Tag Archives: experimental lecture

14TH ANNUAL EXPERIMENTAL LECTURE WITH LYNNE SACHS

14th Annual Experimental Lecture . For past lectures, visit this page!
Choke, Chew, Savor, and Spit: The Messy Practice of Cinema
March 6, 2025 6:00 PM — 9:00 PM
NYU Undergraduate Film and TV and Cinema Studies


“Tonight I explore the making of a visceral cinema – one that does not know where it is going until it arrives, finds meaning in mistakes, and sets no boundaries between the real and the imagined. Through it all, I am aware of the implicit connection between my body, the bodies of those I photograph, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Film contains it all. I drink life and its taste is in my mouth. My lecture is about the way it feels on my tongue, along the palette, along my throat. It’s about that liminal space between the speech and the swallow. A lot can happen in the dark space behind your lips. This is what happens to me.”


CHOKE
Making these films helped me cough it out, not in or behind a handkerchief, but in front of people. I would never have said these things, but I wanted to get them out and film was the means that worked for me.
“The Tarot” 4 min. 1983.
“A Biography of Lilith” 35min. 1997
“States of UnBelonging” 63min. 2006
“Your Day is My Night” 64 min. 2013
“And Then We Marched” 4 min. 2017
“Girl in a Daunting Now” 4 min. silent 2020
“E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo ” 4 min. 2021
“Film About a Father Who” 74 min. 2021


CHEW
In these films, I grapple with ideas that take another kind of thinking. Structure is everything. Finding the visual language that is specific to the project is part of the method. My impulses as an artist collide with doubt and deep considerations around process. Each film requires a different strategy. Sometimes I am reluctant to assert myself. I am more interested in the subtext than the text. I realize that anyone involved in the making of a project – like my daughters or a good friend or someone I have recently met – is also somehow a collaborator I might need to listen to.
“Sermons and Sacred Pictures” 29min. 1989.
“The Task of the Translator” 10min. 2010
“A Year of Notes and Numbers” 4 min. silent 2017
“The Washing Society” 44 min. 2018


SAVOR
ˈsāvər is different from the other words in some fundamental ways. It’s two syllables that come together with an initial punch and then a release. Stress/ unstress. There is an aural narrative that culminates with a form of pleasure, experienced in the articulation of the word, or in this case, the making of the film.
“Drawn and Quartered” 4min. silent 1986
“Wind in Our Hair” 40min. 2010
“Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor” 8 min. 2018
“Maya at 24” 4 min. 2021

SPIT
I celebrate irreverence and disregard for the rules – for the film industry, for the state, for decorum, for narrative.
“The House of Science: a museum of false facts” 30min. 1991
“Investigation of a Flame”, 45min. 2001
“Contractions” 12 min. 2024

You can watch Lynne’s films in “Choke, Chew, Savor, and Spit: The Messy Practice of Cinema” in their entirety here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/11604346 (pw: LS2025)

Gratitude to Jessica Bardsley and Mary Rose McClain.

11th Annual Experimental Lecture – Abigail Child: “Where is Your Rupture?”

NYU’s Cinema Studies Department and Undergraduate Film & TV Department present the 11th Annual Experimental Lecture
Friday, Nov. 19, 7 PM

Website: https://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/events/fall-2021/11th-experimental-lecture

Since 2008, the Experimental Lecture Series has presented veteran filmmakers who immerse themselves in the world of alternative, experimental film. Our intention is to lay bare an artist’s challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, M.M. Serra, and Nick Dorsky.  

                     – Programmed by Lynne Sachs with Dan Streible.

Abigail Child: “Where is Your Rupture?”

“The title of this lecture takes off from Andy Warhol’s Where Is Your Rupture, an early 60s painting which cuts off both a diagrammatic torso and the text beneath it. The result is at once detached and personal, a fragment with both text and body broken, incomplete. 

My own work utilizes fragments and rupture to reconstruct a new and different partiality, often focused on the body and gender. Whether editing found footage or my own filmed images, my principal form has been montage, developing, as Tom Gunning writes, ‘a system founded not on coherence, but on breakdown, not on continuity, but interruption.’ The result has been a complex bringing together of different layers, levels of thought—both fact, and fiction— about the subject at hand. Whether it be the life of Emma Goldman, anarchist and, for a period in American history, billed as ‘the most dangerous woman alive’ (ACTS & INTERMISSIONS -2017) or a re-enactment of still images from ‘strongman’ movies created in the 1930s (PERILS  -1984) or a prismatic approach to family drama  (THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY -2004-2011), my work attempts to rupture the given narratives across filmic genres. 

I will bring to the foreground some examples and also discuss films and collaborations that have yet to come into being, as well as films composed entirely of outtakes, throwaways: the images that are under-valued or not-yet valued. The world increasingly looks to be seamless, ‘lifelike’, realistic, even as our ‘realism’ has evolved into zoom screens and animated caricatures, game-idols of our current myths. Fracturing, recycling, breakdown and sampling are some of the tools contemporary artists use to confront and re-imagine our ‘new’ world.”

Abigail Child has been at the forefront of experimental writing and media since the 1980s, having completed more than fifty film/video works and installations, and written 6 books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image, to create in the words of LA Weekly: “…a political filmmaking that’s attentive to form.” Winner of the Rome Prize, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, the Stan Brakhage Award, Child has had numerous retrospectives worldwide. These include Harvard Cinematheque, the Cinoteca in Rome and Image Forum in Tokyo. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art NY, the Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofia, and in numerous international film festivals, including New York, Rotterdam, Locarno and London. 

The Experimental Lecture Series at NYU (2007-2023)

From 2007 – 2023, Lynne has curated and organized The Experimental Lecture at NYU, with the support of the Cinema Studies Department and the Undergraduate Film and TV Department, Prof. Jonathan Kahana and Prof. Dan Streible, and most recently Prof. Jessica Bardsley.

“From the beginning, I imagined this talk to be one in which someone who had immersed him or herself in the world of alternative, experimental film would reveal something about the process of making their work by visiting pieces that were either unfinished, unresolved, bewitching or even untouchable. The intention was to lay bare the challenges rather than the successes, the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art.”

Please visit each of the pages for these lectures here on my website:

10th Annual Experimental Lecture: Nathaniel Dorsky: Montage and the Human Spirit

10th_experimental_lecture_posterNYU’s Cinema Studies Department and Undergraduate Film & TV Department present the

10th Annual Experimental Lecture: Nathaniel Dorsky: Montage and the Human Spirit

Oct. 11, 2019
Anthology Film Archives, New York City

“For most of my life, my films have been the marriage of external circumstances as seen through the needs of my own psyche. There is no other plan as such. Occasionally these explorations result in a film that is not quite what I would call a public film, something, perhaps, to be shown as camera original in the privacy of one’s apartment.

I would like to use the rare opportunity of this lecture format to show two of these intimate works as original Kodachrome, each quite different from the other. One is called Lux Perpetua II and the other, Ossuary. They are made up of outtakes from decades of shooting 16mm Kodachrome.” – Nick Dorsky

Since 2008, the Experimental Lecture Series has presented veteran filmmakers who immerse themselves in the world of alternative, experimental film. Our intention is to lay bare an artist’s challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, and M.M. Serra. Programmed by Lynne Sachs and Dan Streible.

Lynne’s Intro:
“I am thrilled to welcome Nathaniel Dorsky today to present our 10th Annual Experimental Lecture. Nick comes to us after a decade of talks and screenings by Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, and M.M. Serra. In this series, artists have explored their own process, their own investigation of the shift from discouragement to realization – the why and the how that allows them to continue. My intention has always been to ask each artist to lay bare their challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. I remember Barbara Hammer coming to her lecture ten years ago, “fresh” from a round of chemotherapy, with much hair on her head, of course, she draped the hall with a paper film and then picked up a very heavy Pagent Projector and proceed to create a work of expanded cinema in which all four walls and our skin became screens. I remember Craig Baldwin’s lecture on Cinema Povera and his uncomfortability with actually talking about his own process. Bradley Eros brought in a chorus of poets and performers to accompany him as he stood in the back of the room and spoke in the darkness. Carolee Schneemann gave a lecture that was both introspective and hilarious at time minutes after she had fallen downstairs and broken her hip. MM Serra gave a wonderful lecture that included her own feminist journey exploring her embrace of the erotic image. And Jonas Mekas spoke to us for three hours, without notes or any films whatsoever – about everything from the history of underground cinema in NYC to his own approach to the camera. There were so many people we had to create an overflow hall where the audience watched Jonas on the screen. I would like to dedicate tonight’s program to Barbara, Carolee and Jonas, dear friends, and loving artists.” Lynne Sachs

With additional introductions by poet Lee Ann Brown and UGFTV teacher Darrell Wilson.

9th Experimental Lecture: Art(core) and the Explicit Body: The Films of MM Serra

MM-Serra-9.26 poster
Thrilled to be hosting our 9th Experimental Lecture. This year we are proud to present the brilliant and inimitable filmmaker Mary Magdalene Serra. Join us for MM’s “Art (Core) & The Explicit Body” at NYU Tisch School of the Arts 6th Fl. on Wed. Sept. 26 at 7 pm. Free and open to the public.

In addition to excerpts from MM Serra’s films, we will see a rare screening of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth.

http://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-stu…/…/fall-2018/artcore-mm-sera

Since 2008, the Experimental Lecture Series has presented veteran filmmakers who immerse themselves in the world of alternative, experimental film. Our intention is to lay bare an artist’s challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art.

MM Serra ignites the world of avant-garde film. For three decades in New York City, she has produced some of the most thought-provoking work on women and erotics in cinema today. Serra’s unwavering passion for experimental cinema extends beyond her practice as an artist. Since 1993, she has worked as the Executive Director of the Filmmakers Coop where she distributes, preserves and exhibits an extraordinary collection of films and videos.

Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas and Carolee Schneemann.

8th Annual Experimental Lecture: Bradley Eros: Disappearing Soon at a Theater Near You (ephemeral cinema & other acts of life)

Bradley Eros 10.4.178th Annual Experimental Lecture: Bradley Eros: Disappearing Soon at a Theater Near You (ephemeral cinema & other acts of life)

October 4, 2017

Last October, I invited Bradley Eros to give the 8th Annual Experimental Lecture at NYU. Here is his entire spectacular, collaborative, visionary performance/lecture. He called it “Disappearing soon at a theater near you (ephemeral cinema & other acts of life)”.

I’d like to say a bit about the history of the Experimental Lecture. From the beginning, I imagined this talk to be one in which someone who had immersed him or herself in the world of alternative, experimental film would reveal something about the process of making their work by visiting pieces that were either unfinished, unresolved, bewitching or even untouchable. The intention was to lay bare the challenges rather than the successes, the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art.

Barbara Hammer was our first invited guest. In 2006, she sauntered into the largest lecture hall in this building, weeks after her first round of chemo therapy, carrying an enormously heavy Pagent projector which she then proceeded to carry up and down the stairs as she projected her own 16mm films on every surface of the room in her “The Cinema of the Optic Nerve”.

Craig Baldwin tore himself away from his underground film archive, his artistic practice and his 30-year old alternative media series “Other Cinema” in San Francisco to present “The Collage Essay: From Compilation Film to Culture Jam”.

Ken Jacobs took us on an odyssey from his early romps in NYC to his most recent obsessions with the state of our world as manifested by the beings that live in the dirt and grime of it all in his “Cucaracha Cinema”.

Peggy Ahwesh suggested her own “Parler Femme” by regailing us with her own take on a hard scrabble, experimental ethnography that has taken her to places she never intended on going but somehow found herself – in bliss.

In her “Where Did I Make the Wrong Turn?”
Carolee Schneemann traveled backwards and forwards in time like a archeologist who understands that a cherry pie is more than something to eat. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she analyzed those clues from her past that pushed her toward her life’s work.

Jonas Mekas recounted the entire history of the avant-garde cinema and the fragile but so vital institutions that sustain us in NYC and beyond, like a bard unraveling the secrets of his mind and his community.

In 2016, Ernie Gehr gave his talk “What is an Unfinished Work?”, allowing us into his studio practice, revealing the moments of doubt and stubbornness that he, like all of us, need to continue making our work.

In many ways an animating spirit and catalyzing agent of the NYC underground film scene from the 1980s to the present, Bradley Eros’ radical, sumptuous expanded cinema works stand at the forefront of a movement to redefine our understanding of film as an art form. For his Experimental Lecture, Eros “dismantled a few beliefs, by prying history loose, not nailing it down.” His lecture will take the form of a series of questions, interrupted by quotations, collaborations, expanded and contracted cinema, jokes & aphorisms, music, poetry, and surprise. Eros will talk on the nature of process, the immaterial, unfixed forms, hybrid works, resistance, desire & its discontents.

Eros works in myriad media, in addition to film, including video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, and installation. His conceptual framework includes: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, cinema povera, poetic accidents and musique plastique. Recent works & obsessions include: Black Hole Cinema (‘zine & lecture), eau de cinema (perfume & exhibit), Narcolepsy Cinema.

Thank you to Dan Streible, Cinema Studies at NYU, Cristina Cajulis and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

7th Annual Experimental Lecture: Ernie Gher: What Is an Unfinished Work?

 

Gehr 10.19.16 updatedNYU Tisch School of the Arts

Departments of Cinema Studies and Undergraduate Film and TV present The 7th Annual Experimental Lecture

Ernie Gehr – “What Is an Unfinished Work?”

Wed. Oct. 19, 2016

NYU Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Rm. 674
Free and open to the public

LISTEN TO ERNIE GEHR’S LECTURE HERE: 

 

For nearly fifty years, artist Ernie Gehr has transformed his deep knowledge of the moving image into a distinct vision of cinema’s potential for interpreting and fragmenting reality. With an astute, often humorous, appreciation for the limits and possibilities of the frame, Gehr has, since the mid-1960s, created a large, radical body of work that continues to challenge and surprise audiences. He uses his camera as a tool for creating new modes of perception. With few words, no characters, and no plots, his films, video work, and installations push us to re-imagine our own relationships to time and space. 

There are a multiplicity of adjectives that fit Ernie Gehr’s experimental film and digital work: abstract, beautiful, mysterious, invigorating, utopian. — Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 11/11/11

 In Gehr’s hands, the camera seems to take on magical properties, able to transform the most quotidian object or environment –– the pattern of sunlight on a wall, a busy street — into marvelous and unexpected phenomena. — Ernie Gehr’s Marvelous Cinema, Harvard Film Archive

 

Join us for screenings at 5:30 and Gehr’s Experimental Lecutre at 7:00.

 

5:30 Pre-lecture 16mm screening of Serene Velocity (1970), Shift (1972-74) and Rear Window (1986/1991)

6:30 Artist reception

7:00 Experimental Lecture with screenings of Lisa and Suzanne (1969-79), Untitled: Part 1 (l981), On the Coney Island Boardwalk (2010)

Link to event: http://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/events/fall-2016/ernie-gehr

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6th Annual Experimental Lecture: Jonas Mekas

Mekas B 10.21.15The 6th Annual Experimental Lecture
Organized by the Departments of Cinema Studies and Undergraduate Film and Television

JONAS MEKAS

For the last half century, Jonas Mekas has been a passionate filmmaker. His love for the moving image is expressed in his subversive, intimate, and lyrical diary films. Mekas is also a devout and productive advocate for personal cinema, having founded two of New York City’s most active film institutions, Anthology Film Archives and the Film-Makers Cooperative.

Each year, we invite one veteran experimental filmmaker to present his or her work.  The lecture itself is a performance in which the artist explores his or her creative process. Past artists include Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Craig Baldwin, Peggy Ahwesh, and Carolee Schneemann.

Curated by Lynne Sachs.

This event is free and open to the public.
Seating is available first come, first served.

5th Annual Experimental Lecture: Carolee Schneemann: Where Did I Make The Wrong Turn?

Lynne Sachs and Carolee Schneeman at NYU Experimental Lecture.png

Carolee Schneemann Experimental Lecture Sept 17 2014Where Did I Make the Wrong Turn?
The 5th Annual Experimental Lecture by Carolee Schneemann

Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Curated by Lynne Sachs

Carolee Schneemann is a visual artist and moving image maker known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She has been a leader and provocateur in the American avant-garde community since the mid 1960s when she created her ground breaking performance Meat Joy. From Interior Scroll to Plumb Line to Mortal Coil to Vespers Pool, Schneemann’s work pushes form and consciousness like no other artist working today. Ever since Fuses (1965), her landmark exploration of the female body, Schneemann has pushed visual perception in radical directions that awe, disturb and mystify audiences.

In her Experimental Lecture, Schneemann travels backwards and forwards in time. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she will analyze recurring formal properties in her film, sculpture and installation work. The mysteries of a notched stick, paper folds, indentations, the slice of line in space are followed as unexpected structural motives, up to and including her recent photographic grids and objects.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Undergraduate Film and Television and the Department of Cinema Studies.

3RD ANNUAL EXPERIMENTAL LECTURE: Ken Jacobs ” CUCARACHA CINEMA”

jacobs_2 poster

 

 

 

 

NYU Cinema Studies, NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, and NYU Undergraduate Film and Television present
The 3rd Annual Experimental Lecture

Ken Jacobs ” CUCARACHA CINEMA”
Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010
6:15 p.m.   FREE

Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
721 Broadway, 6th Fl.
Michelson Theater

 

“Most movies just make the time pass. Jacobs suspends time. He holds it up to the light so you can see it, letting it flicker for us a little longer. Finally, you see everything you have been missing.” (Manhola Dargis, New York Times)

“Ken Jacobs’ teaching was ecstatic. It was like a volcano.”
(J. Hoberman, former student and film critic for The Village Voice.)

 

 

Ken Jacobs has been making avant-garde film in New York City since the late 1950s. He is the director of “Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son” (1969, USA),” Star Spangled to Death”(2004, USA), and numerous other cinematic visions on celluloid and tape. Jacobs, who taught for many years in SUNY Binghampton’s renowned program on avant-garde film, coined the term paracinema in the early 1970s, referring to cinema experiences provided by means outside of standard cinema technology.

“It’s not natural for anybody with a sex drive to be hopeless. In fact it’s a contradiction in terms, or something. However, we can’t consider Obama’s betrayal -protecting the Bush-Cheney secrets, expanding the war/s, fucking over the peons while rewarding Wall Street thugs, etc, etc- to be leading towards anything other than ka-boom!   Sexy Ken is not hopeless. Because my interest in cinema has much to do with 3D perception I need to learn more about cockroaches, the likely inheritors of the planet,. I’m tuning my art to accommodate cockroach concerns. You don’t catch me whining; I adapt, and Cucaracha Cinema is clearly the next big thing. We’ll intersperse short and long works during the talk and the audience should feel free to say or ask anything — but stick to art, to the discussion of its intrinsic dynamics and we’ll let the rest of the world go by. There will be new works that require “free-viewing” in 3D.” (Ken Jacobs)