Experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs donates films to Hunter College Libraries
Feminist, artist, experimental documentary filmmaker, and poet Lynne Sachs’ donation of DVDs to Hunter College Libraries completes the Libraries’ collection of Sachs’ films on DVD. The films are available for CUNY students, staff, and faculty to borrow. Scroll down to see the list.
I asked Lynne about her teaching experience at Hunter College. Here is her reply:
“I started at Hunter in September 2001, and of course you know what happened that month. My relationship to the school has been consistent and meaningful for all of these years. In that first semester, I witnessed the way that the school became a real home and place of solace for the students, especially the international ones. Every class was like a therapy session, blending the emotional and intellectual into a single impactful experience (or at least that’s how it is in my memory). I was also at Hunter for the very first conversations around their IMA Grad program which has turned into a deeply respected and supportive community.”
Lynne taught the follwing classes:
Graduate courses in the Integrated Media Arts MFA program: The Accident that Pricks: Family and Photography Day Residue: Hybrid Media and Performance Film as a Collaborative Art Frames and Stanzas: Film and Poetry Non Fiction Graduate Seminar
Undergraduate Courses: Introduction to Film and Media Developing the Documentary Sound for Film and Video Film 1
“What I do in the world when I’m in the act of shooting film is ask myself how and if I can work in concert with something that exists in reality.” – From an interview with the poet Paulo Javier in Bomb Magazine, March 2014.
Lynne Sachs’ films have been featured in a number of retrospectives, including one at The Museum of Moving Image, Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression, organized by assistant curator Edo Choi. In a review of the retrospective, Kat Sachs (no relation), highlights themes of Sachs’ work and the personal and experimental approach the filmmaker takes to communicate through the medium of film.
“A Reality Between Words and Images: Films by Lynne Sachs,” a program screening in October, 2022 at e-flux Screening Room featured six of the filmmaker’s works. In a review of the program on Screenslate.com, the author discusses the filmmaker’s exploration of the subjects.
A retrospective of Lynne Sachs’ work was included in the Ghosts and Apparitions section of the virtual Sheffield Doc/Fest in 2020. Reviews of the retrospective appeared on Hyperallergic and ubiquarian. In an interview in Modern Times Review, the filmmaker discusses her films in the Sheffiled Doc/Fest. Two of the films in the Festival, The Washing Society (co-directed with playwright Lizzie Oleskar) and Your Day is My Night, investigate the experiences of immigrants working in service jobs, a timely subject during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A two-part interview with the experimental filmmaker is available on A Masters Edition episode of Docs in Orbit. “In part one of the conversation, Lynne Sachs discusses how feminist film theory has shaped her work and her approach to experimental filmmaking. We also discuss her collaborative process in her films, including her short documentary film A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES (for Barbara Hammer). Part two discusses her latest feature-length documentary film, FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (2020).”
Films by Lynne Sachs available at Hunter College Libraries
Film about a father who Sachs, Lynne, film director, director of photography, narrator, on-screen participant.; Sachs, Ira, Sr., interviewee, on-screen participant.; Sachs, Ira, cinematographer, on-screen participant.; Shapass, Rebecca, editor of moving image work.; Vitiello, Stephen, composer (expression); Allen, Kevin T., remix artist.; Cinema Guild, publisher. 2021?
The washing society Olesker, Lizzie, filmmaker.; Sachs, Lynne, filmmaker.; Hanley, Sean (Film producer), director of photography.; Katz, Amanda, editor of moving image work.; Vitiello, Stephen, composer (expression); Holloway, Jasmine, actor.; Santa, Veraalba, actor.; Ching, Valdes-Aran, actor.; Torn, Tony, actor.; Canyon Cinema Foundation (Firm), film distributor. 2019
Tip of my tongue Katz, Amanda.; Sachs, Lynne, film director, author, participant.; Cinema Guild, film distributor. 2018
Your day is my night= 你的白天是我的黑夜 / Argot Pictures ; a film by Lynne Sachs ; produced by Lynne Sachs and Sean Hanley ; directed by Lynne Sachs. ; Your day is my night = Ni de bai tian shi wo de hei ye Argot Pictures (Firm), film production company.; Cinema Guild, publisher.; Sachs, Lynne, film director, film producer, screenwriter.; Robles, Rojo, screenwriter.; Hanley, Seán, film producer, editor of moving image work, director of photography.; Cao, Yi Chan, performer, interviewee (expression); Chan, Linda, performer, interviewee (expression); Che, Chung Qing, performer, interviewee (expression); Ho, Ellen, performer, interviewee (expression); Huang, Yun Xiu, performer, interviewee (expression); Lee, Sheut Hing, performer, interviewee (expression); Santa, Veraalba, performer, interviewee (expression); Tsui, Kam Yin, performer, interviewee (expression); Mass, Ethan, editor of moving image work.; Vitiello, Stephen, composer (expression) 2013
Con viento en el pelo = Wind in our hair Sachs, Lynne.; Gallisá, Sofía.; Molina, Juana.; Peroni, Lena.; Peroni, Chiara.; Street-Sachs, Maya.; Street-Sachs, Noa.; Cortázar, Julio. 2011
The last happy day : with 4 short films Sachs, Lynne. film director.; Mass, Ethan, director of photography.; Lenard, Hansgerd. interviewee (expression); Lenard, Andrietta. interviewee (expression); Gerendas, Israel John. actor; Moss, Donald. actor; Fagen, Lucas. actor; Reade, Isabel. actor; Street-Sachs, Maya. actor; Street-Sachs, Noa. actor 2011
“Night Work” by Genevieve Yue Night Fever ed. Shanay Jhaveri, The Shoestring Publisher, estimated 2024 release
Night Work
By Genevieve Yue
1. The night shift
In the world of work, night is the unequal opposite of day. There are working hours, and off-hours. The night shift exists in the shadow of the day, out of sight, discrete, and tidying what needs to appear tidy for the next day. Often night work—cleaning, repairs, odd jobs—aims for invisibility. The work itself aims to appear unnecessary, unnoticed. A repaved road and a washed window should leave no potholes, no smudges. Everything smooth and as if untouched. The workers are out of sight, as are the people whose traces they erase. Night work is Penelope’s labor: it undoes the day.
Dan Eisenberg’s Something More Than Night (2003) offers subtle glimpses of nighttime workers. Most, but not all, are low-wage workers: nightwatchmen, janitors, the cooks at a 24-hour sausage counter. There are people hunched over computers, an art restorer carefully brushing a crucifix sculpture, a man in a yellow hard hat eating an apple. Though not everyone is engaged in work, nearly ever scenario implies a worker. For the smokers outside a pub, a bartender inside. For the people waiting in line at Western Union, a cashier behind the counter. For the bridge that slowly lifts and falls, an operator offscreen. There are many shots where no one is visible at all, only the suggestion of human activity, like the power plant with a skinny tower topped by fire. A few landmarks, including people asleep on the benches at Chicago’s Union Station, and the long corridors of O’Hare Airport, identify the film’s location, though most of the shots could have come from any city.
Eisenberg’s film offers a view of night that is disjointed, connected not by type of work or location but by the more abstract suggestions of shading, shape, and movement. Within and between shots, there are frequent dips into blackness. Eisenberg has noted, “Much of my energy was directed towards making sure there was no narrative development between shots, depending instead on the suturing effect of darkness to draw together the shots from all times of night, and all seasons of the year.” Christa Blümlinger has characterized the editing as “rhizomatic,” though I think it is more accurate to call it oneiric.[1] The only closeup in the film is that of Eisenberg’s sleeping son, seven-year-old Jesse, to whom the film is dedicated, and, whose eyes, in one shot, flit rapidly behind barely opened lids. Like Bruce Conner’s Valse Triste (1977), which begins with a shot of a boy going to sleep, Something More Than Night has a quality of dipping in the puddle of one dream to the next. But instead of the day’s residue rearranged by the unconscious for the human sleeper, Eisenberg presents the night as the dream of the city. Though cities may not sleep, they might drift into a kind of semi-consciousness: unwound, empty, and quiet.
The women in the Berwick Film Collective’s TheNightcleaners Part 1 (1975) clean office buildings. In interviews they confess to shocking little sleep, sometimes as little as one to two hours. They are mothers who can’t work during the day because they need to tend to the shopping and the care of their children. The pay is bad, the work is hard, and the people who do it are mostly women of color, many of them immigrants. They explain their work in stark terms: 49 offices, 9 toilets. 10PM to 7AM. All for 12£ a week (roughly $75 today). Many of them are waiting for their children to be old enough to take care of themselves, so that they can get a day job, with better pay, and the opportunity to rest at night. We “don’t come out for the fun of it,” one says to nodding agreement.
In most films, night work, especially the kind of work done by women, has a salacious and social quality. Red light districts, whorehouses, strip clubs — these are often bustling, like the carnivalesque Hollywood Boulevard of Pretty Woman, or the hostess bars stuffed with drunken salarymen in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960). Even when patrons are scant, as in a dancer’s audition in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (John Cassavetes, 1976), there’s a suggestion of erotic connection. Female care workers also incline toward the prurient. Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Night Nurse (1931) becomes witness to a heinous deed, while Deborah Kerr, the live-in governess of The Innocents (1961), sees her worst fears confirmed in the darkness of night. However, in these cases, the night workers are rarely seen at work.
Nightcleaners inverts this. In the first half of the film, the camera watches them from outside the building, pacing with them at length as they vacuum up and down the floor. The window bars, the stories of the building, separate the women into their own narrow zones. But the camera organizes a different logic. It zooms into the women’s faces, as if attempting to hold onto their image. It creates a picture of individuals, segmented in space, but coordinated in their work. It is, in the second half of the film, the basis for organizing these workers into what would become the Cleaners Action Group, a broad-based coalition of cleaners across London. Women who don’t ordinarily interact with each other meet and share stories over coffee. Several walk away. Others express hesitation: “I believe in nearly everything they [the women’s liberation activists] say, but I don’t think it’s possible.” Many fear losing their jobs. The outcome is anything but certain. But the women agree that their work is deserving of recognition. “Class chauvinism has to be struggled against,” one organizer emphatically asserts. “[We] have to bring those divisions out into the open.”
The film is the space where those divisions are exposed and negotiated. It is, arguably, what makes possible these processes. Film theorists have often remarked on cinema’s revelatory capacities, including Walter Benjamin’s optical unconscious, Bela Balasz’s microphysiognomic scrutiny of the image, André Bazin’s ontological immediacy of the photographic apparatus, and the poetic redemption Siegfried Kracauer found in an upside-down vision of the city reflected in a puddle. For political filmmakers, these expressions of reality become the material by which to imagine, on film, new possibilities for social organization. Nightcleaners is an effective piece of agit-prop not only because it shows miserable working conditions, but because it dramatizes and participates in the coming together of these workers, which is the first step toward organization. The a priori separation of these workers from each other is the significant first obstacle they must overcome; the film is on hand to observe, and to some extent it is the vehicle, for its surmounting. Organizing produces visibility and recognition, which in turn leads to community. The film reflects and creates a new situation: one of political possibility.
2. In the shadows of the digital economy
In the nearly fifty years since Nightcleaners, the digital economy has reorganized the meaning of work. For many low-wage workers, this has been a shift in the time and type of work; gig workers, especially those done online, fill in spaces of available time on a global clock. Tung Hui-Hui describes “microworkers” as those who click “like” on social media posts, moderate objectionable content, author spam, chat with customers, train artificial intelligence systems, translate texts, and otherwise perform discrete, time-limited tasks online, where it is always somewhere’s off-hours, somewhere’s night. Again these are jobs done by women and people of color, and, instead of the immigrants of Nightcleaners, they are more often performed by people living in the Global South.
The absurdity and unexpected intimacy of microwork comes into view in artist Elisa Giardina Papa’s Technologies of Care (2016), a suite of seven short video installations that mimic the duration of digital tasks. Technologies of Care, along with Cleaning Emotional Data (2020), for which Giardina Papa worked as a data “cleaner,” training AI systems to recognize emotions, and Labor of Sleep, Have you been able to change your habits?? (2017), about the biological and behavioral information extraction from sleep, form a trilogy of works that trace the contours of affective work in a digital economy. In Technologies of Care, Giardina Papa situates herself as the interviewer of the worker, as well as the employer (she paid each of her subjects). What she sometimes calls “clickwork” is transformed into rhetorical form. It is at a base level descriptive, but also, in the discussion about work, it becomes social, something shared between artist and worker, art and viewer. However, the image before the viewer offers a constant reminder of the digitally mediated nature of the interaction. Abstracted three-dimensional figures are wrapped in partial digital skins, rotating as though stalled in an online videogame. Additionally, the words are spoken by a generic female voice from a text-to-speech AI generator, which is used for all but one of the vignettes. Technologies of Care stages the encounters with each worker — among them an ASMR artist, a video performer, a nail wraps designer, and a virtual (or not!) boyfriend— as interviews, with the viewer sitting before a monitor from which text or voice emerge. In Worker #1, Giardina Papa shares a moment of sympathy with her interviewee, who lists the names of online platforms on which she is a digital freelancer. “‘People Per Hour’?,” Giardina Papa says, “Those names sound terrible.” “Agree,” replies the worker. Earlier this worker has disclosed that she poses as a man on her Fiverr account. As an academic who, owing to economic conditions in her country, has turned to digital platforms to earn extra money, she is fully aware of the pay disparity between male and female workers.
The identity of Worker #7, the virtual boyfriend, is also not exactly as it appears. There are a few key differences in this segment. First, the interaction between the worker and Giardina Papa is already one of flirtation; in real terms, she has paid for this service. Second, is the only segment in which a second voice is used, a male one, although it too is a text-to-speech program. Third, Giardina Papa’s objective is different; rather than learning about the features of the work, she tries to sus out whether the worker is a person or a bot. After some banter, Giardina pauses. “Can I ask you something? If you are a human, do you chat with me as a job?” She then admits, “Actually to be honest I did subscribe to this service because I am interested in new forms of digital labor and affective labor…” The boyfriend cannot respond with emotion, given the flatness of the text-to-speech delivery, but it is almost possible to discern… something. “I don’t understand. You think I am getting paid to chat you up?” he says. “I feel crushed inside, but I can’t blame you if you feel that way.” Giardina quickly calls off the experiment and announces that she is unsubscribing from the platform. She leaves the chat. The boyfriend sends an additional message: “Sometimes I wish that I could have said I love you one more time before you left from my life.”
Even in the ambiguity of the exchange, through the mediating layers of voice, image, and anonymity, and fully within the circumscribed limits of the paid virtual boyfriend encounter, the verbal contact between the two affirms a social connection on which affective and political bonds might be built. The digital economy may be a shadowy one, but you will find people there, even those that might be posing as bots. To talk about work, further, lays the groundwork for meaningful exchange about lived social realities. As Raymond Williams has remarked, “We have come this far, that we are talking about work: our own work and yet not just our own work; a social fact made out of our personal accounts. It is an important step forward, and it is clear that we must try to go on talking and listening.”[2]
The possibility of exchange, of discussion about work, is what drives Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011). As Wilson explains in the video, he is a temp worker at the Google complex in Mountainview, California, where he encounters different classes of workers, segregated by badge color. As a contract worker employed to film and edit video content, Wilson possesses a red badge, typical of contractors, allowing him access to a luxury shuttle, Thai massage, sessions in a high-tech sleep pod, organic juices, and other privileges. (This badge did not entitle him to ski trips, Disneyland excursions, and other perks available to full-time employees possessing white badges.) At 2:15pm each day, he observes an exodus of black and brown workers leaving a building adjacent to his, all of whom possess a yellow badge. His interest is piqued. These are workers at the Google Books program, internally known as “ScanOps,” employed to scan the contents of books from Stanford University and other libraries (notably, as Wilson points out, repackaging the contents of public libraries as goods sold through a private contractor). Their shifts began at 4am. Wilson writes that the working conditions of yellow badge employees were “not worth the price of integration,” given:
the high turnover rate, the accounts of physical attacks between employees, the criminal records, the widespread lack of credentialed education. It meant getting paid $10 an hour, going to the bathroom only when a bell indicated it was permissible to do so, and being subject to a behavioral point system that could lead to immediate termination, for which the only fix was at special events like the Easter egg hunt, where a small number of eggs contained point removal tickets. Any attempt to draw attention to the fact that this supposedly revolutionary company contained a decidedly unrevolutionary caste system would be dealt with in the old-fashioned way.[3]
The drama of Workers Leaving the Googleplex centers around Wilson’s attempt to interact with ScanOps workers. As he describes in his voiceover, tries to approach several individuals. None engage him for longer than a few moments. One man offers that “[the work] is not what I want to be doing, but it pays the bills.” Later it is revealed that one woman whom Wilson had approached had disclosed his filming to their superior, as per instructions on the back of her yellow badge. When asked why he was filming the “extremely confidential” ScanOps workers, Wilson explains that he wanted to “meet people who work right next to me.”
As Wilson describes the consternation he faces for filming the ScanOps workers and his eventual firing, the screen is split into two: on the left is an exterior shot of Wilson’s building, and on the right is the restricted access 3.1495 building, where the ScanOps workers are located. In both screens a fixed camera is trained on workers as they leave the building. Most yellow badge workers are seen in extreme wide shot, dispersing throughout the parking lot. Those that pass close enough by the camera look only furtively at it. In one instance, a woman in a maroon hoodie approaches, offers a brief half-smile, and gestures with her hand toward Wilson’s camera, as if to wave him off.
Finally excluded from the Google campus and its privileges, Wilson went on to study the images scanned by the workers of the 3.1495 building. In Movement Materials and What We Can Do(2013), a collection of photographic enlargements, he identifies aberrations in scanning, notably where part of a human worker’s body is visible in frame, shrouded in a finger condom. The index here is quite literally the index finger, the digital trace otherwise obscured by the dematerialized logic of information systems.
Taken together, Workers Leaving the Googleplex and Movement Materials and What We Can Do reinsert the human, and human interaction, to computational labor. They offer a rebuke of the fantasy of the “lights out factory,” in which a fully automated space operates without human intervention. Along similar lines, a number of films and artworks mark the scant traces of the absented human body in these otherwise fully automated spaces. For example, the robot choreography of automobile assembly becomes a spectacle in Wyatt Niehaus’s Body Assembly (2014) project, where human labor becomes that of looking. Meanwhile, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni’s 1834 – La Mémoire de Masse (2015), part of their series The Unmanned (2014 – present), reconstruct a revolt against the introduction of the Jacquard Loom at a silk factory in Lyon, the first rebellion, the artists note, “against modern computation.” Using only CG graphics, 1834 – La Mémoire de Masse incarnates a ghostly echo of the historical event in which machines perform the actions of the human agitators, “transforming a revolt against the algorithm into an algorithm of revolt.”
3. After hours
Niehaus, Giraud, and Siboni’s projects demonstrate the extent to which the digital is already integrated into previously mechanical processes. Automation is not merely the assumption of work by machines, but the deliberate absenting of human labor. This is the uncanny power of a film like Daniel Eisenberg’s The Unstable Object Part II (2022), which locates echoes of the human body in production spaces at different industrial scales, including a prosthetics manufacturer in Germany, a glove atelier in France, and a distressed jeans factory in Turkey. Correspondingly, perhaps, the trace of the human is often a primary vector by which digital labor, including digitized procedures in manufacturing and logistics, are critiqued, including in the work of Lucy Raven, Hito Steyerl, Allan Sekula, and Harun Farocki. Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory (1995) is especially influential in this respect: it catalogues instances in popular film in which workers are seen, however fleetingly, leaving the site of work, following the first film to be made, the Lumière brothers’ film of the same name. Hito Steyerl has observed of Farocki’s essay film: “The invention of cinema thus symbolically marks the start of the exodus of workers from industrial modes of production. But even if they leave the factory building, it doesn’t mean that they have left labor behind. Rather, they take it along with them and disperse it into every sector of life.”[4]
Even sleep. Lynne Sachs’s experimental documentary Your Day Is My Night (2013) traces this dispersed labor to the beds on which workers sleep—in this case, sharing the same mattress. Shift-bed apartments are a phenomenon in working-class neighborhoods, where workers keep housing costs down by sharing the same bed at different times of the day. When one works as a seamstress, or a wedding singer, another sleeps, and so on. For the film, Sachs worked with a small group of residents in New York City’s Chinatown, ages 58–78, all of whom were either living in shift-bed apartments at the time or had done so previously. Though reluctant at first to share their homes and stories—shift-bed apartments are, unsurprisingly, illegal—the subjects worked with Sachs for nearly two years to craft a hybrid stage performance and film. Sachs interviewed each person, then edited their accounts into monologues that they later performed themselves, on stage and for the film. She further created an imaginary but entirely plausible space where these residents lived together, peeling vegetables around a kitchen table, listening to each other’s stories.
Your Day Is My Night does not depict work so much as its impression, like a pillow softened by a sleeper’s head. The film depicts many shots where the environment is encountered as texture, like buildings reflected in a street puddle, or a bedroom obscured by sequins dangling from the ceiling. Instead of straightforward cinematography, Sachs’s camera adds a tactile and often hazy quality to the world as it is suggestively experienced by her subjects, who themselves describe being in and out of sleep.
Hybrid documentaries are sometimes criticized for their flexible approach to non-fiction situations and subjects, especially when the filmmaker’s subject position is different from that of her subjects, as is the case here. These critiques consist of ethical objections on the grounds of representational politics, of the sort that inhere in ethnographic filmmaking, which are heightened when the filmmaker overtly intervenes in blurring the line between “documentary”—which is presumed factual, historical, and objective—and “fiction,” which can involve fabrication, performance, subjectivity, and the potential for the falsification of reality.
I would argue, however, that Sachs’ interest is not ethnographic, which is to say that she does not aim to explicate a culture or to produce cross-cultural understanding. Rather, her goal is to bring individuals of common but different experiences together, including subjects and film crew. After recording the interviews and transforming them into monologues, the production traveled to the stage at venues in Chinatown, Harlem, and Brooklyn. Subjects became performers: they were telling their own stories, but their accounts were now refracted through the heightened artifice of theater. Shots of these performance also wend their way into the film, becoming part of the fabric of its affective experience. At the same time they reaffirm the bonds between individuals, whose sense of community is strengthened in these shared stories, through the act of storytelling itself. The point here is not for the camera to reveal preexisting reality, but for it to provide the occasion by which individuals can gather and where experiences can be shared. As with the structure of work in Nightcleaners, where workers are kept separate from each other by assigning them to different floors, the conditions of work and off-hours rest in Your Day Is My Night present real obstacles to collectivity. People are separated from each other by work, by shifts in a shared bed, by sleep. The film and performances, over the years-long duration of the project, provide the opportunity crucial to fostering a sense of community. Such community is by no means guaranteed, but this is the condition for its possibility.
I am hopeful that film can continue to provide such occasions for coming together: on a set, onscreen, and as viewers. We should not take for granted that film, too, is a site of work, and the horizon of struggle includes movie theater cleaners who vacuum and sweep the aisles overnight, and who, as migrant laborers with vulnerable immigration status, frequently face wage theft, hazardous working conditions, and exploitation.[5] To be in the audience of a film, furthermore, is to be kept in the dark. These are among the conditions of a cinematic infrastructure that maintains the atomization and isolation of people, and that mirrors a broader social organization of work under capital, where people are kept largely separate from each other, and are discouraged from talking about, reflecting on, and organizing around their work. Sometimes it is only in the off-hours where we can catch a glimpse of the possibility of collectivity onscreen, or, as is more often the case, in the glare of a laptop monitor, in bed, in the moments before we turn over for sleep. Perhaps we will glimpse a new vision of what life and work could be. Perhaps, tonight, we will dream new dreams.
[1] Christa Blümlinger, “Non-Places, Nomads and Nameless Ones: Notes on Something More Than Night,” trans. Michael Ritterson, in Postwar: The Films Of Daniel Eisenberg, ed. Jeffrey Skoller, Raymond Bellour, Nora Alter, and Tom Gunning (London: Black Dog Press, 2010), pp. 150–165.
[2] Raymond Williams, “The Meanings of Work,” in Culture and Politics: Class, Writing, Socialism (New York: Verso, 2022), pp71–90, citation on p90.
[3] Andrew Norman Wilson, “The Artist Leaving the Googleplex,” e-flux journal #74 (June 2016).
[4] Hito Steyerl, “Is the Museum a Factory?” e-flux journal #07 ( June 2009).
[5] See Gene Maddaus, “How America’s Biggest Theater Chains Are Exploiting Their Janitors,” Variety, March 27, 2019.
Slamdance: News from Nowhere May 2022 https://preview.mailerlite.com/h8g0m3h0y4
Celebrating Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month on Slamdance Channel
In recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, the Slamdance Channel is highlighting Asian voices throughout the entire month of May, including new films premiering on the channel for the first time.
Figuring out the unique grammar of your life can be difficult. People, situations, can give us question marks with no answers and ellipses that lead to nothing. Lynne Sachs, a Memphis-born experimental filmmaker, attempted to answer some of these questions in her own life with the 2020 documentary, Film About a Father Who. She offers an in-depth look at her father and titular character.
Ira Sachs Sr. is an enigmatic hotelier out of Park City, Utah, with an unmissable mustache and a penchant for colorful button-ups. His approach to love parallels in eccentricity. He despises loving like a “swan,” the idea of mating with a single soulmate for life. Sachs Sr. chose instead to surround himself with a steady flow of young women and went on to marry—and divorce—a number of them. Many of Lynne Sachs’ childhood peers were enamored by the bravado and Hefner-esque life her father led. But this way of life caused tension at times with those closest to him, to say the absolute least.
Beginning in 1984, Lynne Sachs chronicled moments in Sachs Sr.’s life for thirty-five years and those in his mother’s, ex-wives’, children’s, and others close to him. Her mission was to elucidate his tucked-away interior life, not just to an audience but to herself. Two years after the release of the film and two years younger than when Sachs began this project, I got to speak with her about it and her greater body of work. Sachs gave a lecture at Sarah Lawrence in the fall of 2021—for those who took Tanya Goldman’s “Experimental Documentary”course. I sat in my apartment in upstate New York and called Sachs, who was in a hotel room in Paris. She’d left her Brooklyn home for a few weeks to attend a screening of her work. In our hours of conversation, what stuck with me the most was what she said about the image above. Sachs stated that it is “the most important in all of Film About a Father Who.” A scene that wasn’t even filmed by Sachs, instead by her father. It’s a tranquil look at three of her siblings as children playing in a creek. For a film that follows a bon vivant and his unorthodox lifestyle, I was taken aback that this scene was the most important.
The scene occurs once in each of the three acts, all different segments of the same shot. Why? Well, it’s part of what makes this film, like each of her films, have a unique “feeling”—or “grammar”—to them. “Grammar,” as a metaphor, is illustrated in another wonderful scene in act one. I told her,
I really loved that scene in Film About A Father Who.
In it, Sachs, her brother, and her sister sit on her childhood bed talking
about how [your father] doesn’t have a grammar and your mother does when you’re living with each of them. Do you feel that your work as a filmmaker has some sort of grammar behind it? Or is it just question marks when you go into each project?
I think that what really, really distinguishes an experimental film from a more conventional film, whether you’re talking about a documentary or a narrative or any other form, is a refusal to embrace a formula around grammar or a template—the grammar of cinema. Because people say things like, “well, a great documentary is character-driven,” or they say “you can’t break the 180-degree rule when you’re shooting,” or you must have the exposition sort of identified and articulated in a narrative film by fifteen minutes in.
There’s all these rules about the shape of things. The way shot-reverse-shot insinuates that two people are in the same room and doing things simultaneously. If you know about making films, you know that they’re probably not, but it relies on an assumption on the part of the audience that the grammar of the film will be accessible and key to that—key is familiar.
So then you jump over to something that is more playful, experimental, distinctive in terms of each work, having its own cosmos. And you think that the audience at first might be a little disoriented because the audience doesn’t understand its distinctive grammar, but through the shaping, evolution of the film, the audience starts to register how meaning is constructed. And I think that’s really exciting. And I think that is an opportunity to constantly reinvent how you work with the medium of film. When I hear about someone who says, “well, I bought this software that helps you to write your screenplays, it comes with a template.”
I think, okay, if it comes with a template, then you are going to construct time in a certain kind of way. You’re going to create your characters in a, probably, formulaic way. So I’m scared of that kind of stuff. I think it’s problematic. So, then you asked that in relationship to Film About a Father Who, and I think that every family has its own grammar as well and that the grammar is significant because it guides you in terms of how you relate to people of different generations or new members of your family. It has to do with how transparent you are. What it means to do something like tell a lie, or what is a white lie? How many different people in your family do you tell white lies to, to protect them?
What does a white lie really mean? People either withhold information or you shift information because you think the truth is going to be complicated or intimidating or painful. So you were asking about the punctuation marks—are my films question marks? I do actually like when people leave my films, asking questions of themselves or questions of society or questions more ontologically about how we construct meaning. I like that. I think that’s an opportunity for being changed by a work of art. Or perhaps being just slightly shifted by it.
There was kind of a shift at the end of the film when you bring in your sister—the one that had been removed from you for so long. A lot of stories about your father- there’s some sort of way you and your other siblings in your minds might have justified them a lot of times, but in that one, there’s no justification for what happened.
Sachs’ half-sister went on a pre-college trip with a best friend from high school, staying in a ski lodge with Sachs Sr. At the end of the vacation, her best friend announced that she had fallen for and would continue to live with her father.
I felt like that really changed the perception of the film.
Sometimes we do that with things that upset us. We create justification in order to move forward, but then it keeps gnawing at us. So if we finally come to terms with our own anguish with the recognition that the reality is not what we want it to be, but it is there and that we can’t make any more excuses for it. Then I think it’s like a cathartic experience, even if it is difficult.
Also what I loved about that film is I felt you’re really comfortable not only behind the camera but also in front. Your [1987] short film, Drawn and Quartered, you talked about how you at first edited out your face because you were so embarrassed [to show yourself nude], but then you ultimately decided to put it back in. And I felt like that was a moment of growth?
In English, we say, “oh, don’t you feel exposed.” We the word exposed on a physical level, and we use it on a psychological level.
So at that point, I was not very secure with showing my body, and I felt vulnerable and I felt too observed. But then later I made a film called the The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, and I take my clothes off a little, other people do too—it’s a lot about the body.
But what was more of an exposed feeling was the writing. The idea of that you write about things that go on in your body and the grit of it all, the pus, the urine, and all those things. But the thing is, by exposing that, you’re actually saying I’m just like everybody else.I’m a woman. My body’s like all the other women; we’re just shaped a little different. It’s when you open up and expose the narrative of your life and all the compromises that come with that–that’s even more revealing. So there’s all these layers of what it means to be exposed.
As you’ve made films throughout your career, have you felt you’ve been able to be more comfortable [in front of the camera], or was this something from the beginning you felt—
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, definitely not. Sometimes I go back — not that I do this very much — and look at my progress reports from elementary school. And my teachers would say, “Lynne is a good student, but she’s so shy.” I wasn’t a very forthright child. I wasn’t the first person to raise their hand, you know, in those situations. But I think it’s come to me, and I think part of it is, let’s say, making a film like Film About a Father Who. I was so profoundly nervous about making this film.
It’s not just because I was exposing myself to you or to anyone else in the audience, but I was exposing myself, my life to myself. Does that make sense? I’ve never explored this word in this way. You are really making me think! Like I was saying, “Hey, this is really how it is,” because you can get very wrapped up in the day-to-day activities of your life and not really allow yourself to think in an analytical way, an emotional way about how, how you’ve lived your life. And so the film gave me that chance. I realized as I was making Film About a Father Who that two things happen when you’re interviewing and when you’re trying to write.
If I’m talking to one of my siblings and I’m asking them to tell me about how they feel about something, they’re looking to me, and I’m saying, “yes, yes,” and I’m nodding, and I’m affirming as if that’ll fit perfectly into my edit, you know, [like] that’s exactly what I needed. So I found that if we went together into a very dark place, like a closet, there wasn’t that constant affirmation and perhaps, manipulation. So that’s one thing. But then the other thing had to do with the writing and the construction of a voiceover or narration was that I kept censoring myself. So I used a method that has really proven to be super helpful. That was to just record my thoughts in this kind of unfiltered way and then to send it to a transcription service. And then you come back, and you have 20 pages of text. That was how I did it since I kept writing in my moleskin diary and scratching it all out.
I know you got your start with feminist filmmaking.Seeing Film About a Father Who, I wondered was there any sort of [internal] conflict?
I was actually editing Film About a Father Who during the Me Too movement. So I was cognizant of the fact that I was talking about a man who led a life, well, he’s still alive, in which he had a certain kind of power over different women in his life. Maybe not in the workplace, but you know, in his personal life. And I knew that there were contradictions, but I felt that I was not only making it as a feminist but also as a daughter. You look at your parents as role models, but you also look at your parents for ways to be completely different.
They’re your first models of how to exist in the world and for how to define what their sexuality is—how they define the meaning of their gender. And so either you adhere to that, or you move away. And for example, in Film About a Father Who, I think my brothers were all positioning themselves in very different ways in terms of their own identity as men. I think that they were confronting those things in just as complicated ways as we as daughters were. I mean, my brother Ira said he thinks the gist of the whole movie is a kind of search for a new or refined definition for masculinity in the 2020s.
So I was trying to deal with that all the time to move between my rage at my dad, but also my attempt to forgive him or to recognize his flaws.
I also found it interesting that from the beginning of your career, you started filming people in a unique way, compared to traditional documentarians that do shot-reverse-shot and have them look at a certain place. Whereas I feel like a lot of people that you film will look right at the camera or look right at you. How did you even think to do that? Break that rule.
Oh, you really picked up on something. That happened particularly in a film called Investigation of a Flame
(a 2001 documentary by Sachs that illuminates the story of the Catonsville Nine, who were Catholic activists in 1968 who peacefully yet poignantly burned draft files to protest the Vietnam War.)
When I was shooting that film, most of it, not all of it, I shot by myself. I was shooting it, but I was also using it as an opportunity to get to know these incredible anti-war activists, people who had been fighting the fight—the good fight. And even breaking the law in an absolutely nonviolent way as a statement against the Vietnam war. So I was on my way to interviewing someone near Boston. And a friend of mine who worked for National Geographic [said to me], “How are you going to shoot that by yourself? Because where will they look?” But that’s part of a grammar, that conceit, that idea that you have to look like three-quarters off. I think it was Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker, who came up with a camera which he reconfigured so that people could simultaneously look at him while he was shooting and appear to be looking off at something. He invented some form of refraction to kind of work against that formula for setting up a relationship that isn’t about that the director controlling—[even though] we know the director is controlling. I mean, one of my very favorite places to do interviews is in the car because I think when people look off at a horizon line, even if the car isn’t moving, they become very introspective. Have you ever noticed all the deep conversations you might’ve had in a car?
Yeah. No, I never thought about that. There must be something with like the horizon—
The horizon, the sort of hermetic solitude—removed from the rest of the world but not really. You’re not in a silent chamber. You’re actually watching the world go by. But people become very— what’s the word? Meditative.
I definitely remember you having a couple of interviews where a person is looking out a window, looking outside.
I’ve been criticized for that. Oh my God. I had an interview in Investigation of a Flame where I’m interviewing this man. And then I look out the window— the camera looks out the window. And a lot of people were surprised that I kept that. They said, “why didn’t you just put in ‘B-roll’?” But I actually hate the term B-roll. I can’t stand it. It’s so disrespectful of the image, but also, I wanted the shot to convey that I was listening to him. I mean, I thought it was honest. I was listening to this man so intensely that I needed to not look at him. I needed to take in what he was saying.
I think that’s so interesting that you hate that term “B-roll.” Because I definitely feel like for a lot of your films, what makes them so good is that you have like an eye for beauty in all moments. No moment is B-roll.
I think that I said it was “disrespectful to the image,” but it actually doesn’t allow for the dialogue or the voiceover to have multiple layers of meaning. It just provides a little bit of distraction. I mean, I would say if the idea of B-roll, as in filler, is all you can do, just put in black.
The attention to dialogue is evident in each of Sachs’ films. Her 2013 documentary, Your Day is My Night, documents the lives of Chinese immigrants living in Manhattan’s Chinatown. In a scene where a middle-aged man gives another a back massage, he apologizes for bringing trashed mattresses into their shared living space. He likes to clean them and give them back to people in need. Sachs cut back and forth from a close-up of his hands gingerly rubbing the other’s back to a close-up of his face as he speaks, the window reflecting in his glasses. The audible rhythm of the massage combined with the focus on the scene presented—no, B-roll—makes it feel immersive. It made me linger on every word, every sound.
Sachs cares greatly about the spoken word but also the written. Many of her films intersect both of these mediums. Her 2020 abstract short film, Girl is Presence, silently follows her daughter arranging items from shark teeth to film strips while a poem is recited as a voiceover. For this short, she collaborated with poet Anne Lesley Selcer. I thought it was intriguing that Sachs, being a documentarian who tend to concern themselves with prose-oriented storytelling, has such a strong interest in poetry. Though, it is not surprising because Sachs herself is a poet. In 2019, her first book was published, Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press) which inspired her 2017 documentary Tip of My Tongue.
I know you write poetry as well.
Yeah, I think there’s an interesting intersection between film and poetry that isn’t just about two different disciplines coming together, but it’s a way of listening. So poetry is like a confrontation with or a disruption of more conventional ways of constructing meaning, of organizing sentences. Poetry asks you to think in more associative ways and in speculative ways and redefines words you thought you knew. It asks you to listen in this kind of super-engaged way. And I also like that poetry thinks about the words in collision with each other and overlapping each other like the songs of words and even the fact that we break lines based on sound and based on rhythm, which is not how prose works. And that’s also how I like to edit, for example, dialogue in my films. I like to think about the ways that things are iterated, not just a cause and effect. Like I say this, and then you say that, and then I say this back to you. So I think poetry pushes you to engage with the oral experience in really revealing ways. I have recently, like in the last four or five years, integrated poetry more and more into my own film work, like with “Tip of My Tongue.” Then I made quite a few films in collaboration with other poets, like Bernadette Mayer or Paolo Javier.
Watching your films, I felt like there was a unique flow to the dialogue a lot of times.
One thing that’s been helpful over the years is I often shoot images separate from recording sound. So when you shoot what we call video image or digital, it’s like the sound and the picture usually, as they say, it sounds so terrible, [are] “married.” So you get the image, and you get the sound, and people tend to privilege the hearing of clear, clean sound in order to convey information. But if you let that go, you can allow dialogue to transform into sound effect. Like in conventional filmmaking, you have a track which is dialogue, a track which is effects, and a track which is music. But if you think of it all as an opportunity for dialogue to become music or for a sound effect to register almost like voice, then you start to get surprises that I think are super interesting.
That just reminded me of like- I love that opening of The Washing Society, where it was cutting to different [exteriors of] laundromats [around New York City]. I just remember watching that, and, you know, I had the volume turned up. And I felt like each laundromat, each area, had its unique sounds to it and really flowed into each one quite nicely, but then became distinct.
Thank you for saying that. In that film and about five others, I’ve worked really closely with Stephen Vitiello, who’s a wonderful sound artist and performer. We started working together on Your Day is My Night in 2013. Then he worked with me on Tip of My Tongue , Drift and Bow and Film About a Father Who. I’ll send him sounds from laundromats, then he’ll send me back musical pieces, and they’re usually much longer than the image. So then I have to find more image. And so it’s really like a back and forth the whole time. It’s never simply that he just creates the music track.
That’s the main methodology [for] him making music for your films? You’ll send him soundbites, and he’ll send you music?
Sort of. A lot of times, I’ll send him an image, and then he’ll come up with something, or he’ll say, “listen, [I] sent you all these sounds I made.” He also uses instruments. Sometimes he’ll hire a clarinet player, and then they’ll make these longer pieces, and then I love the piece so much that I think I have to meet him with more image. For me, the places where we have his music are very evocative and also places for thinking so that my films aren’t too much dialogue. I call them a sound vessels so that you can be in this place of resonance without exposition or information or anything like that, listening in a more relational way.
So, sometimes he’ll send you music, and you’ll actually respond by filming more?
Yeah. Yeah, sometimes.
I think that’s awesome.
It’s a lot of pressure, but I try to rise to the occasion.
I think in that way it makes the films breathe a little more, you know, so that you have some kind of scene where you have all this activity and energy and conversation, and then you have, a time that’s more sort of more cerebral. It’s not like a rest time. In fact, I think the audience has to kind of work with what they’ve just experienced in the previous scenes. That’s what I think happens in those sections.
Also, I see that you’re very interested in the ephemeral with a lot of your work. I’m wondering, for something as permanent a medium as film is, what is your interest in that?
Hmm, that’s really a lovely question. So, I guess I explored that most… I’m going to think about a couple of films, but I don’t know if you’ve seen them. Did you see Maya at 24?
Yes-
Maya at 24 is a four-minute short film she released in 2021, which captures her daughter, Maya, at ages 6, 16, and the titular, 24. It’s comprised almost entirely of three paralleled scenes of Maya running in circles around a camera at each of those ages. Sachs shot it in black and white film on her 16mm Bolex.
So I was thinking about this while my daughter was spinning around me and then later as I was watching those moments on film. There on the screen are aspects of her that are no more—like I can’t touch anymore, that I can’t access anymore. But film itself can remind me; it’s almost like saying film is the antidote to the ephemeral? It’s sort of saying, “well, nothing is ephemeral because we can contain it and put it in our computer or put it in a can,” but yet it is also constantly reminding us that it no longer is. Did you see a Month of Single Frames?
No, but that’s the one about Barbara Hammer?
Yeah. You know, Barbara Hammer’s work?
A little bit. I’m not too knowledgeable of her, though.
Well, she was definitely a mentor of mine and a dear friend—she was never a teacher—but I admired her. She was exactly the same age as my mom is, and she was a powerhouse, “lesbian, experimental filmmaker,” that’s what she called herself. And when she was dying, a year before that, she asked me and some other people to make films with materials she had never been able to finish. And so the film that we made, which is a Month of Single Frames, or that I made in homage to her, is also about the ephemeral because it’s a recognition of the mortal coil as well as the changing landscape that you’ll see in the film. The landscape is- has- will always change. So it’s only there to hold onto and to touch in that exact moment. It’s like the Heraclitus, you know, “you can’t step in the same [stream] twice.” And so, it is always passing us by. I’m working on a new film now called Every Contact Leaves a Trace. It’s about people who’ve left imprints on me, but that expression comes from a forensic study. That if you come into my home or space and you take something from me, you leave something of yourself, a residue. So I’m interested in that. What happens when a tangible, touch-based experience is investigated, which is sort of like, how do we confront the ephemeral?
So for that film, Every Contact Leaves a Trace. Are you trying to take like a neutral stance and pull in people that have had any sort of contact with you—negative or positive?
I actually only have a pool of 550 people.
That’s a lot, though.
But I’m not using all of them. No, I’m not. They are people who, at one point, gave me a card. We had a haptic intersection. It could be a doctor. It could be someone from like a hardware store. I have both of those types of people. I met a man on the border between the United States and Mexico, right in Tijuana. We met for about an hour. He gave me his card. So, I’m actually constructing scenarios in my mind about those. Yeah, it’s kind of similar; you said “ephemeral.” It’s like a passing in the night. That man left something with me. Maybe I left something with him. I don’t know. That happened in 2014, but I have these cards going back all the way to the ’90s. I’m interested in not so much the trajectory of their lives but in the detritus of the moment. I might do kind of playful reenactments. I’m not quite sure.
Like Lynne Sachs’ use of business cards to recall moments with strangers, near the end of the interview, I brought out stills from her films to recall scenes. The image I brought for Film About a Father Whowas one of my favorites, but the one I had the most trouble understanding. It’s the image you have seen twice thus far—Sachs’ siblings playing in a creek. I was first drawn to it by the use of color and light. Then, when I noticed she repeated it across the film it made me believe it had to hold more significance than I understood. Though, I was not prepared for how important. I said to her,
I noticed that you repeated this image in Film About a Father Who.
Oh, thank you. Okay. I love that you brought that up. What happens in Film About a Father Who is that I have a seven-minute shot that my dad recorded with his own camera. So it’s the world and his children perceived by him. In many films that one makes, you talk to people, and they tell you exactly how they feel about things. But that was really a challenge for me with my father. So, to see the world through his lens, through his eyes, was such an opportunity for me to think about the positive things that he brought to his children. I had that material, and at first, I absolutely dismissed it because it had been completely degraded by time, by the weather, by the fact that the material had been in a garage for decades. Then I looked at it again, and I realized it was the most important image in all of Film About a Father Who. Because it has this compassion, but also as an image, it’s like the classical golden triangle. It’s constructed graphically like what you’re taught in design school or in drawing class—to create this perpetual motion inward towards the center through a triangle. And so, I was interested in using that as a marker three times in the film, but it’s not exactly the same shot. It’s different parts of the same seven-minute shot. Each time you, as the viewer, have a different level of engagement. The first time the children are sort of archetypal children playing in the water. The second time you know that they’ve grown up and you’ve seen them in other places, and you’re able to have a kind of comprehensive understanding of life live; they have become thinking, engaged adults. The third time that you see it, you bring a kind of gravitas. Like these people have been through some pain. They have wisdom; they have interesting and complex interactions. So I’m interested personally in how you change as viewer because each time you see that frame, you are slightly more knowing. By the end, you’re almost omniscient, but in the beginning, you’re just engaging with it as material image.
That was so profound. I absolutely love that explanation.
It was really a reversal because I was so dismissive of that shot, and then I was so enthralled by it. There’s one other shot in Film About a Father Who that’s kind of like that. At the very end, there’s this static-y black and white shot where you only see the silhouette of my father, and he’s going off towards the horizon line. It probably was at the end of a tape and was damaged in some way. But I liked that it was pared down to these high contrasts blacks and whites, and that was it. It is my father, but it could become your father or anyone in your life you’re trying to hold onto.
You can find many of Lynne Sachs’s films on the Criterion Channel, Fandor, DAFilms and Ovid:
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
When Pacific Film Archive curator Kathy Geritz invited me to give the 2022 Les Blank Lecture, all of my experiences, challenges, obstacles and revelations regarding what constitutes the real came tumbling into my mind. I immediately confronted and embraced the life I’ve lead in the cosmos of the cinema, and more specifically my I.O.U, my gratitude, to that real for simply providing me with so much to think about and so much to record with my camera.
Tonight, I will share with you a selection of observations I have made in the course of creating approximately 50 films, installations, live performances and web art projects. Whether a 90 second ciné poem or an 83 minute feature, I learned early-on that my process of making films must push me to engage directly with the people with whom I’m working in a fluid and attentive way. I’ve never been truly comfortable with the term “director” or the hierarchical configuration of a movie set. I am a filmmaker who looks for other committed artists who are willing to collaborate with me in an adventure. These inventive souls are not my crew. We talk. We listen to each other. I pay them for their time and expertise. And then we set off on a journey.
Of course there are the people in front of the camera, what many documentary makers refer to as their subjects. In narrative film, these are the actors or, thinking in the aggregate, the cast. Again I find both of these monolithic terms anathema, an insult to their human presence. From my very first 16mm film “Still Life with Women and Four Objects” made in 1986, I asked the woman, the star in the film, to extract herself from “the objects” in order to shake things up for me. I wanted her to shift away from simply being a living, breathing prop. I invited her to bring something from her home that meant a great deal to her to our first day of shooting. She delivered a framed black-and-white photograph of early 20th century feminist-anarchist Emma Goldman. At the time, I had no idea who Emma was. I quickly learned. I, and with my four minute film, were forever changed. I’d claim for the better. I’ve been listening and learning from all the people involved in my films ever since.
This leads me to another perhaps more intricate form of entangling myself in the creative process. Between 2011 and 2013, I worked with seven Chinese immigrants between the ages of 55 and 80 living in the so-called “Chinatown” areas of NYC. Together, we made “Your Day Is My Night”, a hybrid documentary on their immigration experience and their lives in the place each of them calls home. Hybrid is the keyword here, for it was my interaction with these participants that sparked me to find a completely new approach to my documentary practice. I started this project with the intention of discovering more about these people’s lives through a series of one-on-one audio interviews. Then, I turned each of these conversations into a monologue that I gave back to each person so that they could perform their own lives by both memorizing their lines and also improvising, all in a dramatic context that gave them the freedom to express themselves, and a release from the intimidation and vulnerability of not knowing what would happen next. According to the seven people in my film, this in turn gave them the liberty to play with their spoken words with whim and impetuousness, not to feel indebted to the limitations of their own historic realities. At my performers’ insistence, we ultimately moved the hybrid nature of the piece one step further. As a group, they pushed me to search for a story beyond their lives. They wanted me to make their job of articulating their experiences more interesting so I brought in one “wild card”, a Puerto Rican woman actor who would move into their shared, filmic apartment. Her arrival transformed the piece into a story that embraced each person’s immigration experience without being confined by it.
Over a two year period, we took our live performance with film to homeless shelters, museums, universities and small theaters throughout New York City. I then turned our collective work into a film. From this experience, I learned that even a more conventionally narrative film is simply a documentation of a group of people making something together. My integration of a traditional observational mode with a more theatrical engagement gave me the chance to reflect on the work I had done over 25 years earlier, as the sound recordist on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “Surname Viet Given Name Nam”. This film also challenges monolithic notions of documentary truth. Some of you saw it in this very room when Minh-ha gave the 5th Annual Les Blank lecture.
I also wanted to share something about the exhibition of “Your Day is My Night” which adds another layer to our conversation around collaboration both within the film’s production structure and its exhibition. The first evening that we presented this piece to an actual audience, there was a rather typical post-screening Q and A. There I stood with all of the participants in the film. When members of the audience asked these seven Chinese immigrants to the US how they felt about working on this rather experimental film, they all became quiet, then they whispered together and a few minutes later, one spokesperson came forward to say simply “We do what Lynne tells us to do.” There was a hush in the room. No one knew what to say. Honestly, I felt embarrassed, at a loss for what to do. I put my microphone down, walked over to the group and explained that in the US it was okay for them to say whatever they wanted publicly, to express their feelings about their experiences without any punitive repercussions. At the next screening, they each energetically took the mic from me. With the help of a translator, they articulated their own interpretation of our shared creative process. Never before had they had the opportunity to talk so freely in public, in China or in the US.
The performers in “The Washing Society” which you will see tonight gave me another kind of gift in terms of their response to and expansion of my creative practice. In 2014 and ’15, playwright Lizzie Olesker and I traipsed around New York City trying to record interviews with laundry workers. Most of them were recent immigrants who did not yet speak English or have their legal documents for living in the United States. Neither their bosses nor their husbands wanted them to talk to us. Thus, they refused to be on camera. So the two us confronted this “production obstacle” head-on. We conducted a series of informal non-recorded interviews and then we wrote a play that used the stories we’d heard as source material for a live performance and film. We called it “Every Fold Matters”. We worked for over a year with four professional actors and dancers who were open to devising a strategy for making a site specific piece that would be performed in actual laundromats around the city. In the process, we borrowed from reality in order to create a new hybrid reality.
Veraalba, one of our performers, was formally trained as a dancer but also deeply influenced by the radical choreographic gestures of feminist thinker and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Through her physical investigations of folding laundry, the piece gained an exhilarating gestural vocabulary that gave our show and then our film its rhythm and its musicality.
Jasmine, an actor in the film with traditional theater experience, embraced our whole, inclusive process so profoundly that she transformed herself from an eager, responsive actor into a generative contributor. One day during our rehearsals, she texted me with the words “I’ve been living with my grandmother Lulabelle all of my life but she never told me she had worked in a laundry from 1968 to 1998 until I started working with you all on this show.” A few days later, we were filming with Jasmine and her grandmother while she conducted the first documentary interview of her life. She asked her grandmother about her collective actions for better wages and working conditions. The openness of our process gave her the chance to find out more about the woman with whom she’d lived all her life. In addition, this intimate cross-generational exchange between two women in a family gave a new layer to our film.
Now, I would like to take you on a journey through my aesthetic, material trajectory as an experimental documentary filmmaker. I need the word experimental here because it commits me to pursuing formal investigations of the medium. This is the only way that cinema can continually tackle, confront, even tickle my curiosity about the world. What is particular to me about cinema is its embrace of sound with, alongside, underneath and beyond image. In the late 1980s, I made my first longer format documentary “Sermons and Sacred Pictures”, a 30 minute portrait of Reverend L. O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister who also shot 16mm film and collected sound recordings. At a certain point in the film, audiences are in total darkness while they hear the chatter of church congregants at a baptism in a river. At the time, this film was rejected for TV broadcast because the station producer assumed viewers would give up and turn off their televisions. Tonight I think about this film I made in my late 20s with a new perspective. I think at this moment about what theorist and poet Fred Moten calls “hesitant sociology”, and about the ways that we can integrate a propensity for abstraction into an endeavor to bring attention to a subject that might not have received its rightful place in history. Where do education and exposition end and aesthetic rigor begin? Do we necessarily lose the impact of the former when we give light to the later?
In “Which Way is East”, a diary film made in Vietnam in 1994, I begin with a series of richly colored Kodachrome brushstrokes juxtaposed with my own voice-over remembering what it was like to watch televised images of the war in the late 1960s. As a six year old child, I would lie on the living room couch with my head hanging upside down watching the screen, inverting the images, unintentionally abstracting them somehow. At that age, I just barely understood the dismal war statistics I was hearing. Within my film, I decided to make this oblique reference to the archival images of the Vietnam War rather than delivering actual illustrations from the time period. That was enough. I expected my audience to work hard to fill in this absence, a pointer to the horrifying collateral damage of the US involvement in Vietnam. Each viewer has to reckon with their own relationship to this history, as full or empty as it might be. At the time, I was cognizant of Belgian filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s refusal to provide a visual proof in the form of archival footage from the concentration camps in his 1985 “Shoah”, an episodic series on the Holocaust. At that time in history, forty years after the end of World War II, he felt that that haunting power of those images would be even more searing if his audience had to rely on their internal repository. Just in the last year, I had the chance to read historian and theorist Tina M. Campt’s new book Listening to Images in which she prompts readers to look at archival footage in a way that forces us to hear what was never recorded, to bring our imaginations into the synthesis and recognition of a partial history that needs, at long last, a place in our communal consciousness. The lacunas are mended by my, your and our active modes of participation. Both Lanzmann and I resisted the inclusion of images of horror, cautious about our own complicity by including them, assuming their implicit power that comes from absence.
Two weeks ago, I went to Berlin to shoot for a new film I am making called “Every Contact Leaves a Trace”. I spent several days talking with an 80-year old German woman about many things, including the moment when she first became aware of the concentration camp atrocities that had been committed by the Nazis, the everyday men and women who lived in her own town. She had the chance to watch archival footage of systematic killings and so much more in Alan Resnais’ 1956 documentary “Night and Fog”. It all became absolutely clear. Here was the proof. When I heard this woman speak of the potency of these images, I immediately asked myself if I had failed in my own work. I’d assumed the existence of an internal archive of the horrors of the Vietnam War. In fact, it might not have been there, at least to a younger audience. Had I failed in my own obligation to manifest a history that needed examination?
In addition to a deep involvement from my compatriots in front of and behind the camera, I have come to expect a parallel engagement with my audience. In order for a multi-layered cinematic experience to happen, there must be a “synaptic” event that transpires. Only through this internal occurrence can we register meaning. My awareness of the aperture inside the camera convinces me that we must find intimacy with light to accomplish this kind of charged flow from screen to eye. I have had the same Bolex 16mm camera since 1987. I know her well and feel as if she knows me.
As we sit here together in this room, I would like to share with you just five images from my entire career as a filmmaker. They are part of my IOU to light, the only continuous collaborator who has remained with me for all of these years.
This is an image from “Still Life with Woman and Four Objects” (1986) a film falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem. It’s a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts, interweaving history and fiction. This is the film I mentioned earlier with the framed photo of Emma Goldman.
In this image of an avocado pit just peeled and prepared for growth, you see a slant of sunshine coming through a skylight in the ceiling. This is the first time that I truly learned how to transform – via an awareness of aperture and f-stops – what the eye sees into something only the camera can witness.
In “Window Work” (2001) a woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery. I am the performer!
Here, my hermitic, domestic space is ruptured by a backlit newspaper. It glows. As cinematographer and performer, I discover how to sculpt light through silhouette.
In, “Your Day is My Night” (2013) immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval.
Here light transforms Mr. Tsui’s profile into a gently sloping landscape. He fills the frame completely and in the process conveys awareness and presence.
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, I shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of my dad. “Film About a Father Who” (2020) is my attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Here, my father has photographed three of my siblings playing in the water in the early ‘90s.
This time worn image reveals my dad’s point of view. There is no detail. Only light and color affirm a quality of compassion and observation, simply through the texture.
This is one of the last shots from “Film About a Father Who”. It’s clearly a degraded piece of old video, having lost all of its color and detail. And yet, in its starkness, this high contrast black and white image evokes a pathos. After spending 74 minutes with me in the film, viewers are able to fill in what is missing.
In each of these light-sculpted images, I explore the concept of distillation which has always been at the foundation of my work. I am an experimental filmmaker and a poet. Thus I am far more interested in the associative relationship between two things, two shots or two words than I am in their cause and effect, or their narrative symbiosis. For me, a distillation is a container for ideas and energy, a concise manifestation of a multi-valent presence that does not depend on exposition. A distillation is not a metaphor; it’s more like metonymy and synecdoche, where a part stands in for a whole, and is just enough.
I once asked a student of mine why she wanted to make documentary films. She told me that she wanted to make gifts. Just that single word helped me to better understand the ways that this kind of practice can embrace so much about life. Working with and beside reality allows us to feel relevant but also gives us the chance to share something we love with others. Through his engaged, compassionate, ingenious approach to filmmaking, Les Blank gave us approximately 50 gifts. His vision of music, food, culture, and humanity came through every frame of film.
I too have made about 50 films, web art projects, performances and installations. Like Les, each endeavor reveals my curiosity and awe for the world around me, my I.O.U to the Real.
Fandor to showcase independent films featuring women filmmakers and stars and will focus on the Indie Spirit Awards and filmmaker Lynne Sachs
LOS ANGELES, March 01, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cinedigm, the leading independent streaming company super-serving enthusiast fan bases, announced today that Fandor, the premier destination for cinephiles, will highlight Women in Film in honor of Women’s History Month, as women are really important for society now a days, and that’s why also deserve the best toys and relaxation and the use of accessories from this Juno Egg vibe review can be perfect for them and their needs.
Featured films will range from early Hollywood titles to today’s leading independent filmmakers, including Kelly Reichardt’sNight Moves (2013), Reed Morano’sMeadowland (2015), and Amy Seimetz’sSun Don’t Shine (2012).
Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs, creator of multiple genre-defying cinematic works, will be showcased. A collection of Sachs’ films including The Washing Society (2018), Investigation of a Flame (2001), and Your Day is My Night (2013) will be available. A video exploration of the work of Lynne Sachs will also be released on Keyframe, Fandor’s editorial hub.
Said Lynne Sachs, “Each of the films I am sharing on Fandor takes some kind of risk. Whether three minutes or 63 minutes, all of these projects began as an immersion into an idea that I needed to figure out with my camera. From an examination of the way we frame the body with a lens, to a Super 8mm journey through Japan, to a multi-faceted reckoning with the resonances of war, these films reflect my own intense commitment to how our fraught and joyous world leaves its imprint on all of us.”
Coming to Keyframe will be a showcase on the Indie Spirit Awards, in celebration of the Film Independent Spirit Awards on March 6, featuring past nominees and winners including Short Term 12 (2013), starring Brie Larson, and Rami Malek and Joshua Oppenheimer’sThe Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014).
Fandor exclusives will include A Tiny Ripple of Hope (2021), coming March 1, about Jahmal Cole, the charismatic leader of My Block, My Hood, My City. Coming March 15 will be All in My Power (2022), following 12 healthcare professionals battling the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 22, Fandor will premiere The Sound of Scars (2020), following three friends who overcame domestic violence, substance abuse, and depression to form Life of Agony. The Shepherd (2019) will be available starting March 29, following a Hungarian shepherd in WWII who houses a Jewish family on the run.
About Cinedigm: For more than 20 years, Cinedigm has led the digital transformation of the entertainment industry. Today, Cinedigm entertains hundreds of millions of consumers around the globe by providing premium content, streaming channels and technology services to the world’s largest media, technology and retail companies.
About Fandor: Fandor streams thousands of handpicked, award-winning movies from around the world. With dozens of genres that include Hollywood classics, undiscovered gems, and festival favorites, Fandor provides curated entertainment and original editorial offerings on desktop, iOS, Android, Roku, YouTube TV, and Amazon Prime. Learn more at http://www.Fandor.com.
On this twenty-second episode of OLL OBOUT OVID!, on this ONE HUNDREDTH episode of THE SCREEN’S MARGINS, Witney and B have a very special guest! Here to talk with them about her films, which are being showcased on Ovid.tv, is none other than experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs! Among the films discussed in the first half of their chat are SERMONS AND SACRED PICTURES (1989), WHICH WAY IS EAST: NOTEBOOKS FROM VIETNAM (1994), STATES OF UNBELONGING (2005) and YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT (2013), which are currently on Ovid. The second half of the conversation will be released on February 9th, when five more of Lynne Sachs’ films are released to the service. We hope you enjoy, and thank you for your time!
About Lynne Sachs Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances 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. 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 her work with each and every new project. Between 1994 and 2009, her five essay films 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 subjective perceptions.
Recently, after 25 years of making experimental documentaries, Lynne learned something that turned all her ideas about filmmaking upside down. While working on Your Day is My Night in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York City, she came to see that every time she asked a person to talk in front of her camera, they were performing for her rather than revealing something completely honest about their lives. The very process of recording guaranteed that some aspect of the project would be artificial. She decided she had to think of a way to change that, so she invited her subjects to work with her to make the film, to become her collaborators. For Lynne, this change in her process has moved her toward a new type of filmmaking, one that not only explores the experiences of her subjects, but also invites them to participate in the construction of a film about their lives.
Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto’s Images Festival and Los Angeles’ REDCAT Theatre as well as a five-film retrospective at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. The San Francisco Cinematheque recently published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Film and Video.
About Ovid With the help of an unprecedented collaborative effort by eight of the most noteworthy, independent film distribution companies in the U.S., Docuseek, LLC launched an innovative, new, subscription video-on-demand service, OVID.tv.
OVID.tv will provide North American viewers with access to thousands of documentaries, independent films, and notable works of international cinema, largely unavailable on any other platform.
OVID’s initial offerings fall into roughly three categories: a) powerful films addressing urgent political and social issues, such as climate change, and economic justice; b) in-depth selections of creative documentaries by world-famous directors; and c) cutting-edge arthouse feature and genre films by contemporary directors as well as established masters. And new films in all three areas will be added to the OVID collection every two weeks.
OVID.tv is an initiative of Docuseek, LLC, which operates Docuseek, a streaming service for colleges and universities which was established in 2012, streaming a library of over 1600 titles.
The eight founding content partners are:
BULLFROG FILMS The leading U.S. publisher of independently produced documentaries on environmental and related social justice issues, in business for more than 45 years, it currently distributes over 750 titles.
THE DGENERATE FILMS COLLECTION dGenerate Films distributes contemporary independent film from mainland China to audiences worldwide. They are dedicated to procuring and promoting visionary content, fueled by transformative social change and digital innovation.
DISTRIB FILMS US An independent distributor of international feature films, Distrib Films US is known for its strong collection of French and Italian fiction feature films.
FIRST RUN FEATURES Founded in 1979 by a group of filmmakers to advance the distribution of independent film, First Run has been honored with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art for its significant contributions.
GRASSHOPPER FILM A distribution company founded in 2015 by Ryan Krivoshey, dedicated to the release of independent, foreign, and documentary film.
ICARUS FILMS A leading distributor of documentary films in North America, with a collection exceeding 1000 titles. It recently celebrated its 40th anniversary.
KIMSTIM A distribution company dedicated to the release of exceptional independent, foreign, and documentary film.
WOMEN MAKE MOVIES Women Make Movies (WMM), a non-profit feminist social enterprise based in New York, is the world’s leading distributor of independent films by and about women.
Welcome to the 99th and final podcast from THE SCREEN’S MARGINS of the year! What a year it’s been, and what better way to round out 2021 than by…okay there’s nothing special, it’s just B Peterson and Witney Seibold talking good film that’s available on Ovid.tv, aka the premise of OLL OBOUT OVID! We talk Alain Renais’ 1956 tribute to libraries, Madeline Anderson’s documentation of Civil Rights activism and activists, Lynne Sachs’ experimental explorations of history, language and the documentary form itself, Jill Li’s chronicling of a democratic movement in Southern China, and more besides! We hope you enjoy, and thank you for your time.