Category Archives: SECTIONS

Scenic Ruptures: Experimental Documentaries from New York City and Los Angeles

Scenic Ruptures

Experimental Documentaries from New York City and Los Angeles

2014 International Festival of Documentary Cinema: Encounter with Other Cinema

Quito, Ecuador

Co-curated by Alexandra Cuesta and Lynne Sachs

Synopsis for NYC program by Lynne Sachs

Ten New York City artists ranging in age from 24 to 80 bring their personal impressions of the place they call home to Quito’s EDOCS screen. This program of experimental documentaries transforms a “bigger than life” metropolis into a place full of delicate, sometimes dirty, occasionally shiny images that will certainly complicate the more famous, monolithic images created by the mainstream media. Because these films are shot “from the inside out” by people who know the city well and are sensitive to the weave of the urban fabric, they reveal a fresh, intimate view from the ground up. Where and how do we engage with the city’s flora and fauna in our daily lives? How might the omnipresent trash of the streets reveal something about our quotidian rituals? When does the simple task of walking along a sidewalk become a surprising piece of radical performance art? Where are the silent, hidden workers who make the things we wear everyday? Together we will answer these questions during and after the screening of the NYC section of “Scenic Ruptures”.

Dear Alexandra,

Some people believe that the world looks better through “rose colored glasses.” I am not sure if this expression has any meaning in the Spanish language, but in English the implication is that these glasses are able to trick us into thinking that the bad things in life are not really so bad. It’s a kind of strange, optically generated false optimism. I’ve been living in New York City for eighteen years, and I must admit that ever since I arrived here I refused to put on those proverbial rose-colored glasses. I always wanted to see the dust, grime and shine of this major metropolis for what is was, in the same way that I truly prefer to see people without makeup, finding the lines of aging far more compelling than the smooth surface of cosmetics. I suppose this is the reason I make experimental films. I don’t want to cover up the brilliant, scary, intimidating surprises that the world offers, but instead prefer to look head-on with my eyes open. In this program, I have chosen a suite of short films that I think will show you and the audience at EDOCS a side of New York City that is rarely depicted through those big mainstream Hollywood movies that travel so easily across borders.

We will start the program by diving into the under water world. “Living Fossil” reveals a thriving beach side “community” of sea crabs, lovingly deposited on our local coastline by the Atlantic Ocean. Then in “Fulton Fish Market” you’ll see the nocturnal activities of the workers at the renowned, though now sadly defunct, South Street Seaport market. Next we will visit the cluttered, colorful streets of Manhattan by way of the object animations in “Early 12 New York Song”. Here, we will look at the magnificent detritus of the sidewalks, transforming the trash of our city into an archeologist’s treasure box. After that, we will take a pastoral detour to Central Park where, believe it or not, you will witness the Christmas time ritual of SantaCon. “Extinction Becomes Us” is an exquisite film portrait of an annual, anarchic event in which thousands of New Yorkers prance around the city dressed like, you guessed it, Santa Claus. Oh, and I better add, they are all drunk! From this nonsensical, apolitical reverie, we will move onto something far more dialectic. “Capitalism: Child Labor” is radical in every sense of the word. The film is an aggressive visual diatribe against all that New York City has come to represent in the world arena. The next two films on our visual journey will take us downtown to Chinatown. Through “Chinaman’s Suitcase”, we’ll experience a riveting, darkly humorous performance piece in which a somber traveler from Chinatown walks all the way to Midtown and then back again. As a finale to his low-key pedestrian adventure, our protagonist delivers one of the most outlandish film finales I have ever seen. “Night Scene New York” then carries us on a breathtaking, yet contemplative magic carpet ride through the same neighborhood. Moving north just a few blocks to the starkly different Lower East Side, “Bitch Beauty” gives us a candid portrait of a downtown woman artist who has lived a life full of heartbreak, disappointment, creativity and revelation. Our last image of New York City is my own “Drift and Bough”. We had an extremely cold and long winter this season, so I thought the only way I could reckon with its challenges was to make a movie.

I hope you will enjoy this cinematic voyage through the place I call home. I certainly had a great time designing your itinerary.

All the best,

Lynne Sachs

Quito, 9 de marzo, 2014

Querida Lynne,

Gracias por tu carta. Tengo mucha curiosidad de ver a Nueva York a través de los filmes que has escogido. Me identifico con tu mirada porque, al igual que tú, pienso que la esencia de un lugar esta detrás de lo que se percibe en el exterior. Como dices, hay infinitas perspectivas desde donde explorar una ciudad, y en mi caso el entendimiento de Los Ángeles está ligado a mi contexto personal. Viví ahí durante siete años, siendo este el tiempo más largo en que he vivido en un solo lugar. Desde temprana edad me he trasladado de ciudad en ciudad, llevando conmigo diversas culturas. Por esto, mi relación con el lugar es una experiencia simultánea entre pertenecer y ver desde afuera, adaptarme y observar, siempre desde algún lugar en la mitad. Es desde ahí desde donde construyo mi descripción de esta gran urbe. Una mirada que se fija en los márgenes, en los intersticios y en lo invisible. Paradójicamente también es la razón por la que mi práctica e interés en el cine están enraizadas en lo experimental, justamente porque este proceso permite construir perspectivas permeables y abrir significados.
Al no disponer de un centro definido en un amplio territorio, una de las características más impactantes del imaginario urbano de Los Ángeles es el urban sprawl, “esparcimiento urbano”. Partiendo de esto, el espacio de la ciudad y de sus habitantes no se puede definir con fronteras trazables. Es así que he creado un programa de obras poéticas y personales que crean una descripción abierta y ambigua, proponiendo una oportunidad para imaginar a la ciudad. Además, esta selección servirá como una introducción a las diversas tradiciones experimentales en el cine.
El primer filme en el programa, My Tears Are Dry, es un homenaje al cineasta experimental Bruce Baillie y también una oda al ideal californiano: palmeras y el cielo azul en una tarde de descanso. Después, observaremos la decadencia suburbana en un paisaje nocturno donde imágenes de películas viejas evocan al pasado en el filme Vineland. Continuando con un paisaje diurno, estaremos visualmente estimulados con la gran cantidad de vallas, sonidos, música y letreros que aparecen en Get Out of the Car, una sinfonía de ciudad del gran cineasta Thom Andersen, quien describe la nostalgia en el presente y visibiliza el maquillaje multicultural de la ciudad. Seguimos con The Electric Embrace, un estudio formal y estético filmado en película blanco y negro de alto contraste, sobre estructuras eléctricas e industriales particulares en las afueras de la ciudad. Continuamos con Everybody’s Nuts, un filme-ensayo sobre la presencia forzada de corporaciones agrícolas en la tierra de un trabajador mexicano, en un filme altamente personal. Regresamos a la urbe con mi película Piensa en mí, que incluí porque visibiliza a la gente que utiliza el transporte público mientras recorre la ciudad de Este a Oeste en una trayectoria visual. Finalmente, salimos a la frontera y nos encontramos en el muro que separa a Estados Unidos con México en Crossings, una obra altamente experimental del cineasta Robert Fenz.
Este es el recorrido. Por supuesto, es una pequeña muestra en un inmenso territorio. Siempre habrá más que mostrar y quedan infinitas miradas por incluir. Sin embargo espero que disfrutes de este fragmento y que te dé una idea de esta gran ciudad.

Con mucho cariño,
Alexandra Cuesta

Living Fossil

dir. Sean Hanley

16mm, 2 min., 2014

Sean Hanley

It is springtime along the coast of New York’s Long Island. Thousands of horseshoe crabs spawn on beaches under the glow of the full moon. This film offers a brief glimpse of a 450 million year old ritual. (SH)

Sean is an educator and filmmaker pursing experiments in the documentary genre. His work as a director and/or cinematographer has shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Images Festival, the Pacific Film Archive, the Vancouver International Film Festival, FLEXfest, and the Black Maria Film + Video Festival. He is the Assistant Director of Mono No Aware, an annual exhibition of expanded cinema and film-installation.

Fulton Fish Market

dir. Mark Street
35mm, sound, color, 12 min., 2003

Mark Street

Until 2005, New York City’s Fulton Fish Market exploded with movement, sound and color between the hours of midnight and 7 AM, Monday through Friday in lower Manhattan. Fishhooks flailed, crates were ripped open, and tens of thousands of fish were arrayed in ice as discerning retailers and restaurant owners made the rounds. This lyrical, visually vibrant documentary reveals a profoundly tactile material world tucked away in the shadow of the digital age. (MS)

Mark Street graduated from Bard College (B.A, 1986) and the San Francisco Art Institute (M.F.A., 1992). He has shown work in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series (1991, 1994), at Anthology Film Archives (1993, 2006, 2009), Millennium (1990,1996), and the San Francisco Cinematheque (1986, 1992, 2009). His work has appeared at the Tribeca (5 times), Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense (Spain), Mill Valley, South by Southwest, and other film festivals.

Early 12 New York Song

dir. Amanda Katz and Anthony Svatek

Video, 3 min. 2012

Objects and sounds collected on an early morning walk through Brooklyn, New York billow against a sun-struck floor. The smallest parts of the city are up for grabs. (AK & AS)

Amanda Katz is a professional film editor who teaches 16mm filmmaking at the Mono No Aware workshops in Brooklyn, NY. She remains endlessly inspired by the urban environment, and this is reflected in her personal work. Georg Anthony Svatek is a documentary cinematographer and producer who seeks to inspire estrangement from the familiar and create a sense of awe within the viewer. Aside from working at BBC World as a shooter and researcher, Anthony is currently co-creating an experimental documentary tentatively titled The BQE Project.

Extinction Becomes Us

dir. Josh Lewis
Super-8mm, color, silent, 3 min., 2010
“Lewis, Josh” <m.joshualewis@gmail.com>

Shot at Christmas time in New York’s Central Park with Lewis’ last roll of Super 8mm Kodachrome, this film was born from a chance encounter with the post-irony holiday bacchanalia known as SantaCon. Sad to say, it is no longer possible to process this exquisite film stock, so the very look of the film is a relic from an age gone by. (LS & JL)

Working freely in abstraction, documentary, performance, and narrative filmmaking, Josh Lewis creates work that engages with the mechanics of human need, guilt, desire and transcendence. His film-based work revolves heavily around chemical experimentation and an unconventional, often derelict approach to darkroom procedures. He is a firm believer in manual knowledge and the transformative potential of an immediate bodily struggle with the elements of the natural world.

Capitalism: Child Labor

dir. Ken Jacobs

Video, color, sound, 14 min., 2006
“A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great sky-lit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by their bosses! ‘Boys,’ they will say, ‘Have we got a war for you.” (KJ)

“For more than fifty years, Ken Jacobs’s work has inspired the sense of awe and mystery that nineteenth-century audiences must have felt when confronting motion pictures for the first time. Jacobs’s lifelong project has been the aesthetic, social, and physical critique of projected images.” (Museum of Modern Art) In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic -rather than demagogic- cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant.

Chinaman’s Suitcase

Dir. Miao Jiaxin

Performance Video, 6 min., 2012

In a performance, the artist Miao Jiaxin brings hanging ducks to Zuccotti Park (famous as the site of Occupy Wall Street) in downtown Manhattan, sprays them with color, hangs them back in Chinatown. (LS)

From his early practice, starting as a street photographer tracking Shanghai prostitutes to the development of a pseudo-transvestite web celebrity, Miao Jiaxin has evolved an edgy and protean practice. Beginning in Shanghai, Miao then immigrated to New York, expanding his view of urban streets towards a more conceptual public stage, where his works travel across different media.

Night Scene New York

dir. Jem Cohen

16mm, 10 min., 2009

A sleepwalker’s circumnavigation becomes a chance observation of New York’s Chinatown. (JC)

Jem Cohen is a filmmaker especially known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats (16mm, Super 8, video) and collaborations with music artists. Cohen found the mainstream Hollywood film industry incompatible with his sociopolitical and artistic views. By applying the do-it-yourself ethos of Punk Rock to his filmmaking approach, he crafted a distinct style in his films.

Bitch Beauty

dir. M.M. Serra

16mm & Super 8mm, 7 min. 201

This film is an experimental documentary profiling the life of Anne Hanavan, who experienced the underground scene in the East Village of the Eighties. It is a time capsule of addiction, the perils of street prostitution, and subsequent renewal through cathartic self-expression. (MS)

Filmmaker, writer, teacher, curator, director of the Film-Makers’ Co-op and all around dynamo, MM Serra has been central to the East Village experimental film scene for two decades. Her raven-black Betty Page hairdo, starlet sunglasses, sexpot leather pants and outrageous laughter make her one of downtown’s most unforgettable personalities.

Drift and Bough

dir. Lynne Sachs

Super 8mm, 6 min. 2014

“I spent a morning this winter in Central Park shooting film in the snow. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness creates the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro, or a monochromatic tableau-vivant. When I am holding my Super 8mm camera, I am able to see these graphic explosions of dark and light.” (LS)

Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design.

Los Angeles (and vicinities) Experimental program

My tears are dry

Laida Lertxundi, 4 minutes, sound, original format 16mm screened on blue ray, 2009

A film in the three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land’s song is played and interrupted as guitar makes

sound, two women, a bed an armchair, and the beautiful outside. After Bruce Baillie ́s All My Life.

The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises. (LL)

Vineland

Laura Kraning, 10 minutes, sound, original format 16mm screened on DV, 2009

VINELAND is a short experimental documentary filmed at the last drive-in movie theater in Los Angeles, located in a desolate area called the City of Industry. Floating within a backdrop of smokestacks, beacon towers, and passing trains, dislocated Hollywood images filled with apocalyptic angst are re-framed and reflected through car windows and mirrors as the displacement of the radio broadcast soundtrack collides with the projections upon and surrounding the multiple screens. In VINELAND, the nocturnal landscape is seen as a border zone aglow with dreamlike illusions revealing overlapping realities at the intersection of nostalgia and alienation. (LK)

Get Out of The Car

Thom Andersen, 35 minutes, sound, original format 16mm, screened on dvd, 2010

Get Out of the Car is a city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks (including El Monte Legion Stadium and the Barrelhouse in Watts).

The Electric Embrace

Norbert Shie, 2minutes, silent, original format 16mm screened on SD, 2010-2011

This silent hand-processed and optically printed film shifts like an electric current between positive and negative spaces to examine the electric pylons by the Los Angeles River.

Everybody’s Nuts

Fabián Euresti, 15 minutes, sound, HD,

I started shooting images around the house. The more images I shot, the more I started thinking about the accompanying narrative. And this is how the film’s narration was born. The more I kept thinking about what to say, the more I kept thinking of images I still needed to shoot. The film is ultimately a product of time spent in the home and the surrounding environment. (FE)

Piensa En Mí

Alexandra Cuesta, 15 minutes, original format 16mm screened on dvd, 2009

Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative meditation on public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.

Crossings

Robert Fenz, 10 minutes, sound, original format 16mm screened on DVD, 2006-2007

Crossings is an abstract portrait of the border wall. Both sides are confronted. The film is a short installment on a larger project that investigates insularity in both geographical and cultural terms. It is also my short reflection on From the Other Side, a film I worked on in 2002 by Chantal Ackerman (filmed at the United States- Mexico border). (RF)

Asian American Life TV features Your Day is My Night in Focus on Chinatown Shiftbeds

Asian American Life’s Minnie Roh brings us to Chinatown, to a community of undocumented immigrants hidden from view who live in a form of housing known as “shiftbeds.”

Featuring excerpts form Your Day is My Night with a special focus on our beloved wedding singer Yun Xiu Huang. An interview with director Lynne Sachs is also included.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W4BA0VXNmE&feature=youtu.be&t=1m

Biography of Lilith – Screening, Workshop and Lecture by Lynne Sachs

New York Open Center: 22 E. 30 Street, NYC

Friday, October 24th, 7:00-8:30pm

For more info: http://www.opencenter.org

“In a lively mix of narrative, collage and memoir, A Biography of Lilith (35 min. 1997) updates the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale with a present-day Lilith musing on a life that has included giving up a baby for adoption and working as a bar dancer. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, director Lynne Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as mother. ”

“Sachs’ film conveys the real experience — bloody and poetic — of Lilith alive and now in every woman. Bravo! A film felt, imagined, and informed by life.” – Barbara Black Koltuv, Ph. D. Clinical Psychologist, Jungian Analyst, and Author of The Book of Lilith

“Sachs’ art for fusing documentary and experimental narrative is unquestionably enormous. Her combination of an interview with a friend, the myth of Lilith and beauteous images of things like jelly fish (which float like iridescent breasts on screen) culminates in stunning cinema.” Molly Hankwitz, Art Papers

In addition to screening her film, Sachs will present a discursive mixed-media lecture. Her presentation includes video clips from conversations she had with Rabbi Mayer Fund, a brilliant, confrontational Orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn. Next she will show excerpts from conversations she had with four wonderful octogenarians from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx. Then, a zig-zag ahistorical mapping of LILITH sightings including: images of Lilith in haunting silver, hebrew protection amulets from medieval Europe (stored in the Jewish Museum in New York); Lilith on Baroque canvases and Mesopotamian ceramics; Lilith played by screen-beauty Jean Seberg as a crazed, exquisitely sensual woman living in a mental hospital; intense, intellectual, ridiculous Lilith in the TV-sitcom “Cheers”; and, Lilith, as a kind of Amazonian cannibal mother in the outrageously puerile comic book series Ghost Rider.

5th Annual Experimental Lecture: Carolee Schneemann: Where Did I Make The Wrong Turn?

Where Did I Make the Wrong Turn?
The 5th Annual Experimental Lecture by Carolee Schneemann

Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Curated by Lynne Sachs

Carolee Schneemann is a visual artist and moving image maker known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She has been a leader and provocateur in the American avant-garde community since the mid 1960s when she created her ground breaking performance Meat Joy. From Interior Scroll to Plumb Line to Mortal Coil to Vespers Pool, Schneemann’s work pushes form and consciousness like no other artist working today. Ever since Fuses (1965), her landmark exploration of the female body, Schneemann has pushed visual perception in radical directions that awe, disturb and mystify audiences.

In her Experimental Lecture, Schneemann travels backwards and forwards in time. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she will analyze recurring formal properties in her film, sculpture and installation work. The mysteries of a notched stick, paper folds, indentations, the slice of line in space are followed as unexpected structural motives, up to and including her recent photographic grids and objects.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Undergraduate Film and Television and the Department of Cinema Studies.

BBC Talking Movies features Experimental Film in NYC

Post by BBC Talking Movies.

The Filmmakers Co-op was profiled by the BBC Talking Movies program in September 2014. Great interviews with Gregg Biermann, Mary Magdalene Serra, and Ephraim Asili, Lynne Sachs as well as footage of Insha Fitzpatrick and films by Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, and several others. With a special cameo appearance of Maya Street-Sachs.

MIFF movie review: ‘Your Day is my Night’

Lynne Sachs has spent 25 years of her young life making films, installations and documentaries from Vietnam to Bosnia and all corners of the world. She is a master of the art and a gifted collector of the tiny moments of the human comedy and tragedy.

At home in New York City, she became intrigued with stories about the “shift bed” people of Manhattan’s Chinatown, a collective of Chinese performers and workers who live in an old apartment building on lower Manhattan’s Hester Street.

In this gorgeous, breathtaking film, “Your Day is my Night,” she takes us deep into an almost fairyland world.

With the camera magic of Sean Hanley, who did the editing as well, and Ethan Mass, Sachs walks us up the long flights of stairs to the heart and home of these pilgrims, all displaced from the big cities and tiny villages of China. Prepare yourself. This is no ordinary documentary. This is film, a canvas, a moving poem. It never stands still. It moves and it moves us.

The film opens with a closeup — and Hanley uses that form throughout — of an old woman waking. Her eyes flutter, her lips move as though trying to rid the taste of a bad dream of ancient memories deep in her DNA.

The camera is there as dawn breaks, with the light of a dirty New York sun turning clean and golden as it fills these rooms. Slowly, there is a montage of awakening bodies, floating white sheets, flowery scarves and cheap, yellowing curtains in a slow Chinese ballet of ever changing color. Stravinsky would have killed to score it, but Stephen Vitiello’s score is proper and enchanting. From here, the day workers go about their tasks throughout the city, and the night workers come home and take their places on the beds made warm by the day people, the sheets still bearing the imprint of the night bodies.

Most of us are shocked by these seemingly airless rooms that are smaller than some people’s closets. They are filled with tiny beds, double decked, triple decked. They first make us think of kennels for humans too complicated to engage. But these are Chinese,and despite the fact that some of them have lived for generations in poverty, they have inherited the gifts to transform each room into musical notes. They hang posters, small pieces of art, photographs and notes on whatever piece of space they have. There are goldfish and small birds. The air is redolent with the aroma of their communal cooking.

We meet seven of the dwellers, all performers, dancers, singers, magicians and actors, as they move through the days and nights of their lives. In Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese, we learn the stories they’ve brought with them out of the smoke of their pasts.

We meet Chung Che, who was a medical professor in a Chinese university, then came to America and worked as a garment cutter. Eventually, with his medical knowledge, he became a massage therapist.

There is Yun Xiu Huang, a larger than life entertainer, a gregarious Chinese Tom Jones, who has been here for twenty years working as a professional singer and musician. He performs at weddings and Chinese banquets. These tiny rooms shake with his laughter. Some work in building maintenance and restaurants, some teach dance and Chinese music. But all cling to one another like sparrows in a familiar tree.

Lynn Sachs brings seven of them together and steps back, letting the camera of Sean Hanley move among the players. In one sequence, Sachs and Hanley take us to a big Chinese wedding that looks like it was taken from the musical version of “World Of Susie Wong.” In another, the group perform an amateur dance number in home made cowboy costumes, dancing to Bizet’s “Carmen.” Hanley’s closeups, each one, are framable pieces of art, that look as they though they should be illustrating poems. His color and editing are astonishing. He moves from lips to eyes like Vermeer, to hands practicing Tai Chi in the early light and the blue light of evening. Director Sachs places the monologues carefully throughout. One tells of his journey from China as he massages a friend. Another tells his housemates of his family following the great military leader Chiang Kai-Shek from war-torn Peking to Taiwan, where he loses his parents, never to see them again.

An old man,who slept on stone as a child, walks the streets of Manhattan, collecting old mattresses, torn and old, simply because he never had one. These stories are told to one another in their native language, not meant to entertain us. We are merely welcome eavesdroppers, and we find ourselves lucky to be here.

We are in the presence of survivors unlike any we’ve ever known, people who have learned by listening to the inner voices of their ancestors, how to survive war, drought, and famine. I feel you have never seen anything like it.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer and former actor.

Direct Link to review in Kennebec Journal: http://www.centralmaine.com/2014/07/15/miff-movie-review-your-day-is-my-night/

Critics Page: “The Thing is No More” by Lynne Sachs in The Brooklyn Rail

FLUX TIME: Moving-Image Art and the Ends of Cinema

To address the relationship between contemporary contexts of art and cinema, we asked 17 artists, curators, programmers, and critics to respond to a simple question: what and where is artists’ cinema today, and what and where is its future?

http://brooklynrail.org/2014/07/criticspage/the-thing-is-no-more

“The Thing is No More” by Lynne Sachs

I like making things. Objects that are distinct, take up space, have weight and texture, can be given as gifts, are occasionally sold, contain the very story of their making in the material of their being. And so it is with a stubborn adolescent fury that I refuse to believe that the work I do as a filmmaker is being pushed so quickly and definitively from the three dimensional into the digital and ultimately to the virtual world. In the face of time’s uncontrollable whimsy, I am a guileless Peter Pan, a cantankerous Rip Van Winkle, and a naïve Cinderella all rolled into one. Clearly I am not alone in my resistance to this technological transformation of the way that human beings witness, record, and preserve images and sounds. Are we watching the “stuff” of cinema disappear before our very eyes?

Recently, I traveled to the Encuentros del Otros Cine Festival International in Quito, Ecuador to screen my own work, give a lecture on my practice as an experimental documentary maker, and present a program of short films by New York City filmmakers including Ken Jacobs, M.M. Serra, Mark Street, and Jem Cohen, along with five other younger artists on the scene (Sean Hanley, Amanda Katz, Josh Lewis, Miao Jiaxin, Georg Anthony Svatek). My intention for this program entitled Scenic Ruptures was to present a radical, distinctly unshiny picture of life in the Big Apple. Throughout my career as an artist, I have worked to promote the films and videos of my peers, locally, nationally, and internationally. So when I was instructed to send all of our weightless media files over the Internet rather than using an exorbitantly expensive and often unreliable shipping service, I was ecstatic. It wasn’t so long ago that we were facing the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of screening a U.S.-made N.T.S.C. standard video in the P.A.L. universe of Europe or South America, or when a brazen film about sexuality was stopped full throttle in the customs office at J.F.K.

Over the last two years, I’ve discovered that one of the most exciting and affirming places to see my own work projected is not necessarily in a traditional film viewing space. Strangely enough, this new-found awareness just might fall in line with my attempt to climb my way out of the melancholy I am feeling about the disappearing movie thing. In 2012 and 2013, my own filmmaking process became more performative. I hauled projectors, screens, and stage props all over New York City in order to present a live version of my hybrid documentary Your Day is My Night. In both versions of the piece, immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, we try to reveal the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through autobiographical monologues, movement pieces, and projected images. In this more theatrical and certainly more unpredictable setting, an astonishing chemistry erupted between the projected documentary elements of the media and the performers’ dances and songs. The film itself was transformed by the spontaneity of the performers and the performers’ presence on the stage took on a new dimension as a result of the moving image. During our shows, it seemed that the projector functioned as an activator, a full participant in the resurrection and cultivation of complex, sometimes paradoxical memories. I am just realizing now how much this performative documentary mode of working might very well have changed the way I make movies.

And so it is with trepidation and optimism that I begin to let go of the thingness of cinema, still embracing my camera like a painter’s brush or a writer’s pen, but knowing that the light as it hits the screen is nothing more than an illusion.

2014 International Festival of Documentary Cinema: Encounter with Other Cinema presents Scenic Ruptures

2014 International Festival of Documentary Cinema: Encounter with Other Cinema, Quito, Ecuador

Scenic Ruptures: Experimental Documentaries from New York City and Los Angeles

Co-curated by Alexandra Cuesta and Lynne Sachs

Synopsis for NYC program by Lynne Sachs

Dear Alexandra,

I hope you will enjoy this cinematic voyage through the place I call home. I certainly had a great time designing your itinerary.

All the best,

Lynne Sachs

Quito, 9 de marzo, 2014

Querida Lynne,

Con mucho cariño,
Alexandra Cuesta

NYC Program:

Living Fossil
dir. Sean Hanley
16mm, 2 min., 2014

Fulton Fish Market
dir. Mark Street
35mm, sound, color, 12 min., 2003

Early 12 New York Song
dir. Amanda Katz and Anthony Svatek
Video, 3 min. 2012

Objects and sounds collected on an early morning walk through Brooklyn, New York billow against a sun-struck floor. The smallest parts of the city are up for grabs. (AK & AS)

Extinction Becomes Us
dir. Josh Lewis
Super-8mm, color, silent, 3 min., 2010

Capitalism: Child Labor
dir. Ken Jacobs
Video, color, sound, 14 min., 200
“A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great sky-lit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by their bosses! ‘Boys,’ they will say, ‘Have we got a war for you.” (KJ)

Chinaman’s Suitcase
Dir. Miao Jiaxin
Performance Video, 6 min., 2012

Night Scene New York
dir. Jem Cohen
16mm, 10 min., 2009

A sleepwalker’s circumnavigation becomes a chance observation of New York’s Chinatown. (JC)

Bitch Beauty
dir. M.M. Serra
16mm & Super 8mm, 7 min. 2011

Drift and Bough
dir. Lynne Sach
Super 8mm, 6 min. 2014

Lynne Sachs receives 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video

http://www.gf.org/fellows/17669-lynne-sachs

2014 Fellows – United States and Canada

In its ninetieth annual competition for the United States and Canada, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 177 Fellowships (including one joint Fellowship) to a diverse group of 178 scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is one of the most unique characteristics of the Fellowship program. In all, fifty-six disciplines, eighty-three different academic institutions, twenty-nine states and two Canadian provinces are represented by this year’s Fellows, who range in age from twenty-nine to seventy-seven.

LYNNE SACHS FELLOWSHIP

Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics, and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Between 1994 and 2009, her five essay films took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy, and Germany—sites affected by international war—where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.

Recently, after twenty-five years of making experimental documentaries, Lynne learned something that turned all her ideas about filmmaking upside down. While working on Your Day is My Night in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York City, she came to see that every time she asked a person to talk in front of her camera, they were performing for her rather than revealing something completely honest about their lives. The very process of recording guaranteed that some aspect of the project would be artificial. She decided she had to think of a way to change that, so she invited her subjects to work with her to make the film, to become her collaborators. For Lynne, this change in her process of filmmaking has moved her toward a new type of filmmaking, one that not only explores the experiences of her subjects, but also invites them to participate in the construction of a film about their lives.

Since 2006, Lynne has also collaborated with her partner, Mark Street, in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary” and co-curated the 2014 film series “We Landed/ I Was Born/ Passing By: NYC’s Chinatown on Film” at Anthology Film Archives. Lynne has received support from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts and residencies in both film and poetry from the MacDowell Colony. Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto’s Images Festival, and Los Angeles’ REDCAT Theatre as well as a five-film retrospective at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. The San Francisco Cinematheque recently published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work.

In 2012, Lynne began a series of live film performances of Your Day is My Night in alternative theater spaces around New York City. She then completed the hour-long hybrid video, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013 and screened at the Vancouver Film Fest, Union Docs, New Orleans Film Fest, and other venues in the U.S. and abroad.

Drift and Bough

Drift and Bough
dir. Lynne Sachs
Super 8mm, 6 min. 2014

Music by Stephen Vitiello + Molly Berg
“Back Again”
from the album “Between You and the Shapes you Take”
Courtesy 12k

“There I was disarmed by the quiet, unassuming succession of art-photo shots of snowy Central Park, which seemed pretty ordinary, but which again drifted little by little into a richer and richer collection of elements, such as the lines that did various things like scale shifting and–with the lines of duck trails through the ice-pack–lines that “drew” a kind of benign insinuation into a cold world…which seemed to help effect an insinuation into my affect in my reception of the film. By the time the film ends I have been drawn, partially consciously, into a meditative state that I wanted to resist at its beginning. The ending–with the people moving about and the bicycle taxi and camera both drifting to the right–was a slight break in that mood, perhaps because of the people moving about and doing things, but it still maintains some of the meditative mood through my realization that a barely perceptible superimposition of nothing very distinguishable has occurred mysteriously for the first and only time in the film.” – Ron Green, in letter to filmmaker Lynne Sachs

Screenings:
Cork International Film Festival, Ireland Artist Focus presented by Artist and Experimental Moving Image., Museum of Modern Art “City Symphony” Celebration of Millennium Film Journal 2022.

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs