All posts by lynne

“A Month of Single Frames” at Rosendale Theatre Screening & Exhibition of Schneemann and Hammer

Women in Experiment: Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer
02/15/2021
Rosendale, NY

The Rosendale Theatre is excited to offer the program Women in Experiment: Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer from March 12-14. March is Women’s History Month in the U.S., and International Women’s Day is observed across the planet on March 8.

Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer are both major American filmmakers who have influenced visual and filmic arts in several wide spheres. Carolee Schneemann was known for her multi-media works (film, performance, installation, painting) on the body, narrative, sexuality and gender. Barbara Hammer, feminist filmmaker and pioneer of queer cinema, made over 90 moving image works as well as performances, installations, photographs, collages and drawings.

Both filmmakers were friends and mutual admirers, born in the same year and died within 10 days of one another. Their connections to our local area (including the Women’s Studio Workshop, the Woodstock Film Festival, and the Rosendale Theatre) are maybe more poignant for us locally, but their international reach as artists and mavericks speaks freedom and creativity out loud and in all languages.

WOMEN IN EXPERIMENT: CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN AND BARBARA HAMMER

THE PROGRAM SCHEDULE:

March 12-14 with SELECT FILMS AVAILABLE until March 16.

Saturday, March 13: TWO PANEL DISCUSSIONS through the Rosendale Theatre Live streaming.

Carolee Schneemann Panel Discussion, live at 4 pm EST on March 13
Barbara Hammer Panel Discussion, live at 7 pm EST on March 13

Sunday March 14 | 2 – 6 PM | $10
In-Theatre Media Gallery & Short Films AT THE THEATRE

Rosendale Theatre’s walk-through media gallery. Timed entry tickets available: Pond and Waterfall (1982), Lesbian Whale (2015) (Barbara Hammer); Plumb Line (1968-71), Vulva’s School (1995) (Carolee Schneemann)
Safety Protocols for In-Theatre Event:

Capacity is limited
Timed entries into program
Temperatures taken at door
Masks must be worn
Social distancing enforced

ONLINE FILMS PACKAGE or Individual Films Available:

Full Package: (good from March 12-14) $30 or $5 each movie.

Fuses(Carolee Schneemann; 1964-67, 29:37, color silent)
Kitch’s Last Meal(Carolee Schneemann; 1973-76, 54:11, color, sound)
The Great Goddess(Barbara Hammer; 1977, 22:16 b&w sound)
Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor: A NY Subway Tape(Hammer, 1985, 12:39, color sound)
Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS(Barbara Hammer; 1986, 7:42, color sound)
Catscan(Schneemann; 1988, 12:46, color sound)
Still Point(Barbara Hammer; 1989, 9:14, color sound)
Americana I Ching Apple Pie(Schneemann; 2007, 16:37, color sound)
Infinity Kisses(Schneemann: 2008, 9:18, color sound)
Maya Deren’s Sink (Hammer; 2011, 29:08, color sound)

Stand Alone Movie: (good from March 12-16)

Welcome to This House( Barbara Hammer; 2015; 78:54, color sound) $12
Fuses & Infinity Kisses
Part of the full package above, March 12-14.
Stand alone, March 15-16, both movies for $12.
A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (Lynne Sachs; 2019, 14 min) (available to U.S. audiences only) $5
CLICK HERE to preorder tickets or watch when available.

ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS:

Carolee Schneemann October 12, 1939 – March 6, 2019

Carolee Schneemann was born in Pennsylvania, and received a BA in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and MFA from the U of Illinois. She was based locally, living at the line between New Paltz and Rosendale, in an 18th century Huguenot farmhouse, about 3 miles from the Rosendale Theatre.

“Carolee Schneemann is one of the most important artists of the postwar period. Her work in a range of media—painting, film, video, dance and performance, constructions and installations, the written word, and assemblage—presents an unparalleled catalogue of radical aesthetic experimentation.” —notes on the publication Carolee Schneemann Unforgivable

investigations into gender and, in her own words, “forbidden aspects of the female experience” laid the groundwork for much feminist art of the 1980s and 90s.

“Prior to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire.” — Jan Avgikos, Artforum

“Carolee Schneemann was a visionary. She challenged taboos and was undaunted by censorship, including cancelled screenings of her 1967 film Fuses, bans on imagery documenting her 1975 performance Interior Scroll, and attacks on her later political work… Her language is the visceral, yet intensely political, language of the body, of gesture, of sensuality and eroticism. Even today, she remains radical.” — Joy Garnett, National Coalition Against Censorship

“A feminist visionary and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century.” _The New York Times

Her work has been exhibited around the world, she has received numerous international awards, and she published several books and taught at many institutions.

Barbara Hammer, May 15, 1939 – March 16, 2019

In the early 1970s Hammer studied film at San Francisco State University. After seeing Maya Deren’s film Meshes of the Afternoon, she was inspired to make experimental films about her personal life. After coming out as a lesbian she “took off on a motorcycle with a super-8 camera” and in 1974 filmed Dyketactics, widely considered to be one of the first lesbian films.

Hammer sought to deconstruct and disempower the narratives and structures that oppress women in general and lesbians in particular. From her earliest experimental work, her films are playfully and relentlessly challenging of accepted norms and taboos.

In Barbara’s words, “As a visual artist who primarily uses film and video in experimental, nonlinear time based work, my practice includes performance, installation and digital photography. I embrace critical and formal complexity while promoting an active and engaged audience. Thematically, my work deconstructs a cinema that often objectifies or limits women. My work makes these invisible bodies and histories visible. As a lesbian artist, I found little existing representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural record for future generations.”

Barbara received over 50 career awards and honors, and more in individual film awards and grants. Besides her extensive body film and video works, Barbara published several books and many articles.

“Hammer prefers the term ‘actionary’ to ‘visionary’ in describing the work of other queer artists she has documented and promoted over the decades. On the basis of this show, I’d say both terms apply to her.” – Holland Cotter, New York Times

“A testament to the singular combination of sincerity and irreverent humor that characterizes [Hammer’s] sex-positive feminism. . . . Hammer’s work reminds us that visibility is a political act.” – Artforum (review of Hammer’s book, Evidentiary Bodies)

“Barbara Hammer is a true cinematic pioneer; her tremendous body of work continues to inspire audiences and artists alike.” —Jenni Olson, LGBT film historian

Primarily based in New York City, Barbara spent time in the Hudson Valley/Catskills area. She exhibited at the Woodstock Film Festival, SUNY Ulster, and the Rosendale Theatre.

ABOUT THE FILMS:

Fuses(Carolee Schneemann; 1964-67, 29:37, color silent)
Schneemann’s self-shot erotic film remains a controversial classic. “The notorious masterpiece… a silent celebration in colour of heterosexual love making. The film unifies erotic energies within a domestic environment through cutting, superimposition and layering of abstract impressions scratched into the celluloid itself… Fuses succeeds perhaps more than any other film in objectifying the sexual streamings of the body’s mind” — The Guardian, London

Kitch’s Last Meal (Carolee Schneemann; 1973-76, 54:11, color, sound)
This film documents the routines of daily life while time passes, a relationship winds down, and death closes in.

The Great Goddess (Barbara Hammer; 1977, 22:16 b&w sound)

Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor: A NY Subway Tape (Hammer, 1985, 12:39, color sound) Would You Like to Meet Your Neighbor? A New York City Subway Tape finds Barbara Hammer (wearing a mask made of subway maps) conducting gonzo interviews with subway riders, getting their thoughts on the city, their fellow passengers, and navigating public space.

Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS (Barbara Hammer; 1986, 7:42, color sound)
“I first heard of AIDS in 1985 when I was teaching at Columbia College in Chicago. I noticed the strange and inflammatory articles in the newspapers and I asked my students to collect hysteric headlines for me. And so I began my work on Snow Job: The Media Hysteria of AIDS. I examined the public ignorance, stigmatization, and just plain wrong attitudes towards this new illness. By making a snow storm of newspaper clippings I could show what a ‘snow job’ the media was making.” — Barbara Hammer

Catscan (Schneemann; 1988, 12:46, color sound)
Catscan is a group performance within a chaotic density of projected images and office furniture, motivated by Egyptian funerary rituals of mourning, grief and spirits of the dead. It sustains aspects of Schneemann’s previous works built with dream instruction, positing the interchange of intimacy and physicality, the erotic and the obscene, the incubation of dream enactment. Catscan centers on the death of a beloved cat as a means to ritualize more universal mourning and to bring forward ghosts of the past. As a ritual consecration, Schneemann, blindfolded, dances out of 20 yards of red fabric wound around her body.The performance, which had a duration of approximately 90 minutes and variously featured 5 to 8 performers, included a slide projection system, 15 video monitors, ladders, furniture, suitcases, and debris.

Still Point(Barbara Hammer; 1989, 9:14, color sound)
Still Point whirls around a point of centeredness as four screens of home and homelessness, travel and weather, architecture and sports signify the constant movement and haste of late twentieth century life. “At the still point of the turning world, that’s where the dance is,” wrote T.S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton,” the first poem of Four Quartets. Hammer seeks a point of quiet from which all else transiently moves.

Americana I Ching Apple Pie (Schneemann; 2007, 16:37, color sound)
Writes Schneemann: “The ‘Americana I Ching Apple Pie’ recipe was first enacted in my Belsize, London kitchen in 1972. Unfortunately, the original footage disappeared with the man doing the documentation who may have been working for the CIA. The next presentation was May ’77, as a cooking event for the Heresies Magazine performance and jumble sale benefit. With the exception of a dozen apples, flour, maple syrup, and eggs which I brought, all the cooking ‘material,’ utensils, and props were discovered in the jumble. Objects which functionally approximated actual cooking utensils were used: nails, hammers, an arrow, a flower pot, ball bearings, rags, a watering can. The cook’s apron was a ripped mini skirt with which I covered my hair. As I state in the performance, ‘traditionally you need an apron, but it doesn’t matter where you put it.’

Infinity Kisses (Schneemann: 2008, 9:18, color sound)
Infinity Kisses – The Movie completes Schneemann’s exploration of human and feline sensual communication. It incorporates extracts of the original 124 self-shot 35mm color slide photo sequence, Infinity Kisses, in which the expressive self-determination of the ardent cat was recorded over an eight-year period. Infinity Kisses – The Movie recomposes these images into a video, in which each dissolving frame is split between its full image and a hugely enlarged detail.

Maya Deren’s Sink(Hammer; 2011, 29:08, color sound)
Maya Deren’s Sink explores Deren’s concepts of space, time and form through visits and projections filmed in her Los Angeles and New York homes. The project began after Hammer discovered a sink formerly owned by Deren at Anthology Film Archives and embarked on an homage to the “Mother of American Experimental Cinema.”

Hammer re-imagines Deren’s film locations of the 1940s in the present, providing entry into intimate spaces and former times, reclaiming the places that inspired the influential filmmaker. Hammer interweaves the performance of an actor, as well as the voices of the current home owners, Judith Malina, Carolee Schneemann, Ross Lipmann and others. The meditation on space and architecture investigates the relationship between private and public spheres, creating a unique architectural portrait of Deren.

The experimental soundtrack is created from the music of Teiji Ito (Deren’s third husband), Tavia Ito, and Teiji’s daughter.

Welcome to This House (Barbara Hammer; 2015; 78:54, color sound)
Welcome to This House is a feature documentary film on the homes and loves of poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), about life in the shadows, and the anxiety of art making without full self-disclosure. Hammer filmed in Bishop’s ‘best loved homes’ in the US, Canada, and Brazil believing that buildings and landscapes bear cultural memories. Interviews with poets, friends, and scholars provide “missing documents” of numerous female lovers. Bishop’s intimate poetry is beautifully performed by Kathleen Chalfant and with the creative music composition by Joan La Barbara brings Bishop into our lives with new facts and unexpected details.

“As an artist I believe that the architectural structures in which I live and work influence the art I make. I went in search of Bishop’s homes to explore the buildings and the poetry and paintings she made in them. This quest took me to her childhood home in Nova Scotia, to Camp Chequesset on Cape Cod, to Vassar College where she went to school, and to her homes in Key West, Brazil, Cambridge and Boston.

“Bishop was in the closet to the outside world, but she seemed to have as many lovers as she had homes. I globe trotted on her trail and found more and more female lovers emerging from interviews with friends, colleagues, critics and poets. Bishop was a lusty woman and I respect that, but writing openly of these experiences wasn’t possible due to her need for privacy propelled by the homophobia of the times. In addition, and maybe partly responsible for her reticence, was the childhood trauma she experienced of her mother’s breakdown and confinement in an institution. The understanding of this significant loss following the death of her father when she was an infant, and her conflicted need both to stay still and to move brought me to a closer reading of published and unpublished poems where I found intimate disclosures in her poetry.” — Barbara Hammer

A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (Lynne Sachs; 2019, 14 min)
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal.

In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.

“While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film. My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once.” — Lynne Sachs

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Saturday, March 13, 4:00 pm: Panel on Carolee Schneemann

Moderator: Rachel Churner, Director of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation. She is also an art critic, editor, and faculty member at Eugene Lang College at The New School. She owned and operated Churner and Churner, a contemporary art gallery in New York, from 2011 to 2015.

Peggy Ahwesh, Filmmaker. A true bricoleur, she has produced a broad range of works through the approaches of storytelling, improvisation, image appropriation and visual essay forms in an inquiry into cultural identity and the role of the female subject. Recent shows include: Queer Paranormal, Usdan Gallery, Bennington, VT; Private Lives, Public Spaces; MoMA; and Unsettled States, Center for New Media, Baruch College. Ahwesh is represented by Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn.

Dr. Juan Carlos Kase, Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research, which has been published in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Millennium Film Journal, The Moving Image, and OCTOBER, concerns the overlapping aesthetic, historical, and political registers of experimental cinema, documentary, art history, performance, and popular music within American subcultures.”

Erin Zona, Director Women’s Studio Workshop. Worked with Carolee before her death to republish Schneemann’s 1972 book: Parts of a Body House Book.

Parts of a Body House Book was originally published in 1972 by Beau Geste Press, which was run by Felipe Ehrenberg in Devon, England. This reprinting is a facsimile of Carolee’s personal copy from the first edition. Her intentions were to paint the back cover of each book and create a new set of hand interventions for the present day. This publication was in production at the time of her death in 2019. All hand interventions including corrections, stamping, staining, drawing, and highlighting were recreated to the artist’s exact wishes. Each copy in this edition is signed by Carolee’s beloved feline, La Niña, using a pigment mixed from beet juice and dirt gathered from the grounds of Carolee’s eighteenth century farmhouse in New Paltz, NY.

This book includes the first publishing of an excerpt from Schneemann’s Sexual Parameters Chart, Americana I Ching Apple Pie, film positives from two of Carolee’s films, notes and sketches on Kinetic Painting, a very special menstrual-blood-blotted paper work, and more.

In the exhibition catalog for her retrospective Kinetic Painting, Schneemann writes, “Parts of a Body House Book (1972) is a prototype for my big book. Each element in this edition was culled from mounds of related material. It is a releasing of the recent past into the present. A unitary life view – all about the same thing… and I can’t say what IT IS. But see it, live it.”

Saturday, March 13 at 7:00 pm: Panel on Barbara Hammer

Moderator: Sally Berger, film and media curator, writer, and art consultant in experimental, non-fiction and independent film, video installation and digital media. She is a Visiting Instructor, Visual Studies, Haverford College. Previously, she worked at The Museum of Modern Art (1986 -2016) as a curator in the Department of Film and co-founder and director of Documentary Fortnight, an international festival of non-fiction film and media (2001 – 2016). At the Museum she organized numerous contemporary film and media exhibitions, retrospectives and artist presentation series. She received an MA from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts in Cinema Studies and a BA in Media Studies from Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

Florrie Burke, Executor and Director of Barbara Hammer Art Legacy.
She is an international expert on human trafficking, worker exploitation and trauma.

Sarah Keller, associate professor of art and cinema studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on experimental form, film experience, and feminist issues in cinema. Her book on the career of experimental filmmaker and artist Barbara Hammer, Barbara Hammer: Pushing Out of the Frame, is forthcoming in Fall 2021 for Wayne State University Press’s Queer Screens series.

Lynne Sachs, Filmmaker. “For more than thirty years, Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” (Edo Choi, Asst. Curator, Museum of the Moving Image)

As of 2020, she has made 37 films. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest have all presented retrospectives of her work. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems in 2019. On the occasion of the January, 2021 virtual theater release of her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, the Museum of the Moving Image is currently presenting a career-ranging survey of Lynne’s work.

FILM EVENT AT THE THEATER

In-Theatre Media Gallery & Short Films AT THE THEATRE
Sunday March 14, 3-6 pm

Movies on the Screen:

Plumb Line (Schneemann; 1968-71, 14:27, color sound)
Pond and Waterfall (Hammer; 1982, 15:00, color silent)
Vulva’s School (Schneemann; 1995, 7:15, color sound)
Lesbian Whale (Hammer; 2015, 6:35, color sound)

Safety Protocols for In-Theater Event:

Capacity is limited
Timed entries into program
Temperatures taken at door
Masks must be worn
Social distancing enforced

The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as 16 mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance.

Plumb Line(Schneemann; 1968-71, 14:27, color sound)
The dissolution of a relationship unravels through visual and aural equivalences. Schneemann splits and recomposes actions of the lovers in a streaming montage of disruptive permutations: 8 mm is printed as 16 mm, moving images freeze, frames recur and dissolve until the film bursts into flames, consuming its own substance.

Pond and Waterfall

Pond and Waterfall (Hammer; 1982, 15:00, color silent)”Hiking in Point Reyes National Seashore I came upon a vernal pool with an intriguing and mysterious underwater world. I optically printed swimming underwater to slow the movement to a meditative rhythm. I hoped that the appreciation of the clarity and beauty of water would lead us to better protect it.” — Barbara Hammer

“The camera eye is like an amphibian that sees on two levels in its journey from underwater in a safe pond down to a violent, turbulent ocean. Early in the silent film shot north of San Francisco we see an homage to Monet’s Nymphiades in the faded raspberry color of the step-printed underwater lilies. The painterly effects of the printing make the water seem viscous. Pushing through clouds of fish eggs, fronds and algae, the camera establishes a sense of intimacy and connection in a natural ecosystem. But this amiable underwaterscape acquires ominous overtones as the camera/amphibian surfaces. Splashes strike the lens, and the rock of the ocean surf is destabilizing and disorienting. One of the most provocative foreshadowing ambiguities occurs when the half-submerged camera tracks the tip and slosh of the horizon, echoing the mood change from underwater confidence to vulnerability to natural forces, a passage from balance to defiance.” — Kathleen Hulser, “Frames of Passage: Nine Recent Films of Barbara Hammer,” Centre Georges Pompidou

Vulva’s School

Vulva’s School (Schneemann; 1995, 7:15, color sound)

A performance in which Schneemann personifies an irrepressible vulva, which engages two animal hand puppets in a clamorous deconstruction of sexual bias in French semiotics, Marxism, patriarchal religions and physical taboos.

Lesbian Whale

Lesbian Whale(Hammer; 2015, 6:35, color sound)

ROSENDALE THEATRE LOBBY EXHIBIT:

Poster(s), pictures, ephemera courtesy of the Carolee Schneemann Foundation and the Barbara Hammer Art Legacy, and the book: Parts of a Body House Book, courtesy of the Women’s Studio Workshop:

Front (left) and back (right) covers of Carolee Schneemann, Parts of a Body House Book

Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (Lynne Sachs; 2018, excerpt);

Kinetic Painting present day. This publication was in production at the time of her death in 2019. All hand interventions including corrections, stamping, staining, drawing, and highlighting were recreated to the artist’s exact wishes. Each copy in this edition is signed by Carolee’s beloved feline, La Niña, using a pigment mixed from beet juice and dirt gathered from the grounds of Carolee’s eighteenth century farmhouse in New Paltz, NY.

Austin Chronicle Reviews “Film About a Father Who”

Austin Chronicle
Film About a Father Who
2021, NR, 74 min. Directed by Lynne Sachs.
REVIEWED BY JENNY NULF
FRI., FEB. 12, 2021
https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2021-02-12/film-about-a-father-who/

Film About a Father Who, Lynne Sachs’ family self-portrait, opens with a shot of the documentarian brushing her father’s hair. Her gentle combing is then disrupted by a knot that won’t detangle. Sachs fights it, nervously laughing as she does, but refusing to give up. It’s a scene so personal, the act of grooming your own parent, but Sachs makes the audience aware that even in tenderness there is pain.

Ira Sachs Sr., we soon discover, has a complicated relationship with his daughter. She jokes he’s the “Hugh Hefner of Park City,” which is as playful as it is scathing, but there’s a sharp truth to his nickname. Sachs Sr. wasn’t just briefly unfaithful to his wife but has nine children with five different women. His lifestyle made him the black sheep of his family, and left his own mother ashamed and disgusted. She snarls in one interview about how her son has become an incredible disappointment, always on his phone and never present because he’s too busy toggling multiple women.

Sachs’ downward spiral into her father’s personal life has been in the works for roughly 26 years, with footage collected from 1984 to 2019. By using a mixture of 8mm film to pristine digital, her experimental documentary feels worn, an eclectic mixture of home videos that blends in with the film’s familial nature. Moments of Sachs as a child playing with her father are juxtaposed with interviews with the mothers of his children, whose openness with Sachs and the camera is intimate and brutal. Tears choked back, Sachs Sr.’s girlfriends have complex emotions toward their kids’ father, a man who betrayed their trust but who they also genuinely loved.

But Sachs doesn’t want to paint a picture of hate toward her father. This is the man who spent time with her on the self-proclaimed Bob Dylan Day, a man who has given her a large network of siblings to bond with. While family doesn’t mean everything, family is something that is a stable anchor to have when things feel hopeless, and while each child has complex feelings toward their father, it is also because of their father that they have a gigantic support circle who can (mostly) relate.

At one point in the film, Sachs explains that it’s her “reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” Film About a Father Who is not meant to give Sachs answers to her labyrinth of affection toward her father, but rather used to understand the man from whom she seeks so much approval. The film circles back to that opening scene of hair brushing, but the knot is no longer there. She’s finally tackled it and moved past it.

“Girl is Presence” to screen at 2021 Oberhausen Film Festival

“Lynne Sachs’s GIRL IS PRESENCE, with poetry by Anne Lesley Selcer, is one my absolute favorite films in the @kurzfilmtage program so far. What a stunner. #Oberhausen”. Film critic and arts journalist Ela Bittencourt on Twitter

Oberhausen – Announcing our first 2021 competitions
12.02.2021 Press Release News
https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/press/detail/announcing-our-first-2021-competitions/
Announcing Oberhausen’s first online competitions
67. Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, 1.-10. Mai 2021

The International Online Competition

40 films from 30 countries have been selected for Oberhausen’s first International Online Competition, more than half of them made by women. The list includes numerous new discoveries, but also works by filmmakers Lynne Sachs, winner of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen 2020 or Kristian Mercado, Grammy nominee for his music videos and SXSW jury prize winner, or artists such as Eszter Szabó or Sebastian Buerkner. One of the main underlying themes in the selection is the boundary between humans and machines. Avatars, robots, artificial intelligences are the focus of films like Sebastian Buerkner’s Surge (UK), my favorite software is being here by Alison Nguyen(USA) or Ieva by Vytautas Plukas and Domas Petronis (Lithuania), which explore the question of what actually makes us human at the intersections between digital and real, between the virtual world and reality.

The online selection committee: Hilke Doering (Kurzfilmtage), Christiane Büchner (filmmaker, Cologne), Greg de Cuir (curator, Belgrade), Javier Estrada (curator, Madrid).

International Online Competition

+x+=+, Niyaz Saghari, Iran
3xShapes of Home, Elisabeth Brun, Norway
Un très long temps d’exposition (A very long exposure time), Chloé Galibert-Laîné, France
Azkorri árnyéka alatt (Under the Shadow of Azkorri), Eszter Katalin, Spain
Belos Carnavais (Beautiful Carnivals), Thiago B. Mendonça, Brazil
Berlabuh (Anchoring), Haris Yuliyanto, Indonesia
Birthday, Yuka Sato, Japan
Cântec de leagăn (Cradle), Paul Mureșan, Romania
copia de la copia (de la copia), Rafal Morusiewicz, Austria
Dear Aki, Nina Kurtela, Croatia
Dos hombres atentos (Two Watchful Men), Joserraúl Ortiz, USA
Footnote to a Season, Julia Dogra-Brazell, France/UK
Girl Is Presence, Lynne Sachs/Anne Lesley Selcer, USA
Hemen. Gaur. Berriz (Here. Today. Again), Aitor Gametxo Zabala, Spain
Ieva, Vytautas Plukas/Domas Petronis, Lithuania
Kalsubai, Yudhajit Basu, India
La Cumbre, Felipe Lopez Gomez, Colombia
La Promenade sous les arbres (Walk Under the Trees), Nathan Clement, Switzerland
Las Credenciales (The Credentials), Manuel Ferrari, Argentina
Minnen (Memories), Kristin Johannessen, Sweden
my favorite software is being here, Alison Nguyen, USA
Nuevo Rico, Kristian Mercado, USA
Oasielles, Nathalie Rossetti, Belgium
Only Yesterday, Sione Monu, New Zealand
Pole Žin (Fields of Žinas), Marie Lukáčová/Anna Remecova, Czech Republic
Rumi X Phantasm, Khavn, Philippines
SON CHANT, Vivian Ostrovsky, USA
Suodji (Shelter), Marja Helander, Finland, Norway
Surge, Sebastian Buerkner, UK
Széphercegnő (Princess Beauty), Szabó Eszter, Hungary
The Light of Day, Alex Eisenberg/Anne Bean, UK
The Other Garden; Joel’s Garden, Go-Eun Im, Netherlands/South Korea
The Shadows, Paulo Pécora, Argentina
The___________World, Peixuan Ouyang, USA/China
Tracing Utopia, Catarina de Sousa/Nick Tyson, Portugal/USA/Australia
Trampa de luz (Light Trap), Pablo Marín, Argentina
Μεσογειακό Τοπίο (Mediterranean Landscape), Christiana Ioannou, Cyprus
Состязательная инфраструктура (Adversarial Infrastructure), Anna Engelhardt, Russia
Wei Qiao (Dangerous Bridge), Aixing Wang, China
我伪装起来了，就在你面前 (Guising, In front for you), Zhu Changquan, China

Oberhausen, 12 February 2021

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, T +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda(at)kurzfilmtage.de

Anne Lesley Selcerr & Lynne Sachs discuss “Girl is Presence” Collaboration

Stephen Vitiello: Soundtracks for Lynne Sachs (Volume 1)

Stephen Vitiello, an excerpt from Bowed from “Film About a Father Who”

Stephen Vitiello, an excerpt from Something Betweene from “Film About a Father Who”

STREAM OR PURCHASE THE ALBUM HERE:
https://stephenvitiello.bandcamp.com/album/soundtracks-for-lynne-sachs-volume-1-film-about-a-father-who-tip-of-my-tongue

Lynne Sachs first reached out to me in 2012, asking if I could recommend someone to work on the soundtrack for an upcoming film. I probably paused for a polite moment and then offered my own services. Since that time, I’ve created music for several projects by Lynne, including 4 feature-length films, a performance work (created in collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker) and a short film that uses a track I did with Molly Berg for a 12k CD. Over the years, I’ve amassed an archive of pieces made for these projects, some used in the films, some excerpted, some proposed. In some cases, Lynne would be looking for a 30-second clip for a transition and I’d use that as an excuse to record a 10-minute piece, figuring we’d find the 30-seconds somewhere in there.

This first volume of soundtracks works are from two films – Film About A Father Who, a complex portrait of Lynne’s father and (many) siblings. And then, Tip Of My Tongue, a piece on events of the last 55 years as remembered by a collection of friends and colleagues. As much as these musical tracks were created for the films, I don’t believe one has to have seen the films to enjoy them. That said, running out, or jumping on your computer, to watch and listen to the films would be a very good thing to consider.

Film About A Father Who, directed by Lynne Sachs, 2020
Editor – Rebecca Shapass

Tip Of My Tongue, directed by Lynne Sachs, 2017
Editor – Amanda Katz

credits

released February 5, 2021

Stephen Vitiello – guitar, modular synthesizer, piano, Rhodes keyboard, field recordings
Justin Alexander – percussion (FAFW)
Sara Bouchard – piano (FAFW)
Olivia LeClair – clarinet (TOMT)
Andy McGraw – percussion (TOMT)

Cover art – Lynne Sachs
Mastering – Lawrence English

license

KQED: Now Playing! – Lynne Sachs at the Roxie

Now Playing! SF Alums and Urban Film Fest Find the Connective Threads

KQED
By Michael Fox
February 11, 2021
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13892725/now-playing-sf-alums-and-urban-film-fest-find-the-connective-threads

This week’s offerings commemorate the intersection of Valentine’s Day and Black History Month with an overlap of class reunion.

The Films of Lynne Sachs
Opens Feb. 12
Roxie Virtual Cinema

“This is not a portrait,” states Lynne Sachs, near the end of Film About a Father Who, after the last in a string of revelations. “This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” Shot on a procession of film and video formats from 1965 though 2019, Sachs’ fascinating new film isn’t therapy, either.

Sachs studied and made films in San Francisco from the mid-’80s through the mid-’90s, bridging the experimental film and documentary worlds. Several of her pioneering works from that period, including The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), are included in the Roxie’s accompanying shorts program “Inquiries Into Self and Others.” A second collection, “Profiles in Courage,” showcases Sachs’ recent work, including A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer).

Sachs’s films are, generally, intentionally unpolished, willfully undercutting the popular presumption that the job of documentaries is to provide answers. Film About a Father Who excavates her (now-elderly) dad’s messy, lifelong love life through a pastiche of loose ends, unanswered questions and unresolved emotions. The film imperceptibly gets deeper and darker as it goes, ultimately amassing the power of an indictment.

Show Me What You Got
Feb. 12, 14–15
VOD

Svetlana Cvetko lives in L.A. and shoots all over the world, but her roots as a filmmaker are in the Bay Area. After gravitating to San Francisco from the former Yugoslavia several years ago, Cvetko took film classes and turned her eye from photography to cinematography. She was a quick study, making narrative shorts while shooting local docs like Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning Inside Job, Jacob Kornbluth’s Inequality for All and Jason Cohen’s Silicon Cowboys.

Cvetko’s wonderful and wise second feature as a director, Show Me What You Got, is infused with an L.A. vibe filtered through the French New Wave. Shot by Cvetko in joyous, handheld black-and-white, the movie depicts a ménage à trois between a barista-slash-artist (Cristina Rambaldi), the son of an Italian TV soaps star (Mattia Minasi) and a would-be actor (Neyssan Falahi) postponing his return to Tehran.

A seductive yet mature study of love, freedom and responsibility, Show Me What You Got returns for a virtual run after screening at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2019. Play dates are limited, so hurry and schedule your play date (pun intended).

SF Urban Film Fest
Feb. 14–21
Online

Film festivals continue to test and tweak virtual models, trying to conjure the group experience of live screenings and the connective threads of community. The first is a hard nut for anyone—even Sundance—to crack. This year’s SF Urban Film Fest, though, has mastered the second challenge, of bringing people together online to brainstorm on issues and seed solutions.

The theme of this year’s edition is “Wisdom Lives in Places,” which evokes the street-level experience and expertise on offer in the films as well as the accompanying panel discussions. The program “People-Led Solutions: Models of our Shared Future” centers on evictions and homelessness and features local filmmaker Irene Gustafson’s collaboration with the Tenderloin ensemble Skywatchers, reimagining the city, as our own. An inspiring group of activists and advocates convenes after the film program.

Who can resist an event called “Times Like These: An Inflection Point for Food & Our Cities”? The film component includes Aaron Lim, Anson Ho’s uplifting short doc about a young man doing his part and more to keep Chinatown restaurants going through the pandemic. The diverse group talking turkey following the films includes La Cocina Program Director Geetika Agrawal. Bring your wisdom; join the conversation.

SNF Parkway Theatre/ MdFF – Filmmaker Spotlight: Lynne Sachs

A conversation and live Q&A about Lynne Sachs’s newest documentary, a personal look at memory, familial love, and the unknowability of parents to their children. Sachs will discuss the movie with art historian, critic and long-time friend to the filmmaker, Kathy O’Dell and Artistic Director, Christy LeMaster and then take questions form the audience.

Lynne Sachs and Stephen Vitiello Program at the LA Film Forum

Lynne Sachs & Stephen Vitiello: Sound Engagements – Program 1: Four Films

https://www.lafilmforum.org/schedule/winter-2021/lynne-sachs-four-films-with-stephen-vitiello/

Los Angeles Filmforum presents

Lynne Sachs & Stephen Vitiello: Sound Engagements

Part 1: Four Films

Films Screening February 12-22, 2021

Live Q&A with Lynne Sachs on Friday, February 19, 7:00 pm PST (10:00 pm EST) by Zoom

Conversation with Lynne Sachs and Stephen Vitiello moderated by musician and music critic Sasha Frere-Jones on Sunday February 21, 5:00 pm PST (8:00 pm EST) by Zoom

Online via Los Angeles Filmforum

Filmforum is delighted to kick off 2021 by welcoming back our friend Lynne Sachs with her new film and several past works, all of which include original music by sound artist Stephen Vitiello.

“In collaborating on the soundtracks for my films, Stephen Vitiello somehow recognizes the interior sounds of objects and releases them for us to hear. Together his music and his sound designs push audiences toward a new way of experiencing cinema.” – Lynne Sachs

In these two programs, Los Angeles Filmforum explores the seven-year collaborative relationship between filmmaker Lynne Sachs and sound artist Stephen Vitiello.

Admission will include receiving links to both Zoom conversations!

Four films are covered by this admission, which is on a sliding scale, and which takes you to a screening room set up by Canyon Cinema. You also get a free link to the live Q&A with Lynne on Friday February 19 and the tripartite conversation on Sunday Feb 21.!

Ticketing for Four Films: Sliding Scale, $0 for members, $5 for students, $8, $12, $20

at https://lynnesachs4films.bpt.me

We hope that, if your means allow, you might go for $20, as you will be getting to see 4 wonderful films and attend two discussions!

Film About a Father Who is distributed by Cinema Guild, and has its own virtual cinema admission charge, listed on its own Filmforum webpage at https://www.lafilmforum.org/schedule/winter-2021/film-about-a-father-who/

Special Thanks to Brett Kashmere, Canyon Cinema, Tom Sveen, Cinema Guild.

Films by Lynne Sachs with music and sound design by Stephen Vitiello

2013 – 2020

Biographies:

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and a poet born in Memphis, Tennessee but living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together text, 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 every new project. Her work ranges from the very personal, as in her early experiments that are reminiscent of Bruce Connor’s found footage films and Chris Marker’s essay films, to documentary, as in her film on the Catonsville Nine’s antiwar-activism in Investigation of a Flame. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, George Kuchar, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Between 1994 and 2006, she produced five essay films that 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.

Sachs has made 37 films, which have screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance, Oberhausen, Viennale, BAMCinemaFest, Vancouver Film Festival, DocLisboa and many others nationally and internationally. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other venues. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Documentary Festival have all presented retrospectives of Lynne’s films. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first collection of poetry, Year by Year Poems. Lynne lives in Brooklyn with filmmaker Mark Street. Together, they have two daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs. www.lynnesachs.com

Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and sound artist who transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. He has composed music for independent films, experimental video projects and art installations, collaborating with such artists as Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler and Dara Birnbaum. Solo and group exhibitions include MASS MoCA, The High Line, NYC, and the Museum of Modern Art. https://www.stephenvitiello.com/
Solo exhibitions include All Those Vanished Engines, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2011-(ongoing)); A Bell For Every Minute, The High Line, NYC (2010-2011); More Songs About Buildings and Bells, Museum 52, New York (2011); and Stephen Vitiello, The Project, New York (2006). He has participated in such group exhibitions as Soundings: A Contemporary Score, Museum of Modern Art, NY (2013); Sound Objects: Leah Beeferman and Stephen Vitiello, Fridman Gallery, New York (2014); September 11, PS 1/MoMA, LIC, NY (2011-2012); the 15th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2006); Yanomami: Spirit of the Forest at the Cartier Foundation, Paris; and the 2002 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002). Vitiello has performed nationally and internationally, at locations such as the Tate Modern, London; the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; The Kitchen, New York; and the Cartier Foundation, Paris. In 2011, ABC-TV, Australia produced the documentary Stephen Vitiello: Listening With Intent. Awards include Creative Capital (2006) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-2012). Vitiello is a professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University. He lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Sasha Frere-Jones is a writer and musician from New York.

Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the Wilhelm Family Foundation, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

The Washing Society
Directed by Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker
2018, color, sound, 44 min.
When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there by observing these disappearing neighborhood spaces and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in THE WASHING SOCIETY creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.

“The legacy of domestic work, the issues surrounding power, and the exchange of money for services are all potent themes which rise to the surface and bubble over in dramatic, thrilling escalations of the everyday.” – Brooklyn Rail

“Spotlights the often-invisible workers who fold the clothes, maintain the machines and know your secrets.” – In These Times

Featuring: Jasmine Holloway, Veraalba Santa, and Ching Valdes-Aran
Cinematography: Sean Hanley, Editiing: Amanda Katz

Trailer: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2017/08/23/the-washing-society/

“Drift and Bough”
2014, Super 8mm on Digital, B&W, sound, 6 min.
Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painterʼs chiaroscuro. Woven into this cinematic landscape, we hear sound artist Stephen Vitielloʼs delicate yet soaring musical track which seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to the sky.

Tip of My Tongue
2017, color, sound, 80 min.
“To mark her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers a group of her contemporaries—all New Yorkers but originally hailing from all corners of the globe—for a weekend of recollection and reflection on the most life-altering personal, local, and international events of the past half-century, creating what Sachs calls ‘a collective distillation of our times.’ Interspersed with poetry and flashes of archival footage, this poignant reverie reveals how far beyond our control life is, and how far we can go despite this.” — Kathy Brew, Museum of Modern Art

“A mesmerizing ride through time, a dreamscape full of reflection, filled with inspired use of archival footage, poetry, beautiful cinematography and music. Raises the question of how deeply events affect us, while granting us enough room to crash into our own thoughts, or float on by, rejoicing in the company of our newfound friends.” — Screen Slate, Sonya Redi

“A beautiful, poetic collage of memory, history, poetry, and lived experience, in all its joys, sorrows, fears, hopes, triumphs, and tragedies … rendered in exquisite visual terms, creating an artful collective chronicle of history.” Christopher Bourne, Screen Anarchy

Trailer: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2017/04/25/tip-of-my-tongue/

Featuring: Dominga Alvarado, Mark Cohen, Sholeh Dalai, Andrea Kannapell, Sarah Markgraf, Shira Nayman, George Sanchez, Adam Schartoff, Erik Schurink, Accra Shepp, Sue Simon, Jim Supanick

Cinematography: Sean Hanley

Editing: Amanda Katz

Your Day is My Night
2013, HD video and live performance, color, sound, 64 min.
Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.

“A strikingly handsome, meditative work: a mixture of reportage, dreams, memories and playacting, which immerses you in an entire world that you might unknowingly pass on the corner of Hester Street, unable to guess what’s behind the fifth-floor windows.” -The Nation

In Chinese, English & Spanish with English Subtitles.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pks0_IRHek

Featuring: Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Qing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, Sheut Hing Lee, Kam Yin Tsui, & Veraalba Santa.

Camera by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass

Winner, Best Feature Documentary, San Diego Asian Film Festival, 2013 * Winner, Best Feature Film, Workers Unite! Film Festival, 2013 * Winner, Best Experimental Film, Traverse City Film Festival, 2013

THE FILMS OF LYNNE SACHS Curated by Craig Baldwin at the Roxie (San Francisco)

THE FILMS OF LYNNE SACHS
Curated by Craig Baldwin

https://www.roxie.com/the-films-of-lynne-sachs/

Film About a Father Who +

Two Sidebar Programs

Starts February 12

Fresh from her early 2021 retrospective at New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image, filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to San Francisco where she lived and went to school (SFSU & SFAI) between 1985 and ‘95. It was here that Lynne really immersed herself in our city’s experimental and documentary community, working closely with local artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson and Trinh T. Minh-ha and spending time at the Film Arts Foundation (RIP), Canyon Cinema, SF Cinematheque, and Other Cinema.

“For more than thirty years, artist Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political conflict; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” – Edo Choi, Assistant Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image.

Accompanying our Bay Area premiere of Sachs’s Film About a Father Who, the Roxie offers two accompanying shorts sidebars programmed by filmmaker and Other Cinema curator Craig Baldwin.

Special thanks to Other Cinema, Canyon Cinema, and Cinema Guild for their support in organizing this program.

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. (74 min., 2020, A Cinema Guild Release)

Critic’s Pick! “[A] brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait.” – Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times

“Sachs achieves a poetic resignation about unknowability inside families, and the hidden roots never explained from looking at a family tree.” – Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

“Formidable in its candor and ambition.” – Jonathan Romney, Screen International

Tickets for FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO will be available on February 12

SACHS SHORTS SIDEBARS

Sidebar 1: INQUIRIES INTO SELF AND OTHER

Still from “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (4 min., 1986)
Sermons and Sacred Pictures (29 min., 1989)
The House of Science: a museum of false facts (30 min., 1991)
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (made with Dana Sachs) (33 min., 1994)

“As sidebar to her fresh Father feature, here is the first of two shorts programs, showcasing the astonishing cinematic artistry of Lynne Sachs…all made during her san fran years and recently digitally restored. Her ‘89 Sermons offers an early glimmer of her sensitivity to both marginalized communities and their archives, as she gracefully threads ultra-rare ‘30s & ’40s footage from Rev. LO Taylor into a tapestry of visibility and respect for Memphis’ Black community. Her facility for celluloid extrapolation is demonstrated in even more creative ways in House of Science, a personal essay on female identity, told through found footage, poetic text, and playful experimental technique. Which Way is East raises its eyes to engagements in international waters, and to insightful exchanges with her expat sister Dana, towards new understandings of and in the oh-so-historically charged Republic of Vietnam. Opening is Lynne’s first ever 16mm, Still Life.” – CB

TRT: 96 min.

Tickets for Sidebar 1: INQUIRIES INTO SELF AND OTHER will be available on February 12

—

Sidebar 2: PROFILES IN COURAGE

A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (14 min., 2019)
Investigation of a Flame (45 min., 2001)
And Then We Marched (4 min., 2017)
The Washing Society (co-directed with Lizzie Olesker) (44 min., 2018)

“Characteristically, Sachs speaks in first person to cultural difference and dissent, here particularly valorizing acts of resistance and struggles for justice. Her collaboration with the recently deceased lesbian maker Barbara Hammer keynotes this ‘Solidarity’ set, with Lynne literally framing/finishing her mentor’s last project. Younger allies are also acknowledged in Sachs’ inspiring 2017 celebration of women’s political power on contested Washington, DC turf. The 2001 Investigation is a tribute to the courage and conscience of the epochal Berrigan-led burning of Baltimore draft records, made while Sachs was teaching in that town. And the local debut of The Washing Society, produced with playwright Lizzie Olesker, stakes their support of NYC’s low-paid laundry workers—mostly women of color—in even another radiant illumination of the little-seen truths of contemporary race/class inequity.” – CB

TRT: 107 min.

Tickets for Sidebar 2: PROFILES IN COURAGE will be available on February 12

“Film About a Father Who” ‘Best of 2020’ Picks!

The 2020 Village Voice Voice Poll, Reconstructed

Filmmaker Magazine
https://filmmakermagazine.com/110892-the-2020-village-voice-voice-poll-reconstructed/#.YCRKTJNKg8M

BRIAN DARR
(unranked)
The Beast Must Die
The Brilliant Biograph: Earliest Moving Images of Europe
Days
Film About a Father Who
First Cow
Fourteen
The Giverny Document
Nomadland
Steven Arnold: Heavenly Bodies
Undine

from Nelson Kim
My 20 favorite new movies of 2020, in alphabetical order. (LOVERS ROCK and NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS were probably my favorite-favorites.)

ANOTHER ROUND (Thomas Vinterberg)
THE ASSISTANT (Kitty Green)
BAD EDUCATION (Cory Finley)
BEANPOLE (Kantemir Balagov)
THE CLOUD IN HER ROOM (Zheng Lu Xinyuan)
COLLECTIVE (Alexander Nanau)
DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD (Kirsten Johnson)
EMMA (Autumn DeWilde)
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (Lynne Sachs)
FIRST COW (Kelly Reichardt)
THE GRAND BIZARRE (Jodie Mack)
LOVERS ROCK (Steve McQueen)
MINARI (Lee Isaac Chung)
NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS (Eliza Hittman)
NOMADLAND (Chloe Zhao)
SHITHOUSE (Cooper Raiff)
SWALLOW (Carlo Mirabella-Davis)
TIME (Garrett Bradley)
THE TROUBLE WITH BEING BORN (Sandra Wollner)
THE VAST OF NIGHT (Andrew Patterson)

BFI: The best films of 2020 – all the votes

We asked 104 contributors – British and international – to pick the ten best new films they’d seen in 2020. Here you can browse all 353 films they nominated.

18 December 2020
https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/polls/best-films-2020-all-votes

Tara Judah
Critic and programmer, UK

Lynne Sachs’s body of work first came to my attention via Sheffield Doc/Fest’s online focus and I am now completely immersed in her craft.

There are many more films that will seem like omissions and perhaps it is only that my eyes await them, as I was unable to see the usual level of films this year, though I have still witnessed great talent, art and beauty.

Cine-File Contributors’ Best of 2020 Lists

https://www.cinefile.info/blog/best-of-2020

Kathleen Sachs
Favorite New(-ish) Releases I Saw for the First Time in 2020
1. CITY HALL (Frederick Wiseman)
2. DAYS (Tsai Ming-liang)
3. BEANPOLE (Kantemir Balagov)
4. THE WOMAN WHO RAN (Hong Sang-soo)
5. EMA (Pablo Larraín)
6. (Tie) MAAT MEANS LAND/SAN DIEGO (Fox Maxy)
7. JUANITA (Leticia Tonos Paniagua)
8. (Tie) FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (Lynne Sachs)/A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME: WRIGHT OR WRONG (Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa)
9. ON A MAGICAL NIGHT (Christophe Honoré)
10. FIRST COW (Kelly Reichardt)

48 Hills – “Screen Grabs: The Outlaw Sounds of Youth”

Screen Grabs: The outlaw sounds of youth

Lover’s Rock and outlaw country docs. Plus: MC Escher, Black art history, and are we living in a simulation? New movies!
By DENNIS HARVEY
FEBRUARY 8, 2021
https://48hills.org/2021/02/screen-grabs-the-outlaw-sounds-of-youth/

Film About a Father Who

Pathological in a comparatively old-fashioned way is the man at the center of Lynne Sachs’ very-long-in-the-making personal documentary. (It deploys footage shot by herself, family members, and others between 1965-2019.) She is daughter to Ira Sachs, a hotelier and entrepreneur who worked as little as was needed to maintain his extravagant, globe-trotting, pleasure-seeking lifestyle. (Ira Sachs Jr. is Lynne’s full brother, as well as the slightly-better-known director of such excellent movies as Keep the Lights On and Little Men.) Some apparently called him “the Hugh Hefner of Park City.” I doubt he protested.

While he may be elderly and perhaps a bit senile now (or perhaps he’s just using “I don’t remember” as an excuse to dodge questions), few deny that he was charismatic, fun, generous, genuine in his love for people…even if his actions often caused them grief. What he wasn’t was “the stable parent” (that was Lynne and Ira Jr.’s mother), or anyone who could be counted on, least of all to be honest. “He doesn’t lie—he just doesn’t tell you what’s going on” one daughter says here. That fibbing by omission extended to his neglecting to inform his “legitimate” children of their “hidden siblings” scattered hither and yon, some left to grow up in abject poverty while he flew with the jet-set. Even the kids he was hiding such intel from were all too aware he was constantly stringing along not just wives and mistresses, but “subsidiary girlfriends,” short-term flings, much-younger pickups, et al. His bedroom should have had a revolving door.

Compromised largely of home movies covering decades, Film About a Father Who is a semi-experimental collage documentary that asks the question “How can you love people you don’t know?” The senior Sachs is lovable, by all reports, yet refuses to be truly “known,” perhaps even to himself—evasion seems utterly core to his being. His own wealthy, long-suffering mother (from whom he kept many of his children secret) calls him a kind of psychological “cripple,” his compulsive promiscuity a sickness. He’s not exactly an above-board embodiment of “free love”: He has been deliberately deceptive, misleading women and to varying degrees skipping out on the consequences they’ve then had to live with. His filmmaker daughter doesn’t see him as a simple cad. But as intriguing as this ambivalent portrait is, the viewer may well disagree. It becomes available as part of the Roxie Virtual Cinema programming on Fri/12.

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs