Sachs’ films are searching, inquisitive projects — quests of discovery (and self-discovery) that yield facts and insights that become even more meaningful when they are shared with audiences as art.
In my twenty year relationship as audience to Lynne Sachs’ filmworks, I have always admired her amazing ability to connect the very personal, physical relationship of ‘selfhood’ to film and film history and to collage a variety of complex themes into one complete film, often with challenging ambiguity and open endedness.
“Anthology groups together shorts by the experimental filmmaker, offering a diverse look at her studies of people undergoing change. It’s dense, difficult, and allusive, but Sachs has a fundamental mastery of tone that makes the films worthwhile, even for relative avant-garde novices.”
Three Films by Lynne Sachs (Friday and Saturday) This review of recent work by one of the leading New York independent filmmakers includes the local premiere of “Wind in Our Hair,” a 41-minute video, made in Argentina with the collaboration of Leandro Listorti and Pablo Marin, that explores the world of four teenage girls, both as they imagine it and as it exists within the restraints of social reality.
“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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
