“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.”
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
On June 28, 2018, laundry workers from El Barrio in New York City marched to the laundromat where they work. Their community and the Laundry Workers Center were there to support them.
This campaign is called “Awaken” and the fight is just beginning.
With the community at their backs, member leaders Juanita and Nicolas delivered their demands to the owner: Respect the minimum wage, respect our right to health and safety, and respect our dignity!
Speakers:
Nicolas Benitez-laundromat leader
Juana F. – laundromat leader
Mahoma López- Laundry Workers Center Co-Executive Director
Heleodora Viva- Street Vendor Project Member Leader
Video:
Camera – Lynne Sachs, co- director “The Washing Society” film
Editing- Rebecca Shappas
Production support: Rosanna Rodriguez, Laundry Workers Center Co-Executive Director; Padre Fabian Arias, Iglesia Sion; Lizzie Olesker, Co-Director “The Washing Society” film
Translation: Maria Scharron
A 50th birthday is often an opportunity to reflect. US-American filmmaker Lynne Sachs does so in a clear and completely unsentimental manner. Therefore, her experimental birthday film Tip of my Tongue transcends the conventional “portrait of a half-century”. Shot in one location over the course of one weekend, the individual and collective memory converge in what becomes a poetic as well as eminently political film. In conversation with Lukas Maurer, Lynne Sachs explains how she planned the shoot, why it was important to her to stage it in one location, and how she gathered people from every continent. And the City, which in the film is present particularly through the soundscape, makes itself noticeable also in this interview: Oktoskop Curator Lukas Maurer visited the artist in her studio in New York.
Folge von So, 17.06.2018
Ein 50. Geburtstag ist oft Anlass um zurück zu schauen. Die US-amerikanische Filmemacherin Lynn Sachs tut das mit einem klaren, vollkommen unsentimentalen Blick. Ihr experimenteller Geburtstagsfilm Tip of my Tongue” wird dadurch weit mehr als das herkömmlich Portrait eines halben Jahrhunderts. An einem Ort und während eines Wochenendes gedreht, verschränken sich individuelle mit kollektiven Erinnerungen zu einem ebenso poetischen wie eminent politischen Film. Im Gespräch mit Lukas Maurer erzählt Lynn Sachs wie sie den Dreh Arbeit geplant hat, warum es ihr wichtig war, dass alles an einem einzigen Ort statt fand und wie sie dort Menschen von allen Kontinenten versammelte. Und die Stadt, die im Film vor allem als Sound präsent ist, macht sich auch während des Gesprächs bemerkbar: Denn Oktoskop-Kurator Lukas Maurer hat die Künstlerin in ihrem New Yorker Atelier getroffen.
Filmmaker Willy Bearden hosts this hour long program which features both conversations with and performances by some of the most renowned musicians and entertainers of this generation. His in-depth interview style and this personal setting make Dialogue with Willy Bearden one of the most must-see programs available on cable television.
Investigation of a Flame – Review by Chris Shields Featured May 27th 2018
On May 17th 1968, nine Catholic activists entered the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland. They took 378 draft files, brought them to the parking lot, and burned them using homemade napalm. In order to get to the files, the group was forced to struggle with a clerk, Mary Murphy, who was working at the office that day. Later, from jail, the activists sent Murphy a bouquet of flowers and an apology.
This curious detail is one among many that come to light in Lynne Sachs elegiac 2001 film Investigation of a Flame,screening tonight at Anthology Film Archives. This poetic cinematic essay integrates interviews, archival footage, and experimental flourishes into a gentle evocation of the Catonsville Nine’s direct action. From this variety of material, the film develops its own deliberate cadence, where found and original footage create an effortless dialogue across time. Sachs gives us a rich vision of the event, the people involved, and its political and philosophical context, that’s always elegant, never didactic.
Sound maintains the leading role in Sachs’ film. It binds her images together, giving the formally playful passages their necessary freedom while keeping them tethered just closely enough to the larger subject. A variety of voices are also key. In Investigation of a Flame, we hear from the Nine themselves and Mary Murphy, the draft board clerk, and the Catonsville Nine prosecuting attorney as well. These voices of seeming dissent are not at odds with the work at large, but rather become some of its greatest strengths, achieving, strangely enough, the kind of dialogue advocated by a steady stream of present-day editorials. The perspectives of the Nine, Mary Murphy, and others however, so many years after the incident, are still reckoning with questions of duty, faith, and violence. What results is a not a work of lifeless history, but a vital, wisened film about the nature of protest.
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (2018). 8:00 minutes. Directed by Lynne Sachs.
It was deep into her artistic practice that Lynne Sachs shifted to a collaborative style of filmmaking. As she recounts on her website, Sachs was in the midst of recording a project when it struck her that those in front of the camera were performing. Aware that such hyperbolic displays might betray the authenticity of her subjects, Sachs invited the subjects to participate with her. No longer was her process about filming and being filmed. Rather, filmmaking became a joint effort that softened the camera as an intermediary and aloof barrier.
It’s this approach to filmmaking that makes Sachs’ most recent work, Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, such a particularly wonderful piece. The short film doesn’t expose the stories of just any subjects; it looks at the lives of three creative giants who work with the moving image: Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson. With filmmakers balancing out both sides of the lens, the collaboration between filmmaker and subject reaches superheroine proportions.
Shot on 8mm and 16mm film, the soft colors and square aspect ratio of the film pull the viewer out of contemporary times. In the first image of the film, a cat is perched on a tree limb. In the next, the cat is acting as sentinel on a porch. The camera looks from the inside of a house out, framing the cat in a doorway. This moment jars me. I hear the voice of Schneemann discussing her entry into the medium of moving images, but the picture quality, the cat, the framing—it all conjures images of Schneemann’s own Fuses. For a moment, I wonder if I’m actually looking at Schneemann’s footage, but the tell-tale painted film frames, frenetic cuts, and abstraction of her work are absent.
Sachs’ camera casually captures mundane moments at Schneemann’s upstate New York home with beautiful, compositional precision. Schneemann describes moments ranging from her first experience with a Bolex camera to her desire to film the ordinariness of light coming through a hospital window. While she describes it, Sachs captures the sentiment; Schneeman is seen talking on the phone, hanging laundry, looking at mail. Sachs also prioritizes otherwise subtle images in and around the home: a dead bird on the porch, light coming through the window, and shots of greenery around the yard. In this piece, collaboration comes in the form of homage and interpretation.
Next, the film moves to the voice and image of Barbara Hammer. Of the film’s three subjects, Hammer is perhaps the most performative of the bunch. In a compositionally stunning scene, Hammer, at turns, walks and jogs the length of an iron fence in New York’s West Village. She repeats this several times, her body mingling with the long shadows cast by the iron slats. Eventually, she addresses the presence of Sachs’ camera. She stops, stares into it—challenges it—until Sachs pulls the camera skyward. A moment later, Hammer is on the ground, bathed in the fence’s shadows and smiling. Accompanying these images is Hammer’s forever youthful voice, explaining her love of performance both with and without her camera.
From here, the viewer moves into Hammer’s studio space to watch her toy with window blinds and choreograph film cameras as she slides them across her table. She discusses identity, and that discussion is punctuated with another challenge to Sachs’ camera; Hammer points the lens of a camera right back at her.
The final section of the triad takes the viewer to a montage of images that focus on the natural: flowers, ducks, a pond, and landscape greenery. There is no audio soundtrack for the first portion of this section: no music and no narration. The faintest sound of birds in the distant background can be missed unless the volume is set to high. Finally, the voice of Gunvor Nelson cuts the silence. It joins the images, describing Nelson’s entry into film and her impending exit from it as well. The images in this section of the film seem crisper, perhaps to reflect the camera Nelson holds in her hands—a digital Nikon. As Nelson and her camera interact with flowers and landscape, Sachs’ camera watches. Eventually, the two artists end up lens to lens, looking down a barrel at one another’s craft.
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an exquisite dance shared by filmmakers and their literal and metaphorical lenses. It’s also a wonderful journey of nostalgia. The look of the 8mm and 16mm film paired with the subject matter easily takes the viewer back to the innovative first moments of women’s experimental filmmaking.
by Gonzalo de Pedro
Ciné Dore/ Filmoteca Español Programmer and Professor of the University of Carlos III
Feb. 2018
The extensive experimental and North American film tradition, which is interwoven with the history of documentary filmmaking and deeply rooted in political struggles, is full of names to be (re)discovered, in most cases women who continue the formal, poetic and political explorations of the avant-garde film, but broadening the space of what can be filmed and rewriting, in their own way, the old school feminist moto: “the personal is political”. Lynne Sachs’ case, filmmaker, professor at Princeton University, friend and collaborator of the French filmmaker Chris Marker (she worked with him in Three Cheers for the Whale), is symptomatic of a certain kind of cinema that has been for years focusing on intimate spaces as places in which social issues can resonate. These social concerns intertwine with what is most intimate and personal, along with the physical portrayal of bodies in dialogue with spaces, memories, desires, dreams and voices.
This March session of ‘Free Radicals’, titled “ Peculiar Intimacy” and with the presence of the filmmaker, is centered around a selection of Sachs’ pieces that were created throughout more than thirty years of work. This selection is organized around several portrayals of intimate spaces, mainly feminine, in which Sachs’ camera, without abandoning formal experimentation, tries to find the precise distance to portray those spaces. In addition to what is visible, physical and audible, the director also tries to capture what people imagine, dream, or desire. As she says: “That is the key of the documentary for me. When you can work with people in your film and their imagination breaks free […]. I think that one of the keys to work with reality and people is to allow the extraordinary to seem familiar, instead of exotic.”
Sachs’ work with the protagonists of her films, in some cases they are relatives (her daughters, her parents…) or even herself, always establishes a singular dialogue that subverts the traditional categories of actor and director: “Since I started to make films, I have always resisted the production hierarchy of the traditional pyramid, of the director and her team, or the director and her obedient cast of actors. In both sides I wanted to develop a more porous relationship, in which everybody listens and learns from each other.” That relationship, based on work that is in dialogue with what’s intimate, is also the way of integrating those other spaces of the real that remain invisible to the camera: what is dreamt of, what is desired, what is imagined.
The five pieces presented in this session, are tied together by an awareness of the passing of time and a concern for the way this can be contained in the cinematographic matter. They are also a way of traveling the diverse formal and aesthetic paths of Sachs’ work: from the portrait of her filmmaker sisters, with whom Sachs establishes a legacy and homage rapport, to the spaces that her parents inhabit; to the portrait of one of her daughters which is produced in two very distant moments in time, and finishing with a medium-length film, which is created following the steps of Julio Cortázar and his short story book End of the Game, which captures the lives, real or imagined, of a group of teenagers from Buenos Aires. Cortázar wrote in A yellow flower, “It seems like a joke, but we are immortal”. We probably are, in the suspended intimacy and peculiarity of Lynne Sachs’ films.
Declarations by Lynne Sachs were extracted from the interview with Karen Rester, published in The Brooklyn Rail in 2013.
Translated by Marichi Scharron.
Written by Pablo Castellano Garcia
Translation by Ana Almeyda-Cohen and Maria Scharron
Inspired by Julio Cortázar’s short stories House Taken Over (Casa tomado, 1951) and End of the Game (Fin del juego, 1956), Lynne Sachs has created Wind in Our Hair (Con el viento en el pelo, 2010), a film that explores the everyday lives of four girls. Girls being girls, they carry themselves with the spontaneity that only joy can bring, and which probably will never come back. This easiness seems to derive from the sensation or belief that playing will never end. It is as if they are able to bug and annoy everybody around them without any major repercussion but a light smack. By revealing flashing images of contemporary Buenos Aires, Lynne Sachs presents four girls who reminded me of Gummo’s Bunny Boy (Harmony Korine, USA, 1997), but instead of cars they have trains, and instead of pure decadence these girls project pure life. All four girls dress up in order to see life pass them by. It is in this kind of irrational search for the contrast between stillness — as much physical in its statue-like pose as psychic — and the interruption of life the play entails. The adult world is suggested by the brute images and sounds of the passing trains. From the train, a boy who want to meet them observes the young girls and transforms their world.
Lynne Sachs then establishes three voyeuristic relationships given by different observers who are at different levels. The first relationship, which takes place within the narration, relates to the correspondence established between the statues—the girls understood as characters in the game that they are playing, and not as much as girls understood in the terms established by adults—and the boy who observes them daily. This relationship is mediated by idealization, love and a feeling of belonging to the same group / world. The second relationship, as I have already stated, operates on a different level, one that concerns the bond generated between the characters and the film director. This relationship, points to a common artistic end, and is also a confrontation, since there is always a camera following the girls, and one adult that interferes with what is supposed to be a private game.
In contrast, (we also saw) Same Stream Twice (USA, 2012), another piece by Lynne Sachs in which the game that the girl is playing, (the girl is Maya Street-Sachs the artist’s daughter and also protagonist of the film being reviewed), is designed in advance to show a protagonist who is not afraid to hide her true condition or artifice, that of “performing for the camera”. Therefore there is complicity and an implied pact. It is quite different in Con viento en el pelo in which the camera movement, whose flow it seems is going to crack at any moment, becomes perverse.
Third, and much more crazy and perverse is the relationship between the characters and the viewers. At this level, where there is neither desire nor inclination to produce a whole artistic piece, the union is reduced to the abandonment of the adult who, in having the possibility of feeling bored, in the case of some, or the need to desperately seek knowledge or aesthetic feeling, in the case of others, takes the option of putting their life in parenthesis to observe without being observed. In the three types of relationships mentioned, we are the only observers that the girls cannot see—unfolding ourselves in the world through the play of these girls who ignore us and whose privacy is violated without even being able to defend themselves. In the three levels of relationship described, the audience is the only subject that observes but is not observed back by the girls. We are able to watch these girls — who ignore who we are and whose intimacy is transgressed — playing and not being able to defend themselves from being observed. At this crossroad of simple elements, Lynne Sachs manages to combine the intimacy of the movie theater with that of a children’s game in the same space, and at the same time, as the only way of making a sincere reconciliation with an already disappearing childhood.
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Tomando como apoyo Casa tomada (1951) y Final del juego (1956), ambos cuentos de Julio Cortázar, Lynne Sachs construye con Con viento en el pelo una obra que explora el día a día de cuatro niñas que, como niñas que son, se encuentran en ese período en el que se pueden permitir tanto desenvolverse en el mundo con la naturalidad que produce el sentimiento —que luego ya no vuelve— de felicidad que deriva de la sensación de tomar el momento del juego como eternidad, como el tocar las pelotas a todo cristo sin tener repercusión alguna más allá de la hostia light. Es así como, revelando de manera intermitente imágenes del Buenos Aires contemporáneo, Lynne Sachs nos presenta a este grupo de niñas que, como el niño-conejo de Gummo (Harmony Korine, EEUU, 1997), pero cambiando los coches por trenes e invirtiendo la decadencia de este por la aceptación pura de la vida, se disfrazan para ver la vida pasar. Es en esta especie de búsqueda irracional del contraste entre la quietud, tanto física en su pose de estatua como psíquica en esa interrupción de la vida que supone el juego, y la velocidad bruta del mundo adulto que les ofrecen la imagen y el sonido del tren que pasa, en la que las crías serán observadas por un chico que querrá entrar en su mundo, aunque sea para transformarlo.
Lynne Sachs establece entonces tres relaciones de carácter voyeurístico dadas por diferentes observadores que se encuentran en diferentes niveles y que fijan su retina en las niñas como único elemento observado. La primera de ellas, que tiene lugar dentro de la propia narración, se correspondería con la correspondencia que se establece entre las estatuas —las niñas entendidas como personajes del juego en el que participan, y no tanto como niñas en plan término medida establecido por el adulto— y el chico que las observa diariamente, quedando mediada la relación por la idealización, el amor y el sentimiento de pertenencia a un mismo grupo o mundo. La segunda relación, que como decía arriba afecta a otro nivel, atañe al vínculo que se genera entre las intérpretes y la directora. Esta relación, que tiene su base en el interés de señalar a un mismo fin artístico, supone un choque en el sentido de que ya tenemos a una cámara que las sigue en todo momento, a un adulto que se entromete en ese juego que se entiende como algo privado. A diferencia de otra obra de Lynne Sachs, Same Stream Twice (EEUU, 2012), en la que el juego de la niña —Maya Street-Sachs, hija de la artista y protagonista también de la película que aquí se reseña— está diseñado de antemano para mostrar su carrera alrededor de la cámara como producto que no quiere ocultar su condición de “ser para la cámara” y de artificio, y en el que por lo tanto hay complicidad y se presupone el pacto, el seguimiento de la cámara de Con viento en el pelo, que parece que en cualquier momento va a resquebrajar el flujo que registra, resulta perverso. En tercer lugar, y mucho más perversa y loca que la anterior, surge la relación que une a personajes y espectador. En este nivel, donde no hay ni deseo ni inclinación de producir como un todo una pieza artística, la unión queda reducida al abandono del adulto que, en su tener la posibilidad de sentir el aburrimiento, en el caso de algunos, o la necesidad de buscar a la desesperada el conocimiento o el sentimiento estético, en el caso de otros, toma la opción de poner entre paréntesis su vida para observar sin ser observado —en los tres tipos de relación enunciados, somos el único sujeto observador al que las niñas no ven— el desplegarse en el mundo mediante el juego de esas niñas que nos ignoran y cuya intimidad es vulnerada sin ni siquiera poder defenderse. Y es así como, con este cruzarse tantas cosas a partir de elementos tan sencillos, Lynne Sachs consigue juntar la intimidad de la sala de cine con la del juego infantil en un mismo espacio y en un mismo tiempo como única vía de reconciliación sincera con la infancia ya pasada.
Revolution in the Air & Theories of Weightlessness review in Otro Cines Europa by Victor Esquirol Punto de Vista International Film Festival, Pamplona, Spain March 9, 2018
“Yesterday (International Women’s Day) at Punto de Vista International Film Festival in Pamplona everything got scrambled. Or, better yet, revolutionized. Several screenings had to be postponed because even the festival bubble isn’t completely impenetrable, or, if it is, it at least feigns the same kind of openness to the world that we ask of our finest films. Out in the streets, women were saying Time’s Up, and Festival Director Garbiñe Ortega’s competition joined their cry. That cry resounded not only through the programming, but also in the many voices conjured up on such a historic day. Men and women reached parity. Not numerical parity but the very best kind. Balance—hell, justice—was achieved. It came mainly by way of the most noble and honest of gestures: that of underlining the importance of something we never imagined had any importance at all, in this case the operation of washing machines.
The Washing Society, by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs, makes the rounds of some of New York City’s more than 2,500 laundromats, local businesses that serve as a sociological laboratory. Through the eyes of the two directors—and with apologies to Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, 1985)—these unassuming storefronts take on the character of strategic observation posts occupied by Mandarin- and Spanish-speaking sentinels.
Olesker and Sachs zoom in—at a microscopic level—on the idea of the melting pot. It’s an astonishing image: a skein of fibers and threads badly woven together. So much so that there isn’t anything left to do but send the whole mess to the laundry. What follows is an attempt to make sense of a nebula of colors that run circles around themselves, an image that, by its centrifugal force, creates an illusion of homogeneity. Nonetheless, far from cohering, the elements emerge shaken up, not mixed together. It’s 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 classism) on an American Dream that seems to want to scrub away every last trace of its own identity. Later, a few more turns around the neighborhood and their documentary morphs into performance art. The voices go silent and the people we just heard interviewed get caught up in a cathartic dance that culminates in one final act of fading out, if not utter dissolution. All they have left are the clothes they’re wearing. Simple, comprehensible, and without question terrifying.”
