Canyon filmmaker Lynne Sachs.Sight & Sound has ranked her experimental documentary Your Day is My Night among the best films of the year, and the BBC has already declared it to be one of eight films to watch in 2014. Now is a great time to return to the Canyon catalog to explore her unique body of work, which deftly navigates the borders between individual subjectivity and political collectivity, theory and practice, film and poetry. Head over to Fandor to see more than two decades of her short work, then read a new interview with Lynne at Brooklyn Rail, and check out several entries from her ongoing attempt to write a poem for every year of her life on our Tumblr
Canyon Cinema Foundation is dedicated to educating the public about independent, non-commercial, experimental, avant-garde and artist-made moving images. We manifest this commitment by nurturing scholarship and awareness with public programming at universities and nonprofit cultural organizations worldwide.
Getting to know the vibrant film community here in Beijing through the China Women’s Film Festival and the community organizers at the Crossroads Center. The opening ceremony begins this evening.
China Women’s Film Festival opened with stirring images about women’s continued struggles worldwide. I was particularly impressed by the forthright address by the UN representative in China who had an extraordinary grasp of the issues. Saw a great film on the Chinese lesbian film director from the 1940s Esther Eng.
Post #3 from Beijing: I meet an art critic Wang Zhang Wen at the regular weekly NGO meeting at the Crossroads Center in the city’s old hutong neighborhood. In response to my dislike for the famous but rather commercial 798 art district, he offers to take me to the Songzhuang art district on the edge of the city. We go the next day and I discover an incredible live/work area with studios for 5000 artists! If only NYC could offer a community like this that is affordable too! We visit Wang’s cabaret style cafe The Chestnut Tree where he hosts experimental films and readings. He offers coffee from from dainty cups and saucers and tells us that the cafe is named for the Chestnut Tree Cafe in 1984. This was the place, according to the character Winston, where thought criminals spent their time. “Under the spreading Chestnut Tree I sold you and you sold me.”
Post #4 from Beijing: Today I screened Your Day Is My Night to a great, really insightful audience in Bejing as part of the China Women’s Film Festival. later I was on a panel with four brilliant feminist film scholars. What a wonderful, feisty, compassionate group including Yang Hui from Beijing Film Academy, Yushan Huang from Taiwan University of the Arts, Yu Min Mei and Juan Jiang. We all responded to the question “What is a woman’s film?” And on our journey talked about the films of Barbara Hammer, Trinh T Minh-ha, Yvonne Rainer, Susan Sontag, Jane Campion, and many others
China post #6: Shanghai screening tonight of my 1991 film “The House of Science” at a women’s bookstore. All thanks to the nuanced translations of Lesley Yiping Chin who is so capable of articulating the poetry of Gertrude Stein and other mysteries in Chinese.
I saw Liu Chuang “Segmented Landscape” at the Shanghai Art Biennale and was transformed by the way that the work made me think about security, safety, complacency and fear.
Whether you see Chinatown as a place or a state of mind, a purgatory or an oasis, a shrinking immigrant community or an expanding business district, its presence in our cinematic imagination is enormous. Situated north of NYC’s Wall Street, east of the Tombs, west of the old Jewish Ghetto, and mostly south of Canal, the neighborhood that began in the mid-19th century has maintained its distinct character – savory, hardscrabble, succulent, and cacophonous.
WE LANDED/I WAS BORN/PASSING BY explores a provocative array of images of the community from the 1940s to the present day. By embracing the perspectives of grassroots activists, performance artists, conceptual visionaries, home-movie makers, punk horror devotees, and journalists, the series raises questions about how we look at the neighborhood and how its representations have reciprocally shaped our imagination. Who lived in Chinatown at the beginning? Who lives there now? How and why has it changed? What language best describes Chinatown? Whose voices do we hear?
Inspired by the fabulously observant 1960s poetry of Chinatown’s very own Frances Chung, this 5-part film series looks at the streets, desires, shops, and struggles of an iconic community that only begins to reveal its stories when the most obvious outer layers are pulled back. Comprised of documentaries, archival footage, home videos, literary readings, photography, and performance, the series rings in Chinese New Year by opening a window to both early and contemporary conditions. Through it all, geography, memory, and observation compress and expand the imaginary and the real of this beloved section of the Big Apple.
Curated by Lesley Yiping Qin, Lynne Sachs, Bo Wang, and Xin Zhou.
Anthology Film Archives | 32 Second Ave, New York, NY 10003 | (212) 505-5181
Fri, Jan 24 7:30pm | PROGRAM 1: TWO COLD NIGHTS IN NEW YORK CHINATOWN
1月24日（週五）晚7:30 ｜影片集1：紐約華埠之兩個寒夜
Part of the Chinatown Film Project commissioned by the Museum of Chinese in America, Jem Cohen’s NIGHT SCENE IN NEW YORK is a close nocturnal observation of the people and lights of this urban milieu. In contrast to Cohen’s beautifully shot yet vernacular street scenes, conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s black-and-white video work expresses a more distant gaze on the Chinatown community, offering an ambivalent and imaginary take on the same cityscape. VOYEUR CHINATOWN (1971) Dir. Gordon Matta-Clark | NIGHT SCENE NEW YORK (2009) Dir. Jem Cohen | A reading Annie Ling from Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple: The Poems of Frances Chung.
Sat, Jan 25 6:00pm | PROGRAM 2: THE TOUCH OF AN EYE 1月25日（週六）晚6:00 ｜影片集2：視線的觸覺
The view from above – the bird’s eye view – can be omniscient and detached, playful and wicked. Shelly Silver’s TOUCH, a restrained yet endlessly sensual ciné-essay on loss and presence, takes us on a journey that begins with the psyche of an enigmatic son who returns as both insider and outsider to a Chinatown from which he escaped. Celebrated 1960s community activist Tom Tam also shot irrepressibly inventive experimental films of the world he fought so hard to defend. Tam’s pixilated glimpse of a boy on a roof gives voice to a child’s sense of flight and the realization that he will never have wings. BOY ON CHINATOWN ROOF (1970s) Dir. Tom Tam | TOUCH (2013) Dir. Shelly Silver. Followed by a reception.
Sat, Jan 25 8:00pm | PROGRAM 3: CHINATOWN PROBLEMATICS
1月25日（週六）晚8:00 ｜影片集3：華埠問題考
How can realities be engaged if the idea of a place has already been mediated by a sense of otherness and displacement? It all began with the name “Chinatown”, a specific place that can be found in many cities of the world. THE TROUBLE WITH CHINATOWN, originally aired on WNBC in the 1970s was a survey of social and educational problems. A 2013 CNN “exposé” on the “dirty, dangerous firetrap” at 81 Bowery Street sparked the eviction of the tenants who couldn’t afford another place to live. The reactions today can be linked to Tom Tam’s silent film TOURIST BUSES, GO HOME! that protests against Chinatown tourism. Shelly Silver’s 5 LESSONS AND 9 QUESTIONS ABOUT CHINATOWN interweaves fragments of neighborhood lives with questions of history, change, a sense of belonging and home. Followed by an informal talk by photographer Corky Lee, an activist in the Asian and Pacific American community for the past forty years. WNBC-TV THE TROUBLE WITH CHINATOWN (1970) Dir. Bill Turque | TOURIST BUSES, GO HOME! (1969) Dir. Tom Tam | 5 LESSONS & 9 QUESTIONS ABOUT CHINATOWN (2011) Dir. Shelly Silver | CNN report on 81 Bowery St: “Eviction & Protest” (2013) | Photos and artist talk by Corky Lee.
Sun, Jan 26 5:00pm | PROGRAM 4: BOWERY STREET PLAYBILL
1月26日（週日）晚5:00 | 影片集4：包厘街戲單
Quotidian life is provoked and embodied in this eclectic playbill of Chinatown. We begin with a quietly rueful look at the closing-down of MUSIC PALACE, the last Chinatown movie theater on Bowery Street. In contrast is MAKING CHINATOWN, a reenactment parody of Polanski’s CHINATOWN and its profiling LA Chinatown as a lawless enclave. From the upfront self-mocking of PAPER SON, to two lesbians munching fortune cookie messages in I AM STARVING, to following grocery shoppers home for dinner in THE TRAINED CHINESE TONGUE, everyday experiences constantly negotiate the personal. Interspersed are two historical documentations of Chinese New Years in the 40s and 60s. Chinatown-born photojournalist Alan Chin will provide his vision of the neighborhood through his candid, sharply rendered insider’s eye. MUSIC PALACE (2005) Dir. Eric Lin| MAKING CHINATOWN Pt. 7 (2012) by Ming Wong | I AM STARVING (1998) Dir. Yau Ching | THE TRAINED CHINESE TONGUE (1994) Dir. Laurie Wen | YEAR OF THE RAT (1963) Dir. Jon Wing Lum | Photo slideshow by Alan Chin.
Sun, Jan 26 7:30pm | PROGRAM 5: A TIME OF TWO SQUARE MILES
1月26日（周日）晚7:30 | 影片集5：方圆二英里的時光
Mixing live readings and videos, this program investigates domestic and public spaces in the two square miles of Chinatown. Shanghai-born performance artist Jiaxin Miao carries his suitcase between Chinatown and Zuccotti Park and then boldly sprays colors onto roast ducks. Galvanized by flickering and fast forward motions, revered political activist Tom Tam’s intimate camera work captures the communal life of a health fair in Columbus Park. Lynne Sachs’ hybrid documentary is set in shift-bed rooms in Chinatown where performers transform their everyday movements into dance and are tenderly challenged to leave their shared, self-supporting world. After traveling ten thousand miles to get here, what is it like to go five miles further? Followed by readings of work by novelist Ha Jin and poet Frances Chung, who belong to two different generations of Chinese-American writers. A reading by Herb Tam from a novel Ha Jin | CHINATOWN STREET FESTIVAL (1970s) Dir. Tom Tam | CHINAMAN’S SUITCASE (2011) Featuring Jiaxin Miao | YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT (2013) Dir. Lynne Sachs | A reading by Paolo Javier of poetry by Frances Chung.
“New York’s Chinatown, a place as much spectral as real, flickers and flares into life in this singular hybrid of documentary, performance piece and cine-monologue. Seven working-class, immigrant residents of a shift-bed apartment play versions of themselves, recalling violent upheavals, long journeys and endless yearnings. Beautifully scored by Stephen Vitiello, marrying subtle comedy to its dominant mood of dreamy disorientation, and achieving a rare intimacy, it’s one of the most mysterious and magical evocations of the migrant city in many a year.”
“Director Lynne Sachs’ Your Day is My Night shines a light on a little documented sub-culture in New York’s Chinatown, chronicling immigrants who live communally in buildings where there’s a shift-bed system. One person returns from a stint of overnight work to sleep in a bed just vacated by another person off to their day job. The form of this documentary is as compelling as its content. It is a beautiful collage of different media and music intricately edited together with the often emotional testimony of the immigrants.”
RiDE is a series of educational and cultural episodes that bring various processes related to artistic, intellectual, and design practices into a visible arena while illustrating the unforseen 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.
RiDE episodes feature invited artists, designers, writers, and creative practitioners from many different fields, as well as Pratt faculty, staff, and students across departments and disciplines. They inspire and instigate curricular innovations while bringing to light emerging practices and new disciplinary formations.
In 2014 filmmaker Lynne Sachs was invited by the Department of Film/Video to present Taking a Docu-mentary Detour, a lecture/performance with students from several Pratt divisions that was part discussion, part experiment, and part artwork.
“Anything that happens in front of the camera is some kind of performance,” said experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs at the top of Tuesday’s “The Line Blurs: Shifting Narratives in Filmmaking” panel. Sachs, along with Caveh Zahedi, Josephine Decker, Keith Miller and moderator Nathan Silver, spent an hour debating the division between narrative and documentary forms at DCTV. The evening was chockfull of quotable quotes as the participants reflected on their own work with equal doses of humor and candor. Zahedi, for starters, admitted that he initially considered documentaries to be “the autistic younger brother of cinema,” and only labels his films as such on grant applications.
With introductions out of the way, a recurring point of conversation evolved around the question of ethics. Do documentarians owe a degree of truth to their audience from which their fiction counterparts are exempt? “I think it’s ethically wrong to assume anything is a documentary,” said Decker, who co-directed the doc Bi The Way, and has since directed two narrative features. “When you’re cutting 500 hours into 90 minutes, you’re manipulating chronology to such an extent, it can become an ethical dilemma.” Miller, whose films expound upon actual encounters, agreed: “Anyone who has ever made a documentary has said, ‘Wait — can you just say that again?’ to a subject.”
For Welcome To Pine Hill, Miller copped to re-staging a pivotal event, transporting the action to where he “wished it had actually happened.” Though his lead Shannon Harper plays a version of himself in the film, Miller emphatically considers it a work of fiction. This allowed for a slight scuffle as to what one should even call these documentary subjects: “Collaborators, performers, what?” asked Sachs. For her part, Sachs feels that the form is defined by ethics — not so much whether they’re being upheld, but how they are considered. “Documentary is the ethics of how you work with people,” she said. “How you embrace their lives, or, how you use them as a tool.”
Zahedi falls on the “tool” side of the spectrum, believing that “the subject [shouldn’t] dictate what you’re doing with them,” though he is well aware of their contributions toward the final product. Lamenting Hollywood’s emphasis on “story” above all else, Zahedi countered that, “Cinema is not about the story; it’s about the face of the person.”
Decker finds the notion of morality in documentary filmmaking a bit cumbersome. “There’s the assumption that if you’re making a documentary, you’re a moral person with something to say, but I really had to say something in a narrative.” She also doesn’t view non-fiction as having the formal restrictions many often place upon it. Citing the work of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (Leviathan, Sweetgrass, Manakamana), Decker argued that documentary can be as experimental as fiction, and that the two do not necessarily differ when it comes to “unlimited creativity.” That particular, observational style, is all about “how you keep someone engaged through looking,” which can also be said of more contemplative narrative work as well.
Silver chimed in from his perch to say it’s just semantics: “The distinction is a way of critical categorization and marketing movies.” Miller, meanwhile, took a step back to consider the name of the panel, noting that, “The distinction between blurriness and clarity of vision wasn’t invented until the camera.” The same, of course, is said of the supposed divide between fiction and non-fiction. After all, the first few decades of filmmaking subsisted around the novelty of capturing an actual event. With the turn of the 20th century came the first narrative features, which were naturally defined in contrast to their predecessors. But as time and technology progress, and formal techniques are borrowed and shared, the “line” grows ever thin.
Your Day is My Night
Pacific Film Archive
University of California Berkeley Art Museum
November 20th, 2013
Introduction by Jeanne Finley
It gives me tremendous pleasure to introduce Lynne Sachs this evening. Lynne describes her films as explorations of the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences.
As viewers, we experience that personal and historical exploration through the act of conversation. Lynne’s films invite us as viewers, to enter into a conversation between the filmmaker, her subjects, and the circumstance in which the conversation takes place. This is a privileged position that it is both rigorous and intimate. And it is a position that can only be offered because whether the film we are watching is an essay film, or a film based on interviews, or a performance based film — Lynne is a master of the art of collaboration.
True conversations, are by their very nature, collaborations. Every one of Lynne’s films embody the essence of collaboration throughout all levels of its creation. Collaboration is at the structural heart of her films — she invites those she is filming to engage with her and participate in making the film through conversations. This collaborative process also spreads out to the entire crew she works with, all of whom participate in the conversations that guide the creation of the film. And then in its furthest reaches, she invites us, as viewers, into collaboration. Her works are not complete until we watch, we participate, we collaborate and enact our own conversations with the film and those in it, through our imaginative process. Lynne’s films lead us through her creative cinematic response to the documentary materials she collects, by engaging everyone involved in the films’ process in this multi-layered collaborative conversation.
Full disclosure here. I have had the opportunity to collaborate with Lynne, not only through participating in viewing her films, but Lynne and I collaborated in the early part of this century on a project in Bosnia called Dom Promija — or, The House of Drafts. I had lived in former Yugoslavia for a long time, and Lynne had never been there when we got to Sarajevo, but she was able to engage in collaborative conversations from the first day we arrived because her conversations are explorations born from deep curiosity and an insatiable desire to discover and learn. This curiosity and desire is palpable, and the people around her feel this, and immediately jump in with her on the exploration, traveling together in the filmmaking process to discover. Her in-person conversations, like the film she makes from them, are extended questions .
I’m not going to speak much about the film we are seeing tonight, because you will see it and Lynne is here to address it. But I want to mention two earlier films, each quite different in form, yet both of which, like the film you will see tonight, have this element of collaborative conversation at their core.
The film, “The House of Science” which Lynne directed in 1991, is an essay film. It is a conversation between the material of the film and the voice of the filmmaker that explores the divide of the feminine body and psyche through historical scientific representations. Lynne, asks questions in the film, and then lets the film respond. Or she lets footage in the film ask a question and she responds through the essay voice-over format. In many ways, although her later films diverge from the essay film format, they all retain that element of a powerful filmmakers voice responding to non-fiction or documentary materials by questioning its veracity, its authority and its potential to evoke and represent experience.
Investigation of a flame” which was directed in 2002, is a documentary film that relies heavily on interviews with members of the Catonsville 9, a group of priests and lay people who, in 1968, burned draft records with homemade napalm in front of the Maryland draft board office. Lynne doesn’t come directly at the interviews, but allows the interviews to wander – something discouraged in traditional documentary filmmaking. They wander both visually through the camerawork, and through the conversations she has with her subjects. It isn’t an essay film in structure because it lacks a first person narrative, but it is an essay film in its conversational nature between the documentary material and the filmmakers voice.
Tonight’s film uses a completely different structure, the structure of performance, integrated with documentary material to create this collaborative conversation to explore privacy, intimacy and urban life within the immigrant community. I’ve followed this film since Lynne’s first imaginings about it and it is a remarkable accomplishment, and a film that I can watch many times and still see a new film because each time I watch it, the conversations I have with the film as I watch are always new.
Lynne has shown her films all over the world — this film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And she has received numerous grants and awards for her work including a Rockefeller Foundation Award, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Jerome foundation grant. But more important than any of those remarkable achievements, is the collaborative spirit with which Lynne engages with the experimental documentary community. Like her films, her relationship to that community is a collaborative conversation, constantly exploring the possibilities of the voice, the material, the observations and the community’s response to contemporary, as well as historical experience. It is this voice, this question that coupled with Lynne’s rich filmography, that inspires all of us to think more deeply about film, about witnessing and about what it means to be human in this unstable world.
SAT. 11/16/13: LYNNE SACHS’ YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT + CHRIS MARKER Prodigal daughter Sachs returns with a dramatic ethnography on a little-seen subculture: older residents of “shift-bed” apartments in New York’s Chinatown, where immigrants are jammed into shared rooms, beds in use around the clock. Non-professional actors play out issues of privacy, intimacy, and ownership, as their shift-bed experience finds cinematic expression through vérité conversations, character driven fictions, and integrated movement pieces. Collaborating with cinematographer Sean Hanley and composer Stephen Vitiello, Sachs’ mixture of reportage, play-acting, and memory opens up an Other hidden world. Preceded by: Lynne’s collaboration with Three Cheers for the Whale, directed by Chris Marker with Mario Ruspoli.
Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hyprid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life (64 minutes, in Mandarin, Spanish, and English with English subtitles).
GRADUATE SEMINAR WITH LYNNE SACHS – Tuesday, November 19, 10AM-1PM (advance registration required, location TBA)
Screening and discussion of film and video work by Sachs, Jem Cohen, Bruce Conner, Gunvor Nelson and Chris Marker. To reserve a place in the seminar and receive location information, email Jonathan Kahana (jkahana@ucsc.edu) or Irene Lusztig (ilusztig@ucsc.edu) before November 13.
