Inspirada en los cuentos cortos de Julio Cortázar, aunque combinada con las realidades contemporáneas de Argentina, Con viento en el pelo (Wind in Our Hair) es una narrativa experimental sobre cuatro niñas que se descubren a través de una fascinación con los trenes que pasan por su casa. Filmado en formatos de 16mm, Súper 8mm, 8mm Regular y video, el cortometraje sigue a las niñas por las vías del tren, en la cocina, por las aceras, entre disfraces y dentro de patios en el corazón de Buenos Aires, además de a las afueras de la ciudad. Es una historia de expectativa y decepción preadolescente, y Final del Juego está circunscrito por un periodo de profunda inestabilidad sociopolítica en Argentina. Sachs y sus colaboradores Argentinos se mueven por Buenos Aires con sus cámaras atestiguando los juegos de las cuatro niñas mientras ellas recorren una ciudad presa de un debate sobre el rol del comercio agrícola, los recursos alimenticios y los impuestos. Con una ambientación sonora bilingüe y complejamente construida, Sachs y su co-editora, la cineasta Puertorriqueña Sofía Gallisá, articulan esta atmósfera agitada de caos urbano que rodea las vidas de las jóvenes protagonistas. Con viento en el pelo además incluye la música atrevida y etérea de la cantante Argentina Juana Molina.
“Inspired by the short stories of Julio Cortázar, Lynne Sachs creates an experimental narrative about a group of girls on the verge of adolescence. While their lives are blissful and full of play, the political and social unrest of contemporary Argentina begins to invade their idyllic existence. Sachs’ brilliant mixture of film formats complements the shifts in mood from innocent amusement to protest. ” – Dean Otto, Film and Video Curator, Walker Art Center
“Inspired by the writings of Julio Cortázar, whose work not only influenced a generation of Latin American writers but film directors such as Antonioni and Godard, Lynne Sachs’ Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo is an experimental narrative that explores the interior and exterior worlds of four early-teens, and how through play they come to discover themselves and their world. “Freedom takes us by the hand–it seizes the whole of our bodies,” a young narrator describes as they head towards the tracks. This is their kingdom, a place where–dawning fanciful masks, feather boas, and colorful scarves — the girls pose as statues and perform for each other and for passengers speeding by. Collaborating with Argentine filmmakers Leandro Listorti, Pablo Marin and Tomas Dotta, Sachs offers us a series of magical realist vignettes (rock/piedra, paper/papel, scissors/tijera), their cameras constantly shifting over their often-frenzied bodies. A collage of small gage formats and video, the 42-min lyric is enhanced further by its sonic textures that foreground the whispers and joyful screams of the young girls with the rhythms of a city and a reoccurring chorus of farmers and student protesters. Filmed on location in Buenos Aries during a period of social turmoil and strikes, Sachs and co-editor Sofia Gallisá have constructed a bilingual work that places equal value on the intimacy of the girls’ lives and their growing awareness of those social forces encroaching on their kingdom. “ – Carolyn Tennant, Media Arts Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York
“Argentine author Julio Cortazar is the inspiration for WIND IN OUR HAIR (2009, 42 min.), which loosely interprets stories in the collection “Final de Juego” against the backdrop of social and political unrest in contemporary Argentina. In her first attempt at narrative filmmaking, Sachs still retains her associative, playful structure and documentary eye. Four young women, again played by Sach’s daughters and family friends, grow restless at home and begin to make their way through Buenos Aires in search of excitement and eventually to a fateful meeting at the train tracks near their home. The film moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces and into the skittering beyond of adolescence, exploding with anticipation and possibility. Argentine musician Juana Molina lends her ethereal sound to compliment the wild mix of formats and styles.” – Todd Lillethun, Artistic Director, Chicago Filmmakers
“I completely felt Cortazar’s stories throughout. The fluidity in which a ludic and serious tone mix and the combined sense of lightness and deepness capture the author’s vision.” – Monika Wagenberg, Cinema Tropical
Selected Screenings:
Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN http://calendar.walkerart.org/event.wac?id=5786
La Habana Festival de Cinema Latinamericano, 2010
Anthology Film Archive, New York
When those words appear onscreen during Lynne Sachs’ “The Last Happy Day,” they refer to an aspect of Sachs family history during World War II that had been unknown to the filmmaker. But the question is one that resonates throughout Sachs’ work, as both theme and motivation.
Sachs’ films are searching, inquisitive projects — quests of discovery (and self-discovery) that yield facts and insights that become even more meaningful when they are shared with audiences as art.
And, just so you won’t be intimidated, we might add: All this, and Winnie-the-Pooh, too.
A native Memphian who now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, filmmaker Mark Street, and two teenage daughters, Sachs returns to her hometown next week for a mini-retrospective at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art titled “I Am Not a War Photographer: A Film Series by Lynne Sachs.”
Four films — ranging from 33 to 63 minutes in length — will be screened, two per day, at 7 p.m. Thursday and 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 20.
The “I Am Not a War Photographer” title connects the screenings to the “Picturing America” exhibitions now at the Brooks, which include Civil War engravings by Winslow Homer and photographs of Civil War re-enactors by Robert King. The title also acknowledges that the films selected for this series all deal with war, albeit in an indirect if extremely personal way.
For example, 1996’s “Which Way Is East,” which screens Nov. 20, is a sort of experimental travel documentary shot by Sachs when she and her sister, Dana Sachs, visited Vietnam. “It’s about how the resonance of the Vietnam War, the dust of it, settled into my consciousness as a child, and then remained there as an adult,” said Sachs, 49, who remembers watching Walter Cronkite’s war reports “lying on the couch, with my head upside-down, so it was sort of abstracted … .”
Perhaps more influential, she said, were the violent depictions of staged combat she encountered in Hollywood war movies when her father, who “despised children’s movies,” took her to see such films as “Patton” at the old Malco Quartet theater at Poplar and Highland. “In a way I think I had more access to ideas about war through those movies than on TV, because they were usually at least subliminally anti-war, through their harshness, even if the depiction of warfare was their calling card.”
Other “war zones” revisited in the Sachs films that will screen at the Brooks include Israel, Hungary and Catonsville, Md., where in 1968 nine war protesters — including celebrity dissident priest Daniel Berrigan — raided a draft board office and burned selective service records with a gooey mixture of homemade napalm contrived from gasoline and Ivory soap.
Constructed from archival materials, newsreel footage, re-enactments, films of children at play and more, “The Last Happy Day,” the most recent work in the series, is a sort of Holocaust story about Sachs’ cousin, Alexander Lenard, a Hungarian doctor who fled the Nazis but later was hired by the U.S. Army to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers for funeral and identification purposes. Years after this ghoulish if necessary job, Lenard was associated with an icon of cuteness and innocence when he achieved a certain celebrity as the author of the surprise best-seller “Winnie Ille Pu,” a Latin translation of “Winnie-the-Pooh.”
Sachs — the sister of director Ira Sachs (winner of the 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for his Memphis-made “Forty Shades of Blue”) — credits a teacher at Central High School, the late Lore Hisky, with “turning her head toward the screen.” Hisky organized a student film club that “was very influential to a few of us, because she talked about looking at images in a very sophisticated way. It wasn’t about movie stars. … It was often about political reflections of the day, with a level of thinking that was complex and meaningful.”
Sachs apparently retained those lessons, because the 20-plus more or less avant-garde short films she has made over the past 23 years — typically described in such uncommercial terms as “essay films” and “experimental documentary portraits” — have been movies of ideas, screened primarily at museums, cinematheques and film festivals around the world.
Sachs said her films attempt to “interweave the personal with a shared cultural experience.”
“So much about war has to do with first-person witnessing, and most of us don’t do that, but we still live during a time of war,” she said. “I’m very interested in the way our memory holds onto a crisis, and we try to reckon with it, but then we don’t know where to put it. What I want people to do is think about their own process of looking at crisis in society, and try to figure out where it fits into their own understanding.”
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“I Am Not a War Photographer: A Film Series by Lynne Sachs” at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
7 p.m. Thursday
“Investigation of a Flame” (2001, 45 min.), a look at the 1968 Vietnam War protesters — including three priests — known as the “Catonsville Nine,” who burned hundreds of selective service records with homemade napalm in a public act of “civil disobedience.”
“States of UnBelonging” (2006, 63 min.), a portrait of an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed by terrorists on a West Bank-area kibbutz.
Saturday, Nov. 20, 4:30 p.m.
“Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam” (1996, 33 min.), an impressionistic travel diary of Ho Chi Minh City.
“The Last Happy Day” (2009, 38 min.), an “experimental documentary portrait” of Sachs’ cousin, the late Alexander Lenard, a Hungarian Jew who fled the Nazis and later authored “Winnie Ille Pu,” a Latin translation of “Winnie-the-Pooh.”
Admission: $8 per day, or $6 for museum members. Advance tickets: brooksmuseum.org.
One Eye, Two “I’s”
50 years of Cinematic Collaborations from the Archive of the Filmmakers Cooperative
Sunday, Nov. 14, 2010
Union Docs
Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Curated by Lynne Sachs
Special guests: P. Adams Sitney, Bradley Eros and the Zaqistan Arts Council (Sofia Gallisá, Zaq Landsberg, Scott Riehs, and Jeff Sisson).
Screened in glorious 16mm, tonight’s program celebrates five decades of film collaborations from the collection of the New York based Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Scholar and historian P. Adams Sitney will introduce our first short works — three New York City cine-poems shot by Rudy Burckhardt who worked regularly with artist Joseph Cornell during the 1950s. Our 1960s selection is Joyce Wieland’s and Michael Snow’s formalist vision of dripping water in a bowl – pure, liquid, kinetic sculpture in exquisite black and white. Next we will witness a grid-like flicker film hurled onto the screen by Beverly and Tony Conrad in 1970. By 1984 the avant-garde was into body art and filmmaker Tom Chomont photographed his brother Ken shaving — from the top of his head all the way down. Bradley Eros’ and Jeanne Liotta’s 1992 movie pushes our awareness of the body even further, into a dream-like reverie on cinema. And Stan Brakhage created one of his only film collaborations with Mary Beth Reed in 2001, revealing to the world his delicate process of painting on film. We will finish this evening with the premiere of a Wild West conceptual art video by the Zaqistan Arts Council (Sofia Gallisá, Zaq Landsberg, Scott Riehs, and Jeff Sisson).
Aviary, The/Nymphlight, A Fable For Fountains (1957 – 1970) 16mm, color & b/w,sound, 19 min
by Rudolph Burckhardt and Joseph Cornell.
According to P. Adams Sitney, “Rudy Burckhardt photographed ‘The Aviary’ (1955), an impression of New York’s Union Square, under Joseph Cornell’s direction. This location held a particular fascination for Cornell who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film he treats the park as an outdoor aviary.” In ‘Nymphlight’ (1957) Burkhardt and Cornell filmed a 12-year-old ballet student in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library. In ‘A Fable for Fountains’ (1957-70) Cornell met a young actress when she played a boy in an off-off-Broadway production. He remarked at her resemblance to a figure in one of his boxes and later persuaded her to appear in this film, this time shot by Burckhardt in Little Italy.
Dripping Water (1969) 16mm, black and white, sound, 11 min.
by Joyce Wieland and Michael Snow
“Snow and Wieland’s film uplifts the object, and leaves the viewer with
a finer attitude toward the world around him, it opens his eyes to the
phenomenal world. and how can you love people if you don’t love water,
stone, grass.” Jonas Mekas, New York Times, August 1969
Straight and Narrow (1970) 16mm, black and white, sound, 10 min.
by Beverly Conrad and Tony Conrad
Straight And Narrow uses the flicker phenomenon, not as an end in itself, but as an effectuator of other related phenomena. Also, by using images which alternate in a vibrating flickering schedule, a new impression of motion and texture is created.
Razor Head (1984) 16mm, color, silent, 4 min
by Tom Chomont with Ken Chomont
One brother shaves another in this highly charged erotic performance.
Dervish Machine (1992) 16mm, black and white, sound, 10 min
by Bradley Eros and Jeanne Liotta
Hand-developed meditations on being and movement, as inspired by
Brian Gysin’s Dreammachine, Sufi mysticism, and early cinema. A knowledge of the fragility of existence mirrors the tenuousness of the material.
Garden Path (2001) 16mm, color & b/w, silent, 7 min
by Mary Beth Reed and Stan Brakhage
The film reveals The creative process of hand painted film visionary, Stan Brakhage. whose painted images leap out of black and white footage of the
artist at work.
Defiance: Zaqistan at 5 years (2010) video, 6 min.
by Sofia Gallisá, Zaq Landsberg, Scott Riehs, and Jeff Sisson
This collaborative video documents the sixth expedition to Zaqistan, a breakaway republic founded from two acres of remote Utah desert purchased off of Ebay and declared independent from the United States in 2005.
In my twenty year relationship as audience to Lynne Sachs’ filmworks, I have always admired her amazing ability to connect the very personal, physical relationship of ‘selfhood’ to film and film history and to collage a variety of complex themes into one complete film, often with challenging ambiguity and open endedness.
I first heard of Sachs as part of an active cadre of “downtown” avant-garde feminist filmmakers working in New York City, who were –in the late eighties–reading the new radically feminist theory of Helene Cixious, Luce Iriguay, and Julia Kristeva and who had strong links to San Francisco’s experimeantl feminist film scene. These women were busily exploring the great personal and political themes of, the ‘then’, feminist culture: gender, body, sexuality and language–how to develop womens’ language. Later, I had the good fortune to meet Sachs in person at Other Cinema.
The recent West Coast retrospective of Lynne’s work demonstrated just how far-reaching, intimate, and astute her work can be and given my personal connection to that past, radicalized period of feminist culture, and the admiration I have for Lynne and her work, I decided to ask her about some of the influences, opinions and practices she’s formed over a nearly thirty year career.
…
Molly Hankwitz Cox: Drawn and Quartered (1987) and House of Science (1991) revolve around your own body. House of Science also radically investigated the male dominance in consciousness of the female body, as it enshrouds personal understanding of female selfhood and the incompleteness of this picture. You may say that it was about your own preparation for becoming a mother or exploration of self, but I’ve often wondered if you anticipated how meaningful that film would be – has been – to your audience?
Lynne Sachs: In the late 1980s and early 90s, my deepest concerns as a woman and an artist revolved around issues of gender and sexuality. I was in a reading group with a group of very intellectual and creative women – including Kathy Geritz ( film curator at the Pacific Film Archive) and Peggy Ahwesh, Nina Fonoroff, Jennifer Montgomery, Lynn Kirby and Crosby McCloy (all filmmakers) – and we were reading some of the most powerful, eye-opening literature I had ever experienced. For each of us, the discovery of the expansive, rigorous and playful essays of French writers Luce Irigeray (Speculum of the Other Woman) and Hélène Cixous (The Newly Born Woman) completely changed our sense of language and the body.
Both my films Drawn and Quartered and The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts were informed by these radical texts and the discussions we had as we sat in one another’s apartments drinking tea and eating. I think these films express my own reckoning with the sense of fragmentation I felt throughout my adolescence, my desire to be removed psychically from the me that was a body. I appear naked, briefly, in both of these movies as well as in the later Which Way is East (1994). For a girl who hated to go bra shopping because she would have to undress in public, these movies were minor watersheds, I guess. Now that I have lived through two childbirths, my daughters Maya and Noa claim I am too comfortable taking my clothes off wherever I feel like getting undressed.
MH: Ha. (Smiles) Feminist filmmaking unmasked the camera as spectator and the power that gave us to explore our collective disavowal of physicality was huge. But times have changed since then and discourse on spectatorship is less pronounced or fresh. In Wind in Your Hair /Con viento en el pelo (2010) you expand your vision well beyond your own camera and/or any use of archival footage. You’ve enlisted a number of super8 filmmakers/students from Buenos Aires and Sofia Gallísa in New York, for example. Are you simply casting your net wider by being more inclusive — developing more of an international and global film community in your work?
LS: Ever since I first started making films, I have resisted the traditional pyramid-shaped production hierarchy of a director and her crew as well as the model of the director and her obedient cast of actors. On both fronts, I wanted to develop a more porous relationship in which we would all listen and learn from each other. Watching Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers really rocked my world; she included these frank interior dialogues in a piece that ostensibly looked like a dance documentary. The levels of perception that she created were astounding.
MH: It’s true. Yvonne’s films are so complex in that way. Just great. She deconstructs without pretension.
LS: When I made the short film Still Life With Woman and Four Objects (1986), I asked my actress to bring a prop (one of the four objects) that would reveal something about her thinking and shake things up a bit. She brought a black and white photo of the revolutionary feminist Emma Goldman and things were never the same again. More recently, one of the key participants in my film was an Argentine psychoanalyst who came to our set during the nightmare scenes to help us infuse this dream with another psychological dimension I didn’t think I had access to. Her training was critical to the shaping of the mise-en-scene. Then there was the bilingual aspect of (Con viento en el pelo). I didn’t speak a word of Spanish until I started showing my films in Argentina in 2007 and a year later decided to spend two months in the city making the film. Integrating a language I was just beginning to speak, read and understand problematized the whole process in such interesting and dynamic ways. I often had to release the presumed power I had as director, and these moments were the times when I learned the most from the children and from the members of my crew. These kinds of fragile collaborations are vital to my way of making films.
MH: In other dialogues, you have sometimes defined two types of film–YES films, which include putting everything into the mix, allowing the maker to invent and intuit, arriving at a different place than where one began, and NO films which are “Think of a topic and carry it through” works. This categorization includes, arguably, the sensibilities of many film works, regardless of genre, and also separates modes of imagining and creating, from the end result. You suggested to Kathy Geritz that is a NO film, but when the young “actresses” invent freely (choose costumes daily, create dialogue, choose locations) in their “kingdom” isn’t this a YES dimension?
LS: It’s interesting that you bring up this Yes/No dichotomy that occurred to me about ten years ago, when I realized that there was a pattern emerging in my work, a rhythm between films that were open to changes brought by the times and films that followed a very clearly defined vision or concept. For both you and me, as mothers, we have spent the last few years of our lives using these terms as a way to define the liberties our children could have, what was allowed or at least not dangerous, and what was out of bounds. But in my artistic practice, I sometimes feel that I am too distracted, too lenient on myself and not capable of working in a more pared down, essential way. So a NO work is one that implies a discipline of the mind. , which is essentially my first narrative film, grew out of a short story by Julio Cortázar about three preadolescent girls performing by a train track. I thought it was a NO film and that I would adhere to the author’s vision rather closely. Instead, I took liberties by integrating the inner thoughts of my “actresses” and by engaging head on with the social unrest that was whirling around us in Buenos Aires during our production. Maybe the most important rules to break are the ones you impose upon yourself.
MH: touches upon the delicate transition from childhood to adolescence taking place in girls when they begin to navigate the real world. The film bears the marks of a parent’s sensitivity to this period when children learn judgment in caring for themselves, hence, personal independence and the need to protect themselves. Their fears and dreams sometimes disclose unconscious concerns with detaching from what is familiar into that which is unknown. On some level, you have expressed the primordial, parental need to fix their play to architecture, building in both your own concern, and their immature need, still, for protection. Can you comment?
LS: I really love the way you talk about a parent who wants to fix – even transform – her child’s play into architecture. If Gertrude Stein – the experimental poet and grand-dame of the mid 20th century avant-garde – had been a mother I wonder if she would have succumbed to this desire to reign in the amorphous spirit of a child. What I so love about her writing is its resistance to conventional syntax and prescribed meaning. In the language of the semiotician, she wanted to create provocative ruptures between the sign and the signified, between the way we are taught to speak (to communicate) and the way we ultimately choose to express ourselves (art). We experimental filmmakers are trying to do the same thing, not only with words, but also with images and sounds. So if you and I believe with all our hearts in the paradigm of the avant-garde, where does that lead us in terms of bringing up our children in a society with a whole set of explicit and implicit rules and expectations? Does a piece of architecture need four walls, a window and a door? Does a story need a conflict and a resolution? In my short film Atalanta: 32 Years Later (2006), I played with two different versions of the myth of Atalanta. The story is a retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s Free To Be You and Me. Clearly, this is a classic tale with a conflict between a daughter and her father and between a young woman and the society at large. For the first time in my life, I embraced the tale in its entirety and remained true to the original structure. Let me tell you, this is not my style. My 2006 twist on the myth’s storyline was to give it an explicitly lesbian conclusion and to split the screen in two in order to show the 1974 version forwards and backwards simultaneously. While the essence of the “architecture” is still there, I celebrate “play” to its fullest. I dedicated this film to filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
(pause)
MH: You always enjoy trying out new ideas, new experiences and places, and meeting people with unique stories?
LS: I remember hearing Stan Brakhage say once that maintaining an element of play in the filmmaking process was at the very foundation of his practice. In my mind, what he was saying was that the exploration had to remain constant. I have tried to do that all of my life, and this can sometimes slow down the process because you end up letting the materials speak back to you, telling you how to make the work, sending you in directions where you feel awkward and out of your element. This way of working, however, comes out of the traditions of painting and sculpture much more than story-based moviemaking. When I find kindred spirits who want to work with the medium of film or video in this way, I naturally gravitate toward them!
MH: What drew you to Argentina? You and Mark Street, curated an Argentine experimental film program and screening. Is this how it all happened?
LS: In 2007, I took my daughter Maya to a mini-retrospective of my films in Buenos Aires, met some Argentine filmmakers and was immediately convinced that I wanted to return not only to shoot a film but also to begin learning Spanish. While Mark and I were in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay with our two daughters during July and August of 2008 and then again in 2009, we each collaborated with experimental makers in those cities to make new artwork. I made Wind in Our Hair / Con viento en el pelo with a Leandro Listorti and Pablo Marin, two Super 8 aficionados who probably know more about American avant-garde film than most artists in the States. They love the whole history of experimental filmmaking – Man Ray, Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, Jem Cohen, Marie Losier and more – and watch it whenever or wherever they can. In Uruguay, Mark and I introduced a group of artists to the wonders of “hand-made” film. We taught them how to make their own movies with found footage, dyes, q-tips and razors. The two of us then made a film about this workshop experience which we call Cuadro por cuadro/ Frame by Frame (2009). It’s a film about our sharing of our love of experimental filmmaking and our students’ discovery of its wonders.
MH: Other Cinema screened that film last year and I couldn’t believe I was seeing yet another Lynne Sachs film; this one such an adventure in handmade film and working with people. It was great. There are such a variety of motivations in all of your works. I’ve always admired that relaxed, almost lackadaisical editing style you have in many of your films. Its like you are offering something luscious to the audience, for us to take in, like the hostess for the experience–an invitation to participate in the way you think. You make filmmaking seem effortless. You’ve described editing yourself out of Drawn and Quartered, shot on 8mm as trying to ‘erase’ yourself, and then? re-purposing the outtakes and putting yourself back in. In Wind in Our Hair, you have a larger group collaborating and editing as you go. Could you talk about these processes, in hindsight, and how you see them having changed or not?
LS: You have such an astute way of thinking about the plasticity, shape, surface and structure of film. I really appreciate this approach to your questions because it gets me thinking about the dialog between material and concept. I actually made Drawn and Quartered with an old boyfriend, John Baker, and so the dance of images between the man and the woman and between the camera and the performers (the two of us) is a visual love poem that articulates our intimacy as well as our problems as a couple. While we are on the screen together, we are never actually in the same frame. As they say “Appearances can be deceiving.” I was still so uncomfortable with my body at the time that I initially took out my face from the movie and then, with pressure from some feminist-minded girl friends, put it right back. Since the film is made on regular 8mm film, these “cuts” (yes, this is a double entendre) show. Now, many years later I am still fascinated by how the series of images were actually photographed in a particular order; and, I am sad to see the way digital technologies obliterate the spirit of the initial chronology of shots. So you are somewhat right when you speak about and the way that it was edited. My co-editor, Sofia Gallisa, and I tried to keep the physicality of the small gauge film materials in as close to the original order as we could. In this way, it felt truer to the moment in time in which it first breathed. In my other recent film The Last Happy Day (2009) I videotaped a rather conventional headshot interview with an 85 year old woman sitting in a chair. I adored they way she talked about the past, and her candor in regards to her inability to recount something that happened long, long ago with any accuracy. She told me she could no longer distinguish between her own reality and fantasy. I tried to celebrate this poignant awareness of memory by leaving black spaces between cuts in her monolog. This formal fissure in the diagetic space upsets some people because it is a bit ugly and raw, but I think it is critical.
MH: Slight change of subject…Some of your work is about war. Instead of explaining it as a political event in an obvious way, you explain it instead from the perspective of how humanity responds to the ongoing crisis. In The Last Happy Day, a man, a distant relative, I believe, whose job it is to sort the remains of the dead is the central character. I know you were in Brooklyn –because we contacted you–during the events of September 11th. You described the ash in the sky falling near your home in Brooklyn. Is your interest in the process by which we absorb war’s atrocities, a means through which to articulate your own feelings about that horrific event? Is there a conscious connection for you there?
LS: I remember you and David contacting me from Australia soon after that day, and it meant so much to hear from you from so far away and with such compassion. A group of Bosnian artists actually wrote to me the afternoon of September 11, 2001. I, along with SF artist Jeanne Finley, had recently returned from working with these artists during a two week fellowship in Sarajevo. We were collaborating over the internet on a web art project we called The House of Drafts, 2001. Since, they had lived through the mid-1990s bombings of the Balkan wars, they were keen to convey to me that they knew how it felt to be attacked from the air. As you said earlier, this kind of international collaboration is critical to my practice – on both an artistic and an emotional level.
MH: The beauty of the Internet.
LS: In terms of The Last Happy Day, I think you are the first to see the connection between my interests in war and the human body. Even back in 1994 when I made Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam, I was aware of this exchange between the physical self and the social self. As I was traveling through the Mekong Delta, just a few months after they opened Vietnam to American travelers, I wrote “I am a bone collector who knows nothing about anatomy” in my journal. Whether I am rummaging through the Twin Towers ashes that floated into our neighborhood playground (Tornado, 2001) or listening to stories about my distant relative who worked for the US Army reconstructing the bodies of American soldiers, these issues keep coming back to haunt me.
MH: Thank you so much, Lynne. I hope we can talk again soon and in more depth.
Find more on Lynne Sachs’ work at: www.lynnesachs.com
Stills from House of Science, Wind in Our Hair , and The Last Happy Day, respectively, and courtesy of Lynne Sachs.
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Links
Opening Doors in the Red Light District: Making Films in Buenos Aires by Lynne Sachs
Filmthreat.com review of THE LAST HAPPY DAY (Sept. 2010)
Essay by Susan Gerhard for Lynne Sachs Retrospective
Film Comment Review of Abecedarium:NYC an interactive website by Lynne Sachs (june 2010)
Last Address: an elegy for a generation of NYC artists who died of AIDS by Ira Sachs, Lynne Sachs and Bernard Blythe
INTERNATIONAL HOUSE
3701 Chestnut St. Philiadelphia 3701 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19104, USA
An Evening with Lynne Sachs
Wind in Our Hair
dir. Lynne Sachs, US, 2010, BetaSP, 40 mins, color
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, Wind in Our Hair is an experimental narrative about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, Wind in Our Hair is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest.
followed by
The Last Happy Day dir. Lynne Sachs, US, 2009, BetaSP, 39 mins, color
A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society, and ran away. The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938, Lenard, a Jewish doctor and writer, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired him to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil, translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstract war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
two evenings of films by Lynne Sachs
Nov. 18 and 20
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
1934 Poplar Avenue
“Native Memphian Lynne Sachs, an experimental documentary filmmaker based in NYC, presents I Am Not a War Photographer, a two-night presentation exploring her artistic fascination with the resonance of war.”
Thursday, November 18 | 7 PM Investigation of a Flame | States of UnBelonging
An exploration of a 1968 war protest by the Catonsville Nine – three priests, a nurse, an artist and four others – who broke the law in a poetic act of civil disobedience, followed by a portrait of Israeli filmmaker Revital Ohayon, who was killed in a terrorist act on a kibbutz near the West Bank. Runtimes: 45 minutes, 63 minutes.
Saturday, November 20 | 4:30 PM Which Way is East | The Last Happy Day
The first film, part road trip, part political discourse, documents Lynne and her sister Dana Sachs’ travels from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The second is an experimental documentary portrait of Sachs’ distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian doctor who fled the Nazis and then was hired by the U.S. Army to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers, only to achieve brief fame years later as the Latin translator of “Winnie the Pooh.” Runtimes: 33 minutes, 38 minutes.
“Anthology groups together shorts by the experimental filmmaker, offering a diverse look at her studies of people undergoing change. It’s dense, difficult, and allusive, but Sachs has a fundamental mastery of tone that makes the films worthwhile, even for relative avant-garde novices.” Two days 9/24 and 9/25. Anthology Film Archives, New York City.
Published in THE NEW YORK TIMES September 24, 2010
Three Films by Lynne Sachs (Friday and Saturday) This review of recent work by one of the leading New York independent filmmakers includes the local premiere of “Wind in Our Hair,” a 41-minute video, made in Argentina with the collaboration of Leandro Listorti and Pablo Marin, that explores the world of four teenage girls, both as they imagine it and as it exists within the restraints of social reality. Also on the program are “The Last Happy Day,” Ms. Sachs’s 2009 portrait of a distant cousin whose itinerary took him from prewar Hungary to a remote corner of Brazil, and a brief homage to Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (2010). Anthology Film Archives, 32-34 Second Avenue, at Second Street, East Village , (212) 505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org; $9. (Kehr)
Opening Doors in the Red Light District:
making films in Buenos Aires
by Lynne Sachs
We’ve been spying on children in the city for about a century now.
Using our movie cameras, we become omniscient god-like figures who
traipse behind a mischievous boy or a dreamy girl, privy to their
every move, even their thoughts, and, in this way, finding a
deceptively easy access to our own pasts. From Albert Lamorisse’s
“Red Balloon” to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Nobody Knows” to Ralph Arlyck’s
“Sean: Then and Now”, both fiction and documentary films propel adult
viewers into the dynamic, cacophonous, barely Super-Ego-driven psyche
of young city dwellers en route to maturity. For a child alone, in an
urban metropolis, a city can hurl all that a society has to offer – be
it salubrious or deleterious – in a single bus ride. Buenos Aires is
complex but hardly iconic, dilapidated but not tawdry, secretive yet
somehow also inviting. In the summer of 2008, my burgeoning
familiarity with and fascination for this South American city offered
a canvas on which to explore these transformative moments.
Minutes after reading Argentine author Julio Cortázar‘s short story “End
of the Game”, I knew I wanted to shoot a cinematic interpretation of
this seemingly quiet yet tumultuous moment in three pre-adolescent
girls’ lives. Leticia, Holanda and the narrator (un-named) are
spending a few weeks together in a house on the edge of Buenos Aires.
Each day they perform a series of “sculptures” and “attitudes” on a
landing looking out over the tracks of a commuter train as it speeds
by. One afternoon, an older boy throws them a note from the train
window, indicating that he has been watching them from afar. The
girls are transfixed, exhilarated, and confused by this attention.
The game continues for a few weeks longer, anonymously. Then one day,
the boy get off the train and the girls finally have a chance to meet
him. Their conversation is brief, stilted, and uninspired, nothing
like what they had imagined. The game is, alas, over.
This realization that nothing is ever quite what you imagined it to be
becomes a harbinger of the adult awareness that will come. Cortázar’s
girls’ liminal halcyon days are coming to an end. They don’t want to
let go of their whimsy, their dramatic play or their baroque
costuming. Their moment in time reminds me of what my own two girls,
ages 11 and 13, are experiencing in their lives now. I decide to turn
this story into an experimental narrative film, one that “documents”
and explores these sensations that are so close to the ones I too knew
in my early teenage years. While “End of the Game” takes place on the
edge of the city in a kind of hermetic, bourgeois residential area
seemingly far from the urban center of Ciudad Federal, I decide to
push my four girl actors into a cityscape that will shake things up in
some unpredictable ways.
I tell an Argentine friend of my grandmother’s who’s been living in
the United States for over half a century that I will be spending a
summer in Buenos Aires making a movie with my two daughters and two
Argentine girls. She takes a deep, raspy breath and responds with
three simple words: “Beware of kidnappings.” Two weeks before we
leave, I read an article in The New York Times about a series of
possibly violent agricultural street protests creating a lack of fresh
food in the major urban areas of Argentina and a palpable atmosphere
of anxiety. With a wing, a prayer, and a box of 16mm film, I head
south with my husband Mark Street and our girls. In Buenos Aires,
we discover a summer of winter weather in a city I first encountered
in 2007 when I traveled with my older daughter Maya Street-Sachs
to show five films in their Buenos Aires Festival de Cinema Independiente.
Soon after our arrival in Buenos Aires, I invite Pablo Marín and
Leandro Listorti, two local filmmakers whose lyrical Super 8
experimental films I had seen during the film festival, to join me in
this collective endeavor. Leandro and Pablo see the world through a
distinctive, curious lens so I am thrilled they have agreed to help me
shoot the film. In addition, they begin to show me the history of
Argentine experimental cinema, starting from the 1960’s to the
present. In this milieu, I watch the transportive, often
dream-inspired films of Narcisa Hirsch, Claudio Caldini and Lucrecia
Martel all of which give me a deeper sense of the of the textures
surrounding me.
Since we will be doing a great deal of shooting in the family house of
Lena and Chiara, my two Argentine “actresses”, I am particularly
inspired by the charged, tight-knit home environment I see in Lucrecia
Martel’s “La Cieniga”. I try to create a similar spirit of emotional
electricity in the domestic spaces the girls inhabit. As the children
move through the rooms of this austere 1970’s haute-modern building,
they tentatively investigate the flamboyant costumes I’ve found for
them and begin to understand the personalities of their characters.
Lena is playing Leticia which is probably the most difficult role: a
girl with a pronounced physical disability that makes her posture look
awkward and wrought. She is haughty, brilliant and vulnerable. Chiara
plays Holanda, who is clever, patient and naughty. My older daughter
Maya plays the narrator (whom we name Elena), an observant, overly
responsible girl who feels her changes of life painfully. Noa plays
Pilar (a name all of the girls adore), the fourth, invented character,
who is playful and wily.
To get things started and as a way to get “into character”, I ask them
to play a game I have invented called “House Taken Over”, inspired by
Cortázars haunting eponymous story of a brother and a sister who
discover that their home is inhabited by voices, and perhaps the
people who own these voices. They run manically through the house
trying to escape the frightful sounds, and ultimately end up outside
their very own front door – homeless in a way. We follow the girls
with the camera, as they become similarly terrified characters in the
process of playing a kind of paranoid hide-and-seek. A few days
later, I describe this theater game of sorts to an Argentine
philosophy student who certainly has a deeper appreciation for
Cortazer’s writing than I have yet attained. He explains that for
some Argentine readers, the story is sharply and hauntingly political
in its depiction of the fear that the Buenos Aires intelligentsia felt
during the period now referred to as the Dirty War (1970s to 1983). A
house taken over is a mind taken over; that which we most fear is
invincible until it is there to eat us up.
One torrentially rainy day when I plan to shoot in the backyard, but
am forced to move indoors, I film the four girls performing Cortázar’s
14 different attitudes including rancor, charity, envy, and sacrifice.
I position the girls in front of a large ceiling-to-floor window and
discover the enigmatic seductiveness of their silhouettes. By not
revealing their facial expressions, I allow the language of their
bodies to function like a semaphore for their interpretations of these
words, their articulation of prescribed human emotions is pared down
to its essence. The girls’ bodies transform into moving arabesques
against the wet, green out-of-doors. From this perspective, the
metropolis of Buenos Aires feels remote, ethereal, and unproblematic.
Despite the fictional foundation of Cortázar’s tale, the documentary
spirit of my working process rears its ugly head. I think about Jean
Luc Godard’s and Anne Marie Miéville’s groundbreaking 1977 French
television series “France Tour/Detour/Deux Infants”. Here the
directors asked two children a series of thought-provoking questions
that lead them to ponder their own fragile existence. In the
willy-nilly production schedule I have created, we are shooting
through day and night for several weeks; the four girls climb into
their costumes (typical Argentine school uniforms) and won’t take them
off. So when I say “Tell me the things you fear most about life in the
city,” they don’t realize that they will be peeling away the fiction
to find something about themselves just one layer below.
Listening to Chiara’s recounting in Spanish of her dream, I discover a
scary underbelly of fear surrounding abduction here in Buenos Aires:
“When I was little, around 8 years-old, I had a dream. In the dream I
am 13, and I am sleeping, and a thief comes in, and everyone is
downstairs and the thief climbs up the stairs very quickly. He comes
into my room, grabs me, puts me in a bag and takes me. I am taken to
an alley where he makes me lay down, and then the thief calls my house
and says that if my parents want to see me again, they have to pay a
million pesos. And they don’t have the money. And then my dad goes to
the place; it is a very dark place. The thief isn’t there but I am,
lying on the ground. So my father grabs me and we run away. And when
the thief comes back, he sees that I’m not there and he kills
himself.”
And you’re not afraid of spiders, the dark or anything like that?
“No.”
Each girl has one scene in the film in which she discovers some aspect
of urban life. Holanda dances a Cyd Charisse style jaunt on the broad
Parisian steps of the Plaza Francia. Pilar jumpropes under the
shockingly modern sweep of the Biblioteca National and squirms in the
infamously ghostly Cementerio Recoleta. Elena and Leticia shop in the
cotillion stores of Once and along Corrientes, Buenos Aires’ Broadway
chock full of elegant, crowded bookstores, three story pizza parlors
with elderly men in silk scarves, and the constant threat of street
crime. In this teeming section of the city, the girls feel a sense of
urgency and uncertainty. They must be vigilant in order to stay solid
and just slightly self-assured, as they walk along the sidewalks in
costume. We follow them with our cameras, trying to be there and not
there at the same time. Two friends of mine have already had their
cameras pulled from their hands in broad daylight in this bustling
neighborhood, so a tight grip is no guarantee.
To imagine the barrio of Once, I think you would need to picture New
York City’s Lower East Side as it was in the 1970s – full of wholesale
fabric stores, street vendors, and earnest Hasidic storeowners.
Through the lens of the camera, Leticia and Elena, the two older
girls, appear more liberated and independent, embracing the color and
the grime of this ebullient neighborhood, relishing in the fact that
they are gallivanting about all alone. With cameras in hand, we watch
them stare at a small coterie of construction works sitting on a curb
drinking maté. In the aural fabric of the film, they listen to a
homeless man and his son singing a chant of need and desire. But in
reality, the girls are clearly not in this place alone, not at all.
We, the small production crew, are there witnessing them and caring
for them, being adults, being parental, overseeing. Even their
free-spirited jaunt through the vibrant but daunting Retiro train
station is monitored and contrived. Out of necessity or timidity,
life in the city for these girls is as protected and secure as life at
home. The camera presents a brazen autonomy that is, in the end,
false.
In my recorded conversation with my daughter Maya, she too squirms
uncomfortably in response to my questions about what she fears most in
the city. She speaks of the unknown neighbors, the ones who talk with
vitriol and resentment just on the other side of her bedroom wall.
Their anger is audible; and in their invisibility and proximity, their
“off camera” performance in the theater of her own psyche is
monstrous. Here city life offers her the opportunity to imagine an
anonymous neighbor who wavers randomly between the heroic
and demonic. Later, she describes a scene she has witnessed with
her own eyes but never described in her own words.
“On Las Heras Avenue is a bank, and in front of the bank is an older
woman who is homeless. We’re coming back from dinner, or from a movie
or something, and we all kind of go silent for a little bit ‘cause we,
you know, feel bad for this older woman who seems like every single
time we walk by is just sitting there.”
As much as these four middle class girls have observed poverty in
their every day lives as city dwellers (Maya and Noa in New York City,
Lena and Chiara in Buenos Aires), it is rare to hear them articulate
this kind of crisp observation. They know how to see but they don’t
yet know how to speak about the multi-layered, multi-class experiences
that is modern urban life.
On one of the most challenging days of all, we spend about five hours
at the Mitre train station, shooting the girls in their various wacky,
poignant, beguiling statues and attitudes, all on the grass just
beside the train. Everyone is prepared with a cell phone because we
must coordinate the boy’s ride on the train with the girls’
performances. Pablo and Leandro shoot video. I am running around with
my 16mm Bolex. A third local media artist is on the train with the boy
actor who is in a grey suit with a book bag. All of the people in the
station, on the sidewalk and on the train are watching us suspiciously
but we throw caution to the wind and keep going. The girls at first
are clearly feeling shy and then suddenly they give into the process
(my game) and become their characters, relishing the world of their
imaginations while still wondering what they heck we are doing. At
last, they let go of their own self-consciousness, break the rules of
comportment in a big city. This charged, hectic, public world full of
lonely train riders, housewives shopping for dinner, and impoverished
day workers riding the rails is a stage inviting wild improvisation.
The weather is very cold but we prevail somehow, completely worn out
but thrilled as the light disappears and we must go home.
Another cold morning, Pablo Marin and I take the boy and my daughter
Maya to the Retiro train station, in the center of the city, to shoot
the nightmare scene exactly as Cortázar had imagined it. The minute we
pull out our Super 8 camera we are told by the police to leave. Just
minutes before, I happen to spot an even more nightmarish location for
our pesadilla scene on my way to the station, a magnificently
grotesque sculpture garden behind Retiro, full of dinosaur-size
animals built by Argentine railway artist Carlos Ragazonni. So we
immediately walk to this hidden, hellish, fantastic place and decide
we are lucky to have been evicted from the station. When government
rules and regulations prevent us from following the story as given,
the city of Buenos Aires provides an even grander, spookier back lot
for the shooting to go on.
Our last production day is an exploration of another nightmare, one
that parallels the hide-and-seek game the girls played on the first
day. I ask a psychoanalyst friend to join us to help me move the
girls into a more oneiric frame of mind. Her understanding of and
appreciation for the layers of meaning behind and inside dreams sparks
wonderful tableaux vivant that I think can only enhance this aspect of
the movie. We shoot in a wooded area right next to the train tracks in
Parque Palermo. Here three girls, wearing moon masks, dance like
ghosts under the trees while the fourth searches for them in a game of
“Gallito Ciego” (similar to our Blindman’s Bluff). Every few minutes,
the noisy commuter trains whiz by, disrupting the quiet of the game
and reminding them that they are no longer in a back yard, but rather
the heart of the big city.
During July and August, 2008 in Buenos Aires, the tensions between the
farm workers, agribusiness and government move from distant rural
manifestations to tented encampments in the infamous Plaza de Mayo to
raucous street marches of a quarter of a million people. While at
first this intimidating illustration of Latin American politics
brought to the street seems like a hindrance to my film project, I
realize that these boisterous, anguished expressions of the poor
(mixed in with the behind-the-scenes manipulations of large-landowners)
are part and parcel of a multi-layered political landscape the girls are
beginning to notice and perhaps think about. For this reason, I weave
the wild particulars of these Buenos Aires uprisings into the film,
including the cacerolazo (banging of pots in a group protest) and
tractors rumbling down the Avenida Libertad. The hermetic space of
the girls’ childhood, and indeed of Cortázar’s fiction in general, is
punctured by the needle of reality.
Of course, I had hoped to name my film “End of the Game” and to attain
the blessing of Julio Cortázar’s wife, who controls his estate, to
use the title. Once I am back in New York City and editing with
Puerto Rican filmmaker Sofía Gallisa, my friend and former student,
I spend half a year corresponding with her agency about my project
and eventually send her a fine cut version of the film. In the end, my
decision to embrace the city of Buenos Aires – howling, dancing,
complaining, lusting, creaking, and dreaming – is my downfall.
By inviting the city hook, line and sinker into the movie, I am, she
feels, betraying the precious spirit of childhood that her husband
worked so hard to create. By opening the doors to things we might
not want to see, the red light district of our own consciousness, I am
constructing a porous, drafty fiction/non-fiction universe. I name
the film “Wind in Our Hair” to celebrate the untidy, fluid, physical
world these girls will eventually learn to navigate all by themselves.
“The Last Happy Day” is a stunningly beautiful essay film by Lynne Sachs, in which she uses the remarkable story of her distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Jewish Hungarian doctor who survives two world wars, as a lens for her meditations on trauma, survival, history, and healing.
The outline of Lenard’s story is fascinating by itself: he hides his Jewishness from his first wife and children, and mysteriously disappears as the Nazis come to power. He turns up in Rome, where he works for the American army, grimly handling corpses and reconstructing the remains of American soldiers. He later moves to Brazil, where his knowledge of Baroque music wins him quick cash on a TV quiz show, enabling him to retire to a quiet life in the countryside, where he becomes famous for his translation of the book “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin.
The film, however, rather than simply telling his story, is a complex and exquisitely constructed film essay, in which the elements of Lenard’s story (told through his letters) are interwoven with archival footage and stills, ambient sounds, and interviews with family members. Impressionistic montages of images and sounds create a meditative and melancholy atmosphere, while superimposed text is used to reinforce key phrases from the letters. Sachs interweaves these elements into an elegiac counterpoint, much like Lenard’s beloved Bach, music which figures prominently in the soundtrack. (This soundtrack is notable for its subtle blend of historical sounds, such as radio war reports in Italian and airplanes, with music and narration.) Film footage about the war is projected onto ordinary household objects and medical equipment, an effective image of the superimposition of war memories onto daily life. The result is a double portrait, capturing Lenord’s sense of displacement, but also capturing the filmmaker’s own mind, as she investigates the story and learns more about Lenard’s life, and contemplates the variety of human responses to the devastation of war.
One of the film’s strongest and most original strategies is the use of four children as a kind of Greek chorus, commenting on the film throughout in a variety of ways. These children at times narrate the story, act it out, provide the music (pantomiming a string quartet playing Bach), and perform the story of Winnie the Pooh. The kids do not function merely as a screen onto which Sachs projects her ideas; they become as genuinely obsessed with Lenard’s story as the filmmaker herself is. (Two of them are Sachs’ daughters.) They sift through Lenard’s letters together, searching for clues to his story. Although, as children who have grown up in peaceful, prosperous America, it must be difficult for them to imagine Lenard’s experiences, they comment on them with great sophistication and empathy. (Sachs juxtaposes the kids’ scenes with contrasting images of children in fascist uniforms in Italy.) The children are always shown working as a group. Images of collaborative work, especially the collaborative work of a group investigating archival texts, are an important theme running through many of Sachs’ recent films, such as “The Task of the Translator” and “Wind in our Hair.”
Lenard’s Latin version of “Winnie the Pooh” is not merely a whimsical side project. The story itself is not fluff: the quoted texts acted out by the children deal with death and violence, and Lenard’s translation, as Sachs explains to the kids, consciously cites Latin poems about war. It almost seems as if, for Lenard, the study of Latin represented a civilized, educated world, the world which was utterly destroyed by two world wars, and which he never ceases to long for. As the language of science and Linnaean classifications, Latin is also part of the comforting process of ordering and containing the world, of turning the unspeakable horrors of the war into safely intellectual experiences. (Many educated people seemed to find the book appealing; my parents had a copy.) One begins to see how the same man who picked up bodies from the chaotic scenes of battlefields and methodically reconstructed them also translated a children’s book into Latin.
Lenard’s basic approach to the presence of war, violence, and trouble is an approach that has been central to Jewish life for thousands of years: run as far away from it as possible. The result is living in a condition of permanent spiritual exile. Like many American Jews, even before the war he found it more convenient to elaborately erase any evidence of his Jewishness. (His family name was originally Levy.) Lying, hiding, and escape become lifelong habits, making it especially challenging for Sachs to try to find out details about his story. (He hides the fact that his own father died in a concentration camp.) The images of the interviews with Lenard’s relatives are punctuated with frequent gaps in the image and sound, like the gaps in the story. This condition of uncertainty about the facts becomes a permanent part of the film, as it was a part of Lenard’s life. Like many Holocaust survivors, he becomes bitterly disillusioned when he observes that the racist ideology of Nazism, far from being discredited after the war, seems stronger than ever. His escape to Brazil seems motivated as much as anything by a disgust with Europe.
This is a man who develops a sophisticated and profound understanding of the art of healing, both for himself and for others. He surrounds his house in Brazil with healing plants, and writes that he rarely prescribes medicine for patients, instead, advising them to climb a mountain and look at the sky. The Brazilian sections of the film, near the end, are filled with entrancing tropical birdsong.
Sachs has reached a new height in her exploration of the personal essay film in “The Last Happy Day.” The viewer can feel the hunger for meaning and connection which drives her through her investigation, sending her to Europe and Brazil in search of clues. Her sophisticated gift for montage, which balances sounds with images in an elegantly musical form, turns her curiosity into a thing of beauty. Posted on August 20, 2010 in Reviews by David Finkelstein
