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...

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

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

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

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

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 I juxtapose Sandor’s fearless introspection in his unpublished letters with my imagined visualization of his idyllic life in his house in the woods.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

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

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

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

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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

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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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“Experiments in Documentary”
Millennium Film Journal 51 (Spring/Summer 2009)
Guest Edited by Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs

These media artists challenge the way we see (and hear) documentary. While visually and aurally innovative, they are also socially engaged, offering cultural critiques that cannot be reduced to a singular agenda. Through their engagement with images and institutions, they open up new ways of examining how we understand our world and our history.

Featuring contributions by
Peggy Ahwesh, Tommy Becker, Michelle Citron, Donigan Cumming, Jeanne
Finley, Sasha Waters Freyer, Su Friedrich, Richard Fung, Barbara Hammer,
Lucas Hilderbrand, Adele Horne, Liza Johnson, Alexandra Juhasz, Jonathan
Kahana, Leandro Katz, Caroline Koebel, Ernie Larsen, Jessie Lerner, Julia
Meltzer, Sherry Millner, Frédéric Moffet, John Muse, Lynne Sachs, MM
Serra, Conrad Steiner, Deborah Stratman, Mark Street, Tess Takahashi,
David Thorne, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Grahame Weinbren, Chie Yamayoshi, and
Greg Youmans

Order online at:
http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ51/MFJ51TOC.html

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Tuesdays 9:30 – 12:15  Fall ‘09  H56.1002.01  Room #109, Tisch Building,NYU

This semester in Media Mavericks we will explore the experimental media work that has emerged in the realm of the documentary.  In our discussion of this movement in film and video, we will consider how the practice of working with reality can be challenged, even transported, by the aesthetic freedom that comes with alternative modes of visual expression.  Your teacher, Lynne Sachs, was the co-editor of the Millennium Film Journal #51 Summer 2009 issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. This journal offers the public a compilation of writings by and about media artists who are constantly creating their own signature modes of production as well as their own language of cinema.  Through our reading of these texts, we will contemplate how these artists use: first person subjectivity, political manifesto, reenactments, or even visual poetry on the act of seeing.  This journal will form the core of our reading for the class, with an additional package of articles in a class reader.  Lynne will have the journals during the first two weeks of class for you to purchase.

As artists who are looking for your own cinematic way of working, you will discover a series of formally innovative ways of working, including:  found footage, installation, re-enactment, home movies, text as image and more.  Over the course of the semester, several visiting artists who were contributors to Lynne’s issue of the MFJ will visit our class, giving us the opportunity to see their work and question them about their interpretation of this alternative documentary approach.  These artists include Deborah Stratman (Oct. 6), Peggy Awesh (Nov. 10) and  Sherry Milner/Ernie Larsen (Nov. 17). In addition, on October 27 Grahame Weinbren , the Senior Editor of the Millennium Film Journal and a New York video artist, will visit our class to talk about the history of this important thirty year old journal as well as his own work.

During the first three weeks, you will make a 1-3 minutes New York City experimental documentary (posted October 20, in class Nov. 3) which I would like you to post on the blog of the newly launched New York Public Library website Abecedarium:NYC (www.nypl.org/abecedariumnyc), which Lynne produced for the NYPL in 2008.  Abecedarium:NYC is  an online interactive exhibition that reflects on the history, geography and culture of New York City through 26 unusual words.   Each student will choose one word from this selection of 26.  On  the evening of Dec. 1, the entire project (including your new contributions) will be presented and discussed in the UGFTV department.

Students will keep a response journal (due Oct. 13 and Dec. 1) that will be turned in twice over the course of the term. This assignment should include writing on in-class screenings and at least three outside screenings at non-commercial, alternative sites for seeing film and video. I will provide you with suggestions for screenings (most optional, a few required) and exhibitions.  Each week, you will integrate the articles from the class reader into your journal as these texts will provide you with an essential historical and conceptual foundation.

Each student will either conduct an interview (one-on-one meetings with Lynne all day Wed. Oct. 14; first draft due Nov. 17; final due Dec. 1 or 8) with one film or video maker in the New York area (or outside NYC by recorded phone interview).  Lynne will assist you in making arrangements with a maker whose work will speak to your own sensibilities as an artist. This semester students are encouraged to look for an artist from the MFJ #51 community of participating artists. You should see as much work by this artist as possible before the interview. After you have transcribed the interview, you will edit the conversation and add a personal perspective. Include stills from films in the completed piece.   Our in-class presentations will be on Dec. 1 and 8.

Finally, you will do a close analysis (due Nov. 10) of one media work from the Avery Fisher Media collection on reserve in the Bobst Library. This paper will look at the way the film/video creates its own visual and aural language.

I will make the MFJ #51 available in class for your to purchase for $5. There will also be a Media Mavericks Reader.  You will read both collections of writings as part of your engagement with the course.  The reader will be available at Unique Copy on Greene Street and must be printed unbound on paper with three holes so that you can use the binder to add new articles.

All websites which are discussed in class as well as numerous other fascinating and useful arts and media related sites are listed and tagged for easy searching at

http://delicious.com/MediaMavericks

Class Policies: More than two missed classes will result in a change of grade. Late assignments are discouraged and will result in a lowering of your grade.  No work will be accepted via email.   No computers or cell phone can be used in class. You are expected to attend all screenings during class.  Our discussions will presume your having seen the work, so late arrivals after 9:45 are not acceptable. Changes to the screening schedule may occur. Course grading:  Projects – 75%;  Class participation – 25%

Office Hours:  please arrange to meet me after class or write to me to make an appointment.

SPECIAL MEDIA MAVERICKS FALL 2009 EVENTS:

Chick Strand Retrospectives:   Please attend at least one program.

Strand (who died this summer) was a fearless leader of the experimental film community and an active feminist since the 1960s when she co-founded the Canyon Cinema Cooperative.

Anthology Film Archives:  Monday, Sept. 14 @ 7:30 (Lynne will be part of a post-screening panel discussion); Tuesday, Oct. 6 @ 6:30

New York Film Fest, Views from the Avant-Garde:  Saturday, October 6

Documentary

New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde”: Please attend at least one program.

Saturday, Oct. 3 and Sunday, Oct. 4, choose at least one screening of experimental films from this list of 10 programs. ( www.               ).  I will premiere my newest film “The Last Happy Day” as part of NYFF program #8 on Oct. 4 @ 3PM.

Millennium Film Journal #51 Experiments in Documentary Screening & Publication Party

Saturday, October 24 at Millennium Film Workshop on 66 East 4^th Street

Week #1: Sept. 8 Introduction

- Screening: “In Order Not to Be Here” by Deborah Stratman; “How to Fix the World” by Jacqueline Goss

-Reading: “The Sound of One Line Scanning” from Bill Viola’s book Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House

-Distribute questionnaire.

- Special Outside Screening Monday, Sept. 14:  Chick Strand at Anthology Film Archive (Lynne will be part of post-screening panel discussion)

Week #2: Sept. 15 Stan Brakhage: The Untutored Eye Finds Joy Behind the Camera

-Screening:  “Mothlight”, “Window Water Baby Moving”, “Commingled Containers”, “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes” and others by Stan Brakhage

-Reading: Please visit www.fredcamper.com/Film/BrakhageL.html for at least one hour

-Completed Questionnaire due.

Week #3: Sept. 22 From the Inside Out/ From the Outside In:  Early experimental documentaries

In “Las Hurdes/Land Without Bread”, Bunuel uses confounding, dramatic improvisations, narrative voice-overs, and rephotography to explore the extreme impoverishment of the peasants of Las Hurdes, a region in northern Spain. In “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm”, William Greaves directs a weary film crew in Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they’re making.

- Screening: Excerpts from “Land Without Bread” by Luis Bunuel; “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” by William Greaves

- Reading: “Experiments in Documentary: Contradiction; Uncertainty, Change” by Lucas Hilderbrand, introduction to MFJ#51; “Notes on Ethnographic Film by a Film Artist” by Chick Strand from Class Reader.

Week #4: Sept. 29  Strategies of Experimentation

- Screening: “Gently Down the Stream”, “Sink or Swim” by Su Friedrich; “Daughter Rite” by Michelle Citron

-Readings:  Su Friedrich’s and Michelle Citron’s essays in MFJ #51

Week #5: Oct. 6 Visiting Artist Deborah Stratman

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist whose films and frequent works in other media, including photography, sound, drawing and sculpture explore the history, uses, mythologies and control of highly varied landscapes: from Muslim Xinjiang China, to rural Iceland, to gated suburban California.

-Screening:  “O’er the Land” A meditation on the milieu of elevated threat addressing national identity, gun culture, wilderness, consumption, patriotism and the possibility of personal transcendence. Of particular interest are the ways Americans have come to understand freedom and the increasingly technological reiterations of manifest destiny.

-Reading:;  Deborah Stratman’s artist response in MFJ#51;   Please read interview with Stratman at http://www.cinemad.iblamesociety.com/2006/12/deborah-stratman.html

Week #6: Oct. 13 The Future as Science and Aesthetics: Speculative Archive

-Screening: “It’s Not My Memory of It”,  “Not a matter of if but when” and “We will live to see these things, or, five pictures of what may come to pass” (exceprt)   by Speculative Archive

-Reading:  “When We Speak of the Future: an Interview with Julia Meltzer and David Thorne” by Tess Takahashi in MFJ #51

-Response Journal #1 due.

Week #7:  Oct. 20 – Beyond Our Peripheral Vision

- Screenings:  “Hidden Plain Sight” by Mark Street, “South of Ten” by Liza Johnson

- Reading: “Interstates: South of Ten” by Jonathan Kahana and Liza Johnson in MFJ#51;  artist essay by Mark Street in MFJ #51

- Abecedarium:NYC cine poem due online at www.nypl.org/abecedariumnyc, go to BLOG

Week #8: Oct. 27 Grahame Weinbren and the Millennium Film Journal

Screening: “Tunnel”, “Frames” and “Letters” single channel works and installations by Grahame Weinbren

Reading:   “The Cinema of Pessimism” by Grahame Weinbren in MFJ#51; If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (excerpt) by Italo Calvino in Class Reader

Week #9:  Nov. 3   Abecedarium:NYC Screening of Media Mavericks Students

-Screening:

-Reading:

Week #10: Nov. 10 Visiting Artist Peggy Ahwesh

-Screening: “Bethlehem”; “The Third Body”; “Warm Objects”; “Beirut Outtakes”; “Martina’s Playhouse” by Peggy Ahwesh

-Reading:  Artist Pages by Ahwesh in MFJ #51; “Unpacking My Library” by Walter Benjamin; “Peggy Ahwesh” by John David Rhodes from Senses of Cinema

-Close analysis paper due.

Week #11: Nov. 17 Visiting Artists Sherry Milner and Ernie Larsen: The Cinema of Activism

Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen are anarchist artists who produce and curate STATE OF EMERGENCY, an interventionist series of video projections in the windows of a loft on 23 St. They began collaborating in the mid-seventies with a performance about the Weather Underground. They have made anti-documentaries on crime and semi-autobiographical videos on the nuclear family

-Screening: Selections from a 30 year body of films and installations

-Reading:  Essay by Milner/ Larsen in MFJ #51

Week #12:  Nov. 24 Searching for a Language of Possibilty: Films by Lynne Sachs

Today we will return to our original survey/questionnaire to discover how our notions of the documentary have shifted over the last few months.  In dialogue with Lynne and her films, students will imagine their own evolving relationship to the practice of working with and against reality.

Screening:  XY Chromosome Project; “The Last Happy Day”

Reading: Lynne Sachs artist essay in MFJ#51; “The Forgotten Image Between Two Shots: Photos, Photograms and the Essayistic” by Tim Corrigan in Class Reader

-First draft of filmmaker interview due.

Week #13: Dec. 1 Student Presentatons

Week #14: Dec. 8 Student Presentations

– Final Interview project due.

No related posts.

Published on Otherzine:   http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/index.php?issueid=18&article_id=56

It all started with atheism.  I’ve always been troubled by the idea that a person would need to define her entire spiritual world view by relying on beliefs and experiences that were not her own.  I do not believe in God therefore I am an atheist.

So, alas, I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER is what I’ve decided to call a group of five films I’ve made over the last thirteen years.  After breathlessly watching Christian Freil’s “War Photographer” (2001), the utterly transformative documentary on the life of James Nachtway, print journalism’s quintessential career war photographer, I knew that Nachtway’s remarkable credo –

“Every minute I was there, I wanted to flee.  I did not want to see this.  Would I cut and run, or would I deal with the responsibility of being there with a camera?”
(James Nachtway)

– was not my own.

From Vietnam to Bosnia to the Middle East today, the making of my experimental documentary films has taken me to parts of the world I had never expected to see in my life as an artist.   Using abstract and reality based imagery, each new film has forced me to search for precise visual strategies to work with these fraught and divisive locales and themes. Often opting for a painterly rather than a photographic articulation of conflict, I struggle with each project to find a new language of images and sounds I can use to look at these volatile moments in history.  My films and a recent web project expose what I see as the limits of a conventional documentary representation of both the past and the present. Infusions of colored “brush strokes” catapult a viewer into contemporary Vietnam. Floating drinking glasses moving across a Muslim cemetery in Sarajevo evoke a wartime without water. Pulsing, geometric mattes suspended in cinematic space block news footage of a bombing in Tel Aviv.   With each project, I have had to search for a visual approach to looking at trauma, painful memory, and conflict. By using abstraction I am not avoiding the graphic realism that Nachtway so bravely captures but rather unpeeling the outer, more familiar layer, hoping to reveal something new about perception and engagement in cinema.

Poet Adrienne Rich once wrote “A place on the map is also a place in history.”   This intersection of vertical space (i.e. the globe, a continent, a country, a city, a home, a kitchen table) with horizontal time (war, birthdays, holidays, hurricanes) perfectly encapsulates the fascinating paradoxes that are revealed when one travels with a camera.

In 1992, my sister Dana Sachs (author of The House on Dream Street: Memoirs of an American Woman in Vietnam and the novel If You Lived Here) was living and writing in Hanoi for the first of her many years in that Northern, colonial capital so haunted by the French and American wars. Communication between our two countries was still unbelievably difficult — no phone calls, no faxes and of course no email.  This was the first year in which Americans were allowed visas to travel to Vietnam. With my 16mm Bolex packed deep inside a backpack and no particular cinematic agenda, I got on a plane from San Francisco and flew west to see “the East.”

In retrospect, I think I was trying to grapple with a particular view of history inspired by Hayden White’s brilliantly inventive Metahistory, an analysis of our western historical imagination, the ways that we tell stories and order time.   In my mind, there were two opposing views of the timeline of what we call the Vietnam War and what the Vietnamese call the American War (1959 – 1975).  As a history major in the early 1980s, I was already questioning Lyndon Johnson’s problematic role in the escalation of the US assault on Indochina.  While my liberal parents had depicted Johnson as a hero, at least on the domestic front, his model reputation was shattered by my realization that he was also a culpable player in the game of war on the other side of the globe.  Simply put, I wanted to find out how Vietnamese people felt about Americans – from a 1960s president to actress-celeb Jane Fonda, who became a Lefty phenome when she visited  Hanoi in 1972.  The Pacific Ocean was a topographical manifestation of this temporal line of history’s ebbs and flows, its moments of crisis, collapse and calm.  I wanted to see it from the other side, to understand the most pivotal events – from the Tet Offensive to the fall of Saigon –  as well as the small personal epiphanies from a Vietnamese perspective.

In my film WHICH WAY IS EAST: NOTEBOOKS FROM VIETNAM, I make it clear right from the start that my1960s childhood experience of listening to Walter Cronkite every evening had a strange, albeit well-informed influence on my understanding of these volatile times.

“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.”

Perhaps even more influential were the ‘70s war movies like “Apocalypse Now”, “The Deer Hunter” and “Coming Home” my father took his three children to see in lieu of the more typical (and perhaps equally “powerful”) Disney kids fare. We had one family friend who had been a soldier in the war.  OJ was a “frogman”, an underwater diver, for the US Army.  He died about 10 years ago from a cancer we all assumed was a result of the occupational hazards of working with Agent Orange. I talk about OJ in the last lines of the film.

Back to my production story.  The early 1990s was a time when documentary makers were embracing video hook, line and sinker.  The ease with which you could shoot sound and picture simultaneously made it almost impossible to resist.  And yet, I felt that I thought more clearly about the properties of images when I collected them separately.  So, I decided to carry my trusty 16mm Bolex with a 28 second shot limit and a small tape recorder.  There would be no synchronous sound and no on-camera interviews.  In exchange for this inability to capture the gestalt of my touristic reality with the push of one button, I would have discrete sensory experiences of light and sound. In addition, I would abstain from using  the zoom lens.  Vietnamese filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha was a teacher of mine in graduate school in the Film Department at San Francisco State.  Her disdain for the telephoto as a tool that enables us to shoot from a distance from our subject imposed a strict discipline on my own relationship to the camera.  The sheer physicality of making an image became critical to my process. I had to move my body to find the frame I wanted.

May 15, my third day in Vietnam. Driving through the Mekong Delta, a name that carries so much weight.  My mind is full of war, and my eyes are on a scavenger hunt for leftovers. Dana told me that those ponds full of bright green rice seedlings are actually craters, the inverted ghosts of bombed out fields.

More often than I’d like to admit, what I saw with my eyes was often not at all what was really there.  On so many levels, looking at the footage from the “field work” I did abroad eventually revealed to me the superficiality of my understanding of the place.  Only after spending two years working with new Vietnamese immigrants in the Bay Area did I begin to grasp the resonating affects of the conflict I too now think of as the American War.

With INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME (2001), I returned to this same period in Vietnamese/American history, only this time from the opposite perspective.  With two young children and a full time teaching position, overseas travel for a production was prohibitive.    I was living in Catonsville, Maryland in 1998 when I first came across the story of the Catonsville Nine, a radical band of Catholic anti-war activists who broke into a draft board office in 1968 and destroyed hundreds of files with homemade Napalm.  I spent the next three years making a film on this extraordinary act of civil disobedience – a performance piece with political dimensions that resonated from coast to coast.  I followed renowned priest Philip Berrigan in and out of federal prison, met Marjorie Melville on a sand dune near Tijuana and interviewed Tom Lewis in the woods the day he was released from a recent stint in prison for knocking a fighter plane with a hammer.

With WHICH WAY IS EAST, I wanted to rely on our shared mental archive of the Vietnam war, to allow that documentation to flow on a charged yet invisible “memory screen” my audience would bring to the theater. This time, however, I desperately needed to find the lost roll of film that a local TV reporter had shot of the action.  With this new project, I became an obsessed detective in search of the proof of a very lofty crime.  Once I found the reporter and convinced him to give me the material, the 400’ of 16mm reversal sound film became sacred contraband I would keep under lock and key.  For the previous ten years of my life, I’d followed the post-modern credo of my fellow experimental filmmakers:  any piece of film was one worth critiquing, parodying or destroying.   Now, I’d met my match.  I would treat this sliver of historical detritus like a family heirloom.

Making films about wars certainly makes the exhibition and distribution process very dynamic.  I began FLAME before September 11th, when any fascination with the long lost art of anti-war protests was considered purely nostalgic.  I showed my movie to a group of San Franciscans in October of 2001 and many of the viewers in the theater expressed horror at the actions of the Catonsville Nine because the very act of breaking the law in the name of one’s god was just a degree away from violence.  Not a question of kind but of degree.  When I showed the film a year after the US invasion of Iraq, people were giddy to remember that there was once a brave, vocal, engaged anti-war movement in this country.

In 2001, I went to Sarajevo with videomaker Jeanne Finley on a fellowship to create a collaborative work with eight Bosnian artists. One year later, we completed the website WWW.HOUSE-OF-DRAFTS.ORG, a virtual apartment building inhabited by nine imaginary characters who have chosen to stay in Sarajevo after the war in the Balkans. From a performance artist who moonlights as a de-miner to a cinematographer who uses his camera to turn a decaying Sarajevo into a bustling Bangkok to a traveler caught by the inferno of a burning library  — the website represents our ruminations on a city and its inhabitants during and after a period of war.  In the process of making this work, I discovered that giving people the license to explore their own histories through fiction was profoundly liberating and creatively regenerative.  Rather than asking our collaborators to speak about the harrowing past they had somehow managed to live through, we encouraged them to create funny, irreverent personas who could speak brazenly “untrue” things, tell jokes, even lie in the most haunting and revealing ways.  Our tendency toward the use of abstracted imagery pushed the questions of authenticity even further away from the burden of fact.

On a November morning in 2002, I sat down to read the New York Times.  To my shock, I came across the story of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and teacher who was killed along with her two sons in a terrorist act on a kibbutz near the West Bank.  In so many ways, her work paralleled my own. I immediately contacted a young Israeli who had been a film student of mine, explaining to him that I wanted to make a movie about this woman but that I was not in a position to fly to the Middle East to shoot the project.  My reasons were two-fold.  First of all, I was disturbed by Israeli political actions in the West Bank and wanted to follow the exigencies of French feminist Helene Cixous “I am on the side of Moses, the one who does not enter…. ‘Next year, in Jerusalem’ makes me flee.”   Secondly, having lived in New York City through September 11, I still felt too unsettled to travel to another place on the globe where violence seemed to run so rampant.  Quite honestly, I was scared. So I convinced myself that I could understand this volatile place by reading novels and ancient texts and looking at Revital’s movies.  STATES OF UNBELONGING was ultimately an effort at making an anti-documentary. Unlike everyone else in the field, I didn’t want to see, hear or smell for myself. I wanted to rely on my imagination, and this intellectual struggle became extremely interesting as a challenge. Ultimately, however, I capitulated to the sensory-deprived documentarian in me and in 2005 I flew to Tel Aviv with my camera.

I have recently finished THE LAST HAPPY DAY, the fifth and final piece in my I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER project.  During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired my Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers.   I am intertwining a silent movie-style narrative, interviews shot in Brazil and Germany and an impressionistic children’s play as part of the production for this elliptical work that once again will resonate as an anti-war meditation.

Lynne Sachs lives in Brooklyn, New York with her partner Mark Street and their daughters Maya and Noa.  She recently finished a collaboration with Chris Marker on a new version of his 1972 essay film “Three Cheers for the Whale”.

Lynne’s films are distributed by www.microcinema.com, First Run Icarus Film (www.frif.com), New Day Films (www.newday.com), Canyon Cinema and the Filmmakers Cooperative.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS:

Dispatches by Michael Herr;  “Ear Before Eye” from Framer Framed by Trinh T.Minh-ha;  “Notes on Travel and Theory” by James Clifford; In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster; Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag; “My Algerience” from Stigmata by Helene Cixous;  Don’t Call it Night by Amos Oz; The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald; The Things We Used to Say by Natalia Ginzburg

REVIEWS:

I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER REVIEW IN BALTIMORE EXAMINER
http://www.examiner.com/a-514942%7EArtful_activism.html

I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER REVIEW ON FLAVORPILL
http://nyc.flavorpill.net/78614

“A reverie of war-torn terrains floats silently across an editing screen, accompanied by long-distance calls between an American journalist and a beleaguered Israeli. Children play in front of a television rolling out images of oddly abstracted battlegrounds. Herein lies the world of director Lynne Sachs, whose films splinter the typical structure of social-issue documentaries, applying an avant-garde sensibility to harsh realities that usually inspire stultifying over-earnestness. In this three-night series of screenings and talks about Sachs’ decade-long appraisal of war, what emerges most is that rare political filmmaker whose forms prove as worthy as her function.” – FLAVORPILL.COM

“Committed Poetics”: Review of I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
in Gay City News by Ioannis Mookas

http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17766832&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=569331&rfi=6

“Across three intimate evenings Brooklyn-based avant-documentarian Lynne Sachs presents her lapidary meditations on modern history, political strife, and moral engagement.”

Review by George Robinson of I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER in The Jewish Week, scroll to Jan. 19, 2007.
http://cine-journal.blogspot.com/

Review by Stuart Klawasns  in the Nation
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070130/cm_thenation/20070212klawans

“I Am Not a War Photographer,” focuses on Sachs’ meditative, essayistic films about armed conflict: in Israel and Palestine, in the former Yugoslavia and in Vietnam. Among the works to be shown are States of Unbelonging an uneasy exchange of video-letters about murder, mourning and filmmaking on the edge of the West Bank; Which Way Is East, an expressively beautiful diary of a trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi; and Investigation of a Flame, a montage that gives density and weight to contemporary recollections of 1968 and the Catonsville Nine protest.”

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