The body of the body: examining the films of Lynne Sachs, inspired by a new retrospective.

https://brooklynrail.org/2024/07/film/DCTVs-Lynne-Sachs-From-the-Outside-In
July 1, 2024
By Hannah Bonner

In Barbara Hammer’s memoir HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life she writes, “My films begin in what I call feeling images, an inseparable unity of emotion and thought/idea/image and internal bodily states of excitement.” Hammer’s desire to wed both emotion and thought, objects and bodies, could also be the epigraph to the experimental filmmaker and writer Lynne Sachs’s ongoing illustrious career. 2024 marks forty years since Sachs took her first video class at DCTV, where their June retrospective From the Outside In honors Sachs’s oeuvre of experimental shorts, cinepoems, and hybrid documentaries that explore feminism, family, New York City, labor, and “internal bodily states of excitement” with radical empathy and joy evinced in the act of their making. 

From the Outside In features twenty-four films from Sachs’s body of work spanning 1983 to 2024, as well as an artist talk and workshop on uniting poetry with cinema. This preoccupation with language and translation—or the ever ongoing interplay between the aural, textual, and visual—is always at the forefront of Sachs’s work. In the very first program, “Performing the Real,” her short Fossil (1986) opens with a series of bodies in medium close-up performing various repetitive terpsichorean movements. The VHS camera, handheld, slightly unsteady, traces their shadows and gestures against the room’s white walls. Sachs then cuts to video footage of women in Ubud, Bali, packing sand into their baskets at a river bank. Through juxtaposition, the dance is both an interpretation as well as a translation of the Indonesian women’s labor. As Sachs elaborates in a recent phone interview, the cut is “another type of line break” that allows “the juxtapositions between shots … to have [what we’ll call] free song.” 

The Washing Society (2018) expands upon the content and form of Fossil. Sachs initially began this projectwith her co-director/playwright Lizzie Olesker by informally interviewing various people who worked in laundromats to create the play Every Fold Matters, which was performed in laundromats all over New York. The composite of all those different conversations is also the content of her film. In between subjects candidly sharing their experiences of racism or overtime at work, The Washing Society also features actors delivering monologues about laundering or dancers bounding atop site specific washing machines with interpretive abandon. The Washing Society makes visible typically invisible labor both by conducting talking head interviews, as well as by lovingly translating folding gestures into emotive dance. The mix of registers (veering from participatory to performative modes of hybrid documentary), coupled with the chorus of voices, creates a powerful panoply of experiences on this historically marginalized, gendered, and racialized labor. 

Swerve concludes “Performing the Real’s” program by deftly (and movingly) uniting Sachs’s interests in translation, language, and text on screen. Inspired by Paolo Javier’s (Queens Poet Laureate 2010–14) sonnets in his 2021 book O.B.B. a.k.a. The Original Brown Boy, Swerve takes place in both an Asian food market and a playground in Queens. As various actors recite Javier’s lines, the camera tracks their movements closely like a confidant; at times, text layers the images, language equally worthy of sight as a face or a hand. Sachs further underscores her love of language in her short A Year in Notes and Numbers (2017) where the camera cuts from marginalia to to-do lists to vital signs in rhythmic succession. Sachs describes A Year as a “concise, autobiographical poem … made from the detritus. [It’s all] about the micro coming together.” Text typically delegated to the margins—or reserved solely for medical spheres—takes center frame. 

Elsewhere, like in E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021), the letter becomes another format from which to aurally and textually examine the power and politics of images. E•pis•to•lar•y begins with the white text “Dear Jean” against a black screen, ominously overlaid with the chatter of children and what sounds like a crackling fire. Sachs then cuts to black-and-white footage of the January 6th rioters descending on the Capitol before cutting back to the black screen where white text now states, “I don’t believe that childhood is swathed in innocence.” Each member of this mob was once a child—but children are equally capable of inciting chaos as adults. Sachs subsequently cuts to footage from Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963) as two young children push a large rock from a cliff. When the rock begins its descent, Sachs immediately cuts back to the rioters overturning a barricade; the objects, as well as the sound bridge of the rock falling, links the two disparate source materials. The result is a deeply unsettling collage of mob mentality that activates the viewer not just intellectually, but sensorially due to the match on action cuts and sound bridges. This is a film where the power of images surpasses the power of the written word. Through disquieting visual juxtapositions, Sachs’s E•pis•to•lar•y returns us to Hammer’s “inseparable unity” of embodied violence and political ideology.

Yet, politics—and the politics of identity—are never removed from any of Sachs’s work. She is always already attuned to bodies (both her own and others’), and their multiplicities, gradations, and variations. As Audre Lorde wrote, “It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences”; Sachs’s films live by Lorde’s tenet that difference is worthy of record—and celebration. Some films, like Your Day is My Night (2013), include both English and Chinese subtitles; others, like Tip of My Tongue / En la punta de mi lengua (2017), include Spanish subtitles on screen. Sachs does not always automatically assume her audiences are English speakers. Nor is she interested in documenting a single political or social experience. Nowhere is such a chorus of voices more personally rendered than in Film About a Father Who (2020). Filmed over thirty-five years, Sachs’s portrait of her charismatic yet unknowable father incorporates interviews with family members who provide loving, albeit troubling, insight into Ira Sachs Sr. as a father, husband, lover, and son. As additional facts come to light, Father reveals that sometimes the best story is told by multiple people, not just one.  

Contractions (2024)¹, a much more performative documentary than Film About a Father Who, stages its bodies, rather than observes them. As an obstetrician and reproductive rights activist narrate their time working in an abortion clinic offscreen, various performers congregate outside a closed abortion clinic in Memphis, Tennessee in a long shot, their backs to the camera. The decision to obscure the faces of the performers is both to protect their privacy as well as to formally gesture to collective solidarity. Though the bodies range in age, race, and nationality, the choreography (and current political landscape) unite them in a post-Roe world, as does the cinematography which holds each and every body in the frame. Though we do not know every person’s individual story, Sachs’s camera does not discriminate. The long shot makes it possible that every person’s body, however anonymous, is seen.  

The reproductive politics of Contractions (2024) recalls Sachs’s 1991 film The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, a more formally embodied polyphonic collage film about women’s bodies. Incorporating archival footage as well as her own home movies, The House of Science is a scintillating examination of sexuality and science’s gendered biases. Whereas Contractions requires (necessarily so) a level of remove due to the anonymity of the actors, The House of Science is much more personal due to Sachs’s incorporation of her own story, as well as varied footage. On a formal level, I would argue Sachs’s works achieve Hammer’s “internal states of bodily excitement” when they are not as performative or tightly choreographed, but more interested in the power of montage, graphic matches, and the interplay between language and sound, because it is not just the actors, but the medium itself which activates new ways of seeing. 

In The House of Science, Sachs’s diary chronicles receiving a diaphragm from “Dr. L.” in preparation for going to college, just as Esther Greenwood, in Sylvia Plath’s novel, receives a diaphragm to get out from under the bell jar’s oppressive dome. But Sachs’s doctor doesn’t tell her how to use it. Sachs’s text on screen elaborates: 

My memory of being a girl includes a “me” that is two. I am two bodies—the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk. 

While Sachs may have once described her body as leaky and porous, full of “dirty liquids” and “smells,” her overall filmography affirms a heuristic approach to radical self-acceptance, not just of herself, but of others around her, including friends, family, and fellow artists like the aforementioned luminary Hammer. Through such ongoing generosity at both the level of content and form, Sachs’s films arouse ongoing intellectual and emotional compassion through myriad actors, materials, and mediums. 

1. Contractions will begin streaming in perpetuity on the NYT OpDocs page as part of their coverage of the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to end a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.

by Edward Douglas
June 6, 2024

https://edwarddouglas.substack.com/p/the-weekend-warrior-june-7-2024?utm_source=substack&publication_id=799402&post_id=145354620&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false&r=bapy&triedRedirect=true

“Although there aren’t as many wide releases as there were last week, at least this week’s two offerings are being released into over 3,000 theaters, and hopefully one of them will break out and save us from the biggest bummer of a summer in recent memory…

I’d usually save this next bit for the Repertory section below, but I don’t often cover stuff out of the DCTV Firehouse, which is in my neighborhood, just maybe a ten-minute walk from where I live. Anyone who has read any incarnation of this column going back to 2001 probably knows how much I generally love the documentary genre, which the Firehouse specializes in. On Friday, they’re kicking off a new retrospective series called “Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In,” with probably the most comprehensive screening of the filmmaker’s work, running from Friday, June 7, through Tuesday, June 11. I haven’t had much of a chance to watch her films, though I have seen her 2020 film Film About a Father Who, which will screen with one of her more recent shorts, The Jitters, and she’ll be there for a QnA with some of her family. It’s a little tough breaking away to get over there this weekend, being that it’s also the opening weekend of Tribeca Festival, but I want to make sure that any doc enthusiasts reading this column are aware of the series and of the DCTV Firehouse.”

June 7, 2024
https://www.instagram.com/p/C77U14Zs0S2/

“A delightful visit from Lynne Sachs! This weekend begins a great retrospective of her films—Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In—at DCTV in New York! Sachs will be in attendance for Q&As alongside special guests.

Lynne’s Picks:
Wim Wenders’ PARIS, TEXAS
Chris Marker’s SANS SOLEIL
Claudia Weill’s GIRLFRIENDS”

Alex Fields
June 7, 2024
https://notreconciled.substack.com/p/lynne-sachs-from-the-outside-in

For forty years, Lynne Sachs has produced adventurous work at the intersection of documentary, essay, and avant garde film. Though they vary greatly in form, all of her films seek novel ways of questioning dominant perceptions of gender, work, and artistic representation. A career-spanning retrospective of her work, From the Outside In, screens this weekend (June 7-11) at DCTV in New York City and includes approximately two dozen films, from the early 80s to brand new films.

The earliest of these films are interested in our gendered perception of the movements of human bodies. The strongest of these, Drawn and Quartered (1986), uses 8mm film stock in a 16mm projector to display a “split” screen of four frames on one reel of celluloid. The top and bottom rows are identical, but the left and right show difference scenes, initially with a man on the left and a woman on the right. The figures, both naked, engage in a series of ordinary activities: squatting and standing, speaking and gesturing. The quadruple frame, along with the film’s silence, create a choice and push the audience into awareness of where we direct our attention, including how we may interpret the man’s and woman’s body language differently despite their essential similarity.

Other early films employ different devices toward comparable ends. Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986) films a woman putting on a coat, peeling an avocado, and so on, but adds a soundtrack seemingly unrelated to the images. A voiceover reads what sounds like a screenplay–“Scene 1. Woman steps off curb and crosses street”–but these actions never occur on screen. Similarly, Fossil (1986) cuts back and forth between video of women performing modern dance and women in a Balinese village working along a river. Both films break down barriers between what we perceive to be scripted performances of art and what we perceive to be mundane performances of work.

Over the following decades, Sachs’s work expanded this interest in representation into an examination of scientific and medical literature. One of her most ambitious and complex works, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991) assembles a whirlwind collage of texts and images dealing with (pseudo)scientific accounts of women’s physiology and and women’s experience in medical contexts. Women’s efforts to speak for themselves–in poetic written memories or seemingly documentary audio records–are interspersed with supposed expertise speaking for and about them, from Renaissance art to images from science books and documentaries. The sheer variety of source material, combined with the fact that images and sound rarely match, means that the materials are never able to settle into a clear narrative, and instead are presented in their character as representations. The overall effect mimics something of the confusion of a lifetime of contradictions taught to women as demeaning frameworks for understanding their own bodies, with the clarity of lived experience struggling to emerge from among this morass. This is sometimes played as comedy, such as when the laughter of children is played over a patently stupid text describing women’s brains and criminal tendencies.

Questions of meaning and textual representation get a much darker and less playful treatment in The Task of the Translator (2010), named for Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same name. Sachs is arguably less concerned with the problems of translation between two written languages and more so with how one appropriately translates the horrors of war into a journalistic text or art work. In the film’s first section, the voice of a doctor describes the work he did during a war to preserve and present human remains while we watch footage of kids at play. In the second section, scholars sit around a table translating a horrifying article about burials in the Iraq War into Latin. In the third and final section, a radio report describes a woman’s effort to recover the remains of her husband who died in the war, while a laundry machine spins on screen. All of these segments pose an unanswerable question about how the meaning of these wartime texts can possibly be grasped by their intended audience living in an utterly different context.

In a very different way, A Month of Single Frames (2019) also deals with the idea of translation, this time between two artists. A posthumous collaboration between Sachs and Barbara Hammer, the film incorporates reels from an uncompleted 90s work by Hammer with new footage and audio recordings by Sachs. Hammer speaks through her own voice and through her work, and Sachs is implicitly in dialogue through her editing and her own footage. It’s partly a documentary, partly a completion of a once abandoned project, but its real magic is in the present tense interaction of these elements.

Sachs seems drawn to these ambiguous and open-ended forms, even in her more apparently conventional documentary work. Your Day Is My Night (2014) portrays residents in a Chinatown apartment who take turns using the same beds according to their different work shifts. The scenes are poignant, so much so that they begin to feel too perfect, raising the question of how scripted some of this might be, particularly when new characters arrive and introduce themselves without ever noticing the camera. Later in the film it becomes clear that the action is partly staged, even explicitly revealing the set as a literal stage. The film was created collaboratively with its actor-participants, who played versions of themselves and other actual interview subjects in both live and filmed performances, blurring the already soft lines between documentary reenactment and scripted fiction. The film itself emerges as only one document of a process which was, arguably, a more expansive art work in its own right. It therefore frames itself as a contingent and partial view, as interested in the political nature of representation and translated meaning as in the specificity of its subject, raising more questions than it attempts to answer.

See also this interview with Sachs published by my friends at Ultra Dogme.

Ep 807: Vanessa Hope • Lynne Sachs
https://filmwaxradio.com/2024/05/31/episode-807/

Frequent Filmwax guest filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to discuss a retrospective of her work to be presented by DCTV. The series, called “From the Outside In“, runs June 7th — 11th at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in Lower Manhattan. 2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV. In From the Outside In, we traverse Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.

June 4, 2024

https://mysterycatalog.com/2024/06/40-years-of-lynne-sachs-at-dctv/

By Herbert Gambill

“40 years ago, Lynne Sachs took a video class at Manhattan’s DCTV (Downtown Community Television Center). In the next four decades she made dozens of remarkable films and beginning this Friday, June 7, DCTV will present From the Outside In, seven programs showcasing the variety of her important work with the artist present at each screening. Go here for program and ticket information.

Her films have been influenced (either cited by her or by my estimation) by many great artists and movements: Vietnamese filmmaker and professor Trinh T. Min-ha (whose classes I also attended while at San Francisco State University), Chris Marker (“Sans Soleil”), the dance/film aesthetics of Yvonne Rainer and Meredith Monk, early underground filmmakers like Bruce Baillie, body art performance artist Carolee Schneeman, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, American feminist documentary filmmaker Martha Rosler, left politics, the French avant-garde lettrism movement, post-colonial studies, Nina Menkes and much more. She is one of the most important American experimental filmmakers still active today. 

Here are my personal and political notes on ten of her films I viewed or re-viewed recently. All of them are included in the DCTV programs.

Ladies Wear (1983) Lynne and her brother (film director Ira Sachs) both paint their nails while on a subway car. (An ‘80s subway decorated by graffiti; they get off at the Spring street stop.) Themes: NYC, gender, graffiti as a form of public cosmetics. Her first film.

Fossil (1986) In Mambai in Bali, Indonesian female workers dredge sand from the river onto containers they balance on their heads. This is contrasted with a dance performance by Sachs and other dancers as response to the movements of the Bali workers. Mixing the workaday rhythms of laborers with a modern dance interpretation is a tactic she will employ in many of her films. 

Drawn & Quartered (1987) A nude male and female are separated into four quadrants of the film frame. Sachs says this was the year she “first encountered Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’, seen Carolee Schneeman’s ‘Fuses’, pondered Yvonne Rainer’s ‘Lives of Performers.’”

Investigation of a Flame (2001)  We are in Chris Marker territory here. (And please see his incredible 1977 film, “The Grin Without a Cat.”) Stock footage of the Vietnam War is intercut with the story of the Catonsville Nine. In 1968 Daniel Berrigan and eight other Vietnam War protestors stole boxes of selective service records to a park and burned them with homemade napalm. Sachs interviews the participants, including a female clerk at the selective service office who explains why she felt she failed American soldiers who wouldn’t be relieved by new recruits. A moving exploration of our moral responsibility to confront the foreign policies of our country, no matter the cost to us.

Tornado (2001) A short meditation on 9/11. She folds a torn calendar of September 2001 while explaining how her daughter’s response to the tragedy was to “mourn the twins.”

The Task of the Translator (2010) Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” this short contrasts the improbable assignment of Latin scholars translating a newspaper story about Iraqi burial rituals with accounts wartime cosmetic surgery and human remains.

The Washing Society (2018) Co-directed with Lizzie Olesker, this 44-minute film is one of my favorites. Workers at a few of the thousands of NYC laundromats talk about their work days as ghosts from an 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta reappear. Intimate connections (like the one I have with my local laundromat workers) are being replaced by “super laundries” where conditions are more factory-like. (Recall that a super laundry was atop the meth lab in the TV series “Breaking Bad!”) Required reading: Chapter 10 (“The Working Day”) of Karl Marx’s “Capital: Volume 1.”

A Year in Notes and Numbers (2019) Closeups of to-do notes are combined with test results from her annual physical. This is a beautiful example of making art out of miscellaneous documentation.

E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021) What does Jean Vigo’s great 1933 film “Zero for Conduct” have to do with footage of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol building? When is anarchy good and when is it bad? 

Swerve (2022) I have written about this short film here.

Go here for program and ticket information.

Listen to a new interview with Lynne Sachs on FilmwaxRadio!”