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
New York Open Center: 22 E. 30 Street, NYC
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.
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.
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.
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/
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, 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
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
NYC Program:
Living Fossil
dir. Sean Hanley
16mm, 2 min., 2014
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
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
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., 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)
“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. 2011
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 Sach
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.
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
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.
Extra Long Twin
an original live film performance
conceived and directed by Lynne Sachs
Written and performed by: Kamau Agyeman, Lorenca Alencar, Diana Li, Hanna Lindeyer, Sofia Monestier, Dan Steven
March 11, 2014
Pratt Institute
Brooklyn, New York
In the spirit of Pratt Institute’s RIDE (Risk/Dare/Experiment) series, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and a group of six Pratt film students present their own short film-performance as a finale to Lynne’s “Taking a Documentary Detour” talk. During a workshop held in the film department at Pratt Institute, each student created a composite character built from both autobiography and fictional discoveries. Expanding upon the theme of the bed in Lynne’s hybrid film Your Day Is My Night, the students utilize the bed as a starting point for inquiry into the personal and collective experience of living in a New York City apartment or dormitory. Archival film footage of people in their beds throughout the history of cinema forms a backdrop to the entire performance.
Co-sponsored by the Pratt School of Art and Design, the Department of Humanities and Media Studies, the student club Film Cult and Bomb Magazine.
Produced by Jacki Ochs and Mary Billyou
Found footage provided Craig Baldwin
Performance Documentation by Donald Daedalus and Brandon Brown
Editing by Sean Hanley
RiDE is a new series of events organized by the Pratt Institute’s School of Art and Design that features invited artists, as well as Pratt faculty, staff, and students across departments and disciplines.
RiDE sessions bring various processes related to artistic and design practices into a visible arena while illustrating the unforeseen outcomes of experimentation—ventures that open up new paths, abandoned projects that lead to new insights, and other types of risks that inspire adventurous ideas and actions.
Taking a Documentary Detour
Lynne Sachs lecture presented with performance:
In Taking a Documentary Detour, Sachs discusses her associative, non-literal approach to images in the context of her new enthusiasm for mixing fiction and non-fiction modes of production. Recently, after 25 years of making experimental documentaries, Sachs noticed something that turned all her ideas about filmmaking upside down. She was working on Your Day is My Night , her film about Chinese immigrants in New York, when 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. “I had to think of a way to subvert the rigidity of both the documentary and the narrative model, so I decided to invite the people in my film to work with me to make the film, to become my collaborators.” In her lecture, Sachs will explore the austere yet playful dramaturgy of French theater director Ariane Mnouchkine (Theatre du Soleil), Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, the Wooster Group’s high-tech stage shenanigans, and Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s mixing of artifice and truth. She shows clips from her own films, including The Last Happy Day (2009), Wind in Our Hair (2010) and Your Day is My Night .
Hanna Lindeyer, Sofia Monestier, Kamau Agyeman, Dan Stevens in EXTRA LONG TWIN directed by Lynne Sachs
BOMB Magazine published this interview with Lynne by poet Paolo Javier today. They talk about poetry, documentary, politics and personal histories. BOMB is a sponsor of the RiDE (Risk, Dare, Experiment) lecture.
http://bombmagazine.org/article/1000059/lynne-sachs
Transcript from EXTRA LONG TWIN live performance with film:
Extra Long Twin – RiDE (Risk/ Dare/ Experiment)
Conceived and directed by Lynne Sachs
Written and performed by: Kamau Agyeman, Lorenca Alencar, Diana Li, Hanna Lindeyer, Sofia Monestier, Dan Steven
During Lynne Sachs’s RiDE workshop, each student created a composite character that combine autobiography and fictional discoveries. Sachs asked each student performer to imagine a situation from the past that might have occurred in the room where they currently live. Each participant then wrote and performed a monologue that could have been spoken by the fictional person who lived in the room.
Play begins. Performer 1 sits on the left and across from her, Performer 2. Each holding a pillow and blanket.
Performer 1 gently folds out her sheet and starts arranging her bed while Performer 2 flops down.
Performer 1
I’m not going to answer that, they keep insisting. I haven’t even gone to any of them. I hate these High School reunions.
Performer 1 continues to tweak her space making sure her sheets are even
Performer 1 (Cont’d)
I can’t find anything in this place. It would help if someone else was looking here. That they have clothes for both men and women. But it’s okay you know. He pays me and kinda reminds me of my daughter. Haven’t been able to sleep very well. Vera the soul cleanser she says that my mom use to be a slave owner in a past life. And that’s why I can’t sleep cause the spirits are haunting me. She gave me this…
Performer 1 grabs an unmarked spray and starts spraying around her
Performer 1 (Cont’d)
It’s to keep them from bothering me. My daughter thinks it’s all bullshit, at least that’s what she says when we talk over the phone.
Performer 2 lets out an audible groan.
Performer 2
Ahh… Shit… A who the hell wakes up on 3 PM on Saturday. I’m up I’m good alright. Aw shit, fuck, fuck.
Performer 2 stands up from bed
Performer 2 (Cont’d)
Alright, A-Alright buddy you need to go. (Motioning for the person in her bed to leave) Yeah here, here take your shoe. Upstairs. Alright I’ll call I promise… Yeah totally… Aw Fuck. Shit what time is it?… Fuck me… Aw God… Aw fucking shit… Too early for this.
COU—COUGHHH Performer 2 tries to clear their through before dialing a phone.
Performer 2 (On Phone)
Hey Pops what’s up man…Yeah Dad whaddup… Yeah I’m good. Yeah I just got back from the gym… Yeah 17 reps now, Yeah I’m jacked as shit man… Yeah you watch out man I come back and pfffft… Yeah hold on let me put you on speaker for a second.
Places the phone down
Performer 2 (Cont’d)
How ya doing Dad. I’m good. Totally Man. Yeah college is the shit man. Like totally. Oh yeah I’ve made some good guy friends this year. Yeah I was gonna talk to you about sports this year I don’t think… No I’m good I’m good. I don’t think I really wanna play… No this is not like Berkeley again Dad I told you I can’t I can’t talk about this right now. I don’t want to be like you and every other guy in the family, I just want to do some art, what’s so wrong about that? Look dude you gotta’ hear me out…fuck…Look I don’t want to talk about this right now. I’m about to go out with some friends. Aha we are about to go to a club… Yeah condoms pfffft… Of course I have condoms, yeah dude totally, I’ll tell you about all the bitches dad… aha yeah, yeah… look dad I’ll call you later. I really don’t want to talk about this right now… ahah yeah, bye now.
Performer 2 dials a new number
Performer 2 (There is a noticeable change in their voice)
Oh hey girl… I’m excited for tonight. oh yeah okay alright good luck and don’t fuck it up bye.
Performer 2 lays back down on the bed.
Two new performers —who we’ll call 3 and 4— enter stage and sit across from one another, one on each bed.
Performers 1 and 2 exit stage
Performer 3
March 11th 2014. Not a lot of UFO’s today. Lotta’ planes but no UFO’s. Oh my lord it’s beautiful out. All the children on the street are just playing.
Something catches their attention and Performer 3 motions at it
Performer 3
Get down! Get! Get! God damn cat… Hey you see this guy? God damn city worker is back here with the sign. Don’t he know we’re in here. Hey uh are you hungry? I was gonna make some pasta if you want…you’re not hungry… alright I was gonna make some pasta anyway.
Performer 3 moves across stage to a kitchen
Performer 3
Hey uh… Did you remember to take the water down from the roof…that’s alright I guess I won’t make pasta… (Walking back to her bedroom window) I don’t know what that girl does all day she just doesn’t do anything, just stays in her room. There he is again. You see this guy? Every single goddamn week! I been here 40 years ain’t no man from the city gonna take this away from me. This is my home.
Performer 4 sits up in bed
AHHH — Pounds her fists into her bed
Performer 4
You cosmically conceited cunt, I hate you! Just can’t you stop talking. Just talktalktalktalktalktalk all day long… Just SHUT UP. Just quiet that’s all I ask for, for a little bit out of everyday. Just a little bit. Just the fucking worst
Performer 4 paces back and forth
Performer 4 (Cont’d)
It’s so fucking loud in this place all the time. All the time that goddam fucking cat – jesus christ. The cat snores, fuck. No I didn’t get the water off the fucking roof. Why am I supposed to melt snow to get water. This apartment is disgusting. It’s trashed. There’s always some shit around. Cause you never leave, she never cleans up. She watches kids out the window like a fucking pedophile… FUCK… Just want her to leave, think it might kill her though. She steps outside she might trip and fall on her fat ass. So sick of not being able to find anything. It’s not even my shit… Cat poops on my bed one more time I might punt it out the window.
Performer 4 takes a gulp of water to wash down a pill before pulling the covers over.
To new performers— 5 and 6— enter stage while 3 and 4 exit
Performer 5
Ah Juan, you like jazz yeah? Father loves jazz, think I got it from him. My father’s a West African jazz musician and he’s always played African and American jazz. He actually left me a crate full of old records that I haven’t had a chance to look through yet, so that’s what I plan on doing tonight. (Starts to flip though the records) You like Miles Davis yeah? Bitches Brew— That is a nice cover.
Performer 5 pulls out the record… Bwfooof…blows the dust off it. Then takes a very DEEP breath in.
Performer 5 (Cont’d)
Smells like Jazz.
Puts the record on then starts snapping their fingers and bobbing their head to the music
Performer 5 (Cont’d)
That is good music. It’s really good to relax to. My mother’s really into her culture too and I promised her that um, I would wake up before I wake up and before I go to sleep so if you don’t mind
Proceeds to do tai-chi
Performer 5
That’s enough of that.
Picks up the crate of records and puts them away.
Performer 5
You know Juan, I was thinking, if I were to die, hopefully I’d make it to the upper 80’s. If I were to die I would go to heaven, hopefully I’d make it to heaven, if when I get to heaven, if God was a DJ, which I’m sure God would be a DJ, and God were playing music which I’m sure would be jazz and God was playing Miles Davis. If I had to pick one Miles Davis song that God was playing, now I’m not an atheist, but I think if God were to play a Miles Davis song it would be… So What… Good night.
Performer 6
Wait did you know that there’s this rare species of orchids; that their leaves resembles fungus so that flies come to pollenate them. Don’t you think that’s incredible. Like flies. Wouldn’t you think that bees or birds would come to pollenate flowers, you know beautiful creatures, but these orchids actually want flies to pollenate them. Would you take me to China to see them? I think that’d be great. I would love to see those orchids.
Performer 6 rises and begins to adjust the plants in the room
Performer 6
Do you ever think about ants. How they’re so small and they could live inside my plants and climb over all of my leaves. I wish I was as small as an ant so I could live inside my flowers. I’m sorry they’re everywhere, but you don’t mind right. I’ll clean it up.
Performer 6 then kneels before her bed and prays.
Performer 6
Good night Lloyd… Good night flowers.
End