Category Archives: SECTIONS

Interview with Lynne Sachs in The Brooklyn Rail – 2013

The Brooklyn Rail

IN CONVERSATION: LYNNE SACHS with KAREN RESTER

https://brooklynrail.org/2013/09/film/lynne-sachs-with-karen-rester

When the experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs taught avant-garde filmmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992, few if any in our class had ever heard of the essayist Chris Marker, with whom she later collaborated on Three Cheers for the Whale, or Trinh T. Minh-ha, whose approach to filmmaking strongly influenced her own. In an interview we did back then, Sachs talked about Trinh’s ability to maintain a certain distance in her work in order to create a non-hierarchical space in which events unfold. At the same time Sachs was adamant about being “participatory” and, for her first long format film Sermons and Sacred Pictures: The Life and Work of Reverend L.O Taylor (1989), “interacting with the people that I was talking to in a very physical way.”

Sachs, who is also known for incorporating poetry, collage, and painting as well as dramatic performance in her films, continued to explore and develop this approach over the course of 25 works, including her latest, Your Day is My Night (2013), a hybrid documentary about residents in shift-bed apartments, a virtually unknown phenomenon of New York’s Chinatown. Like her previous films The Last Happy Day, a portrait of her distant cousin who survived the Holocaust, and Wind in Our Hair, a loose adaptation of a Julio Cortázar story, the film weaves in fiction elements—some are jarring, others are so seamless they’re hard to pinpoint.

The film is especially notable for the unexpectedly personal monologues the residents of this insular community deliver, which are based upon her interviews with them. How an outsider got a group used to staying out of the public eye to open up is largely the subject of our conversation.

Karen Rester (Rail): Let’s start off with the Uncle Bob story that launched you on this project.

Sachs: So I have a 93-year old distant cousin named Uncle Bob. He told me that in 1960 two planes crashed over New York. One went down over Staten Island and the other one crashed onto Flatbush Avenue. I said, “That’s horrible! I’m sure all the people on the plane died, and they did—‘but what about the people on the ground?’” He said, “Well, Lynne, there were so many hotbed houses in that area, who knows?” So, of course you hear the expression “hotbed house” and you think, “Hmm, that seems pretty racy!”

Turns out a hotbed house is where workers, and, in this case, people who worked on the docks in Brooklyn, shared beds. One person was on the night shift, one person was on the day shift, and that really sparked my imagination as a platform or a location. Then I discovered that these shift-bed houses—which is another name for them—still exist in Chinatown today.

That’s what led me to the Lin Sing Association, where I met the group of older Chinese immigrants who would collaborate with me on the film.

Rail: And, as you told me, you asked some of them this one great question, about beds, that led to some of the most intimate stories in your film.

Sachs: It wasn’t a clever question at all. It was just what I needed to ask: Can you tell me anything interesting that ever happened to you in a bed? ​I thought they would tell me something like, “When I first came to the United States I lived in a room with eight people. Let me tell you, it was hard.” Instead, they were the ones who opened it up to stories that were very personal, very revealing of the larger story of Chinese history and Chinese immigration. It went from one Chinese man telling me about living on a mattress in a closet in Chinatown for three months to another woman talking about lying in bed and dreaming about the father she never really knew. That question sparked their imagination.

That’s a key to documentary for me. When you can work with the people in your film and get them to harness their own imagination.

Rail: I think I mentioned I’ve been recording interviews with some Chinese relatives in the Mississippi Delta, and even being a member of the community it’s not easy getting them to open up. So when I saw your film the first thing that came to mind was, how in the world did a non-Mandarin speaking white woman get them to reveal some of their most intimate details on camera?

Sachs: [Laughs.] I think one of the keys to working in reality and working with people is allowing the extraordinary to appear familiar rather than exotic. If you immediately respond, “Oh that is so heavy!” then you’ve introduced a level of intimidation. So if someone was telling me how during the Cultural Revolution his father was beaten to death by a group of farmers, I’d say, how did you feel about that as a child? If you didn’t have any food what did you eat? I tried not to make these issues, which have this mythic horror, seem that big, because then it becomes scary to talk about them. So I’d guide them to revisit these moments in the most vivid way possible, not as a symbolic event in the history of China.

Rail: This isn’t your first film about beds. You made Transient Box in the early ’90s. I understand you, camera in hand, asked your now–husband, Mark, whom you’d only known for a few weeks, to accompany you to a motel room and remove his clothes?

Sachs: [Laughs.] I wanted to film the marks a man leaves on the bed and in the room, but I wanted him to remain invisible. All the detritus that people want to erase, the pieces of yourself that you leave behind, are interesting to me.

Of course in your own bed you can leave as much as you want and people aren’t going to sweep it away. That’s what intrigued me about these shift-beds. People aren’t able to leave an imprint of themselves and that became very unsettling to me.

Rail: The British artist Tracey Emin once did a controversial installation called My Bed. She took her bed, which she’d been sleeping in when she was depressed, and put it in the Tate. It was blood-stained and there were condoms around it.

Sachs: That’s exactly what would never happen in a shift-bed apartment. You wouldn’t leave that detritus because that’s saying, “This is mine.” By erasing your presence you’re inviting another person to establish theirs.

Rail: How did you see Chinatown before and after the making of this film?

Sachs: Before I made the film, Chinatown was a place to feel out of place. A place in New York where you had the sense you were in another country. I’m really interested in this French word dépaysé, to be out of your country. It also means to be disoriented. I like the idea that when you go into another community you have this sensation of being an outsider. And for most people so much of it is about gratification. You feed your eyes. You feed your mouth.

Then I started making the film and Chinatown became a neighborhood. It’s not just a destination for outsiders to go and experience the pleasure of another culture. It’s a place where people have very intricate relationships, and they work, and they sleep. They don’t want to leave it because it’s so supportive. I didn’t know any of that, for sure, and I didn’t know what happened above the ground level. For me, Chinatown was all on the first floor—

Rail: Shops.

Sachs: Exactly. It’s almost as if I never looked up. Now I look up and I can imagine looking in. And I have friends to visit.

Rail: I’m half-Chinese and Chinatown is a foreign place to me, though seeing your film helped change that. I think movies have trained me to think of Chinatown as background or an exotic setting where the protagonist chases the bad guy through a maze of crowded streets.

Sachs: You never know how a film will draw open curtains on various worlds for audiences. There’s the New York City audience that sometimes responds, “Oh, you’ve forever changed the way I walk into Chinatown.” And maybe not just Chinatown, but any place where you feel you are benefitting from its differentness. Then there’s the audience made up of young Chinese immigrants who say the film harkens back to a time in Chinese life that was closer to their grandparents.

Rail: At least two of your performers have lived in New York since the, 60s. They’d never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art until you took them there. What inspired you to do that?

Sachs: One of the things I tried to do was take them out of their comfort zone. I think this is what creates unpredictable, almost theatrical situations. We went to the Met to see two things. The first was an exhibit called The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City. It was a simulation of a grand palace in China in which the emperor created different seasons in different rooms. So if it was winter outside and he wanted to be in spring time, he would go to the Spring Room. I just love that idea because it’s the antithesis of living in a shift-bed house, where you have such little control over your environment. Then I took them to the 20th century wing to see Andy Warhol’s floor-to-ceiling portrait of Mao Tse Tung. I actually wanted to trigger something, I wanted to rock everyone’s world. I thought, big things are going to happen! We get there and they really couldn’t have cared less.

Rail: [Laughs.] Let’s talk about the wall you hit during the editing process. The film suffered from a dramatic storyline you couldn’t make work. People didn’t like it, you were devastated, and you didn’t know what to do.

Sachs: Mark actually said to me, “Stop sitting in front of your computer editing, editing, editing, and not going anywhere—it’s getting worse!” [Laughs.] Then, out of the blue, someone sent me an email about an abandoned hospital in Greenpoint looking for artists to put on performances. So I called everybody up and said, “Let’s do our show live, I’ll bring two beds.” We did it again in the Chinatown public library. Then at University Settlement, a community center in the Lower East Side. I grew to love the performance more and more, and saw it as a way to lay bare the structure of the film.

Rail: Did that help you finish it?

Sachs: Enormously. Especially with the transitions. Once you listen to these really intense monologues you can’t just move onto something else that quickly. Where do I take the viewer afterwards? I realized I could integrate scenes we recorded from the performances as transitional places where people could meditate on what they heard.

Rail: By the way, I misinterpreted your title. I realize now it’s dialogue between two people sharing a shift-bed. One has the day shift, the other has the night shift. How did you come up with it?

Sachs: I knew the film was called Your Day is My Night before I even started shooting. It’s a little bit of a tribute to Truffaut’s Day for Night and also, the history of narrative filmmaking where if you needed day but were shooting at night you just created it. It’s sort of like the Forbidden City where the emperor had so much power that he could create seasons. The hegemony of everything. I’ve always resisted that in my filmmaking. I didn’t want to be a director per se; I wanted to be a filmmaker who didn’t work in such hierarchical situations.

Your Day is My Night will screen September 25 and 26 at Maysles Cinema and October 26 at New York Public Library’s Chatham Square branch. Upcoming festivals include Vancouver Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and Bordocs in Tijuana, Mexico. For more information visit yourdayismynight.com

4th Annual Experimental Lecture: Parler Femme – Peggy Ahwesh

Peggy Ahwesh Parler Femme 10.30.13NYU Undergraduate Film and Television &
NYU Cinema Studies present
the 4th Annual Experimental Lecture

PARLER FEMME
by Filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh

“The impulse in my work is always somewhere between the playground and the academy. I think of myself as an idea person but also someone who loves thinking through materials. I pay serious attention to play – investigating the codes of behavior, body language, power games, gender roles and the codes involved in how we perform who we are and how we operate in society. Female subjectivity, the mundane, the unfinished, the improvised and the discourses of fantasy and desire are subjects of my work. The characters in my films are often stand-ins for myself- outsiders who are on their own path. Lately my work serves as a “memory aid” and a form of (self) preservation, to order the eccentric and diverse materials I have accumulated from travels, pilgrimages, quests, intellectual tours and research trips. Sometimes ordinary, sometimes unusual, collected images and objects offer solace about the past and help predict the future. In BETHLEHEM (2009) I work through my personal archive of accumulated footage, editing together memories like a string of pearls with a bittersweet memory of home. The APE OF NATURE (2010) is about memory and the uncanny. The performers, under hypnosis, communicate with “the other side,” telling the tale of a dystopic future informed by the power of suggestion and the unconscious.”

This event is free and open to the public.

Boston’s Arts Fuse reviews Your Day is My Night

Arts Fuse

Fuse Film Review: “Your Day Is My Night” — An Innovative Look Inside a NYC Chinatown Apartment, July 12 2013
By Betsy Sherman

On July 15, The DocYard series, running Monday nights at the Brattle Theatre, will host writer-director Lynne Sachs and her gorgeous, intimate look inside one very crowded New York Chinatown apartment, Your Day Is My Night. The film examines the phenomenon of “shift beds,” an accommodation between someone who works during the day and someone who works at night, when neither can afford their own apartment. Or, as a singer-for-hire who uses one of the mattresses puts it, “Moon, working. Sun, sleeping.” And vice-versa for his counterpart.

Sachs calls the film a “hybrid documentary,” with real-life stories told by middle-aged and elderly, Chinese immigrants presented in a honed, often theatrical, style rather than as verité oral histories. Your Day Is My Night was produced for the stage before it was made into a movie. The seven Mandarin and Cantonese speakers who play inhabitants of the apartment and its tiny bedrooms are non-actors or Chinese folk-arts performers.

The opening frames do what a stage show could never do: make an extreme close-up of an elderly, Chinese woman’s profile suggest a formidable landscape. After situating the viewer within the apartment by focusing on everyday objects, the film lets its subjects spin stories of the present and the past. In their adopted country, they share closet-like bedrooms, stuffed with twin beds, bunk-beds, and mattresses on the floor. They watch the seasons pass and celebrate traditional Chinese holidays. The stories of their youth in China are more volatile: reminiscences of beds they have known and shared with family members lead to revelations of death and displacement generated by the Communist revolution. These tragedies feel like a brutal rousing from a lovely sleep. For some, there was never a lovely sleep. A sad-eyed man recounts how his family followed Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan in 1949, leaving him on the Mainland. They said they would come back for him. They never did.

The subtitled dialogue isn’t the movie’s only form of communication. Movement signifies spiritual as well as physical vitality. The elders are shown practicing tai chi, vertically and, as if to suggest there isn’t always room for that, horizontally in bed. To illustrate the bonds between roommates, hands work in tandem with tongues. As a woman talks about sharing a bed with her grandmother (for so long that imprints of their bodies were left are the mattress), she combs a roommate’s hair. As one man talks about the stone bed of his childhood, he massages the shoulders of another. Passages that visually mimic home movies serve as an oblique connection with the singer’s belief that his voice helps people in insulated Chinatown “go back to the homeland of their dreams.”

Spending time with this interdependent community makes one recognize new meanings in small actions. A fresh, new pillowcase ceases to be merely a fresh, new pillowcase: the act of placing it over a pillow becomes a gesture of respect.

Cultivora Reviews Your Day is My Night

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A Cinematic Week in Review

posted by Rose Mardit on June 28, 2013

Brooklyn, New York — Last week marked the end of the fifth annual Northside Festival. Between all of the music, film, and NExT (entrepreneurship and technology) events, there was enough going on to satisfy any culture-monger, but I focused on the film portion of the festival. These were my favorites…..

Your Day Is My Night

This film provides a fantastic voyeuristic look at the shift beds of New York City’s Chinatown. Combining scripted performance with improvisation, Your Day is My Night becomes immediately difficult to classify. Is it a documentary? Or does the small injection of a fictitious character in the lives of real people make it inherently non-documentary? Either way, it’s awesome. During the course of 64 minutes, the Chinese immigrant occupants of a shared and very cramped apartment each share a story. Their stories are heartbreaking, comical, and uplifting. Sometimes they are all of these things at once. All of their tales are thought-provoking, and captured in a way that seems to disregard time, place, gender, age. Throughout, these individuals offer nuggets of wisdom in unlikely moments, whether they are sitting on a bunk bed or staring at a screen. See it if you have the opportunity. Bonus: if you’re in NYC, check out filmmaker Lynne Sachs’s website for news of upcoming events; I’ve heard talk of a live performance in the works.

Asian American Writers Workshop Interview with Lynne Sachs

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Your Day is My Night: Documenting Shifting Lives by Kyla Cheung
June 7, 2013

LINK: https://aaww.org/your-day-is-my-night/

When director Lynne Sachs first got the idea to make a film about shift-bed houses, she googled “hot-bed house” and got X-rated results. That was three years ago. This past February, her film Your Day is My Night, which focuses on the stories of eight immigrants living in Chinatown shift-bed houses, made its global premiere at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (A ‘shift-bed’ is a bed shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship.) Interspersing autobiographical monologues with half-scripted, half-improvised conversations, Your Day is My Night explores the space between documentary and scripted film, the resident and the city, and the domestic and the global. For Sachs, the bed becomes the symbolic place to traverse these gaps; she calls it a “floating land,” or a plane for the individual and history to struggle and to rest.

Lynne Sachs, the director of “Your Day Is My Night.”

Seven out of the eight performers in the film are actual Chinese immigrants between the ages of 58 and 78. When they were first recruited from the Lin Sing Association, a welfare and rights organization in Chinatown, the assumption was that Sachs was looking for extras. But what makes Your Day is My Night remarkable is that the film gives lead roles to the non-white immigrant and elderly—people who are often invisible or silent in mainstream film, but who are here portrayed with a deep and varied humanity. We bear witness to the traumas of the Cultural Revolution through tales of their personal histories, as well as the prosaic bickering between the residents. (“These shoes are dirty. You know they’re not allowed inside.” “These shoes cost hundreds of dollars!”).

“Sachs seems to ask her audience, as well as herself: What are the limits of understanding?”

Yet, Sachs accomplishes this without speaking any Chinese. She relied on a team of translators throughout production. In fact, her struggle to understand her performers is mirrored in a scene where Lourdes, a Puerto Rican woman who lives in the shift-bed house, cannot understand what one of her Chinese roommates is saying. Though English translations for Lourdes are attempted, they are botched and awkward.

Sachs seems to ask her audience, as well as herself: What are the limits of understanding? Kyla Cheung caught up with Lynne Sachs to talk about the inspiration behind and the making of her film.

Open City: Can you speak about the genesis of the film?
Lynne Sachs: In 2010 I had a conversation with a distant cousin who was telling me about a plane wreck here in Brooklyn. It was the 50th anniversary of the wreck. He said two planes crashed over Staten Island. I knew the people in the plane had died, but I said, “What about the people on the ground?” His reply? “It’s hard to tell. There were so many hot-bed houses.” I had no idea what a hot-bed house was, so he explained that it’s a house where people live in shifts and share beds. They come and go over a period of weeks, and it’s usually people who worked on the docks, like shoremen. So I got interested in showing what it would be like for a group of adults to live together and for their lives to intersect. I wondered what kind of stories they would tell each other, what sort of things they’d witness and what intimacies would be revealed.

Yun Xiu Huang, an opera singer in the film, teaches Kam Yin Tsui how to sing “Happy Birthday” in English.

Can you explain the casting process with the actors?
Sometimes when interviewing actors, when you ask very precise questions and ask more about sensations and moments rather than big abstract questions, they start to reveal more. So, when I asked a question like, “Could you tell me what it was like at any point in your life when you were either sharing a bed or something happened to you,” I didn’t know that all those stories about China—or what we call The Cultural Revolution here—were going to come out of their experiences. The violence they saw was stunning to me. It was like talking to someone who had lived through the Holocaust. Who knew that the conversational catalyst, a bed, which is something you would think would be very protected, would lead to stories so vulnerable and so life-shattering?

Immigration is a huge hot button issue right now. How, politically, do you view your film? Or do you want to resist any sort of political context?
One of our performers does not have his documentation. At all. He actually hired an immigration lawyer in Chinatown to help him. The lawyer had heard about my movie and came up with the bright idea for him to get political exile because he mentions things about China in the film. It could be a reason he could have a problem returning to China. I was like, whatever. If you want me to do something to help you, I will. I wrote a letter supporting his political exile saying that it could cause problems. That was about two months ago. The attorney said, “Great letter! This is going to make all the difference!” Then, in December, we noticed online that a bunch of Chinatown lawyers were arrested by the FBI. A sweep, for falsifying political situations. Guess what? His lawyer was one of those lawyers.

Oh god.
But, he’s not in trouble. He didn’t do anything wrong. But, the story ended up in the New York Times. It was a big deal. Those lawyers were teaching people to pretend they had forced abortions when they hadn’t.

Sachs recruited performers for the film, like those here on a shared bed, from the Lin Sing Association, a welfare and rights organization in Chinatown.

There is only one character you actually give a name to in your film—Lourdes [a Puerto Rican character, played by Veraalba Santa, who comes to live with the much older Chinese immigrants in the shift-bed house]. Why is that? When she comes into the movie, the other performers say things like “Oh, she’s a Westerner.” She has language problems that are interesting in that the viewer is being able to understand what is being said but she is totally out of it.
I figured out pretty quickly that I didn’t want to present the Chinese world as absolutely hermetic and completely separated. I realize that in all immigrant communities there is a level of porousness so that other kinds of discourses and languages and experiences come and go. There are these fissures in which things happen that trigger some sort of change. So, I kind of inverted it. I made Lourdes an immigrant in their world. She doesn’t speak the language. So Lourdes becomes a little bit like me, like us. She’s an outsider. And the Chinese day workers are outsiders, too. They exist in this country not speaking the language and are separate.

So, she’s our witness?
Yes. She has to witness. She has to process a bit. Part of film making is creating situations that are almost like a game. I threw Lourdes in and said, “Let’s see what happens.” And they started that whole thing of “What’s that Westerner doing here?” And actually, I didn’t know they had even said it until I had been editing that material for several months. Bryan [one of the film’s translators and editors] pointed it out. I thought they were just chatting about the kitchen. The other thing about Lourdes was she represented a different generation. She’s younger. Her purposes for travel are sort of products of a different generation: She travels because she is curious. Because it will change her. Because, she will grow up.

Sheut Lee, right, reminisces about her father in the film: “I’d never met this person, yet I could see him in my dreams.”

You were even talking about avoiding making their community seem “hermetic,” or even insular, even though some of the press says this movie “offers a rare glimpse into a hidden world…”
I know [makes a face]. One thing about making social issue documentaries is that there’s a tendency by the filmmaker to think that they know best or they’ve come to some realization that nobody else has ever come to. Or their film will prove such and such a point. For example, when you tell people about the “shift-bed” situation, there’s always this response which is always like a breath of “Whoa. What a struggle. That’s so sad.” I don’t think my film says that, although there’s struggle throughout the movie.
One of the things I saw that was really—and this word is overused—empowering for those people is that there was this sense of a microcommunity. Where you come home to a place where people are talking, adults are interacting and it’s not just about the nuclear family. Where there is this criss-crossing of experiences. I think that helped me see the measure of success is not necessarily that you make enough money that you can get out of that shift-bed situation.

On Saturday, June 8, 2013 Lynne Sachs will be screening her documentary “Your Day is My Night” at an event at Union Docs in Brooklyn. Joining her will be with photographer Annie Ling, who will share a slideshow of her photographs of residents at 81 Bowery in Chinatown.

Kyla Cheung is a former intern at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her writing, both fiction and non-fiction, has appeared in The Columbia Review and featured by Longreads. Normally located in New Jersey and New York City, she has been temporarily transplanted to Chicago to research social issues using computer science and statistics. Follow her on Twitter @kylacheung.

Direct Link to interview:  http://opencitymag.com/your-day-is-my-night/

Shifting Lives: Photographing the Immigrant Experience in Chinatown

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A couple of years ago, when I was just beginning the work on my most recent film Your Day is My Night, I happened to notice an astonishing photo essay by Annie Ling in the New York Times.  Annie had spent a year taking a series of exquisite photographs of a group of residents living at 81 Bowery Street in Chinatown.  It became clear to me that the work she was doing corresponded on multiple levels with my own film project on the shift-bed houses of Chinatown. I decided to contact Annie so we could talk about our shared interests.  Ever since that time, we have remained in contact and on Saturday, June 8 we will present our work together for the first time at Union Docs.

Shifting Lives: Photographing the Immigrant Experience in Chinatown
Director Lynne Sachs & Photographer Annie Ling
Union Docs
322 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, New York
Saturday, June 8 7:30 p.m.  $9
http://www.uniondocs.org/2013-06-08-shifting-lives-chinatown/

Annie will present a slideshow of her photographs and I will screen Your Day is My Night. Afterward photo-journalist Alan Chin will host a Q & A.   Wine and beer will be served.

Your Day is My Night wins best Narrative Feature at Workers Unite! Film Fest

Workers Unite Film Fest

Your Day is My Night screens as part of the opening night on May 10 at Cinema Village and the closing night program at the Workers Unite! Film Festival, alongside Builders & The Games.

NEWS: Your Day is My Night wins best Narrative Feature at Workers Unite! Film Fest

Your Day Is My Night – Part Documentary, part narrative, completely enlightening look at what it means to be a Chinatown NY resident for decades and still sharing a bed by shifts, called “shift-bedding.”  In this provocative, hybrid documentary, the audience joins a present-day household of immigrants living together in a shift-bed apartment in the heart of Chinatown. Seven characters (ages 58-78) play themselves through autobiographical monologues, verité conversations, and theatrical movement pieces. This film had it’s world premier in February at The Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight. 64 minutes.

Event:
Brecht Forum – New York, NY
Start:
May 17, 2013 7:45 pm
Organizer:
Workers Unite! Film Festival
Venue:
The Brecht Forum
Address:
451 West St, New York, NY, 10014, United States

followed by:

Builders & The Games – In 2005 the 2012 Olympiad was awarded to London amid a blaze of publicity. Two years later construction of the Olympic Park in East London was underway. This film’s mission was frustrated by bureaucracy, security and public relations hype. Aletha, the researcher/presenter, tries to find a way around these barriers. She talks to union representatives, explores the legacy of past developments and examines the Olympic Authority’s promises about safety, jobs and training. 57 minutes.

The Catonsville Nine Panel – Lynne Sachs presents “Investigation of a Flame”

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The Catonsville Nine Panel

the Vietnam antiwar movement in 1968, In Catonsville

Friday, May 10, 2013 · 2:30 PM – 6 PM
On Campus

Friday, May 10
Proscenium Theater, Performing Arts and Humanities Building

Looking Forward from the 45th Anniversary of the Catonsville Nine Actions

In May of 1968, nine individuals shook the conscience of the nation as they burned U.S. Selective Service records with home-made napalm on the grounds of the Catonsville, Maryland Knights of Columbus hall. The fire they started erupted into an infamous trial where the nine were defended by William Kuntsler. The news spread throughout the country, influencing other similar dynamic actions in every major U.S. city. Two of the original members of the Nine will be on hand to talk about their experiences – about how they met and their stand against U.S. militarization in Latin America. We will also be joined by two scholars who will help us connect this story with the larger context of Vietnam War era protests.

2:30pm Reception

3:00pm Screening of the documentary film Investigation of a Flame (dir. Lynne Sachs), followed by excerpts from the documentary film Hit and Stay (dir. Joe Tropea & Skizz Cyzyk). Q&A with the directors.

4:30pm Panel:
Thomas and Margarita Melville (authors of Whose Heaven, Whose Earth?);
Karin Aguilar-San Juan (Macalester College, author of Staying Vietnamese and The State of Asian America);
Joby Taylor (Shriver Center Peaceworker Program, moderator); and special guests.

Co-sponsored by the Department of American Studies

David Finkelstein Reviews “Your Day is My Night” in Filmthreat

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http://www.filmthreat.com/reviews/66608/

by David Finkelstein

“Your Day is My Night” is a fascinating and innovative portrait of Chinese immigrant life in New York by Lynne Sachs. Sachs made the film through a lengthy series of workshops with Chinatown residents who became the film’s authors and performers. Most of the actors are retired people who have had some experience performing in amateur dance and theater productions, so they are comfortable as performers, without being overly polished. Only one makes his living as a performer: the wedding and nightclub singer Yun Xiu Huang, whose charismatic screen presence is an engaging part of the film. The film is framed around the common immigrant experience of living in “shift bed houses,” crowded apartments where the beds are shared in shifts between those with daytime and nighttime jobs.

 

The film employs a variety of story-telling modes to convey the immigrant experience: scripted monologues, improvised scenes, and verité footage. The actors have all either lived in shift bed houses, or are familiar with them, so the monologues combine autobiography with biography. There is also one completely fictional element in the film: the character of a Puerto Rican girl who comes to stay in the house, which is used to dramatize the characters’ relationship with non-Chinese. This untraditional approach to documentary filmmaking, freely mixing the spontaneous and the staged, proves to be an innovative way to use multiple strategies for telling a story about the subjective experiences of immigrants, which would be hard to convey through conventional documentary techniques. In a similarly hybrid way, Sachs deftly blends digital footage with sequences shot on film. The staged scenes have lush lighting and lovely cinematography by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass, making “Your Day is My Night” a more visually sumptuous experience than most documentaries.

 

We see some of the pleasant parts of communal living, such as sharing cake on a holiday in the kitchen. The scenes of food preparation show that one of the great aspects of New York Chinese culture is that every meal is carefully prepared from fresh ingredients, as opposed to the fast food options eaten by many other immigrants as well as middle class New Yorkers. Some scenes depict frankly the friction that can develop when roommates not only share a tiny room, but a bed as well. One of the film’s most visually lavish and fun sequences is the elaborate Chinese wedding where Mr. Huang is singing, with its gaudy ballroom decorations, perfect groom and bride, and dancing girls who look like they popped out of a Chinese music video. But the film also depicts less glamorous occupations, such as working as a dishwasher in the crowded kitchen of a restaurant.

 

All of the monologues reference beds or sleeping in some way, and this theme organizes the material around the search for refuge from the hardships of life, whether it is grinding poverty in the US, or atrocities which the characters endured as young people during the Cultural Revolution in China, or the wrenching separations caused by war and by immigration itself. It is striking how beds become poetic metaphors with so much resonance, as in the anecdote a woman tells about sharing her bed with her grandmother until her grandmother dies when the girl is 14. Afterwards, she has the whole mattress to herself, but she still only sleeps on “her side,” as if to honor the importance that her grandmother still holds in her heart.

 

Between the monologues, a good part of the film is given over to montage sequences depicting the texture of Chinatown life. These beautifully shot and edited sequences combine exteriors which focus on arresting details of the street such as elevated subway tracks in the rain or old pamphlets affixed to lampposts, with interior shots of the characters in their restless attempts to sleep in crowded conditions, or their morning routines of Tai Chi. The soundtrack, too, is a carefully composed collage of ambient sounds. Stephen Vitiello’s haunting score of piano, guitar and electronica creates an atmosphere of suspended contemplation which greatly adds to the film’s power. These sequences are highly effective at conveying the flavor of everyday life for the characters.

 

The characters in this film are poor and endure multiple hardships, but their culture and their lives also provide them with many pleasures and a supportive community. The language barrier keeps many of them locked inside Chinatown, but they still interact with non Chinese New Yorkers at key points. The obvious difficulties of managing a crowded, small apartment where people sleep in shifts only highlight the social resourcefulness and sophistication of the Chinese culture which makes it a workable, if not ideal situation. “Your Day is My Night” invents a style of filmmaking in which the storytelling skills of the subjects are tapped to make them into effective collaborators in a sophisticated film which creates a vivid sense of the inner lives of immigrants.

 

 

Toronto Star on Your Day is My Night

Toronto Star

Images Festival gets up close and personal this year

By: Visual Arts, Published on Wed Apr 10 2013

The public pulse is measured every way: from political polling to pondering why dance videos go viral. But at the avant-garde video extravaganza, Images Festival, it’s possible to reflect on how inward looking we’ve become by having us listen to a long-gone love affair revisited via long-lost tapes or watching a smuggled-in Chinese worker’s quiet private battle to keep his dignity.

“Last year, a lot more works had an epic, landscape, outdoor feel,” says Kate MacKay, interim artistic director. “There’s always a tension between the epic and the intimate at Images but this year the films show a lot more intimacy.”

Jane Gillooly’s Suitcase of Love and Shame is the festival’s signature piece in this regard. It’s also one of the most accessible works among the festival’s 35 programs from 135 artists worldwide at 24 locations starting April 11.

  • A still from Lynne Sachs's Your day is my night, USA, 2013, video, 64 minutes.

A collage made from a collection of reel-to-reel tapes found in an old suitcase bought on eBay, Suitcase unreels an affair between Tom, a married veterinarian and Jeannie, his mistress, who also seems to be employed in an animal hospital. The same one? We never know. Uncertainly adds to the piquancy of the piece as does our partial knowledge. Snippets of news or an overheard TV show give the away the time as the mid-’60s. So does their audio technology of choice. Unlike a phone call, tapes can be replayed — the tape as sex aid.

They ramp up their desire by hurriedly sending the voice recordings in the mail to one another. He plans to send her a copy of Playboy. She cranks up the sounds of a Miss America contest on TV to tweak his libido.

The visual elements added by Gillooly to what is mostly a sound event seem generic and may in fact be misleading. No matter: it’s Gillooly’s intuitive sound editing — “it’s almost a piece of music,” says MacKay — that distinguishes Suitcase. Lust Hollywood-style never feels as true as this.

In a city with some 70 festivals annually, Images differs mainly in its pursuit of newer-than-new experimental work unencumbered by money-making motives and undaunted by any impossibility of popular recognition. This is the true outsider’s festival, more fluid, indeterminate and unfettered than most.

The themes within Images this year include music, architecture and pioneers.

The piano’s 19th-century technology animates Brian Virostek’s Early Figure, screening in the Sleight of Hand program. Music likewise shapes the fascistic romanticism in Scott Stark’s Bloom, in the Rhythm and Reflection program, where “Edelweiss,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein tune from The Sound of Music in 1959, is blended with fiery fumes shooting up from Texas’s oilpatch.

The same program concludes with The Woolworths Choir of 1979, the spectacular 20-minute-long video by Elizabeth Price that conflates images of a deadly 1979 fire in a Woolworth furniture department in England with sweet early ’60s girl group pop and images of ecclesiastical architecture. Winner of the 2012 Turner Prize, The Woolworths Choir ups the bar for all of contemporary video.

Built environments are subject matter for many video makers such as Lynne Sachs, whose Your Day Is My Night raises questions of privacy and isolation of Chinese immigrant workers in New York who must share the same bed around the clock.

 

Meanwhile, Althea Thauberger, a festival regular and 2013 Spotlight Artist, rounds out the pioneer theme with films that confuse the boundaries between drama and documentary. Her A Memory Lasts Forever screens April 12.

The 26th Images Festival takes place April 11-20, at 24 locations around the city. Go to www.imagesfestival.com for information.