If you’re braving indoor screenings and other head- and heart-enriching activities, and you happen to find yourself in Europe at some point over the next few months, we’ve got a couple of tips. The second of three exhibitions devoted to the work of Agnès Varda opens tomorrow at the Palais idéal du facteur Cheval in Hauterives, France. On view through April 3, a series of installations will explore the artist and filmmaker’s engagement with architecture. Varda first visited the Palais in the 1950s and returned to it throughout her life. Five hundred miles north, in Bonn, the Bundeskunsthalle is presenting the Rainer Werner Fassbinder Method, an exhibition of more than 850 items, including screenplays, letters, photos, sketches, and costumes, through March 6.Here are just five items that caught our eye this week:
In The Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1973), we see Luchino Visconti “at his most operatic, confessionally queer, and questioning of the present through meticulous reconstructions of the past,” writes Joshua Barone in the New York Times. The German trilogy is “a series of films that quietly wrestled with his own conflicted feelings about sexuality and class, and at the same time illustrated the twilight of the monarchy, of the aristocracy and, eventually, of Germany itself.”
The Damned is one of the films Bernardo Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro watched together while preparing to shoot The Conformist (1970). American Cinematographer has republished a 2001 interview with Storaro in which he talks about creating a “visual cage” around Marcello Clerici, the ’30s-era Italian fascist played by Jean-Louis Trintignant. That cage is “almost monochromatic” until Clerici leaves Rome, when it opens up to an orange afternoon before sinking into a blue evening in Paris. Storaro created an astonishing palette, often with limited resources, but he humbly emphasizes that all credit for the compositions and camera movements goes to Bertolucci. “From the first time I met Bernardo in the early 1960s,” says Storaro, “he made it clear that the positioning and movement of the camera was part of his directorial grammar.”
The twentieth Courtisane Festival, opening in Ghent on Wednesday, will screen Sumiko Haneda’s The Cherry Tree with Gray Blossoms (1977) on Friday. Haneda first encountered what is believed to be the oldest tree in Japan—planted by Emperor Keitai in the early sixth century—in 1969. She says she intended to make “a short, musical kind of work” incorporating poems by her younger sister—who died one year later. Haneda returned to the project in 1972 when, as Erika Balsom writes for the New Left Review, the tree “had become ‘something ominous’ to her. She shot intermittently over two-and-a-half years to capture its changing state across four seasons—in close-up and at a distance, in glorious bloom and dusted with snow—and then worked for a further eighteen months to complete the film. The result is a poetic reckoning with mortality and memory at the crossroads of the human and nonhuman, anchored by a female voiceover, haunting appearances of an adolescent girl, and, of course, myriad images of the titular entity. It is a portrait of a village and its inhabitants; a cultural history of a celebrated tree; a film like no other.”
On the Criterion Channel, we’re presenting seven short films by Lynne Sachs as well as her new introduction to her latest feature documentary, Film About a Father Who. Ira Sachs, Sr., a developer in Park City, Utah, fathered not only Lynne and her brother and fellow filmmaker, Ira Sachs, Jr. (Keep the Lights On,Frankie), but also nine other children that Lynne counts as half-siblings. Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Harrison Blackman suggests that Film About a Father Who “tests the limits of audience empathy as it explores an obscure figure whose behavior is gradually revealed to be abhorrent. Though Sachs doesn’t pull any punches, her film takes pains to convey her love for her father despite the revelations she has discovered . . . Though it’s become a staple of the memoir genre in film and nonfiction to air familial dirty laundry, Sachs proceeds with her investigation in a conscientiously humanistic way.” John Bleasdale, in the meantime, talks with Lynne Sachs on his latest podcast.
Movie poster aficionados will be familiar with the Polish School, and while “luminaries such as Jan Lenica, Waldemar Świerzy, or Roman Cieślewicz are well-known in design circles,” writes Zosia Swidlicka in the Calvert Journal, “their female counterparts remain consistently overlooked.” Swidlicka tells the story of Barbara Baranowska, whose “impressive body of work encapsulates twentieth-century visual culture at its peak.” Baranowska designed a series of book covers for her first husband, author Adolf Rudnicki, as well as the poster for Possession (1981), directed by her second husband, Andrzej Żuławski—who introduced her to her third husband, film producer Christian Ferry. In Paris, she created innovative posters for the French releases of films by Miloš Forman, Steven Spielberg, and Alan J. Pakula. And “she still goes to the cinema every day, devours books, and is just as perceptive today as she was forty years ago.”
[6 mins. 27 secs.] Legendary cinematographer Ed Lachman (“Ken Park”, “Far From Heaven”) returns to discuss his work with frequent collaborator Todd Haynes on the documentary “The Velvet Underground“. The documentary explores the multiple threads that converged to bring together one of the most influential bands in rock and roll. Those participating in the film include John Cale, Maureen Tucker, Jonathan Richman and Mary Woronov. It is currently enjoying a theatrical run at NYC’s Film Forum and premieres today on the Apple TV+ streaming service.
[33 mins. 45 secs.] Lynne Sachs returns to the show for her 4th visit. This time we are discussing the Criterion Channel’s celebration of her work which includes their streaming premiere of her most recent feature work of non fiction filmmaking, “Film About A Father Who“. Over a period of thirty-five years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16 mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah in her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Additionally, they are streaming 7 of her short films.
ABOUT THE PODCAST
Filmwax Radio is America’s favorite podcast featuring luminaries from the indie film community. Guests include actors, filmmakers, festival programmers, journalists and just about anyone else with a stake in the game.
Hosted by Adam Schartoff, Filmwax Radio began in September of 2011 and it wasn’t long before the show became the spot to stop by and discuss your latest project.
Beginning in the summer of 2013, Filmwax Radio began a partnership with Rooftop Films. As a result, the show may be listened to on the Rooftop Films website using the built-in audio player, as well as by subscribing on iTunes or Stitcher at no cost.
The organizers behind Boulder’s Mimesis Documentary
Festival, which runs from August 4 through August 10, don’t
believe in documentary as a genre.
“Documentary is an impulse within the arts, something that
exists within all art-making,” says Eric Coombs Esmail, director of
the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Documentary and
Ethnographic Media, which is presenting Mimesis in
collaboration with the Dairy Arts Center and
the ATLAS Institute B2 Center for
Media, Arts and Performance. The festival will include traditional docs, as
well as ethnographic, docu-fiction and experimental films.
“We have a broad scope of what we consider documentary,”
adds festival director Curt Heiner, noting that the festival exhibits not just
films but also theatrical, audio and even immersive works.
“The installation format of a documentary piece is older
than the screen,” Esmail explains. Immersive techniques that are growing in popularity
among artists and audience members today have a long history, and displaying
such artwork at Mimesis gives audience members perspective into the many ways
documentary art can be relayed.
The eighty artist-made films and installations cover a
vast array of subjects — from how tumultuous political divides affect our inner
landscapes to how couples form and infrastructure impacts human lives and the
environment. In addition to hosting screenings and installation-based
works, the festival will offer workshops and presentations by master
filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Pedro Costa.
Sachs will
screen and discuss her 2020 movie, Film About a
Father Who, as the opening-night presentation at 6 p.m.
Wednesday, August 4. Built from archival footage, home videos and interviews,
the film portrays family dynamics across time, from multiple — often
contradictory — perspectives. Sachs will also teach a filmmaking workshop that
demonstrates how small, everyday moments can inspire film poems.
Costa,
Mimesis’s featured artist, has gained recognition for his own “slow cinema”
approach to documentary filmmaking. His signature docudramas often
focus on Cape Verdean communities in Lisbon, Portugal, and he has received
awards from Locarno and Cannes Film festivals, among others. He will offer a
virtual masterclass about the art of editing, in addition to multiple
screenings.
“He’s a touchstone artist” for a lot of the people
submitting work, Esmail says.
But the festival’s focus is less on iconic filmmakers and
more on exploring lesser-known artists. The bulk of selections were picked
mostly from more than 300 entrants and many have been divided into smartly
named programming blocks such as Towards an Architecture of Inclusion,
Lessons for Unlearning, Borders Within, Motherese, A Place I Know, Impregnable,
Untangled Archives and Zero for Conduct.
Organizers hope Mimesis will help documentary artists and
scholars grow local, regional and international networks.
“There are so many documentarians from this region,” says
Esmail. “I hope they will find this valuable and interesting to them.” Mimesis Documentary Festival runs from August 4 through 10 at various
Boulder locations; find a full schedule and tickets here. All films are
also available for streaming online through
the festival dates.
Running Aug. 4-10, the artist-focused festival will feature workshops, installations and more
Mimesis is a word that carries many meanings, including
“resemblance, receptivity, representation and the act of expression.”
The University of Colorado Boulder’s Mimesis Center —
originally founded in 2016 as the Center for Documentary and Ethnographic Media
— allows up-and-coming creatives to dive deep into the art form of documentary
film making by exploring the many layered shapes it can take on.
With a focus on encouraging profoundly
personal, underrepresented and culturally-specific works to bloom, Mimesis
cultivates boundary-pushing material whose influence stretches long after
credits roll.
Last year, the center launched its inaugural Mimesis Documentary Festival, but
the event — in keeping with COVID-safe guidelines — was strictly virtual. This
year, the fest returns with workshops, at-home and venue-based screenings,
conversations with world-renowned film makers and other intriguing offerings.
The festival will open — on Wednesday, at The
Dairy Arts Center’s Boedecker Cinema — with “Film About A Father Who” by
award-winning documentarian Lynne Sachs.
Through a series of thoughtfully curated home movies, images and interviews,
Sachs creates a captivating collage steeped in nostalgia that also carries the
complexities of familial relationships.
On Aug. 7, she will lead a workshop “Day
Residue” that will prompt attendees to utilize fragments of their daily lives
as fodder for film poems.
Award-winning Portuguese film director Pedro Costa — the
festival’s featured artist — will give a master class on editing at 9:30 a.m.
on Aug. 8 at Grace Gamm Theater, within the Dairy Arts Center.
His 2019 film “Vitalina Varel” will be
screened at 7:15 p.m. on Aug 6., and his 2014 film “Horse Money”
will be shown at 11:30 a.m. on Aug. 8, both at Boedecker Cinema with the Dairy
Arts Center.
Aside from a variety of visually and
emotionally compelling features and shorts, installations that utilize film and
other materials to enhance the art of storytelling can be found at CU Boulder’s
B2 Center for Media Arts and
Performance.
“Blowback,”
by Nima Bahrehmand, is a three-channel synchronized video and sound
installation sourced from a found footage video, streamed online, from a
location in the Middle East. It can be viewed from Thursday through Aug. 10.
“24
Cards,” displays the artful decades-long postcard correspondence between
filmmakers Abraham Ravett and the late Donald Richie.
There are several audio documentaries; “Put
the Brights On” sheds light on the experience of transgender individuals
residing in rural Minnesota.
From docufiction to experimental selections,
over 80 projects aim to stir something in viewers.
There are a variety of ticketing options and
festival passes are $270. CU Boulder faculty, staff and students are eligible
for a 50% discount on most tickets and passes. Some free tickets will be
offered to CU Boulder students.
We caught up with Mimesis Center Director Eric
Coombs Esmail to find out more about the upcoming festival, some of the
documentaries that have had a lasting impact on him through his life and his
latest film project that spotlights the stories of homeless citizens seeking
refuge in the tree-lined national forests of Colorado.
Daily Camera: What inspired you to bring Mimesis to Boulder and
what are you most looking forward to about this year’s upcoming fest?
Eric Coombs Esmail: Mimesis is an initiative of the Center for
Documentary and Ethnographic Media at the University of Colorado Boulder. We
support documentary production, pedagogy, and exhibition at CU and the festival
serves part of that mission by acting as the focal point for building a strong
documentary community in our region and exhibiting unique international work.
As this will be our first year in-person with physical events, I am most
excited to see that community come together on opening night on August 4, at
the Dairy Arts Center, to celebrate the outstanding work of the programming
team and all this year’s Mimesis artists.
DC: What do you think sets Mimesis apart from other
festivals?
ECE: We are an artist-focused festival. For us, this means
a commitment to programming at least 80% of our lineup from the open submission
process, rather than through distributors or direct relationships. Our team
actually watches each project submitted — more than once — and they are
carefully curated into programming blocks so that every selected work really
shines. We also are quite different in that we accept works of expanded
documentary arts, including installation and interactive projects — installed
in the B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance in the Atlas building on the
CU Boulder campus.
Our programming is unique and brings
international documentary to Boulder that you simply won’t see anywhere else.
DC: Do you recall the first documentary that had an
impact on you and prompted you to want to get into this form of storytelling?
ECE: There’s not really one specific project, but I
remember being blown away by a range of works, like Gottheim’s “Fogline,”,
Flaherty’s “Man of Aran,” Jacobs’s “Little Stabs at Happiness,” Kopple’s
“Harland County, USA” and so many others. What really captured my imagination
was the idea that the documentary impulse exists in all art, from the
experimental to the traditional. When art is articulated through the lens of
documentary, we get so much more than simple information — we get to share in
the lived experience of others in a powerful, embodied way. Mimesis is all
about creating a space in our community for that to happen, and to celebrate
the artists whose labor makes those experiences possible.
DC: I know this is the first in-person festival of
Mimesis, but what would you say you hope for the evolution of the fest?
ECE: We have decided that Mimesis will always be a hybrid
event. We learned in the pandemic that flexible access points for artists and
audiences is critically important and that hybridity allows for productive
participation that in-person only events simply do not.
We will always be a festival that centers
artists and their work and that builds community in a grassroots way. While we
welcome industry participation, we will never be industry oriented. Our goal
each year will be to create an event that is valuable to our artists and unique
for our audiences. With our community’s support, we intend to continue growing
our festival and expanding our programming each year.
DC: I read that you are currently working on a
documentary feature that focuses on houseless communities that live and travel
through Colorado’s national forests. What has your experience been like
capturing this so far and when can we look forward to a release?
ECE: “American Refuge”
investigates the strange and complex history of the national forests around
Nederland. Shooting is challenging, fast-paced and exciting. We’ve found so
many amazing people — both housed and unhoused — who use the forest as a place
of refuge and respite and of transformation and recovery — but not without
significant risk. The pandemic put a hold on production for a year, but we are
set to finish principal photography at the end of this summer with a festival
run starting in 2022. Curt Heiner, our founding festival director, is also a
producer on the project.
For the past six years, I sought out amateur travel films made
by women in the first half of the 20th century, which I collected in an
all-archival essay film, Terra Femme. In the
process, I watched dozens of hours of footage of everything under the sun:
biblical gardens, women doing laundry, ice fields, a tapir, mounds in a
cemetery. Occasionally, there is a handwritten intertitle. “Crossing the
Equator” reads one, and the filmmaker has added little serif marks to the
letters in “Equator.” What follows is footage shot onboard a boat during a
line-crossing ceremony, in which Poseidon and his goons haze anyone crossing
for the first time by slathering them in shaving cream and throwing them in a
pool—an equatorial baptism. Elsewhere, title cards show up with facts (“Had
lunch here”) or bits of acquired wisdom (“Camel wisdom: if you stand behind
them, they can’t spit on you, if you stand in front, they can’t kick you.”). By
turn spectacular, mundane and cliched, the films also feature hand-drawn maps
and shots of signage or tourist pamphlets. The effect is of a moving image
scrapbook, annotating journeys through vanished worlds.
With the advent of home movie cameras in the 1920s, products
quickly came on the market that allowed amateur filmmakers to make printed
intertitles with borders and decorative fonts. Premade title sets were also
advertised, a few feet of leader that could be affixed to the head of a film,
with stock titles like “Symphony in Color” and instructions on what should be
shot—in this case, spring blossoms. Other suggested subjects included airports,
auto races, birthday parties and a scenario called “Hold the Phone” in which a
housewife has her phone call interrupted by a “child crying, a salesman at the
door, a collector, etc.” In contrast to this preordained content (and the
predestined activities of female lives), women’s travel films are comparatively
anarchic, seemingly driven by an urge to capture chance events, then collate
the world according to them, with private notations and other forms of text
stitching them together. Their haphazard arrangement and personal touches set
them firmly apart from professional travel documentaries of the time. These
were not aspirational endeavors, nor were many of the women I researched
involved in the (male-dominated) amateur cine-club circuit. These films seem,
by and large, to have been private documents, intended for the friends and
families of their makers or for the makers themselves.
In his essay “In Defense of Amateur,” Stan Brakhage noted that
the word in Latin meant “lover” and wondered why, by 1971 (when he published
the piece), it had acquired a derogatory connotation. He extols the dedication
of the home-movie maker, who photographs “the events of his happiness and
personal importance.” Brakhage sees himself and other experimental
practitioners as successors to this tradition. (He is in agreement here with
Quentin Tarantino, who once stated, “I like holding on to my amateur status.”).
As an experimental film canon took shape in the 1970s and ’80s, filmmakers like
Hollis Frampton and Fred Worden used handwriting to call attention to the
nature of word and image in a film, and to create palimpsestic studies of the
different drafts living inside a finished work in films like Frampton’s Poetic Justice and Worden’s How The Hell I Ripped Jack Goldstein’s Painting In The
Elevator. Brakhage himself “signed” many of his films by
scratching cursive letters into successive frames of celluloid leader—when
projected, the frames write the filmmaker’s signature across the screen in
light. In 2021, we have seen the near-elimination of the line between
professional and amateur. We use screens to scribble on Instagram stories and
dash off memes. But handwriting continues to show up purposefully in
experimental and nonfiction films, even as longhand writing becomes
increasingly obsolete (cursive is no longer taught in many primary schools).
What does handwriting convey when it shows up in a film? What is its
relationship to past modes of vernacular writing? How does written text imbue
or even subvert the information it conveys?
In The History and Uncertain Future of
Handwriting, Anne Trubek points out that early writing was primarily
a form of counting. Cave paintings are less works of self-expression, it is
believed, than tallies of goods—an early form of data visualization. Many of
the Mesopotamian tablets that have survived are receipts, the minuscule marks
of ancient cuneiform recording a trade of linen under the rule of a particular
king or providing a list of temple holdings. It would be several millennia
before the notion of personal handwriting, and the belief that it reveals
attributes of the individual, entered the public imagination. For the centuries
in between, written scripts operated more like fonts, and the point was to
adhere to them. The Romans wrote inscriptions in capitalis, the classically
balanced serif script to which, perhaps, the filmmaker makes homage in her
embellished “Equator” (and from whence we get the term capital letters). The
geographically distinct scripts that proliferated in Europe through the Middle
Ages were so ornate they were often unintelligible across regions. They were
conformed to diligently by the monks who copied books and manuscripts and,
following the advent of the printing press in the 15th century, found
themselves in demand as tutors of penmanship. Formal calligraphy had a new
application in Europe: the drawing up of documents and bureaucratic papers in
the conquest of territories.
The analysis of character through handwriting came about in the
19th century and was briefly linked to the occult and divinatory practices like
palmistry. But it gained steam as an empirically tested collection of truths
that could bridge science and religion by revealing how the soul shows itself
scientifically through writing. These ideas especially took hold in France,
where to this day it is common to ask job applicants to provide handwriting
samples, which are then analyzed by graphologists, or handwriting experts.
Strong-willed people cross their t’s with force; low-hanging g’s and y’s are
evidence of sadness. Pioneering graphologist Jean-Hippolyte Michon wrote, “Who
can doubt that every word is the spontaneous and immediate translation of
thought? And who can doubt that handwriting is as spontaneous and immediate a
translation of thought as speech? All handwriting, like all language, is the
immediate manifestation of the intimate, intellectual and moral being.” That
the written word is the uninterrupted route from self to page is essentially
the logic behind the signature, that mark of the unique self that binds us
irrevocably to time—to debt, marriage and more. It becomes physical evidence,
and this instant memorialization of the moment of writing links the pen to the
camera, which can only ever film the present moment.
Handwriting often shows up in fiction films, as when a character
reads or writes a letter or makes a written confession, as in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. Usually, it is a way of
conveying internal emotions to the viewer or simply a means of moving the story
forward. In nonfiction filmmaking, it could easily be seen as a neutral
technology—just another way of making words, an ornamental flourish. But
longhand writing carries with it more than just the information it conveys. In
it lies the mystery of the author, a person living and writing in time. While
the history of writing calls to mind learned volumes and chiseled inscriptions,
and all the forms of perpetuity that humans have sought after, it is conspicuous
evidence of frailty and disputation, of the provisional nature of factual
knowledge. Authors die or change their minds. Libraries burn. Buildings fall.
Ink fades.
Handwriting often shows up in films that feature nudity. In Mona
Hatoum’s 1988 epistolary short Measures of Distance,
we hear letters read aloud from the filmmaker’s Palestinian mother, exiled in
Beirut. Arabic writing is layered upon what we learn are nude pictures of
the mother taken by the daughter on a previous trip, before the current war
that prevents Mona from returning. The mother’s letters, read aloud, tell of
car bombs and the circumspect eye of her husband. She writes, “You asked me in
your last letter, if you can use my pictures in your work. Go ahead and use
them, and don’t mention a thing about it to your father. You remember how he
was shocked when he caught us taking the pictures in the shower during his
afternoon nap…. He still nags me about it, as if I had given you something that
only belongs to him.” What is illicit in the film are not the naked pictures
but the secret intimacy, forged in the text that overlays them. The letters
speak to the constraints of female life; the fact of writing is a form of
resistance.
In Maryam Tafakory’s short I Have Sinned A Rapturous Sin,
made 30 years later, the filmmaker’s arms, but not her face, can be seen
writing Farsi in chalk on black fabric. The words are lines from Sin, the poem by Forugh Farrokhzad (who would also
direct the immaculate film The House Is Black).
The lines, published when the Iranian poet was only 19, describe a bliss found
in submission, beginning:
I have sinned a rapturous sin / in a warm enflamed embrace /
sinned in a pair of vindictive arms / arms violent and ablaze
As she writes, Tafakory whispers the words
aloud in a voice of urgent defiance. English subtitling in the form of
cascading typed text fills up pockets of black in the frame, like echoes of the
handwritten pleasure. The filmmaker writes me via email, “typed text and
handwriting are different voices for me: handwriting is more quiet, a little
shy and secretive. often cryptic or blended into the image. it can be dismissed
or lost. my handwriting is always in farsi. typed text is more rigid, has
a louder and more arrogant tone with fake authority and/or contradictory
remarks. my typed text is mostly in english.” The scenes of writing are
contrasted with footage of male commentators, offering their own take on
female sexual energies: “In order to reduce her lust and unbridled passion,
woman should eat lettuce.”
Written text is by its very nature an act of friction. In Goodbye to Language, Jean-Luc Godard’s 3D feature, the
author Mary Shelley is depicted writing outdoors, her quill squeaking buoyantly
on the page, as if to suggest that the loss of the written word is the loss of
a kind of intercourse. Scratching words into celluloid is analogously erotic,
like grazing skin with a needle. It’s also incredibly time-consuming. For just
a few seconds of a word onscreen, one must carve the same word into hundreds of
individual frames of film. The end effect is something coarse and alive. In
1967’s White Calligraphy, Takahiko Iimura carved an entire
eighth century Japanese fable into black leader, one character per frame. It is
too rapid to read and becomes pure choreography—a flurry of line and curvature.
Writing is, after all, a form of drawing, and character languages carry in them
earlier modes of representational sketches. In Su Friedrich’s film Gently Down the Stream from 1981, the filmmaker
relays a series of dreams she had, interspersed with impressionistic images.
“Wander through / large quiet / rooms” read the first three frames, in what
appears to be liquid chalk but is revealed to be inscription on the film
itself. The shifting allography (ways of making letters) suggests the
mutability of dream space, in which one is some sense both writer and reader.
The text HOWLS in sharp capitals when a woman cries out or gets tidy and nearly
translucent when another shivers. From the handwriting analysis perspective, is
variation the equivalent of the soul engaging in open play? An old book on
handwriting analysis says that the letter t alone can tell you a lot about a
person. A high t means you’re vain, a looped cursive t means you’re sensitive,
a low stem on the looped t means you’re sensitive, but you try not to show it.
Try to be less sensitive, the book advises. But the film is uninterested in
this kind of external analysis. The self is a conjurer. When the dreamer makes
a second vagina next to her first one, she wonders: Which is the original?
As a viewer, waiting for words in the frame
causes a shift in the images. In Friedrich’s film, highlights on the surface of
a pool start to look like letters attempting to form, which also carries an
edging, erotic charge. “I lie in a gutter giving birth to myself,” the text
finally declares. In the films of Nazlı Dinçel, hand-scratching (and typing,
and hammer-punching) agitates the surface of explicit images as a way of
claiming them. In her series of “Private Acts” films, the filmmaker recalls
forbidden scenes: early experiences masturbating with a showerhead and other
forms of autoeroticism, first sex following a divorce. These recollections are
scratched into haptic imagery—the thumbing of a flower stamen is as charged as
the jerking off of an anonymous penis—firmly imposing her own articulation of
events upon tender scenes, an act against shame.
In another scene from Goodbye to Language,
a voice asks from offscreen, “To live one’s life? Or to tell it?” The line is
quoted by Moyra Davey in her 2016 video Hemlock Forest.
Davey says that when she asked her son if he keeps a diary, he replied that
he’d rather live his life than narrate it. Handwritten ruptures threaten to
destabilize the image, to force time into review even as it unfolds. But they
also open the frame to a different kind of truth-telling, which comes from
earned knowledge and intellectual itinerancy. They are interested in what
gathers over time, similar to a coral reef or the marked-up margins of a book.
Language time differs from visual time because what is written has already
happened, has been experienced, processed and transformed into words. Handwriting
adds to this the accumulated time of the physical being, beginning with the
years it took the child to learn to write.
Films use handwriting to summon the pasts that lie dormant in
the present, not only for individuals, but within the physical landscape. Hope
Tucker’s The Sea [Is Still] Around Us is what the filmmaker
calls a salvage ethnography. The 2012 short film uses postcards sent from
Corinna, Maine, over the course of the 20th century. The text is laid over
contemporary shots of Corinna’s buildings and landscapes while Tucker’s
quivering hand holds the postcard itself in the frame, showing earlier versions
of the contemporary places. The chronology of postcards describe decades of
industrial exploitation, starting with fragments of text from the years before
the mill came—“I have a dandy tan on”—which give way to descriptions of choked
waterways and overdevelopment. What began as handwritten messages transitions
to typewritten text. One can’t be sure if this mirrors what is on the back of the
cards we are shown, but the switch is clearly meant to suggest the same
mechanization imposed upon the land.
Longhand is the mark of the living human;
mechanical type is the mark of The Man. It is near-consensus among historians
of type that something was lost in the transition to networked writing
systems—not only in the loss of intimacy between the writer and the word, but
the loss of intimacy found in vernacular modes of writing such as the postcard,
with its shorthand convivialities. “Aloha!” reads a postcard from Hawaii sent
in 1961 (and acquired by me at a thrift store a half-century later). “Mickey
Rooney stayed here while visiting Honolulu. Most of the movie actors and
actresses stayed here. Warm today 80 degrees. Looks like rain but when it rains
it lasts about five minutes. Just a drizzle. Liquid sunshine. Los Angeles
tomorrow.”
But then tragedy falls into our lives: A loss, an illness, a
pandemic interrupts the route we were on, remapping our geographies. All
proximities become personal. In Instructions on Parting (2018),
the filmmaker and artist Amy Jenkins documents a period in her life during
which, in rapid succession, she became pregnant, then lost her sister, her
mother and her brother, all to cancer, in a matter of a few years. The intensities
of this time period are punctuated with notes of handwritten grief, stated
frankly, ellipses between locations during an intense series of transits
between dying family members in an endless succession of final visits. What can
be told to the page is different than what can be spoken aloud, and this holds
true of spoken voiceover.
In 2017’s Tip of My Tongue, Lynne Sachs, on the event of her
half-century birthday, gathers people born the same year but from other parts
of the world, to think through the major historical events of the past 50 years
as refracted through place and perspective. The film opens with a sequence of
notations scanned from notebooks. Jotting and crossed-out phrases alight on the
screen, then burn out like coals in time. They echo the feeling of living
through historic events, when what is happening feels too fast to ever quite
grasp except in retrospect. Plato wrote that written words can do nothing more
than remind one of what one already knows or has already experienced, and the film
is an homage to orality, the idea of writing as a prompt for performance and
dialogue. As Socrates quipped, “If you ask a piece of writing a question, it
remains silent.”
Baseball marginalia from James Benning’s private collection are
linked to the diary of a would-be assassin in American Dreams: Lost and
Found (1984), an iconographic exploration of the American
social landscape. The scrolling cursive text at the bottom of the screen
belongs to the diaries of Arthur Bremer, who, intent on shooting president
Nixon, found an easier target in Democratic candidate George Wallace (Wallace
survived). Hank Aaron memorabilia are presented in the upper quadrant of the
frame, while the soundtrack offers key audio from the era: “You don’t have
Nixon to kick around anymore,” advertising jingles, news coverage, rock
ballads. This approach of multivalence through ephemera has the effect of being
both lovingly culled and openly incomplete, acknowledging its own limits
through the sheer specificity of what has been chosen for inclusion. We get the
contours of a subtractive intelligence, collating debris and sifting through
transmissions, striving not for completion but for insight. Benning’s cursive
hand shows up again in 1992’s North on Evers. This
time, it’s his own diaries that scroll over the physical landscape, often
disappearing behind darker patches in the frame, then reemerging over grass or
a window, like thoughts that dip into the arcane and return unfazed. He visits
some friends in San Antonio. “They have a four year old daughter,” the words
announce over sand. “I like kids at that age. They want to learn so bad.”
A figure walks through what appears to be a smoldering forest in
Sky Hopinka’s Fainting Spells (2018), whose
form makes homage to Benning. The film is an imagined conversation between
someone younger asking someone older to tell them the story of how the ho-chunk
began using the Xąwįska (Indian pipe plant) to revive people who have fainted.
Text scrolls across land and sky, though maybe this terrain is less a place,
like Benning’s America, than a substrate upon which knowledge is remembered:
“Night is falling and the spirits can see us. / It’s time to go
home. / You had told me, ‘When you see the red / oaks, follow the water. /
Then, when you find a fork in the river there / will be a lovely piece of land.
/ Remove everything that shines from your / hands, from your neck, from your
body, and / swim to the nearest shore.’ / Xąwsįska, you’ve fainted again.”
Magnetic poles determine the earth’s latitude lines and the
equator, but lines of longitude are a human invention, drawn onto the earth
arbitrarily. A conference to decide where to place the Prime Meridian took
place in 1884, at which representatives from several nations (the colonizing
ones) met in Washington, D.C., to agree upon a common zero longitude line. Each
nation had used its own navigation for maritime maps—on French maps, deviations
of longitude were measured from Paris and so on. But the equally
essential point of the conference was to standardize time zones so that clocks
around the world would sync. At the time in America, neighboring cities
sometimes had different times of day, making train schedules rather
complicated. The record of the conference attendees vying for a longitude zero
that centered themselves reads a bit like a Monty Python script. The delegate
of France shoots down the British delegate’s pretext for a longitude zero
cutting through Greenwich, England (that the British Empire had the largest
tonnage of world shipping), as “entirely devoid of any claim on the impartial
solicitude of science.” In other words, it would simply be a flex on the part
of Great Britain. The conference adjourns with Greenwich as longitude zero,
initiating Greenwich mean time. One imagines the world’s globe-makers updating
their globes, drawing the longitude lines on by hand. Imperial perspective has
been subsumed into the appearance of objectivity. Writing in its earliest form:
a transaction receipt.
In Kevin Jerome Everson’s short film Partial Differential
Equation (2020), a college student fills a chalkboard with a
long mathematical proof. Differential equations include a changing, unknown
variable, often stemming from the physical world. What is the force on the
object? Where is it going? Partial differential equations are concerned with
the multiplicity of factors at play in a given situation: position,
temperature, orientation. These variables can end up encompassing almost
everything, and solutions can blow up to infinity as they evolve in time,
becoming unsolvable. We never learn what is being represented in the equation
on the chalkboard. It takes more than eight minutes to write it out, filling
the chalkboard (but safely by the end of the 16mm reel).
Those who read in languages that move left to right on the page,
like English, tend to experience screen motion the same way: a car driving
toward screen right has the sense of forward momentum and progress. Movement
toward screen left is going somewhere else, as in Behrouz Rae’s short
film Untitled. When the filmmaker draws a line in pencil
“backward” across a world map in a book labeled Retreat
of Colonialism in the Postwar Period, he charts his own path from
his native Iran to his adopted home, the United States. Mapmaking is a way
humans assert control over the physical world. Like the drawing up of
contracts, it was an essential tactic of imperialism. Drawing one’s own path
into an atlas, or making a moving image version of one, is an alternate form of
mapmaking. Both add another variable to the two-dimensionality of the map—the
variable of time. The use of handwritten language in non-narrative cinema is
similar. Language, in these genres, is often used to deliver facts and
information, which are supposed to have no point of view. But by including
their own written hand, the filmmaker uses these tools as a means of
finding out what the filmmaker themself knows, embracing the infinite
contingencies that have acted upon them, and which may even be encoded in their
handwriting. I find my own to be inconsistent; the graphology book tells
me that variability is the result of a desire for change.
“One day, time will make every road map in the known universe
obsolete and useless. And then we’ll all get lost,” says Bill Brown in
his short documentary Roswell (1994),
filmed on desert roads in and around New Mexico. Brown isn’t so much interested
in whether a UFO crashed in Roswell in 1947 as he is
in the burden of space and time that acts upon those on earth. What must it
have been like for that UFO captain, navigating above the big blank desert
without a map? Phrases of spoken voiceover are occasionally scrawled in strong
Sharpie letters in the filmmaker’s “secret diary”: “ON THE ROAD TO CORONA I
REMEMBERED (the page is turned) A REALLY SAD STORY…” A solitary woman, living
out on the land during pioneer days, would write love letters, then release
them into the open wind. The narrator speculates that one of these letters
reached an alien starboy, who came to New Mexico looking for her. Maybe, he
speculates, the Roswell crash is less a terrestrial mystery than a cosmic
tragedy: the story of a woman who almost had the chance to outrun her own fate
by vanishing in a UFO. A woman who, through desperation or optimism, wrote
tender greetings into a void—to no one in particular.
Presented in Italian preview at the 57th International Exhibition of New Cinema in Pesaro, Film About a Father Who by Lynne Sachs is the fragmentary portrait of an elusive, eccentric, excessive father, a real tangle, like the one that knots his long gray hair and that his daughter tries to comb him in the opening of the film. A Memphis-born Jew who became an entrepreneur, Ira Sachs Sr. has been involved in the hospitality industry by managing hotels and resorts in various corners of the planet. In the repertoire accumulated in over 30 years of life and filming, whose formats go from 8 and 16mm to video and digital, the director shows it both through the look of family films she herself shot as a young girl and in repertoires television and promotional. In the latter emerges the paradoxical and kaleidoscopic figure of a tycoon hyppie in multicolored outfits, intensely dedicated to work but also to joy, which as soon as the first, enormous,
Serial seducer with six
marriages behind him and nine children not all equally recognized, the father
is today a disarmed patriarch who has left behind a trail of pain, trauma,
abandonment and mysteries, starting with his name and surname which perhaps in
origin was not what the children have always known. But to the omissions
and riddles disseminated throughout his life is added a kind of senile amnesia (perhaps
yet another stratagem for not assuming his responsibilities?) Which prompts him
to respond with a “I don’t remember” to all the questions he asks.
daughter today.
So how to translate his
silence? How to mend the scattered pieces of an existential puzzle? How
to completely outline a father figure full of gaps and at the same time
reconstruct a little even themselves? What Lynne, her sister writer Dana
and her brother director Ira Jr., the fruit of their first marriage, choose to
do is take on the responsibility of keeping the scattered pieces of the family
together. The language, primarily cinematographic, takes on the role of
witness and mediator of this process of encounter and collective
re-elaboration. In one scene we see daughters and sons of different ages,
social status and geographical origin gathered in the same room to talk about
“him”, some sharing crazy anecdotes, some pulling out all the anger
accumulated even towards half-sisters and half-brothers.
In addition to the archive
materials and the sequences shot today in which the director recalls
“her” father, the interviews with his eccentric mother, the various
“girlfriends” he had over time and all the children between yesterday
and today make up the mosaic of the many possible perspectives on a bulky
father figure despite and perhaps precisely because of his absence. An
absence suffered individually and which by now can no longer be filled but can
be shared and perhaps weigh a little less. In a private repertory scene,
the young director herself explains what years later this film would become:
“in the past I made a film in which I aimed the camera lens all around me,
another in which I looked at myself instead inside and now I want to make one
in which I look both inside and outside ”. This intimate work,
The title of the film pays homage to Film about a woman who by Yvonne Rainer (1972-74) and that elision of the verb is both a reference to absence and an open space. As the director said: “The film is part of a series of portraits that I am making to understand the extent to which we can get to know another person. I hate when it comes to documentaries ‘that are based on the character’, I’m not interested in making a complete portrait of someone, I don’t know if it’s possible. This is also what the film is about and in this sense the missing verb opens up many possibilities: it is a film about a father who … jokes, misbehaves, has had many children. What interested me, however, was not filling a void, finding answers or finding secrets but following traces and asking questions.”
PLOT It was not easy for the director to
have a father like hers: always taken by the job of an entrepreneur, by the
never satisfied desire for conquests, professional and sentimental adventures,
full of women and children. A man who has done everything to be hated but
to whom his daughter remains attached despite everything and to whom he pays
homage with this film shot for more than thirty-five years and in various
formats.
CREDITS International title: Film about a Father Who / Director:
Lynne Sachs / Screenplay: Lynne Sachs. / Editing: Rebecca Shapass /
Photography: Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs Sr., Ira Sachs Jr. / Music: Stephen
Vitiello / Performers: Ira Sachs Sr., Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, Ira Sachs Jr.,
Diane Sachs, Rose Sachs / Production: / Country: USA, 2020 / Running time: 74
minutes.
Cinema Garage with Lynne Sachs – Sphere spherefestival.com July 18, 2021
In focus: Film About a Father Who 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 centre 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.
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created
cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and
cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film,
collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her highly self-reflexive films
explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader
historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit
connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.
The Artist : Lynne Sachs From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded
support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts,
the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened
at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the
Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the
Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives
of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield
Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival
International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019
film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of
Short Films in 2020.
Lynne Sachs’s catalogue is
represented in North America by Canyon Cinema and
the Filmmaker’s
Cooperative with selected features at Cinema
Guild and Icarus Films.
Her work is distributed internationally by Kino Rebelde. In tandem with making
films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press
published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.
In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and
the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded
Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.
The Task of the Translator By Lynne Sachs 10 min. 2010 Premiere: Migrating Forms Film Festival, New York, NY May 2010
Lynne Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s
essay “The Task of the Translator” through three studies of the human body.
First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task
of a kind of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of
Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of
translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And
finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
In “The Task of the Translator,” Lynne Sachs turns her original, probing eye to the ways in which we struggle to put words to the horrifying realities of War. In her subtle, trademark shifting between the intimate, personal space of a few individuals and the cavernous, echoing ambiguity of larger, moral questions, Sachs stakes out unsettling territory concerning what it means–what it feels like–to be made into unwitting voyeurs of Mankind’s most grotesque doings. At the same time we find she is also talking, with startling deftness, about the way that all artists are, in the end, engaged in the task of the translator: stuck with the impossible task of rendering imponderables, unutterable, and unsayables, into neat representations to be consumed, digested, perhaps discarded. We are not, however, left despairing; a pair of hands, caught again and again in the beautiful motion of gesticulation, is far from helpless or mute. This image captures, rather, the supreme eloquence of the effort to translate, and the poignant hope represented by this pungent, memorable film itself.”Shira Nayman author of The Listener and Awake in the Dark, both of which “ explore the havoc historical trauma plays with the psyche.
The Small Ones By Lynne Sachs 3 min. colour sound 2007 (from 16mm and video) Screenings: Tribeca Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria FilmFest (Award), Dallas Video Festival, Pacific Film Archive, MadCatFilm Fest
During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration
Service hired the filmmaker’s Hungarian cousin, Dr Sandor Lenard, to
reconstruct the bones–small and large–of dead American soldiers. This
elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of
excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery
and home movies of children at a birthday party.
“Profound. The soundtrack is amazing. The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed is so hopeful. Good work.” – Barbara Hammer, filmmaker
“Photograph of Wind” by Lynne Sachs 16mm, b&w and colour, 4 min. 2001 SCREENINGS: San Francisco Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival
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.
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” – Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
We strive to identify the problems of multidisciplinary objects and find a concrete and practical panacea with the extensive and experiential applications across the streams of science, art and social philosophy to construct an alternative culture in earth.
When
Petaluma artist Carol Ceres succumbed at 56 to cancer last January, the quick
rise of COVID-19 prevented any public memorial or retrospective exhibit of her
work. Now, thanks to a new group show at the Petaluma Arts Center, art lovers
can meet Ceres through her work and that of her circle of mostly LGBTQ artists.
The
show’s title, Undertakes to Answer, is a phrase taken from the poem
“Conversation” by Elizabeth Bishop. When visitors step into the center’s lobby,
the first thing they see is a large reproduction of the 12-line poem, which
begins “The tumult in the heart keeps asking questions. And then it stops and
undertakes to answer.”
This is the center’s first Pride Month-related exhibit.
“What I love about the show’s title is that there are so many unanswerable
questions in the world, but art undertakes to answer them anyway,” said
Brittany Brown Ceres, the spouse of the artist, who passed away just 20 days
after her diagnosis. The Ceres’s moved to Petaluma with their two young
children in 2017.
The subtitle of the show, which runs through July 10, is
“LGBTQIA+ Artists (and Allies) of the U.S. West & East [Carol Ceres and Her
Circle].”
It brings together 23 artists, with 37 works in varied media.
While most of the artists in the show identify as members of the LGBTQ
community, curator Jonathan Marlow urges visitors to not bring their
preconceptions. The show is neither sexualized nor thematically about identity.
As a program director for the center, Marlow recruited Ceres to teach at summer
art camps for several years. With assistance from painter Mary Fassbinder, he
put together the show to pay tribute to both Ceres’ art and her character.
Marlow’s own background combines art and technology. Formerly of
Seattle, he was one of the first 100 Amazon employees. He later moved to San
Francisco, where he and two others founded Fandor, a subscription service and
social video sharing platform that operated from 2011 to 2019. He now works in
film distribution.
The
heart of the show is the five-piece “Trust Series” by Ceres, which takes up
much of a long wall in the gallery. Each painting features an intense closeup
of two bodies, cropped to achieve a near-abstract quality. The images variously
suggest caring, sensuality, grieving — and dance, appropriately enough, given
Brown Ceres’ background as a dancer and choreographer.
There
are three other pieces by Ceres in the show.
Bookending the long wall where “Trust” hangs, two large
paintings by East Bay artist Christine Ferrouge evoke an aspect of LGBTQ
culture that is finally in the ascendant — that of family and children. The
Ferrouge and Ceres families were neighbors until the latter moved to Petaluma.
In “The Day After the Costume Party,” the artist’s two young
daughters are joined by Ceres’ young daughter in a garden. Still in their
costumes, the girls smile at the viewer, exuding camaraderie and joy.
The other Ferrouge painting, “The Huddle,” suggests the mystery
of childhood. A group of five young girls, most with their backs to the viewer,
conspire together while one of them keeps a watchful eye on us.
“Christine’s work is exploding in the art world,” said Brown
Ceres. “It’s exciting to see.”
Petaluma artist Garth Bixler is represented by a series of color
studies he has done during COVID-19. Previously on the center’s board of
directors, Bixler is also an art collector, and several of the works he loaned
the show are intriguing. There are three photos created by John Dugdale using
an updated version of cyanography, a 19th century photographic technique.
Instead of black & white, the images emerge in tones of blue. The effect is
old-and-new and rather uncanny. In “The Stairway,” a ghostly shadow hovers near
the top of a steep, plain stairway.
Bixler also loaned the show two works by David Linger, who
achieves a similar old-new effect by silk-screening dim, dark photo portraits
he took in Russia onto thin porcelain.
There are many such delights in the show.
“Lota and
Bishop,” a small construction-collage by Barbara Hammer, pays tribute to the
poet Bishop (1911-1979), who lived in Brazil with Maria Carlota de Macedo
Soares for many years. Hammer, who died in 2019, and filmmaker Lynne Sachs,
also created “A Month of Single Frames,” one of the two short films that run
continuously in the background of the show. The other film, “Eastern State,”
was made by Talena Sanders, an assistant professor at Sonoma State University.
Petaluma artist Robin Bordow’s large painting “23 Blue” suggests
the ultimate diamond, cut with hundreds of facets to hypnotic effect. Bordow is
the director-manager of City Art Gallery in Petaluma. She is also a
professional drummer.
Ceres
had many friends in the art world, several of whom are in the show. In addition
to Ferrouge, there is Russell Ryan, with the painting “Deer Jawbone with Cast
Iron Rabbit and Poppies,” and Oakland artist Hadley Williams, who has three
abstract paintings on display.
Born
in Madison, Wisconsin, Ceres attended the Art Institute of Chicago on
scholarship and moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s, eventually becoming
a member of City Art Gallery. She met Brittany Brown in 1998. When Mayor Gavin
Newsom announced the legalization of gay marriage in February 2004, Ceres and
Brown were 11th in line to get married. The couple spent a decade in Oakland,
where their children were born.
During the pandemic, Ceres painted at the dining room table every day.
“Up until a few weeks before her terminal diagnosis and despite
COVID, Carol was also teaching art to the Grant Elementary kids here in our
open-air driveway,” said Brown Ceres. “I was thrilled for her to be using art
as healing, weaving her painting in between school and meals with our kids.”
Initially, she assumed this daily art meditation was primarily a
coping mechanism during such a stressful period.
“At the time, I did not understand that it was a part of her
dying,” said Brown Ceres. “But then again, she was such a unique soul and never
failed to surprise us — especially with her profound wit and imagery. What was so
important to Carol was that young artists, especially LGBTQ artists who may
feel marginalized, have the chance to make art.”
Throughout her life, Carol Ceres’ goal, remarked Marlow, “was
always to help younger, emerging artists find their way in a competitive art
world.”
To that goal of supporting artists, as part of the Undertakes to
Answer show, there will be a panel discussion at the center on June 19 at 2
p.m. Several artists will discuss how the artist makes the work and the work
makes the artist. The Zoom-platform panel will be moderated by Josephine
Willis, a niece of the Ceres family and an art student in Milwaukee.
Inspired as it is by the work and legacy of Carol Ceres, the
gathering of artists to discuss what art matters seems a fitting and appropriate
way to honor someone who was constantly inspired by and actively inspired
others, though her art and through the example of how she lived her life.
“You never know when a piece of art will influence or change
someone,” said Brown Ceres. “If it changes one person’s life, doesn’t that
matter?”
The Museum of Modern Art ’s film department accepted the Carte Blanche offered by FIFA by creating three thematic programs. The films, rarely presented in Canada, are mostly selected from MoMA ’s own museum collections. The curated artworks are presented in the three following programs: At Home With…., Two Places and Eco City.
Curated by Sophie Cavoulacos, Assistant Curator, and Brittany Shaw, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Artists’ Cinema from The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Over The Museum of Modern Art ’s eight decades of exhibiting, studying, and archiving wide-ranging motion picture practices, the artist-filmmaker has been a continuous interlocutor. Whether tied to artistic movements or pioneered by individual, adventurous, and experimental voices, films by artists constitute a vital counterpoint to the cinematic auteur in form and modes of viewership, exhibition and circulation. Eschewing the idea of a masterwork, the selection proposes a more open-ended and poetic experience of the MoMA film collection. Each of the three programs hold cinematic images as a set of social and spatial relations, in pursuit of new aesthetic, experiential, and political horizons. Through unexpected juxtapositions, new preservations, and rarely-seen works, the program hints at the multitudes of histories embedded within the Museum’s 30,000 titles, proposes connections between past and present, and celebrates those artists who model new ways of seeing.
MoMA’s Department of Film was established as the Film Library in June 1935, and in 1938 became one of the founding members of the Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film (FIAF). The department has an extensive archive of over 30,000 film and media works, including the world’s largest institutional collection of the works of Andy Warhol. Annual exhibitions include New Directors/ New Films, Documentary Fortnight, The Contenders and To Save and Project, showcased across three theaters and a Virtual Cinema.
Program 2: Two places
This program offers two experiences of perceiving place: Lynne Sachs ’s roaming, intimate portrait, Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (presented here in a new preservation by the Museum of Modern Art) and Rose Lowder ’s structural Rue des Teinturiers. “It’s as if she understands Vietnam better when she looks at it through the lens of her camera”, Lynne’s sister Dana remarks, an apt observation as Lynne explores the place defined early in her life by depictions of war on a television. Rue des Teinturiers is filmed from a balcony in single frames over a period of twelve days spread across six months, the racked lens obscuring the bustling city life of the street below.
Why Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam — Lynne Sachs. USA. 1994. 33 min. In English and Vietnamese. English subtitles. Digital scan of 16mm film.
Rue des Teinturiers — Rose Lowder. France. 1979. 31 min. Silent film. Digital scan of 16mm film.
CELEBRATING INNOVATION
THROUGH 40 YEARS
OF INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING
THOMAS EDISON FILM FESTIVAL 2021
The Black Maria Film Festival is now the Thomas Edison Film Festival! We are proud to announce our new name and logo. Films from the 2021 & 2020 seasons and the festival archive are available on-line.
The 1st annual Edison Innovation Award 2021 was presented to Lynne Sachs “For Pioneering New Forms and Innovation in Film Making” on February 20th at the festival premiere.