writing

2009

Senses of Buenos Aires: a few of my favorite things

Senses of Buenos Aires
a few things about the city that I love
by Lynne Sachs
Confiteria Ideal
In my opinion, this is the most wonderful place to see tango. Real people doing the dance of Argentina with a kind of love and commitment that that will make you want to get on the floor yourself. Mystical, misty old [...]

2008

Bruce Conner Remembered

Bruce Conner died in the summer of 2008. For those who may not know, he was a Beat generation artist, the first filmmaker to see the value in “found footage”, and an extraordinary visionary. His collages and films are in museums and archives all over the world. Two different people in Buenos Aires, where I was living last summer, mentioned his death to me without even knowing that I knew him. Bruce was a very important person in my life and psyche.

2008

History of the Artist Abecedarium

Anthropologists, filmmakers, linguists, musicians, painters, poets, writers — all share a fascination with the 26 letters of the alphabet. An abecedarium is traditionally an educational book for children containing words beginning with each letter, but for centuries it has also been a resource for creative work by artists in almost every media. This history of the abecedarium will look at a selection of artists whose intentions are both to celebrate and disrupt this most basic and widespread system of verbal communication.

2007

Watching Richard Fung’s “Sea in the Blood”

Thinking about Richard Fung’s “Sea in the Blood”
By Lynne Sachs
Two men swimming, the flow of skin against the skin, and there below the surface of the water is a camera.  Richard Fung’s lens is an activated observation machine, the eye gazing at the self.  His memory becomes an animal in the pool – at once [...]

2007

Visit to New Orleans

Visit to New Orleans
Grey afternoon everything carved away
gaunt woman in once-tight jeans
zig-zags patterns, boulevard desolate.
Archeological trash pile
not for garbage
collector.
Everything carved away.
Dogs no longer here.
Old kitten dangling thread, teasing between splinters
from a screen door stretching
blissful
open and shut
by the arm of the wind.
Woman again, more gaunt than five minutes ago,
watching me pretend not to watch her,
circles round [...]

2006

States of UnBelonging Transcript

STATES OF UNBELONGING a film by LYNNE SACHS
in collaboration with NIR ZATS
63 minutes
Hebrew spoken by children
“When I am big and someone dies, I am going to go to the funeral.”
“You can put a doll on the grave, just like in the story.’
Dear Lynne,
I patiently wait for the sand to sink, for the water to get [...]

2006

Thoughts on Birth and Brakhage

From California to Florida to New York to Maryland to Tennessee, I’ve been making and teaching avant-garde film for 20 years. In my experience, there is only one film, of the many works to which I expose my college students, that consistently creates a passionate, call it vitriolic, reaction: Stan Brakhage’s “Window, Water, Baby, Moving”(1959, 12 min.).

2006

Tran Trang’s Blindness Series: My Letter to Helene Cixous

Thoughts on Tran Kim Trang’s Decade with Blindness:
A Letter to Helene Cixous from Lynne Sachs
“I want to see what is secret.  What is hidden amongst the visible.  I want to see the skin of the light.”
from “Writing Blind:  Conversation with the Donkey” in Stigmata by Helene Cixous
Dear Helene, …I begin by conveying to you the [...]

2006

Grapevine to the Sky: Meditation on Life in Brooklyn

A Grapevine to the Sky:
A Meditation on Life in Brooklyn
by Lynne Sachs
Jack must have started his infamous climb to the sky from a backyard in Brooklyn.  While not the eponymous beanstalk with which most of us are familiar, the seventy-five foot high Concord grape vine in my backyard reaches so daringly up to the clouds [...]

2006

Making and Being “Drawn and Quartered”

MAKING AND BEING “DRAWN & QUARTERED”
BY LYNNE SACHS
My great Uncle Charlie was a prominent Memphis businessman who took a giddy pleasure in shooting some of the most elegant, compassionate photographs I’ve ever seen.  I remember his close-up portrait taken in the late 1950’s of a wizened black man looking into the lens.  I would sneak [...]

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