Thinking about Richard Fung’s “Sea in the Blood”
By Lynne Sachs
Two men swimming, the flow of skin against the skin, and there below the surface of the water is a camera. Richard Fung’s lens is an activated observation machine, the eye gazing at the self. His memory becomes an animal in the pool – at once [...]
Visit to New Orleans
Grey afternoon everything carved away
gaunt woman in once-tight jeans
zig-zags patterns, boulevard desolate.
Archeological trash pile
not for garbage
collector.
Everything carved away.
Dogs no longer here.
Old kitten dangling thread, teasing between splinters
from a screen door stretching
blissful
open and shut
by the arm of the wind.
Woman again, more gaunt than five minutes ago,
watching me pretend not to watch her,
circles round [...]
STATES OF UNBELONGING a film by LYNNE SACHS
in collaboration with NIR ZATS
63 minutes
Hebrew spoken by children
“When I am big and someone dies, I am going to go to the funeral.”
“You can put a doll on the grave, just like in the story.’
Dear Lynne,
I patiently wait for the sand to sink, for the water to get [...]
From California to Florida to New York to Maryland to Tennessee, I’ve been making and teaching avant-garde film for 20 years. In my experience, there is only one film, of the many works to which I expose my college students, that consistently creates a passionate, call it vitriolic, reaction: Stan Brakhage’s “Window, Water, Baby, Moving”(1959, 12 min.).
Thoughts on Tran Kim Trang’s Decade with Blindness:
A Letter to Helene Cixous from Lynne Sachs
“I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to see the skin of the light.”
from “Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey” in Stigmata by Helene Cixous
Dear Helene, …I begin by conveying to you the [...]
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 [...]
MAKING AND BEING “DRAWN & QUARTERED”
BY LYNNE SACHS
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 [...]
Seven on Ice
by Lynne Sachs
After two weeks of persistent pleading, a young girl with wispy brown hair and long fingers convinced her parents that she had not only memorized the way through the woods but that she could be trusted to stay strictly on the well-trodden path. This was her first time to take the [...]
It’s taken me seventeen years to realize what an inspiration Gunvor Nelson is for me as a filmmaker, a teacher and a mother who allowed her work as an artist to grow and change as a result of her decision to become a parent. Aspects of the life she led in the Bay Area during [...]
Lilith Speaks to Adam
Just when I am on my way to becoming,
My eyes open and you are there.
Is Eden large enough for the two of us?
Wherever I turn,
there are branches pulling at my hair,
Earth between my toes and under my tongue.
I slither and sometimes I use my wings.
Let’s slither together.
(ADAM: “I’m working on my posture…”)
Earth [...]
