“Experiments in Documentary”
Millennium Film Journal 51 (Spring/Summer 2009) Guest Edited by Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs
These media artists challenge the way we see (and hear) documentary. While visually and aurally innovative, they are also socially engaged, offering cultural critiques that cannot be reduced to a singular agenda. Through their engagement with images and institutions, they open up new ways of examining how we understand our world and our history.
Featuring contributions by
Peggy Ahwesh, Tommy Becker, Michelle Citron, Donigan Cumming, Jeanne
Finley, Sasha Waters Freyer, Su Friedrich, Richard Fung, Barbara Hammer,
Lucas Hilderbrand, Adele Horne, Liza Johnson, Alexandra Juhasz, Jonathan
Kahana, Leandro Katz, Caroline Koebel, Ernie Larsen, Jessie Lerner, Julia
Meltzer, Sherry Millner, Frédéric Moffet, John Muse, Lynne Sachs, MM
Serra, Conrad Steiner, Deborah Stratman, Mark Street, Tess Takahashi,
David Thorne, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Grahame Weinbren, Chie Yamayoshi, and
Greg Youmans
Actor, Director Tim Robbins Takes Up Historic Vietnam War Protest in Production of “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine”
Academy Award-winning actor, director and writer Tim Robbins is involved in a new production of Father Daniel Berrigan’s acclaimed play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. The play centers on the events of May 17th, 1968, when nine Catholic peace activists, including Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother, the late Father Philip Berrigan, entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. They were arrested and then sentenced in a highly publicized trial that galvanized the antiwar movement. We speak to Robbins about the play, which is being staged by his Los Angeles troupe, the Actors’ Gang.
“XY Chromosome Project” 12 min. 2007
“The Small Ones”, 3 min. video 2006
“Noa, Noa”, 8 min. 16mm, 2006
“Atalanta 32 Years Later” 5 min. video, 2006
“Tornado”, 4 min. video 2002
“Photograph of Wind” 4 min. 16mm, silent, 2001
“Window Work” 9 min. video, 2000
“Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning”, 9 min. 16mm. 1987..
“Still Life With Woman and Four Objects”, 4 min. B&W 16mm., 1986
“Drawn and Quartered”, 4 min. color 16mm., 1987
“Lynne Sachs is best known for her spirited and lyrical essay films—films defined by an unwavering woman’s inflection and a commitment to pry the cracks in official history. However, throughout Sachs’s career, we’ve been treated to a succession of short experimental works that tease out the details of the everyday with the same clarity of vision and instinct for the hand-nurtured image as her much-lauded lengthier works. These films and videotapes, whether they be mystified glimpses of childhood, reinventions of films past, or formal excursions into the poetic, surrender the wonder of a world seen by an artist with a soulful eye and a conscientious heart.” –Steve Seid, Film-Video Curator, Pacific Film Archive
“Equal parts humanist and formalist, poet and historian, telling tales that are both timeless and political, Lynne Sachs creates film worlds in which the textures of daily domestic life are seamlessly connected to the realms of war, political activism, and our response to terrorist attacks. In one film, a grid becomes a secret map for understanding the difference between male and female. In another, an affectionate portrait of her young daughter becomes a study of whirling circular energy. For each of these ten shorts, Sachs creates a unique film language, by weaving together images, sounds, and words that evoke a particular way of viewing the world. All of these works reveal a sensibility that refuses to flatten either life or art, insisting on a multilevel reality in which the personal and the universal become doorways to a broader consciousness.” –David Finkelstein, writer for filmthreat.com
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” — Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
“Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings.” –George Kuchar, filmmaker
“Profound, the soundtrack amazing….the image of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful.” –Barbara Hammer, filmmkaer
“In Sachs’s theatrical, microcosmic worlds, the everyday is defamiliarized. Objects — toys, hands, a cherry pie, a miniature Empire State Building — resonate and tremble.” Bosko Blagojevic, Flavorpill.net Reviews
Educational Media Reviews Online
http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/emroDetail.asp?Number=3352 Selected Screenings:
TriBeca Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Tate Museum of Art London, Whitney Museum of Art
We will serve Yerba Mate tea in a communal gourd and sweet dessert churros in the lobby before the show.
This rollicking evening of challenging, expressive and oppositional Argentine cinema offers a window onto makers shredding formal niceties, relishing in risk and daring to access the sublime. From an achingly beautiful evocation of an hourglass to a darkly humorous evisceration of the tenets of the stock market, this program will take us to the land where summer is winter and winter is summer and render our souls topsy-turvy for a bit too. Last summer NYC experimental filmmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs immersed themselves in the Buenos Aires film community through a variety of collaborative cinematic endeavors. In addition to shooting Super 8 movies with their artist peers in town, Street and Sachs spent time meeting and watching the works of local moving image makers – some young bucks and some veterans who have been expanding the parameters of the medium since the early 1960s. (72min TRT.)
“Los Angeles” (5 min., 16mm, 1976) by Leandro Katz
Portrait of a small community living by the railroad tracks in the banana plantation region of Quiriguá, Guatemala. Originally a single take, this film is composed of alternating equal number of moving frames and frozen frames as the camera tracks alongside the train station.
“Workshop” (10 min.,16mm 1977) by Narcisa Hirsch
A structuralist vision as conceived by one of South America’s most beloved experimentalists, Narcisa Hirsch. One wall of the filmmaker’s studio as seen through a fixed camera. We see photos she’s stuck on the wall, then there is a dialogue with a male friend to whom she is describing the rest of the walls that you don’t see. A “one upmanship” of a similar film by Michael Snow where he describes a wall of his studio- workshop, by describing what one CAN see.
“Aleph” (1 min., 16mm) by Narcisa Hirsh
In the blink of the eye – 1440 frames in one minute – the rituals of childhood and adolescence give a magical and haunting rhythm to daily life.
“El Eroticismo del Tiempo” ( 1 min., video, 2005) by Narcisa Hirsch
Like the curves of the body, an hour glass can both seduce and repel us.
“Bajo Tierra” (4 1/2 min., Super 8, sound on CD, 2007) by Pablo Marin
A film portrait of filmmaker Claudio Caldini: in the industrial town of General Rodriguez, Buenos Aires, a man makes a new cinematic offering in front of the no-longer-industrialized Kodachrome.
“Sin título(Focus)” (4 min., Super 8, b&w, silent, 2008,) by Pablo Marin
Shot on a rooftop in Buenos Aires, this film truncates space in ever inviting ways using a dizzying array of formal tropes.
“Equivale a mentir” (3 min, Super 8 to video, sound, 2001) by Macarena Gagliardi.
A meditation on the four elements, and various aspects of fusion—a sensual evocation of the process of change.
“Espectro” (6 min, super 8 with separate sound on CD, 2008) by Sergio Subero.
Abstract images shimmer and shift on the screen. We are invited to look within as we enter an unfamiliar and unpredictable realm.
“Montevideo” (4 minutes, DVD, 2008) by Leandro Listorti
The capital of Uruguay reveals, briefly, its characteristic of a Doppelgänger City: a single place cut in two spaces where two pairs of creatures explore the limits of the travelogue.
“Stock” (5 minutes, 2007, mini DV ) by Ruben Guzman
A boy from La Cruz walks to school to read aloud the stock market report from the newspaper. We are witness to the last day of capitalism.
“El Guardian” (5 min., video, 2008) by Ruben Guzman
A fantasmic guardian coddles and keeps the images of the world.
“Nunca Fuimos Allah Luna” (7 min., 35mm, 2008) by Ernesto Baca
Two characters on split screens collide, converse and argue as the city unspools kinetically behind them.
“For You/Para Usted” (16 minutes, video, 1999) by Liliana Porter
A witty and wry comparison of linguistic and visual modes of expression through a series of pithy and provocative animated vignettes.
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, “Wind in Our Hair” is an experimental narrative directed by New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs about four girls (performed by Argentine sisters Lena and Chiara Peroni with Sachs’ own daughters Maya and Noa Street-Sachs) discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, “Wind in Our Hair” is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest. Shot with 16mm, Super 8mm, Regular 8mm film and video, the film follows the girls to the train tracks, into kitchens, on sidewalks, in costume stores, and into backyards in the heart of Buenos Aires as well as the outskirts of town. Sachs and her Argentine collaborators move about Buenos Aires with their cameras, witnessing the four playful girls as they wander a city embroiled in a debate about the role of agribusiness, food resources and taxes. Using an intricately constructed Spanish-English “bilingual” soundtrack, Sachs and her co-editor, Puerto Rican filmmaker Sofia Gallisa, articulate this atmosphere of urban turmoil spinning about the young girls’ lives. With the daring, ethereal music of Argentine performer Juana Molina.
Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs (NYC), experimental filmmaker will present her latest creation as a pre-premiere “Wind in Our Hair”, it is based on stories by Julio Cortazar, filmed in various formats (16mm, super 8, regular 8mm film, video) digitally mastered and set to music by Juana Molina.
And Which Way Is East (1994) a travel diary filmed in 16mm, which portrays her vision of the documentary that comes from contemplation, from prioritizing the moment and the light it displays, from her way of being in the world. This film was made in Vietnam with her sister the journalist Dana Sachs who lives there.
Awards the film has received: Grand Jury Prize, Atlanta Film and Video Festival; Sundance Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Prize, Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Cinematheque; “Arsenal” Film Festival, Rega, Lativa; Pacific Film Archive; Mill Valley Film Festival; Vassar College; Yale University; Cornell Cinema; SF Asian American Film Festival.
