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Opening Doors in the Red Light District: making films in Buenos Aires

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.

FILMTHREAT review of THE LAST HAPPY DAY

FILMTHREAT REVIEW OF THE LAST HAPPY DAY by Lynne Sachs
by David Finkelstein

THE LAST HAPPY DAY

“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

Wind in Our Hair at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis

Wind in Our Hair at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis

https://walkerart.org/magazine/lynne-sachs-wind-in-our-hair-screening-august-3-september-5

August 3 – September 5, 2010
Lecture Room
Free. Screens at the top of the hour from 12 noon during gallery hours.
On Thursday, August 26, Sachs introduces the 7 pm screening, which is followed by a discussion.

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 and the ethereal music of Argentine singer Juana Molina complement the shifts in mood from innocent amusement to protest. 2010, video, in English and Spanish with English subtitles, 41 minutes.

Presented in conjunction with Guillermo Kuitca: Everything—Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980-2008 exhibit.
Through some 50 large-scale paintings and 25 works on paper, Guillermo Kuitca: Everything traces nearly three decades of work from the Buenos Aires–based artist Guillermo Kuitca (b. 1961), one of the most important painters working in Latin America today, whose canvases have received significant international attention since the early 1990s. Departing from previous surveys, it explores both the conceptual nature of Kuitca’s singular painting practice, as well as its interdisciplinary origins.

Walker Art Center
1750 Hennepin Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55403

“The Worlds Lynne Sachs Calls Home” by Susan Gerhard

Published in San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph Lynne Sachs Retrospective 1986 – 2010

The Worlds Lynne Sachs Calls Home by Susan Gerhard

The films of Lynne Sachs travel to exotic places, but find themselves concerned primarily with the universal qualities of the everyday. They revisit war zones but refuse to foreground the idea of War as humanity’s most fascinating pursuit. They are experimental in nature yet can offer straightforward and earnest approaches to literal problems. They defy expectations for radical art.

The central concern of one of these films, Investigation of a Flame, is the burning of selective service records with so-called “home-made napalm” by an activist group, which included three priests and a nurse, dubbed “The Catonsville 9.” Their protest has been called “a poetic act of civil disobedience.” And while those same words could describe Sachs’ catalogue as a whole—in its upending of the status quo with a sense of joyful lyricism—it’s the word “home-made” in front of “napalm” that strikes the uniquely Sachsian chord.

In Sachs’ oeuvre, life lived in a lowercase way can be ambitious and extreme and remains a primary source of inspiration. Sachs told me that she calls Investigation of a Flame her “backyard film.” Produced over three years while living in Catonsville, Maryland—with a two-year-old and a four-year-old—the film concerns a protest staged thirty years prior in a Knights of Columbus building one minute from Sachs’ home. “I was there, many of them were there, and the access was easy,” she recalls. “It was the perfect setting for building the kind of trust that is important to a documentary film. Plus,” she adds, “none of them wanted to meet for a late-night beer, thus keeping up with the little ones at home was not that tough.”

Sachs has frequently integrated her life into her films. Generally focusing her work on nearby topics (as in Investigation of a Flame), she often utilizes her own children and their friends as actors (in work as varied as The Last Happy Day and Wind in our Hair) and maintains an on-going collaboration—The XY Chromosome Project—with her partner, filmmaker Mark Street. While necessity is largely responsible for Sachs’ approach to work, it is also motivated by the idea that life itself is art and that art should be intersecting with life.

Sachs is currently collaborating with her brother Ira on an installation in New York City which is based on his film Last Address. The piece involves the placement of images in thirteen windows of NYU’s Kimmel Student Center to call attention to artists’ lives lost to AIDS in a period of time that now seems so long ago. On working with family, she says, “I think the best way to see someone regularly is to work on a project with them.”

Physical connections in the lived world are an important feature not just of Sachs’ process as a filmmaker, but for her perception of film as a medium. In an era of personalized screens, she insists that the cinematic experience be physical, and shared. “You know how kids always say, ‘I’m bored?’ Adults don’t get the opportunity to be bored enough, to feel like you’re a vacuum, that you have that much empty space,” she says. “There’s this expression, ‘horror vacui,’ that wherever we are, we have a horror of emptiness. When you go to a theater and are involved with a film to that extent, you stay, and that empty feeling gets filled in ways you can’t predict, ways you can’t quite control.”

“I also think it’s true with filmmaking,” Sachs says. “Trinh T. Minh-ha once said she tried to resist using zoom lenses, or telephoto lenses, because she wanted people to have to move their bodies.”

Sachs has been moving, in one sense or another, from a very young age. The oldest of three children by the same two parents (she has many other siblings on her father’s side), she—along with her sister Dana (now a writer of novels and nonfiction) and her brother Ira (an award-winning and well-known filmmaker)—spent summers with their mother in farmhouses or rock-bottom hotels in Europe, learning how to simply “be” with one another in tightly packed conditions. “We had to sit around tables and have conversations for all those weeks about what we were thinking and doing. The solitude in a small group was important,” she says.

Her mother, a sociology professor, and her father, an iconoclastic businessman, supported their children’s creative lives in unexpected ways—with, on the mother’s side, intellectual ardor, and from the father’s side, a sense of theatrical politics. (“He took us to ACLU meetings, made us help him collate left-wing propaganda materials he liked to distribute. He even ran for political office on the slogan ‘Vote the Rascals Out.’”)

Her sense of home and family, at it happens, extends beyond the core groups she grew up with and the one she is helping to raise. Her working methods with children are reflected in her methods with adult actors, the sense of agency she allows each. “I think it’s very interesting to listen to kids when they are actually being philosophical. Although they would not use that word, they’re grappling for words to express how they exist, how existence works.” She was influenced in this by a series of videotapes that Jean Luc Godard did for television called France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1978), with interviews with kids. Listening to adults, as it turns out, means offering them a piece of the creation of many films. “In Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1987), for example, I asked the actor who was playing ‘the woman’ if she would bring something that meant something to her. She brought a picture of Emma Goldman and it became this grounding for the whole film. The documentary side of me said I don’t want to have control over everything. I want her to offer something that’s going to spin this in a new way.”

One quality she’d like to support in her own two daughters, she says, is a sense of adventure of taking actual, physical risks. “Not that they have to climb the highest height, or run a certain distance in a length of time,” she relates, “but I remember when I was five years old and was on what we called ‘monkeybars’ and I was really scared to cross over from one rung to the other to the top. And I remember saying to myself, ‘If I don’t actually climb these monkeybars now, then maybe I’m gonna be scared to do things for the rest of my life.”

You could say with confidence that Sachs has, by now, climbed the monkeybars, and the mountains, in a career spanning decades and continents, that’s found her moving from Memphis to San Francisco to Catonsville to New York, that found personal and political stories to essays about in Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany.

“In a broader way,” she says, “I’ve always been interested in the French idea of dépayser—to be out of one’s country; to be out of your comfort zone. Sometimes I feel more confident in my observational skills outside the place that I call home.”

Susan Gerhard is a journalist and culture critic whose creative nonfiction, reporting and criticism have appeared in a variety of international and local publications. She was a Sundance Arts Writing Fellow 2002–04 and a senior editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian for many years. She currently edits SF360.org.

Letter from Bill Nichols on Investigation of a Flame

Published in San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph Lynne Sachs Retrospective 1986 – 2010

& Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary

Letter from Bill Nichols
August 31, 2004

Dear Lynne,

It was such a pleasant surprise to see you again after so many years at the benefit for the Anthology Film Archives. Your work has clearly gelled into an oeuvre of some note since we were both, passingly, at San Francisco State University in the late eighties.

I am very glad you were able to send me a copy of Investigation of a Flame, your film about the destruction of draft records in Catonsville, Maryland by Daniel and Philip Berrigan and the seven others. It is quite a compelling work. I think it is extremely revealing in terms of the motivations and consequences of what took place. This was a part of the history of the 1960s that was mediated to us by papers and networks that were in a near hysteria, fueled partly by a fear that the social fabric, and the social contract, was being torn asunder by people who would not accept lies and hypocrisy, and partly by a government that was determined to impose its will on a public vulnerable to a rhetoric of fear—from the specter of Communism that time, the specter of terrorism now. The past does return, doesn’t it, but not always as farce.

I was just getting back from two years in Kenya, where I had gone to teach in a secondary school and to rethink my trajectory toward a medical career, when that and other events occurred. The assassination of Martin Luther King had taken place just before I was due to leave and the May-June events of 1968 in France were at their height. I came back partly with the optimistic thought of resuming my studies, but now in cinema, and partly with the pessimistic dread that my plans would be postponed by the draft. I was eligible but also a bit clueless about what my options were. I had heard news of draft resisters and had friends in Paris who worked with draft deserters; I knew I could go to Paris instead of back to the U.S., but I also knew it would alter the rest of my life more than I could imagine.

Events like the one you reexamine flickered past on the limited news that reached my remote village. Their function on an ethical plane of giving witness to an alternative view of community and relationships was not lost on me, not after having followed King’s efforts in some detail. But this had to be filtered out from the general hysteria, scapegoating and demonizing. I never had access to the interiority of the event, certainly not with the density and complexity that you are now able to offer. You give a delicacy to the representation of what happened that really enlivens memory and enriches history. The sensitivity and strength of the “perpetrators” is quite impressive. They know what they are doing and why and have given it such careful thought. They remain vividly aware of what they wanted to do, how intensely they wished to cause no physical harm to any individuals who may have worked at the draft center, and how visible the symbolic level of their acts had to be. You give these acts, through the archival footage and the very personal, moving testimony of those who participated, an exemplary power: they come to stand for, in your film, those acts we sometimes undertake when we are driven by conscience and a compelling need to give witness to an alternative sense of social responsibility.

I felt at times that Investigation of a Flame bore similarity to The Thin Blue Line with the poetic, evocative quality Errol Morris instills, but without the romantic overtone that his use of Philip Glass’ music imparts. You withhold that kind of musical dramatization; your film remains within a realm of historical witness and physical action that is not now, as it was not then, embroidered with the richness of musical tapestry. The actuality of the event, which in The Thin Blue Line remains, in fact, invisible since no one saw the murder that is at the heart of the film, is rendered visible again. Your rapid pans of flowers and other objects, in an evocative color that evokes the past more than a photo-realist present, have an austere, provocative quality to them. Unlike Glass’ music, whose “work” for Morris’ film is clear, these images of garden flowers challenge us to determine what “work” they do. They do not soften the sharpness of a still vital historical past. They may reduce the pleasures that one ponders upon stepping up to the box office window, but they reward in ways I am still in the process of contemplating.

What I do not need to contemplate but remember is that the efforts of people like the ones you feature did have a profound impact on me. What to do about the draft? I went back to the classes in theology I had had at Duke and to the questions of a just war that St. Augustine had raised so long ago and wound up writing an extremely long explanation of why I felt I had to request status as a conscientious objector to my own draft board on Long Island. Remarkably (because very few boards paid much heed to such requests), my request was granted and, through a series of additional vicissitudes, I was able to resume my studies and continue my opposition to the war in Vietnam without having to enter the Army. People like the Catonsville 9 had a direct influence on the shape of my life and you have now given the shape of their actions and the clarity of their thoughts a brilliant frame. It is a slightly better world now that your film is part of it. Thanks again, so much, for sending it to me.

Bill Nichols is an historian and theoretician of documentary film.

“Wind in Our Hair” Emphasizes Art over Action by Christine Dickason

As the lights came back on in the theater, I sat in my seat, trying to absorb everything that had played on the screen over the last 40 minutes. The camera angles, the plot (or lack thereof), the Spanish words combined with English narration…it was all too much. As I walked out of the movie theater, I felt a sense of disappointment. Why had I sat through that? I had just seen my first “art film,” and I had been completely unprepared for it.

“Con Viento en el Pelo,” (or “Wind in Our Hair”), inspired by the writings of Julio Cortázar, gives the audience an exclusive viewing of life as seen through the eyes of four young girls living in Buenos Aires, Argentina who have yet to discover the outside world that surrounds their “kingdom.” Director Lynne Sachs, an experimental filmmaker born in Memphis, Tennessee, is able to transform the girls’ ordinary lives into something a bit more extraordinary. Though character development is slim, we learn the most about Leticia, a physically disabled, yet confident girl about which the others note, “leads us.” Every day the girls adorn their bodies with colorful swatches of cloth, gaudy masks, and parts of discarded Halloween costumes and anxiously wait for the train to pass by to entertain the boarded passengers with their crazy outfits. They call themselves “statues,” which is a perfect description of their daily show. The train is the girls’ only reminder that there is a world beyond their backyard. The train brings people, noise, and a boy, Ariel, who soon befriends them. He becomes their only concrete form of communication with the outside world by writing them notes and throwing them out the train’s window.

The notes, written in Spanish, are only one of the numerous mediums Sachs employs to convey the movie’s meaning. Spanish dialogue and writing, English subtitles and narration, all contribute to the melting pot of cultural differences expressed in the film. The narrator has a magnificent voice for translating the girls’ rapid chatter. She can turn three minutes of undistinguishable murmurs to one clear line of understanding. In one scene, a girl chants, “Piedra, papel, tijeras”; yet, until the narrator informs the audience that this is simply the game “rock, paper, scissors,” the audience is lost.

Beyond the narrator’s voice, the movie contains few other vocals. This movie consists of one song: “Un Día,” meaning “one day.” Do not walk into this movie expecting a beautiful original score. The rest of the “soundtrack” is simply everyday sounds: birds chirping, dogs barking, kids laughing, the train chugging. At points, this lack of music works: it forces the audience to focus on the natural sounds of daily life. Other times it seems to leave an empty hole in the movie experience. Occasionally, you will hear a reporter on the radio announcing a farmers’ strike. But the girls pay no attention to it. Footage of demonstrations, reports of grain shortage, angry farmers yelling- these sounds barely break into the girls’ laughter as they sit at the table eating a variety of breads, which symbolizes a luxury that the girls take for granted. Only once in the movie does the narrator address the poverty in the surrounding neighborhoods. But the moment is brief, and soon the girls resume whatever game they had been playing before the outside world had intruded. This stark contrast reinforces the innocence of the four girls. The film does a nice job of juxtaposing the girls’ secluded “kingdom” to the chaos of the real world through visuals.

Every camera shot, though oftentimes seemingly random, has been crafted with great care by Sachs. The shots are often close-up, focusing on something that Sachs wants to be sure you notice. For example, you rarely ever see a full, detailed view of the girls. The frame might focus on a girl’s mouth if she is talking, her profile if she posing, her shoes if she is running. But at times, the camera angles are dizzying, forcing the viewer to try to decipher what is happening in the shot, instead of reading the subtitles flashing along the bottom of the screen. Wide-angle shots are rare: the backyard is one of the images that is shown from far away, which effectively relays to the audience how big the backyard, or their “kingdom,” appears to be to the four growing girls.

As I write this review, I realize I liked the film more than I previously thought. I understand and appreciate the careful decisions that went into every frame. Thought provoking and creative, “Wind in Our Hair” took me on a journey that opened my eyes to a life very different from my own. It showed me a genre of filmmaking that I had never been exposed to before, for which I am grateful. However, at times, the film ceased to hold my interest. Without the structure of a typical movie, I was caught off-guard by the lack of any real plot, problem, or resolution. What it lacked in plot, though, it made up for in originality and heart. Overall, the film did not fulfill my expectations and left me rather bewildered; however, from an artistic point of view, this film was satisfying to the eyes and the mind. “Wind of Our Hair” is a refreshing antidote to a movie industry dominated by special effects. If you go into the theater craving an action-packed “Clash of the Titans,” you should probably skip this movie. However, if you are seeking a movie that is artistic and stimulates the mind, “Wind in Our Hair” may be the perfect choice.

by Christine Dickason
Memphis, Tennessee

Abecedarium NYC in Film Comment Magazine June 2010

FILM COMMENT
May/June 2010

SITE SPECIFICS: Abecedarium: NYC
by Jesse P. Finnegan

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/site-specifics-abecedarium-nyc/

Inspired by her children’s ubiquitous ABC picture books, not to mention the traditions of avant-garde alphabetizing, experimental mainstay Lynne Sachs concocted Abecedarium: NYC, an exquisite online corpse of cinematic cartography. Pearls of obscure vocabulary, ranging from “Audile” (one who thinks in sounds) to “Zenana” (in India and Pakistan, an area of the home reserved for women), serve as free-associative prompts for local artists. Clicking a particular letter reveals a corresponding interpretation culled from our fair metropolis. They’re typically short video works, aspiring to (and frequently transcending) a certain iMovie lyricism. The films are intimately observed audiovisual slivers, unfolding over a map that instantly scrolls to each work’s point of origin. Gotham emerges as a palimpsest of momentary glimpses and found poetics.

Sachs’s ever-ready eye is behind the lion’s share of entries: her “Foudroyant” response is a particularly potent rendition of the kaleidoscopic Coney Island film. David Gatten (“Rete”) and George Kuchar (“Pelagic”) contribute, respectively, a city symphony from leafily obstructed vantages and a poignant and peculiar visit to a Bronx funeral home. Beyond its homepage’s elegant interface, the project is meant to stand as an ongoing exploration through participatory blog threads and collaboration with other online media forums. Welcoming work from any and all who visit, the site (co-produced by artist/web designer Susan Agliata) aspires to be a perpetual atlas in progress, a sensorium of ever-accumulating coordinates. Abecedarium: NYC is rife with pockets of Web wonderment, serene handmade meditations, and, perhaps most intriguing, yet-to-be-realized potential.

Go to www.abecedariumnyc.org

“Between Yes and No: An Interview with Lynne Sachs” by Kathy Geritz

Published in San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph Lynne Sachs Retrospective 1986 – 2010

Between Yes and No: An Interview with Lynne Sachs by Kathy Geritz

Lynne Sachs and I were graduate students in San Francisco State University’s Cinema Department in the mid-eighties. We met as TAs for a huge undergraduate cinema history class, and became friends as we scrambled to stay two—or at least one—steps ahead of the students. New to teaching, we discussed ideas for films to show in our sections and also shared strategies to get discussions going. One disadvantage we faced was that neither of us had actually taken the film history course; instead, we had fulfilled this requirement through an independent study that entailed viewing films at Pacific Film Archive, where I worked. Together, we watched films religiously every week in a small screening room; but rather than the classics, we were drawn to experimental films, cinematic essays and offbeat narratives that fueled our enthusiasm for our field while providing an idiosyncratic survey of film history. Our friendship deepened during our wide-ranging conversations that continue to this day.

I spoke with Lynne about her film practice by telephone in January 2010. She was at her home in Brooklyn. — Kathy Geritz

What initially drew you to working with film?

All my life I’ve been working in the arts. I drew, took pictures and wrote poetry a lot as a kid. Later, when I was a teenager, I got very excited and disturbed by a number of issues—particularly the reinstatement of the draft and abortion rights. I realized, “There’s this part of me that cares about social and political situations; but, I’ll still need to keep this other part that is about my more private self, the part that wants to play with images and words, exploring the everyday.”

It was 1981, the year I went to live in Paris, when I started going to film programs, and I discovered the films of Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman. I also saw classic films like Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise (1945) at these sweet revival house theaters. I didn’t know terms like “avant-garde” or “experimental film.” I just knew that this kind of cinema was not about plot or movie stars, but about the expression of ideas or what it was to be a woman in the world, which seemed much more visceral and intellectual.

When I returned to the U.S., I didn’t yet think “I want to be a filmmaker;” I was just thrilled by this medium that I had discovered. I finished Brown University with a history degree, and thought I’d like to get into film, so I started to look for jobs in New York. In between desperately looking for paid work, I spent some time hanging out at what I later realized were some very important, even revolutionary, places. One was Downtown Community Television in Chinatown. The other was Global Village in Soho, which was a renegade community of people who had been followers of Marshal McLuhan and were committed to teaching young people about media. In 1984, I had a job answering the telephone and hanging film trims at documentary filmmaker Robert Richter’s office. He said to me, “You’re interested in documentary.You’re just out of college. Maybe you should go to the Flaherty Seminar.” I applied for a scholarship to go in the summer of ‘85. It was by far the most experimentally oriented year they had ever had. VéVé Clark was there to talk about Maya Deren. They showed a film that Meredith Monk had made on Ellis Island. I had never seen a documentary that used dance to create such a fluid access to space. Plus Bruce Conner was there! I said, “This is what documentary can be? Found footage films by Bruce Conner?” It was eye opening for me.

I applied to graduate school at both San Francisco State and San Francisco Art Institute. I had not really completed a film yet, so I wasn’t accepted at SFAI, but I got into State. Eventually I went to both. I’m glad that I went to State first, otherwise I wouldn’t know about film history, film theory or have worked with Trinh T. Minh-Ha. The documentary impulse was a tableau where I thought I would feel comfortable and enthralled. Documentary also allowed me to knock on people’s doors and ask questions, and be the nosy person I thought I already was. But the first four films I made were strictly experimental. I felt that I could only work out my initial investigations of the medium this way. I also had the chance to intern with Bruce Conner in his basement, helping to organize his archive and talking about art for hours. It was, to say the least, a transformational time for me.

Looking back at that time, I think the films of Jean-Luc Godard—particularly Vivre sa vie (1962) and France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1978)—were major influences on me. …deux/enfants was so fragmented and yet it left you with a philosophy of childhood that we lose as we become adults. Then I saw Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) and I knew from then on, I wanted to make experimental documentaries, although I probably didn’t yet use those words. I was already drawn to things that were political but when I saw Vivre sa vie I realized that political work could be more nuanced and more about form. Honestly, I didn’t understand that at all until I got to San Francisco and saw Craig Baldwin’s RocketKitKongoKit (1986) which was so confrontational and engaged. It made me think about culture, knowledge and historiography in an entirely different way.

A distinctive aspect of your films is your capacity to make connections and associations. Sometimes the resonances are immediate and poetic, and other times the associations build over time, which becomes a way of opening up a film.

I feel a closeness with writers, poets and painters, much more than with traditional film “directors.” We share a love of collage. In the kinds of films I make, there are fissures in terms of how something leads to something else. Relationships and associations aren’t fixed. I always learn from an audience, about whether or not the convergence of two images is actually expressing an idea. I hope it’s doing one thing, but I might learn that it is doing something completely different. In this way the films are kind of porous; they are open to interpretation. One thing I realized recently is that I have this rhythm when I make films—ABABAB or yesnoyesnoyesno. For example, I call House of Science a “yes film” because any idea that came into my head, pretty much made its way into the movie. The yes films are full of associations—some of them are resolved and some of them are adolescent; they’re still trying to figure out who they are. Other films are “no films.” Window Work is a single eight-minute image of me sitting in front of a window. It’s very spare and kind of performative. I felt like it had to be done in one shot. “No, you can’t bring in any clutter.” Sometimes I try to make films that don’t have clutter; other times I make films that are full of it.

You have always made both short and long films. Do they offer different things to you?

I love making both. My longer films are almost like diary films. It usually takes me three to four years to make them. In the case of The Last Happy Day you could say eighteen years, at least in terms of the thinking in my head. The short films have to do with an impulse or an idea that might come to me when I’m taking a shower or eating dinner. Or maybe I read something that sparks me, and I think I’m going to try that out. I’m very envious of photographers, particularly ones who still use darkrooms. They walk into a room with a blank piece of paper and walk out with a thing. It’s that kind of coveting of a thing that often drives me to make short films because I like that they have a relationship to a moment.

Some of your films take the form of a letter, others include notes and observations, others aphorisms. Will you talk about the role of writing in your films?

Writing has always been a vital part of my creative process. In House of Science, I tried to look at all the manifestations of writing. I wanted to include the gesture of journal writing and how that is an extension from your mind to your fingers to the page. I included the sounds of pencil on paper and I even included the sounds of things you might do before you write, as in the sounds of a woman sitting on a toilet and urinating. Some of my best writing has been done on airplanes because I am concentrating and there is nowhere to go. Other times I might be in a subway or walking down the street where I don’t have access to the utensils but I have access to the plodding, pleasurable aspect of putting words in order and expressing an idea.

In Which Way is East, I tried to think about the nature of translation in relation to text as a series of visible icons. I was interested in writing as an articulation of a thinking process but also as an indication of cultural identity. I was exploring the experience of being an outsider or a tourist. I like for my viewer to come to see any language as an opportunity for an awakening outside your most familiar universe. In Which Way is East sometimes you see the unfamiliar lettering of the Vietnamese language while hearing it in English. Other times you hear a parable told in Vietnamese but you see it in English. There are shifts between what is given to you and what’s not given to you. You have to think “How does something that is so familiar in one culture, move to another, and how does it shift in meaning?”

You asked about letters, and yes, this aspect of the creative process has been vital to the way I have written for several films, in particular States of UnBelonging. For two years, I exchanged emails with my former student Nir Zats, an Israeli writer and filmmaker. He was in Tel Aviv and I was in Brooklyn. We struggled during a time of intense Middle East violence to make a film about a woman neither of us had ever known. It took me a year before I realized that our back and forth “conversation” was actually the foundation for the whole film.

Does your working method differ when you begin with another writer’s work as source material?

The seeds of Wind in Your Hair were the stories “Final del Juego” and “Casa Tomada” by Julio Cortázar. I played with his original texts, hoping they would speak to the four “actresses” (including my two daughters) who performed the roles of girls who were just about to reach adolescence. I shot the entire film in Buenos Aires, with a group of Argentine super 8 filmmakers. For both the adults who were making the film and the children who were in it, these stories quickly entered our consciousness. The text gave us a shared experience which in turn allowed us to jump into an extremely playful and engaging dialogue (in Spanish and a little English).

In A Biography in Lilith, I wrote a lot of poetry and then turned it into song with a cellist, a Talmudic scholar, and the wonderful performer Pamela Z. Music enlivened the writing. The poetry was inspired by my having read the Midrash—stories from Jewish folklore and mysticism. It all happened between my becoming pregnant with my first child and giving birth to my second, from 1994 to ‘97. The film reflects that time of my life, when I was keeping journals and was interested in observing the changes in my body, grappling with the oppositions between motherhood and my own sexual identity.

When I was working on The Last Happy Day, the part of the Sandor Lenard story that held me up for the longest time was the Winnie the Pooh part. I knew that this incredibly fascinating distant relative of mine had become famous for translating the Pooh story into Latin, but I couldn’t wrap my head around why someone would do such a thing. In this country, Winnie the Pooh has been trivialized to the basest form of Disney. When a child grows up, he or she grows out of Winnie the Pooh. I have learned that Europeans think Winnie the Pooh has a kind of philosophy to offer children—it represents a child’s first introduction to thinking about the ephemeral, the unattainable. This isn’t necessarily how we see the book. I had to keep doing research so I could excavate Pooh in a way that had meaning for me outside his American identity. I kept rereading the book but it didn’t click. I couldn’t find a way to like him enough to make this movie. Sometimes you come upon a kernel of an idea, and it doesn’t speak to anybody but you. In this case, it was speaking to lots of people but not me. Part of it was that I had the idea to make the film before I had kids, then I had kids, and I started reading the book to them. Once I could bring it alive to children, I knew how to make it into a movie. I hope that all of this “process” does in a sense become revealed in the film.

I’ve heard you refer to your longer works as experimental documentaries or essays, and just now you said they are like diary films. Do these terms mean different things to you?

The key to the whole question of the kind of film I make has to do with how I see process. This goes back to why San Francisco was important to me. I felt like in that city, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we were so driven by process; we had a commitment to innovation during each and every phase of our production. For me, the film essay isn’t simply a series of questions that are asked about the act of making a film. We often say that the film essay is self-reflexive, that it opens up the maker’s tactics. The difference between process and tactic is that tactic is procedure but process is continual exploration. Process remains unclosed. I’ve always said that an interesting film is never a work-in-progress but rather a work-in-process. That’s where the experimental comes into play, because the maker is continually trying-out strategies, and willing to fail. My measures of success aren’t necessarily that a film is entertaining or that it conveys a sense of authority, but that it takes the medium to a new level of public consciousness. I want the film to struggle to create a new kind of visual expression, moving me and in turn my audience to think in new ways.

Kathy Geritz is Film Curator at Pacific Film Archive and co-editor of Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, to be published in Fall 2010.

“Searching: Lynne Sachs’ Cinema” by Lucas Hilderbrand

Published in
San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph for
STATES OF BELONGING: A LYNNE SACHS RETROSPECTIVE (1986-2010)
APRIL 10-14, 2010

Searching: Lynne Sachs’ Cinema by Lucas Hilderbrand

If I had to choose a single word to encapsulate Lynne Sachs’ cinema, it would be “searching.” Her work is marked by a mode of inquiry, of seeking out connections, of investigation. What is she looking for? Meaning, maybe. But more so, historical consciousness, an ethical way of being in the world, a politics of humanity. I’ve known her to get on a plane to move a film project forward, unsure what she will find when she lands or where the project is going. It seems every time we talk and check in, she’s been someplace else, at work on yet another project. She is indefatigable in her search, and she has been extraordinarily prolific.

With Which Way Is East, Sachs began a series of explorations that are central to her work: exploring geo-political conflict and politics in dialogue with family relations. In Which Way, Sachs visits her sister Dana, who had been living in Vietnam for a year, and this visit produces a cognitive dissonance between the place she saw represented in TV news reports of the Vietnam War as a child and the place she was then seeing as an adult. This tension might also be read as embodied in the celluloid itself: Which Way Is East’s formal signature is its superimpositions, often of blurred streaks of rich green foliage over sharp-focus landscapes, and its general refusal of image-sound synchronization. (Sachs has articulated this film’s form with a resistance to the rise of a common social documentary video aesthetic; with her move from film to video, Sachs would later experiment with frames-within-the frame as an alternative mode of juxtaposition.)

The Vietnam War likewise provides the incitement for Investigation of a Flame, perhaps Sachs’ best-known film. Here, rather than visiting a foreign land in the present, Sachs revisits a local past. While living in Catonsville, Maryland (outside Baltimore), she discovered the actions of the Catonsville Nine, a group of progressive Catholic clergy and believers who dissented against the war in Vietnam by raiding a selective service office and burning draft cards doused with napalm. Investigation explores the ways that ethical and religious beliefs can motivate people to question, even transgress the law; made before but screened after 9/11, the film’s meaning has been accidentally resonant with the later war on terror. In the film, the prosecutor in the Catonsville case raises the compelling archival question of whether the draft records had the right to exist, a peculiar slippage that grants the rights of personhood to inanimate objects, yet one that nonetheless broaches the ways history could be erased through the destruction of records. Even more essentially, the dissenters question the government’s right to dehumanize its people, whether by sending troops into a losing battle or by imprisoning the protesters. In one of the film’s most affecting moments, a participant recalls her first meal after being released from prison: when she stared at the menu at a restaurant, she couldn’t make sense of it and couldn’t decide; she cried because she realized prison had taken away her ability to think for herself.

The effect of war on an intellectual has taken Sachs farther away and yet, in a manner of speaking, closer to home. She has recently worked to unravel the enigmatic story of her distant cousin, anthropologist-doctor-refugee Sandor Lenard. This search began with the succinct The Small Ones, in which Sachs calls our attention to the human cost of war through recovering this cousin’s story of working to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers in Rome during WWII. Sachs continued excavating this complex familial connection in the longer and more ambitious The Last Happy Day. In this second take, we learn that she first heard of this cousin as a child because he had translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin while in exile; this discovery is mirrored by her own children’s contemporary inquiry into his story. A Hungarian Jew, Sandor lived in Germany when WWII began and hid prisoners of war in his apartment while in Rome. After the ravages of war, he moved to Brazil in search of “a far away place” and won a small fortune on a game show that allowed him to buy a house in the woods; although living in exile, he planted “all the fruits that can cure homesickness.” But Sandor’s amazing journey was sullied by the fact that he deserted his family in Europe. Sachs visits one of his sons in Germany, in the attempt to reconstruct Sandor’s story, but he only knows fragments of his own father’s story. He shows Sachs how their shared relatives’ books had once been inscribed with the original family name (Levy) but that this name had been partially torn out of each book and replaced with a less Semitic one (Lenard); this act served to hide an identifiably Jewish name but stopped short of removing all trace of the family’s existence. In a curious way, as in the Catonsville Nine’s symbolic burning, the destruction of documents ultimately points to a larger historical-political truth. Commenting on the impossibility of making truth claims about the past, Sandor’s wife comments, “There are things so old, I’m not sure of the truth.” The Last Happy Day is a film about a life structured by wars and the ways that knowledge of that life has been translated between generations.

More impressionistic in structure yet still working through issues of translation, Sachs’ most recent film, Wind in Our Hair/ Con viento en el pelo (2010) was inspired by Julio Cortázar’s short stories and shot in Buenos Aires. The film’s bilingualism might be seen as a metaphor for the work’s focus on young women transitioning from childhood to more mature sexual desire and political awareness. Early in the film, four girls (including Sachs’ two daughters, who appear in a number of Sachs’ works) play a game of searching behind closed doors and around corners. They wear colorful masks and frequently shriek with a mixture of delight and surprise. The girls play a number of games that they are seemingly too old to play—games they will soon enough leave behind. They experience life the ways we remember childhood as adults—as a series of intense moments, many of them related to the routines of daily chores and materiality of daily life. The film is positively tangible in its attention to the fluff of puppy fur, the crustiness of pastry, the lint on stockings, and the curl of paper that’s dried after being saturated with markers’ wet ink. The film is also about the girls’ glimmers of awareness of the world around them, such as the ambient sound of news radio or television images of protests. One girl describes a dream she had when she was eight, dreaming of being thirteen and being kidnapped; the dream suggests the anxiety of growing older and the ways the specter of The Disappeared continues to haunt the country. Yet the film ends much as it begins, with an eruption of exuberance, as the film transitions again: from video to film, from documentary sound and voice-over to Juana Molina’s “Un Día”, from pensive to quick images of girls again in states of excitement.

Trinh T. Minh-ha has written, “Meaning can be neither imposed nor denied.” It strikes me that meaning is something, in Sachs’ work, that is found. It’s what she searches for, but not in the form of some absolute truth. She finds meaning through productive juxtapositions of sound and image, past and present, near and far, family and politics. But she also trusts the audience to make its own meanings, too, by participating in her search.

Lucas Hilderbrand is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright.

Last Happy Day — Lynne Sachs Director’s Statement

Lynne Sachs during Last Happy Day production

Artist Statement
Published in April 2010
San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph: Lynne Sachs Retrospective 1986-2010

The Last Happy Day (2009) by Lynne Sachs; digital video, color, sound, 38 minutes

“In 2009, I completed The Last Happy Day, a film that uses both real and imagined stories about Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin of mine and a Hungarian medical doctor. (See text above for description). Several years ago I traveled to Sao Paolo, Brazil to film Sandor’s eighty-five year old wife, Andrietta. She described in vivid, almost dreamy, detail her husband’s macabre work. I listened to her recount his daily contact with the detritus of war, wondering to myself why we so rarely think about who is responsible for “cleaning up” the dead. Later in the film, Andrietta’s graphic, realistic recollections stir visual ruminations on this futile act of posthumous, cosmetic surgery.

“In my previous films, the elusiveness of the biographical impulse pushed me to interweave home-movies, found footage, interviews, and actual letters as a way of exploring the intricacies of my subjects’ lives. Stylistically, I developed a discursive way of working that integrated authentic materials with more artificial, constructed visuals. With The Last Happy Day, I constructed a narrative triangle between Sandor, my Uncle William and myself. While their presence in the film is grounded in a dialogue from the past, my participation is more temporally and geographically fluid, creating an evolving relationship of distance and intimacy through voice and text.

“Early in the film, I jump right into a reverie that introduces Sandor’s strange understanding of the human body—in death and in life. Through an evolving, highly saturated visual language, I contrast the haunting confinement and violence Sandor experienced in Rome during the Nazi occupation with the verdant emptiness of his later life in remotest Brazil. I juxtapose Sandor’s fearless introspection in his unpublished letters with my imagined visualization of his idyllic life in his house in the woods. The geography of his NOW simultaneously saddens and protects him from the threats he fears are still percolating on the other side of the Atlantic. As a way of articulating his longings, I project images from Roberto Rossellini’s hauntingly sad feature film Rome, Open City onto an array of reflective surfaces in Sandor’s vine-covered house in the woods of Brazil.

“Always an exile, a victim of a kind of human ‘continental drift,’ Sandor never felt ‘at home’ in the synthesized post-war euro-culture he found in Brazil. Building a harpsichord on which to play Bach, reading thirteen languages and translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin allowed him to stay connected to an old-world life to which he would never return. Through the visual texture of this film, I use images of landscapes as proscenium, and even as character. The camera searches for familiar terrain, names, and identifiable landmarks: zones of danger, safety, comfort and despair.

“In all honesty, I’ve wanted to make a film about my distant cousin Sandor for over twenty years. His was the only branch of my family that remained in Europe during World War II. During the production, I traveled to Dusseldorf, Germany to meet Sandor’s son, Hansgerd, now in his late sixties. As I stood with my camera, he uncovered a trove of family diaries, letters and inscribed books from the 1920’s and 30’s. Inside each book, Sandor and his parents had meticulously transformed their obviously Jewish name “Levy” to a more Hungarian “Lenard”. Rather than destroying this direct reference to their hidden family identity, Sandor’s family, my sole remaining European relatives, meticulously erased. In their minds, the key to survival in early twentieth century Hungary would be pristine assimilation. My own southern Jewish family in Memphis also refused to grasp fully the catastrophe that was Europe. With far less to lose, their methods of confronting eminent danger were similarly subtle. Keeping this legacy of detachment in mind, I try to create narrative distinctions between close and remote experiences of war. As Sandor’s world fell into a state of hunger and decay, he delighted in the absurd and the arcane. Humor was his life raft, his potent means of resistance. Speaking, reading and writing Latin kept him from what Natalia Ginzburg, another writer trapped in Occupied Italy, called ‘the fury of the waters and the corrosion of his time.’ Through images and writing, implicit connections to our own wartime situation push their way into the fabric of the film.

“Throughout this episodic story, I also work with a cinema-verité style scene of four children (including my two daughters Maya and Noa) grappling with the challenges of putting on a play of Winnie the Pooh, the book Sandor had, strangely enough, chosen to translate into Latin. The children’s extemporaneous conversations express an awareness of both the English and the Latin versions of Pooh, as well as the philosophical ponderings implicit in the text. In my mind, the inclusion of this quintessential sliver of innocence allows me to explore the implicit paradoxes of a life both thwarted and nourished by the contradictions of a troubled time.” (Lynne Sachs)

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs