by Jared Mobarak
https://www.heyhaveyouseen.com/week-ending-11-21-25/#every-contact-leaves-a-trace
Beginning with the idea of “trace evidence,” filmmaker Lynne Sachs seeks to discover if genetic material and fingerprints remain attached to the six hundred or so business cards she’s collected over the years. The idea is that these pieces of cardboard maintain markers of the people they represent beyond contact information that often becomes outdated in the time since receipt. More than these scientific remnants, however, are also memories steeped in emotional connection. Why have some of their owners vividly imprinted upon her mind?
Every Contact Leaves a Trace is the result of Sachs’ fascination with this tactile phenomenon that has all but been erased with the advent of cellphones and digital address books. She exposes this generational divide by enlisting her twin niece and nephew (Felix and Viva Johnson Sachs Torres) as soundboards with which to ask if they’d ever keep a collection of cards like this themselves. They of course say no because the technology has objectively become obsolete and I admittedly felt sad for them since business cards played a big role in my own life.
I too have a book of cards from the early aughts and became fascinated with the potential of graphic design as a career through the ingenuity they represent. I love the wild ideas Stefan Sagmeister came up with for his branding projects. He made something so simple and, perhaps, classist (see American Psycho) into unique objects with their own motion, puzzles, and artistry. His ability to make something so uniformly commonplace into an unforgettable keepsake left an indelible mark. Sachs’ subject Bradley Eros’ punched “tickets” recall this truth.
A similar thing happened with Sachs, but through the cards’ scrapbook nature as symbols of their owners rather than objects in their own right. We watch as she leafs through her tote, shuffling them together like playing cards before putting them on her table one by one with brief commentary on whether she thinks the person is both someone she’d want to reconnect with and someone who’d be interested in participating in the film. In the end, Sachs chooses seven cards that hold a strong enough contact trace to hunt down their owners.
Betty Leacraft is a former student turned textile artist Sachs seems to remember more and have a stronger bond with than the other way around. Angela Haardt was the director of a German film festival she attended at twenty-nine and an in-road to better consider her heritage as a German Jew and her guilt towards what’s happening in Gaza. Jiang Juan was the chairperson of the China Women’s Film Festival in which Sachs was an invitee. Irina Yekimova is her hairstylist and bookend to the film who provides a great moment of epiphany.
The gist of this revelation is that we can only ever know what we know. Yes, these people have all left their mark on Sachs, but only insofar as what that mark means to her. She doesn’t actually know any of them. Not really. Not wholly. There’s a great moment where she rejects a card saying that she’s pretty sure she already knows everything he’s willing to let her know—proof that our understanding of the people around us is forever incomplete. We place our meaning on their words and actions. So, our truth isn’t necessarily the truth.
Case and point: cards six and seven. One is that of a former therapist who Sachs couldn’t track down. She instead hires actor Rae C. Wright to portray the character in a hypothetical scene wherein the filmmaker confronts her for what she believes was complicity to deceit. Through this exercise comes the acknowledgement that the words Sachs thought were permission could have been interpreted many different ways. But the way she did take them ultimately becomes the only “real” answer considering it’s what drove her actions.
The other card is Lawrence Brose, a name I’m familiar with living in Buffalo and having gone to UB. A controversial figure due to his 2009 arrest for child pornography, Sachs voices the thought that maybe she should cut him from the film since that isn’t why she contacted him. Her memory upon seeing his name concerned his experimental film De Profundis and it was only after they connected that she remembered the rest. But she decides to hear his truth about the arrest anyway and, perhaps, change her own ideas about him as a result.
Therein lies this journey’s thesis. Whereas a contact trace in investigative terms purports to forensically find objective truth, there’s always room for error (enough that the government offered Brose a plea deal but not enough to guarantee an exoneration). And when it comes to contact traces in terms of personal memory and impact, there’s probably more error than truth due to perspective. Whether your memory is right or wrong, however, proves moot in hindsight. How you used it cannot be changed, but a new trace might still be left for tomorrow.
7/10