For over 130 years, women have contributed to creating images for the cinema. Stories of self-empowerment lie at the heart of all important feminist movements. Cinema enables us as film-makers and audiences to show solidarity with people of yesteryear and perhaps even fall rapturously in love with them. In all decades – since the silent films of the 1910s – radical, anarchic heroines have inspired us, and we can connect with them as accomplices through time and across generations. Valuable clues into current feminist practices lurk in the archive.
We’ve gone for a bold concept with the Focus section: We’ve formed groups spanning various timeframes. We look for common links, friction points and feelings to make the experience of encountering other people a less solitary one. This time-crazy idea is inspired by Carolyn Dinshaw’snconcept of »Communities Across Time«. In »Getting Medieval«, the historian evokes queer communities in the late 14th century based on medieval texts, opening up for us and herself a desire across centuries where past and present touch.
Our programme invites you to interact with women accomplices across time. Cinema is such an ideal medium for this, as the audience and the characters on the screen can experience direct relationships while time axes can be turned all ways. We can mobilise greater energy for feminist causes when we know the achievements of different feminist positions outside our own radius.
Internationales Frauen Film Fest Dortmund+Köln is Germany’s largest forum for women in the film industry and presents outstanding films by women spanning all genres and styles. For almost 40 years the festival has played an active role in ensuring that films by women directors are seen, appreciated and celebrated. We promote the influence of women in all fields of the cinema industry, mainly as directors, but also cinematographers, producers, scriptwriters, composers, songwriters and, actors to name but a few.
144 Moody StreetBuilding 18Waltham, MA, United States (map)
A night of short films and discussion with legendary filmmaker Lynne Sachs featuring some of her works on/about/alongside women be they daughters, mentors, idols or friends.
Lynne Sachs will attend in person for a post-screening discussion.
FILM PROGRAM – Screening order subject to change
Photograph of Wind| 4 min | 16mm | b&w and color | silent | 2001 My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Screened in 16mm.
Noa, Noa | 8 min | b&w and color | sound | 2006 by Lynne Sachs with Noa Street-Sachs Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand. Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic “Crawdad Song”.
Same Stream Twice | 4 min | 16mm | b & w and color | silent | 2012 by Lynne Sachs with Maya Street-Sachs My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her – different but somehow the same.
“And Then We Marched” | 3 min |S8mm | sound | 2017 Lynne shoots Super 8mm film of the Jan. 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. Lynne then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions.
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor | 8 min | Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital | 2018 Three renowned women artists discuss their passion for filmmaking. From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
A Year in Notes and Numbers | 4 min | video | silent | 2018 A year’s worth of to-do lists confronts the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone.
A Month of Single Frames| 4 min | color | sound | 2019 In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in Cape Cod. While there, she shot 16mm film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack materials to Lynne and invited her to make a film. “While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film. My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once.”
Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home| 3 min | 16mm | b&w | sound | 2020 In July 1971, avant-garde writer and language poet Bernadette Mayer produced Memory, a multimedia project in which she shot one roll of 35mm film each day and kept a daily journal. In honor of the project’s compilation and release as a book, Lynne Sachs embarks on a study of the memory and language of place. Journeying to Mayer’s childhood home in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens, Sachs pays homage to Mayer in a collage of architecture, light, and rhythm.
Maya at 24| 4 min | 16mm | b&w | sound | 2021 with editing and animation by Rebecca Shapass music by Kevin T. Allen Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
Total Running Time: 42 min.
Doors open at 6:30PM – Show at 7:00PM Seating is first-come, first served. Admission is free, however a $5-10 suggested donation is encouraged. Donations will be split between the guest artist and AgX. Donations help support future film programming at AgX.
The Flow Chart Foundation’s Text Kitchen is a series of hands-on workshops providing writers and other art-makers with opportunities for deep exploration into poetry and interrelated forms of expression.
UP NEXT:
Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop, with Lynne Sachs
Tuesday, February 28 & Tuesday, March 7 (registration includes both sessions) 6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT) on Zoom
When award-winning Brooklyn filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs first discovered The Flow Chart Foundation’s enthusiasm for poetry as a conduit for an interplay with other artistic modes, she knew that we would be a great place to offer a workshop that would nourish a deeply engaged dialogue between the written word and the image.In this two-part virtual workshop, Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words over the course of two three-hour evening meetings (participants must be able to attend both sessions). Lynne will guide the workshop on a creative journey that will include writing several poems in conjunction with shooting moving or still images. Lynne has always been fascinated by the conversation between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence.
We encourage those with backgrounds in either or both poetry and image-making to sign up. Participants will need only a smartphone for creating their short films. Because creative collaboration between participants is a vital part of the experience, Lynne will carefully pair participants based on a questionnaire sent after registering. Note that this is not a tech-focused workshop, though some basic tech instruction will be shared. Lynne’s virtual workshop will include the screening of some of her own recent short film poems, including “Starfish Aorta Colossus” and “Swerve” (2015, 2022 made with poet Paolo Javier), “A Month of Single Frames” (2019), “Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” (2020), as well as excerpts from her feature “Tip of My Tongue” (2017). Join us in this 2-week multimedia investigation of the sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences that all come together in a video poem. We could not be more delighted to be launching the Text Kitchen workshop series with this event.
Queer Filters: Legacies and Artifacts (Filtres queer: héritages et artifices) Festival International du Film d’Amiens (FIFAM) Curated by Matthias Smalbeen, Caroline Alonso, Etienne Commaux, Louise Camerlynck, and Victor Berquez November 11, 2022 https://www.fifam.fr/en/
We are a group of five students in our second year of a cinema master’s degree in the UPJV’s University in Amiens (France). We have the opportunity to be charged by the FIFAM (Festival International du Film d’Amiens) and by its artistic director, Marie-France Aubert, to organize a carte blanche during the festival. Our screening will take place on the 12th of November and takes part in a partnership between our University and the festival.
So, we got the idea to show three works that could create a visual history of lesbian and queer films and representations.
We would love to show to the public during the festival A Month of Single Frames by Lynne Sachs.
English translation of poster:
CARte blanche M2 Cinema, UPJV
Caroline Alonso, Victore Berquez, Louise Camerlynck, Etienne Commaux, Matthias SMalbeen
A Month of Single Frames and Les Démons de Dorothy Followed by a discussion with Alexis Langlois
Queer filters: Legacies and Artifices
A Month of Single Frames, Lynne Sachs
“Barbara Hammer, famous lesbian experimental filmmaker, begins her own dying process by revisiting her personal archives. She donates some of her images, sounds and writings to filmmaker and friend Lynne Sachs and invites her to direct her own film with this material.”
Dorothy’s Demons, Alexis Langlois
“Director Dorothy is unleashing on a script, when a call from her producer breaks the mood: enough queer comedies, it’s time to start making mainstream films! To avoid sinking into despair, Dorothy seeks solace in the Romy the Vampire Slayer series.”
SATURDAY November 12, 4.45 p.m., Orson Welles cinema as part of FIFAM
Original French text:
CARTe blanche M2 Cinéma, UPJV
Caroline Alonso, Victore Berquez, Louise Camerlynck, étienne Commaux, Matthias SMalbeen
A Month of single frames et Les démons de Dorothy Suivie d’une discussion avec Alexis Langlois
Filtres queer : héritages et artifices
A Month of Single Frames, Lynne Sachs
“Barbara Hammer, célèbre cinéaste expérimentale lesbienne, entame son propre processus de mort en revisitant ses archives personnelles. Elle donne une partie de ses images, de ses sons et de ses écrits à la cinéaste et amie Lynne Sachs et l’invite à réaliser son propre film avec ce matériel.”
Les démons de Dorothy, Alexis Langlois
“La réalisatrice Dorothy se défoule sur un scénario, lorsqu’un appel de son producteur casse l’ambiance : assez de comédies queer, il est temps de se mettre à faire des films grand public ! Pour ne pas sombrer dans le désespoir, Dorothy cherche du réconfort dans la série Romy the Vampire Slayer.”
SAMEDI 12 Novembre, 16h45, cinéma Orson Welles dans le cadre du FIFAM
“Welcome to ‘Between Sight and Touch: Selected Shorts by Barbara Hammer’
Which is Part of EFlux Screening Room’s
Revisiting Feminist Moving-Image Art, a monthly series of screenings aimed at revisiting the origins, contexts, developments, and impact of feminist video art and experimental cinema around the world from the 1960s through the present.
It’s really an honor for me to have the chance to introduce this exciting and thought provoking selection of films by artist and dear friend Barbara Hammer.
Tonight you’ll be watching.
“Psychosynthesis”, “Women I Love”, “Sync Touch”, “No No Nooky T.V.”, “Save Sex”, and “Lesbian Whale”, accompanied by a screening of “A Month of Single Frames”
Barbara Hammer and I met in 1987 in San Francisco, a mecca for alternative, underground, experimental filmmaking. She taught me the fine, solitary craft of optical printing during a weekend workshop, thus beginning a friendship that eventually followed us across the country to New York City.
Tonight you will see her 1975 “Psychosynthesis” and her 1981 “Sync Touch” both of which will give you a sense of her masterful ability to use this extremely technical analog machine which was absolutely essential to her practice as a filmmaker who wanted to both celebrate and deconstruct – a word of the day – the culture she saw swirling around her. In “Psychosynthesis”, Barbara goes completely auto-biographical, but in oh so psychodelic way, using her body and her archive of family photos to investigate who she was and who she wanted to be. You will see her unbelievably skillful use of mattes and superimpositions here. Pre computers, this kind of image manipulation took incredible skill! Made around the same time…yes Barbara was extremely prolific, her film “Women I Love” is an openly Lesbian, openly compassionate embrace of the women in her life she holds dear. How extraordinarily brave Barbara was in the mid 1970s!
“Sync Touch”, a favorite of mine for a long time, is an exhilarating celebration of the haptic – skin to skin – in all its manifestations and a precise, ingenious investigation of feminist theory – which Barbara was clearly exploring in profound ways at the time.
Barbara first decided to call herself a moving image artist at a time when the separation between the practice of making films and the practice of making video were very, very different. More than a painter choosing oil over acrylic, a moving image artist who sided with celluloid was forced to decide how she wanted to embrace or reject a long legacy of mostly male produced media that were circulating on screens or on tv. For the most part, Barbara opted for the film side of things, but in 1987 her 12min “No Nooky TV” arrived in the scene. I dare say, the videomaking would never be the same again. This brazen, text based send up of all things “broadcast” took the body language of experimental film coming out of the 60s and 70s and transformed into a TV-minded send up of advertising, news, and mainstream graphic design – transposing the culturally tame words of the media mainstream with words like Boob, Cunt, Do It. Literal becomes Cliteral and away we go. Plus Barbara has figured out how to make and disseminate all of the wildest 1980s character-generator signage to make her feminist discourse look like something you might have seen lit up in Times Square. In her 1993 “Save Sex”, we see Barbara’s AIDS activism in full force. This Hammer-esque public service announcement type of piece that celebrates SAFE SEX while while also advocating for “saving” sex at the same time.
You will see Barbara’s face and body in most of the films curator Lukas Brasiskis is presenting tonight. Barbara always had an uncanny ability to understand herself from the inside out and from the outside in. Her films were visceral and personal. In both subtle and overt way, they were also intentionally political calling attention to the sexual inequities she witnessed everywhere.
Now I will tell you a bit about “A Month of Single Frames”, the film I made with and for Barbara.
Some background. Between 2015 to 2018, Barbara agreed to be part of the making of my short, experimental documentary Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (2018) a three-part film that includes Carolee Schneemann and Gunvor Nelson. All three were renowned artists and beloved friends, just a generation older than I, who had embraced the moving image throughout their lives. I shot this film with Barbara near her home and studio in the West Village.
In 2018, Barbara asked me to come to her home to discuss something she needed to say in person. I immediately faced a complicated set of emotions. This was around the time she gave the talk “The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety)” at the Whitney Museum. I knew that this tête-à-tête would involve some kind of good-bye, but I had no idea that she had decided to share a part of her personal archive, and thus a part of her being on this earth, with me. Filmmaking, in the tradition that Barbara and I have espoused for most of our lives as experimental makers, involves a deeply focused solitary period of introspection. A complementary aspect of our practice, however, calls for playful, engaged exchanges with all of the people in the film — both in front and behind the camera. Fundamental to Barbara’s sense of herself as an artist was her commitment to deep and lasting intellectual engagement with her fellow artists in the field, particularly other women who were also trying to find an aesthetic language that could speak about the issues that meant so much to us. By asking me to work with her, alongside her but not “for” her, Barbara, a feminist filmmaker, was actually creating an entirely new vision of the artist’s legacy.
While writing the text for my own film, the words I placed on the screen came to me in a dream. By the time I finished my film, Barbara had died. I quickly realized that this kind of oneiric encounter could become a posthumous continuation of the dialogue I had started with Barbara.
I hope you enjoy this program, a part of a magnificent series of films and videos made by women over the years. If you are interested in reading more about my work with Barbara, you will find an essay I wrote in Camera Obscura: a journal on Feminism, Culture, and Media published last year.
I also hope that you will join me for EFlux’s presentation of my work on Oct. 27, 2022 when I will be able to join you in conversation here in Brooklyn.
Between Sight and Touch: Selected Shorts by Barbara Hammer With a video introduction and special screening by Lynne Sachs
Admission
starts at $5
Date September 22, 2022, 7pm
172
Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
A
lesbian/feminist aesthetic proposing the connection between touch and sight to
be the basis for a “new cinema.”
—Barbara Hammer
Join
us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, September 22 at 7pm for Between
Sight and Touch, a screening of selected works by Barbara
Hammer, featuring Psychosynthesis, Women I Love, Sync
Touch, No No Nooky T.V., Save Sex, and Lesbian
Whale, accompanied by a screening of A Month of Single Frames by
experimental documentary filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs, who will
also be introducing the evening via video.
Barbara
Hammer (1939-2019), a pioneer of queer experimental filmmaking in the US,
devoted most of her five-decade artistic career to the deconstruction of
normative understandings of gender and sexuality. She was attempting to build a
new cinema via material explorations of onscreen representations of the female
body and analysis of the functioning of the film medium itself. This program
features Hammer’s lesser-known short films and video works in which the artist
questions the strict boundaries between the representation of gender and
sexuality and the exploration of one’s body—between sight and touch.
Between
Sight and Touch is part of Revisiting Feminist Moving-Image Art, a
monthly series of screenings at e-flux Screening Room aimed at revisiting the
origins, contexts, developments, and impact of feminist video art and
experimental cinema around the world from the 1960s through the present.
Films
Barbara
Hammer, Psychosynthesis, 1975, 6 minutes
“The sub-personalities of me, as baby, athlete, witch, and artist are
synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and color layers
coming together through the powers of film.” (Barbara Hammer)
Barbara
Hammer, Women I Love, 1976, 23 minutes
A series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker’s friends and lovers intercut with
a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature. Culminating footage
evokes a tantric painting of sexuality sustained.
Barbara
Hammer, Sync Touch, 1981, 10 minutes
“…The film explores the tactile child nature within the adult woman
filmmaker, the connection between sexuality and filmmaking, and the scientific
analysis of the sense of touch.” (Barbara Hammer)
Barbara
Hammer, No No Nooky T.V., 1987, 12 minutes
Using a 16mm Bolex and Amiga computer, Hammer creates a witty and stunning film
about how women view their sexuality versus the way male images of women and
sex are perceived. The impact of technology on sexuality, emotion, and the
sensual self is explored through computer language juxtaposed with the everyday
colloquial language of sex.
Barbara
Hammer, Save Sex, 1993, 1 minutes
A minute-long, partly animated color video that is a humorous plea for good
sex, safely prophylactic though it may be.
Barbara
Hammer, Lesbian Whale, 2015, 6 minutes
A video animation of Hammer’s early notebook drawings set to a soundtrack of
commentary by the artist’s friends and peers.
Lynne
Sachs, A Month of Single Frames, 2019, 14 minutes
In 1998, lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer took part in a one-month
residency at a Cape Cod dune shack without running water or electricity, where
she shot film, recorded sound, and kept a journal. In 2018 she gave all of this
material to Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with it.
Accessibility –Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. –For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space. –e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.
Barbara Hammer was born in 1939
in Hollywood, California. She lived and worked in New York until her death in
2019. With a career spanning fifty years, Barbara Hammer is recognized as a
pioneer of queer cinema. Working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a
groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories,
lives, and representations. Hammer has stated: “My work makes these invisible
bodies and histories visible. As a lesbian artist, I found little existing
representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural
record for future generations.”
SEKUNDENARBEITEN
Christiana Perschon, Österreich 2021, 14 min
*WOMEN
(VALIE)
Karin Fisslthaler, Österreich 2021, 7:30 min
DAS
BIN NICHT ICH, DAS IST EIN BILD VON MIR
Christiana Perschon, Österreich 2021, 9:30 min
BEATRICE
GIBSON TO BARBARA LODEN, NINA MENKES AND BETTE GORDON
Beatrice Gibson, Großbritannien 2022, 4 min
DIANA
TOUCEDO TO DANIÈLE HUILLET
Diana Toucedo, Spanien 2022, 8 min
*WOMEN
(NICO)
Karin Fisslthaler, Österreich 2021, 2:30 min
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES Lynne Sachs, USA 2019, 14 min
About
the Affairs of the Art program
This
Maria Lassing-like express lesson on the history of art takes us directly into
the heart of this year’s focus program, searching for propitious places from
which creativity emerges. After all, creativity is essential for dealing with
the daily struggle between coping with everyday life, inspiration crises,
striving for recognition, self-marketing and self-optimization pressure. How
could all that be reconciled with an artist’s own identity? Which subversive
methods can help to skirt the laws of the art world that are so hostile to art?
Four film nights – with a special focus on the fight for gender equality that
artists have waged for future generations – afford resistive considerations and
creative strategies for self-empowerment.
After the rain, magic happened. 💜
What a memorable night! A heartfelt thank you to 80 (!) people who were holding out in the rain with us to see the short film program THIS IS HOW I SEE YOU from our focus program AFFAIRS OF THE ART on the big screen in the garden cinema of @volkskundemuseumwien.
Timing could not have been better: Right after the start of the film screening the rain stopped and we enjoyed magical encounters on screen as well as a film talk with Christiana Perschon and Karin Fisslthaler after the screening.
The film program featured seven short films by women filmmakers paying tribute to iconic women artists and filmmakers who have waged a fight for artistic autonomy and gender equality for future generations: Lieselott Beschorner, VALIE EXPORT, Karin Mack, Barbara Loden, Nina Menkes, Bette Gordon, Danièle Huillet, Nico and Barbara Hammer.
Director: Lynne Sachs, ENG + ENG subtitles Lynne Sachs is an American filmmaker and poet who focuses on documentary and short experimental films, film essays and live performances. Her work often pushes on the boundaries of genre, relying on a feminist approach and an introspective form to explore the complex relationship between personal observation and universal historical experience. She is interested in the implicit connection between body, camera and the materiality of film. She has produced a body of more than 40 films, several installations and hybrid performances. Our selection will feature the short film A Month of Single Frames (2020), which Sachs has made for legendary American experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer and which earned the main prize at last year’s International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, as well as her piece Maya at 24, screened for the ‘Fascinations’ section at Ji.hlava IDFF 2021.
Films screened Following the Object to its Logical Beginning The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor Month of Single Frames Maya at 24 Window Work
About us A4 – Space for Contemporary Culture is an independent cultural centre focusing on contemporary forms of professional theatre, dance, music, film, visual art and new media. Established in 2004 as a result of a joint effort between several civic cultural organisations, it became one of the first cultural centres in Slovakia founded by a bottom-up initiative. Since its beginning, A4 has been a vivid and active location on the Central European cultural scene, an open field for creative experimentation as well as a home for fresh and unique experiences. Besides presenting innovative contemporary art, it actively supports the new creative activities and education. A4 engages in public debate on important social issues, and attempts to foster conditions for non-commercial cultural activities, culturing of public space, urban development, etc.
Preamble kicks off June with screenings of the Lynne Sachs Retrospective
Preamble kicks off June with the presentation of the Lynne Sachs Retrospective as a preview of the American filmmaker’s visit to the Costa Rica International Film Festival to be held June 9-18.
To kick off the billboard on Thursday, June 2, starting at 7:00 pm, an exhibition of Film About a Father Who (United States, 2020) .
From 1984 to 2019, Lynne Sachs filmed her father, a lively and innovative businessman. This documentary is the filmmaker’s attempt to understand the networks that connect a girl with her father and a woman with her brothers. The show is for ages 12 and up.
On Friday June 3 starting at 7:00 pm screening of short films. A selection of short films by Lynne Sachs that shows her aesthetic and thematic searches and the experimentation that characterizes a good part of her creations.
The program includes the works: DRAWN AND QUARTERED, STILL LIFE WITH WOMAN AND FOUR OBJECTS, FOLLOWING THE OBJECT TO ITS LOGICAL BEGINNING, THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE: A MUSEUM OF FALSE FACTS, PHOTOGRAPH OF WIND, SAME STREAM TWICE, 2012, CUADRO BY CUADRO , CAROLEE, BARBARA AND GUNVOR, A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES, E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO and MAYA AT 24.
For Saturday, June 4, at 7:00 pm presentation of the documentary Tip of my Tongue . To celebrate her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs brings together other people, men and women, who have lived the exact same years but hail from places like Iran, Cuba, Australia, or the Lower East Side of Manhattan, but not Memphis, Tennessee, where Sachs grew up.
The documentary takes place with all these people discussing the most remarkable, strange and revealing moments of their lives, in a brazen and self-reflective examination of the way events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are.
SPANISH
Costa Rica Festival Internacional de Cine que se realizará del 9 al 18 de junio.
Para dar inicio a la cartelera el jueves 2 de junio a partir de las 7:00 p.m exhibición de Film About a Father Who (Estados Unidos, 2020).
Desde 1984 hasta 2019, Lynne Sachs filmó a su padre, un animado e innovador hombre de negocios. Este documental es el intento de la cineasta por entender las redes que conectan a una niña con su padre y a una mujer con sus hermanos. La función es para mayores de 12 años.
El viernes 3 de junio a partir de las 7:00 p.m. proyección de cortometrajes. Una selección de cortos de Lynne Sachs que muestra sus búsquedas estéticas, temáticas y la experimentación que caracteriza buena parte de sus creaciones.
La programación incluye las obras: DRAWN AND QUARTERED, STILL LIFE WITH WOMAN AND FOUR OBJECTS, FOLLOWING THE OBJECT TO ITS LOGICAL BEGINNING, THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE: A MUSEUM OF FALSE FACTS, PHOTOGRAPH OF WIND, SAME STREAM TWICE, 2012, CUADRO POR CUADRO, CAROLEE, BARBARA AND GUNVOR, A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES, E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO y MAYA AT 24.
Para el sábado 4 de junio en función de 7:00 p.m. presentación del documental Tip of my Tongue . Para celebrar su cumpleaños 50, la cineasta Lynne Sachs reúne a otras personas, hombres y mujeres, que han vivido exactamente los mismos años pero que provienen de lugares como Irán, Cuba, Australia o el Lower East Side de Manhattan, pero no de Memphis, Tennessee, lugar donde creció Sachs.
El documental transcurre con todas estas personas discutiendo sobre los momentos más destacados, extraños y reveladores de sus vidas, en un examen descarado y autorreflexivo de la forma en que los eventos fuera de nuestro propio universo doméstico impactan quiénes somos.
– The retrospective category has been dedicated to the American filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs –
Displaying independent films from 37 countries and in 15 different languages, the tenth edition of the Costa Rica International Film Festival begins on Thursday.
According to the Ministry of Culture, the festival will take place in two parts. First from June 9 to 18 and then from June 29 to Aug. 26.
The categories of the festival include retrospective films, panorama, young people and pioneers of cinema, among others.
The retrospective category has been dedicated to the American filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs, who has made 37 films, some of which have won awards or have been included in retrospectives at major festivals.
Sachs’s 2019 film, “A Month of Single Frames,” made with and for Barbara Hammer, won the Grand Prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2020.
In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded Sachs for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.
Last year the Festival displayed “Film About a Father Who” (2020), directed by Sachs, which is defined as “a poignant and moving film,” by Fernando Chaves-Espinach, director of the festival. “(Sachs) mixes fiction, documentary, experimental film, performance among others,” he said.
“Sachs demonstrates the energy of contemporary cinema and the multiple forms that this art takes, from an intimate and reflective perspective that dialogues with certain forms of filmmaking in our context,” Chaves said.
The festival will be held in several movie theaters in San José, as well as in different communities of the country in rural areas so that more people can enjoy the event, the ministry said.
In San José, the films will be shown at Cine Magaly, the Film Center of the Ministry of Culture and the French Alliance of the France Embassy in Costa Rica.
In rural areas, the festival will be presented at the CCM movie theaters, located in San Ramón and San Carlos in Alajuela Province, in Jacó Beach in Puntarenas Province.
Also, CitiCinemas movie theaters in rural areas will present the festival in Grecia in Alajuela Province, Limón City in Limón Province and Paso Canoas in Puntarenas Province.
In addition, the festival will be presented at Multiplexes in Liberia, Guanacaste Province.
The jury is made up of directors, producers and people of the film industry from Costa Rica and other places such as Northern Ireland, the United Kingdom, Colombia, the Basque Country, Germany and Hungary.
The festival will award three mail films for their formal quality and content. In addition, the winning films will receive about $11,000 in prizes in the categories such as Best National Short; Best Costa Rican Feature Film, Best Central American and Caribbean Feature Film, among others.
People interested in participating in the festival can buy tickets, priced between $3 and $4, on the Festival weband Magaly Theater web.
When filmmaker Barbara Hammer died from complications of ovarian cancer in 2019, the film world lost one of the most innovative filmmakers of its avant garde. In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Hammer had created an outstanding body of work, ranging from scores of experimental shorts, including Multiple Orgasms (1976), which was chosen to be preserved by the National Film Preservation Foundation with funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation, to the extraordinary Nitrate Kisses, a documentary about the hidden lives and legacies of lesbians that went on to win numerous accolades and is considered a landmark masterpiece of queer cinema, a first of its kind. Her work is at once provocative, playful, sensual, and formally inventive.
Although 10 years younger than Hammer, experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs hit her professional stride in the same circles with her in San Francisco in the 1980s, and the two developed a unique friendship that spanned several decades. Sachs, herself an innovator in creative nonfiction filmmaking, took a workshop taught by Hammer about optical printing, a process for creating special effects through specialized processing and techniques in celluloid film. Likewise, Hammer studied sound recording with Sachs. Both conceptually and practically, they were working in an alternative film universe compared with the mainstream, male-dominated one. Each of them operated like a one-woman band: filming, recording sound, editing, performing, directing, etc. each on her own, making deeply personal films that addressed larger societal issues from individual perspectives.
In that environment at that particular time, Sachs says, “The word documentary was not assumed to be a sort of template for an educational film or a diatribe on a political thesis, but it was a place to explore the subjectivity of reality. And that’s what drew us into working with issues that matter to us. Whether we were looking into issues around race or age, at the time we were doing it from our subjective place. We were both making films that refracted and played with the reality we were observing.”
As each woman’s career in cinema expanded, they maintained a creative connection, with talk of collaboration going back many years. But as Hammer was preparing to die, having lived with ovarian cancer for several years, she asked four filmmakers to complete films she had in the works. One of those filmmakers was Sachs, whom Hammer asked to complete a film from footage, sound, and journal entries created here in Provincetown while staying in one of the famed dune shacks in 1998. Sachs agreed and the resulting 14-minute film, A Month of Single Frames (2019), will be shown at AMP Gallery as part of a month-long celebration of Hammer’s life, work, and legacy, along with Sachs’ 2018 documentary about Hammer and two other filmmakers (Carolee Schneeman and Gunvor Nelson) called Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor, and one by Brydie O’Connor called Love, Barbara.
A Month of Single Frames is an extraordinarily beautiful meditation that combines sound and image from the 1998 dune shack stay with present-day recordings of Hammer reading from her journal and poetic on-screen text Sachs wrote. The process is transparent, with Sachs and Hammer discussing what to record as they record it, bringing us back to that idea of documentary as a construction and not mere “reality.” Closeups of a dragonfly, beach grass swaying in the breeze, stop-motion animation with snail shells are enveloped in the sounds of nighttime insect choirs, waves, and creaky floorboards. Hammer’s sense of wonder, what she describes as being “overwhelmed by the simplicity” comes through bright and clear through colored gel flag shadows in the sand with her narration describing the cinematic experimentation that continued throughout her life. Sachs weaves these elements together to create a portrait of an incredible film artist who, like many before her, found inspiration here in the ecology of the dunes.
While Hammer’s body of work is centered on female sexuality quite specifically, and Sachs often weaves in elements of her family history, (sometimes focusing entirely on it, such as in the film Film About a Father Who… about the complexity of her father and his problematic relationships), the two filmmakers share a feminist approach and an interest in film as language; they worked with its formal qualities, experimenting with techniques and devices unique to cinema, and they both imbue their films with the personal and specific, often in a documentary context. In an age where documentaries have become extremely popular but also extremely narrow in their formal conventions, there is often a misunderstanding of just how diverse documentary as a form is. Both fiction and documentary films convey truth, opinion, and fabrication by virtue of being creative works, and there is a long history of hybridity that distinguishes documentary from journalism. This doesn’t only include experimental artists like Sachs and Hammer, but also more mainstream documentarians like Werner Herzog and Agnes Varda whose works never attempt to hide the personal lens through which the subject matter is seen.
“It’s a vessel for thinking about how reality works and doesn’t work sometimes… It’s separate from journalists. We actually not only deal with reality, we also ask how that can become a truth, or it becomes a subjective hypothesis. It always comes with a subjectivity that’s, I think, really important—that who sees the reality is as important as what is seen. And so when we say, ‘through the lens,’ it’s, you know, through the lens of a woman or through the lens of a gay person or a Black person, and it shapes your experience of that reality,” explains Sachs.
But also, she says the process is about discovery as you go. “To engage with reality is also the possibility for play and a kind of dance with what you observe and how you then share it with your audience. I think Barbara taught us that. She loved to play with her materials. That was like her touch, and that’s where she found surprises and found out more about herself. I think in documentary you also have a chance for introspection which to me is really important.”
Barbara Hammer’s films, drawings, and other works are on view at AMP Gallery, 432 Commercial St., Provincetown, along with the films by Lynne Sachs and Brydie O’Connor through June 22. For more information call 646.298.9258 or visit artmarketprovincetown.com.
This Week’s Films at AMP Gallery Films by Barbara Hammer
June 9Place Mattes: 1987, 7:36 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video.
June 11 Contribution to Light: 1968, 3:42 min, color, silent, Super 8mm film on HD video.
June 12Multiple Orgasm: 1976, 5:32 min, color, silent, 16 mm film on HD video.
June 13Dream Age: 1979, 10:58 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video.
June 14Pond and Waterfall: 1982, 15 min., color, silent, 16 mm film on video.
Film by Brydie O’Connor
June 8 & June 15 – 16Love, Barbara (documentary; 15 min.)
Films by Lynne Sachs
June 10 & June 17 – 18A Month of Single Frames (Made with and for Barbara Hammer; 14 min. color sound 2019)
