Tag Archives: Your Day is My Night

Lynne Sachs: Disarming Drift by J. Ronald Green in Millennium Film Journal #60

Lynne Sachs: Disarming Drift
by J. Ronald Green
Millennium Film Journal #60
Fall, 2014

I have found several of Lynne Sachs’s films unusually disarming. Wind in Our Hair starts by just hanging out with four barely adolescent girls and seems to drift with them to no evident purpose; one is tempted to say that the attention and impressionistic, closely shot fascination comes from a mother’s affection that a general audience has little reason to feel. By the time a narrative event starts to shape the film, we sort of know these girls, or we start to feel that we are among them by way of the film’s stylistic drifting. A non-incisive drift transforms itself into a thickening bundle of barely perceptible but compelling discourses through which one finds oneself caring about the characters, not as individualized, biographical characters, but as female beings drifting toward a world that is itself drifting toward sexual and political fission, a fission that might be disastrous or revolutionary. The energy that would feed that fission is felt in the experimental music of Juana Molina that accompanies the transcendent avant-garde film poem of the end-credits—the drifting girls have suddenly exploded into articulate girl-power and woman music, just as the drifting Lynne Sachs-made film explodes into incisive experimental film. The stirring success of the music and of the film’s coda suggest a positive future for these drifting girls, while the discourses woven finely into their lives during the entire film remain frighteningly daunting.

There is an analogously disarming feel in Drift and Bough, though it is a totally different kind of film with no character development at all. There I was disarmed by the unassuming succession of art-photo shots of snowy Central Park, shots that seemed pretty ordinary, but that again gently drifted toward a richer collection of elements, such as the graphic lines that did things like scale shifting. The lines of duck trails through the ice-pack—lines that “drew” a kind of benign insinuation into a cold world—seemed to help effect an insinuation into my affect. By the time that film ends, I have been drawn, partially consciously, into a meditative state that I wanted to resist at its beginning. The ending—with people moving about and with bicycle taxi and camera both drifting to the right—was a break in that mood, but it still maintains some of the meditative mood through the realization that a barely perceptible superimposition of nothing very distinguishable has occurred mysteriously for the first and only time in the film.

The disarming feeling in Sachs’s films is especially strong in Your Day is My Night. Again the film starts by hanging out with some ordinary people, in this case Chinese immigrants in a confined space doing ordinary things. We gradually meet these people by name and hear them interact and tell stories. I won’t try to develop how that works, but will just say that somehow this ordinariness changes into—not just the liking and caring about the characters that one can see in numerous effective documentary films such as Salesman and Fallen Champ and The Square and American Pictures, or in the ur-documentary Nanook, and even the surreal Act of Killing—the ordinariness in Sachs’s film changes into something more than those films’ liking of or sympathizing with characters, something more like loving those characters, though that seems a bit strong.

My main point is the experience across several films of this imperceptible transformation from a disarming ordinariness to something strongly opposite. The kicker for me with Your Day is My Night was that I first experienced the film as a documentary, not as a scripted film with actors performing characters via learned lines; thus, my feeling of being disarmed extended to the ontology of the represented reality. That reversal of expectation, from something like Direct Cinema to a set of carefully researched and scripted performances—including the insertion of a “fake” character, Lourdes—comes at different points in the film for different viewers, but that doesn’t really change the reception structure of the film, or the films discussed above—they have little or no character or story arc but have a reception arc that moves one from being disarmed, even being uninterested and dubious, to something stronger than caring and understanding.

Sachs’s refusal to romanticize the glimpses of hopefulness, and her ending of the film with a quotation that re-affirms the power of the world’s alienation, are important contributions to the depth that the reception-arc achieves. Though the film finally leads into territory beyond the opening close-shots of packed human flesh, beyond the later medium-shots of crowded beds within crowded rooms, and the still later long-shots within crowded apartments within a crowded neighborhood of one of the world’s most crowded cities…though the film leads us beyond this over-determined within-ness to other, less impacted parts of the city, indeed leads us to a bridge that Lourdes—the outsider—introduces to Haung, one of the Chinatown shift-bedders—though the film takes us out there to that suggestively transitional bridge, nevertheless the viewer remembers what Haung has said earlier in the film that he has no benign means to get out of this life buried deep within the world situation. He will not ever be able to go home to see his children and he will have to kill himself when he reaches retirement age, perhaps by jumping off a bridge, he says. We remember that line when we see him on the bridge with Lourdes, but we also see that Lourdes has benignly infected his alienation, and has infected the entire over-determined within-ness of the characters’ lives and of the film’s structure. The deep within-ness of the characters’ situations has been broached by the character Lourdes, and by Sachs with her bizarre idea to make a film of these unknown Chinese and the more bizarre idea to introduce a Puerto Rican immigrant deep into this pervading within-ness; Lynne Sachs herself has infected the characters’ alienation, for real, by making this strange film, and thus Sachs opens the documentary people, who play themselves, to Sachs’s world and to the film’s audience. And she opens the viewer to a well-hidden within-ness, through documentary explorations that go deeper than Direct Cinema. All this in a way that is so disarming.

Asian American Life TV features Your Day is My Night in Focus on Chinatown Shiftbeds

Asian American Life’s Minnie Roh brings us to Chinatown, to a community of undocumented immigrants hidden from view who live in a form of housing known as “shiftbeds.”

Featuring excerpts form Your Day is My Night with a special focus on our beloved wedding singer Yun Xiu Huang. An interview with director Lynne Sachs is also included.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W4BA0VXNmE&feature=youtu.be&t=1m

MIFF movie review: ‘Your Day is my Night’

Lynne Sachs has spent 25 years of her young life making films, installations and documentaries from Vietnam to Bosnia and all corners of the world. She is a master of the art and a gifted collector of the tiny moments of the human comedy and tragedy.

At home in New York City, she became intrigued with stories about the “shift bed” people of Manhattan’s Chinatown, a collective of Chinese performers and workers who live in an old apartment building on lower Manhattan’s Hester Street.

In this gorgeous, breathtaking film, “Your Day is my Night,” she takes us deep into an almost fairyland world.

With the camera magic of Sean Hanley, who did the editing as well, and Ethan Mass, Sachs walks us up the long flights of stairs to the heart and home of these pilgrims, all displaced from the big cities and tiny villages of China. Prepare yourself. This is no ordinary documentary. This is film, a canvas, a moving poem. It never stands still. It moves and it moves us.

The film opens with a closeup — and Hanley uses that form throughout — of an old woman waking. Her eyes flutter, her lips move as though trying to rid the taste of a bad dream of ancient memories deep in her DNA.

The camera is there as dawn breaks, with the light of a dirty New York sun turning clean and golden as it fills these rooms. Slowly, there is a montage of awakening bodies, floating white sheets, flowery scarves and cheap, yellowing curtains in a slow Chinese ballet of ever changing color. Stravinsky would have killed to score it, but Stephen Vitiello’s score is proper and enchanting. From here, the day workers go about their tasks throughout the city, and the night workers come home and take their places on the beds made warm by the day people, the sheets still bearing the imprint of the night bodies.

Most of us are shocked by these seemingly airless rooms that are smaller than some people’s closets. They are filled with tiny beds, double decked, triple decked. They first make us think of kennels for humans too complicated to engage. But these are Chinese,and despite the fact that some of them have lived for generations in poverty, they have inherited the gifts to transform each room into musical notes. They hang posters, small pieces of art, photographs and notes on whatever piece of space they have. There are goldfish and small birds. The air is redolent with the aroma of their communal cooking.

We meet seven of the dwellers, all performers, dancers, singers, magicians and actors, as they move through the days and nights of their lives. In Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese, we learn the stories they’ve brought with them out of the smoke of their pasts.

We meet Chung Che, who was a medical professor in a Chinese university, then came to America and worked as a garment cutter. Eventually, with his medical knowledge, he became a massage therapist.

There is Yun Xiu Huang, a larger than life entertainer, a gregarious Chinese Tom Jones, who has been here for twenty years working as a professional singer and musician. He performs at weddings and Chinese banquets. These tiny rooms shake with his laughter. Some work in building maintenance and restaurants, some teach dance and Chinese music. But all cling to one another like sparrows in a familiar tree.

Lynn Sachs brings seven of them together and steps back, letting the camera of Sean Hanley move among the players. In one sequence, Sachs and Hanley take us to a big Chinese wedding that looks like it was taken from the musical version of “World Of Susie Wong.” In another, the group perform an amateur dance number in home made cowboy costumes, dancing to Bizet’s “Carmen.” Hanley’s closeups, each one, are framable pieces of art, that look as they though they should be illustrating poems. His color and editing are astonishing. He moves from lips to eyes like Vermeer, to hands practicing Tai Chi in the early light and the blue light of evening. Director Sachs places the monologues carefully throughout. One tells of his journey from China as he massages a friend. Another tells his housemates of his family following the great military leader Chiang Kai-Shek from war-torn Peking to Taiwan, where he loses his parents, never to see them again.

An old man,who slept on stone as a child, walks the streets of Manhattan, collecting old mattresses, torn and old, simply because he never had one. These stories are told to one another in their native language, not meant to entertain us. We are merely welcome eavesdroppers, and we find ourselves lucky to be here.

We are in the presence of survivors unlike any we’ve ever known, people who have learned by listening to the inner voices of their ancestors, how to survive war, drought, and famine. I feel you have never seen anything like it.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer and former actor.

Direct Link to review in Kennebec Journal: http://www.centralmaine.com/2014/07/15/miff-movie-review-your-day-is-my-night/

SF MOMA “OPEN SPACE” ESSAY ON YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT BY LYNNE SACHS

Your Day is My Night

by Anne Lesley Selcer
02/07/2014

“. . . dawn, always new, often superb, inaugurates the return of the everyday.”—Henri Levebvre

“the house protects the dreamer”—Gaston Bachelard

“. . . the non-I that protects the I.”—Gaston Bachelard

This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.

Coming into culture is also coming into discipline. It begins with trying to get newborn babies to sleep at night (which they would not otherwise), simple: night from day. The process of subjectivation is palpable, you can trace its progression daily via a series of corrections, separations, instructions. We teach them to be children. There is an argument lurking deeply in here somewhere that art is one level on which politics can get shifted.

What if, after an infancy and subsequent enculturation into sleeping at night, a person got flipped by work into an opposite schedule. Then we have another culture. We have a culture that no longer forms, and is formed by an individual body growing up through concentric circles of mother’s arms, family home, neighborhood, village or town, no longer resonating with, as Henri Lefebvre says, “days, nights, seasons, the waves and tides of the sea, monthly cycles,” a body intensely interrupted, mediated. Then what if that worker did not have a bed, but rented one by the shift? What if that body without a bed also did not yet have citizenship, but also did not have the proper papers to go home again.

This is an argument that the beauty of the film Your Day is My Night — a saturated beauty of texture and proximity, stamped in Chinatown reds and blues, awash in ambivalent New York light — is a palliative beauty. The film is a love song to the singular face. Silently, at the center of the film is the bed, site of dreams, synecdoche for the individual interiority, become a capitalist commodity. The failure of protection — of home, of family, of country — refrain throughout. Here, it is impossible to experience filmic love for the singular face, without also understanding this is a film about the recession of the singular, of the subject.

The project began when Lynne Sachs, curious about the Chinatown shift bed, entered the bustling, open sociality of a Chinese cultural center and asked the people there for stories. She filmed them cooking together, eating together, passing time, and retelling the stories in a small apartment which approximates the spaces where many live. Everything here is aesthetically interesting: the music, the color, the camera variation, the mishmash of things, the pacing, the intimacy between the economically constituted family of the small apartment. She shot in mirrors often to increase light and space among the warren of bunk beds.

Here, we could talk about the social air of a tiny apartment shared by numerous, unrelated adults, about the novel, generative collaboration of the experimental filmmaker with Chinatown residents, or we could talk about the profoundly vulnerable population of Chinese elders living in the enclaves of protection, of shared language and culture, that dot the United States. We could talk about the direct threat posed by the expansion of capital into every interstice of city space evidenced in San Francisco by Ellis Act evictions, of the Lee family, who lived in their Chinatown apartment for thirty-four years, in Vancouver by the destruction of, among other buildings, the Ming Sun Benevolent Society,[1] and portended by the growing number of art studios in New York’s Chinatown. We all know about the rhythm that follows artists around cities. What if we can call the source of the night worker’s interruption what it is essentially: another body, with more capital? Then there is a new rhythm, a rhythm which emanates from the bodies whose needs are so large, that the space of one bed for one dreaming body is unviable.[2] We might consider the shift bed on the same spectrum as the necessity to leave one’s own home country. We might consider that the rhythm of the concentric culture was always a dream.

The artist has shown us our dream, via beauty of the individual face, to the quiet and sweet melody of that dream’s failure. From this contradiction, I surmise a theory of art’s political efficacy in the present: The impulsion to all of us right now is to become very, very small and very hard underneath several layers of total availability, adaptability, flexibility, and precarity, infinitely adjustable by location, schedule, and interface, inside of which is assumed a small core of self, hard, closed, and perpetually vying for its own survival and individual satisfaction. Against this structural adjustment of self into subject, art remains open — and I don’t mean the market which surrounds art, I mean the work of the artist herself who, in lieu of being able still to resonate openly with the rhythms, generations, and seasons, relegates her open flow into object-based play, and each time re-presents the possibility of an open world, to be accessed through the openness of others. That site of encounter with art is the troubled political efficacy of art in this moment. It is troubled because that dear and representative moment of opening is itself commodified, sanctioned, and sectioned off, and the habit of having it, like a porn climax, can stand in for an actually open world.

But I fight on the side of the creator, who, against the self’s structural adjustment does this thing, be it alone, in order to be multiple again. Perhaps that is where it becomes relevant that the subject/actors in Your Day is My Night eventually became a troupe that performed the script live around New York, and to this day hang out with the director. Except Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Quing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, Sheut Hing Lee, and Kam Yin Tsui still have no real permanent, secure base from which to protect their dreams — and that, of course, is the limitation of art. Art is not a corrective song, perhaps it’s even a vestige. But the human body — the beginning point or end point of the rhythm of Humanist culture, and that which justifies it — is now overtaken by and dissolved into the rhythm itself. No bed, for some, no nation. The film ends with this Fedrico García Lorca poem.

Forgetting does not exist, not dreams

just raw flesh

kisses tie our mouths

in a tangle of new veins.

Those who hurt will hurt without rest,

those who fear death will carry it on their shoulders.

Let there be a panorama of open eyes

and burning bitter wounds.

Nobody sleeps in this world.

No one. No one.

I said it before.

Nobody sleeps.

___________________________________________________________________________

1. More on the struggle in Vancouver’s Chinatown here: http://friendsof439.wordpress.com/.

2. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 10.

___________________________________________________________________________

Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival and in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires International Film Festival. The San Francisco Cinematheque recently published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn. Your Day is My Nightscreened at the Pacific Film Archive on November 20, 2013, curated by Kathy Geritz.

https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2014/02/your-day-is-my-night/

Travel Thoughts – Visiting Beijing

Some thoughts from my time in Beijing:

Getting to know the vibrant film community here in Beijing through the China Women’s Film Festival and the community organizers at the Crossroads Center. The opening ceremony begins this evening.

China Women’s Film Festival opened with stirring images about women’s continued struggles worldwide. I was particularly impressed by the forthright address by the UN representative in China who had an extraordinary grasp of the issues. Saw a great film on the Chinese lesbian film director from the 1940s Esther Eng.

Post #3 from Beijing: I meet an art critic Wang Zhang Wen at the regular weekly NGO meeting at the Crossroads Center in the city’s old hutong neighborhood. In response to my dislike for the famous but rather commercial 798 art district, he offers to take me to the Songzhuang art district on the edge of the city. We go the next day and I discover an incredible live/work area with studios for 5000 artists! If only NYC could offer a community like this that is affordable too! We visit Wang’s cabaret style cafe The Chestnut Tree where he hosts experimental films and readings. He offers coffee from from dainty cups and saucers and tells us that the cafe is named for the Chestnut Tree Cafe in 1984. This was the place, according to the character Winston, where thought criminals spent their time. “Under the spreading Chestnut Tree I sold you and you sold me.”

Post #4 from Beijing: Today I screened Your Day Is My Night to a great, really insightful audience in Bejing as part of the China Women’s Film Festival. later I was on a panel with four brilliant feminist film scholars. What a wonderful, feisty, compassionate group including Yang Hui from Beijing Film Academy, Yushan Huang from Taiwan University of the Arts, Yu Min Mei and Juan Jiang. We all responded to the question “What is a woman’s film?” And on our journey talked about the films of Barbara Hammer, Trinh T Minh-ha, Yvonne Rainer, Susan Sontag, Jane Campion, and many others

China post #6: Shanghai screening tonight of my 1991 film “The House of Science” at a women’s bookstore. All thanks to the nuanced translations of Lesley Yiping Chin who is so capable of articulating the poetry of Gertrude Stein and other mysteries in Chinese.

I saw Liu Chuang “Segmented Landscape” at the Shanghai Art Biennale and was transformed by the way that the work made me think about security, safety, complacency and fear.

Sight & Sound Best Films of 2013 List

Published online at Sight & Sound – The International Film Magazine

Best Films of 2013 List
By Sukhdev Sandhu

“New York’s Chinatown, a place as much spectral as real, flickers and flares into life in this singular hybrid of documentary, performance piece and cine-monologue. Seven working-class, immigrant residents of a shift-bed apartment play versions of themselves, recalling violent upheavals, long journeys and endless yearnings. Beautifully scored by Stephen Vitiello, marrying subtle comedy to its dominant mood of dreamy disorientation, and achieving a rare intimacy, it’s one of the most mysterious and magical evocations of the migrant city in many a year.”

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/annual-round-ups/best-films-2013/contributors-best-films-2013-list

BBC selects 8 Films to Watch in 2014

Eight films to watch in 2014

Published online on January 3^rd, 2014

By Tom Brook

“Director Lynne Sachs’ Your Day is My Night shines a light on a little documented sub-culture in New York’s Chinatown, chronicling immigrants who live communally in buildings where there’s a shift-bed system. One person returns from a stint of overnight work to sleep in a bed just vacated by another person off to their day job. The form of this documentary is as compelling as its content. It is a beautiful collage of different media and music intricately edited together with the often emotional testimony of the immigrants.”

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140102-eight-films-to-watch-in-2014

La ficción del documento by Rojo Robles

http://www.80grados.net/your-day-is-my-night-la-ficcion-del-documento/

por Rojo Robles | 22 de Marzo de 2013

La cita era para las 8:00pm y el studio de Sofía Gallisá en Fort Green, Brooklyn empezó a llenarse de amigos puertorriqueños. Éramos cerca de diez. Habíamos sido convocados por la cineasta y profesora, Lynne Sachs. Lynne quería conocer nuestras historias de cama, grabarlas y estudiarlas. Sofía, su colaboradora, confiaba en nuestro poder narrativo y extrañezas, de ahí la invitación.

La discusión fue entretenida y alegre. Se habló de dormir rodeado de almohadas por todas partes, de intolerancia al ruido, de estar envuelto en sábanas como momias, de pelearse por el lado de la cama con la pareja, de idiosincracias de limpieza; loqueras y rituales de cada cual al momento de acostarse.

Una semana después me enteré de que aquel encuentro fue una audición y que tres de nosotros (Veraalba Santa, Pedro Leopoldo Sánchez y yo) habíamos sido seleccionados para participar en el proyecto de Lynne, Your Day is my Night. En mi caso como escritor.

Una vez me reuní con Lynne me informó que simultáneo a nosotros un grupo de chinos fueron igualmente entrevistados/audicionados para el filme que se empezaba a gestar: un documental híbrido acerca de las camas itinerantes en los apartamentos de Chinatown. Parte de mi tarea fue ir con ella a realizar nuevas entrevistas con los seleccionados. Mi misión sería la de co-escribir unos monólogos basados en lo escuchado.

“My way of filmmaking is all about process – Tell me who you are and I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do and let’s work on something together. I was taken by a Chinatown activist to the Lin Sing Association on Mott Street, where he told me I could find willing performers. Most of Lin Sing’s members are retired, so they have time. I happened to come during a karaoke contest. The place was packed. I said I am auditioning –as a documentary filmmaker I usually say I’m interviewing– I am making a film about beds. I didn’t explain any more than that. About 40 people signed up to come to audition and 26 people showed up. Working with a Chinese translator, I interviewed every one of them but I only asked them about one thing. I said, “Do you have any interesting stories about beds in your life? Did you ever have to share a bed? Did you ever live in a really crowded apartment where there were many beds? I taped the interviews with these 26 people. It ended up that seven people actually had these stunning and haunting stories to tell me.“ -Lynne Sachs on Asian Cinevision, Cinema Spotlight: Your Day is my Night

Las historias de los siete chinos, cuatro hombres y tres mujeres, se distanciaban bastante de lo que había escuchado o contado con los puertorriqueños. En sus historias no había mucho espacio para celebrar la cotidianidad o las selecciones de comodidad. Todas estas historias remitían a pasados devastadores, separaciones familiares, traumas, violencia y eventos horribles que finalmente llevaban a experiencias de imigración. La mayoría como hijos de comerciantes fueron sacudidos de mala manera por la revolución. Debieron abandonar el país. En una primera instancia el hacinamiento en Chinatown, New York, tenía la pinta de progreso.

“Interestingly, the disturbing stories that you hear in the film surprised Jenifer Lee, one of our translators. She’s from Taiwan originally and she said that she’d never heard about so many terrible things happening as early as the 1940s in China. Things like gangs breaking into someone’s house and beating up parents in front of their children. People were not really talking about this kind of violence in history very much. Still, most of our performers did bring their kids to the show. To me, this is important, because they were proud as performers and a lot of them wanted to reveal their tragic stories to their own families.” Ibid.

En esa primera etapa de atento escucha en pos de un texto se me presentaron varios retos. Primeramente andar a ciegas en el laberinto idiomático en el cual me había metido. Los entrevistados solo hablaban mandarín. Sus historias pasaban por el sedazo de una traductora. Sabía que algo siempre se me escapaba: un matiz, una entonación, un comentario de doble sentido, quién sabe. No había manera de identificar los aspectos emotivos del habla o de corroborar cuan fiel era la traductora.

De este escuchar sin referencia yo tomaba notas en inglés que luego condensaba y le daba algo de tono cinemático. Lynne escribía por su cuenta y luego yo editaba ambos textos en una versión casi final. El proceso se invertía y se les hacía una traducción en mandarín para que ellos se aprendieran o improvisaran, como terminó siendo el caso, a partir de sus monólogos. En todo ese recorrido de capas lingüísticas se quedaba la sensación de un algo incomunicado, lost in translation.

El siguiente reto consistió en introducir a los personajes puertorriqueños de Veraalba y Pedro en el mundo de Chinatown. Lynne no estaba interesada en repetir el proceso de filtrar la realidad y contar una versión estudiantil y artística del inmigrante en NY. Su interés era el de crear una ficción acerca de unos boricuas de clase baja que terminan viviendo entre estos señores chinos. Los personajes servirían como catalizadores para las historias chinas. La película era tanto una propuesta documental como un invento de ficción. Había que nadar en ambas aguas.

Muchas preguntas surgieron: ¿Cómo manejar la yuxtaposición de ambos acercamientos? ¿Cómo serle fiel a la cruda historia china? ¿Cómo mantener una credibilidad con estos puertorriqueños de la ficción? ¿Deberíamos enfocarnos también en las dificultades de la emigración puertorriqueña? ¿Es este filme el foro indicado para ello?

El trabajo con Lynne propone retos muy interesantes pero rara vez conclusiones o métodos fáciles. Su acercamiento como cineasta da muestra de su visión poética del mundo. Una visión personal y de referencias eclécticas que toma tiempo descubrir, pero estimulante y sui generis sin duda. Su proceso fílmico señala a las prácticas de directores como Jean-Luc Godard oTerrence Malick, quienes privilegian la improvisación actoral y visual y la intertextualidad. Fue en la misma filmación y posteriormente en la sala de edición, donde se fueron tomando las decisiones de tono, construcción narrativa y de utilización de los textos. En la película se mezclan escenas actuadas con momentos puramente documentales como una boda china o un talent show en un centro comunal de chinatown.

Los monólogos chinos los mantuvimos bastante fieles a los datos recibidos por los actores. Se agilizaron y sintetizaron en una prosa coloquial que podía encajar en cualquier situación. En un inicio escribimos ciertos rodeos literarios que demostraron no ser necesarios para comunicar sus historias. El poder de las anécdotas era suficiente. Mientras menos adornos mejor. Los personajes cuentan sus historias mientras cocinan, comen, tejen, tocan el piano, dan un masaje, ven una película en la laptop o simplemente están tirados en sus catres. La cámara explora sus rostros y partes del cuerpo desde muy cerca y se sumerje en los distintos objetos del apartamento. La visual es tanto íntima como claustrofóbica. Esto fue tanto una decisión estética de los cinematográfos como una necesidad traída por las circunstancias espaciales. La narrativa visual en Your Day is My Night es tan importante como la palabra hablada y en muchos momentos incluso más evocadora.

“Because of the tight quarters, some parts of your body cannot move. What you can move more freely is your hands. In this circumstance the performer’s hands became two bodies. They are interesting and sculptural. So we tried to use the hands and the sheets as two kinds of landscapes. From the very beginning this was a visual plan we had. I always wanted the sheets to become like caverns, to have a feeling of adventure over the sheets. There was one shot of Mr. Huang’s pink sheet right after his first monologue. I wanted it to feel like the Grand Canyon, or the Steppes in Eurasia, something very far out there.” Ibid.

Los personajes puertorriqueños fueron más dificiles de componer y sostener en el filme. Como no estaban basados en datos reales se les inventó una vida. Lourdes, el personaje de Veraalba, trabajaba como empleada en un Ikea arreglando camas (showroom beds). Carlos, su hermano (Pedro) había muerto en un accidente de carro pero ella se lo imaginaba por todos lados cargando una planta de moriviví. Lourdes se va de Puerto Rico tratando de escapar de su propia angustia (la muerte de su hermano, una madre opresiva) pero algo de su motivación queda ambigua. Su proceso como inmigrante es históricamente menos trágico aunque advertimos vive perdida tratando de encontrar un ancla. Lourdes, quien también es bailarina y escritora, se muda a Chinatown buscando conocer una cultura lejana a la suya. Sentirse despatriada es su manera de encontrar su esencia como persona.

Creo que con Lourdes alcanzamos construir una historia rica en matices, tipo novela de aprendizaje; pero desarrollarla, contar todos esos detalles, significaba alejarse del tema principal que motivaba a Lynne: las camas itinerantes; el chinatown oculto y hacinado. Dejar que el personaje moviera la trama era hacer otra película teniendo a la comunidad de chinatown como trasfondo secundario. Ese no era el balance que se buscaba entre ficción y documental. Aunque se filmaron muchas escenas acerca de Lourdes y Carlos, poco a poco Lynne y Sean Hanley cinematógrafo, co-editor y productor, las fueron extirpando (la historia sobre Carlos fue eliminada por completo, por ejemplo) para mantener el foco del filme y una duración adecuada.

“Originally the film was a little bit more narrative. For example, we had this whole part where Mr. Huang disappears, because Lourdes originally tries to get him out of Chinatown after he claims that he never leaves. They walk across the Manhattan bridge and she says: “I have to go to work”. When she leaves to go to work, he’s never seen again. It didn’t work in the film. It turned it into a narrative film that had a forced story and people judged it on the acting.” Ibid.

A pesar de este proceso de eliminación, el personaje de Lourdes cumple una función importante: crear un puente entre el apartamento y el exterior, un afuera que va más allá de la comunidad de chinatown y de la generación de los protagonistas chinos.

“One thing that I didn’t want to happen in this film was to portray either the shift-bed houses or Chinatown as isolated enclaves that didn’t exist anywhere else…I wanted to say that in 21st Century America, life is more porous. People have accidental interactions that affect them, and so I felt like bringing in not just another language, but also another person with a slightly different immigration experience, would add to that conversation. I also felt that for an audience, it broke the snowglobe feeling of “I’m looking in, but I cannot go in.” That would imply that Chinatown was a kind of hermetic space. So I thought that by having a new person in the apartment who’s a little bit wide-eyed, who wanted to learn from her older “roommates”, we could offer the audience the opportunity to become more involved.“ Ibid.

Durante año y medio mientras se editaba la película Lynne regresó con Sean varias veces para filmar tomas ambientales y aveces pequeñas escenas extras. En una de estas escenas se logró acceso a un apartamento repleto de camas itinerantes. La landlady y algunos inquilinos se dejaron filmar y hablan cómodamente con Huang, el cantante de bodas, uno de los personajes más curiosos del reparto. Esta escena es de las más impresionantes por la tristeza y resignación que esta manera de vivir trae a los implicados.

Ese juego entre escenas orquestradas y escenas documentales culminó con unas tomas en que se filmó a los protagonistas chinos en uno de los performances del “work in progress”. Estas tomas, por tener iluminación teatral y movimientos del tai-chi, tienen un aspecto surrealista siendo a la vez un registro híbrido entre ficción y documentación de las actividades del grupo.

“Far into our production, as I was documenting one of our live performances, I thought “This is really expressive and totally non-verbal, why aren’t we using it in the film?” Again, the idea, the process, revealed itself, whereas the more plot driven story was what I was forcing on them. It was artificial. So I took out all of that and allowed the film to become more improvisational and intuitive. This switched everything. We spent a year edit the other way and then just threw it all out when we realized how lucky we were to work with people so confident about their bodies, very willing to go on the stage and move freely. They had that ability and confidence.” Ibid.

Mi presencia en la etapa de post-producción fue mínima y se limitó a verificar unos subtítulos para una escena en español. No fue hasta que el filme estrenó el pasado 24 de febrero en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York (MoMa), en que finalmente vi entrelazados todos los niveles de escritura audiovisual. El filme tiene una cualidad atmósférica y voyeur que lo acerca más al género del documental, aunque ciertamente es una propuesta híbrida y con una estética muy trabajada.

Me sorprendió cómo decantar la palabra hablada ayudó al ritmo de la película. Los monólogos pueden considerarse islas dentro del tema-archipiélago de las camas y la vida en chinatown. Con las capas de traducción y la improvisación de algunos diálogos desapareció la autoría o los trucos de estilo, míos o de Lynne. El personaje de Lourdes terminó encajando muy bien como ese ojo externo dentro de las circunstancias. Las escenas estrictamente visuales no dejan de crear un texto pero este se manifiesta desde unas instancias poéticas y emotivo-arquitectónicas. Sin carecer de narrativa, Your Day is My Night no alardea de grandes peripecias sino de una observación cuidada al cotidiano de los personajes. Nunca victimiza sino que reconoce y valida la presencia de los por lo general anónimos habitantes de este barrio nuyorkino.

Lynne Sachs labora en el medio fílmico y en el del video. Otras facetas de su trabajo incluyen instalaciones y proyectos para la red. Su obra explora la relación intrincada que existe entre la observación personal y las experiencias históricas. Su estilo entrelaza poesía, collage, pintura, política y complejos diseños de sonido. Los filmes de Lynne se han presentado en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York, el Festival de Cine de New York, el Festival de Cine de Sundance y el Festival Internacional de Cine de Buenos Aires. Lynne enseña cine y video experimental en la Universidad de Nueva York y vive en Brooklyn.

Para más información visitar: www.lynnesachs.com

Apriete aquí para leer la entrevista completa a Lynne Sachs sobre Your Day is my Night, publicada en Asian Cinevision-Cinevue.

HERE IS A ROUGH GOOGLE TRANLATION FROM SPANISH TO ENGLISH

The appointment was for 8:00 pm and Gallisá Sofia studio in Fort Green , Brooklyn began to fill with Puerto Rican friends . We were about ten . We had been invited by filmmaker and teacher, Lynne Sachs. Lynne wanted to know our bedtime stories , record them and study them. Sofia, her collaborator , trust our narrative power and strangeness , hence the invitation.

The discussion was entertaining and cheerful. He spoke to sleep surrounded by pillows everywhere, intolerance to noise, to be wrapped in sheets like mummies , to fight on the side of the bed with the couple, cleaning idiosyncrasies ; craziness and rituals of each when bedtime.

A week later I found out that this meeting was an audition and that three of us ( Veraalba St. , Pedro Leopoldo Sanchez and I) had been selected to participate in the project of Lynne , Your Day is my Night. For me as a writer.

Once I met told me that simultaneous Lynne us a group of Chinese were also interviewed / auditioned for the film that began to take shape : a documentary hybrid about traveling beds in the apartments of Chinatown . Part of my task was to go with her to conduct new interviews with selected . My mission would be to co – write a monologue based on what is heard.

” My way of filmmaking is all about process – Tell me who you are and I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do and let’s work on something together . I was taken by a Chinatown activist to the Lin Sing Association on Mott Street, where I told me I could find willing performers . Most of Lin Sing’s members are retired , so time doing lot . I happened to come During a karaoke contest . The place was packed . I said I am auditioning as a documentary filmmaker , I usually say I’m interviewing , I am making a film acerca beds. I did not explain any more than that. About 40 people signed up to come to audition and 26 people Showed up . Working with a Chinese translator , I interviewed every one of them but I only acerca Asked them one thing . I said , “Do you have any interesting stories acerca beds in your life ? Did you ever have to share a bed ? Did you ever live in a really crowded apartment where there were many beds ? I taped the interviews With These 26 people . It ended up that seven people had actually These stunning and haunting stories to tell me . ” -Lynne Sachs on Asian Cinevision , Cinema Spotlight : Your Day is my Night

The seven Chinese stories , four men and three women , they distanced enough of what he had heard or received Puerto Ricans. In their stories there was not much space to celebrate the everyday comfort or selections . All these stories referred them to devastating past , family separation , trauma , violence and horrific events that eventually led to experiences of immigration . Most traders as children were badly shaken by the revolution . They must leave the country. In the first instance overcrowding in Chinatown , New York , had the earmarks of progress.

” Interestingly , the disturbing stories That you hear in the film surprised Jenifer Lee, one of our translators . She’s originally from Taiwan That and she said she’d never heard about so many horrible things happening as early as the 1940s in China. Things like gangs breaking into someone’s house and beating up parents in front of Their children . People were not really talking about this kind of violence in history very much. Still , most of it did bring our performers Their kids to the show. To me , this is important , Because They were proud as performers and a lot of them wanted to reveal Their tragic stories to Their Own families . ” Ibid .

In the first stage of attentive listening text after I had several challenges . First walk blindly into the linguistic labyrinth in which I had gotten . Interviewees spoke only Mandarin. Their stories sedazo passed by a translator. I knew something always eluded me : a nuance, intonation , two-way comment , who knows. There was no way to identify the emotional aspects of speech or corroborate how faithful was the translator.

This hearing without reference I took notes in English then condensed and gave some cinematic tone . Lynne wrote on their own and then I edited two texts in a near final version . The process was reversed and they were made in Mandarin translation for them to learn and improvise , as it ended up being the case , from his monologues . Throughout this journey of linguistic layers was the feeling of something incommunicado , lost in translation .

The next challenge was to introduce the characters and Pedro Veraalba Puerto Ricans in the world of Chinatown . Lynne was not interested in repeating the process of filtering reality and tell a student and artistic version of immigrants in NY . His interest was to create a fiction about a lower-class Puerto Ricans living among these gentlemen end Chinese . The characters serve as catalysts for the Chinese stories . The film was both a proposed documentary as a fictional invention . We had to swim in both waters .

Many questions arose : How to handle the juxtaposition of both approaches ? How to be faithful to the harsh Chinese history ? How to maintain credibility with these Puerto Ricans from fiction ? Should we also focus on the difficulties of Puerto Rican emigration ? Is this film the right forum for this?

Working with Lynne offers interesting challenges but rarely easy conclusions or methods . His approach as a filmmaker shows his poetic vision of the world. A personal and eclectic references takes time to unravel , but stimulating and certainly sui generis . Their process practices draws film directors like Jean -Luc Godard oTerrence Malick , those who favor visual improvisation and acting and intertextuality . It was in the same film and later in the editing room , where they were taking the decisions of tone , narrative construction and use of texts. In the movie scenes are mixed with moments purely documentary acted as a Chinese wedding or talent show at a community center in chinatown .

Chinese Monologues kept pretty faithful to the data received by the actors. Synthesized were streamlined and conversational prose that could fit into any situation. Initially we wrote some literary detours proved not to be necessary to communicate their stories. The power of the stories was enough. The less ornaments better. The characters tell their stories while they cook , eat , knit , play the piano , get a massage , watch a movie on the laptop or simply are lying in their cots . The camera scans their faces and body parts from very close and is immersed in the various objects of the apartment. The visual is both intimate and claustrophobic . This was both an aesthetic decision of Cinematographers as a necessity brought by the spatial . The visual narrative in Your Day is My Night is as important as the spoken word and many times even more evocative.

“Because of the tight quarters , some parts of your body can not move . What you can move more freely is your hands . In this circumstance the performer ‘s hands Became two bodies . They are interesting and sculptural . So we tried to use the hands and the sheets as two kinds of landscapes. From the very beginning I this was a visual plan we had . I always wanted the sheets to Become like caverns , to have a feeling of adventure over the sheets . There was one shot of Mr. Huang’s pink sheet right after his first monologue . I wanted it to feel like the Grand Canyon, or the Steppes in Eurasia , something very far out there. ” Ibid .

The Puerto Rican characters were more difficult to compose and sustain in the film. As data were not based on real life were invented . Lourdes , the character of Veraalba , worked as a clerk in arranging Ikea beds ( beds showroom ) . Carlos , his brother ( Peter) was killed in a car accident but she imagined him everywhere carrying a mimosa pudica plant . Lourdes is going to Puerto Rico trying to escape his own anguish (the death of his brother , a mother oppressive ) but some of his motivation is ambiguous. His process as an immigrant is historically less tragic but warned lives lost trying to find an anchor. Lourdes , who is also a dancer and writer moves to Chinatown looking to meet a culture far removed from his. Feeling despatriada is your way to find your essence as a person.

I think with Lourdes reach build a richly nuanced story , novel type of learning , but develop it , have all those details , away from the main subject meant that motivated Lynne : mobile beds , the occult and crowded chinatown . Let the character move the plot was taking to make another movie chinatown community as secondary background . That was not the balance was sought between fiction and documentary . While many scenes were filmed about Lourdes and Carlos , gradually Lynne and Sean Hanley cinematographer, co -editor and producer, the were removing ( the story about Carlos was completely eliminated , for example) to keep the focus of the film and adequate length.

” Originally the film was a little bit more narrative . For example , we had this whole part where Mr. Huang disappears , Because originally Lourdes tries to get him out of Chinatown after claims That I ‘ve never leaves . They walk across the Manhattan bridge and she says: ” I have to go to work” . When she leaves to go to work , he’s never seen again . It did not work in the film. It turned it into a narrative film That had a story and people Judged forced it on the acting . ” Ibid .

Although this process of elimination , the character of Lourdes plays an important role : to create a bridge between the apartment and the outside, an outside beyond chinatown community and generation of Chinese players .

“One thing That I did not want to happen in this film was to portray Either the shift- bed houses or Chinatown as isolated enclaves That Did not exist anywhere else … I wanted to say That in 21st Century America , life is more porous . People have accidental interactions That Affect them , and so I felt like bringing in not just another language , But Also another person with a slightly different immigration experience , would add to That conversation . I also felt That for an audience , it broke the snowglobe feeling of ” I’m looking in, but I can not go in. ” Chinatown That would Imply That was a kind of hermetic space . So I thought That by having a new person in the apartment who’s a little bit wide- eyed , who wanted to learn from her older ” roommates ” We Could offer the audience the opportunity to Become more involved. ” Ibid .

For a year and a half while editing the film with Sean Lynne returned several times to shoot environmental and sometimes take small scenes extras. In one of these scenes were accessible to an apartment full of itinerant beds . The landlady and some tenants were allowed to film and talk comfortably with Huang , the wedding singer , one of the most curious of the cast. This scene is of the most impressive by sadness and resignation that this way of life brings to those involved.

That game between scenes documentary scenes orchestrated and ended with some shots that were filmed Chinese actors in one of the performances of “work in progress ” . These shots , by having theatrical lighting and tai -chi movements have a surreal being both a record hybrid between fiction and documentation of the group’s activities .

“Far into our production , as I was documenting one of our live performances, I thought” This is really expressive and totally non – verbal , why are not we using it in the film? “Again , the concept , the process , revealed itself , Whereas the more plot driven story was what I was forcing on them . It was artificial . So I took out all of that and allowed the film to Become more improvisational and intuitive . This switched everything. We spent a year edit the other way and then just Threw it all out When We Realized how lucky we were to work With people so confident acerca Their bodies , very willing to go on the stage and move freely. They had that abitur and confidence . ” Ibid .

My presence in the post-production stage was minimal and was limited to verifying some subtitles for a scene in Spanish . It was not until the film premiered on February 24 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York ( MoMA ) , we finally saw intertwined all levels of visual writing . The film has a voyeuristic quality that atmospheric and closer to documentary genre , but it certainly is a hybrid approach with a very polished aesthetic .

I was surprised how the spoken word decant helped the pacing of the film . The monologues can be considered islands within the archipelago theme – beds and life in chinatown . With the layers of translation and improvisation of conversations disappeared authorship or style tricks , me or Lynne . Lourdes ‘s character ended up fitting very well as the outer eye in the circumstances . Strictly visual scenes no longer create a text but this is manifest from a poetic and emotional bodies – architectural . No lack of narrative , Your Day is My Night does not boast of great adventures but a careful observation of the everyday characters . Never victimizes but recognizes and validates the presence of usually anonymous nuyorkino inhabitants of this district .
Lynne Sachs working in the film medium and the video . Other facets of his work include facilities and projects for the network. His work explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and historical experiences . His style interweaves poetry , collage , painting , politics and complex sound designs . Lynne ‘s films have been presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York , the Film Festival of New York , the Sundance Film Festival and the International Film Festival of Buenos Aires . Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

For more information visit : www.lynnesachs.com

Press here to read the full interview with Lynne Sachs about Your Day is my Night , published in Asian Cinevision – Cinevue .

“Your Day Is My Night” Post-Screening Conversation at NYU

“I think of the bed as an extension of the earth,” says experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, a moving hybrid documentary/performance piece, the bed becomes stage as immigrant residents of a shift-bed apartment in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown are both performers and participants, storytellers and actors. Sharing their experiences as migrants and city dwellers, they reveal the intimacies and complexities of urban living. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs and performers Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Qing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, and Sheut Hing Lee joined A/P/A Institute at NYU on Thursday, October 2, 2013 for a screening of the film and a conversation moderated by Karen Shimakawa (Chair of Performance Studies at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts). Lesley (Yiping) Qin served as translator.

Interview with Lynne Sachs in The Brooklyn Rail – 2013

IN CONVERSATION: LYNNE SACHS with KAREN RESTER

https://brooklynrail.org/2013/09/film/lynne-sachs-with-karen-rester

When the experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs taught avant-garde filmmaking at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992, few if any in our class had ever heard of the essayist Chris Marker, with whom she later collaborated on Three Cheers for the Whale, or Trinh T. Minh-ha, whose approach to filmmaking strongly influenced her own. In an interview we did back then, Sachs talked about Trinh’s ability to maintain a certain distance in her work in order to create a non-hierarchical space in which events unfold. At the same time Sachs was adamant about being “participatory” and, for her first long format film Sermons and Sacred Pictures: The Life and Work of Reverend L.O Taylor (1989), “interacting with the people that I was talking to in a very physical way.”

Sachs, who is also known for incorporating poetry, collage, and painting as well as dramatic performance in her films, continued to explore and develop this approach over the course of 25 works, including her latest, Your Day is My Night (2013), a hybrid documentary about residents in shift-bed apartments, a virtually unknown phenomenon of New York’s Chinatown. Like her previous films The Last Happy Day, a portrait of her distant cousin who survived the Holocaust, and Wind in Our Hair, a loose adaptation of a Julio Cortázar story, the film weaves in fiction elements—some are jarring, others are so seamless they’re hard to pinpoint.

The film is especially notable for the unexpectedly personal monologues the residents of this insular community deliver, which are based upon her interviews with them. How an outsider got a group used to staying out of the public eye to open up is largely the subject of our conversation.

Karen Rester (Rail): Let’s start off with the Uncle Bob story that launched you on this project.

Sachs: So I have a 93-year old distant cousin named Uncle Bob. He told me that in 1960 two planes crashed over New York. One went down over Staten Island and the other one crashed onto Flatbush Avenue. I said, “That’s horrible! I’m sure all the people on the plane died, and they did—‘but what about the people on the ground?’” He said, “Well, Lynne, there were so many hotbed houses in that area, who knows?” So, of course you hear the expression “hotbed house” and you think, “Hmm, that seems pretty racy!”

Turns out a hotbed house is where workers, and, in this case, people who worked on the docks in Brooklyn, shared beds. One person was on the night shift, one person was on the day shift, and that really sparked my imagination as a platform or a location. Then I discovered that these shift-bed houses—which is another name for them—still exist in Chinatown today.

That’s what led me to the Lin Sing Association, where I met the group of older Chinese immigrants who would collaborate with me on the film.

Rail: And, as you told me, you asked some of them this one great question, about beds, that led to some of the most intimate stories in your film.

Sachs: It wasn’t a clever question at all. It was just what I needed to ask: Can you tell me anything interesting that ever happened to you in a bed? I thought they would tell me something like, “When I first came to the United States I lived in a room with eight people. Let me tell you, it was hard.” Instead, they were the ones who opened it up to stories that were very personal, very revealing of the larger story of Chinese history and Chinese immigration. It went from one Chinese man telling me about living on a mattress in a closet in Chinatown for three months to another woman talking about lying in bed and dreaming about the father she never really knew. That question sparked their imagination.

That’s a key to documentary for me. When you can work with the people in your film and get them to harness their own imagination.

Rail: I think I mentioned I’ve been recording interviews with some Chinese relatives in the Mississippi Delta, and even being a member of the community it’s not easy getting them to open up. So when I saw your film the first thing that came to mind was, how in the world did a non-Mandarin speaking white woman get them to reveal some of their most intimate details on camera?

Sachs: [Laughs.] I think one of the keys to working in reality and working with people is allowing the extraordinary to appear familiar rather than exotic. If you immediately respond, “Oh that is so heavy!” then you’ve introduced a level of intimidation. So if someone was telling me how during the Cultural Revolution his father was beaten to death by a group of farmers, I’d say, how did you feel about that as a child? If you didn’t have any food what did you eat? I tried not to make these issues, which have this mythic horror, seem that big, because then it becomes scary to talk about them. So I’d guide them to revisit these moments in the most vivid way possible, not as a symbolic event in the history of China.

Rail: This isn’t your first film about beds. You made Transient Box in the early ’90s. I understand you, camera in hand, asked your now–husband, Mark, whom you’d only known for a few weeks, to accompany you to a motel room and remove his clothes?

Sachs: [Laughs.] I wanted to film the marks a man leaves on the bed and in the room, but I wanted him to remain invisible. All the detritus that people want to erase, the pieces of yourself that you leave behind, are interesting to me.

Of course in your own bed you can leave as much as you want and people aren’t going to sweep it away. That’s what intrigued me about these shift-beds. People aren’t able to leave an imprint of themselves and that became very unsettling to me.

Rail: The British artist Tracey Emin once did a controversial installation called My Bed. She took her bed, which she’d been sleeping in when she was depressed, and put it in the Tate. It was blood-stained and there were condoms around it.

Sachs: That’s exactly what would never happen in a shift-bed apartment. You wouldn’t leave that detritus because that’s saying, “This is mine.” By erasing your presence you’re inviting another person to establish theirs.

Rail: How did you see Chinatown before and after the making of this film?

Sachs: Before I made the film, Chinatown was a place to feel out of place. A place in New York where you had the sense you were in another country. I’m really interested in this French word dépaysé, to be out of your country. It also means to be disoriented. I like the idea that when you go into another community you have this sensation of being an outsider. And for most people so much of it is about gratification. You feed your eyes. You feed your mouth.

Then I started making the film and Chinatown became a neighborhood. It’s not just a destination for outsiders to go and experience the pleasure of another culture. It’s a place where people have very intricate relationships, and they work, and they sleep. They don’t want to leave it because it’s so supportive. I didn’t know any of that, for sure, and I didn’t know what happened above the ground level. For me, Chinatown was all on the first floor—

Rail: Shops.

Sachs: Exactly. It’s almost as if I never looked up. Now I look up and I can imagine looking in. And I have friends to visit.

Rail: I’m half-Chinese and Chinatown is a foreign place to me, though seeing your film helped change that. I think movies have trained me to think of Chinatown as background or an exotic setting where the protagonist chases the bad guy through a maze of crowded streets.

Sachs: You never know how a film will draw open curtains on various worlds for audiences. There’s the New York City audience that sometimes responds, “Oh, you’ve forever changed the way I walk into Chinatown.” And maybe not just Chinatown, but any place where you feel you are benefitting from its differentness. Then there’s the audience made up of young Chinese immigrants who say the film harkens back to a time in Chinese life that was closer to their grandparents.

Rail: At least two of your performers have lived in New York since the, 60s. They’d never been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art until you took them there. What inspired you to do that?

Sachs: One of the things I tried to do was take them out of their comfort zone. I think this is what creates unpredictable, almost theatrical situations. We went to the Met to see two things. The first was an exhibit called The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City. It was a simulation of a grand palace in China in which the emperor created different seasons in different rooms. So if it was winter outside and he wanted to be in spring time, he would go to the Spring Room. I just love that idea because it’s the antithesis of living in a shift-bed house, where you have such little control over your environment. Then I took them to the 20th century wing to see Andy Warhol’s floor-to-ceiling portrait of Mao Tse Tung. I actually wanted to trigger something, I wanted to rock everyone’s world. I thought, big things are going to happen! We get there and they really couldn’t have cared less.

Rail: [Laughs.] Let’s talk about the wall you hit during the editing process. The film suffered from a dramatic storyline you couldn’t make work. People didn’t like it, you were devastated, and you didn’t know what to do.

Sachs: Mark actually said to me, “Stop sitting in front of your computer editing, editing, editing, and not going anywhere—it’s getting worse!” [Laughs.] Then, out of the blue, someone sent me an email about an abandoned hospital in Greenpoint looking for artists to put on performances. So I called everybody up and said, “Let’s do our show live, I’ll bring two beds.” We did it again in the Chinatown public library. Then at University Settlement, a community center in the Lower East Side. I grew to love the performance more and more, and saw it as a way to lay bare the structure of the film.

Rail: Did that help you finish it?

Sachs: Enormously. Especially with the transitions. Once you listen to these really intense monologues you can’t just move onto something else that quickly. Where do I take the viewer afterwards? I realized I could integrate scenes we recorded from the performances as transitional places where people could meditate on what they heard.

Rail: By the way, I misinterpreted your title. I realize now it’s dialogue between two people sharing a shift-bed. One has the day shift, the other has the night shift. How did you come up with it?

Sachs: I knew the film was called Your Day is My Night before I even started shooting. It’s a little bit of a tribute to Truffaut’s Day for Night and also, the history of narrative filmmaking where if you needed day but were shooting at night you just created it. It’s sort of like the Forbidden City where the emperor had so much power that he could create seasons. The hegemony of everything. I’ve always resisted that in my filmmaking. I didn’t want to be a director per se; I wanted to be a filmmaker who didn’t work in such hierarchical situations.

Your Day is My Night will screen September 25 and 26 at Maysles Cinema and October 26 at New York Public Library’s Chatham Square branch. Upcoming festivals include Vancouver Film Festival, New Orleans Film Festival, and Bordocs in Tijuana, Mexico. For more information visit yourdayismynight.com

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs