Artist Statement
Published in April 2010
San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph: Lynne Sachs Retrospective 1986-2010

The Last Happy Day (2009) by Lynne Sachs; digital video, color, sound, 38 minutes

“In 2009, I completed The Last Happy Day, a film that uses both real and imagined stories about Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin of mine and a Hungarian medical doctor. (See text above for description). Several years ago I traveled to Sao Paolo, Brazil to film Sandor’s eighty-five year old wife, Andrietta. She described in vivid, almost dreamy, detail her husband’s macabre work. I listened to her recount his daily contact with the detritus of war, wondering to myself why we so rarely think about who is responsible for “cleaning up” the dead. Later in the film, Andrietta’s graphic, realistic recollections stir visual ruminations on this futile act of posthumous, cosmetic surgery.

“In my previous films, the elusiveness of the biographical impulse pushed me to interweave home-movies, found footage, interviews, and actual letters as a way of exploring the intricacies of my subjects’ lives. Stylistically, I developed a discursive way of working that integrated authentic materials with more artificial, constructed visuals. With The Last Happy Day, I constructed a narrative triangle between Sandor, my Uncle William and myself. While their presence in the film is grounded in a dialogue from the past, my participation is more temporally and geographically fluid, creating an evolving relationship of distance and intimacy through voice and text.

“Early in the film, I jump right into a reverie that introduces Sandor’s strange understanding of the human body—in death and in life. Through an evolving, highly saturated visual language, I contrast the haunting confinement and violence Sandor experienced in Rome during the Nazi occupation with the verdant emptiness of his later life in remotest Brazil. I juxtapose Sandor’s fearless introspection in his unpublished letters with my imagined visualization of his idyllic life in his house in the woods. The geography of his NOW simultaneously saddens and protects him from the threats he fears are still percolating on the other side of the Atlantic. As a way of articulating his longings, I project images from Roberto Rossellini’s hauntingly sad feature film Rome, Open City onto an array of reflective surfaces in Sandor’s vine-covered house in the woods of Brazil.

“Always an exile, a victim of a kind of human ‘continental drift,’ Sandor never felt ‘at home’ in the synthesized post-war euro-culture he found in Brazil. Building a harpsichord on which to play Bach, reading thirteen languages and translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin allowed him to stay connected to an old-world life to which he would never return. Through the visual texture of this film, I use images of landscapes as proscenium, and even as character. The camera searches for familiar terrain, names, and identifiable landmarks: zones of danger, safety, comfort and despair.

“In all honesty, I’ve wanted to make a film about my distant cousin Sandor for over twenty years. His was the only branch of my family that remained in Europe during World War II. During the production, I traveled to Dusseldorf, Germany to meet Sandor’s son, Hansgerd, now in his late sixties. As I stood with my camera, he uncovered a trove of family diaries, letters and inscribed books from the 1920’s and 30’s. Inside each book, Sandor and his parents had meticulously transformed their obviously Jewish name “Levy” to a more Hungarian “Lenard”. Rather than destroying this direct reference to their hidden family identity, Sandor’s family, my sole remaining European relatives, meticulously erased. In their minds, the key to survival in early twentieth century Hungary would be pristine assimilation. My own southern Jewish family in Memphis also refused to grasp fully the catastrophe that was Europe. With far less to lose, their methods of confronting eminent danger were similarly subtle. Keeping this legacy of detachment in mind, I try to create narrative distinctions between close and remote experiences of war. As Sandor’s world fell into a state of hunger and decay, he delighted in the absurd and the arcane. Humor was his life raft, his potent means of resistance. Speaking, reading and writing Latin kept him from what Natalia Ginzburg, another writer trapped in Occupied Italy, called ‘the fury of the waters and the corrosion of his time.’ Through images and writing, implicit connections to our own wartime situation push their way into the fabric of the film.

“Throughout this episodic story, I also work with a cinema-verité style scene of four children (including my two daughters Maya and Noa) grappling with the challenges of putting on a play of Winnie the Pooh, the book Sandor had, strangely enough, chosen to translate into Latin. The children’s extemporaneous conversations express an awareness of both the English and the Latin versions of Pooh, as well as the philosophical ponderings implicit in the text. In my mind, the inclusion of this quintessential sliver of innocence allows me to explore the implicit paradoxes of a life both thwarted and nourished by the contradictions of a troubled time.” (Lynne Sachs)

Related posts:

1. The Last Happy Day “A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story ... a...
2. Jewish Week Review of “The Last Happy Day” It would be tempting but altogether too glib to make...
3. Lynne Sachs at University of Chicago Film Studies Center In conversation with Classics Professor Michèle Lowrie (who acted as...

Review of Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo
by William Weaver

http://www.gomemphis.com/news/2010/apr/23/wind-in-our-hair-blows-down-walls/

Con Viento en Pelo begins and ends with the approaching rumble of a train engine. For the young protagonists of the film, the train represents both a source of freedom and an interjection of cold, adult reality into their innocent, sheltered existence. This film forgoes a traditional narrative in favor of an exploration of the sensations that accompany the burgeoning adolescence of four Argentinean girls. This causes the film to unfold as a documentary of emotions, so to speak, rather than a conventional movie. Director Lynne Sachs is far more concerned with capturing textures, sounds, and feelings, the ingredients of memories, than action or dialogue. For example, in an early scene, Sachs juxtaposes a soft-focused close-up of a fluffy, wet dog with the cold, austere barbed wire fences of the Buenos Aires slums.

Central to the film is the dichotomy between the cold, urban adult world and its harsh realities and the warm domestic comforts of the girls’ homes and the lush gardens in which they play. The girls pretend to live in their own kingdom, where the forces of imposing adulthood are kept at bay by the walls of their imaginary fortress. They run, scream, laugh, and play while outside of their domain, their country is fraught with labor strikes and smoldering social tension.

Even in their sheltered existences, elements of reality manage to seep in and take hold of the young girls’ emotions. When asked what she is most afraid of, one of the girls responds with a recount of a dream she had in which she was kidnapped and her parents could not afford to pay her ransom. Adult issues like the threat of poverty or coping with debilitating illness are ever present in the girls’ lives, despite their best efforts to escape.

Leticia, the eldest girl and self-proclaimed queen of the kingdom, is marred by an unnamed ailment, which leaves her limbs stiff and brittle and demands constant attention. Rather than give up in the face of the disease, the girls mock it with youthful abandon. The girls play a game called “statues” in which they try to hold strange poses for as long as they can by the train tracks. In a way, this innocent game seems like a way for the girls to help ease the pain of Leticia’s ailment by experiencing it each themselves. They laugh at it with the belief that laughing at a serious situation can, through some sacred childhood magic, assuage the severity.

The omnipresent train offers the girls their first brush with the excitement and confusion of adolescence. A mysterious boy throws notes to one of the girls each time he barrels past them on his train ride. The mystery and allure of this situation lead them to envision him as a prince charming. However, they are sorely disappointed when the two finally meet face to face and the interaction is awkward and stilted.

Director Lynne Sachs utilizes a mixed-medium filmmaking technique in which documentary footage of Argentinean riots and protests is unexpectedly interspersed within the larger fictitious framework of the film. It seems as if these interjections of real footage into the film mirror the obtrusion of reality into the girl’s sheltered fantasy world. The disorienting effect of this editing drapes a homogenous haze over the film, blending fantasy into reality and vice versa. This exchange culminates in the cathartic final moments when the walls between the harsh, urban adult world and the girls’ kingdom of childhood innocence crumble and the screen is flooded with a rush of excitement and confusion about the adolescent limbo between child- and adulthood. Con Viento en Pelo ends with the images of the rumbling train and the girls’ outdoor safe haven becoming one as they fade into abstraction.

In slightly over forty minutes, Sachs is able to encapsulate not the events of childhood, but rather the sensations and feelings. All the while, the tensions and concerns of the adult world quietly smolder in the background, offering a constant reminder of the limited longevity of childish innocence. The film is often disorienting and confusing, but couldn’t the same be said about the transition from childhood to adulthood? Con Viento en Pelo is an experience intended to be felt rather than understood.

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2. Wind in Our Hair “sneak preview” Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires Inspired by the stories...
3. Interview w/Lynne Sachs on Making “Wind in Our Hair” in Buenos Aires Cold August winter in Buenos Aires. Lynne Sachs and a...

The Films of Lynne Sachs

Review by Andrea Gronvall

March 12, 2010

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

http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/films-by-lynne-sachs/Film?oid=1390041

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

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

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

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Wind in Our Hair
40 min., 2010,  by Lynne Sachs

DISTRIBUTOR:  Filmmakers Cooperative   www.film-makerscoop.com/catalog/s.html
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, “Wind in Our Hair” is an experimental narrative directed by New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, “Wind in Our Hair” is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest. Shot with 16mm, Super 8mm, Regular 8mm film and video, the film follows the girls to the train tracks, into kitchens, on sidewalks, in costume stores, and into backyards in the heart of Buenos Aires as well as the outskirts of town. Sachs and her Argentine collaborators move about Buenos Aires  with their cameras, witnessing the four playful girls as they wander a city embroiled in a debate about the role of agribusiness, food resources and taxes. Using an intricately constructed Spanish-English “bilingual” soundtrack,  Sachs and her co-editor, Puerto Rican filmmaker Sofia Gallisa, articulate this atmosphere of urban turmoil spinning about the young girls’ lives.   “Wind in Our Hair” also includes the daring, ethereal music of Argentine singer Juana Molina.

“Inspired by the writings of Julio Cortázar, whose work not only influenced a generation of Latin American writers but film directors such as Antonioni and Godard, Lynne Sachs’ Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo is an experimental narrative that explores the interior and exterior worlds of four early-teens, and how through play they come to discover themselves and their world. “Freedom takes us by the hand–it seizes the whole of our bodies,” a young narrator describes as they head towards the tracks. This is their kingdom, a place where–dawning fanciful masks, feather boas, and colorful scarves — the girls pose as statues and perform for each other and for passengers speeding by. Collaborating with Argentine filmmakers Leandro Listorti, Pablo Marin and Tomas Dotta, Sachs offers us a series of magical realist vignettes (rock/piedra, paper/papel, scissors/tijera), their cameras constantly shifting over their often-frenzied bodies. A collage of small gage formats and video, the 42-min lyric is enhanced further by its sonic textures that foreground the whispers and joyful screams of the young girls with the rhythms of a city and a reoccurring chorus of farmers and student protesters. Filmed on location in Buenos Aries during a period of social turmoil and strikes, Sachs and co-editor Sofia Gallisá have constructed a bilingual work that places equal value on the intimacy of the girls’ lives and their growing awareness of those social forces encroaching on their kingdom. “       - Carolyn Tennant, Media Arts Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York

Press from Chicago Filmmakers:   http://www.chicagofilmmakers.org/navkino.htm

“Argentine author Julio Cortazar is the inspiration for WIND IN OUR HAIR (2009, 42 min.), which loosely interprets stories in the collection “Final de Juego” against the backdrop of social and political unrest in contemporary Argentina. In her first attempt at narrative filmmaking, Sachs still retains her associative, playful structure and documentary eye. Four young women, again played by Sach’s daughters and family friends, grow restless at home and begin to make their way through Buenos Aires in search of excitement and eventually to a fateful meeting at the train tracks near their home. The film moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces and into the skittering beyond of adolescence, exploding with anticipation and possibility. Argentine musician Juana Molina lends her ethereal sound to compliment the wild mix of formats and styles.”  - Todd Lillethun, Artistic Director, Chicago Filmmakers

“I completely felt Cortazar’s stories throughout. The fluidity in which a ludic and serious tone mix and the combined sense of lightness and deepness capture the author’s vision.” - Monika Wagenberg, Cinema Tropical

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2. Interview w/Lynne Sachs on Making “Wind in Our Hair” in Buenos Aires Cold August winter in Buenos Aires. Lynne Sachs and a...
3. New Films by Lynne Sachs Reviewed in Chicago Reader Sachs’s daughters and their friends read from this text and...

Three Cheers for the Whale
by CHRIS MARKER

17 minutes / color
Release Date: 2007

Lynne Sachs worked for a year with Chris Marker, her friend of more than twenty years, on rewriting and researching for a new English version of his 1970’s collage film on whales.

Chronicles the history of mankind’s relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry.

Chris Marker’s co-director, Mario Ruspoli (1925-1986), descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, had been a journalist, painter, and ethnologist before discovering his vocation as a documentary filmmaker. In the Sixties he became one of the founders-along with Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, and Chris Marker-of the “direct cinema” movement, pioneering in the use of new lightweight cameras and synchronous sound recording equipment. Ruspoli’s eclectic filmography includes documentaries on medical, scientific, anthropological and historical subjects.

http://homevideo.icarusfilms.com/new2007/whale.shtml

“In San Francisco in  the mid-1980s, I saw Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil”.  I witnessed his mode of daring, wandering filmmaking with a camera.  Alone, he traveled to Japan, Sweden and West Africa where he pondered revolution, shopping, family, and the gaze in a sweeping but intimate film essay that shook the thinking of more filmmakers than any film I know. Marker’s essay film blended an intense empathy with a global picaresque.  Simultaneously playful and engaged, the film presented me with the possibility of merging my interests in cultural theory, politics, history and poetry  — all aspects of my life I did not yet know how to bring together – into one artistic expression.  In graduate school at that time, I wrote an analysis of the film and then boldly, perhaps naively, sent it to Marker.  In a last minute note, I also asked him if he would like an assistant in his editing studio.

Several months later, his letter from Paris arrived with a slew of cat drawings along the margins.  In response to my request for a job, Marker cleverly explained that, unlike in the United States, French filmmakers could not afford assistants.  And, in response to my semiotic interpretation of his movie, he explained that his friend (and my hero) Roland Barthes would not have interpreted his film the way that I had.  Marker suggested that we continue this conversation in person, in San Francisco.  Not long afterward, I found myself driving Chris from his hotel in Berkeley, California to Cafe Trieste, one of the most famous cafes in North Beach.  There we slowly sipped our coffees in the last relic of 1960s hippy culture, talking about his films, his travels, and  my dream to be filmmaker.  As the afternoon came to a close, I politely pulled out my camera and asked him if I could take his picture.  “No, no, I never allow that.”  And then he turned and walked away, leaving me glum, embarrassed and convinced that my new friendship with Marker was now over.

Over the next two decades, Chris and I spoke on the phone occasionally and I attended several of his rare public presentations. Three years ago, Jon Miller, president of our mutual distributor Icarus Films, contacted me to see if I would be willing to assist Chris in the making of a new English version of his 1972 film “Viva la Baleine”, a passionate, collage-based essay film on the plight of the whales.  Of course, I was honored and immediately said yes.  For one whole year, Chris and I corresponded weekly as we re-wrote and updated the narration and I searched for a male and a female voice-over actor to read the two parts.  He renamed the new 2007 version of his film “Three Cheers for the Whale”. It is distributed  with other “bestiary” films he has made including “The Case of the Grinning Cat”.

After we had completed the film, I traveled to Paris with my daughters to talk with Chris about a wide range of things –  our collaboration, Stokely Carmichael (a Black activist in the American civil rights movement), Russian documentary, cats and tea.  Just before we left his home, he showed  me a scrapbook he’d been collecting for several years.  Chris had accumulated hundreds of pictures and articles on a young African-American politician who had just embarked on a campaign to become the next president of the United States.  Chris was convinced that this virtually unknown candidate could stand up to a historically racist United States of America and win.  I was doubtful.”  (Lynne Sachs)

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www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c344_a16848/The_Arts/Film.html

by George Robinson

It would be tempting but altogether too glib to make a similar comparison between recent American documentaries and Lynne Sachs’  fascinating 38-minute film “The Last Happy Day.” Sachs takes a very unconventional approach to the Holocaust-related story of her distant cousin, a Jewish-Hungarian doctor named Sandor Lenard. Lenard fled Germany shortly before the war broke out, abandoning his medical practice and his non-Jewish first wife and son. He turned up in the unlikely haven of Fascist Italy, where he hid escaped POWs in his attic apartment in Rome. Eventually, he worked as a forensic anthropologist helping the American army’s Graves Registry unit in identifying the remains of GIs.
Finally, the pressures of the Cold War, with the threat of renewed and even more cataclysmic violence sent him in search of “a quiet, green, safe place,” which he eventually found on a mountaintop in Brazil. There he embarked on a quixotic project, translating “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, one of the 13 languages Lenard spoke and wrote. The resulting book, “Winnie Ille Pu,” became an unexpected international bestseller, bringing him a brief taste of fame.

Sachs’ previous work (“States of unBelonging,” “A Biography of Lilith” among others) has frequently been reviewed in these pages. Her approach to documentary is experimental and unconventional. In her new film, which is playing as part of the Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde” program, she offers seemingly unrelated images of a quartet of children, two of them her daughters. They are playing at and reading from the Milne books about Pooh, one of them occasionally adding narration of Lenard’s story. But juxtaposed with this cheerful scene are tinted and otherwise altered newsreel footage from WWII, clips from “Open City” and readings from cousin Sandor’s letters to another American relative who, like Sachs, lived in Memphis, Tenn.

The result is a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy. Lenard says in one letter, “Wars have decided my life,” and admits that “the only medicine against world events is distance — safe distance.”

“Lebanon” and “Views from the Avant-Garde,” which includes “The Last Happy Day,” are part of this year’s New York Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 11 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. For more information, go to www.filmlinc.com.

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1. The Last Happy Day “A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story ... a...
2. Lynne Sachs at University of Chicago Film Studies Center In conversation with Classics Professor Michèle Lowrie (who acted as...
3. New Films by Lynne Sachs Reviewed in Chicago Reader Sachs’s daughters and their friends read from this text and...

Click here to view the embedded video.

“Caudro por cuadro” (Frame by Frame)
by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
8 min., 2009

In “Cuadro por caudro”, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguan media artists to create handpainted experimental films in the spirit of Stan Brakhage. Sachs and Street collaborate with their students at the Fundacion de Arte Contemporaneo by painting on 16 and 35 mm film, then bleaching it and then hanging it to dry on the roof of the artists’ collective in Montevideo in July, 2009.

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The Last Happy Day
37 min. 2009 by Lynne Sachs

a portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran

The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs.  In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers.  Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on  the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame.  Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.

“A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story … a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.”  George Robinson, The Jewish Week

“Exquisite…Sachs reclaims (Lenard’s) dignity and purpose using letters, newsreel footage, and recreations of his environment as if to channel him back from the past.”                         Todd Lillethun – Program Director, Chicago Filmmakers

Premiere: New York Film Festival, 2009

Broadcast:  Hungarian Public Television, Spring 2010.

Selected Screenings and Honors: Indiewire.Com: Nominated One of the Best “Undistributed Films” of 2009 (Phillip Lopate); Director’s Choice Award, Black Maria Film Festival 2010; San Francisco Cinematheque;  Pacific Film Archive;  Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival, Spain;  University of Chicago; Chicago Filmmakers;  Closing Night Film Singapore Film Festival; International House University of Pennsylvania.

DISTRIBUTOR:  Filmmakers Cooperative   www.film-makerscoop.com/catalog/s.html

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2. Jewish Week Review of “The Last Happy Day” It would be tempting but altogether too glib to make...
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