From our colleagues at Psyche comes a beautiful short film by Lynne Sachs that is a decades-long collaboration with the late pioneering feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
From the Psyche writeup:
In 1998, the pioneering US feminist artist Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) spent a month at an artist residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Feeling “compelled to do absolutely nothing” while living in a dune shack without running water or electricity, Hammer documented her solitude with a journal, a tape recorder and a 16mm film camera. For decades, these materials remained in her personal archive, until, as Hammer was nearing the end of her life in 2018, she entrusted her friend, the celebrated US filmmaker Lynne Sachs, to craft a film with the materials.
For the project, Sachs recorded Hammer reading from her decades-old journals during her final months. Hammer, who is known for her provocative and often controversial artworks, here provides a widely accessible yet distinctive account of solitude, beauty and where these two experiences met during her month on the beach. Her intimate, diaristic account is accompanied by gorgeous nature shots in which she plays with filters and frame rates, seemingly with no other motive than creative exploration. And, connecting past and present through her editing, including the use of words on the screen, Sachs’s treatment provides Hammer’s experience a delicate narrative structure.
In one sense, A Month of Single Frames is a touching coda to Hammer’s life, as the film concludes with the artist revisiting her own poignant meditations on mortality. But, percolating just beneath the surface is a more expansive celebration of artistry, and the artist’s ability to observe, contemplate, refract and give new contours to the world.
In May, 2018, the same year Hammer gave the materials making up this short to Sachs, she attended an event in her honor Temple University, where she spoke to Elisabeth Subrin and Sarah Drury. Read their conversation here, as well as Astra Taylor’s conversation with Hammer from our Winter, 2007 issue. Additionally, Sachs, who was interviewed by Daniel Eagan in 2020, is the subject of a series beginning today at New York’s DCTV.
United Journalists. Mexico City, March 20, 2024.- On April 10, the nineteenth edition of the Ambulante Documentary Tour will begin with a program of more than 90 films, in which activities and meeting spaces are resumed to strengthen the collective experience that it unfolds from documentary cinema.
The Tour will visit four states of the Mexican Republic between April 10 and May 26, 2024: Mexico City (April 10 to 21); Veracruz (May 2 to 12); Michoacán (from May 8 to 19); and Querétaro (from May 15 to 26). In parallel with the territorial tour of the Tour, part of the programming will also be available online for users throughout the national territory through www.nuestrocine.mx , on the following days of May 2024: from the 2nd to the 5th , 9 to 12 and from 16 to 19.
The programming is made up of more than 90 titles, from more than 23 countries, in 27 languages - of which 7 are indigenous languages -, with 1 world premiere and 14 national premieres. The programming is divided into nine sections:
Pulses (panorama of the Mexican documentary feature film).
Intersections (international contemporary documentary cinema).
Resistance (with a focus on justice, resilience and the defense of human rights).
Rearview mirror (focusing on films that bring the film archive to life).
Sonidero (in homage to resonances, sound and music).
Ambulantito, (section aimed at children).
Invocations (retrospectives dedicated to filmmakers who have marked a watershed in documentary).
Graft (section dedicated to avant-garde cinema).
Coordinates (Mexican films from each region that the Tour visits).
The special program Ecologies of Cinema (works that promote transformations for the defense of the territory), will present the documentary The White Guard , by Julien Elie, in Veracruz, Michoacán and Querétaro.
In addition to an extraordinary and diverse selection of titles, during the Tour there are workshops, conversations, master classes, Q&A, video installation, documentary theater, activations with childhood, projections interpreted in Mexican Sign Language and various mediation processes that seek to provoke changes in the perception of our audiences. Screenings and events will be mostly free. The nineteenth edition of the Documentary Tour will begin its journey in Mexico City with a program of 78 activities spread across twenty venues . From April 10 to 21, screenings, talks, master classes, a video installation, workshops and conferences will be held, two of them dedicated to childhood. Admission will be free to 65% of events.
As part of the special activities of the Tour in Mexico City, the presence of special guests stands out: the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who will teach the master class “Marcos y stanzas. Lynne Sachs on cinema and poetry” and the practical film workshop “Open the family album”, presented by Ambulante in collaboration with the Experimental Film Laboratory, Kino Rebelde and the Digital Culture Center within the “Cinema Beyond” program »; Also, artist Nikki Schuster will carry out the video installation uprooted , which weaves a collective narrative from testimonies and analysis of voices along the tracks of the Mayan Train: destruction, social division and the loss of Mayan identity. This activity has the support of the Cultural Forum of the Austrian Embassy in Mexico, among other accompanied activities.
The Documentary Tour will present a program of short films by Marie Losier and the installation of her loop boxes , small boxes designed and decorated by herself, which contain three audiovisual works in infinite loop, in collaboration with the French Institute of Latin America (IFAL) , Trampoline Association and Casa del Lago UNAM.
In collaboration with Makesense Americas and TikTok México, we will present “Crisis Cruzadas”, a campaign in which we will bring together ten TikTok content creators to expand the conversation about the climate crisis from an intersectional perspective. Within the framework of this campaign, we will screen a documentary capsule at various functions and some creators will participate in an in-person activity at IFAL.
The inaugural screening of the Documentary Tour will take place on Wednesday, April 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the Esperanza Iris City Theater. The film Three Promises will be screened , where director Yousef Srouji takes up the filming made by his mother during the Israeli army’s reprisals against the second intifada in the West Bank, Palestine. The function will be attended by Marielle Olentine, producer of the documentary. Admission is free and space is limited.
From April 12 to 14, the Documentary Tour will offer a selection of feature films that will be screened at Cinépolis Diana and Cinépolis Universidad, through the Cinépolis® Art Room. For followers of the Documentary Tour , Cinépolis will have the traditional Cinebono, with a cost of $180 pesos for four tickets, as well as a special cost of $60 per individual ticket.
At the Cinépolis Diana venue, during the Ambulante period, the following will be presented: Peter Doherty: Stranger in My Own Skin (2023) by Katia deVidas, Copa 71 (2023) by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine, Nocturnas (2024) by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, Patrullaje (2023) by Camilo de Castro Belli and Brad Allgood, Sr (2024) by Lea Hartlaub, and Ch’ul be, Senda Sagrada (2023) by Humberto Gómez. At Cinépolis Universidad, titles such as El Eco (2023) by Tatiana Huezo, Favoriten (2024) by Ruth Beckermann, Inside of me I am dancing (2023) by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann, Queendom (2023) by Agniia Galdanova, and Malqueridas (2023) will be presented. ) by Tana Gilbert.
There will be performances accompanied by the presence of filmmakers and protagonists of the documentaries. Among the guests are Emiliano Ruprah de Fina, director of The Guardian of the Monarchs ; Lynne Sachs, director of Film About a Father Who ; Johan Grimonprez, director of Soundtrack for a coup d’état ; Marielle Olentine, producer of Tres Promesas ; Humberto Gómez, director of Ch’ul be, sacred path ; and Claudia Ignacio Álvarez, protagonist of Patrol. Activists, academics, researchers and artists from various disciplines will also join us.
The venues where activities will take place are: House of the First Printing Press of America UAM, Casa del Lago UNAM, Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico (CCEMx), José Martí Cultural Center, UNAM University Cultural Center, Digital Culture Center, Center National Arts Center (Cenart), Cinépolis Diana, Cinépolis Universidad, Cineteca Nacional, Cineteca Nacional de las Artes, Cine Tonalá, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences UNAM, Faro Aragón, Faro Cosmos, La Cine-Fonda, Le Cinéma IFAL, La Cave, Casa de la Paz Theater UAM, Esperanza Iris City Theater, Underground Paradise.
Ambulante appreciates the support of the Ministry of Culture, the Mexican Institute of Cinematography (Imcine), Ford Foundation, Sigrid Rausing Trust, Ben & Frank, Cinépolis, LCI Seguros, Labodigital, R7D, Cerveza Monstruo de Agua and Fundación Heinrich Böll who contribute to making Tour possible. Likewise, we extend our gratitude to the Secretariats of Culture of the states we visited and to all the sponsors who join their efforts with us, as well as to the different embassies, foundations, headquarters, universities, restaurants, media and all collaborators and collaborators without whom this festival would not take place. Thanks to the volunteers whose invaluable support and dedication have made it possible for the Documentary Tour to reach its 19th edition.
Centro de Cultura Digital
Retrospectiva a Lynne Sachs. Programa de cortometrajes 1
The Cine más allá (CCD) in collaboration with Ambulante and the curatorship of the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, dedicates a retrospective to the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, an obligatory reference of avant-garde cinema in recent years, whose work, as personal – sometimes even intimate – as it is political, is characterized by an uncompromising aesthetic search and experimentation, through documentary, essay, collage and a myriad of formal and technical explorations.
This retrospective is grouped in Ambulante’s Invocations section. The section is made up of two programs of short films, one on film and the other on digital, and two feature films.
Short film program 1: Window Work, 9 min. 2000 Atalanta 32 Years Later, 5 min. 2006 A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer). 14 min. 2019 Wind in Our Hair/ Con viento en el pelo, 40 min. 2010 And Then We Marched, 4 min. 2017 Maya at 24, 4 min. 2021 A Year of Notes and Numbers, 4 min. 2018 Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor, 8 min. 2018
About: Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, collages, performances and web projects that explore the intrinsic relationship between personal observation and broader historical experiences by interweaving poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design.
Strongly committed to the dialogue between art theory and practice, in her films she pursues a rigorous interplay between image and sound, pushing visual and aural textures further with each new project. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco, where she collaborated with artists such as Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Gunvor Nelson, Barbara Hammer and Trin T. Min-ha. Lynne’s recent work combines fiction, non-fiction and experimental modes. She has made over 25 films that have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Images Festival in Toronto, among others. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other national and international institutions. The Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), the New International Film Festival in Havana and the Women’s Film Festival in China have presented retrospectives of her films. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and is a part-time lecturer in the Art Department at Princeton University.
Program: Laboratorio Experimental de Cine is a non-profit civil association dedicated to the training, production, curatorship and dissemination of experimental and peripheral cinema. Through collaboration, they promote the moving image and its relationship with other artistic formats to create a cinema that expands and challenges the limits of conventional audiovisual language.
Marvin
El Cine más Allá del LEC y CCD en la Cineteca y Ambulante
Encounter with other cinematographies: in a huge proposal of movies that will take you out of your comfort zone.
The Cinema Beyond program of the Experimental Cinema Laboratory , LEC and the Digital Culture Center, CCD expands and reaches the National Cinematheque. Cinema Beyond is a project that presents films that go beyond the traditional formats of film projection and exhibition, seeking exploration and encounter with other cinematographies that are marginal, singular, reckless, committed and experimental.
This April the program begins with a retrospective of Ricardo Nicolayevsky. The program is made up of portraits and personal works of the artist. Nicolayevsky is a reference for avant-garde cinema in Mexico. Most of his works were made in the early eighties in Super8 and 16mm formats.
The Ambulante Festival also adds Cinema Beyond to its programming and presents a Lynne Sachs retrospective, which includes a master class, talks, the screening of two of her feature films at the Cineteca Nacional, as well as two short film programs and the results of the workshop ongoing “Open the family album” at the Digital Culture Center.
The Cinema Beyond program brings you artists such as Masha Godovannaya (Russia), Luis Macías (Spain), Mariana Botey (Mexico), Narcisa Hirsch (Argentina), Craig Baldwin (United States), Peter B. Hutton (United States), Saul Levine (United States) and Yevgeny Yufit (Soviet Union-Russia), led by programmers such as Manuel Trujillo, Salvador Amores, Itzel Martínez and Tomás Rautenstrauch.
The Ambulante 2024 documentary tour will take place from April 10 to May 26, 2024 and will visit Mexico City from April 10 to 21, Veracruz from May 2 to 12, Michoacán from May 8 to 19 and Querétaro from the 15 to May 26.
This section of the festival is designed for children and this year’s program is titled “From outer space to the inner world.” For this reason, this edition there will be a live cinema proposal with the interactive kaleidoscopic Observatory, which will function as a celestial vault. This space will seek to mix cinema from the past with the future to “contemplate the infinitely small and the majestically large.” Mixing sky and earth will invite the discovery of new ways of navigating the world.
The programming will include:
Journey to Jupiter , by Segundo de Chomón (France, 1909)
Jungle Inside , by Dominique Jonard (Mexico, 1992)
Matero and the cinema , by Luis Felipe Hernández Alanis (Mexico, 2014)
Zoon , by Jonatan Schwenk (Germany, 2019)
The Moon , by Laura Ginès Bataller, Pepon Meneses (Spain, 2020)
Tide , by Lucie Andouche (Switzerland, 2023)
We are not prepared to be superheroes, by Lia Bertels (Belgium, Portugal, Spain, 2019)
Rearview
This section aims to present on screen works from the past that have been publicly or privately archived. The program that will follow this edition is “Look to inhabit”, whose three short films are pioneers of community cinema. Community cinema has always been of great interest to Ambulante for exemplifying the social power of documentary by being an alternative to “inhabit and face the complex reality.”
The programming will include:
Our tequio , from the Assembly of Zapotec and Chinantec Authorities of the Sierra (Mexico, 1981)
Murmurs of the volcano , by Valente Soto (Mexico, 1997)
Teat Monteok . The story of the God of lightning, by Elvira Palafox (Mexico, 1985)
Intersections
It is the section in which the great diversity of documentary film forms is revealed, in dialogue with a variety of geographies, contexts and perspectives that cross and redefine the stories of the world.
The section is made up of the following titles:
Malqueridas , by Tana Gilbert (Chile, Germany, 2023)
Photophobia , by Ivan Ostrochovský and Pavol Pekarčík (Slovakia, Czech Republic, Ukraine, 2023)
Favoriten , by Ruth Beckermann (Austria, 2024)
Sr , by Lea Hartlaub (Germany, 2024)
The Menu of Pleasures: The Troisgros Family , by Frederick Wiseman (United States, 2023)
And the king said: what a fantastic machine , by Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck (Sweden, Denmark, 2023)
Invocations
This section brings together retrospectives of the tour. This edition, Ambulante, in collaboration with the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine and Cine Más Allá, dedicates a retrospective to the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, an obligatory reference in avant-garde cinema in recent years, whose work, so personal—sometimes even intimate — as a policy, it is characterized by an aesthetic search and a less than accommodating experimentation, through documentary, essay, collage and endless formal and technical explorations. The section will be made up of two short film programs, one film and the other digital:
Your day is my night , by Lynne Sachs (United States, 2013)
Film about a father who , by Lynne Sachs (United States, 2020)
Ambulante is a non-profit organization that seeks to promote documentary film so that people realize its power as a cultural and social tool in Mexico and Central America. It was founded in 2005 by Gael García Bernal, Diego Lunes and Elena Fortes. Its current director is Itzel Martínez del Cañizo.
This time we are going to talk about the North American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who presented a master class in English at the Cineteca Nacional.
One of the special guests at the XIX Ambulante Festival, which has just opened and will continue until May, is the North American poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who presented in English a master class at the Cineteca Nacional, entitled Marcos y estrofas, where They also presented their two feature films.
The writer, born in Memphis on August 10, 1961, spoke about her work that began in 1986 with the short “Still life with woman and four objects.”
She explained that in “Starfish aorta colossus” she illustrates a poem by Paolo Javier with which she would later collaborate and then experiments with translations and subtitles.
In her feature film “Your Day is My Night,” made in 2013, she films a group of Chinese and Latino workers, who live in a small room and long for the family they left many years ago.
The film marked a watershed in Sachs’s career, who stopped traveling to look for subjects and filmed near her home in New York, something that became more acute during the pandemic.
Although she mentions written poetry a lot, this is far from the images presented in her short films, which are limited to illustrating the poems in various ways.
Her cinema is rather experimental, with some short documentaries and essays.
Her other feature film is dedicated to his father Ira.
Fact: In her feature film “Your day is my night”, made in 2013, she films a group of Chinese and Latino workers, who live in a small room and long for the family they left many years ago.
LET US EAT CAKE: Bastille Day Bake Sale FUN-raiser for LPV Friday, July 14th 4:20 – 9:20PM @ LPV
Calling all Faeries at the bottom of our garden! A very special Bastille Day event hosted by secret guests (at the moment) including Delphi and Peewee. A leisurely afternoon to evening at Le Petit Versailles to help raise funds for garden improvements and general upkeep.
BAKERS REQUESTED
Add to the layers of delights for this fae fundraiser for Le Petit Versailles. Please sign up and excite us with what you’ll create!
petercramer@alliedproductions.org
Everything that Jack Waters & Peter Cramer do in LE PETIT VERSAILLES is formidable (with the French pronunciation bien sur) and tonight’s soirée under the stars is no exception. I will be screening my short film “Atalanta” (see a clip here) as part of their “Let Us Eat Cake” Bake Sale Fun-raiser to celebrate Bastille Day. Join us in the darkness and the light.
Le Petit Versailles Community Garden: 247 East 2nd Street (between Avenues B and C in the East Village)
“Atalanta 32 years Later” by Lynne Sachs 5 min. color sound, 2006 from 16mm film original
A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me”. Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance dedicated to film dynamo Barbara Hammer.
“Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings.” George Kuchar
With Kenneth Anger’s L’Eau D’Artifice and other surprises.
For certain types of films, festivals are an end in and of themselves. This is especially true of experimental film festivals and, within the past fifteen years, experimental documentary film festivals. Such venues offer few commercial off-ramps: there is little to no hope of a licensing deal following the festival, and while some bigger titles might get a museum or microcinema event, the short year that a film travels the festival circuit is likely the only time many films will ever screen publicly. At these festivals, a filmmaker may connect with funders on the strength of a previous film, or a critic may take note of a new work in their festival report. In an ideal situation, the filmmaker will then leverage this support to burnish their CV, write grant applications, and, if also employed in the university system, bolster their case for tenure and promotion. They will make new work, to screen at the following year’s festivals, and the cycle repeats.
Despite the limited horizon of experimental documentary festivals, there has been a remarkable proliferation of these events in recent years. This has occurred within a broader increase, beginning in the early 2000s, in all types of film festivals, including those solely devoted to documentary. In this span, the even more niche area of experimental documentary grew at all levels: many experimental documentary festivals were conversions of preexisting festivals, while others were fortified sidebars at established festivals.{1} Dozens more were newly invented, including a first wave in the 1990s; then a flurry in the early 2000s; followed by a smaller but still substantial group into the 2010s and later.{2} There were also a number of non-competition series that began during this period, such as Doc Fortnight (est. 2001) at MoMA, and Art of the Real (est. 2013) at Film at Lincoln Center.
The term experimental documentary is fraught, and I use it only provisionally. Undeniably, it raises a host of objections, some of which are inherited from twentieth-century avant-garde film, which rejected both experimental (unserious and amateurish) and documentary (too conventional a framework for describing formal innovation) as descriptors. The alternatives that have arisen in the names of festivals and programs—among them nonfiction, art of the real, artist film, and avant- or post-doc—raise new problems as they resolve the old. Indeed, it is a well-established tradition among avant-garde scholars to bemoan the inadequacy of terms like avant-garde and experimental, and for anyone invested in transgressive, radical filmmaking, a tidy fit into any category, much less one called experimental documentary, is just as discomfiting.
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME (Lynne Sachs, 2001), which was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural Doc Fortnight program.
Rather than entering into the debates around terminology, I am interested in examining the tension within the phenomenon of experimental documentary between its claims to radicalism and the institutional and material conditions, namely, the film festival, that shape it. In this, experimental documentary inherits various long-standing debates within avant-garde film, including the debate over how aesthetic and political radicalism, inherent in the avant-garde’s very name, can be reconciled with each other, and over the degree to which institutional and industrial supports compromise the avant-garde’s autonomy.
To the extent that experimental documentary can be recognized as a salient mode of practice, circumscribed within the space of international film festivals, it allows us to think through these questions differently, because its unique bounded structure provides an opportunity to understand how such films are made, selected, and seen. Traditionally, avant-garde film, and indeed much of film history generally, has been approached by scholars and critics through textual analysis. While I am indebted to the method of close reading, I shift my emphasis here to the self-contained culture and conditions of making and viewing, a reframing that provides a different view of the relationship between institution and art. How does the social existence of a film, especially as something that exists among many other, likely similar films, shape what Annette Michelson called its “radical aspiration”? To answer this requires approaching experimental documentaries not only as richly signifying texts, but as complex cultural and material objects that travel from city to city on hard drives, film reels, and downloaded media files, to be projected on all manner of screens, and finally discussed and debated in ephemeral conversations and published criticism. This limited arena of circulation makes visible what are often overlooked relations between material conditions of production and claims to radicality.
For what it’s worth, I still believe in film’s radical aspiration, even if I (like Michelson herself) hold many reservations about its viability. As Abby Sun has recently argued, “If the purpose of programming and exhibiting subversive films is to undermine systems of cultural power, one way to do so is by awakening us to our unwitting complicity with these institutions, and offering a model for escaping them through non-commercial production and circulation practices.”{3} I am less hopeful than Sun about the possibility of escaping “unwitting complicity,” but I share with her the conviction that self-awareness is fundamental to any kind of radical project. If cinema is to be politically revelatory, then it must keep its eyes fully open, including to the contexts of its own production.
While there are few off-ramps from experimental documentary festivals, on-ramps are plentiful. Generally speaking, film festivals are attended by the people directly involved in their production, namely filmmakers, programmers, and critics. Though different festivals will make more or less of an effort to engage a local audience, experimental documentary festivals often cater to their own constituents. By and large, experimental documentaries are not widely available outside of these spaces, a sharp contrast to the buzzy features and documentaries that get picked up after their premieres at Cannes, Sundance, and the like. Instead, experimental documentary festivals are highly insular and self-sustaining. For example, museum curators and other festival programmers will attend festivals to scope out new work, replenishing the ecosystem when their own festivals or series occur.
For many of us (and I count myself among those who, since entering this world, haven’t left it), it begins with personal connections, often through college instructors who themselves regularly travel the festival circuit.{4} Students might attend a festival because they worked on a professor’s film, or they might have submitted to a festival on the encouragement of their mentors. For a young person especially, it can be thrilling to discover a large and thriving community of like-minded film enthusiasts. My path to criticism was similar. I started going to film festivals after studying avant-garde film in college and interning at a museum and an experimental film distribution company. These experiences, in turn, shaped how I approached festivals. When I first began attending festivals in 2001, I was excited by the prospect of seeing so many films and also daunted by the task of selecting which ones to watch. With no industry contacts and no real connections, I scanned the program for the familiar and found it in experimental work: a series of Ken Jacobs’s work at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, a Robert Beavers program at Views from the Avant-Garde, a guest-programmed screening by Jean-Marie Téno at the Images Festival. I had only known these filmmakers through a classroom setting, and outside of that protected space I was surprised and delighted to learn that they mattered in the “real world” too. It was thrilling to encounter filmmakers whose work I had seen in my classes, and, after mustering a bit of courage, to chat with them after a post-screening Q&A.
Within these avant-garde film spaces, I began to encounter a newer form of experimental-friendly documentary. Like avant-garde film, these films frequently employed elliptical structures, an attention to surface effects and framing, deliberate temporal manipulation (especially as it contributes to a sense of slowness), and small-scale modes of production. Meanwhile, these works were also rooted in the specificities of a situation, issue, or historical event. This is to say not that avant-garde films eschew documentary concerns, but that the experimental documentaries I started to see at this time prioritized what Okwui Enwezor described as “art’s engagement with social life,” no matter how oblique their treatment.{5} Some examples:
the films produced through the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, like Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s LEVIATHAN (2012), which includes the defamiliarizing view of GoPro cameras on a North Atlantic commercial fishing vessel;
blended docufictions like Mati Diop’s MILLE SOLEILS (2013)
or Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (2013);
and essayistic or observational investigations of history and place, like Nicolás Pereda’s EL PALACIO (2013),
Kevin Jerome Everson’s PARK LANES (2015),
and Zack and Adam Khalil’s INAATE/SE/ [IT SHINES A CERTAIN WAY.TO A CERTAIN PLACE./IT FLIES.FALLS./] (2016)
Important antecedents to this work include James Benning’s structural landscape films (involving considerable fabrication behind what appears to be unaltered documentary footage), which began to circulate widely in European television and art spaces in the mid-90s; Agnès Varda’s celebrated The Gleaners and I (2000), which blended the forms of diary, social-issue documentary, and essayistic rumination to widespread acclaim; and a 2010s interest in essay films, from Jean-Pierre Gorin’s traveling program, launched at the Austrian Film Museum in 2007, to Timothy Corrigan’s book on the subject in 2011.
The documentary emphasis of experimental documentary—namely, works that address real, often exigent situations—revives a key debate of the historical avant-garde film. Famously, Annette Michelson argued in 1966 that film’s inherent revolutionary potential could best be glimpsed when its formal and political aspects were unified, as in the Soviet cinema of the 1920s and 30s, in the work of Godard and other French New Wave directors, and in the American avant-garde. The radical aspiration of these moments was imperfect and short-lived, however, dissipated by co-option by the state and absorption into industrial cinema. Even in the case of New American Cinema, whose cooperative distribution structure preserved some degree of economic, if not political, autonomy, Michelson was still cautious. About the films of Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, she warned, “the formal integrity that safeguards that radicalism must, and does, ultimately dissolve.”{6} In her formulation, form cannot exist in a void. A film is always an entry into a set of sociopolitical conditions. Hence there can be no guarantee, no fixed form of radicality. The radicality of a film lies in its aspiration, which is a gesture toward a “sense of the future”: the revolution it awaits and also makes possible.{7} Paradoxically, then, a radical aspiration aims toward what remains unfixed, even as it can only accrue meaning in situ. The film itself is the means of changing the possibility of the future.
Much has changed since the time of Michelson’s writing. The horizon of revolution has shifted: it is more discrete, concrete, and aligned with activist efforts, and it occurs both inside and outside the world of art. Doubtless the struggle continues, but no longer is there a sense of a unified film front, a manifesto-scribbling cinema culture leading the anti-capitalist charge. While experimental documentary inherits the mantle of formal-political radicalism, most films of this type do not express an overt, pointed politics, such as one would find in the case of Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Hito Steyerl, or Harun Farocki (and it may be telling that most examples of this type of overtly political work are made outside of North America, in an art-world context). More frequently, a film’s engagement with the real occurs alongside lyricism, extended observation, and sensorial immersion. Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden (2021) offers a case in point. The film, which depicts the uprooting of centuries-old trees and their relocation to a billionaire ex–prime minister’s island, embeds its critique within long and otherworldly mises-en-scène. It is ambiguous whether this blunts or sharpens the film’s politics. Is the film attuning to politics in a different register—and thereby advocating for this cordoned-off form of political critique—or is it overwhelming it with nonverbal information? A case could be made for any and all of these possibilities. A similar issue arises with Sensory Ethnography Lab films, where the privileging of sensorial detail over spoken language can be seen as either phenomenological enhancement or evasion of expression. Some of this can be understood as a response to mainstream documentary’s emphasis on moral and political emergency, or what Pooja Rangan has productively described as “immediations,” where documentaries serve as tools of a neoliberal, humanitarian (interventionist) agenda.{8} A more ambiguous, observational nonfiction film may be less useful to such a cause, and thereby more resistant to co-optation. I do not mean to qualify the value of politics in documentary, nor to suggest a right way to do it. Rather, my point is descriptive: Given its roots in the overt politics of Michelson’s era, experimental documentary has drifted to something more obscure. The configuration of this moment tends to locate experimental documentary’s relationship to political movements in the backseat.
Experimental documentary generally takes aim at politics out there, but it is rarely directed inward, toward the institutions that support and sustain it. Unlike the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, which attacked the bourgeois institutions from which they sprang, there are exceedingly few instances where an experimental documentary has critiqued film festivals, museum showcases, streaming platforms, test screenings, film schools, grant applications, artist residencies, or anything pertaining to the social existence of a film. (The exceptions that exist come from filmmakers that tend not to show in these spaces, being either too experimental or too documentary: Owen Land’s satirical Undesirables, 1999, is a portrayal of New American Cinema as imagined by Hollywood; Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I, 2012, features the filmmaker confronting the taboo topics that shape the condition of his participation in the Sharjah Biennial; and Claire Simon’s more straightforward documentary The Competition, 2016, examines the entry process at the famously grueling French film school La Fémis.) Perhaps because, in experimental documentary, there is already an assumed oppositional stance toward mainstream film and documentary, there is a corresponding, though less explicit, protectionism toward the institutions of avant-garde film itself. Still, we should remember that even the most ramshackle, labor-of-love screening series is an institution, and as such it is subject to demands that may differ from those of the works it exhibits. Sun reminds us that institutions strive for permanence, and often the stability they seek is gained by regularly showing oppositional, “edgy” work. That is to say, subversive work often cooperates quite well with the preservative interests of the institution.
Just as formal integrity is no safeguard for radicalism, the reverse is also true, that radicalism is possible even under circumstances of formal impurity.
Currently, the festival structure materially sustains the vast majority of experimental documentary films being made. Experimental documentary film festivals serve both as exhibition venues and as engines for marketing, though they sometimes provide direct material support for filmmakers through prizes and production funding. While avant-garde filmmakers of previous generations would likely reject this level of institutional entanglement, contemporary makers have found ways to thrive within it. The festival is itself a manifestation of form, an enlarged social sphere that contains and makes possible certain types of work. If we consider the festival as a formal determinant, we might hear Michelson’s words differently. Just as formal integrity is no safeguard for radicalism, the reverse is also true, that radicalism is possible even under circumstances of formal impurity.
This kind of festival infrastructure has been supported by three major factors: a new interest in documentary form in the art world, the contraction of state funding for experimental work, and the expansion of public funding in Europe for film productions and festivals. First, there has been an increase in supply, largely supported by the supposed documentary turn in contemporary art (or what may well have been the result of the European influx of funding). Much of this began as moving image–based, and typically digital video, installation, and it was largely made by younger artists. Among an earlier generation of artists, many began as filmmakers, including Isaac Julien, Joan Jonas, Hito Steyerl, and Harun Farocki, while others maintained a documentary sensibility from the start. Mark Nash and Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11, in 2002, marks a watershed moment when documentary aesthetics in moving image form became a dominant mode of artistic practice. Following that event, artists began to seek out spaces beyond galleries and museums to exhibit their work. Many, like the Otolith Group, converted works from gallery formats to single-screen versions for the theater (or vice versa, as in the case of Morgan Fisher); or, like Garrett Bradley, Dani and Sheilah ReStack, Laure Prouvost, Ben Rivers, Ana Vaz, Sky Hopinka, Luke Fowler, and Leslie Thornton (the list could include almost every experimental filmmaker working today), and, among an older generation, James Benning, Jonas Mekas, and Phil Solomon, began making works alternately for both gallery and theater spaces.
Second, funding for experimental work has diminished, especially, in the US, at the state and federal levels. The “culture wars” of the 1980s and 90s led to significant cuts to NEA funding. At the state level, too, there was a substantial decline. For example, B. Ruby Rich, who directed the film and video programs at NYSCA from 1981 to 1991, recalls budget cuts for films as well as staffing cuts made by Mario Cuomo, then governor of New York. Meanwhile, competition among filmmakers has increased. While in the 1970s more funding was devoted specifically to experimental film, the 1980s saw demand from independent, feminist, and Black artists, as well as various groups experimenting with video and public access television. Rich explains: “The funding had to be spread across many different sectors of the state’s film world—which the experimental folks saw as a ‘betrayal’ often.”{9}
The major awards that remain today come from private foundations, as in the case of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Herb Alpert Award, and the LEF Foundation Moving Image Fund. Even then, the size of the grant has diminished. For example, in 1978 and 1979, the first years in which the Jerome Foundation (est. 1964, originally as the Avon Foundation) began regularly funding experimental film, awards hovered around $10,000 and favored avant-garde filmmakers and artists: Marjorie Keller received $10,000 in 1978; Robert Gardner, $10,000 (1978); Lizzie Borden, $15,000 (1978); Ken Kobland, $10,450 (1979); John Knecht, $11,000 (1979); Martha Haslanger, $9,000 (1979); and Bette Gordon, $10,000 (1979). Meanwhile, the twelve awards given by the Jerome Foundation in 2019 were, with one exception, $30,000 grants (worth roughly $8,000 in 1979), and, similar to the situation in NYSCA funding in the 1980s, these grants covered a broad range of genres, including “animation, documentary, experimental or narrative genres, or . . . any combination of these forms.”{10} While it is difficult to determine what counts as experimental versus experimental documentary, it is perhaps notable that there is only one project among the 2019 award recipients that uses the word experimental in its description (Mónica Savirón’s The Ledger Line).
Third, a rise in state funding in Europe has supported increased production as well as festival spaces. This is owing in part to the formation of the European Union and a conscious effort to support a sense of economic as well as cultural integration and collectivity. Film festivals offered an opportunity to fund national projects as well as assert regional hegemony. Notably, this is a phenomenon that takes place largely in Europe, with European festivals and European filmmakers and artists, and there is significant overlap and interaction with the US context, which has historically provided a strong base for experimental work. Important exceptions to the European-US context include Festival International de Cine de Valdivia, Chile (est. 1993); the Expanded Cinema section of the Jeonju International Film Festival (est. 2000); Encuentros del Otro Cine EDOC, Ecuador (est. 2002); Experimenta India (est. 2003); and Ambulante (est. 2005).
To varying degrees, existing festivals adapted to accommodate these works, making room for experimental film, digital video, longer-form films, and hybrid approaches to nonfiction. These include festivals whose entire focus shifted, like the Locarno Film Festival (est. 1946), the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (est. 1954), the Flaherty Seminar (est. 1954), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (est. 1963), International Film Festival Rotterdam (est. 1972), FIDMarseille (est. 1989, with Jean-Pierre Rehm becoming director in 2002), Cinéma du Réel (est. 1978), and Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival (est. 1980s and run by Chicago Filmmakers starting in 2001). They also include sidebars created to accommodate such work at more mainstream festivals, including the Paradocs (est. 2004) section at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (est. 1988), and the addition of Views from the Avant-Garde (1997–2013) to the New York Film Festival (est. 1963).
It can be useful to track the development of festival spaces through the career trajectory of individual filmmakers. This is not to conflate the institutional space with the form and stakes of the work in question, but to examine how each has been responsive to the other in terms of aesthetic possibility. Take, for example, the work of Deborah Stratman, whose films sit at the intersection of experimental, observational, and essayistic practice. She began exhibiting her work in 1990, and soon after began regular festival appearances. Her 2002 film In Order Not To Be Here is the first I’ve found to have been called an experimental documentary, and in 2002 and 2003 it traveled to over seventy screening spaces, including festivals like Sundance, Visions du Réel (est. 1969), and PDX Fest (2001–9), as well as predominantly experimental film spaces, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Media City Film Festival (est. 1994), the New York Underground Film Festival (1994–2008), Pleasure Dome (est. 1989), and Conversations at the Edge.{11} The many awards it won were in best experimental film categories. Later in the decade her work appeared more regularly in documentary venues. O’er the Land (2009), an examination of the secular rituals of American life, went to Sundance, Full Frame Documentary Festival (est. 1998), PDX Fest, Courtisane Festival (est. 2002), True/False Film Fest (est. 2004), and CPH:DOX (est. 2003). It won the Ken Burns Award for Best of Festival at Ann Arbor, and Best Documentary Feature at L’Alternativa, Barcelona Independent Film Festival (est. 1993). Stratman’s The Illinois Parables (2016) likewise picked up awards in both experimental and documentary categories.
Stratman herself has been explicit about her interest in extending beyond the concerns of experimental film. Her consistent interest in history, whether woven into vernacular practices or inscribed in the language of film, maintains a view that departs from the inwardness of traditional avant-garde film. In a 2018 interview, she distinguished her approach from what Tom Gunning called “minor cinema” filmmakers of the late 1980s and early 1990s: “Their works have an inner politics. But from early on I wanted more of the accidental outside. More of the street. Some socio-political to aerate the work.” A film like The Illinois Parables exemplifies her developing commitment to a history “without words.” In the film’s eleven vignettes, Stratman traverses the historiographical terrain of the state, including the violent expulsion of Indigenous peoples, the utopian experiment of a community of French Icarians, and the murder of Fred Hampton. She visits gravesites, mounds, living rooms, and forests, all the while watching, measuring, and listening for “something ineffable, a force of another dimension, call it God, or sorrow, or awareness, or the burden of the past.”{12} Similarly, it may be possible to observe in this film the invisible presence of the experimental documentary festival, the subtle pressure exerted by the social milieu in which films are made and shared. Stratman’s method indicates the often indirect ways these traces might be detected, beyond the directness of words and other representational strategies.
Words, in fact, can obscure as much as they elucidate. Scholarly and critical writing on experimental work tends to privilege textual features, no matter how engaged with social life a film might be. Stan Brakhage, for instance, called himself a documentarian (of the “inner eye”), and despite his towering stature within the avant-garde, he is most often discussed in terms of his formal practice of hand-painted film and poetic allusion. (The word documentary only arises in relation to Brakhage’s Pittsburgh Trilogy, as if the domain of documentary could be crudely demarcated by the use of a camera in an institutional setting.) The impulse to taxonomize, to make clear-cut distinctions between aesthetic and political concerns, leads to overvaluation of textual analysis and undervaluation of the conditions of production, and the treatment of these two areas as distinct.
This tendency can be seen in various attempts to identify previous moments of overlap between avant-garde and documentary film. In Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (2014), Scott MacDonald selects strains of lyricism within ostensibly nonfiction work, including the city symphonies of the 1920s; the films of Robert Flaherty, Stan Brakhage, and Peter Kubelka; diary films; found footage works; and other instances of formal convergence. Though MacDonald would seem to be offering a corrective to the type of pigeonholing I just described, his emphasis on form ends up reifying the categories he challenges. Absent a serious engagement with the political and historical circumstances of how and why these categories came about, both documentary and avant-garde film become reduced to a set of signifiers. The result is a circuitous taxonomy where the entirety of avant-garde film starts to look like a subset of documentary, or, conversely, documentary a subset of the avant-garde.
MacDonald’s description can be understood as symptomatic of a situation in which exhibition spaces for avant-garde film were largely pivoting either to experimental documentary or to moving image art.{13} Take, for example, the mid-2010s restructuring at Film at Lincoln Center: the experimental documentary series Art of the Real began in 2013, and Views from the Avant-Garde, which for many was the premier destination for American experimental film, was replaced in 2014 by the gallery-friendly Projections program and rebranded as Currents in 2020. Though there was overall an increase in the amount of screen time given to films that fall under the broad umbrella of the experimental, there was less room for abstract, hand-processed, animated, and lyrical work associated with the traditional avant-garde. In many ways, MacDonald’s crossover approach and others like it provided these new festival spaces with a language for describing the innovative, genre-busting works they showcased. These films may also be said to be expensive, in that most are supported by grants or other subsidized sources of support. As Josh Guilford observes, “The prioritization of work with socially and politically relevant content within such exhibition contexts has been co-extensive with a valorization of technical and aesthetic polish. It’s another of the many paradoxes animating this culture.”{14}
What we typically call form does not sufficiently account for the specificities of experimental documentary.
MacDonald rightly identifies the role of the academy, where canons are formed and deepened in courses organized according to genres, methods, national cinemas, auteurs, and the like. Canonic revisions along the lines of avant-doc ultimately reinforce this discursive framing. The role of writing at and about the film festival is equally significant for shaping the types of films deemed acceptable, laudable, or forgettable. At a traditional festival, criticism tends toward best-of-the-fest capsule reviews, seeking to identify trends, breakout talents, and new waves. Though festival reports might devote a few sentences at the beginning and end to describing the flavor of the festival-going experience, they generally avoid delving too deeply into a more ethnographic sketch.
Criticism at the experimental documentary festival inherits and exacerbates these tendencies, as well as their problems. I know of no mainstream critics—that is, critics employed by a major newspaper—who are regularly assigned to cover such festivals. Those that attend and write generally do so on their own initiative, as when Amy Taubin or Manohla Dargis have stepped in to write about Projections for the New York Times. It is important to note, too, that the vast majority of film critics today are freelance, working by pitch at one or more publications, rather than writing exclusively for a single outlet as a staff writer. Furthermore, freelance film critics almost always need to work some other kind of job to earn a living wage. Festivals, even when press credentials are handed out, are expensive to attend. For filmmakers, of course, (formal) participation must be conferred by the festival itself, and even then filmmakers often must pay their own way there. Programmers and other industry professionals must have access to funding to travel. Critics, meanwhile, enter festivals through either application or invitation. The latter usually comes with some incentive, often in the form of hotel accommodations. There is an unspoken assumption that critics will favorably review the festival in return for these perks, and even if a critic is outwardly unbound by these obligations (because the critic may be protected by the reputation of their publication, for instance), they might still feel a sense of constraint. Further complicating matters are the multiple ways a critic might be pulled into festival operations. On a few occasions I’ve been asked to speak on festival panels, moderate director Q&As, or introduce screenings, all while still ostensibly on assignment for a publication.
Given the significant personal investment required, it is unsurprising that there are few critics who cover experimental documentary. Those who do select what they write about tend to isolate individual films to discuss, often tracking a thematic throughline across festival offerings. There is also little incentive to write disparagingly about any film. In my own criticism, I have been acutely aware that my writing might be the only press a film will ever receive, and that it is often used for program notes, catalog text, and grant applications. The festival community exerts its own social pressure as well. It is often easier to simply avoid writing about a film than to take issue with it in writing, and the result is that the criticism is skewed toward an abundance of praise with a narrowing of selection. Surely, too, are programmers aware of the influence they exert. The shared perception of experimental documentary’s fragility, of its scarcity and vulnerability, invariably shapes the value system of the festival. This skews the public understanding of the festival, and also misrepresents it to its own community, which ends up reproducing the same distortion. Undoubtedly, more and more diversified criticism, including negative takes but also writing that does not adopt an evaluative framework, is needed. We should recognize, however, that publication venues operate on their own financial models, and that, for better and for worse, they are not beneficiaries of the sources that fund experimental documentary films and festivals.
One unusual result of these pressures is that critics have sought out other ways of participating in film culture. This is also a historical phenomenon, where a number of critics that were writing in the late 1990s and early 2000s shifted to programming, including Rachael Rakes, Dennis Lim, Ed Halter, Jean-Pierre Rehm, Federico Windhausen, and Mark Peranson. Where in the 1960s the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma became directors, the experimental documentary space of the 2000s was largely shaped by critics turned programmers. This coincides with the enlarged role of the programmer more generally at film festivals, cinematheques, and other exhibition venues, and it should be noted that a number of filmmakers, like Sylvia Schedelbauer, Ben Russell, and Ben Rivers, were also active programmers during this time. The critic’s sensibility in programming is perhaps evident in the strong thematic cohesiveness of programs organized by these critics- and filmmakers-cum-programmers. For instance, Rakes and Lim’s Art of the Real is recognizable for its essayistic, intellectual, and political character, while Windhausen’s Pueblo program at the 2016 International Short Film Festival Oberhausen assembled films reflecting the historical and contemporary possibilities of collectivity in Latin America. Such programming departs from mainstream festival programming—which emphasizes heterogeneity and variety—and in its narrower focus is closer to a curatorial model of selection. Hence the critic’s turn to programming, or programming in a critical vein, motivates much of the coherence of experimental documentary as a formal category with institutional endurance.
What we typically call form—namely, the aesthetic characteristics of an artwork—does not sufficiently account for the specificities of experimental documentary. It’s time to enlarge the notion of form beyond the text, to the social world in which it is made and received. MacDonald’s point about predecessors for experimental documentary is an important one, and we might look to earlier examples of radical film form and the institutional supports that sustained them to better understand the contours of the present. How do Cinema 16 and other early incubators of avant-garde film differ from the festival spaces that dominate the contemporary landscape? To address these important concerns, one would need additionally to unpack the historiographical record where discussions of form have prevailed at the expense of institutional analysis. Though they are beyond the scope of this essay, I hope that these reflections might prompt a more integrated understanding of the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and institutional formation in the many histories of experimental moving image work.
Festival infrastructures are as important as aesthetic markers in determining what counts as experimental documentary. One cannot fully comprehend experimental documentary outside of the festival ecosystem in which it is made, programmed, viewed, and written about. It is precisely this outside that has been largely excluded from most writing on avant-garde and experimental documentary film. I hope that both critics and scholars can find new ways to invite texts and contexts into dialogue. Or, as Stratman reminds us, both in her films and in her own words, to remain “attentive to the accidental outside.”
Acknowledgments: I thank Walter Argueta-Ramirez, Erika Balsom, Colin Beckett, Chris Cagle, Jason Fox, Leo Goldsmith, Josh Guilford, Pacho Velez, and Chi-hui Yang for helping me think through the many vectors of experimental documentary film festivals.
Genevieve Yue is an assistant professor of culture and media and director of the Screen Studies program at Eugene Lang College, the New School. She is a member of the board of trustees of the Flaherty, and has written criticism for Film Comment, Film Quarterly, art-agenda, and Reverse Shot. She is the author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (Fordham University Press, 2020).
The American experimental filmmaker and poet participates in the discussion that takes place after the screening of a selection of some of her films, which explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences within the family framework. In addition, she teaches the course Opening the family album .
Lynne Sachs has created genre-defying cinematic works through the use of hybrid forms and interdisciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of essay film, collage , performance, documentary, and poetry. With each project of hers, Ella Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera and the materiality of the film itself.
Program:
Girl Is Presence . USA, 4 min. 2020 In this collaborative work, Lynne Sachs and her daughter Noa make a visual poem in response to a poem by Anne Lesley Selcer. Girl Is Presence has traces of the fragmented language of George Bataille, the source of Selcer’s concept poem that reworks, undoes and recalls its rhythms. Made in the deepest isolation of the pandemic, as the words build in tension, the scene begins to feel occult, ritualistic, and alchemical.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam . USA, 33 min. 1994. When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with strangers and Vietnamese friends reveal the other side of a shared story.
Wind in Our Hair . Argentina / USA, 40 min. 2010. Inspired by stories by writer Julio Cortázar and shot in contemporary Argentina, the film is based on an experimental narrative where four girls discover themselves through their fascination with the trains that pass by their house. As a story of anticipation and disappointment in early adolescence, Con viento en el pelo is set in a period of deep political and social unrest in Argentina.
Maya at 24 . USA / Spain, 5 min. 2021. Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in black and white and on 16mm. at 6, 16 and 24 years. In each recording, Maya runs in circles, clockwise, as if she is propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Aware of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only cinema can convey, this work shows Maya in motion at her different ages.
Swerve 7 min., 2022 a film by Lynne Sachs with poetry by Paolo Javier
A market and playground in Queen, New York, a borough of New York City, become the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/ cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Paolo Javier is a poet who thinks like a filmmaker. I am a filmmaker who thinks like a poet. In Swerve, we’ve come up with our own kind of movie language, or at least a dialect that articulates how we observe the world together as two artists using images, sounds, and words. The first time I read Paolo’s sonnets in his new book O.B.B. aka The Original Brown Boy, I started to hear them in my head, cinematically. In my imagination, each of his 14 line poems became the vernacular expressions of people walking through a food market full of distinct restaurant stalls. I re-watched Wong Kar-wai’s “Happy Together” – a favorite of both of ours – and immediately thought of the Hong Kong Food Court in Elmhurst, Queens, a gathering spot for immigrant and working-class people from the neighborhood who love good cuisine. As we all know, restaurant owners and workers experienced enormous economic hardship during New York City’s pandemic. Nevertheless, the market and the playground across the street become vital locations for the shooting of my film inspired by Paolo’s exhilarating writing. Together, we invited performers and artists Emmey Catedral, ray ferriera, Jeff Preiss, Inney Prakash, and Juliana Sass to participate in a challenging yet playful endeavor. They all said “Yes!”. On a Sunday this summer, they each devour Paolo’s sonnets along with a meal from one of the market vendors. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, they speak his words as both dialogue and monologue. Like Lucretius’s ancient poem De rerum natura/ On the Nature of Things, they move through the market as Epicureans, searching for something to eat and knowing that finding the right morsel might very well deliver a new sensation. The camera records it all. “Swerve” then becomes an ars poetica/ cinematica, a seven-minute meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Made with the support of cinematographer Sean Hanley, sound recordist Mark Maloof, editor Rebecca Shapass, and production assistants Priyanka Das and Conor Williams.
Premiere: BAMCinemafest June, 2022
Screenings: Museum of the Moving Image “Queens on Screen” Chicago Underground Film Festival Camden International Film Festival Woodstock Film Festival
On the set of Swerve
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
Press:
“’SWERVE is shot in Elmhurst, Queens, a richly diverse immigrant space that saw its residents endure our country’s ground zero phase of Covid-19. SWERVE brings tremendous visibility to an Asian food court and workers otherwise invisible and ignored by the city. Some of the film’s performers have lifelong ties to the nabe. Together we all honor the resiliency of Asian American and Pacific Islanders, underscoring the vitality of poetry and cinema in these fraught times’” – interview with poet Paolo Javier in QNS/ Queens News Service by Tammy Scileppi QNS/ Queens News Service: “‘SWERVE’: NYC performers wax poetic in a new film shot in Elmhurst” byTammy Scileppi , June 23, 2022
“Sachs and Javier make a meal out of zipping around table to table where a pandemic may have kept some customers away, but as people begin feeling their way back into the world, the sensations of reconnecting are conveyed in phrases that may come across as no sequiturs individually but coalesce into something greater as the feeling behind intonations and delivery transcend the statements themselves.” – Stephen Saito, Moveable Fest Moveable Fest: Interview: BAM CinemaFest 2022 on Crafting a Clever Turn of Phrase with “Swerve” by Stephen Saito, June 24, 2-22
Please join us on Sunday, October 17, @ 2pm ET to celebrate the publication of O.B.B. a.k.a. The Original Brown Boy, by Paolo Javier, and the debut of Lynne Sachs’ short video, Swerve, which adapts poems from the book. The reading will take place at the Moore Homestead Playground in Elmhurst, Queens—a neighborhood park and location of Sachs’ video—and Javier will be joined by Stephen Motika, Aldrin Valdez, and the cast and crew members of Swerve—Emmy Catedral, ray ferreira, Inney Prakash, Jeff Preiss, Juliana Sass, and Priyanka Das. Swerve will be playing as a video installation inside of HK Food Court, located across from the park at 8202 45th Avenue, from 12 noon to 6 pm.
This event is generously funded by NYFA’s City Artist Corps Grant and co-sponsored by the Queens Museum. Free and open to the public! The Moore Homestead Playground is located on the corner of Broadway, 45th Ave, & 82nd St, and off the Elmhurst Ave R train and Q60 and Q32 bus stops.
An autobiographical family portrait as a starting point for the construction of a film.
A workshop in which we will explore the ways in which images of our mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, grandfather, aunt or uncle can become material for the making of a personal film. Each participant will attend the first day with a single photograph that they want to examine.
Next, you’ll create a cinematic representation for this image by incorporating narration and interpretation. In the process, we will discuss and question the notions of expressing the truth and the language necessary for it.
This workshop is inspired by the work Family Lexicon by the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, whose writing explores family relationships during fascism in Italy, World War II and the postwar period. Ginzburg was a perceptive artist who unified the usual distinctions between fiction and nonfiction: “Whenever I have found myself inventing something according to my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled to destroy it immediately. The places, events and people are all real.”
Imparted by:
Lynne Sachs has created genre-defying cinematic works through the use of hybrid forms and interdisciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of essay film, collage, performance, documentary, and poetry. Her highly self-reflective films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and larger historical experiences. With each project of hers, Ella Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera and the materiality of the film itself.
Lynne’s recent work combines fiction, nonfiction, and experimental modes. She has made more than 25 films that have been screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto Images Festival, among others. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, and other national and international institutions. The Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), the New Cinema International Festival in Havana, and the China Women’s Film Festival have presented retrospectives of her films. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and is a part-time professor in the Art department at Princeton University.
Relevant information:
The workshop will be given in English and Spanish, an adequate level of the language is recommended
Students will have free access to the screening of the Monograph of the filmmaker Lynne Sachs, on Wednesday, May 25 at 7:30 p.m.
The Irish premiere of Lynne Sachs’ celebrated feature Film About a Father Who screens here alongside the world premiere of Myrid Carten’s short film Sorrow had a baby. Both artists will be in attendance for a discussion of their work following the screening.
Both Film About a Father Who and Sorrow had a baby deal, in very different ways, with familial legacy incorporating personal archives and pushing against the traditional boundaries of documentary practice. Myrid Carten’s film Sorrow had a baby is also the first film produced through aemi’s annual film commissioning programme, supported by Arts Council of Ireland.
PROGRAMME
Sorrow had a baby [WP] – Myrid Carten (aemi Film Commission 2021) Sorrow had a baby explores the mother-daughter relationship through multiple lenses: memory, beauty, inheritance. Who writes the stories in a family? Who can change them?
Film About a Father Who – Lynne Sachs Between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot film and video images of her father.
Authors who have made their way looking inward, achieving a work where the constant regression to aesthetic searches, thematic investigations and particular narratives, have a point at which the gaze gravitates, infects and expands.
In this edition, we are happy to share in Mirada Epicentro the work of Lynne Sachs, Bruno Varela and Ecuador de Territory, a program made up of the authors Alberto Muenala, Eriberto Gualinga and Sani Montahuano.
A Month of Single Frames 2020 – U.S.A – 14’ In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal.
In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor 2018 – U.S.A – 8’ From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo 2021 – U.S.A / España – 5’ In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic “Zero for Conduct” in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, Sachs wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can turn so quickly into chaos and violence.
Drawn and Quartered 1987 – U.S.A – 4’ Optically printed images of a man and a woman are fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium, 1987
Film About a Father Who 2020 – U.S.A – 74’ Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
Following the Object to its Logical Beginning 1987 – U.S.A – 9’ Like an animal in one of Eadweard Muybridge’s scientific photo experiments, five undramatic moments in a man’s life are observed by a woman. A study in visual obsession and a twist on the notion of the “gaze”.
Maya at 24 2021 – U.S.A – 4’ Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
Photograph on Wind 2001 – U.S.A – 4’ My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.
Same Stream Twice 2012 – U.S.A – 4’ In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects 1986 – U.S.A – 4’ A film portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a “character”. By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film is also a tribute to a real woman – Emma Goldman, 1986 .
The house of science: a museum of false facts 1991 – U.S.A – 30’ Offering a new feminized film form, this piece explores both art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural college. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.
Viva and Felix Growing Up 2015 – U.S.A – 10’ Capturing fragments of the first three years of her twin niece’s and nephew’s lives with their two dads (her brother Ira Sachs and his husband Boris Torres) and their mom (Kirsten Johnson), Sachs affectionately surveys the construction of family.
Which way is east Lynne Sachs / Dana Sachs 1994 – U.S.A – 33’ When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt. “Which Way Is East” starts as a road trip and flowers into a political discourse. It combines Vietnamese parables, history and memories of the people the sisters met, as well as their own childhood memories of the war on TV. To Americans for whom “Vietnam” ended in 1975, “Which Way Is East” is a reminder that Vietnam is a country, not a war. The film has a combination of qualities: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history’s scope, and a critical ability to discern what’s missing from the textbooks and TV news. (from The Independent Film and Video Monthly, Susan Gerhard)
Program in Spanish
Mirada Epicentro
Autoras y autores que han labrado su camino mirando hacia dentro, logrando una obra donde la regresión constante a búsquedas estéticas, investigaciones temáticas y narrativas particulares, disponen un punto en el cual la mirada gravita, se contagia y se expande.
En esta edición, nos alegramos compartir en Mirada Epicentro la obra de Lynne Sachs, Bruno Varela y Ecuador de territorio, un programa conformado por los autores Alberto Muenala, Eriberto Gualinga y Sani Montahuano.
A Month of Single Frames 2020 – U.S.A – 14’ En 1998, la cineasta Barbara Hammer tuvo una residencia artística de un mes en Cape Cod, Massachusetts. La choza no tenía agua corriente ni electricidad. Mientras estuvo allí, filmó una película de 16 mm, grabó sonidos y llevó un diario. En 2018, Barbara comenzó su propio proceso de muerte revisando su archivo personal. Ella le dio todas sus imágenes, sonidos y escritura de la residencia a la cineasta Lynne Sachs y la invitó a hacer una película.
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor 2018 – U.S.A – 8’ De 2015 a 2017, Lynne visitó a Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer y Gunvor Nelson, tres artistas multifacéticos que han abrazado la imagen en movimiento a lo largo de sus vidas. Desde la casa del siglo XVIII de Carolee en los bosques del norte del estado de Nueva York hasta el estudio de Barbara en West Village y el pueblo de la infancia de Gunvor en Suecia, Lynne graba una película con cada mujer en el lugar donde encuentra la base y la chispa.
E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo 2021 – U.S.A / España – 5’ En una epistolar fílmica dirigida al director francés Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs reflexiona sobre su clásico de 1933 “Zero for Conduct”, en el que los escolares libran una rebelión anarquista contra sus maestros autoritarios. Al pensar en el asalto del 6 de enero de 2021 al Capitolio de los EE. UU. Por parte de activistas de derecha, Sachs se pregunta cómo un juego inocente o una protesta calculada pueden convertirse tan rápidamente en caos y violencia.
Drawn and Quartered 1987 – U.S.A – 4’ Imágenes impresas ópticamente de un hombre y una mujer fragmentadas por un fotograma de película que se divide en cuatro secciones distintas. Un experimento en las relaciones forma / contenido que son peculiares del medio, 1987.
Film About a Father Who 2020 – U.S.A – 74’ Desde 1984 al 2019, Lynne Sachs filmó a su padre, un animado e innovador hombre de negocios. Este documental es el intento de la cineasta por entender las redes que conectan a una niña con su padre y a una mujer con sus hermanos. Con un guiño a las representaciones cubistas de un rostro, la exploración de Sachas ofrece visiones simultáneas y a veces contradictorias de un hombre aparentemente incognocible que públicamente se ubica de forma desinhibida en el centro del encueadre, pero en lo privado se refugia en secretos.
Following the Object to its Logical Beginning 1987 – U.S.A – 9’ Como un animal en uno de los experimentos fotográficos científicos de Eadweard Muybridge, una mujer observa cinco momentos poco dramáticos en la vida de un hombre. Un estudio sobre la obsesión visual y un giro en la noción de “mirada”.
Maya at 24 2021 – U.S.A – 4’ Conscientes del extraño paisaje temporal simultáneo que solo el cine puede transmitir, vemos a Maya en movimiento en cada época distinta.
Photograph on Wind 2001 – U.S.A – 4’ El nombre de mi hija es Maya. Me han dicho que la palabra maya significa ilusión en la filosofía hindú. Mientras la veo crecer, girando como una peonza a mi alrededor, me doy cuenta de que su infancia no es algo que pueda comprender, sino más bien, como el viento, algo que siento acariciar con ternura mi mejilla.
Same Stream Twice 2012 – U.S.A – 4’ En 2001, la fotografié a los seis años, girando como una peonza a mi alrededor. Incluso entonces, me di cuenta de que su infancia no era algo que pudiera comprender, sino más bien, como el viento, algo que podía sentir con ternura rozando mi mejilla.
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects 1986 – U.S.A – 4’ Un retrato cinematográfico que se sitúa entre una pintura y un poema en prosa, una mirada a las rutinas y pensamientos diarios de una mujer a través de una exploración de ella como un “personaje”. Al entrelazar hilos de historia y ficción, la película también es un homenaje a una mujer real: Emma Goldman, 1986.
The house of science: a museum of false facts 1991 – U.S.A – 30’ Ofreciendo una nueva forma de película feminizada, esta pieza explora la representación de las mujeres tanto en el arte como en la ciencia, combinando películas caseras, recuerdos personales, escenas escénicas y metraje encontrado en una intrincada universidad visual y auditiva. Los rituales de mayoría de edad a veces difíciles de una niña se reconvierten en una potente red de afirmación y crecimiento.
Viva and Felix Growing Up 2015 – U.S.A – 10’ Durante los primeros tres años de la vida de mi sobrino y mi sobrina gemela, usé mi cámara Bolex de 16 mm para filmarlos mientras crecían en la ciudad de Nueva York con sus dos papás (mi hermano Ira Sachs y su esposo Boris Torres) y su mamá (Kirsten Johnson). . La película termina con un abrazo por el Día del Orgullo Gay.
Which way is east Lynne Sachs / Dana Sachs 1994 – U.S.A – 33’ Cuando dos hermanas estadounidenses viajan al norte desde la ciudad de Ho Chi Minh a Hanoi, las conversaciones con desconocidos y amigos vietnamitas les revelan la otra cara de una historia compartida.