Tag Archives: lectures

Invocaciones Workshop Ambulante Mexico City

Frames and Stanzas: a master class on film and poetry

Lynne Sachs
Centro de cultura digital  and Ambulante
La Cineteca Nacional, Mexico City

April 11, 2024 – 5 to 6:30 PM / 17 h to 18:30 h

Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share insights she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will share excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay.  This master class will include excerpts from Lynne’s films includingStarfish Aorta Colossus, Tip of My Tongue, The Washing Society, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home, and Swerve.  As part of the class experience, participants will write a poem.

———

Opening the Family Album / “Abrir el álbum familiar”
Lynne Sachs
Ambulante Festival and Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City


Sesiones virtuales: Jueves 14 de marzo, de 19 a 20 horas (9 to 10 PM NYC) y viernes 5 de abril de 17 a 18 horas (7 to 8 PM NYC)
Sábado presenciales: Sábado 13 y domingo 14 de abril, de 11 a 14 horas, final performance April 14 at 6 PM

Opening the Family Album is a workshop in which we will explore the ways in which images of our mother, father, sister, brother, child, cousin, grand-parent, aunt or uncle might become material for the making of a personal film. We will meet virtually twice for one hour: March 14 and April 5. Then we will meet in-person with Lynne for two days (April 13 & 14, 11 am to 14 pm and for a final, public showing later that day at 6 pm), all at Centro Cultural Digital.  Please join Lynne between our workshop and our final performance for her 16mm film program

Each participant will come to the workshop with a single photograph (both in hand and digital) they want to examine.  During the workshop, you will write text in response to this image by incorporating storytelling and performance. In the process, we will discuss and challenge notions of truth-telling and language. Your final work will then be a completed film with sound or a film with live narration. Previous filmmaking and editing experience is appreciated but not required. Participants may use their own digital cameras or cell phones to make images and sounds.  Please register early so that you can be part of our first meeting which will be in March and will be virtual.

This workshop is inspired by the work of Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, whose writing explores family relationships during the Fascist years and World War II. Ginzburg was a prescient artist who enjoyed mixing up conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction: “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled at once to destroy it. The places, events, and people are all real.” We will also read texts from Roland Barthes and Clarise Lispector.

Participants are encouraged to have their own cameras, but cell phone cameras are FINE.  Also, if you know how to edit digitally that is helpful but not critical.


CODE^SHIFT welcomes filmmaker Lynne Sachs for Contractions film screening & workshop

By Nicole Cheah, Digital Journalism Undergraduate | April 18, 2024
https://www.drsrivi.com/post/code-shift-welcomes-filmmaker-lynne-sachs-for-contractions-film-screening-workshop

On March 28, acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs visited the CODE^SHIFT lab to host a workshop and screening of her latest film, “Contractions“. During the session, Sachs presented the 12-minute short film and engaged with participants, sharing tips for conducting oral history research and documentary filmmaking.

Sachs, who is based in Brooklyn, has had a 30-year career as an experimental filmmaker and poet. Born in Tennessee, she completed her undergraduate studies at Brown University, studying History with a focus on studio art. Sachs has produced over 40 films in addition to live performances, installations, and web projects. She has tackled a myriad of topics, often confronting social and political issues. According to Sachs’ website, her films have screened at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, as well as festivals worldwide.

“The workshop was so amazing! I appreciate being able to discuss the film with the director. You could tell she was passionate about health and reproductive rights for women. As an audience member, the film held my attention and left me feeling inspired and moved. Lynne was able to give her audience a glimpse into the new challenges women and healthcare professionals are facing after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. I am thankful that Dr. Srivi provided a space to discuss such an important issue.” – Minnie McMillian, PhD Student (Psychology), College of Arts & Sciences

It was Sachs’ latest residential commission that brought her to Syracuse. In 2023, she received the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Support for Artists grant, and she is in the city to create commissioned work for the Urban Video Project (UVP), a media art program which projects the work of filmmakers and video artists onto the facade of the Everson Museum of Art in downtown Syracuse. During the workshop, Sachs was joined by Anneka Herre, faculty member in Syracuse’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and UVP Program Director.

To create her ongoing project, titled “Citizen Second Class” , Sachs plans to work with local artists, reproductive care providers, and activists to explore issues of reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. She is particularly interested in doing so through the lens of Central New York’s history with womens’ rights. This project is part of a larger effort in which Sachs is involved, called “The Abortion Clinic Film Collective”, a group of artists from around the country who came together in the wake of the landmark 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade.

“This is such a timely moment for a film like Contractions, which discusses the discontinuation of abortion services in Memphis. I felt privileged to see the screening with the director Lynne Sachs, along with other women concerned with the state of women’s health and reproductive rights in the country. Lynne’s film transported us to the testimonies of health workers who have experienced firsthand the effects of the overturn of Roe v Wade in such a sensitive, touching, and poetic way that makes it hard to describe. I’m still thinking about her film, and I feel incredibly moved to have been a part of the screening of her film here at Newhouse.” – Raiana de Carvalho, PhD Student (Mass Communications), Newhouse School

After the session, Lynne sat down for a video interview for CODE^SHIFT’s ongoing “Chai with Srivi” series. Speaking to undergraduate RA Nicole Cheah, Sachs detailed how she came to be the storyteller she is today, what feminist filmmaking meant to her, her ongoing project in Syracuse, and more. Once edited, the interview will be published on the CODE^SHIFT YouTube page.

Hunter College / The Accident that Pricks: Family and Photography

The MFA Program in Integrated Media Arts (IMA) offers advanced studies in multimedia documentary arts. The IMA Program educates multi-disciplinary, socially engaged media makers in a diverse range of skills across the media landscape. Working with faculty from film, emerging media, and journalism backgrounds, students learn to conceptualize, create and distribute innovative, politically and socially engaged expression using contemporary media technologies.

The Accident that Pricks: Family and Photography
Lynne Sachs
3 sessions, 1 credit – Fall 2022 and Spring 2024
Final Showcase Friday February 23, 2024

Course Description:
The Accident that Pricks: Family and Photography is a course in which we will explore the ways in which images of our mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, grand-parent, aunt or uncle might become material for the making of a personal film.  Each participant will come to the first day with a single photograph they want to examine.  You will then create a cinematic presence for this image by incorporating storytelling and performance. In the process, we will discuss and challenge notions of truth-telling and language.  This course is inspired by French theorist Roland Barthes’ theory of the punctum, the intensely subjective effect of a photograph, and Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg’s writing on her family living under Fascism during World War II.  Ginzburg was a prescient artist who enjoyed mixing up conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction: “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled at once to destroy it. The places, events, and people are all real.”  Each student participant will produce a live performance with moving image which will be presented at the end of our third class meeting.
  • Celeste
  • Jane
  • Junia
  • Mark
  • Myrel
  • Shira
  • Sikuma
  • Yashing

The New School / “A Line Break is Like a Cut: The Impulse for Disruption in Poetry and Experimental Film”

“A Line Break is Like a Cut: The Impulse for Disruption in Poetry and Experimental Film”
Lynne Sachs
The New School
Graduate Program in Creative Writing
Oct. 25, 2023

Organized by Margaret Rhee
Assistant Professor of Writing Across Media and Chair of Arts Writing

Working with memoir text as lines of poetry,
Using the 2nd person as the subject
“how do you ….?”
Gives some distance from the subject.

Film About a Father Who
74 min. 2020
a film by Lynne Sachs

Essay on the film by Ela Bittencourt: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2022/08/19/ela-bittencourts-essay-on-film-about-a-father-who/

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

Short Poetry Films by Lynne Sachs

Celebration of words and sounds of words in rhythm with images, not working with interpretation in anyway, no precise intersection, instead there is parallel reading.
“Starfish Aorta Colossus” (Lynne Sachs, 4 1/2 min, unsplit 8mm to digital transfer, 2015)
Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film journeys. NYC poet Paolo Javier invited Lynne to create a film that would speak to one of his poems. In response, she travels through 25 years of her 8 mm films. 
 
Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2015/10/01/starfish-aorta-colossus/Links to an external site.
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/lynnesachs/starfishaortacolossus

Listening to poetry as action, playing with objects in response to words, working with someone else as performer who also interprets.
“Girl is Presence”  by Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer (4 min, HD Video, 2020)
During the global pandemic, Sachs and Selcer collaborated remotely to create Girl is Presence, a rhythmic visual poem tinged by gender and violence. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, a ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things. As the words build in tension, the scene becomes occult, ritualistic, and alchemical. 
Website:http://www.lynnesachs.com/2020/05/28/girl-is-presence-by-lynne-sachs-anne-lesley-selcer/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/412447077
 
Homage to Mayer’s home. My shooting and reading is entering Bernadette’s life experience.
“Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” (Lynne Sachs, 3 min, 16mm, B&W, 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, Sachs embarks on a study of the memory and language of place. Journeying to Mayer’s childhood home in a Queens neighborhood of New York City, she pays homage to Mayer in a collage of architecture, light, and rhythm. 
Website:http://www.lynnesachs.com/2020/11/02/visit-to-bernadette-mayers-childhood-home-2020/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/440075830

Poetry meets painting. I timeless image lands at a moment in history or a current event through the text.
“Orange Glow” by Lynne Sachs and Laura Harrison (1 ½ min, HD Video, 2021)
“Orange Glow” began in September 2020 as an exchange between two friends in two different cities who decided to come together in the making of a film.  From her home in Chicago, Laura Harrison animated each stroke of a painting. She then sent her 90 second video to Lynne Sachs in Brooklyn.  Horrified by the television images of San Francisco enveloped in wildfire smoke at the time, Lynne interpreted Laura’s painting gestures with these thoughts in mind.  She hit the play button of the video and began writing a poem in response to what she saw.
Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2020/12/31/orange-glow/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/460167751
 
I wanted poetry to become language, like a mode of communication but sometimes also not. Place it in Queens. Place it in the pandemic.
“Swerve” (7 min, HD Video, 2022) 
a film by Lynne Sachs with poetry by Paolo Javier
A Queens market and playground become the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five NYC performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/ cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next
Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2021/10/12/swerve-with-paolo-javier/ (trailer only)
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/629421455 (full film)

FILMS TO WATCH IN CLASS that DO NOT explicitly use language

This could be an installation or a performance with language used like the music as punctuation.

“Window Work” (9 min, video, color, 2000)

A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery within and beyond the image. Sometimes one hears the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets on a Baltimore summer night. Other times jangling toys dissolve into the roar of a jet overhead, or children tremble at the sound of thunder. These disparate sounds dislocate the space temporally and physically from the restrictions of reality. The small home-movie boxes within the larger screen are gestural forms of memory, clues to childhood, mnemonic devices that expand on the sense of immediacy in her “drama.” These miniature image-objects represent snippets of an even earlier media technology — film. In contrast to the real time video image, they feel fleeting, ephemeral, imprecise.

Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2000/04/11/78/
Vimeo:https://vimeo.com/183875143


Again the quotidian actually becomes pictures and words at the same time. If you look, you find poetry where you don’t expect it.

“A Year in Notes and Numbers” (4 min, HD 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. Museum of the Moving Image, Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires.

Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2019/02/07/a-year-in-notes-and-numbers-2/z
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/222220963

I used loud whispering and humming as poetry that moves across a generation, btwn a mom and her daughter.
“Maya at 24” (4 min, 16mm to digital transfer, b&w, 2021)
Lynne 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.
 
Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2021/01/15/maya-at-24/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/432200317

How might we use poetry here?
This is titled from a poem.

“She Carries the Holiday in Her Eyes” 4 min., silent, 2023
A picture of parallels and swirls, two women touch with eyes closed, use cameras in motion, discover a holiday of optics. 
 
“I have seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and commanding, and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his (her) eye.”
— From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Manners”
 
Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2023/06/12/she-carries-the-holiday-in-her-eyes/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/829544863 


Plus this film which uses language on screen:

“E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo” (5 min, HD Video, B&W, 2021)

In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic “Zero for Conduct” in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, Sachs wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can turn so quickly into chaos and violence. 

Website:http://www.lynnesachs.com/2021/02/18/e%e2%80%a2pis%e2%80%a2to%e2%80%a2lar%e2%80%a2y-letter-to-jean-vigo-from-lynne-sachs/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/513925175

Discuss how this connects to YEAR BY YEAR POEMS.
Poetry on screen and voice.
Who is reading?

“Tip of My Tongue” (80 min, HD Video, 2017)

To mark her 50th birthday, Sachs gathers a group of her contemporaries—all New Yorkers but originally hailing from all corners of the globe—for a weekend of recollection and reflection on the most life-altering personal, local, and international events of the past half-century, creating what Sachs calls ‘a collective distillation of our times.’ Interspersed with poetry and flashes of archival footage, this poignant reverie reveals how far beyond our control life is, and how far we can go despite this. .
 
Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2017/04/25/tip-of-my-tongue/
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/194980606

Poetry reading:

Year by Year Poems

And

“This Is Not How I imagine It But How It Is”
Talk about how this was written in response to one image.