“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.
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.
Friday 07th, September 2018
Written by Cynthia Ramsay in TV & Film
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. The result is The Washing Society, which will see its Canadian première at the Vancouver International Film Festival, as part of the festival’s Impact programming.
“For this year’s Impact stream, we decided to foreground films that represent prominent themes found in the festival at large – themes that are extremely topical at this historical moment,” said Alan Franey, director of international programming at VIFF, in a release. “Refreshing in their cinematic artistry, insights and lack of platitudes, these films have the power to inspire actual change.”
The Washing Society combines research, interviews, acting, dance, artistic images and other elements to introduce viewers in 45 minutes to some of the laundromats in New York City, which are disappearing, and the people who work in them. Olesker and Sachs, who both live in Brooklyn, will be in Vancouver for the festival and the Independent interviewed them by phone in anticipation of their visit.
The filmmakers are practically neighbours, and they met each other through their daughters, who are about the same age and have the same piano teacher. It was at a piano lesson where they first crossed paths. “Then we saw each other’s work, and really admired what each other were doing,” said Olesker.
The origins of the documentary are in a performance Olesker was commissioned to do in a laundromat, upon which she wanted to expand. Thinking that film would be a good element to add to it, she contacted Sachs.
“We had a series of conversations, which led me to unexpected places in how to think about laundry and women doing laundry, and so it became a deeper, more fruitful collaboration,” said Olesker.
Over a span of about two years, the pair researched the topic, then co-created the play Every Fold Matters with the actors performing it, as well as writing their own text. The site-specific performance and film project – which was performed in laundromats and various venues throughout New York from 2015 to 2017 – formed the basis for what has become The Washing Society.
“We’ve been working together now for probably over four years,” said Sachs, “because we spent almost a whole year traipsing all over New York City – mostly Brooklyn and Manhattan – trying to do the convention of documentary practices, ‘Let’s go into laundromats, let’s talk to workers.’ But the issues in New York are that so many of those workers are undocumented, so they’re very hesitant to have a conversation in front of a camera. So, we would have conversations and we would go back and write pieces and create characters based on all of those interviews we did, which we didn’t film. But then, over the course of time, as it shifted from being a live performance with media to a film, we got better at finding people who were willing to speak in front of the camera.”
They did this, in some cases, with the help of an actor or a translator, who then became more involved or involved in other ways. “One of the things both of us are really interested in,” said Sachs, “is breaking down the conventions of roles in the project.”
Both Sachs and Olesker have done cross-disciplinary work before.
“It’s been exciting for me to work in film and also to engage in questions like, What is a documentary? What does it mean to inquire into a subject or have a question and pursue it in different ways? As a creator of film or theatre, you’re always looking for a truth, not necessarily the truth.”
“I’m really interested in how documentary crosses over into fiction, and how fiction informs the documentary aspect,” said Olesker. In this project, she said, “It’s been exciting for me to work in film and also to engage in questions like, What is a documentary? What does it mean to inquire into a subject or have a question and pursue it in different ways? As a creator of film or theatre, you’re always looking for a truth, not necessarily the truth.”
The Washing Society contains a lot of theatre. “That’s an issue that raises questions with audiences in good ways and in challenging ways,” said Olesker, for whom this film is her first foray into documentary-making.
Sachs, however, has made this type of documentary before, mixing lived experience with fiction; for example, Your Day Is My Night, which she brought to the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2013. “Working in this way,” she said, “has started to make me to question all forms of documentary, or even narrative film, because you see a narrative film and it’s really a document of a bunch of people getting together and making a fictional story.”
One passion “that has been very nourishing for both of us in our work is our relationship to history, to the historical document,” said Sachs.
“With this film,” she explained, “when we came across the story of the Atlanta washerwomen, we found it absolutely riveting and astonishing that there was this moment in American history in which a group of 3,000 black women had enough power or wherewithal or vision … to organize and to change their working lives. Any art project that gives you an excuse to research, I think, is pretty exciting.”
The title for the documentary is inspired by what these washerwomen accomplished in 1881. As for more recent history, The Washing Society both exposes the harsh working conditions in laudromats and laments the loss of these neighbourhood establishments.
“I think it’s interesting to explore that contradiction,” said Olesker. “It is grueling, underpaid, under-recognized work. It’s also necessary work – not necessarily in the form that it’s taken, of dropping off your laundry and paying someone to wash and fold it, but someone is always going to have to do the wash, so that sense of broad history and the roles that women have had in doing that work is something that was behind the project, as well.”
“My nostalgia,” said Sachs, “is any space where there is an intersection.… It’s what makes cities great, the idea that there is a space in which there are intersections, and that people who have less and people who have more are in the same space and they’re spending time [together]. And that all has changed so much now. The thing is, though, that the basic infrastructure – of there being a large group of people who are hidden in some way, and they are doing service work for other people, who have much more access or means – isn’t going to change because, even if it [laundry service] becomes an app, like we show at the end of the film, there are still people doing the work, they’re just not as visible.”
One purpose of the film is to make that invisibility visible. But, said Olesker, “What’s interesting about the film to me is that we’re not so much leaving you with something that we think should happen. We’re opening it up as a question and saying, ‘Look inside this.’ We looked inside and now we’re taking you inside, what is this about?”
There is a challenge to making a documentary when the “people who we would want to have in the movie are undocumented, therefore, they don’t want to be documented by us – they want to be documented by the government….”
In the United States, added Sachs, the idea of the document “comes down to a sense of security.” There is a challenge to making a documentary when the “people who we would want to have in the movie are undocumented, therefore, they don’t want to be documented by us – they want to be documented by the government, and so there is this resistance to being in front of our camera until they can find something that legitimizes their status here in another way that will serve them.
“And it actually comes down to the whole project of making art,” said Sachs. “To whose advantage is it? For example, we’re getting to go to Vancouver and we were talking about, Could we manage to bring one of the people from the film? There is a lot of questioning about what access the artwork gives. We’ve tried to bring along the people in the film as much as possible, but we aren’t always able to.
“There’s even a point in the film where we have Chinese and Spanish … sometimes we translated that and sometimes we didn’t, because we wanted to give opportunity for people who are in the audience who had access to those languages to feel that they were in positions of strength over the rest of us. There’s something about subtitling that, if you subtitle everything, you bring it all into the English window, and people stop listening.
“A big part of the film,” she continued, “is to go outside of issues of work and of cleaning in an urban situation, which becomes involved in service … [and to delve into] all the layers of existence or the layers of identity that happen in cities these days, and who listens to whom. We hear Spanish all the time [in the United States], but are we really listening to it or is it something we can just pass by? Same with Chinese.”
Both Olesker and Sachs are Jewish.
“I’m from New York so, growing up, it’s been a part of my life,” said Olesker. “Not in a religious way, but certainly in the culture of my family and my world. And specifically around labour and labour history, union organizing – not that anyone was an organizer in my family, but there was always an awareness of that, so that is part of my identity in terms of the work I’m interested in making.”
Sachs is a member of Kolot Chayeinu. “The rabbi and founder of the congregation – her name is Ellen Lippmann – she’s always been a hero of mine,” said Sachs. “She’s just retired, about a month or so ago, after 25 years running Kolot Chayeinu. It’s a very, very progressive congregation and I worked with her just a couple of years ago on something that I found very moving.”
Lippmann would often ask Sachs to film various activities for the synagogue and, in 2016, when B&H photo and video store, which is run by ultra-Orthodox Jews, was challenged by labour activists for the company’s treatment of its warehouse workers, “a bunch of people from Kolot decided to organize with the workers in front of B&H,” said Sachs. “I was there to videotape it and so were some television stations. And I think that Ellen Lippmann really wanted to say, this is not, to our mind, following an ethical frame of reference that we want to claim as Jewish.”
Olesker pointed out that the B&H walkout was organized by the Laundry Workers Centre. “So, we actually made a little film, which is kind of a postscript to The Washing Society, where they organize this march through east Harlem to a laundromat … where two of the workers who were part of the Laundry Workers Centre went in and presented a list of demands to the owners … to talk about unfair labour practices and long hours and being underpaid and no breaks. We were part of that march and demonstration, which Lynne shot on film and we edited.”
The video epilogue, as well as teasers for The Washing Society, can be found on vimeo.com. For the film festival lineup, visit viff.org. The festival runs Sept. 27-Oct. 12.
“On Writing the Film Essay” by Lynne Sachs Published in Essays on the Essay Film, edited by Nora M. Alter and Tim Corrigan Columbia University Press, 2017
Note: All of the films I discuss in this essay can be found on www.lynnesachs.com
I feel a closeness to writers, poets and painters, much more than to traditional film directors. For one thing, we ciné experimenters are not bound by the plot-driven mechanics of cause and effect that, for me, often bring the transcendent experience of watching a movie to a grinding halt. The kinds of films I make give the space for mysterious – at least initially — sequences that don’t simply illustrate why one event or scene leads to another. More like an artist than a traditional documentary maker, I am interested in a kind of meaning that is open to interpretation. Once a film is complete, I often learn things about it from my audience — how the convergence of two images actually expresses an idea or how a non-diegetic sound expands the meaning of spoken phrase. I hope it’s doing one thing, but I might discover that it’s doing something completely different. In this way, the films are kind of porous and flexible; they are open to interpretation. My essay films, in particular, are full of association. Some are resolved and some are adolescent; they’re still trying to figure out who they are. Through the making of the film, I learn about myself in the context of learning about the world. My job is not to educate but rather to spark a curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out. The texts for these films come to me in both public and private spaces: on a long train ride, during a layover in a strange city, at a café, in a hotel room, on the toilet.
Throughout the 1990s, I gravitated toward the simultaneously visceral and cerebral French feminist theory of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. As a moving image artist searching for a new discourse that spoke to radical issues with an equally radical form, I embraced this kind of writing as it led me toward the non-narrative, unconventional grammar of experimental film as well as the self-reflexivity of the essay. My first essay film was “The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts” (1991), a personal rumination on the relationship between a woman’s body and the often-opposing institutions of art and science. While I was shooting this film, I was also keeping a diary:
“My memory of being a girl includes a “me” that is two. I am two bodies – the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk. Of course there was the skeleton. This was assumed and only reconsidered upon my very rare attempts at jumping farther than far enough, clearing the ditch, lifting the heave-ho. But the body of the body was not the bones. This body wrapped and encircled the bones, a protective cover of flesh, just on the other side of the wall I call skin.”
I will never forget a cross-country plane ride I took near the end of editing this film. Throughout the time I was in the air, as I flew across the Mississippi, the Great Plains, and the Rockies, I was searching frantically for the hidden skeletal structure of the film. I’d committed to a premiere at the Los Angeles Film Forum, and I only had a couple of months until my screening date. (Stupid me. I’ll never do that again!) Midway into the flight, I realized it was all laid out before me in the form of the poetry journal I carried in my backpack. The writing had been with me all along; I simply hadn’t realized that this text was more than a dispensable traveling partner in the “journey” that was the production of the movie. Over the next few weeks, my poems began to guide my editing of the images and sounds,. Ever since that early period in my filmmaking career, I’ve kept a handwritten journal during the making of my films. In addition to contributing an often times essential narrative element, this kind of writing can also be the critical link to the “naïve” yet curious person I may no longer really “know,” the person I was when I embarked on the intellectual and artistic adventure that is the creation of a film.
In my 1994 essay film “Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam” (1994), I built a voice-over narration out of two surprisingly oppositional perspectives on post-war Vietnam. My sister Dana Sachs, one of the first American journalists to live for an extended period of time in Vietnam, offered expansive, highly informed insights on Vietnamese daily life. In contrast, my writing traced my own transformation from earnest, war-obsessed American tourist to more keenly observant traveler:
“Driving through the Mekong Delta, a name that carries so much weight. My mind is full of war, and my eyes are on a scavenger hunt for leftovers. Dana told me that those ponds full of bright green rice seedlings are actually craters, the inverted ghosts of bombed out fields. At Cu Chi, we pay three U.S. dollars so that a tour guide will lead us through a section of this well-known 200-kilometer tunnel complex. This is the engineering masterpiece of the Viet Cong, a matrix of underground kitchens and living rooms and army headquarters. As I slide through the narrow, dusty passageway, my head fills up with those old war movies Dad took us to in the ’70′s. My body is way too big for these tunnels. I can hardly breathe. After five minutes, I come out gasping. We decide not to spend the extra ten dollars it costs to shoot a rifle.”
Only by reconnecting to the developing stages of my awareness through my journal could I provide an opening to my American audience. The narrative trajectory of this half-hour film follows our evolving understanding of the landscape and the people of Vietnam. Honestly, my sister Dana and I fought all the through the shaping of the film’s voice over. If she hadn’t been my sister, I probably would have fired her as a collaborator! The fundamental tension between the two of us grew out of several distinct differences between our points of view. While she had very much completed her own reckoning with the destruction of the war between Vietnam and the United States, I, like most tourists, was still dealing with the war’s echoes and the guilt that came with that psychic burden. While she wanted to follow the order of events to the letter, I felt free to articulate our experiences by distilling our stories into anecdotes that could function like parables. By recognizing the inherent tension between my position as a non-narrative experimental filmmaker and my sister’s commitment to a more transparent commentary, we were able to find a rhetorical strategy that mirrors the most fundamental conflicts around discourse and truth facing an essayist in any format. In several quintessentially self-reflexive moments, my sister expresses exasperation with almost every aspect of my production process:
“Lynne can stand for an hour finding the perfect frame for her shot. It’s as if she can understand Vietnam better when she looks at it through the lens of her camera. I hate the camera. The world feels too wide for the lens, and if I try to frame it, I only cut it up.”
In 1997, I completed “Biography of Lilith” (1997), a film exploring the ruptures both women and men must confront when transitioning from being autonomous individuals to parents with responsibilities. I began making this film when I discovered I was pregnant with my first daughter and by the time I finished three years later I was able to punctuate the final sound mix with the cries of my second child. Inspired by the theoretical texts of Julia Kristeva and Antonin Artaud, in particular, this film celebrates my most intimate and abject concerns about the changes in my body and my place in the world as a woman. My film on Lilith, Adam’s first mate, is also a portrait of a female archetype who boldly wanted to be on top during sex. The film matches a non-authoritative exposition of Lilith in a multiplicity of cultures – both ancient and contemporary – with my own pre and post-partum writing. In this way, I juxtaposed two years of historical and cultural research and interviews with intimate ruminations on my own sexuality and motherhood.
“I’m learning to read all over again. A face, this time, connected to a body. At first, I feel your story from within. Nose rubs against belly, elbow prods groin. Your silent cough becomes a confusing dip and bulge. You speak and I struggle to translate. I lie on my side, talk to myself, rub my fingers across my skin, from left to right. I read out loud, and I hope you can hear me. I’m learning to read all over again, but this time I have a teacher.”
In “States of UnBelonging” (2005), my fourth film in a five-film body of work I call “I Am Not a War Photographer”, I turned to Terence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” and to the “Hell” section of Jean Luc Godard’s “Notre Musique” for lessons from makers who were capable of articulating the horror of war. I constructed this film around an epistolary friendship I had with an Israeli student who moved back to Tel Aviv during an extremely volatile period in Israel-Palestine. A meditation on war as well as land, the Bible, and filmmaking, this essay film is built from over three years of emails. With enormous hesitation and intimidation, we reveal our anguish and bewilderment in the film’s soundtrack as well as on the screen as text. With an awareness of my own position in this charged political landscape, I start the film with a kind of meta-historical lamentation on the way that human beings organize time:
“Do you ever have the feeling that the history you are experiencing has no shape?
Even as a teenager I was obsessed with history’s shifts and ruptures. Wars helped us order time. A war established beginnings and endings. There is “before.” There is “during.” There is “after.”
I am currently working on “Tip of My Tongue”, a film on memory that began with 50 autobiographical poems I wrote about each year from my birth in 1961 to my 50th birthday. Unlike my previous films, in which the research and shooting themselves prompted the text, this project grew directly from my poetry. Without the slightest concern for how the poems would eventually shimmy their way into one of my movies, in 2012 I gave myself the unencumbered freedom to write about my own life. In each poem, I looked at the relationship between a large public event and my own insignificant, yet somehow personally memorable, connection to that situation. Now, three years later, I am working with a cast of eleven people from almost every continent, each of whom was born around the year 1961. Together we are creating an inverted history of our collective half-century through a series of spoken story distillations that place the grand in the shadow of the intimate. From glimpsing a drunken Winston Churchill on the streets of London to watching the Moon landing from a playground in Melbourne to washing dishes during the Iranian Revolution to feeling destitute during the Recession, we are working collaboratively to construct our own recipe for a performative sound-image essay film.
Excerpt from Review by Tanya Goldman in Cinema Journal:
“There is often a poetic dialogue extending between sections when a voice of the past rhymes with the present. In 1948, Alexandre Astruc wrote of a cinema that should function as “the seismograph of our hearts, a disorderly pendulum inscribing on film the tense dialectics of our ideas.” This quality is echoed in Lynne Sachs’s 2016 reflections on her own practice through which she feels a stronger sense of kinship with writers, poets, and painters than film directors. She states that her job “is not to educate but rather to spark curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out.” Observations such as these bestow the essay film with a distinct emotive quality much at odds with classical documentary’s association with sobriety.”
Tanya Goldman Cinema Journal, Volume 57, Number 4, Summer 2018, pp. 161-166 (Review) Published by University of Texas Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2018.0064
Thrilled to be hosting our 9th Experimental Lecture. This year we are proud to present the brilliant and inimitable filmmaker Mary Magdalene Serra. Join us for MM’s “Art (Core) & The Explicit Body” at NYU Tisch School of the Arts 6th Fl. on Wed. Sept. 26 at 7 pm. Free and open to the public.
In addition to excerpts from MM Serra’s films, we will see a rare screening of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth.
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.
MM Serra ignites the world of avant-garde film. For three decades in New York City, she has produced some of the most thought-provoking work on women and erotics in cinema today. Serra’s unwavering passion for experimental cinema extends beyond her practice as an artist. Since 1993, she has worked as the Executive Director of the Filmmakers Coop where she distributes, preserves and exhibits an extraordinary collection of films and videos.
Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas and Carolee Schneemann.
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)
“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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
