Opening Doors in the Red Light District:
making films in Buenos Aires

by Lynne Sachs

We’ve been spying on children in the city for about a century now.
Using our movie cameras, we become omniscient god-like figures who
traipse behind a mischievous boy or a dreamy girl, privy to their
every move, even their thoughts, and, in this way, finding a
deceptively easy access to our own pasts.   From Albert Lamorisse’s
“Red Balloon” to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Nobody Knows” to Ralph Arlyck’s
“Sean: Then and Now”, both fiction and documentary films propel adult
viewers into the dynamic, cacophonous, barely Super-Ego-driven psyche
of young city dwellers en route to maturity.  For a child alone, in an
urban metropolis, a city can hurl all that a society has to offer – be
it salubrious or deleterious – in a single bus ride. Buenos Aires is
complex but hardly iconic, dilapidated but not tawdry, secretive yet
somehow also inviting.  In the summer of 2008, my burgeoning
familiarity with and fascination for this South American city offered
a canvas on which to explore these transformative moments.

Minutes after reading Argentine author Julio Cortázar’s short story “End
of the Game”, I knew I wanted to shoot a cinematic interpretation of
this seemingly quiet yet tumultuous moment in three pre-adolescent
girls’ lives.  Leticia, Holanda and the narrator (un-named) are
spending a few weeks together in a house on the edge of Buenos Aires.
Each day they perform a series of “sculptures” and “attitudes” on a
landing looking out over the tracks of a commuter train as it speeds
by.  One afternoon, an older boy throws them a note from the train
window, indicating that he has been watching them from afar.  The
girls are transfixed, exhilarated, and confused by this attention.
The game continues for a few weeks longer, anonymously.  Then one day,
the boy get off the train and the girls finally have a chance to meet
him.  Their conversation is brief, stilted, and uninspired, nothing
like what they had imagined. The game is, alas, over.

This realization that nothing is ever quite what you imagined it to be
becomes a harbinger of the adult awareness that will come. Cortázar’s
girls’ liminal halcyon days are coming to an end. They don’t want to
let go of their whimsy, their dramatic play or their baroque
costuming.  Their moment in time reminds me of what my own two girls,
ages 11 and 13, are experiencing in their lives now.  I decide to turn
this story into an experimental narrative film, one that “documents”
and explores these sensations that are so close to the ones I too knew
in my early teenage years.  While “End of the Game” takes place on the
edge of the city in a kind of hermetic, bourgeois residential area
seemingly far from the urban center of Ciudad Federal, I decide to
push my four girl actors into a cityscape that will shake things up in
some unpredictable ways.

I tell an Argentine friend of my grandmother’s who’s been living in
the United States for over half a century that I will be spending a
summer in Buenos Aires making a movie with my two daughters and two
Argentine girls.   She takes a deep, raspy breath and responds with
three simple words:   “Beware of kidnappings.”   Two weeks before we
leave, I read an article in The New York Times about a series of
possibly violent agricultural street protests creating a lack of fresh
food in the major urban areas of Argentina and a palpable atmosphere
of anxiety.  With a wing, a prayer, and a box of 16mm film, I head
south with my husband Mark Street and our girls.  In Buenos Aires,
we discover a summer of winter weather in a city I first encountered
in 2007 when I traveled with my older daughter Maya Street-Sachs
to show five films in their Buenos Aires Festival de Cinema Independiente.

Soon after our arrival in Buenos Aires, I invite Pablo Marín and
Leandro Listorti, two local filmmakers whose lyrical Super 8
experimental films I had seen during the film festival, to join me in
this collective endeavor.   Leandro and Pablo see the world through a
distinctive, curious lens so I am thrilled they have agreed to help me
shoot the film. In addition, they begin to show me the history of
Argentine experimental cinema, starting from the 1960’s to the
present.  In this milieu, I watch the transportive, often
dream-inspired films of Narcisa Hirsch, Claudio Caldini and Lucrecia
Martel all of which give me a deeper sense of the of the textures
surrounding me.

Since we will be doing a great deal of shooting in the family house of
Lena and Chiara, my two Argentine “actresses”, I am particularly
inspired by the charged, tight-knit home environment I see in Lucrecia
Martel’s “La Cieniga”. I try to create a similar spirit of emotional
electricity in the domestic spaces the girls inhabit.  As the children
move through the rooms of this austere 1970’s haute-modern building,
they tentatively investigate the flamboyant costumes I’ve found for
them and begin to understand the personalities of their characters.
Lena is playing Leticia which is probably the most difficult role:  a
girl with a pronounced physical disability that makes her posture look
awkward and wrought. She is haughty, brilliant and vulnerable.  Chiara
plays Holanda, who is clever, patient and naughty.  My older daughter
Maya plays the narrator (whom we name Elena), an observant, overly
responsible girl who feels her changes of life painfully.  Noa plays
Pilar (a name all of the girls adore), the fourth, invented character,
who is playful and wily.

To get things started and as a way to get “into character”, I ask them
to play a game I have invented called “House Taken Over”, inspired by
Cortázars haunting eponymous story of a brother and a sister who
discover that their home is inhabited by voices, and perhaps the
people who own these voices.  They run manically through the house
trying to escape the frightful sounds, and ultimately end up outside
their very own front door – homeless in a way. We follow the girls
with the camera, as they become similarly terrified characters in the
process of playing a kind of paranoid hide-and-seek.  A few days
later, I describe this theater game of sorts to an Argentine
philosophy student who certainly has a deeper appreciation for
Cortazer’s writing than I have yet attained.  He explains that for
some Argentine readers, the story is sharply and hauntingly political
in its depiction of the fear that the Buenos Aires intelligentsia felt
during the period now referred to as the Dirty War (1970s to 1983).  A
house taken over is a mind taken over; that which we most fear is
invincible until it is there to eat us up.

One torrentially rainy day when I plan to shoot in the backyard, but
am forced to move indoors, I film the four girls performing Cortázar’s
14 different attitudes including rancor, charity, envy, and sacrifice.
I position the girls in front of a large ceiling-to-floor window and
discover the enigmatic seductiveness of their silhouettes. By not
revealing their facial expressions, I allow the language of their
bodies to function like a semaphore for their interpretations of these
words, their articulation of prescribed human emotions is pared down
to its essence.  The girls’ bodies transform into moving arabesques
against the wet, green out-of-doors.  From this perspective, the
metropolis of Buenos Aires feels remote, ethereal, and unproblematic.

Despite the fictional foundation of Cortázar’s tale, the documentary
spirit of my working process rears its ugly head. I think about Jean
Luc Godard’s and Anne Marie Miéville’s groundbreaking 1977 French
television series “France Tour/Detour/Deux Infants”. Here the
directors asked two children a series of thought-provoking questions
that lead them to ponder their own fragile existence.  In the
willy-nilly production schedule I have created, we are shooting
through day and night for several weeks; the four girls climb into
their costumes (typical Argentine school uniforms) and won’t take them
off. So when I say “Tell me the things you fear most about life in the
city,” they don’t realize that they will be peeling away the fiction
to find something about themselves just one layer below.

Listening to Chiara’s recounting in Spanish of her dream, I discover a
scary underbelly of fear surrounding abduction here in Buenos Aires:

“When I was little, around 8 years-old, I had a dream. In the dream I
am 13, and I am sleeping, and a thief comes in, and everyone is
downstairs and the thief climbs up the stairs very quickly. He comes
into my room, grabs me, puts me in a bag and takes me. I am taken to
an alley where he makes me lay down, and then the thief calls my house
and says that if my parents want to see me again, they have to pay a
million pesos. And they don’t have the money. And then my dad goes to
the place; it is a very dark place. The thief isn’t there but I am,
lying on the ground. So my father grabs me and we run away. And when
the thief comes back, he sees that I’m not there and he kills
himself.”

And you’re not afraid of spiders, the dark or anything like that?

“No.”

Each girl has one scene in the film in which she discovers some aspect
of urban life. Holanda dances a Cyd Charisse style jaunt on the broad
Parisian steps of the Plaza Francia. Pilar jumpropes under the
shockingly modern sweep of the Biblioteca National and squirms in the
infamously ghostly Cementerio Recoleta. Elena and Leticia shop in the
cotillion stores of Once and along Corrientes,  Buenos Aires’ Broadway
chock full of elegant, crowded bookstores, three story pizza parlors
with elderly men in silk scarves, and the constant threat of street
crime.  In this teeming section of the city, the girls feel a sense of
urgency and uncertainty.  They must be vigilant in order to stay solid
and just slightly self-assured, as they walk along the sidewalks in
costume. We follow them with our cameras, trying to be there and not
there at the same time.  Two friends of mine have already had their
cameras pulled from their hands in broad daylight in this bustling
neighborhood, so a tight grip is no guarantee.

To imagine the barrio of Once, I think you would need to picture New
York City’s Lower East Side as it was in the 1970s – full of wholesale
fabric stores, street vendors, and earnest Hasidic storeowners.
Through the lens of the camera, Leticia and Elena, the two older
girls, appear more liberated and independent, embracing the color and
the grime of this ebullient neighborhood, relishing in the fact that
they are gallivanting about all alone.  With cameras in hand, we watch
them stare at a small coterie of construction works sitting on a curb
drinking maté.  In the aural fabric of the film, they listen to a
homeless man and his son singing a chant of need and desire.  But in
reality, the girls are clearly not in this place alone, not at all.
We, the small production crew, are there witnessing them and caring
for them, being adults, being parental, overseeing.  Even their
free-spirited jaunt through the vibrant but daunting Retiro train
station is monitored and contrived.  Out of necessity or timidity,
life in the city for these girls is as protected and secure as life at
home.  The camera presents a brazen autonomy that is, in the end,
false.

In my recorded conversation with my daughter Maya, she too squirms
uncomfortably in response to my questions about what she fears most in
the city.  She speaks of the unknown neighbors, the ones who talk with
vitriol and resentment just on the other side of her bedroom wall.
Their anger is audible; and in their invisibility and proximity, their
“off camera” performance in the theater of her own psyche is
monstrous.  Here city life offers her the opportunity to imagine an
anonymous neighbor who wavers randomly between the heroic
and demonic. Later, she describes a scene she has witnessed with
her own eyes but never described in her own words.

“On Las Heras Avenue is a bank, and in front of the bank is an older
woman who is homeless. We’re coming back from dinner, or from a movie
or something, and we all kind of go silent for a little bit ‘cause we,
you know, feel bad for this older woman who seems like every single
time we walk by is just sitting there.”

As much as these four middle class girls have observed poverty in
their every day lives as city dwellers (Maya and Noa in New York City,
Lena and Chiara in Buenos Aires), it is rare to hear them articulate
this kind of crisp observation.  They know how to see but they don’t
yet know how to speak about the multi-layered, multi-class experiences
that is modern urban life.

On one of the most challenging days of all, we spend about five hours
at the Mitre train station, shooting the girls in their various wacky,
poignant, beguiling statues and attitudes, all on the grass just
beside the train.  Everyone is prepared with a cell phone because we
must coordinate the boy’s ride on the train with the girls’
performances.  Pablo and Leandro shoot video. I am running around with
my 16mm Bolex. A third local media artist is on the train with the boy
actor who is in a grey suit with a book bag.  All of the people in the
station, on the sidewalk and on the train are watching us suspiciously
but we throw caution to the wind and keep going. The girls at first
are clearly feeling shy and then suddenly they give into the process
(my game) and become their characters, relishing the world of their
imaginations while still wondering what they heck we are doing.  At
last, they let go of their own self-consciousness, break the rules of
comportment in a big city.  This charged, hectic, public world full of
lonely train riders, housewives shopping for dinner, and impoverished
day workers riding the rails is a stage inviting wild improvisation.
The weather is very cold but we prevail somehow, completely worn out
but thrilled as the light disappears and we must go home.

Another cold morning, Pablo Marin and I take the boy and my daughter
Maya to the Retiro train station, in the center of the city, to shoot
the nightmare scene exactly as Cortázar had imagined it. The minute we
pull out our Super 8 camera we are told by the police to leave.  Just
minutes before, I happen to spot an even more nightmarish location for
our pesadilla scene on my way to the station, a magnificently
grotesque sculpture garden behind Retiro, full of dinosaur-size
animals built by Argentine railway artist Carlos Ragazonni. So we
immediately walk to this hidden, hellish, fantastic place and decide
we are lucky to have been evicted from the station.  When government
rules and regulations prevent us from following the story as given,
the city of Buenos Aires provides an even grander, spookier back lot
for the shooting to go on.

Our last production day is an exploration of another nightmare, one
that parallels the hide-and-seek game the girls played on the first
day.  I ask a psychoanalyst friend to join us to help me move the
girls into a more oneiric frame of mind.  Her understanding of and
appreciation for the layers of meaning behind and inside dreams sparks
wonderful tableaux vivant that I think can only enhance this aspect of
the movie. We shoot in a wooded area right next to the train tracks in
Parque Palermo. Here three girls, wearing moon masks, dance like
ghosts under the trees while the fourth searches for them in a game of
“Gallito Ciego” (similar to our Blindman’s Bluff).  Every few minutes,
the noisy commuter trains whiz by, disrupting the quiet of the game
and reminding them that they are no longer in a back yard, but rather
the heart of the big city.

During July and August, 2008 in Buenos Aires, the tensions between the
farm workers, agribusiness and government move from distant rural
manifestations to tented encampments in the infamous Plaza de Mayo to
raucous street marches of a quarter of a million people.  While at
first this intimidating illustration of Latin American politics
brought to the street seems like a hindrance to my film project, I
realize that these boisterous, anguished expressions of the poor
(mixed in with the behind-the-scenes manipulations of large-landowners)
are part and parcel of a multi-layered political landscape the girls are
beginning to notice and perhaps think about.  For this reason, I weave
the wild particulars of these Buenos Aires uprisings into the film,
including the cacerolazo (banging of pots in a group protest) and
tractors rumbling down the Avenida Libertad. The hermetic space of
the girls’ childhood, and indeed of Cortázar’s fiction in general, is
punctured by the needle of reality.

Of course, I had hoped to name my film “End of the Game” and to attain
the blessing of Julio Cortázar’s wife, who controls his estate, to
use the title.  Once I am back in New York City and editing with
Puerto Rican filmmaker Sofía Gallisa, my friend and former student,
I spend half a year corresponding with her agency about my project
and eventually send her a fine cut version of the film.  In the end, my
decision to embrace the city of Buenos Aires – howling, dancing,
complaining, lusting, creaking, and dreaming – is my downfall.
By inviting the city hook, line and sinker into the movie, I am, she
feels, betraying the precious spirit of childhood that her husband
worked so hard to create.  By opening the doors to things we might
not want to see, the red light district of our own consciousness, I am
constructing a porous, drafty fiction/non-fiction universe.  I name
the film “Wind in Our Hair” to celebrate the untidy, fluid, physical
world these girls will eventually learn to navigate all by themselves.

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FILM COMMENT
May/June 2010

SITE SPECIFICS: Abecedarium: NYC  (www.filmlinc.com/fcm/mj10/specifics.htm)

by Jesse P. Finnegan

Inspired by her children’s ubiquitous ABC picture books, not to mention the traditions of avant-garde alphabetizing, experimental mainstay Lynne Sachs concocted Abecedarium: NYC, an exquisite online corpse of cinematic cartography. Pearls of obscure vocabulary, ranging from “Audile” (one who thinks in sounds) to “Zenana” (in India and Pakistan, an area of the home reserved for women), serve as free-associative prompts for local artists. Clicking a particular letter reveals a corresponding interpretation culled from our fair metropolis. They’re typically short video works, aspiring to (and frequently transcending) a certain iMovie lyricism. The films are intimately observed audiovisual slivers, unfolding over a map that instantly scrolls to each work’s point of origin. Gotham emerges as a palimpsest of momentary glimpses and found poetics.

Sachs’s ever-ready eye is behind the lion’s share of entries: her “Foudroyant” response is a particularly potent rendition of the kaleidoscopic Coney Island film. David Gatten (“Rete”) and George Kuchar (“Pelagic”) contribute, respectively, a city symphony from leafily obstructed vantages and a poignant and peculiar visit to a Bronx funeral home. Beyond its homepage’s elegant interface, the project is meant to stand as an ongoing exploration through participatory blog threads and collaboration with other online media forums. Welcoming work from any and all who visit, the site (co-produced by artist/web designer Susan Agliata) aspires to be a perpetual atlas in progress, a sensorium of ever-accumulating coordinates. Abecedarium: NYC is rife with pockets of Web wonderment, serene handmade meditations, and, perhaps most intriguing, yet-to-be-realized potential.

Go to www.abecedariumnyc.com

© 2010 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center

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Published in San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph Lynne Sachs Retrospective 1986 – 2010

Between Yes and No: An Interview with Lynne Sachs by Kathy Geritz

Lynne Sachs and I were graduate students in San Francisco State University’s Cinema Department in the mid-eighties. We met as TAs for a huge undergraduate cinema history class, and became friends as we scrambled to stay two—or at least one—steps ahead of the students. New to teaching, we discussed ideas for films to show in our sections and also shared strategies to get discussions going. One disadvantage we faced was that neither of us had actually taken the film history course; instead, we had fulfilled this requirement through an independent study that entailed viewing films at Pacific Film Archive, where I worked. Together, we watched films religiously every week in a small screening room; but rather than the classics, we were drawn to experimental films, cinematic essays and offbeat narratives that fueled our enthusiasm for our field while providing an idiosyncratic survey of film history. Our friendship deepened during our wide-ranging conversations that continue to this day.

I spoke with Lynne about her film practice by telephone in January 2010. She was at her home in Brooklyn. — Kathy Geritz

What initially drew you to working with film?

All my life I’ve been working in the arts. I drew, took pictures and wrote poetry a lot as a kid. Later, when I was a teenager, I got very excited and disturbed by a number of issues—particularly the reinstatement of the draft and abortion rights. I realized, “There’s this part of me that cares about social and political situations; but, I’ll still need to keep this other part that is about my more private self, the part that wants to play with images and words, exploring the everyday.”

It was 1981, the year I went to live in Paris, when I started going to film programs, and I discovered the films of Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman. I also saw classic films like Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise (1945) at these sweet revival house theaters. I didn’t know terms like “avant-garde” or “experimental film.” I just knew that this kind of cinema was not about plot or movie stars, but about the expression of ideas or what it was to be a woman in the world, which seemed much more visceral and intellectual.

When I returned to the U.S., I didn’t yet think “I want to be a filmmaker;” I was just thrilled by this medium that I had discovered. I finished Brown University with a history degree, and thought I’d like to get into film, so I started to look for jobs in New York. In between desperately looking for paid work, I spent some time hanging out at what I later realized were some very important, even revolutionary, places. One was Downtown Community Television in Chinatown. The other was Global Village in Soho, which was a renegade community of people who had been followers of Marshal McLuhan and were committed to teaching young people about media. In 1984, I had a job answering the telephone and hanging film trims at documentary filmmaker Robert Richter’s office. He said to me, “You’re interested in documentary.You’re just out of college.  Maybe you should go to the Flaherty Seminar.” I applied for a scholarship to go in the summer of ‘85. It was by far the most experimentally oriented year they had ever had. VéVé Clark was there to talk about Maya Deren. They showed a film that Meredith Monk had made on Ellis Island. I had never seen a documentary that used dance to create such a fluid access to space. Plus Bruce Conner was there! I said, “This is what documentary can be? Found footage films by Bruce Conner?” It was eye opening for me.

I applied to graduate school at both San Francisco State and San Francisco Art Institute. I had not really completed a film yet, so I wasn’t accepted at SFAI, but I got into State. Eventually I went to both. I’m glad that I went to State first, otherwise I wouldn’t know about film history, film theory or have worked with Trinh T. Minh-Ha. The documentary impulse was a tableau where I thought I would feel comfortable and enthralled. Documentary also allowed me to knock on people’s doors and ask questions, and be the nosy person I thought I already was. But the first four films I made were strictly experimental. I felt that I could only work out my initial investigations of the medium this way. I also had the chance to intern with Bruce Conner in his basement, helping to organize his archive and talking about art for hours. It was, to say the least, a transformational time for me.

Looking back at that time, I think the films of Jean-Luc Godard—particularly Vivre sa vie (1962) and France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1978)—were major influences on me. …deux/enfants was so fragmented and yet it left you with a philosophy of childhood that we lose as we become adults. Then I saw Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) and I knew from then on, I wanted to make experimental documentaries, although I probably didn’t yet use those words. I was already drawn to things that were political but when I saw Vivre sa vie I realized that political work could be more nuanced and more about form. Honestly, I didn’t understand that at all until I got to San Francisco and saw Craig Baldwin’s RocketKitKongoKit (1986) which was so confrontational and engaged. It made me think about culture, knowledge and historiography in an entirely different way.

A distinctive aspect of your films is your capacity to make connections and associations. Sometimes the resonances are immediate and poetic, and other times the associations build over time, which becomes a way of opening up a film.

I feel a closeness with writers, poets and painters, much more than with traditional film “directors.” We share a love of collage. In the kinds of films I make, there are fissures in terms of how something leads to something else. Relationships and associations aren’t fixed. I always learn from an audience, about whether or not the convergence of two images is actually expressing an idea. I hope it’s doing one thing, but I might learn that it is doing something completely different. In this way the films are kind of porous; they are open to interpretation. One thing I realized recently is that I have this rhythm when I make films—ABABAB or yesnoyesnoyesno. For example, I call House of Science a “yes film” because any idea that came into my head, pretty much made its way into the movie. The yes films are full of associations—some of them are resolved and some of them are adolescent; they’re still trying to figure out who they are. Other films are “no films.” Window Work is a single eight-minute image of me sitting in front of a window. It’s very spare and kind of performative. I felt like it had to be done in one shot. “No, you can’t bring in any clutter.” Sometimes I try to make films that don’t have clutter; other times I make films that are full of it.

You have always made both short and long films. Do they offer different things to you?

I love making both. My longer films are almost like diary films. It usually takes me three to four years to make them. In the case of The Last Happy Day you could say eighteen years, at least in terms of the thinking in my head. The short films have to do with an impulse or an idea that might come to me when I’m taking a shower or eating dinner. Or maybe I read something that sparks me, and I think I’m going to try that out. I’m very envious of photographers, particularly ones who still use darkrooms. They walk into a room with a blank piece of paper and walk out with a thing. It’s that kind of coveting of a thing that often drives me to make short films because I like that they have a relationship to a moment.

Some of your films take the form of a letter, others include notes and observations, others aphorisms. Will you talk about the role of writing in your films?

Writing has always been a vital part of my creative process. In House of Science, I tried to look at all the manifestations of writing. I wanted to include the gesture of journal writing and how that is an extension from your mind to your fingers to the page. I included the sounds of pencil on paper and I even included the sounds of things you might do before you write, as in the sounds of a woman sitting on a toilet and urinating. Some of my best writing has been done on airplanes because I am concentrating and there is nowhere to go. Other times I might be in a subway or walking down the street where I don’t have access to the utensils but I have access to the plodding, pleasurable aspect of putting words in order and expressing an idea.

In Which Way is East, I tried to think about the nature of translation in relation to text as a series of visible icons. I was interested in writing as an articulation of a thinking process but also as an indication of cultural identity. I was exploring the experience of being an outsider or a tourist. I like for my viewer to come to see any language as an opportunity for an awakening outside your most familiar universe. In Which Way is East sometimes you see the unfamiliar lettering of the Vietnamese language while hearing it in English. Other times you hear a parable told in Vietnamese but you see it in English. There are shifts between what is given to you and what’s not given to you. You have to think “How does something that is so familiar in one culture, move to another, and how does it shift in meaning?”

You asked about letters, and yes, this aspect of the creative process has been vital to the way I have written for several films, in particular States of UnBelonging. For two years, I exchanged emails with my former student Nir Zats, an Israeli writer and filmmaker. He was in Tel Aviv and I was in Brooklyn. We struggled during a time of intense Middle East violence to make a film about a woman neither of us had ever known. It took me a year before I realized that our back and forth “conversation” was actually the foundation for the whole film.

Does your working method differ when you begin with another writer’s work as source material?

The seeds of Wind in Your Hair were the stories “Final del Juego” and “Casa Tomada” by Julio Cortázar. I played with his original texts, hoping they would speak to the four “actresses” (including my two daughters) who performed the roles of girls who were just about to reach adolescence. I shot the entire film in Buenos Aires, with a group of Argentine super 8 filmmakers. For both the adults who were making the film and the children who were in it, these stories quickly entered our consciousness. The text gave us a shared experience which in turn allowed us to jump into an extremely playful and engaging dialogue (in Spanish and a little English).

In A Biography in Lilith, I wrote a lot of poetry and then turned it into song with a cellist, a Talmudic scholar, and the wonderful performer Pamela Z. Music enlivened the writing. The poetry was inspired by my having read the Midrash—stories from Jewish folklore and mysticism. It all happened between my becoming pregnant with my first child and giving birth to my second, from 1994 to ‘97. The film reflects that time of my life, when I was keeping journals and was interested in observing the changes in my body, grappling with the oppositions between motherhood and my own sexual identity.

When I was working on The Last Happy Day, the part of the Sandor Lenard story that held me up for the longest time was the Winnie the Pooh part. I knew that this incredibly fascinating distant relative of mine had become famous for translating the Pooh story into Latin, but I couldn’t wrap my head around why someone would do such a thing. In this country, Winnie the Pooh has been trivialized to the basest form of Disney. When a child grows up, he or she grows out of Winnie the Pooh. I have learned that Europeans think Winnie the Pooh has a kind of philosophy to offer children—it represents a child’s first introduction to thinking about the ephemeral, the unattainable. This isn’t necessarily how we see the book. I had to keep doing research so I could excavate Pooh in a way that had meaning for me outside his American identity. I kept rereading the book but it didn’t click. I couldn’t find a way to like him enough to make this movie. Sometimes you come upon a kernel of an idea, and it doesn’t speak to anybody but you. In this case, it was speaking to lots of people but not me. Part of it was that I had the idea to make the film before I had kids, then I had kids, and I started reading the book to them. Once I could bring it alive to children, I knew how to make it into a movie. I hope that all of this “process” does in a sense become revealed in the film.

I’ve heard you refer to your longer works as experimental documentaries or essays, and just now you said they are like diary films. Do these terms mean different things to you?

The key to the whole question of the kind of film I make has to do with how I see process. This goes back to why San Francisco was important to me. I felt like in that city, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we were so driven by process; we had a commitment to innovation during each and every phase of our production. For me, the film essay isn’t simply a series of questions that are asked about the act of making a film. We often say that the film essay is self-reflexive, that it opens up the maker’s tactics. The difference between process and tactic is that tactic is procedure but process is continual exploration. Process remains unclosed. I’ve always said that an interesting film is never a work-in-progress but rather a work-in-process. That’s where the experimental comes into play, because the maker is continually trying-out strategies, and willing to fail. My measures of success aren’t necessarily that a film is entertaining or that it conveys a sense of authority, but that it takes the medium to a new level of public consciousness. I want the film to struggle to create a new kind of visual expression, moving me and in turn my audience to think in new ways.

Kathy Geritz is Film Curator at Pacific Film Archive and co-editor of Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, to be published in Fall 2010.

Related posts:

1. Lynne Sachs Retrospective in San Francisco and Berkeley April 10-14, 2010 Working since the mid-1980s, variously on lyrical formal shorts and...

Published in
San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph for
STATES OF BELONGING:  A LYNNE SACHS RETROSPECTIVE (1986-2010)
APRIL 10-14, 2010

Searching: Lynne Sachs’ Cinema by Lucas Hilderbrand

If I had to choose a single word to encapsulate Lynne Sachs’ cinema, it would be “searching.” Her work is marked by a mode of inquiry, of seeking out connections, of investigation. What is she looking for? Meaning, maybe. But more so, historical consciousness, an ethical way of being in the world, a politics of humanity. I’ve known her to get on a plane to move a film project forward, unsure what she will find when she lands or where the project is going. It seems every time we talk and check in, she’s been someplace else, at work on yet another project. She is indefatigable in her search, and she has been extraordinarily prolific.

With Which Way Is East, Sachs began a series of explorations that are central to her work: exploring geo-political conflict and politics in dialogue with family relations. In Which Way, Sachs visits her sister Dana, who had been living in Vietnam for a year, and this visit produces a cognitive dissonance between the place she saw represented in TV news reports of the Vietnam War as a child and the place she was then seeing as an adult. This tension might also be read as embodied in the celluloid itself: Which Way Is East’s formal signature is its superimpositions, often of blurred streaks of rich green foliage over sharp-focus landscapes, and its general refusal of image-sound synchronization. (Sachs has articulated this film’s form with a resistance to the rise of a common social documentary video aesthetic; with her move from film to video, Sachs would later experiment with frames-within-the frame as an alternative mode of juxtaposition.)

The Vietnam War likewise provides the incitement for Investigation of a Flame, perhaps Sachs’ best-known film. Here, rather than visiting a foreign land in the present, Sachs revisits a local past. While living in Catonsville, Maryland (outside Baltimore), she discovered the actions of the Catonsville Nine, a group of progressive Catholic clergy and believers who dissented against the war in Vietnam by raiding a selective service office and burning draft cards doused with napalm. Investigation explores the ways that ethical and religious beliefs can motivate people to question, even transgress the law; made before but screened after 9/11, the film’s meaning has been accidentally resonant with the later war on terror. In the film, the prosecutor in the Catonsville case raises the compelling archival question of whether the draft records had the right to exist, a peculiar slippage that grants the rights of personhood to inanimate objects, yet one that nonetheless broaches the ways history could be erased through the destruction of records. Even more essentially, the dissenters question the government’s right to dehumanize its people, whether by sending troops into a losing battle or by imprisoning the protesters. In one of the film’s most affecting moments, a participant recalls her first meal after being released from prison: when she stared at the menu at a restaurant, she couldn’t make sense of it and couldn’t decide; she cried because she realized prison had taken away her ability to think for herself.

The effect of war on an intellectual has taken Sachs farther away and yet, in a manner of speaking, closer to home. She has recently worked to unravel the enigmatic story of her distant cousin, anthropologist-doctor-refugee Sandor Lenard. This search began with the succinct The Small Ones, in which Sachs calls our attention to the human cost of war through recovering this cousin’s story of working to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers in Rome during WWII. Sachs continued excavating this complex familial connection in the longer and more ambitious The Last Happy Day. In this second take, we learn that she first heard of this cousin as a child because he had translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin while in exile; this discovery is mirrored by her own children’s contemporary inquiry into his story. A Hungarian Jew, Sandor lived in Germany when WWII began and hid prisoners of war in his apartment while in Rome. After the ravages of war, he moved to Brazil in search of “a far away place” and won a small fortune on a game show that allowed him to buy a house in the woods; although living in exile, he planted “all the fruits that can cure homesickness.” But Sandor’s amazing journey was sullied by the fact that he deserted his family in Europe. Sachs visits one of his sons in Germany, in the attempt to reconstruct Sandor’s story, but he only knows fragments of his own father’s story. He shows Sachs how their shared relatives’ books had once been inscribed with the original family name (Levy) but that this name had been partially torn out of each book and replaced with a less Semitic one (Lenard); this act served to hide an identifiably Jewish name but stopped short of removing all trace of the family’s existence. In a curious way, as in the Catonsville Nine’s symbolic burning, the destruction of documents ultimately points to a larger historical-political truth. Commenting on the impossibility of making truth claims about the past, Sandor’s wife comments, “There are things so old, I’m not sure of the truth.” The Last Happy Day is a film about a life structured by wars and the ways that knowledge of that life has been translated between generations.

More impressionistic in structure yet still working through issues of translation, Sachs’ most recent film, Wind in Our Hair/ Con viento en el pelo (2010) was inspired by Julio Cortázar’s short stories and shot in Buenos Aires. The film’s bilingualism might be seen as a metaphor for the work’s focus on young women transitioning from childhood to more mature sexual desire and political awareness. Early in the film, four girls (including Sachs’ two daughters, who appear in a number of Sachs’ works) play a game of searching behind closed doors and around corners. They wear colorful masks and frequently shriek with a mixture of delight and surprise. The girls play a number of games that they are seemingly too old to play—games they will soon enough leave behind. They experience life the ways we remember childhood as adults—as a series of intense moments, many of them related to the routines of daily chores and materiality of daily life. The film is positively tangible in its attention to the fluff of puppy fur, the crustiness of pastry, the lint on stockings, and the curl of paper that’s dried after being saturated with markers’ wet ink. The film is also about the girls’ glimmers of awareness of the world around them, such as the ambient sound of news radio or television images of protests. One girl describes a dream she had when she was eight, dreaming of being thirteen and being kidnapped; the dream suggests the anxiety of growing older and the ways the specter of The Disappeared continues to haunt the country. Yet the film ends much as it begins, with an eruption of exuberance, as the film transitions again: from video to film, from documentary sound and voice-over to Juana Molina’s “Un Día”, from pensive to quick images of girls again in states of excitement.

Trinh T. Minh-ha has written, “Meaning can be neither imposed nor denied.” It strikes me that meaning is something, in Sachs’ work, that is found. It’s what she searches for, but not in the form of some absolute truth. She finds meaning through productive juxtapositions of sound and image, past and present, near and far, family and politics. But she also trusts the audience to make its own meanings, too, by participating in her search.

Lucas Hilderbrand is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright.

Related posts:

1. Lynne Sachs Retrospective in San Francisco and Berkeley April 10-14, 2010 Working since the mid-1980s, variously on lyrical formal shorts and...

Looking Glass

by Gerry Fialka

19 Feb 2010

[Reviewed: 'Millennium Film Journal' #51]

How do you make art that is not art? Duchamp did it with readymade meta-cognitive creations. He helped spawn motionless dance, invisible art, silent music (John Cage’s 4′33″), the unreadable book (James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and George Manupelli’s unwatchable Film For Hooded Projector. And why make art that’s not art? That’s a good question. I wouldn’t want to ruin it with an answer. But learning how to cope with the hidden effects of what we invent may help. Duchamp sparked awareness of the sense-ratio-shift caused by inventions. He morphed the visual experience into the conceptual experience. Marshall McLuhan probed that “why” with his “media fast” proposition. It grew out of Ezra Pound’s “artists are the antennae of the race, broadcasting the hidden environments of inventions so we can cope with them.”

How do you make a doc that’s not a doc? How do you make an experimental film that is not one? How and why do moving image experimenters and documentarians combine their genres? Howard Guttenplan’s Millennium Film Journal (Spring/Summer 2009, #51) deeply penetrates these questions and creative cross-fertilizations. Guest editors, Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs have gathered innovators to fill 100 pages of insights. Jill Godmilow’s advice to abandon “truth claims, intimacy and satisfying forms” recalls genre-bending pioneer Luis Bunuel’s “I have always been on the side of those who seek the truth, but I part ways with them when they think they have found it.” Reading MFJ raises new questions. Richard Fung queries, “What kind of truths can be communicated better in documentary than in fiction – and vice versa?” This echoes Faulkner’s “Sometimes the best fiction is more true than journalism.” The essays provoke us to examine the motives and consequences of these media practitioners.

Here are my favorites:

1) Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner “unmask” the genre with essential observations on Bunuel’s Las Hurdes, which “will always stick in the craw of the powers that be.” How do you make an experimental doc that’s not an experimental doc? Luis did. His “thank God I’m an atheist” embraces contradiction. Larsen and Millner’s astute word choice “radical in-betweeness” mirrors McLuhan’s axiom “the gap is where the action is.”

2) Deborah Stratman astonishes with keen intelligence. She out-quotes me with Straub, Godard, Bunuel and Trinh Min-Ha. But it’s the Kafka axiom that ice-picks our foreheads with “what are we reading for?” She asks the reader to send her recommendations of new ways to see and think about the world. Stratman is not afraid to use all caps in a “LAWLESS PROPOSITION.”

3) Mark Street’s grassroots essay is a needed relief from the wild sea of polemic discourse. His simple story of a parents’ party for school kids communicates warmly the concerns of intention in the creative process. The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything as well as they can. Street lays it on the line with “it’s hard to communicate…I often find myself tongue-tied.” (Artists often aspire to make that which words can’t describe.) The honesty blossoms from unknowing into epiphany, much like Hilderbrand’s brilliant introduction entitled “Contradiction, Uncertainty, Change.” “The aesthetic of ambiguity” recharges Robert Dobbs’ “Ambiguity is a sign of human maturity.”

4) Hilderbrand and Sachs provide a chance to ponder the many connections between reality and experiments in documentaries. I recently interviewed Jay Rosenblatt, who said Chris Marker was an important influence because of “how he imagined Marker made Sans Soleil.” Rosenblatt could read and study all about Marker’s background, process and intentions till the cows come home. But in the long run, it’s how the perception resonates that’s vital.

What does it become when pressed to an extreme? That’s the fourth question of McLuhan’s Tetrad – the reversal. Kierkegaard wrote “Life can only be understood backwards, but we must live it forward,” which reverberates with Lynne Sachs’ remembrance “When I was six years old, I would lie on the living room couch, hang my head over the edge, let my hair swing against the floor and watch the evening news upside-down.”

5) Liza Johnson articulates the potential in her “small gesture of making the film (South of Ten)” with the statement “nothing is inevitable.” Johnson’s use of the word “inevitable” reminded me that MFJ’s inspired exploration of moving image art is, indeed, in the printed word medium, instead of being a film. This flips Hollis Frampton, who once said that one should lecture on film in the dark.

The word “inevitable” was also used by Marshall McLuhan, who probed form and content issues. He wrote “It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can get through.” Millennium Film Journal #51 provides that inevitable looking glass.

What does the experimental documentary flip into when pushed to an extreme? How do we develop the skills to analyze this question? Can we master the ever-changing language of experimental documentaries so we can assimilate them into our total culture heritage? Since 1995, I have curated such films in my Documental series via Chris Marker’s words: “in the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints, and mirrorlike fugues. Out of the these juxtaposed memories is born a fictional memory.” Or it’s like Guy Maddin says: “manufactured memory.” By hybridizing two genres, filmmakers have accumulated images that “can have conversation among themselves – or better yet, a musical conversation that sings to us about the differences between past and present, witness and participant.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum.

THE END

by Gerry Fialka

19 Feb 2010

[Reviewed: 'Millennium Film Journal' #51]

How do you make art that is not art? Duchamp did it with readymade meta-cognitive creations. He helped spawn motionless dance, invisible art, silent music (John Cage’s 4′33″), the unreadable book (James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and George Manupelli’s unwatchable Film For Hooded Projector. And why make art that’s not art? That’s a good question. I wouldn’t want to ruin it with an answer. But learning how to cope with the hidden effects of what we invent may help. Duchamp sparked awareness of the sense-ratio-shift caused by inventions. He morphed the visual experience into the conceptual experience. Marshall McLuhan probed that “why” with his “media fast” proposition. It grew out of Ezra Pound’s “artists are the antennae of the race, broadcasting the hidden environments of inventions so we can cope with them.”

How do you make a doc that’s not a doc? How do you make an experimental film that is not one? How and why do moving image experimenters and documentarians combine their genres? Howard Guttenplan’s Millennium Film Journal (Spring/Summer 2009, #51) deeply penetrates these questions and creative cross-fertilizations. Guest editors, Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs have gathered innovators to fill 100 pages of insights. Jill Godmilow’s advice to abandon “truth claims, intimacy and satisfying forms” recalls genre-bending pioneer Luis Bunuel’s “I have always been on the side of those who seek the truth, but I part ways with them when they think they have found it.” Reading MFJ raises new questions. Richard Fung queries, “What kind of truths can be communicated better in documentary than in fiction – and vice versa?” This echoes Faulkner’s “Sometimes the best fiction is more true than journalism.” The essays provoke us to examine the motives and consequences of these media practitioners.

Here are my favorites:

1) Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner “unmask” the genre with essential observations on Bunuel’s Las Hurdes, which “will always stick in the craw of the powers that be.” How do you make an experimental doc that’s not an experimental doc? Luis did. His “thank God I’m an atheist” embraces contradiction. Larsen and Millner’s astute word choice “radical in-betweeness” mirrors McLuhan’s axiom “the gap is where the action is.”

2) Deborah Stratman astonishes with keen intelligence. She out-quotes me with Straub, Godard, Bunuel and Trinh Min-Ha. But it’s the Kafka axiom that ice-picks our foreheads with “what are we reading for?” She asks the reader to send her recommendations of new ways to see and think about the world. Stratman is not afraid to use all caps in a “LAWLESS PROPOSITION.”

3) Mark Street’s grassroots essay is a needed relief from the wild sea of polemic discourse. His simple story of a parents’ party for school kids communicates warmly the concerns of intention in the creative process. The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything as well as they can. Street lays it on the line with “it’s hard to communicate…I often find myself tongue-tied.” (Artists often aspire to make that which words can’t describe.) The honesty blossoms from unknowing into epiphany, much like Hilderbrand’s brilliant introduction entitled “Contradiction, Uncertainty, Change.” “The aesthetic of ambiguity” recharges Robert Dobbs’ “Ambiguity is a sign of human maturity.”

4) Hilderbrand and Sachs provide a chance to ponder the many connections between reality and experiments in documentaries. I recently interviewed Jay Rosenblatt, who said Chris Marker was an important influence because of “how he imagined Marker made Sans Soleil.” Rosenblatt could read and study all about Marker’s background, process and intentions till the cows come home. But in the long run, it’s how the perception resonates that’s vital.

What does it become when pressed to an extreme? That’s the fourth question of McLuhan’s Tetrad – the reversal. Kierkegaard wrote “Life can only be understood backwards, but we must live it forward,” which reverberates with Lynne Sachs’ remembrance “When I was six years old, I would lie on the living room couch, hang my head over the edge, let my hair swing against the floor and watch the evening news upside-down.”

5) Liza Johnson articulates the potential in her “small gesture of making the film (South of Ten)” with the statement “nothing is inevitable.” Johnson’s use of the word “inevitable” reminded me that MFJ’s inspired exploration of moving image art is, indeed, in the printed word medium, instead of being a film. This flips Hollis Frampton, who once said that one should lecture on film in the dark.

The word “inevitable” was also used by Marshall McLuhan, who probed form and content issues. He wrote “It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can get through.” Millennium Film Journal #51 provides that inevitable looking glass.

What does the experimental documentary flip into when pushed to an extreme? How do we develop the skills to analyze this question? Can we master the ever-changing language of experimental documentaries so we can assimilate them into our total culture heritage? Since 1995, I have curated such films in my Documental series via Chris Marker’s words: “in the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints, and mirrorlike fugues. Out of the these juxtaposed memories is born a fictional memory.” Or it’s like Guy Maddin says: “manufactured memory.” By hybridizing two genres, filmmakers have accumulated images that “can have conversation among themselves – or better yet, a musical conversation that sings to us about the differences between past and present, witness and participant.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum.

THE END

http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=23&article_id=99

No related posts.

LYNNE SACHS
Notes to future lovers

December, 2009
by Nayantara Parikh  (a student of Lynne’s)

I asked Lynne Sachs if I could interview her and she said yes. I had spoken to Lynne so much over the semester that her constant counsel fitted in, as though I had been interviewing her for the last four months. Strains from Lynne’s work bled into what I had wanted to talk to Julia about. The ideas tumbled onto each other like a pile of puppies being fed from the same mother. In some of Lynne’s words: War is a shared experience that breaks down the routines of ours lives, a moment of crisis that is just BIGGER.

When we spoke I asked her about her collection of five films, “I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER”, why this theme? What drew you to it? She said how there was no specific plan—she just kept following the themes that drew her in. They began to revolve around war; it drew her in because of the breakdown of daily life and rawness of the situations that war creates. “They could have even been about snowstorms, or any major event in the climate”, something that would affect and connect all of us. How does one process horror? How does a society process what is happening when all that is tangible of that society is in the process of being destroyed? Things that are left: fragmented identity, stories, fables that weave ways to perceive.  The only way to deal with what is happening around you when it is too much to process is to maybe turn it into a fable, with animals talking instead of people, with people surviving on poison instead of bread and water. I know it sounds a bit vague, but one can’t pinpoint these things I feel. Sadness is strange and vast. In STATES OF UNBELONGING, Lynne focuses on a filmmaker from Israel, Revital Ohayon, who was killed along with her two sons in a terrorist attack near the West Bank. Her husband says, “The pain is so big, you don’t know where to put it.”

Last night I woke from nightmares again. What monsters were chasing me, I don’t know, but I was to scared to move. In my half sleep state I knew they were there watching me; I tried to breathe quietly, and then sleep grabbed me up and flung me back into the darkness.

In The Last Happy Day (2009), the fifth I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER film, Sachs follows the story of her Hungarian cousin Dr. Sandor Lenard, who was hired by the American army during WWII to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Later on, when he was in Brazil, he translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin, and in the film a group of children read and work on a theatre piece of it. It is “a meditation on war’s perverse and provocative stamp on the imagination”, says Sachs.

In Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam(1994), Sachs visits her sister Dana in Vietnam. They travel together from Ho Chih Minh City to Hanoi and on the way weave parables and images and conversations together to form the texture of Vietnam through their experience of it. Dana apologizes to a veteran at one point, and later tells her friend Phong about it. He says, “War is like a volcano. You can’t control it, so you do what you can to save yourself.” Images blur the screen: greens and whites dragging across and smudging into themselves. Tall trees lined up, I see them as though I am driving past in a car. I feel the humidity hanging on my skin, spices infiltrating the air and wrapping themselves around me—this  reminds me of home. There’s a shot of a woman washing clothes in a bright red bucket, we see her through the open bathroom door, as though we are peeking at her from a rooftop.

The slimy green water stained bathroom wall was like the one behind the house. I know that specific shade of green. It reminds me of that crisp winter morning my sister and I decided to play a war game. It was foggy and pretended we were secret agents, hidden and undercover. We climbed up to the water tanks on the roof and opened them to drop the secret codes. We didn’t know but two lizards were precariously balanced on the edges of the tanks. As we opened them, the lizards tumbled in and began flailing. We woke up my father and had to drain all the water from the tanks so that none of us got sick. We felt so guilty we stopped playing war games, and when enough time had passed for us to forget the guilt, we were too old to play.

Back to images of Vietnam. I see a tall, white building, it fills the screen. It looks like something official, maybe a university building or a house of parliament. Sach’s voice begins to talk about her meeting with someone named Coy. The VietCong burned down Coy’s house during the Tet Offensive in 1968. Coy’s father had been collecting books since he was a boy. When their house was burned all his books burned with it, in it. Coy said his father went crazy after that. Sach’s and Dana’s voices talk one through Which Way is East. Each sentence is like a diary entry, a note to the viewer, so personal that one can’t help but be drawn in. The first time Dana speaks, I thought it was a child’s voice.

….ashes and the smell of burned wood. searing through and cracking the spines of books. a lifetime’s worth of stories. where do burned stories go?“When you love someone, you love everything about them. Even their footsteps. When you hate someone, you hate everything about them, even their existence.”

Some one says, “It’s raining so heavy, it reminds me of the war we fought against the American B-52s.”

Last year I visited my grandmother in Germany. A storm started to break out and she got progressively nervous as it got worse. “I want to go home”, she kept saying. Later my mother explained to me that it reminded her of the war, and the bombs, and that the sound of thunder would always remind her of the planes flying overhead.

In the film, Sachs turns down a street, and realizes that it is the most peaceful street she has seen in Vietnam. None of the doors to the houses are wide open, and there is no commotion. Her guide tells her that this was the street the soldiers brought prisoners to shoot them. “No one wants to mingle with their ghosts.” The vague images would convey a feel of the place for sure, but the voices are what make it feel as though the Sachs sisters are not blind tourists visiting and showing us some faraway place that we know nothing about. We are immersed as visitors who are lovingly shown a place that is more than the American War that happened to it.

Language is inextricably bound to culture. When you speak the language, understand its nuances, its twists and turns, you can begin to communicate from within the society instead of as an outsider. In both Which Way is East and Wind in Our Hair (2009) Sachs uses the language of the place to further integrate and understand. Dana Sachs speaks Vietnamese and Sachs’ daughter learn Spanish in Wind in Our Hair.  They play out the words, repeat them, let them roll around their mouths, sensing the correct hardness of D’s and softness of S’s.

Filmmaking always makes me wonder how one is supposed to balance the work aspect and the family aspect of one’s life. I sometimes think that there could be no possible way to balance film and a regular life. Art takes over, it allows no room for anything else. I am crazy when I create, I am unpleasant, I am unreasonable, and there is no room in my life for anything other than my creation and me. Not the most fun thing to be around. Lynne has found a way to integrate her life into her work, and her work into her life; they fit together. I asked Lynne and she said that her daughters are around her a lot of the time, so it only makes sense for them to find their way into her work. Rather than discard the personal, Lynne embraces it, and that’s exactly what draws one in. Her films live in the realm of public space, but are wrapped in personal space. The documentary aspect comes in on two levels—the actual thing she is documenting, Vietnam for example, and then, her experience of it. Instead of pushing the personal away to “focus” on her work, she pulls it closer, unintentionally so, weaving it into each film.

A pair of feet in socks run across the screen, followed by three more similarly socked pairs. I hear laughter. This is Wind in Our Hair, Sachs’ film that tries its hand at following a vague story line based loosely on Julio Cortazar’s story End of the Game. Four girls are visiting a house for a short period of time. They grow bored, as there is not much to do and find some fun in waiting for the trains to pass at the tracks nearby. The are all about thirteen years old, on the cusp of something new, waiting for the changes to take place, waiting to be one step closer to growing up. Two of the girl’s are played by Sachs’ own daughters. She used 16mm, Super 8mm, 8mm, and video to shoot it.

Remember when my hair was long, it curled all the way down my back and you loved it, more than me I thought on some days. My friend told me one day, “women tend to carry history, identity, and heartbreak in their hair. No wonder we try to change it all the time.” I thought about that later, after 13 inches of my hair heavy with your love had been cut and placed into an envelope sent away to some one who had none.

Plants appear in a lot of Lynne’s work. Sneaking in at the corner of a frame in some places, taking over the whole screen in others. She told me that that she around the time she had her daughters, she got interested in the plants; she knows all their names. Walking around the city, her daughters and her could suddenly share the experience of knowing what would bloom when, and knowing that the nasturtium are late this year, or something else is early. In STATES OF UNBELONGING Revital Ohayon’s mother says of her, “She was so interested in nature, we thought she’s become a scientist.” Odd coincidences draw us to our subjects.

When I had to do my Abecedarium project earlier this semester, I was having problems making my film. Lynne gave me a piece of advice: some films are yes films, and some films are no films. Neither name gives a negative or a positive context. When making a Yes film, say yes to everything, anything that calls out to you, anything that feels right. When making a No film, you stick a story, you keep to your plan and you see it through. Of Sachs’ work, Wind in Our Hair is an example of a NO film, while The Last Happy Day is an example of a YES film. I made my film a YES film and ran with it.

STATES OF UNBELONGING uses Lynne’s voice and the voice of her Israeli friend Nir Zats as they try to find out more about Revital Ohayon. The voiceovers are the backing and forthing of their letters to each other. One of the moments in the film is Ohayon’s two sons’ day care centre at the kibbutz where they lived. The children talk about what to do with their toys and things. Shots of the toys recall ones we see at the beginning of the film. A horse, a tower, a pile of balls, dinosaurs too. Text lights up the screen in white. “I am not a war photographer. All I have is my imagination.” Lynne

Dear Lynne.

I hope I have managed to get across at least some of what I wanted to. I made this a Yes essay for me. I just went where the wind took me. Some of it is perfect, like how I wanted, and some of it is far from it. Thank you for letting me interview you. [art] lives in the lining of your skin. I always seem to wish I had more time.

Home is a strange thing. The day I interviewed Lynne Sachs, I called and she asked me to call back in some time because she was putting her daughters to bed. One of my biggest worries is that I won’t be able to balance work and have a life at home, but I suppose the trick is to intertwine the two, so that neither one is in neglected, and so that both benefit from it. I suppose this is the secret of having enough time.

FILM LIST (films used for this piece)

States of Unbelonging, 2006. Israel and New York.

Which Way is East, 1994. Vietnam.

The Last Happy Day, 2009.

Wind in Our Hair, 2009. Brazil.

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A few nights ago, on the first crisp evening of autumn, I emerged from a film screening at the Millennium Film Workshop onto East 4^th Street in Manhattan with Jem Cohen.  Nested in the sublime clutter and cacophony of the Lower East Side, this block between 2^nd and 3^rd Avenue is home to some of the most innovative theater and film venues in New York City. It’s a dark, quiet, albeit decrepit, building that seems to hide its cinematic and theatrical secrets with a kind of futuristic pleasure.  As we headed east toward the subway that would lead us both to our homes in Brooklyn, Jem gasped, not really out of fear or even surprise, but rather as if an internal light had gone on inside his mind, awakening a memory he needed to release. “Wait,” he exclaimed, “let’s go this way instead. I want to show you the most beautiful building in New York City.”

How could I say no?

Now as I’ve already hinted, East 4^th Street is hardly considered an architectural showplace, for even the most astute cognoscenti. I immediately flashed upon the rest of my evening, wondering how much time I could allow for this aesthetic adventure.  We crossed the street, mid-block, and stood just 15 seconds later in front of several typical rectangular constructions with four-paned windows and unadorned doorways. “See, there it is.”   I looked but I did not see.  “There, that white(ish) building with the exterior spiral staircase.”  And there it was. I’d walked down this block hundreds of times but had never observed this spinal cord-like staircase that climbed up the facade of an unassuming apartment building.  Sinuous, decadent and magically awash in light, the staircase gave fantastic elegance to the street. But this was not all.

Jem would never allow his “audience” (me) merely to witness this awe inspiring structure without revealing a moment of “ah, ha!,” Roland Barthes’ punctum, the time when a photographic image moves from the informational to the visceral to the emotional.  Jem recounted a night years before when he had stood alone exactly in the same place – 16mm Bolex and tripod in hand. As he admired the building at 62 East 4^th Street, he noticed a pigeon preparing to fly from a window of the building. He quickly reached for the trigger of his movie camera.  Something large and ominous, however, distracted him at the same moment.  A black hawk was swooping down as if from the clouds.  This larger bird caught the hapless pigeon and devoured it.

“Did you get it on film?” I asked.

“No, I did not.”

But for me, Jem had captured that dramatic New York moment.  Like no other filmmaker I know, Jem Cohen has collected thousands of junctures, ruptures and sutures like this one – whether on film, on video or in his mind.  These visual treasures are his because he witnessed them, reflected upon them and remembered them in his life-long search for the essence of city life.

In the first few seconds of his film “Long for the City”, an 8-minute portrait of NYC poet, singer and songwriter Patti Smith, we look at the Manhattan skyline through a smattering of wispy grasses. Seduced by the optical possibilities of scale, Cohen’s camera makes this Walt Whitman-esque flora equal in stature to the imposing buildings perched behind.  This tension between nature and city continues to create sparks – both aesthetic and emotional – throughout the rest of the film.  While Smith ponders her fraught relationship with her New York City, she is always wondering if she belongs, where she will thrive. Like Cohen, Smith has unflinching devotion to the buildings that give New York City its visual textures.

“I saw passersby that didn’t really see me. I saw people defacing a beautiful building near my house with advertising. I saw myself 30 years ago.”  (Patti Smith)

Listening to Smith, we catch a glimpse of the city once again, refracted, earthen-flat, in a puddle on the sidewalk.  Both Cohen and Smith imbue the artificial structures and the nature that peeks from behind with an exquisite intimacy.

“Twigs, scaffold, gravedigger, pollen which makes me cough….” (PS)

We are all pigeons, I suppose, relishing in the treasures of the trashcan, destroyed by the violence of the skies, always capable of flying away, somehow here.

In the final image of the film, Cohen’s camera dwells tenderly on a corpulent pigeon on a cement ledge, not so different from the one he’d seen attacked in flight on East 4^th Street.  Again, we hear Smith’s voice, somehow speaking for the two of them.

“Am I a country person or a city person?  I am always longing for the sea.  If I had to choose between the city or the sea, I’d choose the sea and long for the city.”

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and writer living in Brooklyn, New York.  Her most recent film, “The Last Happy Day”, is an experimental documentary that premiered at the 2009 New York Film Festival.

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Our cinematic relationship to Argentina began in March of 2007, when the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) invited Lynne to show a retrospective of her films.  During the one week she was in this film-crazy city, she met Pablo Marin and Leandro Listorti, two extraordinarily active Argentine filmmakers with a commitment to making movies and screening and writing about their thriving alternative film community.  While most of Buenos Aires was boasting about the burgeoning movie industry in Palermo Hollywood, or a lunch-time spotting of temporary denizen Francis Ford Coppola, Leandro and Pablo were mining San Telmo flea markets for Super 8 cameras or rushing across the city to see a festival screening by American avant-garde super-star Jonas Mekas, age 80 and thriving.  Lynne’s shared passion for experimental film quickly assured her that she had found a city she wanted to share with Mark, her husband and sometime artistic collaborator.

In June 2008, we packed our bags, got on a plane and moved to Buenos Aires for two months, studying Spanish as a family (with our two preteen daughters), shooting film and diving even deeper into the experimental film scene.  We learned to speak  Argentine Spanish (the “y” sound is pronounced “j”, so “Yo” becomes “Jo” and “pollo” become “pojo”), eat dinner late and spend hours sobremesa (at table) chatting and sipping wine into the night.  This land can make you feel impatient and shallow, as the Argentine filmmakers we met seemed to relish spending time discussing their movies as well as the political issues of the day (multiple agricultural protests) in Europeanist distended style.  Maybe it comes from the Argentine obsession with psychoanalysis, but talk is not considered passé here.
Our apartment was near the Museo d’Arte Latino Buenos Aires (MALBA) where we relished  the best modern art collection in town, as well as a full film schedule.  We saw a Hugo Fregonese retrospective, as well as the hilarious campy ¨Esperando la Carroza¨ by Juan Carlos Lenardi which friends had recommended.  What a way to learn Spanish. It’s like learning English by watching “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
A lynchpin of the scene is the urbane and witty Ruben Guzman. A prolific filmmaker and programmer, Ruben had moved to Canada in the 80’s but recently returned to make work and program in Buenos Aires.  The Kino Palais at the Palais de Glace  shows 4 nights a week in a cavern-like space in the back of the museum. It’s an underground club hidden in a  19th century ice skating rink (no kidding). This is where we presented our X-Y Chromosome Project , a subjective take on global warming, to the Buenos Aires community for three nights in July.  Here’s what they saw:
“From archival snips of an educational film on the weather to cine poems in full blossom, New York film “avant-gardeners” Mark Street and Lynne Sachs present the XY CHROMOSOME PROJECT .This program of 10 short films on both single and double screen gleans audio-visual crops from the dust of the filmmakers’ fertile and fallow imaginations. In this avalanche of visual ruminations on nature’s topsy-turvy shakeup of our lives, Street and Sachs ponder a city child’s tentative excavation of the urban forest, winter wheat, and the great American deluge of the 21st Century (so far).”

Over Peruvian dinner, Ruben introduced us to Federico Windhausen, an Argentine-American media arts historian currently living and teaching in California, but a man whose Argentine roots run deep.  Federico is the best informal cultural guide we’ve ever encountered, anywhere.  He was constantly suggesting film screenings, theatre and dance pieces (in the plaza of the Biblioteca Nacional, for instance) and ice cream (helado) places.  The Argentine obsession with ice cream is legendary.  Once at an asado (barbecue) in the country, the conversation wound its way from politics to movies to children’s attributes with nary a raised voice.  When it came time to order helados  though the guests argued vehemently and passionately in defense of their favorite flavors.

Whenever we found the conversation turning to the subject of Argentine experimental film there was one name that never failed to come up:  Narcisa Hirsch.  Over the last forty years, this grand dame of South American cinema has earned a well deserved reputation for making extraordinary films that are both formally rigorous and deeply personal.  Inspired by the feminists and the Fluxus artists she met and worked with in Europe in the 1960s and ‘70’s, Narcisa brought back her profound appreciation for avant-garde film to the artist community she knew and loved in Buenos Aires.  In the company of her good friend Ruben and Paula Felix-Didier, the director of the Museo de Cine, Lynne spent a fascinating afternoon with Narcisa in her home-studio discussing her forty year filmmaking career, her children and grandchildren and her farm in Bariloche, in the south of Argentina.

Pablo Marin is one of the guiding forces of experimental cinema in Buenos Aires, and his blog La Region Central (title taken from the Michael Snow film) is an amazing living document.  (http://laregioncentral.blogspot.com/)  Once Pablo and Mark spent the hour just before dusk shooting 16mm film around some stands that sell meat and sausages right next to the Reserva Ecologica.  Later Mark and he drank beers in a café on the Avenida Corrientes (sort of the psychic artery of the city).  Mark asked him to give a quick historical overview of the past.

“The early Argentine experimental period is represented by just a bunch of separate films, made by filmmakers that didn’t pursue a total exploration of the medium and, most importantly, didn’t think in terms of a community or movement. Horacio Coppola, a leading name in Argentinian still photography, made a few films during the 1920s and ‘30s.  His most important is “Traum”, a 16mm film that reminds me of the French-German Surrealists.

“Víctor Iturralde and Luis Bras were a couple of pioneers of experimental animation in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  They mostly painted and scratched on celluloid films in 35mm, 16mm and Super 8mm.

“The 1970s and 80s were a strong and vital period for experimental film in Argentina.  An actual alternative film community was born. During the 70s, we experienced a military coup d’etat which resulted in little contact with the experimental film world abroad. Our productions were more scarce and  individualized. Many films were made (mostly all in 8mm and Super 8) but the conditions of exhibition were totally underground and unconnected (garages, houses, etc). All this began to change in the early 80s when Buenos Aires’ Goethe Institute began showcasing as well as protecting these films and filmmakers. Under the Goethe’s umbrella (to put it visually), this kind of film practice could grow without fear of persecution (that’s why the government reaction was never that intense) and with more support for the movement collectively. The highest point of this Goethe period (if one could call it that) was in 1980, when the Institute held a workshop of experimental film with German filmmaker Werner Nekes. In this period many artists were working, such as Claudio Caldini (Super 8, Single 8), Narcisa Hirsch (16mm, Super 8) and Jorge Honik (Super 8). Other names include Juan Villola, Horacio Vallereggio, Marie Louise Alemann, Juan José Mugni and Silvestre Byrón. The films where shown in bigger, more social, environments but the reaction of the audience was mostly hostile. Once at a screening of Caldini’s “Gamelan” the audience started booing and shouting and turning off and on the lights ! It is also important to note that in this period these filmmakers were more in touch with international, experimental film production. To name a few screenings, there’ was  Jonas Mekas’ 1962 screening of “Guns of the Trees” at Mar del Plata Film Fest and in 1965 the Di Tella Art Institut screened a bunch of New American films (Mekas, Brakhage, Warhol, etc.). Besides that, Narcisa Hirsch traveled a lot to buy film prints that even today represent the most important private, experimental film archive in Buenos Aires.

“Since 1990, experimental media has for the most part switched drastically towards video even though makers such as Caldini and Hirsch continue to produce films. The opening of several film schools makes experimental film more accessible and more studied. The public screenings of international works have gained a solid following mainly through Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival and Mar del Plata, and it is also  more common to see screenings of local experimental works at these venues. Some of the important names are: Andres Denegri, Gustavo Galuppo, Gabriela Golder, Ruben Guzman (all in video), Daniela Cugliandolo (Super 8, video) and Sergio Subero (Super 8, video).”

With this backdrop for experimental film all around us, we tried to let ourselves be charged as artists in Buenos Aires, too, and move ahead with our own work. Mark shot 16mm film and videotape attempting to capture the idiosyncrasy of the city, following up on his 2008 film “Hidden in Plain Sight” (a city symphony film shot in Dakar, Hanoi, Marseille and Santiago de Chile).  He became obsessed with the cartonieres, the gleaners who sift through trash to sell cardboard on the outskirts of town, and the portreros, the men who sit behind glass windows at middle class apartment buildings watching and waiting.  He is currently editing the project, tentatively titled “Fans of Argentina”(based on the store displays that feature industrial fans running at different speeds, like enormous film shutters).

With Argentine super 8 filmmakers Leandro Listorti, Pablo Marin and Tomas Dota, Lynne shot an experimental narrative inspired by  Julio Cortazar’s short story “Final del Juego” about four girls who stand by a passing train everyday posing like “sculptures and attitudes.”  The film is very much about longing, the rite of passage between childhood and adulthood, and performance of an inner self.  The crew of cinema friends shot with a real potpourri of formats – from obsolete Kodak Regular 8 to Super 8mm, 16mm and video.  Our daughters Maya and Noa and their two Argentine friends Lena and Chiara Peroni were hopping on and off trains  throughout the summer as part of the production.  The film used the entire city as a set – including the Tigre Train line that sweeps through the Parque Palermo, the majestic Retiro train station, the flea market in San Telmo’s Plaza Dorrego, and a quiet backyard on the outskirts of the city.  The film is completed and is called “Wind in Our Hair”.

Our last day in Buenos Aires we walked a few blocks to a huge multiplex and caught Lucretia Martel’s brandnew “La Mujer Sin Cabeza” while our kids took in a dubbed version of “Mamma Mia” at the screen next door.  As we munched a last alfajore  walking back to the apartment to collect our security deposit we came up with the idea of curating a film screening in NYC upon our return.

Six months later, on February 21, 2009, we showed thirteen Super 8, video and 35mm films from Argentina at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. In curating “Ventana al Sur: An Evening of Argentine Experimental Film” we culled films from a whole array of non-traditional works made over the last 3 decades, some by veteran masters and mistresses (Leandro Katz, Liliana Porter and Narcisa Hirsch) and some by young upstarts and renegades (Pablo Marin, Ruben Guzman, Macarena Gagliardi, Sergio Subero, Leandro Listordi, Ernesto Baca) with newfound passions for the moving image.   Here are descriptions of just a few of the works we showed:

Leandro Katz’s “Los Angeles” (5 min., 16mm, 1976) is  a portrait of a small community living by the railroad tracks in the banana plantation region of Quiriguá, Guatemala. Originally a single take, this film alternates equal number of moving frames and frozen frames as the camera tracks alongside the train station.

Narcisa Hirsch’s “Workshop” (10 min.,16mm 1977) is a structuralist vision. One wall of the filmmaker’s studio as seen through a fixed camera. We see photos she’s stuck on the wall, then there is a dialogue with a male friend to whom she is describing the rest of the walls that you don’t see. A “one upmanship” of a similar film by Michael Snow where he describes a wall of his studio- workshop, by describing what one CAN see.

“Bajo Tierra” (4 1/2 min., Super 8, sound on CD, 2007) is Pablo Marin’s portrait of filmmaker Claudio Caldini who makes a new cinematic offering in front of the no-longer-industrialized Kodachrome.

In “Montevideo” (4 minutes, DVD, 2008) Leandro Listorti looks at the capital of Uruguay reveals, briefly, its characteristic of a Doppelgänger City: a single place cut in two spaces where two pairs of creatures explore the limits of the travelogue.

In “Stock” (5 minutes, 2007, mini DV ) Ruben Guzman follows a boy from La Cruz who walks to school to read aloud the stock market report from the newspaper. We are witness to the last day of capitalism.

Ernesto Baca’s “Nunca Fuimos Allah Luna” (7 min., 35mm, 2008) presents two characters on split screens,, conversing and arguing as the city unspools kinetically behind them.

The show was packed with Argentine expats, curiosity seekers, and hard core experimentalists who wanted to see how subversive cinematic effusions looked from the land where summer is winter and winter is summer.  We served yerba mate from communal gourds at the show—there’s no caffeine in mate, but there is something in there, and the room seemed to float on the wings of a filmic reverie.  We also served sweet dessert churros  (filled with dulce de leche of course) purchased at the famous Buenos Aires Bakery in Queens.
Driving back home we played back images from the screen in our heads—the frantic single frame pace of Narcisa Hirsch’s “Aleph”,  the wry and witty animated vignettes of Liliana Porter’s “Para Usted/For You” and the truncated urban space of Pablo Marin’s “Sin Titulo”, shot on an apartment building roof in Buenos Aires. As distinctive as New York is, it also recalls other cities, in a similar way that Buenos Aires can seem like Paris or Madrid, refracted, if you squint your eyes just right.  As revelers in Brooklyn ducked in and out of bars at 11 pm, it felt as if an Argentine night was just beginning.

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1. Ventana al Sur: Argentine Experimental Film This rollicking evening of challenging, expressive and oppositional Argentine cinema...

Bruce Conner died in the summer of 2008. For those who may not know, he was a Beat generation artist, the first filmmaker to see the value in “found footage”, and an extraordinary visionary.  His collages and films are in museums and archives all over the world.  Two different people in Buenos Aires, where I was living last summer, mentioned his death to me without even knowing that I knew him. Bruce was a very important person in my life and psyche.    In 1985-86, the year I spent working with him, we often drove around San Francisco in his Cadillac looking for Geiger counters to measure the radioactivity under his home.  Then we would go back to his studio basement and I would listen to him tell stories about the 1960’s and 70s art scene and about growing up in Oklahoma while he did the work (resplicing his films for preservation) I was actually supposed to be doing for him. I was neither careful, clean nor precise enough for his liking.  Then we would have a healthy lunch with Jean, his wife, and I would go home while he took a nap.  A few hours later,  I would tip-toe back into the house and sit on the couch twiddling my thumbs waiting for him to wake up.  Many years later, he gave my daughters Maya and Noa lovely ink-blot drawings they and I will always treasure.

Brings tears to my eyes.  Here’s to found images floating away and then back into our grasp.

Lynne Sachs

Published with other Remembrances
http://www.sf360.org/features/bruce-conner-remembered

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Anthropologists, filmmakers, linguists, musicians,  painters, poets, writers — all share a fascination with the 26 letters of the alphabet. An abecedarium is traditionally an educational book for children containing words beginning with each letter, but for centuries it has also been a resource for creative work by artists in almost every media.  This history of the abecedarium will look at a selection of artists whose intentions are both to celebrate and disrupt this most basic and widespread system of verbal communication.

Linguistic philosopher Johanna Drucker points to the obvious: words come and go while letters remain strikingly constant.  Her Alphabetic Labyrinth: the Letters in History and Imagination is a fascinating place to begin exploring the role that these iconic characters have played in the theater of world history and culture.   Drucker’s interest in the typography of the Roman alphabet is expansive, allowing her reader to witness the alphabet’s omnipotence as well as its eccentricity.   Rather than a dry archeology of language,  Drucker leads us into “the realm of imagination and philosophical speculation.”  Through her erudition and curiosity, we see each letter as a communicative symbol, a picture, and a discrete aesthetic experience.

According to Drucker, both this alphabet and the Chinese character system began as early as 1700 B.C.E.   Remarkable as it may seem, the Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Tibetan languages all stem from one point of origin in the Sinai, the birthplace of both the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations.   Eventually, the Indo-European languages would grow out of this rich environment, creating the 24-30 letter alphabets comprising the Balkan, Germanic, Indian, Indonesian, Romance and  Slavic languages we know today. The non-alphabetic Chinese characters provided the written forms for the rest of the world.  With this rudimentary knowledge of the evolution of letters as signifiers and signs, we can start looking at artists who have played with, challenged, punctured, praised and deconstructed words — those lofty yet prosaic creations that come from the permutations and combinations of the alphabet.

THE FUTURIST EXPERIMENT IN EUROPE

The Italian Futurists were notorious for their desire to rip apart every cultural institution in European society. Coming of age in Italy just before the outbreak of World War I, the Futurist movement’s fearless leader Filippo Marinetti brazenly experimented with all forms of typography by putting “words-in-liberty”, on the page and the wall.  Their new alphabet epitomized a radical “stati d’animo” (state of mind) in which text was turned upside down, flipped, and graphically transformed.  The Futurists even went so far in their desire to shake up the status quo that they wrote a Futurist Cookbook where they invented an edible alphabet that would bake, boil and burn the Italian culinary system like it had never been cooked before.

Just a few hundred miles to the east, the Russian Futurists were doing equally innovative things with the alphabet.  Poet Aleski Kruchenykh and artist Velimir Khlebnikov collaborated on the creation of a new, experimental language they called Zaum.  Equally committed to the articulation of the horrific and the non-verbal, this Cyrillic version of a futurist alphabet embraced baby talk, onomatopoeia, and insanity.    Zaum assigned a characteristic to each sound: the letter A embodied a statement of denial; B was collision or magnification.  Some letters took on the qualities of certain colors.  No one, not even its inventors, claimed to understand the language of Zaum.

AMERICAN WORD PLAY

With a nod to the original purpose of an abecedarium,  Gertrude Stein threw herself into writing an episodic A to Z poem for children in 1940.  She aspired to creating a “book I would have liked as a child.”  Seventeen years later, her dear friend Alice B. Toklas assisted her in the publication of To Do: Alphabets and Birthdays,  a delightful romp through a series of eccentric characters that probably appeals to a open-minded adults more so than an earnest child.  In true Stein form, the language is playful and rhythmic – pushing words and their meanings into new galaxies of sense and non-sense.  By the time we reach Z, this is where we are:

“Oh dear oh Zero.  Zero they said and they felt well fed. Oh hero dear oh Zero….And why is Zero a hero. Because if there was no Zero there would not be ten of them there would only be one….”  Gertrude Stein

Equally resistant to the notion of empowering a man-made thing – be it a word, a song or a canvas — with the ability to express an actual emotion, painter Jasper Johns hurled a quiet epitaph at the grandiose vision of Abstract Expressionism with his 1956 painting “Alphabet”.  Johns’ large, golden beeswax-and-oil canvas full of letters was the harbinger of an artistic movement glorifying “things that are not looked at.”   Over six feet high and six feet wide, this homage to willful banality brought attention to the 26 letters as they had never experienced before.

Like conventional musical notation, the alphabet simultaneously limits and explodes the possibilities for verbal expression.    In 1982, experimental composer and philosopher of time and rhythm, John Cage wrote “An Alphabet”, a radio play with characters based on Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce and Eric Satie.   The piece creates an imaginary encounter between the narrator and sixteen creative personalities who represent “an alphabet by means of which we spell our lives.”  The dialogue between the characters relies on Cage’s infamous chance operations as well as his ingenious mesostic poetry. A mesostic word emerges from a vertical phrase intersecting lines of horizontal text. In contrast to alphabet acrostics where the beginning of successive words follows from A to Z, mesostics emerge from letters found in the middle of a line.

At the same time as Cage was embracing his conceptual alphabet, essayist  Susan Sontag was writing her own alphabet on modern dance.  Her contemplative yet erudite “Lexicon for Available Light”  (1983) looks at contemporary dance through a series of short thought-pieces moving from Beauty to Choreography to Diagonal to Openings to Politeness to Space to Volition to Yearning to Zeno’s Territory. Intertwining a love of both classical and modern choreography, Sontag contemplates the almost typographic postures of a contemporary dancer.

AVANT GARDE FILM MEETS AVANT GARDE ALPHABET

In 1970, American avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton completed his opus on the alphabet and named it “Zorns Lemma”.  For six years, Frampton crisscrossed New York City – from Coney Island to the Lower East Side to the far reaches of City Island — carrying a 16mm film camera and looking for words from A to Z. His documentation of signs is an exhilarating history of 1970s New York.  This astounding experimental film presents us with a recurring structure that transports the way we look at skyscrapers, subway stops, barbershops, diners and newsstands.  With each loop through the letters, purely photographic images begin to replace signs, as a rhythmic kaleidoscopic of activity propels the viewer through the city.

Twenty years later, another New York experimental filmmaker decided to structure a far more autobiographical film around the alphabet, this time in reverse.  Su Friedrich’s “Sink or Swim” is an astonishingly intimate yet elleptical portrait of the filmmaker and her relationship with her father.  Through this collage oddysey,  Friedrich visits all 26 letters, including  Zygote (sci-fi footage of the egg and the sperm), Virginity (a fantacy about harems), Temptation (sleek women bodybuilders), Quicksand (abstracted imagery for a terrifying movie) and Ghosts  (brooding images of a confrontational letter to her father).  Reaching the very core of a young woman’s burgeoning identity, the film has been enormously influential in the realm of both the personal essay film and the experimental film.  Friedrich’s inclusion of a girl singing the alphabet song brings to the fore her interest in this linguistic system – in all its glory and rigidity.

THE ABECEDARIAN POEM

New York poet and Abecedarium:NYC artist, Erik Schurink helps us move from a study of the alphabet as visual image to the alphabet poem, what he calls  “a succession of letters and a big idea .” The beauty of the abecedarian poem, writes Schurink, is that the poet can apply its format to underscore the vastness of the subject he writes about, or to celebrate the completeness within his subject, however small. Its poetic form is guided by order—alphabetical order –  its idea is based on the a to z of things. In his 1983 “ABC,” former poet laureate Robert Pinsky skillfully breaks out of the linear restrained structure of the alphabet, inspiring the reader to do just that with his or her own life—to go beyond the expected while embracing a given structure, even when restrictive.

ABC

Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,

Knowledge, love. Many
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.

Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:

X=your zenith.
— Robert Pinsky

Equaling X to an idea described by two words, Pinsky leaves language—ever so briefly—through math, to revisit words, highlighting the distance between their individual and joined meanings. Bibles and biologists start where he leaves off.  Do Pinsky’s contemporary “ABC”, Geoffrey Chaucer’s “An ABC” acrostic poem, and Psalm 119 (one of the earliest well-known abecedarian poems) sit around the same table? Alphabet poems of various scales, from three distinctly different continents and eras—can they meet?  If not, there is solace in knowing that all of us are abecedarians—beginners in any field of learning. Are we comfortable not knowing? Would we embrace learning to give body to sweet time?

ABECEDARIUM: NYC

In our search for the 26 words which comprise Abecedarium:NYC, we discovered that  some words found in a 1968 Webster’s dictionary had essentially disappeared in 2008.  By giving 16 artists the opportunity to reflect on the fluid nature of language, Abecedarium:NYC  encouraged them to ponder single words — be they familiar or esoteric –  in the context of a city of buildings, neighborhoods, and even people whose relevance shifts with the winds of the day.   Why is a word so vital to one person and irrelevant to another? How do the changes in words reflect the changes in our society? Over the course of two years of production, Abecedarium:NYC has become a multi-media collaboration reflecting these questions in the context of a sound-image exploration of New York City.

In an age in which definitions are utilitarian, spelling is automatic, derivations are incidental, and lack of common usage means abridgement and eventual death, we can only wonder what the life span for a word like WELKIN  might be. Look up to the sky and ask yourself “Is there a word for that sweeping, opening above me?”  The fast-disappearing, almost archaic “welkin”, is indeed your answer.   Visit this word or GEORGIC, or TYPHLOLOGY, or XENOGENISIS and experience one artist’s interpretation of its meaning.  With Abecedarum:NYC,   you can ponder not only this suite of 26 expansive, yet little known, words, but also look at a hidden New York City where tall buildings can easily shadow a treasure below.

For more examples of intriguing artist abecedaria, please visit Abecedarium:NYC on http://del.icio.us/Abecedarium.NYC where you can see a wide range of work including an abecedarium of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts, a folk music abecedarium, an Auschwitz abecedarium, a “Three Stooges” abecedarium and so much more.

RESEARCH SOURCES

“ABC” poem by Robert Pinsky
http://wayneyang.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/abc-poem-by-robert-pinsky/

“A Lexicon of Available Light” in Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag
http://www.susansontag.com/wherethestressfalls.htm

Alphabets and Birthdays by Gertrude Stein, copyright Alice B. Toklas, 1957.
http://www.greeninteger.com/book.cfm?-Gertrude-Stein-To-Do-A-Book-of-Alphabets-and-Birthdays-&BookID=39

The Alphabetic Labyrinth: the Letters in History and Imagination by Johanna Drucker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_Drucker
Chaucer’s ABC Poem
http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Geoffrey_Chaucer/chaucer_poems_CHAUCERS_ABC.htm

Fred Camper’s Review of Su Friedrich’s “Sink or Swim” (1990)
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Friedrich.html

The Italian Futurist Book
http://colophon.com/gallery/futurism/

A New Alphabet Iconographic Language and Textual Embodiment
By Jeanie Dean
http://pw.english.uwm.edu/~jdean/intro.html

Psalm 119
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_119

Shallow Water Dictionary by John R. Stilgoe
http://www.amazon.com/Shallow-Water-Dictionary-John-Stilgoe/dp/1568984081

“Thoughts on The Futurist Cookbook, by F.T. Marinetti”
by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/futurist.dos

Zaum: A Russian Futurist Alphabet
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~janetkki/

“Zorn’s Lemma” by Hollis Frampton (1970)
http://www.ubu.com/film/frampton.html

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