Cinema, San Francisco; Queens World Film Festival; National Civil Rights Museum; Chicago Undergound Film Festival; Downtown Community Television; Scribe Video Center, Philadelphia; Cinema Parallels, Bosnia Herzogovina, 2021; Kinesthesia Festival, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2021; Metrograph Theater, NYC, 2021.
University & College Screenings: Symposium on Black Feminist History, Carter Woodson Institute for African-American Studies, University of Virginia; University of Pennsylvania; Smith College; Mount Holyoke College; University of North Carolina; Dennison College; Amherst College; University of Buffalo; Tisch School of the Arts, New York University; Princeton University, Lewis Center for the Arts; Fashion Institute of Technology; University of California, Berkeley; University of Mississippi Center for the Study of Southern Culture; Yale University, African American Studies Dep’t.
Lynne’s co-director:
Lizzie Olesker is a writer, performer, and director in New York City where she creates theatrical works inspired by social and personal history. Her plays include Dreaming Through History; Verdure; A Kind (of) Mother; and Embroidered Past, seen at the Public Theater, Cherry Lane, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, Here, and New Georges. Her solo performances include housework (St. Mark’s Church) and Infinite Miniature (Invisible Dog and Ohio Theater). Collaborations with other artists include the Talking Band (performing at La Mama and on international tour), Lenora Champagne (Tiny Lights) and upcoming with Louise Smith (Dorothy Lane). She’s received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council and the Dramatists Guild. She teaches playwriting at the New School and New York University where she’s active in the local UAW union for adjunct faculty.
Selected Press:
“Faced with the challenge of making a documentary for which the voices of undocumented immigrants were crucial, filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker had to push the boundaries of convention.” — “Bringing the Invisible to Light: Interview with Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker” Cynthia Ramsay, Jewish Independent, Vancouver, BC, Canada, http://www.jewishindependent.ca/bringing-the-invisible-to-light/ )
“This is a slice of life, a celebration of humanity from the historic Atlanta washerwomen to the New York City workers of today in swirling brilliant color — color that comes from the flesh, hair and eyes of the workers, and the mountains of laundry they deal with every day, underwear, socks, sheets, shirts. One has to see it to believe it.” (J.P. Devine, Kennebec Journal, https://www.centralmaine.com/2018/07/16/j-p-devine-miff-movie-review-washing-society-charlie-chaplin-lived-here/ )
“An exercise in high-concept cinema to which Olesker and Sachs devote three quarters of an hour of film stock and many more quarters in tips, revealing the stains (of racism and classicism) on an American Dream that seems to want to scrub away every last trace of its own identity.” (Revolution in the Air & Theories of Weightlessness, Otro Cines Europa by Victor Esquirol, Punto de Vista International Film Festival, Pamplona, Spain, www.otroscineseuropa.com/aires-revolucion-teorias-la-ingravidez )
“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.
THE WASHING SOCIETY has received support from Workers Unite Film Festival, New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Women and Media Coalition, Puffin Foundation and Fandor FIX Filmmakers.
For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.
Post-Screening Conversation for
WASHING SOCIETY + CLOTHESLINES +A MONTH OF SINGLE
Metrograph, NYC
December 2021
Co-Directors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker with special guest feminist scholar Silvia Federici in a post-screening conversation. Hosted by Emily Apter.
El Telégrafo (Quito, Ecuador) Reviews “The Washing Society”
“The Washing Society,” El Telégrafo (Quito, Ecuador)
“The Washing Society,” an Intimate and Social Portrait.
El Telégrafo (Ecuador) May 15, 2018
In Quito’s Metropolitan Cultural Center hangs a large painting from 1939 by the Ecuadorian artist Germania Paz y Miño called “Lavanderas” (Washerwomen). Three women are working. One is taking down washing from a line, another is scrubbing clothing on a flat rock and a third is nursing her child. The composition juxtaposes the force of these women’s labor and mothering against the white laundry—almost certainly somebody else’s—into which women’s social and emotional worlds have always been wrapped up.
Although she had a critical eye, Paz y Miño was not a polemicist. In fact, due to the power of her works, especially her sculptures, in 1940 she was awarded a grant to study in New York’s New School for Social Research, where Camilo Egas served as studio director and her teacher.
The playwright Lizzie Olesker arrived in Quito last week to present The Washing Society, a film she co-directed with Lynne Sachs, in the Documentary Film Festival (EDOC) . During her travels around town, Olesker visited the Cultural Center and was astonished by Paz y Miño’s painting and the way it related to her film. It showed how, right until today, women have been historically tied to domestic and poorly paid jobs, even when their labor is focused on the care of others—in this case on their clothing, which is a kind of second skin.
The Washing Society takes a wistful and poetic stroll through various New York City Laundromats—some that have since gone out of business—and shows the experiences of the people who work there. Many of these people—the majority women—are badly paid, come from poor neighborhoods and foreign countries.
Characterized by Olesker as a “hybrid documentary,” the film mixes reportage with performance and poetry. It gathers workers’ testimonies and translates them into corporeal exercises on the part of actresses who inhabit the skins of the washerwomen.
“One dimension of documentary film is its performativity,” Olesker told me in a cafeteria at La Floresta. “For this film we did a lot of research on gender theory and feminism. We especially relied on the work of the historian Tera W. Hunter, who studies the 1881 Washing Society strike.”
This is the first collaboration between Olesker (writer, director and performer) and Lynne Sachs, who makes films, installation art and improvisations and projects for the web that strive to create a dialog between personal and historical experiences.
One of Sachs’s finest films is Your Day Is My Night, which deals with the Chinese immigrant community in New York, where people often live in shared rooms with up to eight beds.
This is Olesker’s first film and grew out of a lecture a friend invited her to give in a New York Laundromat. After that, the playwright developed a site-specific performance and asked to Sachs to work with her on an audiovisual component.
“Domestic workers, sex workers, caregivers, washerwomen all struggle with the idea of touching the body, of working in an intimate way,” says Olesker.
“I’m interested in domestic labor as a subject; it’s a fundamental part of women’s history, of my own experience and of our mothers’ lives,” she added. Her film plays with the fictitious and the factual, the material world and the dreamworld, the beautiful and the crude.
Translation: Philip Kay
Kennebec Journal Reviews “The Washing Society”
Maine International Film Festival, Central Maine
MIFF Movie Review: ‘Washing Society’
by J.P. Devine
July 16, 2018
This week the Maine International Film Festival will proudly present a double bill of two 45-minute documentaries: “Charlie Chaplin Lived Here” by Scottish filmmaker Bill Douglas; and the most important presentation of this or any year’s film festival, the magical “Washing Society,” a brilliant documentary by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs.
In July of 1888, a group of African-American washerwomen in Atlanta, Georgia, shook off the heat and humidity to move towards the impossible thing for former slaves to do. They organized themselves to acquire better wages and working conditions. They decided to strike.
There were 20 of them at the time. They went door to door in the city, and raised awareness and recruited sisters.
In three weeks, they grew in numbers from 20 to 3,000 members. That’s a lot of sweaty white folks’ laundry, and the strike worked.
The great forces of white supremacy went to work, as they do even to this day, to suppress the movement.
The women sent an ultimatum. I quote: “We the members of our society, are determined to stand to our pledge and make extra charges for washing, and we have agreed, and are willing to pay $25 or $50 for licenses as a protection, so we can control the washing for the city. We can afford to pay these licenses, and will do it before we will be defeated, and then we will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices. Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council Tuesday morning. We mean business this week or no washing.”
Don’t be thrown by the title and classification. This is no dry, droning documentary. This is a slice of life, a celebration of humanity from the historic Atlanta washerwomen to the New York City workers of today in swirling brilliant color — color that comes from the flesh, hair and eyes of the workers, and the mountains of laundry they deal with every day, underwear, socks, sheets, shirts. One has to see it to believe it.
The film ends with a chilling narration that speaks of the end of an era and these establishments.
“Things change. My neighborhood laundromat where I used to wash my clothes has been replaced by a cafe and clothing shop. Most of the city laundromats have disappeared.
“Now there is an app with a woman’s name. Not a she, but an ‘It,’ a laundry service on your phone that picks up your clothes at 10 p.m., moved down a street to a catacomb somewhere, to be done in a machine that runs all night.
“With the sunrise your clothes will be returned to you. You’ll never see those hands or the person they belong to, it’s guaranteed.”
Things change, indeed.
J.P. Devine, of Waterville, is a former stage and screen actor.
Jury Prize and Workshop at Festival Curtas Belo Horizante, Brazil
“Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor ” wins Jury Prize at Festival Curtas Belo Horizante
Lynne attends festival and also teaches workshop on collaborative filmmaking.
August 2018
“Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor” won the Honorable Mention Jury Prize at the Festcurtas Belo Horizante, Brazil in August. Here is the translation of the jury’s thoughts on the film:
“Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor” creates a path that moves from the gesture of an initial encounter to an aesthetic manifestation — through the manipulation of images, textures and movements. In this way, the film presents a different kind of documentary, bringing to the forefront a human landscape that opens up through intimate contact between the director and three women pioneers in the history of experimental film.
Many thanks to Ana Siqueira for the warm welcome to the festival, to both Ana and Zita Nunes for their translation and to Carolee Schneeman, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson for being such amazing human beings and dear friends.
Film as a Collaborative Art: A Hybrid Media and Performance Workshop
What kind of creative surprises can happen when people who don’t know each other come together for a couple of days to make a film? In this workshop, we will work together for two mornings as a group to create a series of single-shot videos using complex mise en scène, unusual camera movements, and recycled or hand-made props from home. Each participant will have a chance to direct their own component of the piece. Throughout the encounters, workshop leader Lynne Sachs will present a series of experimental performance videos made by her and by artists such as Vito Acconci, Eadweard Muybridge, Chantal Akerman, Christopher Harris and Keith Haring. These short artist works will certainly stretch everyone’s idea of what a moving image art work can be. At the end of the last encounter, we will show the work and the participants are encouraged to invite others to watch. As a group, we will read excerpts from Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (in Portuguese) as a way to embark in this shared, artistic experience.
Twenty editions. If the event makes us very proud, it also comes with the acknowledgment of a path made possible by several people, much beyond what fits in a restricted credits list, and the responsibility of being on par a with its history. To live up to the path of this festival, of public character since its conception, means, first of all, not letting the aesthetic, political and ethical restlessness that moves us, disconcert us, insistently put us into question, to be smoothed over. This restlessness has been, more than ever, stimulated by the transformations in the production, circulation and legitimation of films and the thinking made upon them. Year after year we have followed and celebrated the extraordinary growth of the production by historical subjects who have for too long been relegated almost exclusively to object of cinema’s gaze, as part of a broader political process that has deeply affected our ways of watching, judging, selecting and thinking cinema and the structures that support it, impacting not only the selection of films, but also the diverse activities and practices that make up a festival.
Jury Notes for prize in Portugese:
“Um caminho que vai do gesto do encontro à sua manifestação estética por meio do domínio sobre as imagens, suas texturas e movimentos. Surge assim um filme que se coloca como uma outra possibilidade documental, trazendo paisagens humanas que se abrem a partir do contato direto entre uma diretora e três mulheres pioneiras para a história do cinema experimental. Por conseguir capturar as especificidades estéticas da obra de cada uma dessas mulheres em três cápsulas de imagens, a Menção Honrosa do Fest Curtas BH vai para Carolee, Barbara e Gunvor, de Lynne Sachs.”
Tran Trang’s Blindness Series: My Letter to Helene Cixous
Thoughts on Tran Kim Trang’s Decade with Blindness:
A Letter to Hélène Cixous from Lynne Sachs
Published in
This Long Century- an ever-evolving collection of personal insights from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and cultural icons the world over.
http://www.thislongcentury.com/lynne-sachs?c=441
“I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to see the skin of the light.” –“Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey” in Stigmata by Hélène Cixous
Dear Hélène, …I begin by conveying to you the shock of what I have witnessed. These words are a translation of the visual experiences I had last night and early this morning. My words will be absolute, nothing left to interpretation. From my lash to your lobe. Trust me. Forget the perfidy for which I have become so renowned.
Tran T. Kim-Trang, a Vietnamese-American artist who lives in Los Angeles, dares to call her video work Aletheia, the philosophical concept of truth and possibility. To me the word is a proper name, an ethereal girl I might have known, Aletheia. I begin a precise tracing of the image path Aletheia that Tran lays before me. Go blind now, with me, Hélène. I will not let you loose in the darkness.
“Night becomes a verb. I night.” Hélène Cixous
We hear screeches. Mechanical hysterics. Braille surfaces flip and flop across the screen, overlapping, flowing by … completely unreadable without fingers of course. I wonder what this surface feels like to touch. Tran tells us that Trinh T. Minh-ha writes about reaching out through blindness. I think she finds the same freedom in the darkness that you discuss with the donkey. Hélène, vision is there within you but you too refuse the ease in life that it offers.
I am watching a woman’s mask being pulled off. Can you hear the woman’s voice? She’s accusing them (the people who claim to make history) of not being able to see into her “little squinting eyes.” They don’t reveal a thing!! Asian eyes are extremely good at closing out, keeping secrets, says the voice. So why do the little girls start slicing their own eyes? To my mind the slits are power! They open and close when they damn well please. Like the vagina, don’t you think, unless it is raped. Tran continues. She thinks about having her lids DONE. Her camera is slowly, slowly pulling out to reveal a cosmetic surgeon holding the face with the mask. I’m watching hundreds of Asian faces, listening to punk rock music screaming “I can’t see what it’s all about! Lights out, lights out!!!!”
“Let us close our eyes. Where do we go? Into the other world. Just next door… In a dash, we are there. An eyelid a membrane, separates two kingdoms.” HC
I listen to addresses of plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills, revealing locales on Sunset Blvd. I am eavesdropping.
I see a sign that reads “the Jew as blind.”
Then a parable of a child and the story of Cambodian women who have witnessed war horrors about becoming blind, then suicidal.
Aletheia is Tran’s farrago of blindness metaphors, her textual defense of an obsession with the receptacle of sight. She plays brazenly with the allusions, spinning them around like riddles we must decipher in order for a laugh and then…. a poignant sigh of tragic recognition. Tran is angered by the constraints put on the slanted eye in the modern kingdom, the West. As I watch this modern kingdom, I find nothing appealing about it, at least her view of the wealthy kingdom donned Los Angeles. I’d much rather close my eyes.
Next. there are more listings of addresses in LA. We’ve tumbled into the hell of Hollywood! Richard Pryor, blind groping men at peep holes … Sidney Poitier with a blind white girl,…blonde woman in vulgar, pornographic Hollywood movies about sex and blindness. A lascivious doctor talks about a cure for blindness. I am nauseated and wish I could close my eyes, Hélène. I never mentioned how much of life I would prefer not to see.
Return to mapping of LA, then ranting, ritual, obsessions with fashion, animals, a Native American parable in which a white man borrows an eye from an animal but it does not fit. “A candy colored clown they call the sandman tiptoes to my room every night” croons Roy Orbison. Oh, how I long for the dirt in my eye, the unconscious filtering of grit before it enters my consciousness. A clean, soporific blindness.
…but I say that he who looks into my eyes for anything but a
perpetual question will have to lose his sight.
—Frantz Fanon, from Black Skin, White Mask
Tran ends with Frantz Fanon’s rigorous, righteous eyes demanding only a perpetual question. Do you think that Tran would agree that eyes with this brilliant, curious questioning are windows into that rare thing — a lucid mind?
Tran’s next film is called Operculum An operculum is the plug of mucus that fills the opening of a woman’s cervix. It is also the bony flap covering the gills of a fish. An operculum also has something mysterious to do with fungi. Here flora and fauna are merging in a bewildering visual confluence. Tran is also thinking about cosmetic surgery to reshape her eyes, another approach to the sculpture of the face. She is doing research with her black and white video camera by visiting cosmetic surgery doctors who specialize in blepharoplasty (eyelid crease surgery) and learning that “the Vietnamese have a better crease.” I read text scrolling on the side of the screen about hallucinations after a lobotomy, while we are hearing seemingly objective descriptions of eye surgery for Asian people. I believe that Tran is telling us that both operations are a form of shock therapy. They both use a prick.
It is 4 AM. I am watching Tran’s Kore (sexuality, sex, fantasy, AIDS). Feeling promiscuous, but unaroused. “The eye, like the camera, seeks out its owner’s reflection.” The phallic gaze, horror movies, loads of ugliness, club dance music – all bombard my psyche. Kore suggests that the clitoris is another eye that can be shut: lesbian love making then takes on an all-powerful presence on the screen. A female AIDS health expert talks about blindness and drug treatment, like a perverse Public Service Announcement. She tell us to choose between death or blindness, that there is a problem with so many women being infected by men. We watch a penis image, graphic and grotesque. Kore seems to find an assertive comfort with the abject. “No erotic act has any intrinsic meaning (Boundaries of Sexuality*).”
Again, I watch lesbian lovemaking with technomusic, one of the women is blindfolded. Do her eyes inhibit desire?
“the eye-penis”
“the phallic gaze”
—Luce Irigaray fromSpeculum of the Other Woman
I am reminded of that revolution I experienced in my mind and in my body the moment I laid eyes on Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman. It was as though she were bringing a hidden awareness I had always treasured to my epidermal layer, finally visualized and sublimely conscious. With Tran, the meeting with Irigeray is not only
beautiful but also violent, at least on the level of the imagination. Like a confrontation. For me, you Hélène Cixous and Luce were and are dear, dear friends. Everything in both your writing feels so lustful and wild, yet somehow completely outside the sensual.
Ocularis is another piece on surveillance as erotic. It’s more aggressive. Now the eavesdropping feels transgressive and dangerous, problematically pleasurable. I hear the narrator tell me about a childhood bully who called her a “rice head” on the bus. The story feels like a rant from a standup comedian, and I am entranced without really seeing the performer’s face. The woman remembers the surveillance camera documenting a racist picking on her on the bus. “Kent began his harangue on the bus, then he beat me up on camera.” This recorded act of violence, becomes the pivotal weapon against the bully. It is a GREAT STORY. We are watching buses in a garage depot and hearing this fantasy. We are listening, feeling fascinated without seeing the cause of our satisfaction.
Later, a woman editor falls in love with the man she sees on a surveillance camera. She knows him but he does not know her. Then there is the story of a small Asian teenager whose best friend was the largest girl in class. The large girl was attacked by a man who was a friend of the family. We hear this while we watch two good friends trying on clothes, the white girl asks for the opinion of the Asian girl. We hear about a young girl who carries a camera in her teddy bear. Counter surveillance services are discussed while we watch police at work. A young woman surveillance expert gets fired for a mistake she made on the job.
This movie has a sense of humor. It asks us if surveillance creates anxiety and boredom at the same time. Has all behavior become spectacle?
Finally, the sun is beginning to peek her head out from the lip of the horizon. Morning is knocking on the window, and I am watching Amaurosis. Amuaurosis is the word for vision impairment, especially when there is no obvious damage to the eye. All night, I have been inundated with cinematic reflections on the effects of
blindness. I must admit I am feeling disconcerted by the light. I somehow find it difficult to remember that there may be something out there I would want to see. Then Tran introduces me to Nguyen Duc Dat, a blind classical guitar player to whom she has offered a flute in exchange for writing a song, or maybe for doing an interview. It appears to me a blissfully innocent arrangement that spins lovingly around a deep respect for the music this Vietnamese American makes with his instrument.
Tran begins this movie with a black screen as I hear a poem dedicated to childhood’s hour. “I have not seen as others saw… All I loved I loved alone.” These words are accompanied by guitar playing that I later realize might be Duc’s. Then I see a boy alone, walking the streets. The images are old, like a home movie, and the textures tell me this may be Vietnam. Tran then reveals the story of this blind musician through his own recounting, his philosophy of living in darkness, his commitment to active listening. He speaks eloquently about delivering speeches to an audience, really being heard and feeling more alive than ever, knowing that his words are able to open his mind to others. Duc articulates a concept of beauty in his blind experience that is so distilled and precise. He wonders if this connection between the lip and the ear, or between the guitar string and the ear, might be ruined by sight. Tran decides to illustrate this dichotomy, scientifically, with humor I believe. We are watching two large scale depictions of the cell, a biomorphic metaphor I would call it. One cell is imagery. The other is perception. Can a blind man appreciate the difference? Does it matter? Duc asks us: How far is close? He saw light as a child. Noticed that the sound of thunder had a fraternal twin, lightening born just moments later. In silhouette, Tran does her final interview. She breaks all the rules of good photography, covering the details of Duc’s face with darkness and allowing the sun to surround him with light.
I am almost finished watching ten years of Tran Kim-Trang’s opus on blindness. I listen to this Duc speak of the ocean: it is big, it is horrible, the seaweed smells, the waves are music. This man has no need for blue. As you said “Night becomes a verb. I night.”
Lynne Sachs
2004 – 2021
Films by Tran Kim Trang:
Aletheia 16min 1992
Operculum (cosmetic surgery on the eyes) 14 min 1993
Kore 17 min. 1994
Ocularis 21 min. 1997
Ekleipreis 22 min. 1998
Alexia 10 min. 2000
Amaurosis, 30 min. 2002