Frequent Filmwax guest filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to discuss a retrospective of her work to be presented by DCTV. The series, called “From the Outside In“, runs June 7th — 11th at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in Lower Manhattan. 2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV. In From the Outside In, we traverse Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.
“40 years ago, Lynne Sachs took a video class at Manhattan’s DCTV (Downtown Community Television Center). In the next four decades she made dozens of remarkable films and beginning this Friday, June 7, DCTV will present From the Outside In, seven programs showcasing the variety of her important work with the artist present at each screening. Go here for program and ticket information.
Her films have been influenced (either cited by her or by my estimation) by many great artists and movements: Vietnamese filmmaker and professor Trinh T. Min-ha (whose classes I also attended while at San Francisco State University), Chris Marker (“Sans Soleil”), the dance/film aesthetics of Yvonne Rainer and Meredith Monk, early underground filmmakers like Bruce Baillie, body art performance artist Carolee Schneeman, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, American feminist documentary filmmaker Martha Rosler, left politics, the French avant-garde lettrism movement, post-colonial studies, Nina Menkes and much more. She is one of the most important American experimental filmmakers still active today.
Here are my personal and political notes on ten of her films I viewed or re-viewed recently. All of them are included in the DCTV programs.
Ladies Wear (1983) Lynne and her brother (film director Ira Sachs) both paint their nails while on a subway car. (An ‘80s subway decorated by graffiti; they get off at the Spring street stop.) Themes: NYC, gender, graffiti as a form of public cosmetics. Her first film.
Fossil (1986) In Mambai in Bali, Indonesian female workers dredge sand from the river onto containers they balance on their heads. This is contrasted with a dance performance by Sachs and other dancers as response to the movements of the Bali workers. Mixing the workaday rhythms of laborers with a modern dance interpretation is a tactic she will employ in many of her films.
Drawn & Quartered (1987) A nude male and female are separated into four quadrants of the film frame. Sachs says this was the year she “first encountered Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’, seen Carolee Schneeman’s ‘Fuses’, pondered Yvonne Rainer’s ‘Lives of Performers.’”
Investigation of a Flame (2001) We are in Chris Marker territory here. (And please see his incredible 1977 film, “The Grin Without a Cat.”) Stock footage of the Vietnam War is intercut with the story of the Catonsville Nine. In 1968 Daniel Berrigan and eight other Vietnam War protestors stole boxes of selective service records to a park and burned them with homemade napalm. Sachs interviews the participants, including a female clerk at the selective service office who explains why she felt she failed American soldiers who wouldn’t be relieved by new recruits. A moving exploration of our moral responsibility to confront the foreign policies of our country, no matter the cost to us.
Tornado (2001) A short meditation on 9/11. She folds a torn calendar of September 2001 while explaining how her daughter’s response to the tragedy was to “mourn the twins.”
The Task of the Translator (2010) Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” this short contrasts the improbable assignment of Latin scholars translating a newspaper story about Iraqi burial rituals with accounts wartime cosmetic surgery and human remains.
The Washing Society (2018) Co-directed with Lizzie Olesker, this 44-minute film is one of my favorites. Workers at a few of the thousands of NYC laundromats talk about their work days as ghosts from an 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta reappear. Intimate connections (like the one I have with my local laundromat workers) are being replaced by “super laundries” where conditions are more factory-like. (Recall that a super laundry was atop the meth lab in the TV series “Breaking Bad!”) Required reading: Chapter 10 (“The Working Day”) of Karl Marx’s “Capital: Volume 1.”
A Year in Notes and Numbers (2019) Closeups of to-do notes are combined with test results from her annual physical. This is a beautiful example of making art out of miscellaneous documentation.
E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021) What does Jean Vigo’s great 1933 film “Zero for Conduct” have to do with footage of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol building? When is anarchy good and when is it bad?
Swerve (2022) I have written about this short film here.
Cat Radio Cafe is a live salon of the arts, exploring the politics of art and the creative bounty of New York. Hosted by Janet Coleman and David Dozer (“The Displaced Playwright”), it features conversation, performance, new and archival radio theater, and news on The Rialto (and Ludlow Street).
On tonight’s show we’ll be joined by experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs to discuss Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In the upcoming retrospective of 24 of her experimental films, including Film About a Father, The Washing Society, Investigations of a Flame, Swerve, Your Day is My Night, and a new one, Contractions, commemorating the fall of Roe v. Wade. The presentations run from June 7-11 at the Firehouse Cinema – DCTV – where she took her first video class forty years ago.
Hosted by Janet Coleman and David Dozer
Janet Coleman is an author and actor.
Her publications include The Compass, the definitive history of improvisational theatre in America; and (with Al Young) Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs.
She is a founding producer of the seminal off-off Broadway’s Loft Theatre Workshop. She appeared as Evelyn Lincoln in the film 13 Days and as Emily Ann Andrews in David Dozer’s long-running radio comedy series, Poisoned Arts. She is also a founding member of the Christmas Coup Comedy Players (CCCP) and The Atlantica Radio Empire.
David Dozer is a playwright and actor.
His long-running radio comedy series, Poisoned Arts, debuted on WBAI in 1967 and has been published in Scripts and The Best Short Plays of 1999-2000.
His dada plays and poems currently play in the repertoire of The Dada NYNY Dadas. He appears as Sergeant Groves on the classic TV series M*A*S*H. He is a founding member of the Christmas Coup Comedy Players (CCCP) and the Atlantica Radio Empire.
Media archives, a frozen prawn, skipping school, a women‘s clinic in Memphis, Tennessee, a greenhouse, and a lavish dinner among mothers are the settings for the women and girls of this program. They should all have the basic right to make decisions about their own behavior and their bodies, including the right to an abortion. This is not always the case, as we will see, especially when legal restrictions, patriarchal systems, or social stigma are at play. (mm)
LYNNE SACHS And as far back as I can remember, dad engaged with the world in ways that inspired, excited and sometimes confused me. How do you feel, dad? Very funny. Oh, let me go do my hand.
NICOLE RIVERA So nice to meet you. I’m glad to have you here for Imagen TV Plus. And tell us a little bit about the documentary that you present these [films from] 2024 to and for Ambulante. Yes. Go ahead.
LYNNE SACHS Well, actually, I’m having a retrospective, so I showed 15 films in four programs. Okay. And then, some of them were feature length films, and some of them were short films. And then I also taught a master class where I showed some films and talked about the relationship between film and poetry. And then lastly, I taught a workshop, called Opening the Family Album, which covered a whole month of interactions with 16 participants, 16 artists, filmmakers from Ciudad de México. We met several times on zoom, and then we met in person, and then we created a live expanded cinema documentary performance. So I was very involved with Ambulante.
NICOLE RIVERA Wow. It’s amazing. I totally… I didn’t know that, but it’s amazing. And I feel like it’s really on the line of the work you made that is really personal. So tell us more about… about you, about how you become a part of the cinema environment. how you decide to create the personal masterpieces.
LYNNE SACHS I don’t know if I have made any masterpieces, but I have made a lot of films. and some of them are very short. The shortest one is 90s, and the longest one is 83 minutes. So it’s a full range of films. But I got involved in filmmaking because I was very interested in images. I was very interested in history, but I was also interested in what’s going on in the world and how we as artists can engage in very deep ways and begin to ask people to question their reality. And so film seemed like the right place for that, because film can contain all of those sensibilities in one space
NICOLE RIVERA And of course, actually this topic that you, mentioned about to question your reality, it’s really interesting for me talking about your job because, the documentary that I have the chance to check, it’s, to the, I mean, okay, the documentary that present, it’s about the Chinese community in New York. It’s amazing to see it because I feel like, like Mexican, like people who didn’t live in New York. We had this image of New York that the American cinema and Hollywood sell to us. So to see another perspective of New York is pretty interesting, because it’s a reality that we don’t know and we don’t even imagine.
So how… how do you feel to share with the world this, this other side of, of places that we think we know, we don’t know. And we can see the other faces of the cities that are so famous. But this place is not. Tell me, tell me more about that.
LYNNE SACHS Really love your question. I think that is exactly why I make films. I want to look at the other side of reality. Because in our culture, the global culture, sometimes we think the reality that is produced by commercials, by Hollywood is an opportunity to understand how a place or a person lives. It exists. But that’s not true. And that’s the job of a documentary filmmaker. And so actually, I’ve been making many films before I made your Day Is My Night, but I decided that I wanted to commit myself to looking at my own city and not to need an airplane ticket to make a documentary film. A lot of people think the job of a filmmaker who works with reality is to first buy a plane ticket and go somewhere exotic, and to begin to understand that maybe I’ve done that enough in my life. So I wanted to understand the reality that’s around me all the time. And also to see that my city, New York City, has many different layers of experience. So I decided I wanted to understand the experience of immigration and what it is like for people who are living in a place but only temporarily, or people who are having to share a home in order to make it possible to be where they want to be. And a new understanding of what family is. The family isn’t just a father, mother, and three kids.
A family is… can be something more, surprising. And it can be where you feel calmest and where you feel that you can be yourself. And I saw that when I started to talk to the people in Your Day is My Night, many of whom came here decades ago. So they were reenacting their lives from before, and some of them were articulating their lives from the present course. And actually, I think that’s a beautiful part of your job. It’s not about, like, to go somewhere exotic is to go inside to understand, the, the places that form part of your own life in case of New York as part of your life, because you’re from Brooklyn, and I think this this is so personal because you you have to go inside of these people lives. And I think that could be really telling you more than to cross the world, to go to another place you used to contact with the people next to you sometimes could be really challenging.
NICOLE RIVERA Can you tell me more about…
LYNNE SACHS That’s exactly true, because, for example, I rode the subway yesterday in the metro here in Mexico City, and when you’re on the train, you’re very close to other people. But you don’t say, excuse me, could you tell me about your life? Yeah. And, so I think that it’s very delicate because in documentary film, you don’t want to knock on the door or the window and say, open up your life to me because I’m powerful, or I carry the camera, or I’m from another part of this society, and I want to know how you live your life, which is very different from mine, because you don’t want to be voyeuristic. You don’t want to just look in and exploit. So for me, it’s very important to establish relationship and to work with people who are your subjects also as your collaborators, as the people who can also come up with creative ideas and they can say, this is good for me, this is not good for me. and so I think there’s a lot of listening and collective, processing that can happen within a documentary that usually doesn’t happen in a narrative film, because in a narrative film, you have the executive producer, then you have the director, and then you have all those other people. Oh, I forgot way up here… the movie stars. So you have the executive producer, the movie stars, and the director, and everybody else is kind of secondary. so I think that you need to break up that hierarchy. Yes. Because it’s not about telling a story that you want to tell. It’s to hear a story and to let others talk through your camera.
NICOLE RIVERA You it’s like, yeah, it’s like, work. They work together. Yeah. So I think it’s… it’s beautiful. But I don’t know what you think. This is the way I see documentary. You are not just entering the life of this person. You let them enter into your life. So true, so true. So I want you to know, to tell us about how this process had been for you to let them enter into your life.
LYNNE SACHS Yeah. I loved when you said that in a documentary, you don’t go to the set with an agenda. You don’t go with a thesis. I’m trying to prove something. You go to listen. Not well… I think there’s a difference between listening and hearing. You always hear. But when do you listen? And I think you brought up that distinction. So, for example, with Your Day is My Night. I made that film over about a year and a half, but then I have remained in contact with the people in the film. So we have lunch, and we meet for additional screenings. There are ways that we can try to stay in contact. Two of the women in the film are now in their early 90s there, and they’re still doing well. So I feel very honored that I met them in their early 80s. Now they’re in their early 90s, but their role models, for me, they’re heroes. I think that’s beautiful about great documentaries like the way your life, the story. You know, you experience the story when you are telling it to the others. It’s different than cinema that you just tell a story.
NICOLE RIVERA You finish this and that’s all… know you did you become part of that. So I want you to tell us all your story. That would be…which how would you feel about the experience that you have been in all this process? Who was main, learning about this, the oldest project in your life to be a documentary?
LYNNE SACHS Like, who was a mentor or an inspiration? Yeah. Well, I was very inspired by a French filmmaker who’s extremely famous. He died, his name was Chris Marker, and he made films going back to the late 1950s. And he was very much an observer. But he also brought another side that’s very important to me, which is he had a lot of introspection and he had a lot of doubt. And I think when you’re making these kinds of films, you have to maintain your doubt. So you have to always question your assumptions and. Find yourself with your subjects and, and realize that the obstacle to working with that person might be what’s most important and that that questioning of yourself, the ability to cry because you think you’ve almost failed.
But then to say, well, what did I learn from that person is something I learned from Chris Marker and, something I hope I keep.
NICOLE RIVERA And it’s amazing. And yeah, I feel like to have always this though it lets you continue with this constant learning, not to impose a story. You let the story flow. But tell me in all this process through all these years, who did it, the biggest challenge for you?
LYNNE SACHS Oh, the biggest challenge. Let me think. Oh, the challenge that took me 35 years, actually, was to make a film about my father, which is a film I showed here at Ambulante and we showed it at the Cinemateca Nacional. And, that film actually has probably been seen by more people than any of my other films. It was…distributed theatrically.
So it went to theaters and it was on some major streaming services, and it was very hard. And it’s definitely my most personal film, because in a way, it’s easier to ask questions of the people you know the least, but to ask the questions of your own parent is very vulnerable and a little scary.
NICOLE RIVERA I hope we can be there in your projection, because this sounds like a really interesting project because. Yeah, actually. And that’s what I tell you before something, sometimes it’s harder to go inside of us than to the other side of the world. Yes. So that’s amazing. And so we are really glad to have you here for Imagen TV Plus, there’s something else that you want to share with us to recommend some of your screenings during the festival. Feel you’re free to talk to the camera.
LYNNE SACHS Well, I made many films in my life, and I haven’t had that many opportunities to show so many of them together. And I feel very, very, very supported by Ambulante and also by the Centro de Cultura Digital. Both of those organizations have worked very hard to think about curating my work. I also, I should say, brought five films in their original format on 16mm, which many people in Mexico City are thrilled about. They like to see analog. So that has been very, very important. And, I thought I would share this t-shirt.
NICOLE RIVERA Yes. You want to tell us a little bit more about her t-shirt? Because it’s pretty and can you tell me the story? Okay, I seen okay.
LYNNE SACHS Cinema Que Agita, Cinema that agitates which to many people, that sounds… not very good. But actually to agitate is to stir, to create a motion is to bring new ideas, is to change you. And this t-shirt is from the Costa Rica Film Festival, which presented a retrospect of my work also. So I thought it would be a good t-shirt to wear in another country where people speak Spanish and to have this way of thinking about what cinema can do to us.
NICOLE RIVERA Yes. Because the main topic about this t-shirt, it’s the possibilities to “agitar” the world through the cinema, through the documentary. So that’s the special thing about this t-shirt.
So thank you to share that with us, to agitar with us.
LYNNE SACHS You’re very welcome. I know it’s so good to meet you. And I appreciate it.
Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba IFF began its activities as an independent film festival. Since 2012, the festival has attracted more than 200,000 people to movie theaters, 30,000 people watching movies online and exhibited more than 1,000 films from all over the world.
In 2020, it completed its ninth edition with the screening of more than 78 films, enabling online access for more than 30,000 people to these works.
After nine years of experiments, risks and accurate shots, Olhar de Cinema is already part of the cultural scene of independent cinema in Paraná, Brazil and around the world.
The event aims to highlight and celebrate independent cinema made around the world through the official selection of films with inventive, engaging and thematic commitment, ranging from addressing contemporary concerns about the daily micro universe of relationships, to interpretations and positions on politics and world economy. Films that venture into new forms of cinematographic language, which are open to experimentalism and which, nevertheless, have a great potential for communicating with the audience.
Amidst these requirements, it is possible to compose a program of great thematic and aesthetic diversity, which does not reject genres, formats and durations. A universe composed of approximately 90 films per year, Olhar de Cinema always seeks to value Brazilian and Paraná cinema as well, by digging up what is most precious and urgent in these cinematographies, ensuring special care when programming such works.
The festival seeks to compose shows that mix Brazilian and foreign films, enabling dialogue and exchange between all these universes. Alongside the shows that make up the event’s official selection, the festival also sheds light and pays tribute to masters of world independent cinema, restored classic films and also new directors who, even with a short filmography, already have a strong artistic identity.
With this proposal, the programming carried out by Olhar de Cinema has the vast majority of selected films that are still unpublished in Brazil. In this way, the event is intended not only to provide the public with unique cinematographic experiences, but also to encourage reflection on the language and history of cinema. We thank everyone who made this story possible, who are part of our present and contribute to making the event’s future even more vivid.
Film Description: In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court granted several states the authority to revoke women’s right to autonomy over their bodies, resulting in 21 states, including Tennessee, criminalizing abortion. In Memphis, Tennessee, Lynne Sachs draws upon her decades of experience in producing feminist counter-images to orchestrate a performance involving 14 women and some of their partners. Together, they evoke invisible visibilities and silenced discourses in front of an abortion clinic whose operations were halted following this decision. (C.A.)
Join us at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts for a free invite-only screening of six 16mm prints of films by provocateur, collagist and found-footage whiz BRUCE CONNER. Hosted by New York filmmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs (XY Chromosome Project).
Thursday, May 16, 2024 6 – 8 PM (doors open at 5:30, limited seating) 40 Lincoln Center Plaza
Film Study Center, 3rd Floor | Free
Drawing byBrendan Winick
Street and Sachs first met in San Francisco in the late 1980s when Bruce Conner’s aura as an avant-garde filmmaker was legendary. They both watched everything he’d made, including “A Movie”, his brazen, sardonic salute to the detritus of popular culture and were smitten. “Report” is a kick in the gut, an indictment of media saturation, and a surprisingly elegiac commentary on the Kennedy assassination. “Valse Triste” moves beyond irony to create a dream-like tender world of the imagination. “Marilyn Times Five” pushes all our buttons, simultaneously titillating and infuriating the feminist in both of us. “Mongoloid” pre-curses the MTV era and stands as one of the first rock videos ever made. “Cosmic Ray” animates a Ray Charles tune with a witty mélange of unexpected recycled images. Please join us for this evening in celebration of the work of film artist Bruce Conner, an adept dumpster-diver into the trashcan of history!
LYNNE’S NOTES My background as Bruce’s intern in 1985: Trying to re-splice his films. Driving him around SF in his Cadillac convertible to look for geiger counters to buy – fear of radioactivity Love of gospel music Lunch Fear of dying My children’s birth Helping him interpret highbrow texts on his work Story of MoMA show His attendance at premiere of Sermons and Sacred Pictures
A MOVIE 1958, 16mm, b&w/sound, 12min. Music by Ottorino Respighi “Pines of Rome” (Pini di Roma)
“… a montage of found materials from fact (newsreels) and fiction (old movies). Cliches and horrors make a rapid collage in which destruction and sex follow each other in images of pursuit and falling until finally a diver disappears through a hole in the bottom of the sea – the ultimate exit. The entire thing is prefaced by a girl from a shady movie lazily undressing. By the time A MOVIE is over she has retrospectively become a Circe or Prime Mover.” – Brian O’Doherty, The New York Times” Using only found footage, Conner has created one of the most extraordinary films ever made. One begins by laughing at the juxtaposition of cowboys and Indians, elephants and tanks, but soon the metaphor of association becomes serious, as we realize we are witnessing the apocalypse.” – Freude
REPORT 1963-1967, 16mm, b&w/sound, 13min. Soundtrack: “Four Days That Shocked The World” (1963)
“Society thrives on violence, destruction, and death no matter how hard we try to hide it with immaculately clean offices, the worship of modern science, or the creation of instant martyrs. From the bullfight arena to the nuclear arena we clamor for the spectacle of destruction. The crucial link in REPORT is that JFK with his great PT 109 was just as much a part of the destruction game as anyone else. Losing is a big part of playing games.” – David Mosen, Film Quarterly
“Conner is the most brilliant film-editor of the avant-garde. In REPORT he has used newsreel footage and radio tapes of President Kennedy’s assassination to produce a thirteen minute movie that captures unbearably, yet exhilaratingly, the tragic absurdity of that day.” – Jack Kroll, Newsweek
VALSE TRISTE 1978, 16mm, sepia/sound, 5min.
“VALSE TRISTE is frankly and gracefully autobiographical of Conner’s Kansas boyhood. Here, the period of the 1940s of his source materials parallels his own life experiences.” A line of dark, wet cars file across a flooded road; a man and a boy ceremoniously burn leaves; a businessman at his desk turns to look over his shoulder to the photo of a locomotive on the wall behind him; a medium shot of an engineer in the cab of his locomotive; a shard of rock shears from a quarry wall and plunges into water …” – Anthony Reveaux
Nostalgic recreation of dreamland Kansas 1947 in Toto. Theme music from I Love a Mystery radio programs (Jack, Doc, and Reggie confront the enigmatic lines of railroad trains, sheep, black cars, women exercising in an open field, grandma at the farm …) Meanwhile, a 13-year-old boy confronts reality. Sibelius grows old in Finland and becomes a national monument.
MARILYN TIMES FIVE 1968-1973, 16mm, b&w/sound, 13.5min. With Arline Hunter
“A young woman, allegedly Marilyn Monroe, is seen with pitiless scrutiny in the arena of an old girlie film. The reiteration of five cycles rotates the commodity of her moon-pale body as her song repeats five times on the sound track … ‘I’m through with love.’ The last shot terminates a final reward of stillness as she is seen crumpled on the floor.” – Anthony Reveaux
The image, or Anima, of Marilyn Monroe was not owned by Norma Jean any more than it was owned by Arline Hunter. Images can sometimes have more power than the person they represent. Some cultures consider that an image steals the soul or spirit of the person depicted. They will dwindle and die. MARILYN TIMES FIVE is an equation not intended to be completed by the film alone. The viewer completes the equation.
MONGOLOID 1978, 16mm, b&w/sound, 3.5min. Music by DEVO “Mongoloid”
A documentary film exploring the manner in which a determined young man overcame a basic mental defect and became a useful member of society. Insightful editing techniques reveal the dreams, ideals and problems that face a large segment of the American male population. Educational. Background music written and performed by the DEVO orchestra.
Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, happier than you and me. Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, and it determined what he could see. Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, one chromosome too many. And he wore a hat, and he had a job And he brought home the bacon so that no one knew
COSMIC RAY 1961, 16mm, b&w/sound, 4.5min. Music by Ray Charles “What’d I Say” Live from Atlanta (1959)
“COSMIC RAY seems like a reckless collage of fast moving parts: comic strips, dancing girls, flashing lights. It is the dancing girl – hardly dressed, stripping or nude – which provides the leitmotiv for the film. Again and again she appears – sandwiched between soldiers, guns, and even death in the form of a skull positioned between her legs. And if the statement equates sex with destruction, the cataclysm is a brilliant one, like an exploding firecracker, and one which ends the world with a cosmic bang. Of course, the title also refers to musician Ray Charles whose art Conner visually transcribes onto film as a potent reality, tough and penetrating in its ability to affect some pretty basic animal instincts. But if such is the content of the film – that much of our behavior consists of bestiality – the work as a whole stands as insight rather than indictment.” – Carl Belz, Film Culture
‘I am overwhelmed by simplicity. There is so much to see.’
In 1998, the pioneering US feminist artist Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) spent a month at an artist residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Feeling ‘compelled to do absolutely nothing’ while living in a dune shack without running water or electricity, Hammer documented her solitude with a journal, a tape recorder and a 16mm film camera. For decades, these materials remained in her personal archive, until, as Hammer was nearing the end of her life in 2018, she entrusted her friend, the celebrated US filmmaker Lynne Sachs, to craft a film with the materials.
For the project, Sachs recorded Hammer reading from her decades-old journals during her final months. Hammer, who is known for her provocative and often controversial artworks, here provides a widely accessible yet distinctive account of solitude, beauty and where these two experiences met during her month on the beach. Her intimate, diaristic account is accompanied by gorgeous nature shots in which she plays with filters and frame rates, seemingly with no other motive than creative exploration. And, connecting past and present through her editing, including the use of words on the screen, Sachs’s treatment provides Hammer’s experience a delicate narrative structure.
In one sense, A Month of Single Frames is a touching coda to Hammer’s life, as the film concludes with the artist revisiting her own poignant meditations on mortality. But, percolating just beneath the surface is a more expansive celebration of artistry, and the artist’s ability to observe, contemplate, refract and give new contours to the world.
CONTRACTIONS Lynne Sachs, USA, 2024, 12′ International Premiere
“A couple of years after the annulment of the ruling known as Roe v. Wade, which, since 1973, guaranteed the right to abortion in the United States, weeds are growing on the walls of an empty clinic in Memphis, Tennessee. In this abandoned setting, a group of women, some holding hands with their companions, seem to recreate a kind of off-screen abortion: the entrance and exit of the clinic. We do not see their faces, but the sound guides us: in the voices of two women we hear the testimonies of those who once exercised a right, now lost.” – Karina Solórzano
It is this short film that catapults Lynne Sachs and positions her as one of the first feminist filmmakers of experimental cinema.
Faust: who is she?
Mephistopheles: Look at her carefully. This is Lilith.
Faust: who?
Mephistopheles: Adam’s first wife. Beware of her beautiful hair, the only finery that she shows off, when she catches a young man with it she does not let him go easily.
With a unique sensibility and poetic vision, Lynne Sachs is an American filmmaker who challenges the conventions of experimental cinema. Through her works, she explores themes such as identity, memory and family, creating intimate and emotional pieces that invite reflection. Her distinctive style and commitment to innovation have made her a leading figure in the world of independent film. In this review I will talk about one of the most significant shorts of her career: A Biography of Lilith . And I will speak of it as a maximum expression of semantics.
I met Lilith in my last year of high school, at a Catholic school. My approach to religion had been limited to wearing a skirt on Sunday mass until I was 7 years old. My dad stopped believing in institutions and I stopped believing in God. My interest in other beliefs was not above average, but everything changed when I heard her name.
I asked the same question as Faust in Goethe’s play, and the Mephistopheles of my own drama answered the same: “she is Adam’s first wife.” I did not dare deny her existence for two reasons. The first, because of the ignorance in which I knew she found me: I refused to know more about the Bible; the second, because the idea of a woman before Eve who turned her back on the creator seemed impossible to me, however, it gave me a hope that burned in my chest. Not denied, but demortified, I let myself be carried away by Lilith’s presence in my daily life. I discovered, then, that if God were a woman, then it would be her.
Mentioned by contemporary authors as “the first feminist woman,” Lilith is born from mud. God gives her Eden to him under the same limitations as her successor, but Lilith rebels against Adam’s desires, without him being able to understand that her pleasure also matters to her. Unlike Eve, Lilith is not born from Adam’s rib, so she thinks by and for herself. In the sexual act in which Lilith demands to get on top, Adam does not allow it and she flees to the Red Sea. She meets Lucifer, gives him wings and God gives her an opportunity to return, under the same conditions. Lilith chooses her freedom and, presumably, she is the one who disguises herself as the snake. As part of her punishment, she is condemned to be the infertile woman. Lilith grows and develops in today’s world as the witch who is guilty of the guilt of women of the same condition as hers, as well as the lust of men and also the cause of crib death.
Lilith becomes a fable, the monster who sleeps under the bed of adulterers and impious people, sometimes lulling the crib of a newborn. She is stripped of her own history. Lilith does not appear in The Bible, and yet she exists in the Catholic imagination. She appears for the first time as a literary figure in Goethe’s Faust , briefly (1808 years after The Creation) and begins, at a snail’s pace, to gain visibility . Today, Lilith is one of the greatest symbols of the feminist movement. We carry her in her chest and she burns inside us stronger than ever. It no longer appears only in intellectualism, nor only in books of canonical literature. She becomes Lucifer’s wife in television series, she is painted and sculpted in contemporary art, sociological theses are written under her own name, Drag Queens dress like her on reality shows . Lilith, today, is on everyone’s lips. But, as in Genesis, I think it is important to go back to the beginning to understand the feminist Lilith beyond her sexual liberation.
I remember when I finally discovered what the apple represented in the creation story. Clinging to the little interest she found in Catholicism, I discovered that the apple represents modesty in conservative discourses, which is why Eva covers her naked body. But, this didn’t make sense to me. If Lilith was the daughter of God and had disguised herself as a snake, why prohibit Eve from what freed her? In this same speech, I forgot that the characters in The Bible are, above all, human, and that the ultimate goal of this text is to talk about forgiveness and goodness. I also remembered that it was we who have distorted and polarized belief.
Then I understood that the apple actually represented knowledge, reason, the word. Lilith gave consciousness, first to Eve and then to Adam, about themselves and their surroundings. She gave them free will. And if man is in the image and likeness of God, it is because of his ability to create from the word. If words make reason, and if reason is what differentiates us from animals, then I had no choice but to conclude: if God is a woman, that woman is Lilith. She gave us the gift of knowledge.
After this journey of reflection, which took me approximately 7 years, I keep coming across Lilith: a challenging woman. And this time she did it under the name Lynne Sachs. She understands, as much as I do (or at least I want to think so), the role that Lilith occupies both today and in history, our history. In her short film, A biography of Lilith, she shows us a bar dancer, Cherie Wallace, whom Sachs interviews about some ideas that, if in themselves are a topic to talk about today, in the early 2000s They were barely placed on the table. She talks about men who take refuge in women from the gallant life, from adoption, about women who belong to that world and who are forced to give birth. But the most surprising thing is that she does it from an intellectual and ethical maturity that little is expected of women in her context (and again, I repeat: much less in the early 2000s).
However, it is not the answers or the supposed interview (since we never hear the questions) that we focus on. They only help us understand Lynn’s Lilith. A narrating voice tells the story of Lilith, precisely the one that I have explained previously, but in the images we see representations of her if she belonged to our present day. We see a woman arriving naked to her Eden (which I interpreted as her backyard) full of branches, grass, and a man’s green areas.
So, when the narrator tells us about the relationship between Adam and Lilith, we see this previously naked woman wearing shorts and surrounded by pages, while the man generates approaches that she rejects. She wants to read. But he tries to deny the knowledge. Then, he runs away. Cherie is baptized in the black sea as she discovers her freedom. And somewhere between the present and the past, she becomes a dancer. All this while Sachs places passages of Lilith in the different conceptions that she has of her: witch, lust, stalker, infertile and child murderer. However, as we watch Sachs’ short, Cherie tells the demons accompanying her: “all the children in the world are my children.” Have we not all been guided by the same rule? (Or has teaching made me crazy and I agree with her?: All the children in the world are my children). She doesn’t embarrass us, or I think she shouldn’t embarrass us.
Machismo is not genetic, it is historical. Women and men were not molded by clay, no. We were shaped by our own circumstances. Exiled from Eden, with arms open to knowledge, this is how we wanted to do it. The difference is that women have carried the guilt, the sin… because that is how the beginning of the story tells it. We stay at home and dedicate ourselves to the family. And that is, I believe, our best historical quality: that above all things, we put life first. No, I am not talking about anti-abortion campaigns, but precisely the opposite. Cherie Wallace, in the Lynn Sachs short, basically says that she couldn’t give a child a decent life. She understands her job, she doesn’t intend to leave it, but she understands the weight of carrying a life, a life other than her own and one to which she would not like her baby to belong. So, she gives him up for adoption. Lynn Sachs makes the first approach to Lilith as a human character, as perhaps the Apostles once wanted to make it known.
Lynne Sachs understands the symbology of Lilith as much as feminist women do; not in the archaic text, but in her own life. In her short film Biography of Lilith (1997) we navigate the words of Cherie, who conveys in them a ring of social and emotional responsibility about being a woman in the current era, about the birth, desire and regret of the masculinized man. It is this short film that catapults Lynn Sachs and positions her as one of the first feminist filmmakers of experimental cinema. Sachs also compiles fragments of the fables of Lilith the witch, Lilith the child stalker, Lilith the female demon, Lilith lust, the sinful Lilith, the stormy Lilith, and the Lilith Pandora. Using voice-over narration and Wallace’s voice, he dismantles the metamorphoses of this mythological character, present in the religious imagination, to turn her into her last figure: Lilith, a woman free from male pleasure, a sorora woman who acquires and shares knowledge, woman who liberates her equal, condemned woman and, more than anything, woman of this and all the revolutions that come after.
