FILM COMMENT
May/June 2010

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

by Jesse P. Finnegan

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

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

Go to www.abecedariumnyc.com

© 2010 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center

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New York University’s Kimmel Center will display Last Address, an exhibition eulogizing a generation of New York City artists who died of AIDS, by the New York-based brother and sister filmmakers Ira Sachs and Lynne Sachs, with designer Bernhard Blythe, Sofia Gallísa, and Andrei Alupului.  The exhibition, comprising 13 translucent, color photographs (67 x 42 in.) will be installed on the exterior of the Kimmel Windows Gallery, located at La Guardia Place & West 3rd St.  Last Address will open April 9 and remain on view through May 31, 2010.

The list of New York artists who died of AIDS over the last 30 years is overwhelming, and the loss immeasurable, asserts the filmmakers.  Last Address uses photographs of the exteriors of the houses, apartment buildings, and lofts where 18 of these artists—Patrick Angus, Reinaldo Arenas, John D. Brockmeyer, Howard Brookner, Ethyl Eichelberger, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring, Hibiscus, Peter Hujar, Harry Kondoleon, Charles Ludlum, Jim Lyons, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cookie Mueller, Vito Russo, Assotto Saint, Ron Vawter, and David Wojnarowicz—were living at the time of their deaths to mark the disappearance of a generation. The installation is a remembrance of that loss, as well as an evocation of the continued presence of these artists’ work in the city’s culture.

“I moved to this city in 1984 and now that I’m in my 40s, I realize even more how I’ve had so few models for how to live a creative life as a gay man,” said Ira Sachs.  “I’m winging it, on my own. So many of the men I might have learned from, read about in the papers, seen in the streets, met in a bar, at the theater, died from AIDS in the years before I might have known them. I was a kid. It seemed like it would last forever, but then it was all gone. I wish they were here.”

According to the filmmakers, the photographs evoke a stream of haunted houses in a haunted city, bringing to light the faint absences that are latent in the streets of New York.  As the viewer moves closer, the windows will also reveal biographical and professional information that offers a greater sense of the life interrupted.  The display is a companion piece to Ira Sachs’ short film, Last Address, which premiered at this year’s Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. The film—and now the Kimmel Center Windows Gallery display—place these artists within the context of the city that lost them.

“In my research and conversations for this piece,” adds Lynne Sachs, who is also an adjunct instructor in the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at the Tisch School of the Arts, “I have become more and more awed by the sense of creative rapture that these artists brought to their every click of a camera, every brushstroke, every step onto the stage, every puckering of the lips. Often knowing early-on that their lives would never allow them to go gray in the dignity of old age, these artists lived their brief time on this earth to the fullest—offering to us their creative legacy to relish and remember.”

For further information, contact: Kimmel.galleries@nyu.edu; lynnesachs@gmail.com; or sachs.ira@mac.com.

LAST ADDRESS BIOGRAPHIES:

Patrick Angus

1953 – 1992

173 W. 88^th St.

Patrick Angus was compelled to paint from childhood. Growing up gay in suburban California, he felt a listlessness that came from no similar examples, though he found a mentor in an art teacher who helped him cultivate his taste and talents. Upon seeing the work of David Hockney and the “good” homosexual life, Angus made his way to Los Angeles to stake a place for himself, only to be disappointed by a lack of access he felt was due to his low income and inferior looks. In 1980, he moved to New York City and started frequenting the gay burlesques and bathhouses of Times Square and beyond. He painted canvases of what he viewed as the “bad” gay life – cruising, hustling, darkness – full of shadowy figures sitting in dark porn theaters illuminated by the glow of the projector and the orange tips of their lit cigarettes. Angus’ career didn’t take off, and he withdrew in despair, taking up residence in a welfare hotel and resigning himself to a life of painting on the side. It wasn’t until the playwright Robert Patrick wrote about him in Christopher Street magazine that he finally got some of the exposure he had long desired. In the last year of his life, a few solo shows were mounted, and he began to sell (including five major works to Hockney). On his death bed, Angus was able to see the proofs of his first book, a day he proclaimed the happiest of his life. He was 38 years old.

Twenty-three years after Stonewall, gay people still have few honest images of themselves, and most of these occur in our literature. Gay men long to see themselves – in films, plays, television, paintings. They seldom do. Obviously, we must pictures ourselves. These are my pictures. – Patrick Angus

Reinaldo Arenas

1943 – 1990

328 W. 44th St.

Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban writer who, despite his early sympathy for the 1959 revolution, grew critical of and was later persecuted by the Cuban government. His significant body of work includes Pentagonia, a set of five novels on the “secret history” of post-revolutionary Cuba. Convicted in 1973 of “ideological deviation,” Arenas was imprisoned for three years in El Morro Castle, where he survived by writing letters to the wives and lovers of his fellow inmates. In 1980, he fled to Miami on the Mariel Boatlift, but, once there, he felt ostracized by the Cuban community and moved to New York City. After battling AIDS for three years, Arenas committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs and alcohol.  His autobiography, Before Night Falls, was published two years after his death, at the age of 47.

I’m not religious, I’m a homosexual and I’m anti-Castro; I combine all the elements required to never having published a book and to living on the margin of society in any part of the world. - Reinaldo Arenas

John D. Brockmeyer

1940 – 1990

157 York St., Staten Island

“The creepiest villain never in a Frankenstein movie,” John Brockmeyer was a 6′5″ titan of the stage, and a force in Charles Ludlam’s New York-based Ridiculous Theatrical Company throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Brockmeyer attended Ohio State University before going on to serve in the Navy. In 1970, he made his debut with Ludlam’s troupe, and quickly established himself as the go-to player for all villainous, dastardly and otherwise insidious personalities.  Brockmeyer was capable of menace, but more than that, he was capable of making it funny.  He died of AIDS, aged 50, at his parents’ house in his hometown of Columbus.

Howard Brookner

1954 – 1989

405-465 W. 23^rd St.

Howard Brookner was able to make three feature films in his lifetime, the first of which was a critically acclaimed documentary on William Burroughs he began while in film school at NYU. He showed great potential from an early age, winning a New England prep school award for an avant-garde play he wrote as a young student at Phillips Exeter, which centered on a toilet. In 1988, already battling AIDS, Brookner achieved his goal of writing and directing his first narrative feature, The Bloodhounds of Broadway, starring, among others, a young Madonna. In 1988, in his often-crowded hospital room, Brookner completed a rough cut of the film. Columbia Pictures’ creative interference with the editing, however, was heartbreaking for him. His lover Brad Gooch said, “It was a very clear decision. Suddenly the movie wasn’t the movie he wanted to stay alive to see.” He died with his family around him, at the age of 34.

There’s so much beauty in the world. I suppose that’s what got me in trouble in the first place. – Howard Brookner, on a note taped to his fridge throughout his last year.

Ethyl Eichelberger

1945 – 1990

157 York St., Staten Island, NY

Towering over his audiences even before he put on his trademark stiletto heels and skyscraper wig, Ethyl Eichelberger had a breathless Downtown career, creating nearly forty plays that often explored the struggles of strong women in history, literature and myth – from Medea to Mary Todd Lincoln. Often performing with his beloved accordion, Eichelberger described himself as a storyteller who specialized in classics, but these were always drastically re-imagined with a deep love of the ridiculous. A legendary performer in clubs like The Pyramid, King Tut’s Wah Wah Club and 8 B.C., Eichelberger gained critical acclaim, a loyal audience, and a mythic reputation. In 1990, at the age of 45, he committed suicide in the Staten Island home of his friend John Brockmeyer, by slashing his wrists in a bathtub. Some claim PS122 is gently haunted by his spirit.

Isis knows it hasn’t been easy! / It’s a lot of hard work being a queen! / And there are factions out there who don’t like what I represent! / Tough noogies! I have a right to be here! – Ethyl Eichelberger, from his play Nefertiti

Félix González-Torres

1957 – 1996

405-465 W. 23^rd St.

Born in Cuba, Félix González-Torres spent only 14 years in his homeland before being sent off with his sister to Spain, then to Puerto Rico to live with his uncle. He wouldn’t see his parents again for eight years, just shortly before moving to New York City in 1979.  González-Torres’ work, often conceptual in nature, concerned itself with inclusiveness, participation, engagement – sharing. Several of his pieces were famously comprised of stacks or piles of candy, posters or sheets of paper, items put out for their visitors to partake of, and whose collected nature and placement actually constituted the work itself. González-Torres maintained throughout his career that his work had only one specific audience in mind – his lover, Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS in 1991, and whom he memorialized by placing reminders of his absence all throughout the city, a series of 24 billboards displaying an empty bed. González-Torres died at the age of 38, in Miami, Florida.

Keith Haring

1958 – 1990

542 LaGuardia Place

An iconic and prolific artist who strived to create truly public art, Keith Haring drew and painted a singular kind of graphic expression based on the primacy of the line. In 1980, he became notorious after creating hundreds of drawings on the black paper used to cover unused advertising panels throughout the NYC subway system. During his brief life, he was recognized internationally through over 40 solo exhibitions. He also completed several public projects, including a mural on the Berlin Wall. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, dedicated to working with AIDS organizations and children’s programs, and which now also strives to expand the audience for his work. Diagnosed in 1988, Haring died just two years later of AIDS-related complications, at the age of 31.

My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic. – Keith Haring

Hibiscus

1949 – 1982

622 Greenwich St.

In 1967, an iconic photo was taken during the March on the Pentagon of a brave, peace-loving teenager in a turtleneck sweater putting flowers into the gun barrels of military police. When that kid grew up, he changed his name from George Harris to Hibiscus. ”He was fascinating even as a small child,” said his mother.  ”All the other kids acted out his fantasies. He directed Cleopatra and used the garden hose as the serpent.”  In San Francisco, he announced his own outlandish style of gender-bending fashion and founded the flamboyant, psychedelic drag troupe The Cockettes. With productions like Journey to the Center of Uranus and Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma, Hibisicus called for a free theater of spiritual liberation.  His second group, Angels of Light, included the likes of his lover Allen Ginsberg in drag. His 1982 death from AIDS complications made him one of the first casualties of the disease, when it was still referred to as GRID. He was 33.

Peter Hujar

1934 – 1987

189 Second Ave

In the ’70s and ’80s, Peter Hujar photographed the wrought underbelly of Manhattan’s Westside with the eye of a classically trained portrait painter whose palette was restricted to, but not limited by, all of the gradations of black and white. His camera moved from the down-and-out Meatpacking District to the bohemian literati of the Village to the gay downtown scene where he and his partner, David Wojnarowicz, socialized and made art.  Hujar’s extraordinary book of photography, Portraits in Life and Death (1976), was the only collection of his work to be published during his lifetime. Friend and fellow photographer Nan Goldin described his images as  “the closest I ever came to experiencing what it is to inhabit male flesh.” He died at the age of 53.

Harry Kondoleon

1955 – 1994

405-465 W. 23^rd St.

Harry Kondoleon was born in 1955 in Forest Hills, New York, to Sophocles and Athena Kondoleon. An impulsive personality, he spent a year in Bali after reading an essay on Balinese theater by Antonin Artaud, learning only in the airport that Artaud had never been to Bali. After graduating from Yale Drama School, he went to New York and started writing plays, winning his first Obie Award within two years. Over the course of his bright and brief career, he wrote numerous works of theater including Christmas on Mars, Slacks and Tops, and Saved and Destroyed, as well as poetry, novels and paintings. In 1993, now sick with AIDS, he worked hard to finish his last novel, Diary of a Lost Boy, partially “as a personal achievement to show I wasn’t dead.” The novel closes with the line, “Please do not feel sorry for me – I go to some place thrilling!” He died at the age of 39.

Charles Ludlam

1943 – 1987

55 Morton St

Charles Ludlam grew up in Queens, New York, just a few subway stops from Greenwich Village, and the heart of Gay America. At twenty-four, he founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, where he wrote, directed and performed in almost every production for the next two decades, often with Everett Quinton, his life partner and muse, by his side. Renowned for drag, high comedy, melodrama, satire, precise literary references, gender politics, sexual frolic, and a multitude of acting styles, the Ridiculous Theater guaranteed a kind of biting humor that could both sting and tickle. His many plays included Turds in Hell, Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, a riff on Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Bluebeard, and The Mystery of Irma Vep, his most popular play, and a performer’s tour-de-force. Ludlam continued working until almost the day he died of PCP pneumonia, just three months after his AIDS diagnosis. He was 44.

Most gay theater either apologizes or pleads for mercy. What I do is not gay theater — it’s something much worse.  I don’t ask to be tolerated. I don’t mind being intolerable.
- Charles Ludlam

Jim Lyons

1960 – 2007

75A Willow St., Brooklyn

Passionate about acting and editing, Jim Lyons embraced the art of cinema in all its transformative aspects. His best known dramatic roles were in Poison, a seminal film in the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, and his brazen interpretation of the life of artist David Wojnarowicz in the movie Postcards from America.  But it was as an editor, his life-long métier, that Lyons expressed his keen understanding of the movies and his love for the world of ideas, working often with the filmmaker Todd Haynes on works such as Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, and Far from Heaven. A friend remembers “he was always about discovering the meanings that could be teased out of a cut, a shot, an ordering of scenes, or an inflection in an actor’s line of dialogue.”  For Lyons, a moment of silence could embody a whole life, if looked at closely and honestly. Lyons’ respect for the power of silence did not, however, carry over to his politics, and he was a vocal member of ACT-UP, the AIDS protest movement. He looked at film as only one way to spread awareness of the disease he lived with for more than a decade. He died at the age of 46.

Robert Mapplethorpe

1946 – 1989

35 W. 23rd St

While exploring and documenting New York’s underground S&M scene in the ’70s, Robert Mapplethorpe began to create his signature large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits of naked men. These elegant, precise images triggered some of the most vociferous debates around art and obscenity in the 20^th Century. Bridging notions of physical beauty from classical antiquity with a blossoming contemporary gay sexuality, his photos exuded a stark homosexual eroticism that created shockwaves throughout ‘80s America. Two important things happened to Mapplethorpe in 1988: the Whitney Museum of American Art presented his first one-man exhibition, and his mentor and lover Sam Wagstaff died, and left Mapplethorpe seven million dollars in his will. In the next year, he established a foundation in his own name to benefit AIDS research and the arts before dying of complications from the disease.

I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them. - Robert Mapplethorpe

Cookie Mueller

1949 – 1989

285 Bleecker St

Cookie Mueller was an actress, writer, mother, fashion designer, and go-go dancer. In the 1970s she performed in the John Waters’ film extravaganzas Pink Flamingos and Female Troubles in their shared hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. In Waters’ words, she was “a witch-doctor, art-hag and, above all a goddess.” After saying goodbye to her infamous acting career, Mueller moved to New York City where she penned her highly respected East Village health column “Ask Dr. Mueller.” Shortly before her death from AIDS, at the age of 40, Mueller wrote these words of advice to her readers:

Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free. – Cookie Mueller

Vito Russo

1946 – 1990

401 W. 22nd (building gone)

In the 1970s, Vito Russo traveled across the country giving lectures on the depiction of gay characters in both Hollywood and foreign films. Out of this experience, he wrote The Celluloid Closet in 1981, a groundbreaking study of the representation of gays in the movies. In addition to his work as a scholar, Russo was a fearless leader in the gay liberation movement and a vocal AIDS activist. He co-founded GLAAD, the organization which now presents the Vito Russo Award every year to an openly gay or lesbian member of the media community for their commitment to combating homophobia, as well as ACT UP, the media savvy AIDS protest group famous for their “Silence Equals Death” pronouncement. Russo was 44 when he died, and it is claimed that some of his ashes rest inside the walls of the historic Castro Theater in the heart of San Francisco.

Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people…and gay people what to think about themselves. – Vito Russo

Assotto Saint
1957 – 1994
360 W. 22nd St.

Assotto Saint (born Yves Lubin) was a Haitian-born poet, playwright and activist whose explicitly black themes made him one of the most important literary voices in the burgeoning gay literary movement of the late 20^th Century. To his fellow Haitians, who had also directly experienced the ugliness of the Francois Duvalier era, he offered a spiritual sanctuary, as “a grand, tall queen” who could be both big brother and mother. In addition to his work as a writer, Saint was a passionate advocate for the writings of others in his community, creating his own Galiens Press, and editing The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets. During his lifetime, he was able to publish two collections of his own writing, Stations and Wishing for Wings. Honoring him for their annual literary award, LAMDA described Saint as “one of the fiercest spirits ever to grace the planet.” He died at the age of 36.

Ron Vawter

1948 – 1994

285 Bleecker St

Ron Vawter was the quintessential downtown performer and a founding member of The Wooster Group, an internationally known theater collective based in NYC. He brought to the world of the avant-garde a unique combination of life experiences, including training as a Green Beret in the US Special Forces and his work as a chaplain. In the words of the Village Voice, “Vawter’s resolution of the tensions between theatrical passion and military precision….have not only helped make the Wooster Group a controversial and intellectually assaultive ensemble but Vawter himself a legendary and explosively controlled actor.”  In 1993, Vawter, who also appeared in films like Swoon, Philadelphia, Silence of the Lambs, and sex, lies, and videotape, wrote and peformed in his final play, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, a one man show in which he explored the themes of sexual identity through these two infamous men, both of whom died of AIDS. Vawter died one year later on a plane from Zurich to New York, of an AIDS-related heart attack, at the age of 45.

David Wojnarowicz

1954 – 1992

189 2nd Ave

Throughout his brief life, David Wojnarowicz waged a revolt against death. Through his public excavation of his fantasies and above all his dreams, which he systematically wrote down, he created a revolutionary language of art – one that embraced writing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, photography, and performance art.  From his teenage years as a hustler in Times Square to his cross-country hitchhiking escapades, Wojnarowicz sought a visceral version of American history that would embrace the spirit and the body of a gay identity. In the late 1980s, after he was diagnosed with AIDS, Wojnarowicz became a highly politicized artist, entangling himself in national public debates about medical research and funding, morality, and censorship. An incendiary collection of his writings, Close to the Knives, was first published in 1991, one year before his death at the age of 37.

I am shouting my invisible words. I am getting so weary. I am growing tired. I am waving at you from here. I am crawling and looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. – David Wojnarowicz

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

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

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

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts:

1. Wind in Our Hair “sneak preview” Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires Inspired by the stories...
2. Interview w/Lynne Sachs on Making “Wind in Our Hair” in Buenos Aires Cold August winter in Buenos Aires. Lynne Sachs and a...
3. New Films by Lynne Sachs Reviewed in Chicago Reader Sachs’s daughters and their friends read from this text and...

Three Cheers for the Whale
by CHRIS MARKER

17 minutes / color
Release Date: 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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

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Sunday, Oct. 4 at  3pm
Views from the Avant-Garde Program #8
Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center
Tickets: $11;  $8 senior; $7 member, student, child

The Last Happy Day
Lynne Sachs, USA, 2009, 38m
Nothing is Over Nothing
Jonathan Schwartz, USA, 2008, 17m
The Exception and the Rule
Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, U.K./India/Pakistan, 37m
TRT: 93m

For more information:
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/views.html

Tickets go on sale on September 13 at 12:00 noon.
By Phone CenterCharge, 212 721 6500
In Person: Walter Reade Theater Box Office

The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary on Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin of director Lynne Sachs. Lenard was a doctor and writer with a Jewish background who fled the Nazis during WWII. During the war, the US Army hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task which catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ film, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, uses letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, and interviews.The

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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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Actor, Director Tim Robbins Takes Up Historic Vietnam War Protest in Production of “The Trial of the Catonsville Nine”

Academy Award-winning actor, director and writer Tim Robbins is involved in a new production of Father Daniel Berrigan’s acclaimed play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. The play centers on the events of May 17th, 1968, when nine Catholic peace activists, including Father Daniel Berrigan and his brother, the late Father Philip Berrigan, entered a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, and removed draft files of young men who were about to be sent to Vietnam. They were arrested and then sentenced in a highly publicized trial that galvanized the antiwar movement. We speak to Robbins about the play, which is being staged by his Los Angeles troupe, the Actors’ Gang.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/27/actor_director_tim_robbins_takes_up

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