Category Archives: SECTIONS

Last Address: an elegy for a generation of NYC artists who died of AIDS

Last Address postcard

LastAddresspostcardback

New York University’s Kimmel Center will display Last Address, an exhibition eulogizing a generation of New York City artists who died of AIDS, by the New York-based brother and sister filmmakers Ira Sachs and Lynne Sachs, with designer Bernhard Blythe, Sofia Gallísa, and Andrei Alupului.  The exhibition, comprising 13 translucent, color photographs (67 x 42 in.) will be installed on the exterior of the Kimmel Windows Gallery, located at La Guardia Place & West 3rd St.  Last Address will open April 9 and remain on view through May 31, 2010.

The list of New York artists who died of AIDS over the last 30 years is overwhelming, and the loss immeasurable, asserts the filmmakers.  Last Address uses photographs of the exteriors of the houses, apartment buildings, and lofts where 18 of these artists—Patrick Angus, Reinaldo Arenas, John D. Brockmeyer, Howard Brookner, Ethyl Eichelberger, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring, Hibiscus, Peter Hujar, Harry Kondoleon, Charles Ludlum, Jim Lyons, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cookie Mueller, Vito Russo, Assotto Saint, Ron Vawter, and David Wojnarowicz—were living at the time of their deaths to mark the disappearance of a generation. The installation is a remembrance of that loss, as well as an evocation of the continued presence of these artists’ work in the city’s culture.

“I moved to this city in 1984 and now that I’m in my 40s, I realize even more how I’ve had so few models for how to live a creative life as a gay man,” said Ira Sachs.  “I’m winging it, on my own. So many of the men I might have learned from, read about in the papers, seen in the streets, met in a bar, at the theater, died from AIDS in the years before I might have known them. I was a kid. It seemed like it would last forever, but then it was all gone. I wish they were here.”

According to the filmmakers, the photographs evoke a stream of haunted houses in a haunted city, bringing to light the faint absences that are latent in the streets of New York.  As the viewer moves closer, the windows will also reveal biographical and professional information that offers a greater sense of the life interrupted.  The display is a companion piece to Ira Sachs’ short film, Last Address, which premiered at this year’s Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. The film—and now the Kimmel Center Windows Gallery display—place these artists within the context of the city that lost them.

“In my research and conversations for this piece,” adds Lynne Sachs, who is also an adjunct instructor in the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at the Tisch School of the Arts, “I have become more and more awed by the sense of creative rapture that these artists brought to their every click of a camera, every brushstroke, every step onto the stage, every puckering of the lips. Often knowing early-on that their lives would never allow them to go gray in the dignity of old age, these artists lived their brief time on this earth to the fullest—offering to us their creative legacy to relish and remember.”

For further information, contact: Kimmel.galleries@nyu.edu; lynnesachs@gmail.com; or sachs.ira@mac.com.

LAST ADDRESS BIOGRAPHIES:

Patrick Angus

1953 – 1992

173 W. 88th St.

Patrick Angus was compelled to paint from childhood. Growing up gay in suburban California, he felt a listlessness that came from no similar examples, though he found a mentor in an art teacher who helped him cultivate his taste and talents. Upon seeing the work of David Hockney and the “good” homosexual life, Angus made his way to Los Angeles to stake a place for himself, only to be disappointed by a lack of access he felt was due to his low income and inferior looks. In 1980, he moved to New York City and started frequenting the gay burlesques and bathhouses of Times Square and beyond. He painted canvases of what he viewed as the “bad” gay life – cruising, hustling, darkness – full of shadowy figures sitting in dark porn theaters illuminated by the glow of the projector and the orange tips of their lit cigarettes. Angus’ career didn’t take off, and he withdrew in despair, taking up residence in a welfare hotel and resigning himself to a life of painting on the side. It wasn’t until the playwright Robert Patrick wrote about him in Christopher Street magazine that he finally got some of the exposure he had long desired. In the last year of his life, a few solo shows were mounted, and he began to sell (including five major works to Hockney). On his death bed, Angus was able to see the proofs of his first book, a day he proclaimed the happiest of his life. He was 38 years old.

Twenty-three years after Stonewall, gay people still have few honest images of themselves, and most of these occur in our literature. Gay men long to see themselves – in films, plays, television, paintings. They seldom do. Obviously, we must pictures ourselves. These are my pictures. – Patrick Angus

Reinaldo Arenas

1943 – 1990

328 W. 44th St.

Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban writer who, despite his early sympathy for the 1959 revolution, grew critical of and was later persecuted by the Cuban government. His significant body of work includes Pentagonia, a set of five novels on the “secret history” of post-revolutionary Cuba. Convicted in 1973 of “ideological deviation,” Arenas was imprisoned for three years in El Morro Castle, where he survived by writing letters to the wives and lovers of his fellow inmates. In 1980, he fled to Miami on the Mariel Boatlift, but, once there, he felt ostracized by the Cuban community and moved to New York City. After battling AIDS for three years, Arenas committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs and alcohol.  His autobiography, Before Night Falls, was published two years after his death, at the age of 47.

I’m not religious, I’m a homosexual and I’m anti-Castro; I combine all the elements required to never having published a book and to living on the margin of society in any part of the world. – Reinaldo Arenas

John D. Brockmeyer

1940 – 1990

157 York St., Staten Island

“The creepiest villain never in a Frankenstein movie,” John Brockmeyer was a 6’5″ titan of the stage, and a force in Charles Ludlam’s New York-based Ridiculous Theatrical Company throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Brockmeyer attended Ohio State University before going on to serve in the Navy. In 1970, he made his debut with Ludlam’s troupe, and quickly established himself as the go-to player for all villainous, dastardly and otherwise insidious personalities.  Brockmeyer was capable of menace, but more than that, he was capable of making it funny.  He died of AIDS, aged 50, at his parents’ house in his hometown of Columbus.

Howard Brookner

1954 – 1989

405-465 W. 23rd St.

Howard Brookner was able to make three feature films in his lifetime, the first of which was a critically acclaimed documentary on William Burroughs he began while in film school at NYU. He showed great potential from an early age, winning a New England prep school award for an avant-garde play he wrote as a young student at Phillips Exeter, which centered on a toilet. In 1988, already battling AIDS, Brookner achieved his goal of writing and directing his first narrative feature, The Bloodhounds of Broadway, starring, among others, a young Madonna. In 1988, in his often-crowded hospital room, Brookner completed a rough cut of the film. Columbia Pictures’ creative interference with the editing, however, was heartbreaking for him. His lover Brad Gooch said, “It was a very clear decision. Suddenly the movie wasn’t the movie he wanted to stay alive to see.” He died with his family around him, at the age of 34.

There’s so much beauty in the world. I suppose that’s what got me in trouble in the first place. – Howard Brookner, on a note taped to his fridge throughout his last year.

Ethyl Eichelberger

1945 – 1990

157 York St., Staten Island, NY

Towering over his audiences even before he put on his trademark stiletto heels and skyscraper wig, Ethyl Eichelberger had a breathless Downtown career, creating nearly forty plays that often explored the struggles of strong women in history, literature and myth – from Medea to Mary Todd Lincoln. Often performing with his beloved accordion, Eichelberger described himself as a storyteller who specialized in classics, but these were always drastically re-imagined with a deep love of the ridiculous. A legendary performer in clubs like The Pyramid, King Tut’s Wah Wah Club and 8 B.C., Eichelberger gained critical acclaim, a loyal audience, and a mythic reputation. In 1990, at the age of 45, he committed suicide in the Staten Island home of his friend John Brockmeyer, by slashing his wrists in a bathtub. Some claim PS122 is gently haunted by his spirit. One could also go to this homepage here to get spiritual help.

Isis knows it hasn’t been easy! / It’s a lot of hard work being a queen! / And there are factions out there who don’t like what I represent! / Tough noogies! I have a right to be here! – Ethyl Eichelberger, from his play Nefertiti

Félix González-Torres

1957 – 1996

405-465 W. 23rd St.

Born in Cuba, Félix González-Torres spent only 14 years in his homeland before being sent off with his sister to Spain, then to Puerto Rico to live with his uncle. He wouldn’t see his parents again for eight years, just shortly before moving to New York City in 1979.  González-Torres’ work, often conceptual in nature, concerned itself with inclusiveness, participation, engagement – sharing. Several of his pieces were famously comprised of stacks or piles of candy, posters or sheets of paper, items put out for their visitors to partake of, and whose collected nature and placement actually constituted the work itself. González-Torres maintained throughout his career that his work had only one specific audience in mind – his lover, Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS in 1991, and whom he memorialized by placing reminders of his absence all throughout the city, a series of 24 billboards displaying an empty bed. González-Torres died at the age of 38, in Miami, Florida.

Keith Haring

1958 – 1990

542 LaGuardia Place

An iconic and prolific artist who strived to create truly public art, Keith Haring drew and painted a singular kind of graphic expression based on the primacy of the line. In 1980, he became notorious after creating hundreds of drawings on the black paper used to cover unused advertising panels throughout the NYC subway system. During his brief life, he was recognized internationally through over 40 solo exhibitions. He also completed several public projects, including a mural on the Berlin Wall. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, dedicated to working with AIDS organizations and children’s programs, and which now also strives to expand the audience for his work. Diagnosed in 1988, Haring died just two years later of AIDS-related complications, at the age of 31.

My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic. – Keith Haring

Hibiscus

1949 – 1982

622 Greenwich St.

In 1967, an iconic photo was taken during the March on the Pentagon of a brave, peace-loving teenager in a turtleneck sweater putting flowers into the gun barrels of military police. When that kid grew up, he changed his name from George Harris to Hibiscus. ”He was fascinating even as a small child,” said his mother.  ”All the other kids acted out his fantasies. He directed Cleopatra and used the garden hose as the serpent.”  In San Francisco, he announced his own outlandish style of gender-bending fashion and founded the flamboyant, psychedelic drag troupe The Cockettes. With productions like Journey to the Center of Uranus and Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma, Hibisicus called for a free theater of spiritual liberation.  His second group, Angels of Light, included the likes of his lover Allen Ginsberg in drag. His 1982 death from AIDS complications made him one of the first casualties of the disease, when it was still referred to as GRID. He was 33.

Peter Hujar

1934 – 1987

189 Second Ave

In the ’70s and ’80s, Peter Hujar photographed the wrought underbelly of Manhattan’s Westside with the eye of a classically trained portrait painter whose palette was restricted to, but not limited by, all of the gradations of black and white. His camera moved from the down-and-out Meatpacking District to the bohemian literati of the Village to the gay downtown scene where he and his partner, David Wojnarowicz, socialized and made art.  Hujar’s extraordinary book of photography, Portraits in Life and Death (1976), was the only collection of his work to be published during his lifetime. Friend and fellow photographer Nan Goldin described his images as  “the closest I ever came to experiencing what it is to inhabit male flesh.” He died at the age of 53.

Harry Kondoleon

1955 – 1994

405-465 W. 23rd St.

Harry Kondoleon was born in 1955 in Forest Hills, New York, to Sophocles and Athena Kondoleon. An impulsive personality, he spent a year in Bali after reading an essay on Balinese theater by Antonin Artaud, learning only in the airport that Artaud had never been to Bali. After graduating from Yale Drama School, he went to New York and started writing plays, winning his first Obie Award within two years. Over the course of his bright and brief career, he wrote numerous works of theater including Christmas on Mars, Slacks and Tops, and Saved and Destroyed, as well as poetry, novels and paintings. In 1993, now sick with AIDS, he worked hard to finish his last novel, Diary of a Lost Boy, partially “as a personal achievement to show I wasn’t dead.” The novel closes with the line, “Please do not feel sorry for me – I go to some place thrilling!” He died at the age of 39.

Charles Ludlam

1943 – 1987

55 Morton St

Charles Ludlam grew up in Queens, New York, just a few subway stops from Greenwich Village, and the heart of Gay America. At twenty-four, he founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, where he wrote, directed and performed in almost every production for the next two decades, often with Everett Quinton, his life partner and muse, by his side. Renowned for drag, high comedy, melodrama, satire, precise literary references, gender politics, sexual frolic, and a multitude of acting styles, the Ridiculous Theater guaranteed a kind of biting humor that could both sting and tickle. His many plays included Turds in Hell, Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, a riff on Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Bluebeard, and The Mystery of Irma Vep, his most popular play, and a performer’s tour-de-force. Ludlam continued working until almost the day he died of PCP pneumonia, just three months after his AIDS diagnosis. He was 44.

Most gay theater either apologizes or pleads for mercy. What I do is not gay theater — it’s something much worse.  I don’t ask to be tolerated. I don’t mind being intolerable.
– Charles Ludlam

Jim Lyons

1960 – 2007

75A Willow St., Brooklyn

Passionate about acting and editing, Jim Lyons embraced the art of cinema in all its transformative aspects. His best known dramatic roles were in Poison, a seminal film in the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, and his brazen interpretation of the life of artist David Wojnarowicz in the movie Postcards from America.  But it was as an editor, his life-long métier, that Lyons expressed his keen understanding of the movies and his love for the world of ideas, working often with the filmmaker Todd Haynes on works such as Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, and Far from Heaven. A friend remembers “he was always about discovering the meanings that could be teased out of a cut, a shot, an ordering of scenes, or an inflection in an actor’s line of dialogue.”  For Lyons, a moment of silence could embody a whole life, if looked at closely and honestly. Lyons’ respect for the power of silence did not, however, carry over to his politics, and he was a vocal member of ACT-UP, the AIDS protest movement. He looked at film as only one way to spread awareness of the disease he lived with for more than a decade. He died at the age of 46.

Robert Mapplethorpe

1946 – 1989

35 W. 23rd St

While exploring and documenting New York’s underground S&M scene in the ’70s, Robert Mapplethorpe began to create his signature large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits of naked men. These elegant, precise images triggered some of the most vociferous debates around art and obscenity in the 20th Century. Bridging notions of physical beauty from classical antiquity with a blossoming contemporary gay sexuality, his photos exuded a stark homosexual eroticism that created shockwaves throughout ‘80s America. Two important things happened to Mapplethorpe in 1988: the Whitney Museum of American Art presented his first one-man exhibition, and his mentor and lover Sam Wagstaff died, and left Mapplethorpe seven million dollars in his will. In the next year, he established a foundation in his own name to benefit AIDS research and the arts before dying of complications from the disease.

I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them. – Robert Mapplethorpe

Cookie Mueller

1949 – 1989

285 Bleecker St

Cookie Mueller was an actress, writer, mother, fashion designer, and go-go dancer. In the 1970s she performed in the John Waters’ film extravaganzas Pink Flamingos and Female Troubles in their shared hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. In Waters’ words, she was “a witch-doctor, art-hag and, above all a goddess.” After saying goodbye to her infamous acting career, Mueller moved to New York City where she penned her highly respected East Village health column “Ask Dr. Mueller.” Shortly before her death from AIDS, at the age of 40, Mueller wrote these words of advice to her readers:

Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free. – Cookie Mueller

Vito Russo

1946 – 1990

401 W. 22nd (building gone)

In the 1970s, Vito Russo traveled across the country giving lectures on the depiction of gay characters in both Hollywood and foreign films. Out of this experience, he wrote The Celluloid Closet in 1981, a groundbreaking study of the representation of gays in the movies. In addition to his work as a scholar, Russo was a fearless leader in the gay liberation movement and a vocal AIDS activist. He co-founded GLAAD, the organization which now presents the Vito Russo Award every year to an openly gay or lesbian member of the media community for their commitment to combating homophobia, as well as ACT UP, the media savvy AIDS protest group famous for their “Silence Equals Death” pronouncement. Russo was 44 when he died, and it is claimed that some of his ashes rest inside the walls of the historic Castro Theater in the heart of San Francisco.

Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people…and gay people what to think about themselves. – Vito Russo

Assotto Saint
1957 – 1994
360 W. 22nd St.

Assotto Saint (born Yves Lubin) was a Haitian-born poet, playwright and activist whose explicitly black themes made him one of the most important literary voices in the burgeoning gay literary movement of the late 20th Century. To his fellow Haitians, who had also directly experienced the ugliness of the Francois Duvalier era, he offered a spiritual sanctuary, as “a grand, tall queen” who could be both big brother and mother. In addition to his work as a writer, Saint was a passionate advocate for the writings of others in his community, creating his own Galiens Press, and editing The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets. During his lifetime, he was able to publish two collections of his own writing, Stations and Wishing for Wings. Honoring him for their annual literary award, LAMDA described Saint as “one of the fiercest spirits ever to grace the planet.” He died at the age of 36.

Ron Vawter

1948 – 1994

285 Bleecker St

Ron Vawter was the quintessential downtown performer and a founding member of The Wooster Group, an internationally known theater collective based in NYC. He brought to the world of the avant-garde a unique combination of life experiences, including training as a Green Beret in the US Special Forces and his work as a chaplain. In the words of the Village Voice, “Vawter’s resolution of the tensions between theatrical passion and military precision….have not only helped make the Wooster Group a controversial and intellectually assaultive ensemble but Vawter himself a legendary and explosively controlled actor.”  In 1993, Vawter, who also appeared in films like Swoon, Philadelphia, Silence of the Lambs, and sex, lies, and videotape, wrote and peformed in his final play, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, a one man show in which he explored the themes of sexual identity through these two infamous men, both of whom died of AIDS. Vawter died one year later on a plane from Zurich to New York, of an AIDS-related heart attack, at the age of 45.

David Wojnarowicz

1954 – 1992

189 2nd Ave

Throughout his brief life, David Wojnarowicz waged a revolt against death. Through his public excavation of his fantasies and above all his dreams, which he systematically wrote down, he created a revolutionary language of art – one that embraced writing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, photography, and performance art.  From his teenage years as a hustler in Times Square to his cross-country hitchhiking escapades, Wojnarowicz sought a visceral version of American history that would embrace the spirit and the body of a gay identity. In the late 1980s, after he was diagnosed with AIDS, Wojnarowicz became a highly politicized artist, entangling himself in national public debates about medical research and funding, morality, and censorship. An incendiary collection of his writings, Close to the Knives, was first published in 1991, one year before his death at the age of 37.

I am shouting my invisible words. I am getting so weary. I am growing tired. I am waving at you from here. I am crawling and looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. — David Wojnarowicz

Lynne Sachs Retrospective in San Francisco and Berkeley April 10-14, 2010

handcuffs

States of Belonging: A Lynne Sachs Retrospective

Working since the mid-1980s, variously on lyrical formal shorts and long form experimental documentary, Lynne Sachs’ body of film and video work has explored the relationships between individual memory and experience in the context of large historical forces. Foregrounding personal history and autobiography, Sachs exalts the intimate gesture as perhaps the most heroic of poetic and political acts. With a keen grasp on cultural theory and media history, Sachs’s films avoid academicism in their celebration of life and mindful political engagement, presenting complex pictures of the world with lyrical grace and even joy.

Lynne Sachs: States of Belonging is a four-part retrospective of the filmmaker’s work, presented as a collaboration between San Francisco Cinematheque, Pacific Film Archive, ATA’s Other Cinema and Oddball Film + Video. The series in accompanied by a limited-edition monograph—available at screenings—featuring original writings by Susan Gerhardt, Kathy Geritz, Lucas Hilderbrand and Bill Nichols.

States of Belonging, program one
Saturday, April 10 at 8:30 pm
Other Cinema at Artist Television Access
992 Valencia St., San Francisco
http://www.othercinema.com/calendar/index.html

“GIRL TALK”
Curated by Craig Baldwin

Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Latin America, here’s the world debut of Wind in Our Hair, Lynne Sachs’ 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, the 42-min. lyric is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine sociopolitical unrest. Shot with 16mm, Super 8mm, and Regular 8mm film and video, the rites of passage proceed from train tracks to sidewalks, into costume stores, kitchens, and into backyards in the heart of today’s Buenos Aires. PLUS: In her House of Science: a museum of false facts, Sachs suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title—private, public, and idealized space—without wholly inhabiting any of them. The film explores society’s conceptions of woman through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found-footage and voice-over. ALSO Lynne’s Atalanta: 32 Years Later; Noa, Noa; and Photograph of Wind.
Wind in Our Hair (Con viento en el pelo) (2010); Atalanta: 32 Years Later (2006); Noa, Noa (2006, with Noa Street-Sachs); Photograph of Wind (2001); The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991)

States of Belonging, program two
Sunday, April 11 at  8:00pm
Oddball Films
275 Capp St.  San Francisco
http://www.oddballfilm.com/

“10 Short Films by Lynne Sachs (1986 -2010)”
Curated by Stephen Parr

Lynne Sachs short works reverberate with the distilled quality of  poetic moments. From her early work in 16mm film in the 1980s through her later works utilizing the immediacy of videotape, the texture of 8mm film and expanded pallet of digital editing techniques, Sachs’ works celebrate the ordinary and the profound, mapping and defining unmined territories of the human psyche.  Elegantly fusing her varied influences of  literature, painting  and collage into a inviting yet deep and personal space these shorts bristle with the feeling of newly discovered modes of perception and expressions of movement in time. (Stephen Parr)

Still Life With Woman and Four Objects (1986); Drawn and Quartered (1986) Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987); Window Work ( 2001); The Small Ones (. 2006); Atalanta (2006); Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008); Cuadro por Cuardo en Montevideo (with Mark Street, 2009); XY Chromosome Project (2006-2009); Task of the Translator (2010)

States of Belonging, program three
Tuesday, April 13 at 7:30 pm
Pacific Film Archive
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph, Berkeley

“Dotted Lines: Women Filmmakers Connect the Past and the Present”
Curated by Kathy Geritz

Lynne Sachs has been making films for twenty-five years, shifting between short, lyrical works and longer experimental documentaries, all distinguished by her beautiful camerawork and poetic associations. Her most recent film, The Last Happy Day, is a portrait of a distant cousin, Sandor Lenard, whose life was shaped by war and marked by his unusual pursuits. A Jewish doctor living in Hungary, he fled the Nazis in 1938, relocating to Italy. After he later moved to Brazil, he translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. His story is revealed through letters and interviews, punctuated by scenes from Winnie the Pooh acted out by Sachs’s children and their friends. Which Way Is East, made fifteen years earlier, chronicles Sachs’s trip to Vietnam to visit her sister Dana; the pair traveled together from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Impressionistic yet keenly observed, the film reveals details of life during and after the Vietnam War, interspersed with Vietnamese proverbs and voice-over remarks by both Lynne and Dana as well as Vietnamese friends. Both films are part of a larger series, I Am Not a War Photographer, and along with the short cine-poem Tornado, they provide unique perspectives on the personal impact of war.(Kathy Gertiz)

Which Way is East (1994);  The Last Happy Day (2009);  Tornado (2001)

States of Belonging, program four
Wednesday, April 14 at 7:30 pm
SF Cinematheque at California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street (near 16th), San Francisco

The Last Happy Day  and Investigations of a Flame
Curated by Steve Polta

A frequent theme in Sachs’ work is the aftermath of war and its lingering effects on multi-generational families. Investigation of a Flame is a work of poetic investigative journalism which explores a 1968 Vietnam War protest in suburban Baltimore. Blending archival footage of the event, period reportage and contemporary interviews with participants Daniel and Philip Berrigan, the film examines the resonances of the act over the succeeding decades. A more personal work, 2009’s The Last Happy Day portrays a distant cousin of Sachs, Sandor Lenard. A Jewish writer and doctor, Lenard fled the Nazis and, post-war, worked with the US Army to identify human remains. Later, while living in self-imposed exile in the Brazilian jungle, Lenard achieved brief fame for translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin. Incorporating excerpts from Lenard’s later letters to his estranged family, and on-screen performances by her own children, the film stands as a moving tribute to quiet heroism. Also screening: Sachs’ 2007 “collaborative update” of Chris Marker’s 1972 short Three Cheers for the Whale. (Steve Polta)

The Last Happy Day (16mm  on video, 38 min. 2009); Investigation of a Flame (45 min. color and B&W, 2001); Three Cheers for the Whale
by Chris Mark in collaboration with Lynne Sachs (17 minutes / color, english version, 2007)

New Films by Lynne Sachs Reviewed in Chicago Reader

Chicago Reader
The Films of Lynne Sachs
Review by Andrea Gronvall
March 12, 2010
Family, history, and oblivion pervade these two short works. With the experimental documentary Last Happy Day (2009, 39 min.) Sachs reconstructs the life of a distant relative, Hungarian doctor Sandor Lenard, who escaped the Holocaust, settled in Brazil, and, among other things, translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. Sachs’s daughters and their friends read from this text and and recite bits of Lenard’s biography, providing a piquant tonal contrast to the archival footage and the interviews with his son and his second wife. A visit to Buenos Aires and short stories by Julio Cortazar inspired the dreamy narrative Wind in Our Hair (2009, 42 min.), which deals with sisterhood, children’s games, passing trains, and brief encounters.

Otherzine Review of Experiments in Documentary Issue of Millennium Film Journal #51

othercinema logo

Looking Glass

by Gerry Fialka

19 Feb 2010

[Reviewed: ‘Millennium Film Journal’ #51]

How do you make art that is not art? Duchamp did it with readymade meta-cognitive creations. He helped spawn motionless dance, invisible art, silent music (John Cage’s 4’33”), the unreadable book (James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and George Manupelli’s unwatchable Film For Hooded Projector. And why make art that’s not art? That’s a good question. I wouldn’t want to ruin it with an answer. But learning how to cope with the hidden effects of what we invent may help. Duchamp sparked awareness of the sense-ratio-shift caused by inventions. He morphed the visual experience into the conceptual experience. Marshall McLuhan probed that “why” with his “media fast” proposition. It grew out of Ezra Pound’s “artists are the antennae of the race, broadcasting the hidden environments of inventions so we can cope with them.”

How do you make a doc that’s not a doc? How do you make an experimental film that is not one? How and why do moving image experimenters and documentarians combine their genres? Howard Guttenplan’s Millennium Film Journal (Spring/Summer 2009, #51) deeply penetrates these questions and creative cross-fertilizations. Guest editors, Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs have gathered innovators to fill 100 pages of insights. Jill Godmilow’s advice to abandon “truth claims, intimacy and satisfying forms” recalls genre-bending pioneer Luis Bunuel’s “I have always been on the side of those who seek the truth, but I part ways with them when they think they have found it.” Reading MFJ raises new questions. Richard Fung queries, “What kind of truths can be communicated better in documentary than in fiction – and vice versa?” This echoes Faulkner’s “Sometimes the best fiction is more true than journalism.” The essays provoke us to examine the motives and consequences of these media practitioners.

Here are my favorites:

1) Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner “unmask” the genre with essential observations on Bunuel’s Las Hurdes, which “will always stick in the craw of the powers that be.” How do you make an experimental doc that’s not an experimental doc? Luis did. His “thank God I’m an atheist” embraces contradiction. Larsen and Millner’s astute word choice “radical in-betweeness” mirrors McLuhan’s axiom “the gap is where the action is.”

2) Deborah Stratman astonishes with keen intelligence. She out-quotes me with Straub, Godard, Bunuel and Trinh Min-Ha. But it’s the Kafka axiom that ice-picks our foreheads with “what are we reading for?” She asks the reader to send her recommendations of new ways to see and think about the world. Stratman is not afraid to use all caps in a “LAWLESS PROPOSITION.”

3) Mark Street’s grassroots essay is a needed relief from the wild sea of polemic discourse. His simple story of a parents’ party for school kids communicates warmly the concerns of intention in the creative process. The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything as well as they can. Street lays it on the line with “it’s hard to communicate…I often find myself tongue-tied.” (Artists often aspire to make that which words can’t describe.) The honesty blossoms from unknowing into epiphany, much like Hilderbrand’s brilliant introduction entitled “Contradiction, Uncertainty, Change.” “The aesthetic of ambiguity” recharges Robert Dobbs’ “Ambiguity is a sign of human maturity.”

4) Hilderbrand and Sachs provide a chance to ponder the many connections between reality and experiments in documentaries. I recently interviewed Jay Rosenblatt, who said Chris Marker was an important influence because of “how he imagined Marker made Sans Soleil.” Rosenblatt could read and study all about Marker’s background, process and intentions till the cows come home. But in the long run, it’s how the perception resonates that’s vital.

What does it become when pressed to an extreme? That’s the fourth question of McLuhan’s Tetrad – the reversal. Kierkegaard wrote “Life can only be understood backwards, but we must live it forward,” which reverberates with Lynne Sachs’ remembrance “When I was six years old, I would lie on the living room couch, hang my head over the edge, let my hair swing against the floor and watch the evening news upside-down.”

5) Liza Johnson articulates the potential in her “small gesture of making the film (South of Ten)” with the statement “nothing is inevitable.” Johnson’s use of the word “inevitable” reminded me that MFJ’s inspired exploration of moving image art is, indeed, in the printed word medium, instead of being a film. This flips Hollis Frampton, who once said that one should lecture on film in the dark.

The word “inevitable” was also used by Marshall McLuhan, who probed form and content issues. He wrote “It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can get through.” Millennium Film Journal #51 provides that inevitable looking glass.

What does the experimental documentary flip into when pushed to an extreme? How do we develop the skills to analyze this question? Can we master the ever-changing language of experimental documentaries so we can assimilate them into our total culture heritage? Since 1995, I have curated such films in my Documental series via Chris Marker’s words: “in the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints, and mirrorlike fugues. Out of the these juxtaposed memories is born a fictional memory.” Or it’s like Guy Maddin says: “manufactured memory.” By hybridizing two genres, filmmakers have accumulated images that “can have conversation among themselves – or better yet, a musical conversation that sings to us about the differences between past and present, witness and participant.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum.

THE END

by Gerry Fialka

19 Feb 2010

[Reviewed: ‘Millennium Film Journal’ #51]

How do you make art that is not art? Duchamp did it with readymade meta-cognitive creations. He helped spawn motionless dance, invisible art, silent music (John Cage’s 4’33”), the unreadable book (James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and George Manupelli’s unwatchable Film For Hooded Projector. And why make art that’s not art? That’s a good question. I wouldn’t want to ruin it with an answer. But learning how to cope with the hidden effects of what we invent may help. Duchamp sparked awareness of the sense-ratio-shift caused by inventions. He morphed the visual experience into the conceptual experience. Marshall McLuhan probed that “why” with his “media fast” proposition. It grew out of Ezra Pound’s “artists are the antennae of the race, broadcasting the hidden environments of inventions so we can cope with them.”

How do you make a doc that’s not a doc? How do you make an experimental film that is not one? How and why do moving image experimenters and documentarians combine their genres? Howard Guttenplan’s Millennium Film Journal (Spring/Summer 2009, #51) deeply penetrates these questions and creative cross-fertilizations. Guest editors, Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs have gathered innovators to fill 100 pages of insights. Jill Godmilow’s advice to abandon “truth claims, intimacy and satisfying forms” recalls genre-bending pioneer Luis Bunuel’s “I have always been on the side of those who seek the truth, but I part ways with them when they think they have found it.” Reading MFJ raises new questions. Richard Fung queries, “What kind of truths can be communicated better in documentary than in fiction – and vice versa?” This echoes Faulkner’s “Sometimes the best fiction is more true than journalism.” The essays provoke us to examine the motives and consequences of these media practitioners.

Here are my favorites:

1) Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner “unmask” the genre with essential observations on Bunuel’s Las Hurdes, which “will always stick in the craw of the powers that be.” How do you make an experimental doc that’s not an experimental doc? Luis did. His “thank God I’m an atheist” embraces contradiction. Larsen and Millner’s astute word choice “radical in-betweeness” mirrors McLuhan’s axiom “the gap is where the action is.”

2) Deborah Stratman astonishes with keen intelligence. She out-quotes me with Straub, Godard, Bunuel and Trinh Min-Ha. But it’s the Kafka axiom that ice-picks our foreheads with “what are we reading for?” She asks the reader to send her recommendations of new ways to see and think about the world. Stratman is not afraid to use all caps in a “LAWLESS PROPOSITION.”

3) Mark Street’s grassroots essay is a needed relief from the wild sea of polemic discourse. His simple story of a parents’ party for school kids communicates warmly the concerns of intention in the creative process. The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything as well as they can. Street lays it on the line with “it’s hard to communicate…I often find myself tongue-tied.” (Artists often aspire to make that which words can’t describe.) The honesty blossoms from unknowing into epiphany, much like Hilderbrand’s brilliant introduction entitled “Contradiction, Uncertainty, Change.” “The aesthetic of ambiguity” recharges Robert Dobbs’ “Ambiguity is a sign of human maturity.”

4) Hilderbrand and Sachs provide a chance to ponder the many connections between reality and experiments in documentaries. I recently interviewed Jay Rosenblatt, who said Chris Marker was an important influence because of “how he imagined Marker made Sans Soleil.” Rosenblatt could read and study all about Marker’s background, process and intentions till the cows come home. But in the long run, it’s how the perception resonates that’s vital.

What does it become when pressed to an extreme? That’s the fourth question of McLuhan’s Tetrad – the reversal. Kierkegaard wrote “Life can only be understood backwards, but we must live it forward,” which reverberates with Lynne Sachs’ remembrance “When I was six years old, I would lie on the living room couch, hang my head over the edge, let my hair swing against the floor and watch the evening news upside-down.”

5) Liza Johnson articulates the potential in her “small gesture of making the film (South of Ten)” with the statement “nothing is inevitable.” Johnson’s use of the word “inevitable” reminded me that MFJ’s inspired exploration of moving image art is, indeed, in the printed word medium, instead of being a film. This flips Hollis Frampton, who once said that one should lecture on film in the dark.

The word “inevitable” was also used by Marshall McLuhan, who probed form and content issues. He wrote “It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can get through.” Millennium Film Journal #51 provides that inevitable looking glass.

What does the experimental documentary flip into when pushed to an extreme? How do we develop the skills to analyze this question? Can we master the ever-changing language of experimental documentaries so we can assimilate them into our total culture heritage? Since 1995, I have curated such films in my Documental series via Chris Marker’s words: “in the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints, and mirrorlike fugues. Out of the these juxtaposed memories is born a fictional memory.” Or it’s like Guy Maddin says: “manufactured memory.” By hybridizing two genres, filmmakers have accumulated images that “can have conversation among themselves – or better yet, a musical conversation that sings to us about the differences between past and present, witness and participant.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum.

THE END

http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=23&article_id=99

Lynne Sachs at Chicago Filmmakers

Chicago Filmmakers logo

http://www.chicagofilmmakers.org

Chicago Filmmakers
Friday, March 12th, 2010 – 8:00 PM
5243 N. Clark St., 2nd Floor

NEW FILMS BY LYNNE SACHS
TALES FROM SOUTH AMERICA
Filmmaker In Person! Jewish-Hungarian doctor Sandor Lenard fled Budapest shortly before World War II for the safe distance of Brazil. He abandoned his medical practice and took up translating “Winnie the Pooh” in Latin, which soon became an international bestseller. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs discovered him only recently through letters to an uncle, and pieced together a sense of his life and personality in the exquisite new film LAST HAPPY DAY (2009, 39 min.). Her daughters are enlisted to dramatize bits of his life, and Sachs sets out to reclaim a bit of his dignity and purpose using letters, newsreel footage, and recreations of Sandor’s environment as if to channel him back from the past.

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.

The Task of the Translator

Latin student hand at window

The Task of the Translator (10 min., 2010)

Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of  a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses.  Second, she witnesses  a group of Classics scholars confronted  with the  haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.

“In The Task of the Translator, Lynne Sachs turns her original, probing eye to the ways in which we struggle to put words to the horrifying realities of War.  In her subtle, trademark shifting between the intimate, personal space of a few individuals and the cavernous, echoing ambiguity of larger, moral questions, Sachs stakes out unsettling territory concerning what it means–what it feels like–to be made into unwitting voyeurs of Mankind’s most grotesque doings.   At the same time we find she is also talking, with startling deftness, about the way that all artists are, in the end, engaged in the task of the translator: stuck with the impossible task of rendering imponderables, unutterables, and unsayables, into neat representations to be consumed, digested, perhaps discarded.  We are not, however, left despairing; a pair of hands, caught again and again in the beautiful motion of gesticulation, is far from helpless or mute.  This image captures, rather, the supreme eloquence of the effort to translate, and the poignant hope represented by this pungent, memorable film itself.”      — Shira Nayman,   author of the novels The Listener and Awake in the Dark,

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde. 

3RD ANNUAL EXPERIMENTAL LECTURE: Ken Jacobs ” CUCARACHA CINEMA”

jacobs_2 poster

 

 

 

 

NYU Cinema Studies, NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, and NYU Undergraduate Film and Television present
The 3rd Annual Experimental Lecture

Ken Jacobs ” CUCARACHA CINEMA”
Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010
6:15 p.m.   FREE

Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
721 Broadway, 6th Fl.
Michelson Theater

 

“Most movies just make the time pass. Jacobs suspends time. He holds it up to the light so you can see it, letting it flicker for us a little longer. Finally, you see everything you have been missing.” (Manhola Dargis, New York Times)

“Ken Jacobs’ teaching was ecstatic. It was like a volcano.”
(J. Hoberman, former student and film critic for The Village Voice.)

 

 

Ken Jacobs has been making avant-garde film in New York City since the late 1950s. He is the director of “Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son” (1969, USA),” Star Spangled to Death”(2004, USA), and numerous other cinematic visions on celluloid and tape. Jacobs, who taught for many years in SUNY Binghampton’s renowned program on avant-garde film, coined the term paracinema in the early 1970s, referring to cinema experiences provided by means outside of standard cinema technology.

“It’s not natural for anybody with a sex drive to be hopeless. In fact it’s a contradiction in terms, or something. However, we can’t consider Obama’s betrayal -protecting the Bush-Cheney secrets, expanding the war/s, fucking over the peons while rewarding Wall Street thugs, etc, etc- to be leading towards anything other than ka-boom!   Sexy Ken is not hopeless. Because my interest in cinema has much to do with 3D perception I need to learn more about cockroaches, the likely inheritors of the planet,. I’m tuning my art to accommodate cockroach concerns. You don’t catch me whining; I adapt, and Cucaracha Cinema is clearly the next big thing. We’ll intersperse short and long works during the talk and the audience should feel free to say or ask anything — but stick to art, to the discussion of its intrinsic dynamics and we’ll let the rest of the world go by. There will be new works that require “free-viewing” in 3D.” (Ken Jacobs)

Lynne Sachs presents three films in Pamplona, Spain

Last Happy Day still of childupsidedown copy

Still from “The Last Happy Day” by Lynne Sachs

A filmmaker who started work in the second half of the Eighties, Lynne Sachs effortlessly saunters between film, video, the internet and gallery installations. Principally concerned with the involvement of individuals in History, Lynne Sachs’ films often adopt the film essay form to explore the interrelationship between collective and subjective memory. Her films mix the most experimental and poetic of approaches with live recording, archive material and a range of narrative sources, all with the same air of ease.

To celebrate her participation on the Punto de Vista 2010 jury, we would like to make the most of the occasion to present two of her films: Investigation of a Flame and The Last Happy Days. Both films approach periods of war (Vietnam and the Second World War, respectively) to probe the responses of specific individuals in the face of such circumstances. Both leave the public wondering about their own ability to react in today’s no-less belligerent climate. And as the cherry on the sundae, the session is to be brought to a close with Three Cheers for the Whale, the English-language version of a 1972 Chris Marker film (Vive la baleine) which Lynne Sachs personally oversaw in 2007 and which has never been screened in Spain before. For Punto de Vista, the honour of presenting all these films for the first time in Spain is more than just a simple luxury.

Lynne in Punta de Vista

Blogs and Docs interview with Lynne Sachs (Spanish)

Blogs and Docs interview by Pablo Marin with Lynne Sachs: http://www.blogsandocs.com/?p=216 anan

Su estilo cinematográfico, siempre en movimiento, se ubica en la encrucijada del cine documental, experimental y de ensayo autobiográfico al mismo tiempo que transciende cualquiera de estas categorías preestablecidas. Territorio estético en constante tensión, difícil de explicar con palabras, su visión creativa se expande de fotograma a fotograma como esos organismos microscópicos capaces de multiplicar su tamaño y forma en cuestión de minutos. Siempre rigurosa… siempre aleatoria. Y renovadora, claro.

Trabajando con, contra y más allá de la realidad. Una entrevista con Lynne Sachs.

A mitad de camino entre la teoría y la práctica, la obra de la cineasta, profesora, comisaria y escritora norteamericana Lynne Sachs es prácticamente única. ¿Única? Sí. Su estilo cinematográfico, siempre en movimiento, se ubica en la encrucijada del cine documental, experimental y de ensayo autobiográfico al mismo tiempo que transciende cualquiera de estas categorías preestablecidas. Territorio estético en constante tensión, difícil de explicar con palabras, su visión creativa se expande de fotograma a fotograma como esos organismos microscópicos capaces de multiplicar su tamaño y forma en cuestión de minutos. Siempre rigurosa… siempre aleatoria. Y renovadora, claro.

Durante el pasado mes de abril, Lynne Sachs visitó Buenos Aires bajo el marco de la nueva edición del Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (Bafici 2007) para presentar tres de sus películas: Which Way is East (1994), Investigation of a Flame (2001) y States of UnBelonging (2005). Además, ofreció como actividad paralela un workshop dedicado a su obra y a los caminos paralelos del documental.

En medio de la catarata de imágenes profundamente evocativas que caracterizan su cine (esto es, en completo estado de exaltación y trance), tuve la posibilidad de charlar, junto al programador del Bafici Leandro Listorti, con una de las documentalistas más encantadoramente atípicas de los Estados Unidos.(1)

Venís presentando este workshop a lo largo del mundo, ¿cómo surgió la idea?

Lo que me atrajo de la idea de preparar una suerte de clase única fue tratar de ver la realización de trabajos que respondan a la realidad en dos maneras diferentes. Cada vez que quieres interpretar algo que sucede alrededor tuyo, lo haces desde un lugar interior y de otro exterior. Y la parte interesante es donde esos dos lugares convergen. La primera parte es aquella en la que decidí mostrar pequeños trabajos que hice que pienso que son expresiones directas de algunas observaciones muy pequeñas dotadas de una carga visual electrizante que presencié a lo largo de mi vida. Y luego esa expresión inmediata o articulación volcada hacia el cine. La segunda parte trata sobre la continuación de este interior pero sumándole el exterior. De manera que son respuestas inmediatas al mundo visible. En conjunción con nuestra manera de darnos cuenta de la dialéctica, de esas tensiones que nos rodean para mí como la intersección entre un reconocimiento personal y una conciencia más pública.

¿Cómo llegaste a la definición de que “no soy una fotógrafa de guerra”?

Surgió al darme cuenta de que había hecho varias películas que trataban el tema de la guerra, no era que no lo notara, pero en un momento lo vi más claro, en cierta manera la idea apareció como lo hizo con mi definición de que no soy agnóstica. Dando una idea de lo que no soy, creo que le doy un giro a lo que soy. De hecho el 99.9% de la gente no es un/a fotógrafo/a de guerra. Diciendo eso, estoy diciendo que soy una persona común y corriente.

Todas tus películas, incluidas esas que mostraste en el workshop, tienen una estructura muy poco rígida, casi como improvisada, ¿piensas que es posible iniciar un proyecto sin tener una idea definida?

Pienso que la mayoría de las cosas devienen de la observación. Es interesante porque he trabajado de ambas maneras. En mi película The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), comencé con una idea sobre mi resistencia como mujer en la manera en que la ciencia determina cómo debe ser una mujer en el mundo, y esto históricamente estuvo ligado a una percepción masculina. De manera que realicé una película desde el amor a la ciencia pero en oposición al establishment científico. Esa fue mi idea. Pero lo curioso es que también terminó siendo una de mis películas más experimentales, realizada a partir de collages, found footage y extrañas performances. Pero sí, todo partió de la base de explorar mi relación con la ciencia, específicamente en relación a los cuerpos y resultó en un cruce entre la ciencia y el arte. Por otra parte muchas de mis películas siguen un criterio del “all yes” (todo vale): cualquier idea, cualquier pensamiento, cualquier cosa que me haya ocurrido, es introducido en la película. Eso ocurre en Which Way is East, la cual comenzó sin demasiadas ideas. A diferencia de la mayoría de los cineastas norteamericanos que filmaron en Vietnam, traté de ir con la mente en blanco. De modo que es una mezcla, que comienza de cualquier manera pero rara vez parte de un guión.

En tu última película States of UnBelonging eso se refleja muy bien. Es una película situada en el medio de las ideas y lo espontáneo: comienza con un suceso histórico (el asesinato de la cineasta israelí Revital Ohavon durante un ataque terrorista a un kibbutz) pero a medida que avanza vas incorporando el proceso creativo en tiempo presente, sin eliminar ciertas fallas o dudas.

Eso no fue algo que planeé. Las dudas también son muy importantes, la mayoría de las veces sirven para que la audiencia establezca una conexión con la película, para que se adapte. Ken Jacobs es un cineasta que siempre me inspiró con su teoría de que hacemos un cine “de errores”. Pero no es tanto como querer filmar con cierto nivel de exposición de luz y que no salga de esa manera: es pensar que si el sonido no salió significa que no quería salir de esa manera. Es algo más espiritual. Es tratar de tener una naturaleza menos controladora. En cierta forma es como decía Jonas Mekas, “hacemos films del color de la sangre”. Y no es que queramos hacer películas con sangre, sino tener una relación corpórea con el material.