The Joy of Filming a program of films by Lynne Sachs
In the spirit of classics like the The Joy of Cooking or The Joy of Sex, Lynne Sachs will present an interactive lecture in which she will share her own process (or recipe) for making films. From the very first moment, Lynne will begin a conversation with her AIFVF audience, learning from them (us?) about their (our?) own projects, dreams and experiences. She will then spontaneously live-curate a program of her own films that could include early works such as “Drawn & Quartered” (1986) or “House of Science” (1991) or extremely recent films such as “And Then We Marched” (2017) or “A Year of Notes and Numbers” (2018). The intention of this performative presentation is to engage so deeply with the festival community that an organic, collaborative program will emerge.
Hello fellow documentartians, We are gathering CINEMA OF RESISTANCE videos from all over the US/ World beginning with the historical Jan. 21, 2017 Women’s March. Be a part of our video/film collective. It’s extremely easy. Just post anything you have recorded with your camera or cell phone to Youtube. Any length. Then send me the link via FB message and I will add it to the growing collection. It’s extremely important to save and share this material for our history, for posterity, for solace. We have images from Arizona and Nebraska, no lie, proving that there is passionate objection to the direction the US is going in the red-est of states. Inspired by the words Woodie Gutherie wrote on his own guitar in 1941, we must remember that our cameras can fight fascism.
The film I contributed is called And Then We Marched which you can see here:
And here is an article published by Otherzine I wrote related to this movement of filmmakers:
“This Camera Fights Fascism: A Personal Survey of Cinemas of Resistance”
by Lynne Sachs
It’s been one horrible beginning of the year in America, and as you read this piece you will certainly know more than I do about the first few days, weeks, months and (aargh!) years of a Trump presidency. After marching with hundreds of thousands of other women and men in Washington D.C. on January 21, 2017, I decided that I would put out a call for films of any kind that would become a publically accessible collection of moving image pieces we would call Cinema of Resistance. Through a public social media request, I asked people from anywhere in the world to send me their video-witnessing of resistance beginning with the Women’s March, wherever they experienced it, and after that to send any manifestations of public challenges to the message and the actions of our new president. I’m not necessarily looking for polished works by people who call themselves filmmakers, but rather documents of resistance by anyone with a camera. There are already a whole range of videos in the collection, including powerful material from Red States like Alaska and Nebraska – real proof that oppositional viewpoints exist where you least expect them and most respect them. Take a look at the growing collection HERE and send your own Youtube links to me at lynnesachs@gmail.com to add to the collection:
As a filmmaker and a long-term progressive activist, I have been thinking and talking about the connection between our media practice and the crisis that is our current political situation. From the environment to reproductive health to immigration, Donald Trump is trying to dismantle every aspect of the Obama legacy. And so, with this in mind, I decided to turn to a selection of performance related acts of resistance going back as far as the 1960s that have shaken my own weltanschauung, and forced me to think about the responsibilities of an artist during times of tumult.
In Kazuo Ishiguro‘s novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986) a Japanese painter reflects on his life during and after World War II. In his candid first-person narration, Ishiguro‘s protagonist confronts his own complicity with the totalitarian state as a producer of propagandistic paintings. Once we as readers realize that the narrator is struggling to understand his own confusion about his relationship to the political and commercial institutions around him, we begin to compare his ambivalence to our own, as artists, citizens, and human beings.
This series of reflections represents my personal survey of political actions, films, and performances that push our understanding of the delicate, potentially explosive impact of art, specifically media, in repressive environments, states, and institutions.
On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. This disparate band of activists chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience – what I would call a performance piece with profound consequences. Led by renowned priests and brothers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, the Catonsville Nine planned their action as a visual statement against the Vietnam War, knowing full well that their collective decision would lead to years of imprisonment. An integral part of their planning was their notification to the press. Each phase of the action was documented by a local television crew that had been notified well ahead of time. Without a bona fide news agency’s filming of this production, the political resonances of this visionary gesture would be lost to us now, almost a half-century later. Ever since I first saw this archival material, I knew that its importance would echo in both the world of politics and art, as a manifestation of a radical form of resistance. In 2001, I made Investigation of a Flame, an experimental documentary on the Nine’s action and the aftermath.
Around the same that the Catonsville Nine were encouraging a Baltimore television news crew to film their ritualized act of civil disobedience, performance artist Vito Acconci was producing his own form of self-reflexive photography-based disruptions. Last year, PS1/Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition of Acconci’s media work in New York City.
See Vitto Acconci: Where We Are (Who Are We Anyway?)
In a rare, extraordinarily comprehensive display of his autobiographical performance work, viewers were able to see a wide array of Acconci’s photo series and Super 8 films. As his distributor Video Data Bank writes, Acconci “positioned his own body as the simultaneous subject and object of the work,” in a radical calling to question of male identity and hegemony. Looking back at his Drifts, for example, forces us to think about the current immigration blockades facing so many foreigners trying to enter the United States – legally – from Mexico to multiple countries in the Middle East. With the theme of OC’s Cinema of Resistance in mind, I share three of Acconci’s works:
In 1970, Acconci created Drifts by documenting himself doing the following action:
Rolling toward the waves as the waves roll toward me; rolling away from the waves as the waves roll away from me.
Lying on the beach in one position, as the waves come up to varying positions around me.
Using my wet body: shifting around on the sand, letting the sand cling to my body.
This eloquent series of photographs of Acconci’s body rolling in the waves slapping against the beach compels us to reflect upon the flow of human beings coming and going from sea to land, from nowhere to somewhere, from one country to the next – either with the same ease as the waves or struggling against artificial borders created by the whims of a state – be it only vaguely democratic or fully totalitarian.
In two Super 8mm films, Acconci again simultaneously performs and directs an action that forces us to think about the position of audience and actor. In Blindfolded Catching, we look at the complex relationship between a performer/entertainer and the spectators who are watching him. Acconci challenges the conventions of this relationship in a startlingly violent dynamic that makes us think about the activating presence of the camera in torture scenarios we’ve witnessed recently through public media from Abu Gharib and Guantanemo.
Fixed camera shoots me, full-body, standing blindfolded with my back to the wall; from off-screen, rubber balls are thrown at me, one at a time, over and over again. I’m trying to catch the ball I can’t see … I’m raising my arms up in front of my face, I’ve anticipated when the next ball will be thrown. I’m wrong, my motions are wasted. I’m hit by a ball, my body doubles over, it’s too late to protect myself.
And lastly, amongs the many thought-provoking films created by Vito Acconci in the early 1970s, I find Conversions to be one of the most fascinating interpretations of sexuality, pornography, and power. In this film, Acconci shakes up everything you know about male/female relations.
Conversions (Super-8 film, b/w, 6 min., 1970)
Two naked bodies on the screen: we’re all bodies – my head is out of the film frame, her face is lost in my body. The camera jerks around us, zooms in and out, looking for the right shot. Kathy Dillon, kneeling behind me, takes my penis in her mouth. With my penis confined, with my penis gone, I’m exercising (running in place, kicking, bending, stretching, jumping) – all the while, she’s trying to keep my penis lost in her mouth. As the camera moves in front of us, as the camera zooms in to my groin, my body has a vagina.
I first saw the films of Marie Louise Alemann (1927 -2015) in a 2016 screening at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. This one-evening exhibition marked the premiere of her oeuvre in the United States, roughly 40 years after its creation in the mid-1970s. Alemann, an emigré from Germany, understood the potential that film had for articulating anger and resistance. Knowing that her work was created during Argentina’s “Dirty War”, a time in which military forces and death squads hunted down and killed left-wing dissidents, I was curious to see what kind of work she was able to create in this era of national dictatorship. In Autobiográfico 2 (1974), she filmed herself bound by ropes and then releasing herself in an act of sensual, self-appointed liberation.
While in Buenos Aires in 2010, I spent an afternoon talking with Narcisa Hirsh, who worked closely with Alemann, about Marabunta, their performance and corresponding film collaboration. A marabunta is a gigantic Brazilian ant that lives in the Amazon. Hirsch explained that their interpretation of this small but ferocious insect “served as a metaphor for people eating everything that they could find in their way.” Hirsch, Alemann and the other women in their artist collective made a huge sculpture of a human skeleton and covered it with food. Inside the skeleton were live pigeons painted with fluorescent colors. They mounted this sculpture in Buenos Aires near the doors of a movie theater showing Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966), and all the audience members were forced to look at the sculpture as they exited the film theater. Because the collective filmed the day-long creation and spontaneous exhibition of the Marabunta, their act of defiance against the male-dominated European Art Cinema of the 1960s is available to us today. Since the movie-goers were encouraged to eat the food that comprised the sculpture, they became complicit participants in this “biting” yet hilarious production. On many levels, Alemann and Hirsch’s resulting experimental film becomes an early example of a kind of expanded cinema that would, in our own imaginations, cannibalize Antonioni’s more “bourgeois” production.
Marabunto film (16mm ) by Narcisa Hirsch, Marie Louise Alemann y Walther Mejía
In the spring of 2016, I attended Microscope Gallery’s Brooklyn screening exhibition of Florida-based experimental filmmaker Christopher Harris’s films. This was to be my first opportunity to see a selected program of Harris’s work while he was there to discuss those issues that are most near and dear to him as a maker. Harris’s films are visually arresting, politically provocative, and sensitive — rarely have I watched such a nuanced, ambitious series of films that make you think for the hours, days and years that follow. His films and installations offer a remarkable opportunity to think about the ways that personal cinema can challenge assumptions about the acquisition of historical knowledge. Harris’s radical approach to historiography itself places his performative works in a new category of cinema’s counter culture.
In Harris’s Hallimuhfack (2016), a performer lip-synchs to the actual voice of renowned African-American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting early Black folk songs in her home-state of Florida. According to Harris, “The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear-projected, grainy, looped recycled images of Masai tribesmen and women become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation.”
In A Willing Suspension of Disbelief ( 2014), Harris “restages slave daguerreotype in order to examine scientific racism.” Both pieces embrace the challenges, unpredictability and evanescence of 16mm filmmaking as a form of anachronistic “resistance” to the more commercial, precise high-production “values” of digital. By working with Black women performers who become collaborators in his charged resurrection of the past, Harris offers both his female actors and us as an audience the chance to examine and confront the evils of our shared American story.
And finally, I’ll address Julian Rosenfeldt’s Manifesto which I saw in early 2017 in perhaps the largest single-room exhibition space in New York City, the Park Avenue Armory. According to the catalogue, material for this 13-screen installation is drawn from the writings of Futurists, Dadaists, Fluxus artists, Suprematists, and Situationists. Rosenfeldt weaves together their ideas with the musings of individual artists, resulting in a collage of artistic declarations. Hollywood actress Cate Blanchett performed all 13 different protagonists as each screen attempts to articulate a contemporary call to action. Manifesto is by far the grandest, most expensive, most polished of the film works I have discussed in this essay. Clearly, critics, curators and the European and American art-going public are keen on celebrating the theoretical and historical foundations on which the Rosenfeldt builds his query into historical, political and social dialectics. We learn a great deal about the echoes of a fantastic array of thinkers, but do we come away from this work ready to engage with the world? In the exhibition catalogue, it seems to me, the emphasis is on the work’s “style that beautifully pays tribute to iconic film directors,” rather than to the ideas that he is ostensibly embracing. This is, sadly, a cinema about resistance but not a cinema of resistance.
I first met Father Daniel Berrigan (1921 – 2016), the Jesuit priest whose defiant protests helped shape a bold, grass-roots opposition to the Vietnam War, in 1998, when I was making Investigation of a Flame (2001). Little did I know that my interview with him about his role in the Catonsville Nine would lead to one of the deepest and most meaningful friendships of my life. Daniel was a poet and an activist, and both of these aspects of his being contributed to his life-long commitment to speaking out against injustice. Today, in this America of 2017, all of us must grapple with how to integrate our creative work into our lives as politically engaged members of a society in a disturbing moment of flux. We can certainly turn to the films of Acconci, Alemann, Harris and others as examples of work that expands our understanding of the way that a moving image – be it elliptical or explicit – can become a spark for thinking and action.
Note on Title: “This Machine Kills Fascists” is a message that Woodie Gutherie placed on his guitar in 1941,which inspired many subsequent artists.
“I could make the inside of myself show on the outside,” Barbara Hammer says in Lynne Sachs’s documentary Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), explaining how a lighter movie camera, developed in the Sixties, helped her convey intimacy, and thus became a useful, malleable tool of expression. The short, in which Sachs pays a visit to pioneering women artists who used moving image in their practice — Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson — will enjoy a weeklong run as part of “Doc Fortnight,” the Museum of Modern Art’s annual showcase dedicated to nonfiction film. (Ela Bittencourt)
“Lynne Sachs’ Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an 8-minute triptych of brief encounters with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson filmed at the artists’ homes or studios. Sachs has a really well-attuned photographic eye, and she captures the trio in a series of easygoing domestic situations. The three artists discuss their artistic lives, how they came into their practice, how their gender identities factor in, where their work comes from. It’s a simple premise with intimate results, especially good at giving a sense of the artists’ environments. ” (Tyler Maxin)
A Morning with Jack Waters (2018) HD Video, 46:34, color, sound
In conversation with filmmaker Lynne Sachs, multi-disciplinary artist Jack Waters discusses his career and experiences as a part of the downtown New York City art scene from the early 80s to the present.
Jack Waters works as a visual artist, filmmaker, writer, media artist, choreographer and performer. As a versatile and multi-faceted artist, his work has been celebrated in all of its forms, showing at the La Mama Galleria (NYC), Fales Library and Special Collections (NYC), Frise (Hamburg, Germany). His films have screened internationally and have been aired on the Sundance Channel and PBS amongst others. Recently, he performed as Jason in Stephen Winter’s highly acclaimed feature film “Jason and Shirley”, a historical re-imagining of the making of Shirley Clarke’s 1967 landmark film “Portrait of Jason”.
With his partner, Peter Cramer, Waters helped to establish and foster various collectives and projects such as POOL, a dance and performance collective which “explored contact and other forms of improvisation… creating performance work, choreography, and ephemeral events in NYC” and beyond.
Additionally, Waters and Cramer are co founders of Le Petit Versailles, a Green Thumb Garden on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that is “committed to providing a space for performers, filmmakers and visual artist to show their work.” In this way Waters continues to engage with and support the downtown community arts scene.
Three renowned women artists discuss their passion for filmmaking.
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
Hi dear Lynne, What a beautiful compilation…. I love my section and so appreciate the triple-visions within your camera life. It really is a lyric and incisive triple-portrait. I thank you so much for this clarity, visual richness. And I loved seeing Barbara with those old Bolex cameras! Your subtle inclusion of our personal surround has rhythm, shadow, light, momentum and quietude. How do we celebrate with you for this splendid work?
With love and admiration! Carolee
——
Hi Lynne,
I finally had a chance to watch your lovely film! I was surprised at how energetically I performed for your camera, I was so happy when Gunvor finally spoke! She is as beautiful as ever. I’m honored Lynne, to be grouped with such strong and remarkable filmmakers.
Love, Barbara
Artist Statement:
What is a body? What can a body do? How is a body rendered an object? And, how does this “object” have agency?
I believe these questions are at the root of a female guided exploration of art making. As a young filmmaker and student, I remember reading Laura Mulvey’s ground-breaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she proposes that “sexual inequality is a controlling social force in the cinematic representations of the sexes; and that the male gaze is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy.” As I hold my camera and frame our world, I work extremely hard to keep her words in mind, knowing that gripping my own Bolex 16mm camera or writing my own scripts does not necessarily mean that I would produce images that came from my own experience as a woman. I needed to find a personal, somatic cinema that embraced a new physical relationship to this apparatus. It wasn’t just that I wanted to produce images that spoke to women’s lives, liberation, love, struggle, awareness or consciousness. When I first watched “Fuses” (1965) by Carolee Schneemann (https://vimeo.com/12606342), “Optic Nerve” (1985) by Barbara Hammer (https://vimeo.com/49508330) and “My Name is Oona” (1969) by Gunvor Nelson (https://vimeo.com/242768525) in the late 1980s, my own camerawork was catapulted into an expanded, self-aware, performative mode of working. Their radical, improvisational and totally physical cinematography pushed me and other women artists to dive deeply and fully into our bodies and ourselves.
Over the following decades, I became very close to all three women. They were dear friends, fellow artists, and mentors. Making “Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor” is my gift to them, and theirs to me.
“Lynne Sachs’ Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an 8-minute triptych of brief encounters with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson filmed at the artists’ homes or studios. Sachs has a really well-attuned photographic eye, and she captures the trio in a series of easygoing domestic situations. The three artists discuss their artistic lives, how they came into their practice, how their gender identities factor in, where their work comes from. It’s a simple premise with intimate results, especially good at giving a sense of the artists’ environments. ” (Tyler Maxin)
“I could make the inside of myself show on the outside,” Barbara Hammer says in Lynne Sachs’s documentary Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), explaining how a lighter movie camera, developed in the Sixties, helped her convey intimacy, and thus became a useful, malleable tool of expression. The short, in which Sachs pays a visit to pioneering women artists who used moving image in their practice — Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson — will enjoy a weeklong run as part of “Doc Fortnight,” the Museum of Modern Art’s annual showcase dedicated to nonfiction film. (Ela Bittencourt)
“A similarly brief and similarly enchanting encounter followed with the world premiere screening of Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, (2018) Lynne Sachs’s nine-minute cinematic collage exploring the distinctive styles and approaches of three artists. She delicately weaves them together by positioning them each in a place of familiarity and inner personal power to themselves and their work. Schneemann interacts with a film camera as a prop which becomes an inducer of memories in her Hudson Valley home; documentary maker Barbara Hammer moves around various sources of inspiration in her West Village studio and Gunvor Nelson shares glimpses of the village where she spent her childhood in Sweden. Each artist is gracefully and uniquely introduced via different relationships they have created with themselves, their environments, the filmmaker, and the audience.”
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.
Is this a feminine sensibility? (This question) is at play in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), Lynne Sachs’ portrait of three trailblazing experimental filmmakers, which premiered at MoMa’s Documentary Fortnight last year. In a Derenesque wink, the opening image is a cat, as Schneemann’s voice drifts in from the space offscreen. She remembers her first camera – a Brownie – and how holding it made filmmaking feel like “an inevitability”. Sachs’s camera, as if searching for Schneemann, pans around an empty room—a nod to Deren’s Meshes, andtinged with Akerman, too. Before any of the film’s titular subjects even appear on camera, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor pulsates with the energy of feminist experimental cinema’s kindred trailblazers. Common threads are explicated, teased out by the subjects’ accounts, yet left open-ended as brevity is forced by the film’s short runtime.
In her section of the triptych, Schneemann recalls the challenge of convincing a male friend to lend her his Bolex: he resisted “as if I would bleed on this precious machinery”. She admits that she didn’t really know how to use it. Yet we know that the spirit of determination – so distinct in her oeuvre – won out, because now she’s on the other side of the camera. Next, we see Hammer. In contrast to the disembodied voice from Vever – made frail by poor cell connection and increasingly-advanced cancer – she is vivacious, running through the West Village, clowning for the camera. She recounts a foundational anecdote of her practice: on a detour from another motorcycle ride she was sidetracked by a crop of leaves in striking red. As if compelled by the goddess, she took out a bifocal lens from her optometrist and placed it in front of the camera, moving while she filmed. The finished project was a sublime manifestation of exactly how she’d felt when the leaves first caught her eye. , This embrace of openness and contingency was, for Barbara, fundamentally feminine – “I could make the inside of myself show on the outside” – and a release from the schizophrenic pull of rigidly-gendered rules for expression.
The last and longest section of Sachs’s film opens with a series of lingering close-ups of flowers. “After seeing a few of Bruce Bailey’s films, I understood that I, also as a single artist, could try.” In her childhood village in Sweden, Gunvor Nelson paces herself through what she has decided will be the final three projects of her career. There is a certain and deliberate slowness in her approach. She struggles to find tech support for her DSLR, but adapts to this challenge, finding eagerness and excitement in “calmly working” with stills. Sachs opts for a drawn-out rhythm in this vignette, as meandering shots of the surrounding nature recall the particular intimacy of Nelson’s work. This extends to her current process: even amidst technological change, she is invested in listening to her images, we sense, not bludgeoning them into some preordained vision.
These two shorts give us insight into seven women: Barbara Hammer, Maya Deren, Carolee Schneemann, and Gunvor Nelson as subjects and speakers; Lynne Sachs and Deborah Stratman from behind the camera. Watching both films, I wonder what connections there are to be drawn. Does the recent surge in filmic portraits of female trailblazers point towards a ‘feminine sensibility’, long overdue for historical recognition? I’m hesitant to speak about any ‘shared themes’ across the layered, nuanced careers that constitute this genealogy, lest these similarities be construed as an essentialised roadmap. How can we identify the beauty that comes from rejecting the strictures of masculine ways-of-being in the world without mummifying it, crystallizing these artists’ irreducible vibrancy into a prescriptive binary formula?
The key might lie in situating their work within experimental cinema’s challenging, unfeminist history. Reflecting on her mid-Sixties collaboration with Stan Brakhage, Schneemann laments: “Whenever I collaborated, went into a male friend’s film, I always thought I would be able to hold my presence, maintain an authenticity. It was soon gone, lost in their celluloid dominance.”Cat’s Cradle is hardly the only masterwork of structural film to suggest a sort of Abstract Expressionist-adjacent machismo. Against this backdrop, the nexus of similarities between Schneemann, Deren, Nelson, Sachs, and Stratman becomes explicable not as the record of some intrinsically-female way of seeing and filming the world, but as the product of work: a shared undertaking invested in upending experimental cinema’s more problematic attitudes and replacing them with a new hierarchy of aesthetic values: adaptability, intimacy, and tenderness. Only when we honour these values, in all their many manifestations across these seven artists’ careers, can we begin to construct the kind of feminist genealogy¹ that film history so urgently requires.
Barbara Hammer and Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs shoots with her Bolex camera with Barbara Hammer.
Barbara Hammer
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneeman in her studio.
Carolee and Lynne in Rosendale, New York.
Gunvor Nelson in her studio.
In Search of a Feminst Sensibility: Two New Films by Deborah Stratman and Lynne Sachs (excerpt)
Is this a feminine sensibility? A similar question is at play in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), Lynne Sachs’ portrait of three trailblazing experimental filmmakers, which premiered at MoMa’s Documentary Fortnight last year. In a Derenesque wink, theopening image is a cat, as Schneemann’s voice drifts in from the space offscreen. She remembers her first camera – a Brownie – and how holding it made filmmaking feel like “an inevitability”. Sachs’s camera, as if searching for Schneemann, pans around an empty room—a nod to Deren’s Meshes, and tinged with Akerman, too. Before any of the film’s titular subjects even appear on camera, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor pulsates with the energy of feminist experimental cinema’s kindred trailblazers. Common threads are explicated, teased out by the subjects’ accounts, yet left open-ended as brevity is forced by the film’s short runtime. In her section of the triptych, Schneemann recalls the challenge of convincing a male friend to lend her his Bolex: he resisted “as if I
would bleed on this precious machinery”. She admits that she didn’t really know how to use it. Yet we know that the spirit of determination – so distinct in her oeuvre – won out, because now she’s on the other side of the camera. Next, we see Hammer. In contrast to the disembodied voice from Vever – made frail by poor cell connection and increasingly-advanced cancer(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMeoAx9dZkI) – she is vivacious, running through the West Village, clowning for the camera. She recounts a foundational anecdote of her practice: on a detour from another motorcycle ride she was sidetracked by a crop of leaves in striking red. As if compelled by the goddess, she took out a bifocal lens from her optometrist and placed it in front of the
camera, moving while she filmed. The finished project was a sublime manifestation of exactly how she’d felt when the leaves first caught her eye. This embrace of openness and contingency was, for Barbara, fundamentally feminine – “I could make the inside of myself show on the outside” – and a release from the schizophrenic pull of rigidly-gendered rules for expression. The last and longest section of Sachs’s film opens with a series of lingering close-ups of flowers. “After seeing a few of Bruce Bailey’s films, I understood that I, also as a single artist, could try.” In her childhood village in Sweden, Gunvor Nelson paces herself through what she has decided will be the final three projects of her career. There is a certain and deliberate slowness in her approach. She struggles to find tech support for her DSLR, but adapts to this challenge, finding eagerness and excitement in “calmly working” with stills. Sachs opts for a drawn-out rhythm in this vignette, as meandering shots of the surrounding nature recall the particular intimacy of Nelson’s work. This extends to her current process: even amidst technological change, she is invested in listening to her images, we sense, not bludgeoning them into some preordained vision.
These two shorts give us insight into seven women: Barbara Hammer, Maya Deren, Carolee Schneemann, and Gunvor Nelson as subjects and speakers; Lynne Sachs and Deborah Stratman from behind the camera. Watching both films, I wonder what connections there are to be drawn. Does the recent surge in filmic portraits of female trailblazers point towards a ‘feminine sensibility’,
long overdue for historical recognition? I’m hesitant to speak about any ‘shared themes’ across the layered, nuanced careers that constitute this genealogy, lest these similarities be construed as an essentialised roadmap. How can we identify the beauty that comes from rejecting the strictures of masculine ways-of-being in the world without mummifying it, crystallizing these artists’ irreducible vibrancy into a prescriptive binary formula? The key might lie in situating their work within experimental cinema’s challenging, unfeminist history. Reflecting on her mid- Sixties collaboration with Stan Brakhage, Schneemann laments (https://www.revolvy.com/folder/Films-directed-by-Stan-Brakhage
/544076): “Whenever I collaborated, went into a male friend’s film, I always thought I would be able to hold my presence, maintain an authenticity. It was soon gone, lost in their celluloid dominance.” Cat’s Cradle is hardly the only masterwork of structural film to suggest a sort of Abstract Expressionist-adjacent machismo. Against this backdrop, the nexus of similarities between Schneemann, Deren, Nelson, Sachs, and Stratman becomes explicable not as the record of some intrinsically-female way of seeing and filming the world, but as the product of work : a shared undertaking invested in upending experimental cinema’s more problematic attitudes and replacing them with a new hierarchy of aesthetic values: adaptability, intimacy, and tenderness. Only when we honour these values, in all their many manifestations across these seven artists’ careers, can we begin to construct the kind of feminist genealogy that film history so urgently requires.
A Letter to the World: Experiments in Essay Filmmaking
In the words of renowned film avant-gardist Hans Richter, essay films “’make problems, thoughts and even ideas’ perceptible … they ‘render visible what is not visible.’”
From Chris Marker and Agnes Varda to Travis Wilkerson and Trinh T. Minh-ha, filmmakers and artists have been using the genre of essay filmmaking to explore new modes of blending fact, fiction, and experience to capture essential truths. A constantly evolving and flexible form, essay films are used to document cultural and historical moments, evoke a feeling, unravel an auto-biography, and respond to critical social turning points with a challenging mix of traditional documentary conventions, personal nuance and experimental artistry.
Join UnionDocs and filmmaker Lynne Sachs to explore the history, theory and practice of this shape-shifting genre. Open to filmmakers, students, artists, scholars and more, this three-day intensive enables artists to articulate their ideas and explore new methodologies in crafting their work.
Join UnionDocs and filmmaker Lynne Sachs to explore the history, theory and practice of this shape-shifting genre. Open to filmmakers, students, artists, scholars and more, this three-day intensive enables artists to articulate their ideas and explore new methodologies in crafting their work.
Participants in this intensive workshop will have the chance to work with a wide range of scholars and practitioners: Lynne Sachs will lead the course with help from filmmakers Alan Berliner, Akosua Adoma Owusu and Roger Beebe. Scholars and co-writers of “Essays on the Essay Film”, Timothy Corrigan & Nora M. Alter will join and provide a window into the theory and history of the form. Through seminars and work-in-progress critiques, together participants will each, in their own way, push the boundaries of reality-based work, questioning truth and fact as they are conveyed and represented, and learn how to put this new knowledge into practice. Current projects are not required to attend, but encouraged!
Dec. 2017 Essay Film Workshop withLynne Sachs, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Jacqueline Goss, Jim Finn, Sky Hopinka & Su Friedrich
The Lantern – The Ohio State University
by Chase-Anthony Ray November 2017
When Lynne Sachs celebrated her 50th birthday, she wasn’t concerned about an impending midlife crisis. Instead, she decided to celebrate with 11 New Yorkers she had never met.
For her latest documentary, “Tip of My Tongue,” Sachs gathered a diverse group of men and women from different countries including Iran, Cuba and Australia, who shared one thing in common: age.
Together with Sachs, the group discussed strange and revealing moments of their lives in which uncontrollable events –– outside their own domestic universe –– have impacted who they all have become.
“Tip of My Tongue” will screen at the Wexner Center for the Arts Wednesday in the latest installment of its “Visiting Filmmakers” series.
Sachs is known for creating films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. She also has a habit of weaving together poetry, collaging, painting, politics, and layered sound design.
Sachs wrote her own series of 50 poems for every year of her life, and guided her collaborators across the landscapes of their memories from the Vietnam War protests, to the Anita Hill hearings, to the Columbine massacre, and all the way to Occupy Wall Street, according to her website.
“I am happiest when my film ‘characters’ explore storytelling from various subjectivities,” Sachs said. “[To explore their] various selves and other selves … is a more authentic portrayal of being alive during a specific time, situation or place.”
The Wexner Center prides itself on bringing acclaimed filmmakers like Sachs to screen their works because it believes it is one of few institutions supporting this type of work, said David Filipi, director of film and video at the Wexner Center.
“We make it a priority to support personal filmmakers like Lynne, both by screening their films as well as providing post-production support to some through our studio program,” Filipi said. “There are fewer and fewer venues supporting this type of work, which makes it all the more imperative that we provide an opportunity for these types of films to be screened and seen by audiences in our region.”
Sachs said she chose to screen “Tip of My Tongue” because she believes Ohio State is in the small minority of universities with acclaimed museums.
“There are only two state universities in the United States that have extraordinary, world-class museums — the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive [at University of California, Berkeley] and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State,” Sachs said. “I have had the honor to screen my films at both institutions, and have been deeply moved by my interactions with the students and members of the public who fill the seats in these theaters.”
Filipi said Ohio State students might be surprised and intrigued by what Lynne captures with her film.
“Right now, you’re surrounded by your friends and peers, and your shared experiences are immediately recognizable… [but eventually], your friend and peer group isn’t always as present and there are other commitments and distractions that accumulate as you get older,” Filipi said. “Lynne has a very personal approach to documentary, and this is one of the traits that sets her films apart from others.”
Gathering a group of middle-aged adults from all backgrounds allows the theme of self-reflection and recounting one’s own memories to drive the entire film.
“In ‘Tip of My Tongue’ I tried to dig down into my own and my collaborators’ pain and joy … I was looking for surprising intimacy that is different from simply ‘telling the truth,’” Sachs said. “To bare my own soul, I needed to begin with my own poetry and then move onto something more visual –– I wanted my camera to express this intimacy.”
The screening of “Tip of My Tongue” will take place Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Wexner Center. Admission is $6 for students and $8 for the general public.
Read the full interview below: Can you explain the title a little bit? Well, tip of my tongue is an expression that people use for the experience of trying to remember something but not being able to verbalize it, knowing that it is there in the recesses of your consciousness but not having complete access to it. I like the physicality of the expression, the way it connects to our anatomy and to our bodies. I feel that this sensation – which can be both exhilarating and frustrating – articulates the communal memory experiment that I conducted in the making of the film.
Why bring your film to Ohio state? In my opinion, there are only two state universities in the United States that have extraordinary, world-class museums – the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive at University of California Berkeley and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State. I have had the honor to screen my films at both institutions, and have been deeply moved by my interactions with the students and members of the public who fill the seats in these theaters.
What can OSU students expect from this film? To celebrate my 50th birthday, I gathered together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where I grew up. I invited 12 fellow New Yorkers — born across several continents in the 1960s — to spend a weekend with me making a movie. Together we discussed some of the most salient, strange and revealing moments of our lives. As a group, we talked about the ways in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe have impacted who we all have become. Together, we all move from the Vietnam War protests to the Anita Hill hearings to the Columbine Shootings to Occupy Wall Street. Using the backdrop of the horizon as it meets the water in each of NYC’s five boroughs as well as abstracted archival material, TIP OF MY TONGUE ultimately becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. We replace traditional timelines with a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression.
In addition, OSU students are going to hear music from Stephen Vitiello, one of the most recognized sound artist in this country!
How did you manage to find all these participants among the same age and get them to participate? I used all sorts of methods for finding the people in the film. I posted on Facebook stating that I was making a film project that needed people who were born around the same time that I was – in 1961. I also asked everyone I knew for suggestions because I was really committed to working with participants in the film who came from as many different continents as possible. I wanted as diverse viewpoints and life experiences as I could possibly find.
You wrote 50 poems for every year of your life. Explain to me why you did that and how easy/difficult that process was? When I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1970s, I had a great aunt named Isabel. Aunt Isabel was passionate about poetry. She was a devout aficionado of the works of poets such as Marianne Moore, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, and Cathy Acker and expressed her love of the marriage of poetry and image through her life-long acquisition of artist made books. She had hundreds of these books and was thrilled to share her collection with me throughout my teenage years. Little did I know how affected I would be by the hours we spent together turning the pages of her books. It was during these exhilarating moments of discovery that I began to find my own artistic muse.
I’ve been making experimental and documentary films since 1983. When I turned 50 in 2011, I decided to return to my love of poetry, painting, drawing and photography – to further explore a conceptual thread I had been developing in my films for many years: In what ways are the private, most intimate moments in our lives affected by the public world beyond? While visiting the Museum of Modern Art, I discovered the work of Serbian conceptual and media artist Sanja Ivekovic. In one black and white video piece made over a period of 14 years in the 1970s and early 80s, she created a remarkable visual dichotomy between her existence as a mother at home with her child and her observations on the Yugoslavian police state. She simply cut back and forth between a tall glass of milk and a street tussle with soldiers, or an infant’s eye and some form of state TV propaganda and the effect, for me, was breathtaking.
Why did you choose self-reflection and recounting ones own past memories as a main theme for the film? I am happiest when my film ‘characters’ explore storytelling from various subjectivities,” various selves and other-selves, opening up, perhaps ironically, a more authentic portrayal of being alive during a specific time, in a specific situation or place.”
In “Tip of My Tongue” I tried to dig down into my own and my collaborators’ pain and joy. Then I tried to articulate these experiences as a shared exploration for the camera. I was looking for surprising intimacy that is different from simply ‘telling the truth.’ To bare my own soul, I needed to begin with my own poetry and then move to something more visual. I wanted my camera to express this intimacy through textures, objects, places, reflections, faces, hands. (from a conversation with Kelly Spivey, Brooklyn College Film Professor)
Last October, I invited Bradley Eros to give the 8th Annual Experimental Lecture at NYU. Here is his entire spectacular, collaborative, visionary performance/lecture. He called it “Disappearing soon at a theater near you (ephemeral cinema & other acts of life)”.
I’d like to say a bit about the history of the Experimental Lecture. From the beginning, I imagined this talk to be one in which someone who had immersed him or herself in the world of alternative, experimental film would reveal something about the process of making their work by visiting pieces that were either unfinished, unresolved, bewitching or even untouchable. The intention was to lay bare the challenges rather than the successes, the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art.
Barbara Hammer was our first invited guest. In 2006, she sauntered into the largest lecture hall in this building, weeks after her first round of chemo therapy, carrying an enormously heavy Pagent projector which she then proceeded to carry up and down the stairs as she projected her own 16mm films on every surface of the room in her “The Cinema of the Optic Nerve”.
Craig Baldwin tore himself away from his underground film archive, his artistic practice and his 30-year old alternative media series “Other Cinema” in San Francisco to present “The Collage Essay: From Compilation Film to Culture Jam”.
Ken Jacobs took us on an odyssey from his early romps in NYC to his most recent obsessions with the state of our world as manifested by the beings that live in the dirt and grime of it all in his “Cucaracha Cinema”.
Peggy Ahwesh suggested her own “Parler Femme” by regailing us with her own take on a hard scrabble, experimental ethnography that has taken her to places she never intended on going but somehow found herself – in bliss.
In her “Where Did I Make the Wrong Turn?”
Carolee Schneemann traveled backwards and forwards in time like a archeologist who understands that a cherry pie is more than something to eat. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she analyzed those clues from her past that pushed her toward her life’s work.
Jonas Mekas recounted the entire history of the avant-garde cinema and the fragile but so vital institutions that sustain us in NYC and beyond, like a bard unraveling the secrets of his mind and his community.
In 2016, Ernie Gehr gave his talk “What is an Unfinished Work?”, allowing us into his studio practice, revealing the moments of doubt and stubbornness that he, like all of us, need to continue making our work.
In many ways an animating spirit and catalyzing agent of the NYC underground film scene from the 1980s to the present, Bradley Eros’ radical, sumptuous expanded cinema works stand at the forefront of a movement to redefine our understanding of film as an art form. For his Experimental Lecture, Eros “dismantled a few beliefs, by prying history loose, not nailing it down.” His lecture will take the form of a series of questions, interrupted by quotations, collaborations, expanded and contracted cinema, jokes & aphorisms, music, poetry, and surprise. Eros will talk on the nature of process, the immaterial, unfixed forms, hybrid works, resistance, desire & its discontents.
Eros works in myriad media, in addition to film, including video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, and installation. His conceptual framework includes: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, cinema povera, poetic accidents and musique plastique. Recent works & obsessions include: Black Hole Cinema (‘zine & lecture), eau de cinema (perfume & exhibit), Narcolepsy Cinema.
Thank you to Dan Streible, Cinema Studies at NYU, Cristina Cajulis and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
