Tag Archives: Atalanta: 32 Years Later

‘Atalanta: 32 Years Later’ in Enchanted Brooklyn: Contemporary Fairytale Films / Brooklyn Arts Council

Enchanted Brooklyn: Contemporary Fairytale Films
Brooklyn Arts Council, BAMcinematek
May 9, 2011
https://www.brooklynartscouncil.org/events/enchanted-brooklyn

Enchanted Brooklyn takes a look at the evolution of the fairytale film, with classic stories re-invented by contemporary Brooklyn filmmakers. 

Films by Georges Melies 
Cinderella (Cendrillon)(1899), 6 min
Kingdom of the Fairies (1903), 16 min
Bluebeard (Barbe-Bleue)(1902), 9 min

The program begins with a look at the work of early film pioneer Georges Melies, who created spectacular fairytale films, the likes of which the world had never seen before. Fast-forward 100 years, to present day Brooklyn, where local filmmakers are re-imagining fairy tales and fables in new and experimental ways. Dr. Kay Turner, Brooklyn Arts Council Folk Arts Director, will be on hand to give context about the history and relevance of these magical, classic stories.

The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting 
Emily Carmichael, 8 min

A Brooklyn couple have dinner with a hunter and his girlfriend, a magical swan woman. It doesn’t go well. 

Emily Carmichael is in many ways a Renaissance girl. As a Harvard University undergraduate she studied painting and literature, wrote and directed two full-length plays, directed a production of “Macbeth: The Puppet Shakespeare,” for which she designed and sculpted 22 clay puppets, and created the comic strip “Whiz Kidz,” which ran in the Harvard Crimson for two years. In 2006, she entered the MFA film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she has written and directed several live-action shorts and created the animated series “The Adventures of Ledo and Ix.” Carmichael’s films have screened at the Anthology Film Archives, Sundance, Slamdance, the South by Southwest Film Festival, and the CineVegas International Film Festival.

Atalanta: 32 Years Later 
Lynne Sachs, 5 min

A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me.’ In 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance. 

Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany. Sites affected by international war where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

Fable in 3 Colors 
Adam Shecter, 12 min

Borges states in his Book of Imaginary Beings that Hercules could not kill the Hydra’s last head. Instead, it was buried: immortal, dreaming, and hating. Filmmaker Adam Shecter began to wonder what the dreams of a myth would be. Fable in Three Colors represents the fusion of two types of mythology: the personal (dreams) and the cultural. 

Adam Shecter is a visual artist and educator living in New York City. Working primarily in 2D animation and editions, his work is greatly influenced by mythology and mass cultural forms: from cinema to Saturday morning cartoons, comic books and music. He has had solo exhibitions of his work at Eleven Rivington Gallery (New York), Konstforeningen Aura (Lund), and Bielefelder Kunstverein (Bielefelder), among others. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. He has maintained his online test-site, theworldofadam.com, since 2001. His next show, “Last Men,” opens at the Eleven Rivington gallery this month.

The Queen 
Christina Choe, 8 min

Bobby, a Korean-American teenage outcast, is working at his parent’s dry cleaners on prom weekend. When the prom queen and her boyfriend stop by with their dress and tuxedo, Bobby has his own prom to remember. 

Christina Choe is a writer and director. She began her career as a documentary filmmaker and has screened her short documentary films, Turmeric Border Marks and United Nations of Hip Hop at numerous film festivals worldwide, including AFI Film Festival, Seattle, and Palm Springs Shorts Film Festival. In 2002 she received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant for video. She has also worked as an editor/assistant editor for ABC, VH1, HBO and the History Channel. Her feature script, “Guess Who’s Coming For Kimchee” was selected as the winner of the 2007 CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment) New Writers Award for Best Feature Screenplay, the KOFIC (Korean Film Council) Filmmaker Lab, IFP Market Emerging Narrative Program, and placed in the top 20 for the 2008 Bluecat Screenwriting Competition. Most recently, she was also a semi-finalist for the ABC/Disney TV Writing Program. Her first narrative short, The Queen was selected as ‘Best of Fest’ at Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, Telluride, Aspen ShortsFest, Los Angeles Film Festival and nominated for the Iris Prize (UK Film Council). She is currently based in Brooklyn, where she is an MFA candidate at Columbia University for writing/directing and is working on a post-apocalyptic feature script about the future of food.

Fairytale Fragments 
Li Cornfeld and Paul Snyder, 3 min

Red Riding Hood gets stalked. Beauty gets sold. Bluebeard gets cooked.

Li Cornfeld lives in Brooklyn, where she writes and teaches. Her current projects include a chapter in a forthcoming women’s studies anthology on folklore, feminism, and Hermione Granger, and an etiquette blog,www.civilshepherd.com. 

Paul Snyder is a film, commercial and music video editor. He has had the privilege of cutting for Spike Lee, Brett Morgen, and his work with the directors LEGS has been nominated for VMA and AICE awards. Paul works with the editorial company Lost Planet.

ENCHANTED BROOKLYN: Contemporary Fairy Tale Films is part of BAC’s Once Upon A Time in Brooklyn: Traditional Storytellers and Their Tales, a series of public programs and workshops featuring Brooklyn storytellers practicing various genres including folk tales, fairy tale, ghost stories, saints’ legends, personal experience, spoken word, talking drum, narrative dance, and more.

Lynne’s Films Currently Streaming on Criterion, DAFilms, Fandor, & Ovid

Film About a Father Who available on Criterion Channel: https://www.criterionchannel.com/film-about-a-father-who

Available on DAFilms: https://americas.dafilms.com/director/7984-lynne-sachs
Drawn and Quartered
The House of Science: a museum of false facts
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
States of UnBelonging 
Same Stream Twice
Your Day is My Night
And Then We Marched 
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor
The Washing Society
A Month of Single Frames
Film About a Father Who

Available on Fandor: https://www.fandor.com/category-movie/297/lynne-sachs/
Still Life With Woman and Four Objects
Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning
The Washing Society
The House of Science: a museum of false facts
Investigation of a Flame
Noa, Noa
The Small Ones
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
Atalanta: 32 Years Later
States of UnBelonging 
A Biography of Lilith
The Task of the Translator
Sound of a Shadow
The Last Happy Day
Georgic for a Forgotten Planet
Wind in Our Hair
Drawn and Quartered
Your Day is My Night
Widow Work 
Tornado 
Same Stream Twice

Available on Ovid: https://www.ovid.tv/lynne-sachs
A Biography of Lillith
Investigation of a Flame
The Last Happy Day
Sermons and Sacred Pictures
Starfish Aorta Colossus
States of Unbelonging
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
Your Day is My Night
Tip of My Tongue
And Then We Marched
A Year of Notes and Numbers

Kino Rebelde to Represent Lynne Sachs’ Catalogue Internationally

http://www.kinorebelde.com/lynne-sachs-complete-filmography/

Kino Rebelde has created a retrospective that traces a delicate line connecting intimacy, power relations, violence, memory, migration, desire, love, and war in Lynne’s films. By looking at each of these works, we can see a director facing her own fears and contradictions, as well as her sense of friendship and motherhood.  Moving from idea to emotion and back again, our retrospective takes us on a journey through Sachs’ life as a filmmaker, beginning in 1986 and moving all the way to the present.

With the intention of allowing her work to cross boundaries, to interpret and to inquire into her distinctive mode of engaging with the camera as an apparatus for expression, we are delighted to present 37 films that comprise the complete filmmography, so far, of Lynne Sachs as visual artist and filmmaker. Regardless of the passage of time, these works continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception.

About Kino Rebelde

Kino Rebelde is a Sales and Festival Distribution Agency created by María Vera in early 2017. Its exclusively dedicated to promotion of non-fiction cinema, hybrid narratives and experimental.

Based on the creative distribution of few titles by year, Kino Rebelde established itself as a “boutique agency”, working on a specialized strategy for each film, within its own characteristics, market potential, niches and formal and alternative windows.

This company supports short, medium and long feature films, from any country, with linear or non-linear narratives. They can be in development or WIP, preferably in the editing stage.

The focus: author point of view, pulse of stories, chaos, risk, more questions, less answers, aesthetic and politic transgression, empathy, identities, desires and memory.

Kino Rebelde was born in Madrid, but as its films, this is a nomadic project. In the last years María has been living in Lisbon, Belgrade and Hanoi and she’ll keep moving around.

About María Vera

Festival Distributor and Sales Agent born in Argentina. Founder of Kino Rebelde, a company focused on creative distribution of non-fiction, experimental and hybrid narratives.

Her films have been selected and awarded in festivals as Berlinale, IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, New York FF, Hot Docs, Jeonju IFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sarajevo FF, Doclisboa and Viennale, among others.

María has a background as producer of socio-political and human rights contents as well as a film curator.Envelope

vera@kinorebelde.com

Lynne Sachs (1961) is an American filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances.

Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with renowned musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.

Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project.

Between 1994 and 2009, Lynne directed five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany – sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own perception. 

Over the course of her career, she has worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha.

Review of “Atalanta: 36 Years Later” in Austin Arts E-Journal

Might be Good Austin

“Big Bad Wolf”
Laguna Gloria, Austin

April 29, 2012

http://www.fluentcollab.org/mbg/index.php/reviews/review/190/432

by Caroline Koebel

The program of moving image shorts curated by Mary Magsamen of the Aurora Picture Show was presented by AMOA-Arthouse and Fusebox Festival on April 29, 2012.

If the folk tale ranges over generations first orally and then beginning in the 17th c. with the advent of the fairy tale as a literary genre, key to its very being is its contingency upon each “author” and that teller’s positioning in place and time (or history). In devising innovative forms by which to tell tales, both familiar and novel, the titles included in Aurora Picture Show’s program Big Bad Wolf invoke this centuries-old performative spirit so imbued with a sense of the need to create in order to re-create.

This the curators could know in advance of the event. While they also could know to some extent the screening’s setting (i.e., outdoors on the lush estate of Laguna Gloria in a leafy Austin neighborhood, part of Fusebox, etc.), only until experiencing the evening in the process of its unfolding could they fully grasp—in consort with the invited audience—their presentation in its context-specificity. Their gander that the confluence of night, site and moving image program would be dynamic did not disappoint.

Who could have scripted that peacocks’ cries (from next door at Mayfield Park) would add an otherworldly layer to the evening’s soundtrack, or that a family of swans would glide by just beyond the screen on the Colorado River shortly before the sun sank and the program began? Seemingly glowing in their stark whiteness against the darkening water, the scene foreshadowed the black-and-whiteness of the first film, Hansel and Gretel (1955)1 by Lotte Reiniger. While the director places black on top of white in her silhouette animation and the inverse relation of light to dark is witnessed in the swan scene, their chance juxtaposition results in an exciting formal interplay between the known of the film and the unknown of the event site.

Although the viewer is awed by Reiniger’s dexterity with making shape and motion by cutting and arranging paper as well as by the experimental ethos necessary to arrive at such a signature style, there is a nagging feeling that the cinema pioneer is somehow restrained by narrative. Just as Hansel and Gretel seek refuge from the witch (who we hear to say in a deliciously scary voice, “little mouse who crawled away, come you back with me to stay”2), why shouldn’t the filmmaker straddle her broomstick and grant herself a joy ride from the onus of moving the plot forward? For Reiniger’s animation magic to be fully realized it must break free of the need to be a constant stream of information. This sense of formal enterprise being usurped by narrative gives potency to the screening’s extra-filmic composition (sky, river, breeze, animals), amidst which it is curious to note that Hansel and Gretel find their home again but—joined by the squirrel, goose and deer—are wilder than before.

Beyond Reiniger, I found the two works humblest in production terms the most gratifying formally and conceptually. Putting Situationist teachings—Debord’s theory of détournement—to practice in Cinderella +++ (2002), Eileen Maxson disrupts the hegemony of the Disney classic through uncanny sound and image recombinations. The stunning cel (hand-drawn) animation of first Cinderella and then Lady and the Tramp is given afterlife by the voices of love interests (gone sour) appropriated from the soundtracks of the TV series 90210 and “Jack Nicholson in the film Carnal Knowledge”3 (left unidentified in the program notes). While the Disney images convey a (false) sense of security—the world’s the way it ought to be—the re-purposed dialog underscores how the unknown is all around us.

In Atalanta: 32 Years Later (2006) Lynne Sachs4 takes as source material the 1974 TV show Free To Be You and Me—already an update on the classic tale of the “beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince”5—and re-edits it. She turns the image sideways, pairs different parts of the original through the use of split-screen, and plays both image and sound in reverse—providing “subtitles” for the resulting garbled voices. “The maiden from across the forest cut her hair, put on a mustache….” and the lesbian union strides onto the stage of collective imagination (and commands its role in history). Reading at the film’s tail, “for Barbara Hammer,” this retelling became all the more alive for me. In ways too manifold to express here, Hammer, legendary “pioneer of queer cinema,”6 has—like a fairy tale protagonist—found her way home time and again through many a tangled path.

Caroline Koebel is a filmmaker and writer in Austin.

Atalanta: 32 Years Later

Atalanta: 32 Years Later

5 min. color sound, 2006
16mm film released on MiniDV & DVD

A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince.  In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me”. Now in 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.

“Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings.”  George Kuchar

 For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.