MIT Press Summer 2011

Roundtable on Digital Experimental Filmmaking
Ken and Flo Jacobs, Lynne Sachs, Mark Street, Luis Recoder, Federico Windhausen and Malcolm Turvey

www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00057

Version Espanol:  http://visionesmetaforicas.blogspot.com/2011/10/el-mes-de-october.html

Roundtable on Digital Experimental Filmmaking
Malcolm Turvey: We are here to discuss the various ways digital technologies have, and have not, impacted experimental filmmaking. There was a time, in the mid-1990s, if not before, when some people argued that digital technologies were revolutionary and that they would fundamentally change filmmaking. Now that the dust has settled, or at least started to settle, and we can look back over the last fifteen or twenty years, the “digital revolution” might not seem like a revolution at all. We want to talk about both what has stayed the same and what has changed in experimental filmmaking thanks to the advent of digital technologies.
Ken Jacobs: I think those people were right, but they were premature. They first made that argument about analogue video. But analogue video was not the way. There were people, like myself, who saw it as a great but transient medium. We saw good things being done, but now those things have gone.
Turvey: Are you talking about video art? Ken Jacobs: Yes. Federico Windhausen: When video art emerged, was it being discussed as something
that experimental filmmakers would have to address? I have always had the sense that experimental filmmakers in the era of analogue video art felt that they could keep their distance from it pretty easily.
Flo Jacobs: That’s because the film-developing labs were still functioning. Windhausen: So it wasn’t a threat? It was something you could easily avoid? Ken Jacobs: That’s right. Windhausen: Do others recall the situation in the same way?
Mark Street: I remember the discussion about who was a video artist and who was a filmmaker, and how they had different purviews. You said the advent of ana- logue video art—so you’re talking about the early 1960s?
Windhausen: The moment of wider dissemination of the technology in the late 1960s and ’70s.
Street: In the 1980s, when I went to film school, there was still that distinction, but it started to mean less. People were making choices about shooting on ana- logue video based on economics, not based on content or aesthetics. When I
first went to film school, people would ask, “Is it a film, or is it a videotape?”
But ten years later, it didn’t seem to matter as much. Windhausen: Were you around when Canyon resisted distributing on video? Street: Well, some at Canyon resisted and some didn’t. There were some who felt
that video was a threat, as you say, and there were younger people who felt that it really didn’t matter what medium was being used, that what mattered was the work itself. I remember being pulled both ways.
Flo Jacobs: Don’t you think the change really occurred when cheaper editing soft- ware like Final Cut Pro became readily available? Before that, there was Avid, but Avid was expensive. Then Final Cut Pro changed everything.
Turvey: When was that, Flo? Flo Jacobs: 1999. Windhausen: Right around the time that cheap digital cameras came on the mar-
ket. Lynne Sachs: I think that was a revolution in terms of access. Because of its accessi-
bility, more people could enjoy the freedom of using the new media for creative thinking. People started to believe you could be a “filmmaker” with- out being a “director,” and that making a film could be an autonomous act from start to finish, as painting and writing are. That was very radical, because before that, there was a hierarchy in filmmaking (except among experimental filmmakers who tried to work outside that hierarchy). I think there has been a very important shift in society’s understanding of filmmak- ing. People realize that the resources are there to do it individually. This “democratization” is not just a political shift; it’s a paradigmatic shift in that it allows filmmaking to be the product of a truly individual vision, as Stan Brakhage and others always advocated.
Windhausen: But hadn’t the Bolex 16mm film camera already enabled a lot of what you’re talking about? It facilitated a shift from thinking about becoming a director within the industry to thinking about oneself as a creative artist working individually outside the industry. The difference in the digital era is that there’s already a long history of experimental filmmaking, and that his- tory has valorized and legitimized the notion of the individual film artist that you are talking about, whereas when the Bolex emerged, people like Maya Deren in the 1940s had to stake their claim to being a film artist.
Street: There’s another history at work too, and that’s the history of video art, which is a half step toward what you are talking about. Because analogue video was a popular, anti-high-art medium, it spoke to the idea that you could own your own camera and respond to television and things like that.
Ken Jacobs: The first video cameras were pricey—they weren’t that inviting. I remember one thing that shocked me was their low resolution. Ralph Hocking ran a video center, a lab upstate, and in his own work he con- sciously exploited video’s “low-res” rather than imitating film.
Sachs: The shame of the digital world is that as the machinery gets more and more advanced, there is an attempt to mirror reality as closely as possible. That is what I think is so disturbing, whereas the avant-garde is not trying to mirror reality. We’re trying to shape, investigate, play with, and sculpt it. High-definition is so unappealing to me because of that.
Luis Recoder: You used the word “sculpt,” and I think that film is becoming more of an art because of these crises. The digital wants to emulate film, and it is in a crisis: it doesn’t have a history. While that is going on, filmmakers like myself can work with film in a way that maybe you weren’t able to at one time. It’s a different kind of a possibility, I think.
Turvey: Do you mean that digital technologies show filmmakers ways to use cellu- loid that they might not have thought of before, ways that emphasize film’s differences from high-definition digital video?
Recoder: Yes, filmmakers and projection artists can work with celluloid in ways that are highlighted and assisted by this crisis, rather than evading or negating it.
Sachs: What do you mean by “crisis”? Recoder: Well, you were saying that you’re not crazy about high-definition, right?
I’m not crazy about it either. For instance, when you go to a film festival and bring your video, you don’t know what it’s going to look like when it’s pro- jected, whereas with film, you have a better idea of what it’s going to look like and you can work with the projectionist to get it right. Video artists can sometimes do the same thing. They can run tests to see the quality of the projection. But often, you take your video to Sundance, or international film festivals, and it’s a bummer when you see it projected. With the medium of film, you have more control. I mean, you can even bring your own projector!
Ken Jacobs: I disagree. I can’t imagine a level of control over film that compares to the control you have with video.
Flo Jacobs: Except that you had fantastic problems switching over to PAL and Progressive Scan. You had disasters.
Ken Jacobs: Yes, there were problems. But let’s not forget the computer. It is this fantastic brain that can do anything. It gives just incredible freedom and control.
Sachs: For a while, one was totally dependent upon institutions in the city to con- vert from NTSC to PAL. But these days I can do much better conversions using Final Cut Pro and some other compressors than they can do. It takes a little while, but it looks perfect, going from PAL to NTSC or the other way.
Windhausen: But you’re talking about the advantages of video in production and postproduction, while Luis was talking about control over projection enabled by film.
Ken Jacobs: But there is a forward momentum with digital video, an urgency that’s lacking with film, which is just dying. There are only two film-processing labs in the city now. These problems with video will cease to be problems after a while. Video is constantly improving.

Flo Jacobs: But the other problem with digital video is preservation. What’s going to happen in ten years?
Ken Jacobs: The labs tell us that the only way to preserve digital video is to put it on film—on 35mm. [Laughter.]
Sachs: There are also the changes in our thinking brought about by these new technologies. The practical changes they occasion are a big part of our daily lives. But the changes in our thinking are harder to grasp. The other day, I was watching experimental documentaries by students from Union Docs, and I asked them a question about sound, and every single student had downloaded their sound from the Internet. For them, it wasn’t about listen- ing, about the surprise of finding something in the world around you. Instead, they seem to want to work in a cleaner comfort zone. Of course, we all work with found footage, and I adore that. But the surprises that come from working in the field teach you something about who you are in the world. I asked these people, who are all in their early-to-mid-twenties, if they ever go out into the world to listen to and record sounds. Their answer was no, for the most part. For them, filmmaking is more about acquiring the world than engaging with it.
Windhausen: Mark, do you find this with your students? Street: I can make an analogy with books. I was talking to a student the other day
and I said: “You’re looking for a book and it’s in the intellectual vicinity of these other books, so you go to the library to look for the book, and if the book isn’t there, there might be other books close by that could be of inter- est.” But it was an alien concept to this student—the idea of wandering and browsing and letting the library take you where it will. Nowadays there really is a more acquisitional approach to sound and images. It’s more like “I’m looking for this; let me go and get it” rather than “I’m going out to shoot and maybe I’ll happen on something by chance.” I think that’s a weakness of the digital age.
Ken Jacobs: They live only in their own times. They are not listening to the world, just making something out of the computer.
Turvey: Hold on. Isn’t it possible to discover something by chance on the Internet as well?
Sachs: That’s what they said to me. They said, “We find the most amazing things on the Internet,” and I said, “Oh, I spend plenty of time on the Internet, I know!” But they think: why go listen to the birds if you can download all these bird sounds without even knowing which birds they are?
Turvey: Lynne and Mark, if I understand your work correctly, you use multiple for- mats to shoot on, right? Do you do so because each medium offers different possibilities or advantages?
Street: For me, yes. I was in the basement today looking at a 16mm print that Craig Baldwin sent to me. I had to go downstairs and thread up the projector just
to look at it, and there are limitations involved in that, just as there are limi- tations involved in shooting 16mm and Super 8mm film. I try to let those limitations speak, while also enjoying the freedom of the digital age. These days I transfer everything to digital, so I feel I can go out and shoot a roll of film and it’s OK to be defined by that roll for two minutes and forty seconds. But then I transfer it to digital and that opens up other possibilities.
Ken Jacobs: What moves you to still shoot film? Street: I like the texture of it; I like the fact that when you shoot a roll of film, it
becomes a specific entity and it’s unlike any other thing. It has its own weight and characteristics. You know? Thirty-six exposures: a roll of still film becomes like a little narrative, a little vignette of sorts. And I think that’s use- ful. I remember when I first started shooting videotape, I would fall asleep looking at my footage. [Laughter.] There was so much of it. I had six hours of footage. It used to be I had two rolls! You’d made it work, you’d make it count. So I like those limitations, I like being hemmed in, because making work is always about overcoming the obstacles.
Turvey: You are also interested in 35mm film, right? That’s fairly unusual within the experimental-film world. Didn’t you use 35mm film trailers in Trailer Trash [2009]? Where does that come from, that attraction to 35mm?
Street: Well, for a very brief and misguided period of time, I thought I could cir- cumvent the fact that 16mm was disappearing in the early 1990s. I made a film called Sliding Off the Edge of the World [2000] in 35mm in the hope that I could maintain the purity, such as it is, of the filmgoing experience. I was motivated, in part, by the experience of trying to show my films on 16mm. I would pay for a 16mm print and spend a lot of time and money figuring it out, only to be asked: “What’s that?” or, “Don’t you have that on tape?” Or to be told: “The projectionist is not here.” So I made a few 35mm films, and as I worked at a lab, it was easy for me to do that. However, Trailer Trash was fin- ished in mini-DV, and I don’t really have any desire to work in 35mm anymore.
Windhausen: Ken, you did a couple of found-footage films on 35mm as well, right? Is it Disorient Express [1996] or Georgetown Loop [1996] that’s available on 35mm?
Ken Jacobs: Both are. Windhausen: For the size of the image, because they are widescreen? Ken Jacobs: That’s right. I hear what you’re saying about the intensity of using film.
It costs so much, the meter is always running, and I honor that. But I enjoy having too much stuff on video, and then looking through it and seeing what unexpected thing I find, something I just couldn’t plan.
Turvey: So you find the extra volume of material facilitates creativity and surprise? Ken Jacobs: I look at that stuff the way you might look at the world with a film cam-
era. You pick it up from the world, but I’m looking at this already-recorded
stuff to see what’s there that can suddenly be made vital. Turvey: Luis, if I understand your projection process, you use 16mm film exclu-
sively, is that right? Recoder: And 35mm.
Turvey: You are from the youngest generation of filmmakers in this room, and so that means you would have gone to school in the 1990s, would that be right?
Recoder: Yeah, mid-’90s. Turvey: Can you say something about why you work with celluloid film? Recoder: I think it has a lot to do with what Lynne said earlier about the availability
of media. Digital made celluloid film more available. You can now find it in a flea market for really cheap. I entered filmmaking at that moment in the mid-to-late-’90s when the hierarchy between celluloid film and digital wasn’t there. I didn’t have that kind of baggage, the view that one medium is more authentic than the other. It was more about availability and economic fac- tors. Working with a projector and found footage, by chance I became a projectionist. I was going to festivals and was invited into the booth to set up my projector, and I learned about projection that way. I discovered possibili-
ties within the realms of the theater and the booth, and the division between what’s hidden and what’s not, the apparatus and the audience. So it was really a schooling through the rear end of cinema, through the projection booth, which happened by chance. It wasn’t that I wanted to make films; it was more that I was led into it.
Windhausen: Guy Sherwin says that as well—that you can now buy film projectors really cheap. For him, digital has made it easier to work in film projection and performance than it was before, because you can just go on eBay and buy all these cast-aside film projectors that nobody wants anymore.
Luis, you’ve been appearing at what I assume are expanded-cinema fes- tivals. Have you seen other artists at these festivals working in video in ways that run parallel to, or in interesting contrast with, what you do in film?
Recoder: Not as much, but there are a few people working with old analogue video equipment from the ’70s, so there is a revival, a backwards gaze at the medium of video itself. I think it’s because it’s so hands-on. Even in music there is a revival of the old analogue hands-on process. It’s all due to perfor- mance, the desire to perform with the medium. Earlier, I used the word “control,” but really I think it’s an improvisational process. There’s control in the sense that you know what different things are going to do, but then the
performance opens that up into messier, less controlled ways of working with
the material. Windhausen: So in your experience of going to these festivals, there has been a
revival of expanded cinema largely in the photochemical-film and analogue-
video modes, but not so much in the digital-video mode? Recoder: I haven’t really seen digital video, but I’m sure it exists, more so in the art world than in the film world. At film festivals—not just at expanded-cinema events but also traditional film festivals—they are opening up spaces for installation art and performance, and my partner Sandra Gibson and I fall into that niche. A lot of festivals, even big ones like Sundance, want to high- light materiality. In a strange way they are becoming “structural materialists,” albeit unconsciously. They invite us because they want materiality, again due to the crisis occasioned by digital media. With digital media, there is nothing
material to see or touch as a medium. Sachs: I think one of the interesting directions that the digital world is taking us
toward is a fetishism of decay. We miss decay, so we have to create the activity of something physical breaking apart or aging. In the world of architecture they create furniture that looks faux-worn and antique. It is very peculiar to me that there are digital effects that can create scratches and dust. We don’t want things to age. Nevertheless, we miss the chemical reactions, the fact that physical things change, so we simulate decay. It’s so strange. The desire for decay is a nostalgia for the aura of the original and its physical transfor- mation. In digital, the original isn’t transformed, but we want it to be. I don’t necessarily aspire to this myself, but then I find myself including things like the flash-out flames, and I use found footage because it adds a texture that gives me so much delight. I think it does the same for the audience, who say, “Oh, I really like that,” because it doesn’t look realistic, it doesn’t look like television or digital video. That’s why there’s a desire for decay.
Windhausen: But it’s also a desire for the material markers of the filmstrip, as in the simulated end-of-roll light flares you now see in those spots for the Sundance channel. Things that experimental filmmakers first discovered about film or liked to reveal to an audience are now so easy to achieve digi- tally.
Street: But isn’t it a nostalgia on the part of the younger generation for something that never existed? The great “experimental” filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola said that he has no hankering for film. He lived it, but his daughter who didn’t live it, Sophia Coppola, wants to shoot on film all the time. I used to have this idea that you could go out and get projectors, Dumpster-dive, buy stuff on eBay, etc., and create a DIY punk film aesthetic. Then a student brought in an old camera, a regular 8mm camera, and it was rigged in a weird way with a funny magazine, like a regular 8mm magazine that you would pop in. I had never seen anything like it, so we poked around on the Internet and discovered you could buy those magazines through a Web site.
There was a guy in L.A. who was tinkering with and remaking them and then selling them for $70 or $80 each. I realized there was something faux-nostal- gic about this. It wasn’t about finding the detritus of the culture and using it. Rather, it was about re-creating it, in an anachronistic way, like wearing a pince-nez or jodhpurs or something like that.
Turvey: So decay and obsolescence have become commodified and clichéd? Street: That’s how I felt, that people are paying too much for these things. Why not just use a video camera that’s cheap and that’s the lingua franca now,
you know? Ken Jacobs: But the marks of these older technologies mean something. They ring a
bell, they do something. I studied decay, OK? My Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son [1969–71] is really about decay, among a lot of other things. It wasn’t about nostalgia, it was about asking, What is this old stuff? What is it made of? What is its character as a series of
light impressions? Windhausen: There is a video by the
artist Cory Arcangel called Personal Film [2008], which is full of the effects you are talk- ing about, but he made it on a desktop digital imaging pro- gram and had it transferred to 16mm film. It has flame-outs and scratches and count-down leader, and when you look at it in the installation space—it was at Team Gallery a couple of years ago—it’s a 16mm pro- jector projecting a 16mm film. If you don’t read the text about it, then you don’t know that it was all done on a digital desktop. For better or for worse, he’s someone whose work reflects how that younger gen- eration works with digital imagery.
Ken Jacobs: But that’s to make nonsense out of this stuff. The flameouts—I kept them in my films for a number of reasons. I wanted to say, “This is the end; I can’t shoot anymore, because I have no other roll of film.” But I also wanted to say, “This is film; this is the character of film. What I’m showing you are unedited rolls from a camera; I left the flash frames in”—that was part of the statement. And now you can make it happen digitally, and it doesn’t connote anything. It doesn’t signify. It’s just an effect.
Sachs: That’s why I think that the flash-frame only exists as a conceit, as a metaphor. It’s no longer indicative of something material.
Windhausen: Luis, you choose not to show your audience what you’re doing in
terms of the photochemical film processes and the projection processes that you’re working with. What’s your sense of how they understand the images that you’re creating, given the lack of knowledge about photochemical film that we’ve been talking about. Do you care?
Recoder: Yeah, I do. When I started doing projector performances, a lot of the peo- ple who came to see the show were let down because there was no performance in the traditional sense. I wasn’t in front of the screen doing things. Nowadays, when you are talking about expanded-cinema shows, that’s what they expect—there are a lot of younger artists putting projectors in front of the audience and in front of the screen, so that you can see what they’re doing and can see the effects of what they’re doing. I try to work with
Ken Jacobs.
Celestial Subway Lines. 2004.
the audience’s anticipation of this kind of performance and their subse- quent disappointment, where the whole spectacle maintains itself as an illusion and then breaks down. The audience is confused about what they’re really seeing and what’s really happening. Is it film? Is it video? I work within the space of that confusion.
Windhausen: But does what you’re doing remain, then, a mystery for the audience? Recoder: Slightly. We reveal it sometimes afterwards, during the Q&A. Windhausen: Ken, at times you have shown audiences what you’re doing and at
times you deliberately hide, or stand in front of, the apparatus. Ken Jacobs: That’s only with the Nervous Magic Lantern. I don’t want people to
think that they understand it because they see its parts. It is completely mys-
tifying to me, doing it, and I don’t want an easy answer for them. Windhausen: Do you care whether they think they see a film performance or a video performance? Some of my students get it wrong if they don’t see the
apparatus. Ken Jacobs: No, I do care. I don’t want them to think that they’ve seen video,
although I’m not consistent. We were in Paris, and the interest in seeing the machinery was so strong, I just opened it up. I want people to realize that it really is a magic lantern. That’s all it is. The result is coming from these primitive means. To have someone think it’s video would be disappointing. Now, some of it is being recorded on video. There is a DVD of a piece I did with John Zorn, Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise [2004], so I guess I don’t think that it’s always so important that one see the machine. I also want the effects onscreen to be appreciated for themselves.
Flo Jacobs: But you can’t record it at all; it’s impossible. Every time we rehearse, it’s different, no matter what you do.
Ken Jacobs: What Flo is saying is that each time I do it, I improvise. I can’t repeat what I did a previous time.
Street: I’m just wondering: if flash-frames are film ephemera and Joan Jonas’s verti- cal roll is early video ephemera, what are the ephemera for digital video? What do people show when they’re showing us the subconscious of the medium?
Windhausen: Ken shows artifacting, pixelation . . . Street: Ernie Gehr shows the space between the frames, as in Crystal Palace [2002]. I
guess that’s it. Windhausen: What we’re talking about are the medium-specific gestures that are
typically made when a medium emerges and artists want to see what are, for example, the unique artifacts of decay within that medium, or something like that, right?
Street: Right, things that remain particular and idiosyncratic to that medium. Windhausen: Cameras these days are like computers in that they have built-in obso- lescence, like laptops. After a certain number of years, a camera is going to be off the market and obsolete. You and Lynne still work with mini-DV rather than HD, so you’re already old-school. Ken, meanwhile, has moved on to high-definition (he’s the youngest of all of us). [Laughter.] Last year Ken had a Creative Vado High Definition handheld pocket camera, and now he’s already got a new one that I’ve never even seen before. It doesn’t even have a viewfinder or a screen! So the question becomes: why bother doing medium-
specific work when your medium is obsolete within a year? Ken Jacobs: Young people, I believe, are sampling. They encounter something, they get an idea, and then they go for something else. The idea of making a dis-
crete work that begins here and ends there is passé. Windhausen: At the Oberhausen Film Festival’s retrospective of his work this year,

Fred Worden said something similar when discussing his newer work in video. Filmmakers can now continually revise their work, because they have it on a hard drive. You just look up a particular file and continue working on it. The open work is becoming more of a norm now.
Street: I think that openness is good. I always encourage my students—this is Final Cut Pro talk—to create a new sequence every time they sit down to edit, as if they are reinventing the film every time. Filmmaking was linear; it involved a progression. As you edited it, the film hopefully got better, shorter, clearer. But in the digital age, you can sit down on a Tuesday and reinvent your film and on a Wednesday reinvent it again; you are not bound by a linear progression.
Windhausen: You don’t have the point of termination of having to pay for the print, for example.
Street: There was also an investment in every one of your gestures. A splice had bet- ter be good, because it was costly to go back. But with digital, you can experiment and play around because nothing is irrevocable. Very few of my students take me up on that, though. It’s usually still one sequence that they invest in and keep trying to improve.
Sachs: There is a term used today, which is “non-destructive.” The way we work now is that everything is protected. You’re never really working with what you did yesterday but rather with a duplicate of it, so that if you don’t like what you do today you can always go back to what you did yesterday. But when you were editing with film, you didn’t have that freedom. You were working with a work print, and if you cut it, of course you could put it back together, but most of the time, if you did intricate cutting, you were going towards some- thing and you weren’t going to break up all those little frames again. It was essentially destructive; there was no return. But now we want the constant capability of returning to something as if we were striving towards perfection and any risk we take might lead us astray from that perfect end.
Ken Jacobs: Are you saying this is positive or negative? Sachs: I don’t know. It’s positive because I’m used to it now, but I don’t know if it
makes me more risk-averse or less. Turvey: So if it’s so easy to alter and go back, how do you know when a film is fin-
ished? What is the criterion, now, for a finished film? Ken Jacobs: Oh, wait a minute. That’s nothing new. One simply senses that it is
done, just like with a painting or a poem or anything else. You step away and it’s done. I don’t think that’s changed.
I want to say this: Kino’s Avant-Garde 3 DVD contains Danse Macabre [Dudley Murphy, 1922], The Petrified Dog [Sidney Peterson, 1948], Plague Summer [Chester Kessler, 1951], The Death of a Stag [Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1951], Image in the Snow [Willard Maas, 1952]—all of these could have been shot on video. There are very few films that pertain to the twenty-four frames per second, or sixteen frames per second, of the film strand. It takes some of Brakhage’s work, or Kubelka’s, to say, “Yeah, that had to be shot on film.”
Windhausen: What about Wavelength [Michael Snow, 1967]? Ken Jacobs: Wavelength could have been shot on video, too. Windhausen: Snow might say that you go from a long shot to the close-up of the
postcard with the waves, which is a pyramid-shaped trajectory, whereas the
projection from the film projector to the screen forms an inverse pyramid. Street: But doesn’t that concern projection rather than being shot on video? There is the distinction between showing something on a small screen versus a large screen, and the distinction between shooting something on film and video. For example, I saw Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles [Chantal Akerman, 1975] at Film Forum, and I had only seen it on VHS on the small screen. When you see it big, it all comes together, and when you
see it small, it’s nothing. It’s a question of kind not degree. Ken Jacobs: Scale is enormously important. It’s the same thing with music. Scale is
significant. Windhausen: Interesting. So what you’re saying is that for a large number of exper-
imental films, there is not much lost if you watch them on video? Ken Jacobs: No, I am saying that there is nothing lost if you make them on video;
there is if you watch them on a monitor. Windhausen: Oh, OK. Now, related to this and to distribution issues, there seem to
be more festivals showing experimental work now than ever before. So do you find that your work is being disseminated more than ever before? To what degree are the festivals more important or more prominent than exhi- bition venues like Anthology Film Archives? Also, none of you have films on the Web. None of you have Web sites where full, high-definition versions of your work can be seen. Why not?
Ken Jacobs: I’m unhappy when things are shown in less than optimum conditions. It makes me very unhappy, and that’s why it’s really important to make hard copies. Hard copies exist when people really care about work, people who want to have a DVD or something.
Windhausen: And is more of your work being seen, not just at festivals but in venues that are interested in showing works by Mark Street or Ken Jacobs, now that they can find a DVD to rent?
Ken Jacobs: Yeah, and they can find us. Windhausen: OK, so how many of you travel with your work? One of the core values
of experimental film is the temporary community of the theatrical audience, the people in the seats who are watching your film. If film exhibition becomes Web-based, you lose that temporary community, potentially. Is that something that you are reluctant to let go of? Do you care?
Street: I’m reluctant. When you’re in your house, you’re surrounded by the things that you love, that you bought—bourgeois trappings—and I think you’re less able to take risks. But when you go sit in a theater, there’s a social contract. I’m watching Jeanne Dielman, I’m bored, but I’m not going to get up. I’m going to stick it out because there’s a social contract and I’m part of the temporary com-
munity you mention. I have a film festival at the end of every semester with my students, and the students ask, “Why? Why do we all have to get together at 7 p.m. on a Thursday? Can’t I just look at a disc, can’t you just give me a disc? Is it going to be on the Web?” It’s a very telling, contemporary question.
Ken Jacobs: And when they look at a disc, they skip through the film, the fuckers. [Laughter.]
Street: I like the social part of it. I think it’s important to be in the same room with the work and experience it as a group in the dark.
Ken Jacobs: I disagree. It’s always just me and the work. I’m not even with Flo when I’m watching this thing. I’m with the person who conceived and presented it, just like reading a book. I’m alone. I don’t want people around.
Sachs: You asked about whether we travel with our work. I actually make a lot of effort to travel with my work, and it’s extremely disruptive to family life and work life. But it’s very important to me. It keeps it alive. It makes it human. Many times I am paid an honorarium but they say, “We want you to be here,” and it’s not very much money. Nevertheless, I do my best to go with the films if I can. It’s worth it to me to feel that aliveness the way musicians do, or the- ater people. It’s not as if my work is all over the place in stores and it has this productive presence in society.
Windhausen: I can imagine younger filmmakers thinking that Web distribution is fine because they will get feedback from blog comments or things like that. But I haven’t seen it. I still find that younger filmmakers want a body of peo- ple responding directly to their work.
Ken Jacobs: I would very much love for my stuff to be available. Free is OK with me, although every so often I realize that’s not realistic. We need the money, there should be some money coming back, but really I just want the work simply out there, and as good as it can be.
Flo Jacobs: What Ken really wants is to travel with live works, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. It’s easy for him to just put a DVD in the mail, so the only reason to travel is to perform.
Street: For you, Luis, the DVD does not exist, right? Recoder: No, we have DVDs. We like to have our work seen by as many people as possi-
ble, and not everyone can invite us, not everyone has those resources. Our work has been shown on DVDs in installations, at places where they couldn’t invite us to go and do performances. For me, the medium of digital video is irrelevant; it’s just another distribution format. What we do is not video art. Some people might see it that way, but that’s not really a direction that I’m interested in.
*
Ken Jacobs: I’m someone who really likes working with accidents, and to me, video is a vast accident, you know, unplanned, unexpected, wow!
Turvey: Can you give examples?
Ken Jacobs: Well, I work with these miniature digital cameras, and I can’t see through them. For years I worked without a reflex lens, and it was a major thing in my life when I could afford to buy one with a built-in viewer. These miniature digital cameras are cheap models, unbelievable models. They focus by themselves, they get the right light levels by themselves. You press a button to turn them on and another to take a picture. Yes, there is a lot they don’t do, but it’s so much fun exploring what they can do, much of which is unexpected. So, I’m really grateful.
Turvey: Ken, would you ever go back to shooting on film? Ken Jacobs: I’m not inclined to. Before I worked in digital video, I had pretty much
stopped filming. One reason is that I had accumulated so much footage and I just didn’t want to add to the number of unfinished works. They were very hard to finish; I never had the money. Flo Rounds a Corner [1999] was the first video I did, but it made finishing Star Spangled to Death [1957–2004] as a video thinkable. Forty years, or something like that, after I started it on film, I was able to finish it as a video, and I’m so grateful.
Windhausen: You were talking earlier, Mark, about medium-specific gestures like the vertical roll, and I was thinking of work like Paul Sharits’s from the ’70s, which was accompanied by Sharits’s theoretical statements, which would undergird, or run parallel to, the work he was doing. In the digital era, while there are academics who theorize about digital media, it doesn’t seem to be the case that experimental filmmakers are taking that step. As they move into digital, they don’t appear to be writing theoretical texts about the prop- erties, possibilities, or capacities of the medium, or making work that says, “Maybe digital is this.” Instead, they seem to be working intuitively with the materials, and the theoretical stuff is left largely to academics.
Street: It’s interesting to put it that way. I wonder if it’s because every- thing seems possible in the digital world, so filmmakers don’t feel the need to highlight the limitations in the way that they did with film.
Ken Jacobs: It takes an exquisitely dis- turbed person to dwell on what they can’t do. [Laughter.]
Street: I think it’s interesting, the idea of theories or manifestos about the properties of a medium. Think of Fred Camper’s “The Trouble with Video” [1985] and the update. I don’t agree with him, but it’s interesting that he compared film and analogue
video. I don’t know that any filmmaker is doing that with digital. It’s too easy, in the digital world, to think that the latest thing is the new language and is not to be questioned. I see that right now with the 16:9 aspect ratio, for instance. It used to be that we had 4:3 or 16:9, that there was a choice. But in the last two years, I’ve noticed with my students that it’s not a choice any- more. They use 16:9, and that’s it.
Windhausen: So can we agree that the filmmakers here are relatively conservative in that they prefer to show their work in a theatrical projection situation where the temporary community of an audience has to watch the work from beginning to end?
Ken Jacobs: And you can’t go to the bathroom! [Laughter.] Windhausen: That’s fairly conservative though, right? Flo Jacobs: No, it isn’t! That’s not conservative. Windhausen: It is today. You’re conserving it as a tradition. It’s a valuable tradition
but it’s a conservative move. Flo Jacobs: Do you want to walk in to the middle of Strangers on a Train [Alfred
Hitchcock, 1951]? I don’t think so. Is that being conservative? Windhausen: I guess I mean new work. Recoder: I think you can be more radically conservative now in the gallery. There are
things that we are doing, my partner and I, that no theater is going to show.
They are too long, or too boring, whereas in the gallery you can show them. Windhausen: You’re making gallery work now? Recoder: Yes. Windhausen: But you’re in the minority here, is what I’m saying.
Ken Jacobs: All of us make work that begins at one time and ends at another time. We want it to be seen that way!
Sachs: I do have a piece on the Internet called Abecedarium: NYC [2009], and every time that I open it, aspects of it are different. It will speak back to me based on the climate, on how the public
participates. Flo Jacobs: In terms of being conserva- tive, I think the
work has to be seen from beginning to end. You can’t just stroll in, visit it, and stroll out. You can say the same thing about a painting. You wouldn’t want somebody to cut a detail out of a painting at the Met and hang that up, would you?
Windhausen: Well, there’s a difference between a perpetually open work and one that’s finished. I’m thinking, as a point of comparison, of new-media artists, who make work that’s interactive and continually open to change. It can be entered into and left behind at any point.
Flo Jacobs: But that’s their concept, that’s their work. Windhausen: Another shift is that television is more cinematic, now, in every way,
and people emulate the film theater in their homes. Ken Jacobs: That’s good, because what about the kids who are looking at a cluttered
monitor while watching a movie in bed? Sachs: Or three movies! Windhausen: “What’s wrong with that?” the kids would say. Ken Jacobs: That’s right, they would say that. But they would not understand the
problem. Sachs: That is a real function of the digital, the fact that people believe that it is
just as good an experience to watch more than one thing at once. Ken Jacobs: Multitasking. Sachs: Or multi-watching. It’s not even a task, because they’re not having to do
something. It’s a “more is better” attitude. Windhausen: In relation to this, I was thinking, Luis, that what I’ve seen at
expanded-cinema festivals is a lot of work that is ambient, where I have the sense that the artist expects you to dip in and out of it in a relatively aleatory and arbitrary way, whereas what I’m accustomed to in single-screen theatri- cal, experimental films is having my attention be directed from beginning to end.
Ken Jacobs: OK, there was this guy named Andy Warhol [Laughter], and he intro- duced “background paintings” to convivial meetings, with people drinking and talking in front of something that looked expensive. That is a huge tra- dition now. I call it “stuntism”—fifty paintings of Marilyn Monroe or whatever. It’s not about asking people to learn how to see and to look at something very intently.
Turvey: But there are different kinds of work, right? So, obviously, your work demands and requires an intense perceptual engagement. But that’s not true of other kinds of work, or some television shows, or other things that one might consume on a smaller screen.
Ken Jacobs: There are households where the TV is the first thing on and the last thing off.
Turvey: What I mean is that there are different viewing modes appropriate to differ- ent kinds of work. Just because people are watching three things at the same time on small screens doesn’t mean they are watching them inappropriately.
For example, it would be foolish to sit and watch a CNN broadcast with the
perceptual intensity that one would watch a work you make. Ken Jacobs: Yes, I think we are what they call fascists. We want to dominate your
complete attention. Recoder: I think that’s what you were asking about, Federico, the aleatory, “in and out”
perceptual experience of a certain kind of performance. Allowing that sort of open play and knowing that you have audiences who have all kinds of attention spans is to be anti-fascist, I think. And when you take out narrative and images, you are completely lost. One of the things that brought me to the avant-garde was the experience of viewing. I felt that I could walk in and walk out of it, not physically but perceptually. It allowed me to be in a space where there is a con- fusion between “Am I making this? Or is this making me?”
Windhausen: But you are articulating something very different from what these three filmmakers do in their single-screen works. Maybe you’re an excep- tion, Ken, but most of the work that you’ve all made has a beginning, middle, and end, and you place a value on directing the viewer through the work. But with expanded-cinema pieces, as Luis has said, it’s the viewer mak- ing the work in an aleatory process that is equal to or of more value than being directed through the work.roud
Ken Jacobs: I don’t direct anybody. I am fascinated, and if I remain fascinated from beginning to end, that’s all the direction that goes into it.
Street: But Federico, there was ambient work that you dipped into and out of in the ’50s and ’60s. I don’t know that it’s technological.
Windhausen: It wasn’t the dominant mode. I’m talking about dominant modes within experimental cinema.
Street: So you think the dominant mode of experimental cinema today is aleatory? Windhausen: No, I think it’s the dominant mode of expanded cinema. Street: Right, but I think that’s a style, and I don’t think it’s any greater today than
it was in 1969, or 1959, even. Windhausen: Well, it’s certainly more popular today than it was back then. Street: Maybe, but there has always been artwork that is non-directive, that allows
people to engage it with various degrees of attention. It would be interesting to compare this new paradigm, as you describe it, to Christmas on Earth [Barbara Rubin, 1963], or something.
Windhausen: I’m not saying that those precedents don’t exist; I’m just saying that they weren’t as prominent as they are now.
Recoder: I’m interested in the word Federico used, “conservative.” I’m wondering where that’s coming from, as if you were trying to pin us all down.
Windhausen: I was talking about the theatrical situation with the temporary commu- nity and everyone looking at the same screen at the same time. That’s a long-standing value within the tradition of experimental film, one that I hope continues. But it is “conservative” from the perspective of the new-media artist.
Street: I’m conservative in that sense. I’ll sign.

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Thoughts on Punto de Vista Film Festival

Thoughts on PUNTO DE VISTA FILM FESTIVAL 2010

“Naming an international film festival after a term for subjectivity is, in my mind, a radical stance.  Rather than taking the more obvious city or country identified name, which brings attention to the community, the Punto de Vista festival celebrates a first person cinema based on the documentary practice of working with reality, that privileges the expression of ideas over the dissemination of information.  As a judge for the 2010 festival, I witnessed the results of this brazen decision on the part of the founders and leaders of the festival to foreground the filmmakers’ point of view. From New York City to San Francisco to Buenos Aires, I have judged approximately seven film festivals, so I feel comfortable testifying to the singularity of this body of film work as a whole.  Over the course of one week, I watched work that challenged every aspect of the cinematic idiom, that showed me hidden geographies I didn’t know existed, that introduced me to people who pushed the limits of existence.. From my perspective as a filmmaker, the results were brilliant, electrifying and inspiring.”

Lynne Sachs, New York
Member of 2010 Jury
Punto de Vista Film Festival
Pamplona, Spain

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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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“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.

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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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Tonight I finished reading Julio Cortazar’s short story “Final del Juego”.  Since I will be spending the summer in Buenos Aires in a few months, I am trying to get a feeling for the city and for the people.  As a mother of two 13 and 11 year-old girls (Maya and Noa), I am drawn to Cortazar’s depiction of a seemingly quiet yet tumultuous moment in three pre-adolescent girls’ lives.  Letitia, Holanda and the narrator (un-named) are spending a few weeks together in a house near the train tracks.  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, 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.

The painful realization so cleverly hidden behind whimsy, dramatic play and baroque costuming reminds me of the time my own girls are experiencing in their lives now.  I want to turn this story into a experimental film, one that “documents” and explores these sensations that are so close to the ones I too knew in my early teenage years.

June 26, 2008

We’ve arrived in Buenos Aries and I am ready to begin thinking about making Cortazar’s story into a film.  Problem is, I don’t know any other girls, let alone a 15 year old boy, and I only speak a bit of Spanish.  I suppose Maya and Noa will be thrilled to perform, but I want this project to bring me closer to the country while I am here, so it seems that the only way to start is by integrating local people into the production. My dear friend, Paula Felix Didier, now director of the Buenos Aires Cine Museum, volunteers to serve as a make-shift casting director. She quickly, I’d say magically, finds two wonderful Argentine girls who are the daughters of close friends.  Lena and Chiara Peroni, ages 12 and 10, will join our esteemed cast and I will transform the three “protaginistas” into four, no problem.   Their mother Bettina Nanclares will play the mother.  We decide to use their new house in Martinez, a suburb of Buenos Aires as our home location, which is appropriate since the story takes place in an un-named town on the very same Mitre Line they use every day.

Lautaro Cura, a 15 year-old boy who is the son of another friend of Paula’s, also enthusiastically agrees to join the group as the boy on the train named Ariel. We go to his home at 11 PM one evening to discuss the logistics and discover we will need to organize our production around the schedule of his academic exams and rock and roll band practice.  A meeting with a prospective actor for a movie at midnight might seem odd in New York, but in a matter of just a few days, I have discovered that everything of any import in Buenos Aires seems to take place in the middle of the night. No wonder I have already learned the word “madrugada” after less than a week Argentina.  In English we don’t even have a word for the early morning hours just before sunrise.  We are all asleep at that time.   In desperation, I ask Paula to double up on her rolls in this production.  She agrees to play the esteemed roll of Tia Ruth.

July 1, 2008

I have read just enough about Argentine film production to know that collaboration here is not just a matter of necessity but is also a highly respected form of cinematic production.  I invite three marvelous Argentine filmmakers to join me in this collective endeavor.  I first saw Pablo Marin’s and Leandro Listorti’s lyrical Super 8 experimental films when I came to Buenos Aires last year for the film festival. They both see the world through a distinctive, curious lens so I am thrilled they have agreed to shoot the Super 8 and video sections of the film. In addition, they begin to show me the history of Argentine experimental film, starting from the 1960’s to the present.  In this melieu, I  watch the transportive, often dream-inspired films of Narcisa Hirsch, Claudio Caldini and Lucrecia Martel which give me a deeper sense of the visual textures of the urban and rural landscapes surrounding me.  Tomas Dota, a member of the staff of the film festival and a precocious film student, will also help with the production.  We spend a few weeks planning.  At each meeting, Maya, Noa and I become a bit more comfortable with the delightfully obligatory series of “hola” and “adios” kisses. I put everyone’s phone number into my new BsAs cell phone.  My daughters start listening to the pop music of Fabiano Cantilo and Julieta Venegas and eagerly await the premiere of Disney’s “Desafio” (Latin American version of “HIghschool Musical”).   We start a “sabor” competition between various brands of alfahore.  I feel that this is home for the time being.

July 18, 19 and 25,

During this week, I show a series of experimental films that my partner Mark Street and I made in New York at the Palais de Glace, Palacio Nacional de las Artes. www.palaisdeglace.org.  This will also be a week of pre-production. I fall in love with the Cotillion and costume shops on Calle Lavalle in Once.  The colorful stores full of mannequins, bright fabrics and other superfluous yet splendid wares remind me of the Lower East Side of New York City.   With Tomas’ guidance, I obtain Super 8 film stock for our production from a special, somewhat secret source in town.  I learn to take the Collectivos and how to horde  my “monada” so that I can actually get on the bus with the necessary coins.  We try our best to understand the political dynamics that are part of the tensions between the Argentine farmers and the Argentine government.  There seems to be a charged yet fascinating crisis brewing.

July 27, 2008

Production begins in Martinez.  We will shoot every day this week for approximately 6 – 8 hours a day.  This is the first week of Lena’s and Chiara’s winter vacation so I am lucky enough to have their complete attention.  Inspired by the charged, tight-knit home environment I saw in Lucrecia Martel’s “La Cieniga”, I try to create a spirit of emotional electricity in the Peroni home.  As the children move through the rooms of this austere 1970’s haute-modern house, they investigate their various costumes and  begin to understand the personalities of their characters.  Lena is playing Letitia 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.  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.

As a way to get “into character”, I ask them to play a game I have invented called “House Taken Over”, inspired by Cortazar’s haunting story of a brother and a sister who discover that their home is inhabited by the 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. Leandro Listorti follows the girls with his video camera, as the girls inhabit their characters in the process of playing the game.  This theater game then leads us to the film shooting of all the interior scenes.

July 28 and 29, 2008

Each girl has one scene in the film in which she discovers some aspect of urban life.  While not precisely in Cortazar’s “cuento” I felt it would add to the sense of the characters to see them outside the comfortable environment of the home.  All of this material is shot with the Super 8 film to give these scenes a more textured, timeless quality.  Leandro Listorti shoots with Chiara on the broad Parisian steps of the the Plaza Francia.  Pablo Marin shoots with Noa under the shockingly modern sweep of the Bibliotecha National and in Ricoleta Cemetario. Tomas Dota, Leandro and I take Maya and Lena to the cotillion stores of Once and along Corrientes,  Buenos Aires’ Broadway chock full o’ elegant, crowded bookstores, three story pizza parlors with elderly men in silk scarves around their necks.  Amidst this milieu, there is also a strange sense of urgency and uncertainty and one must be a bit vigilant and constantly aware, in that urban way we have learned by heart in New York, in order to stay solid and just slightly self-assured, walking through the city streets with girls in costumes.

July 30, 2008

I am getting to know the train route between Capital Federal and Martinez.  Today we spend another 8 hours in the home of the Peroni’s.  Paula Felix Didier joins us in her role as Tia Ruth with Betina Nanclares who is the mother.  We have an outrageous time in the kitchen, following Cortazar’s story rather closely.  In these scenes, naguhty Holanda sneaks into the kitchen to throw wet spoons across the floor and hot water (we faked this) on the dog.  Leandro shoots gorgeous video footage of this hilarious sequence of the events and I imagine that our laughing can be heard to the end of the block.  Perhaps one of those ubiquitous security gaurds stationed in a booth at every corner is wondering what on earth we are all up to.  Later there are quiet scenes in Letitia’s bedroom as she write her private letter to Ariel.

July 31, 2008

We are all exhausted. Recreo and pausa are good words to know.  I go shopping in Once for more props and costumes.

August 1, 2008

One of the most challenging days of all.  We spend about 5 hours at the train station, shooting the girls in their various wacky, poignant, monsterous and beguiling statues and attitudes, all on the grass just beside the train.  Everyone is prepared with a cell phone because we must coordinate Ariel’s ride on the train with the girls performances.  Pablo and Leandro shoot video, I am running around with my 16mm Bolex. Tomas is on the train with Lautaro who is in a grey suit with a book bag as Ariel.  We know all the people in the station, on the sidewalk and on the train are watching us but we throw caution to the wind and keep going. The girls at first are ever so shy and then they just become their characters and relish the world of longing and wonder that we all have created.  The weather is very cold today but we prevail somehow, completely worn out but thrilled as the light disappears and we must go home.

August 2, 2008

Pablo Marin and I take Lautaro (Ariel) and my daughter Maya (the narrator) to the Retiro train station to shoot the nightmare scene as Cortazar had imagined it. The minute we pull out Pablo’s Super 8 camera we are told to leave by the police.  I had spotted 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 walk to this daunting, hidden, hellish, fantastic place and decide we are lucky to have been evicted from the station today.

August 16, 2008

Our last production day is a continuation of the narrator’s nightmare.  I ask my friend Ynes Oyarbide, a psychoanalyst and a photographer, to join us as an artist consultant.  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 Mitre train tracks in Parque Palermo. Here  three of the girls, wearing moon masks, dance like ghosts under the trees while the narrator searches for  them in a game of “Gallito Ciego” (similar to our Blindman’s Bluff).  Later, the narrator believes she has failed in the Cortazar game of “statues and attitudes” and looks down at her feet to discover they have become chicken legs. Lastly, all four girls hurl 20 messages, that resemble the ones that Ariel had thrown them, back onto the train tracks.  In my mind, the girls are announcing that they are not dependent on Ariel’s messages for their happiness, but of course who’s to say what any of these wild and wonderful images we have made over the last month really mean. That will be up to our audience to decide.

No related posts.

by Lynne Sachs

Confiteria Ideal
In my opinion, this is the most wonderful place to see tango. Real people doing the dance of Argentina with a kind of love and commitment that that will make you want to get on the floor yourself. Mystical, misty old world atmosphere.  Be sure to go for the open dances called Milongas, and check for the hours (the afternoon is fine) at their website.
http://www.confiteriaideal.com/milongas.htm

Carlos Ragazonni Sculpture Garden:
Lost, abandoned, junk from the industrial world transformed into dinosaur sized animals. Located right behind the Retiro Train Station off the Avenida Libertador.  Not a formal place to look at respectable obra d’arte but more of a magical discovery nestled in the railway’s backyard – so fragile and probably destined to disappear.  I touch the crackling metal, slip underneath the gaping mouth of a strange animal, watch my daughter pretend she is reeling in a nightmare, a pesadilla, on earth.

Reserva Ecologica
One of the wildest, least manicured natural city spaces I have ever seen. Rustic marshes with cawing birds and wisps of brush fluttering in the marsh winds. I can breath deeper here.

Avenida Corrientes
Wandering Avenida Corrientes for a spectacular array of experiences, including:  the provocative and intellectual Ghandi Bookstore (similar to St. Mark’s Books in NYC); the Leopold Lugari Cultural Center for art films; the Gato Negro Café for drinks and spices; eating delicious pizza with older men and women in the 3 story pizzaria Guerrin; taking a peek at the poorly renovated Café Paz which is still full of daylight and 1960’s hippi atmosphere.  I feel exhilarated by all the thinking going on here.  Is the activity of the mind palatable?

Galeria Pacifica; Centro Cultural Borges
First of all I see the luxurious stores of high-style Buenos Aires in an enormous splendidly renovated Beaux Art /Baroque building.  This is too much for me. Too commercial, too chic, too much about possessions. Then with the guidance of a friend I discover the awe-inspiring Centro Cultural Borges with stimulating art exhibitions and intense, idiosyncratic dance or theater performances. I like the hidden, behind the scenes, disposable nature of everything that is on the walls, the stage, in the air in this part of the galleria – the attic of treasures.

Plaza Martin and Gallery Klemm
Walking under the canopied trees of Plaza Santa Fe, perhaps the largest expanse of tiled walkways in the city.  People sit for hours on benches, children see-saw and lovers lie sprawled on the grass – all quiet and undisturbed. I am thrilled by the absence of sound, the possibility of nothingness.  Then I walk toward the end of Calle Florida and down a set of stairs to see the Gallery Klemm, one of the most remarkable private collections of 20th Century Art I have ever seen, including Chagall, Bueys, Warholl, Xul Solars, Koons, Mapplethorpe and a whole room of garish, homoerotic art by Klemm himself.  How and why did this man put all of  this work together? The mystery gives me a chuckle.

Calla LaValle in Once
A dynamic cacophonous, colorful Lower East Side style low cost shopping street where the workers and thrifty bargain hunters search for costumes, fabrics and all you could ever need for a Cotillian (girl’s 15th b’day) party.  Here I wish for the first time that I could be a teenager again, shopping for the girlish paraphernalia I would have distained back in the 1970s. Here in Buenos Aires a party until the wee hours, until madruga (the time just before sunrise), would be a delight to the eyes, the ears and the tastebuds.

No related posts.

A Grapevine to the Sky:
A Meditation on Life in Brooklyn
by Lynne Sachs

Jack must have started his infamous climb to the sky from a backyard in Brooklyn.  While not the eponymous beanstalk with which most of us are familiar, the seventy-five foot high Concord grape vine in my backyard reaches so daringly up to the clouds that I am convinced it is the real thing.  In my Carroll Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn almost everyone who’s lived here more than 20 years is Italian, if not by birth than by family heritage.  Never daunted by how far north we really are, these Italian-Americans miraculously succeeded in recreating a natural looking sliver of their heritage in urban Brooklyn, U.S.A. Every summer, our hearty grapevine actually latches onto the sturdy 60 foot laundry pole outback. Ubiquitous in Carroll Gardens yards, these enormous, once utilitarian poles shoot upward from each and every yard.  According to my neighbors Pete, age 75, and Vincent, age 96, their parents planted the grape vines decades ago, hoping for a seasonal reminder of the old country. They just wanted a bit of Italian flavor to remind them of their childhood.  To this day, I am convinced we harvest enough grapes to make a few bottles of wine!

On a typical July Saturday, I usually pull myself into the hot, sweltering sun to give the garden a swish with the hose. Vincent and I often find ourselves on opposite sides of the chain link fence, quietly puttering about our little plots of grass, discovering what has survived and what has wilted in the heat.  Sometimes we talk and sometimes we acknowledge one another without words, preferring to allow the glory of our modest gardens to surround us with a kind of silent dignity.  It is during these completely non-verbal, but somehow exquisitely friendly, moments that we both look up at the vine, awed by its stature and resilience.   About three times a summer, he sheepishly asks me if he should cut it down because it may be impeding my ability to dry the clothes.  Each time, I remind him that I own a dryer and that such Brooklyn flora will always be near and dear to my heart.

No botanist in his or her right mind could have been convinced that the grapevine in my backyard would survive the climatic and environmental challenges we experience in Brooklyn. It shouldn’t be but it is!  What a glorious time I have with my two daughters each summer as we watch the hearty, verdant vine climb once again up the pole.  There are only a handful of neighborhood residents who still depend on these poles to facilitate the delicate drying process of their sheets, socks and nightgowns.  It must have been a splendid sight to see such an abundance of colorful cloth flapping in the breeze of a Brooklyn August morning.  For me and my imagination, the pole has but one purpose now…propelling a brazen grapevine straight to the sky.

We live about four blocks from a strangely desolate block of scrubby trees and grass that was one of Brooklyn’s most active fuel oil companies a few decades ago.  Unfortunately for the residents of this community, when the oil company moved away and tore down its industrial structures, it callously left a plethora of environmentally hazardous materials in its wake.  On the surface, this empty plot of land nestled between the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Gowanus Canal looks like the perfect spot to create a park.  Face it. We need all the green we can get.  The problem, however, lies just under the epidermal layer, where old containers of oil have been left to rot and seep into the dirt.  Discouraging as this past history is for all of us, here too, there is a sense of hope.  People are beginning to imagine the possibility of cleaning up this little area of Brooklyn – excavating, planting, and transforming an egregious situation into a possibility for green.  I’m considering throwing a few grape seeds over the wire fence.

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My great Uncle Charlie was a prominent Memphis businessman who took a giddy pleasure in shooting some of the most elegant, compassionate photographs I’ve ever seen.  I remember his close-up portrait taken in the late 1950’s of a wizened black man looking into the lens.  I would sneak into the back hall of his house to look at this image, as if those large eyes revealed to me all the horrors of a segregated South that was beginning, thank god, to disappear.  The face still haunts me.

None of Uncle Charlie’s children or even grandchildren took much interest in photography.  My teenage obsession with the camera thus became the reason we developed such a long-lasting relationship.  He and I would spend hours together looking at the photographs we’d both taken.  These were the first rigorous, aesthetic dialogues around image-making I’d ever had.

One afternoon in 1984,  when were sitting side-by-side in Uncle Charlie’s study pouring over some travel slides, I announced that I wanted to be a filmmaker.  I was 22 years old. Uncle Charlie’s response was immediate and silent. He got up abruptly, pulled an object from a bureau drawer, and handed me a heavy, brown camera that looked and felt like an army hand grenade. This was the first time I had ever seen a Regular 8 Filmo camera.  He carefully explained to me how a 50 foot reel fit into the casing, that I needed to shoot half the reel one way, then open the camera, flip the reel and camera and shoot the rest.  “Beware,” he warned me, “if you forget to shoot the second half with the camera right-side up the world will appear topsy-turvy. After you shoot all three minutes, send the film to a lab to have it processed and split down the middle.”

“SPLIT IT DOWN THE MIDDLE?” I thought to myself,  “How violent, how intriguing, how corporeal.” Strangely enough, I didn’t actually use the camera until three years later.  It was the fall of 1987, and I was a new graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute.  By this time, I’d aligned myself with the film avant-garde.  Every normal way of doing anything with a camera was anathema.  My little Filmo cine hand grenade still had an aura I couldn’t resist.  It finally beckoned me to be used.  On one of those rare, warm San Francisco afternoons I convinced my new boyfriend John to follow me to the roof of the Art Institute to make the first movie I would ever shoot in Regular 8mm.  Despite having no experience whatsoever with the camera, I’d meticulously planned every shot we would make together.  Perhaps I’d been inspired by the organized fluidity of Maya Deren’s “Choreography for the Camera”.  Just as significant, I believe, were the mechanical properties of that Filmo.  What would happen if I didn’t rip apart the spinal chord of the film itself?

Once we reached the roof, I surprised John by informing him that we would both have to take off our clothes.  I then explained that I would shoot images of him for the first 1 1/2 minutes of film and that he would shoot the second half of me.  He wasn’t happy with the rules, but he accepted them for the three hours it took.   That must have been the year I first encountered Laura Mulvey’s theory of the “male gaze”, seen Carolee Schneeman’s “Fuses”, pondered Yvonne Rainer’s “Lives of Performers”.  The artistic practice of being a feminist in the late 1980’s was whirly wildly in my mind.

When I took the roll to the lab, I begged them NOT to split the film as they normally would, to leave it all in tact after the processing.  The resulting 8mm footage was simultaneously thrilling (artistically) and humiliating (personally).  There were our two nude bodies on the same screen but also divided by four equilateral frames.  I looked at John (fine…); John looked at me (yikes!).  Within the parameters of the image gestalt, we are dancing together without ever touching.  Our two bodies remain totally distinct and apart.

My immediate reaction took me directly to the editing room where I cut out all the frames of my face.  I wanted to erase myself from the film.  I held these “out takes” in my hand, breathing a sigh of relief at knowing that my nude body could never be identified.  Then I felt strangely ashamed at my own un-hip cowardice.  A few days later, I returned to the splicer and “reconstituted” my body by replacing my face, owning up to what I’d made, and, in a way, accepting my own body with all its flab and flaws.  This was years before the time of “nondestructive” (digital) editing, so if you were to look closely at the finished film print now on 16mm you would see those cuts (SCARS!!).  You would see the mark making that reveals so much about my apprehension in those days.

At that moment, the technological limitations of Uncle Charlie’s hallowed regular 8mm Filmo movie camera lead me to a know place as an artist.  Scared and anxious but also aware of a burgeoning excitement, I named my little movie “Drawn and Quartered”.  Months later, I screened the silent movie to a packed audience at San Francisco’s Red Vic Theatre on Haight Street.  Within those few painful minutes, the crowd went from absolute silence, to raucous laughter and back to an exquisite quiet.  I was shaking.

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