Even when a global pandemic hasn’t upended everything, year-end lists and surveys often strike a faintly apologetic tone, acknowledging up front that there’s something inherently frivolous about ranking films in preferential order (whether individually or collectively). “This is kinda dumb, but enjoy!” How, then, should I further diminish a poll conducted in the name of a publication that effectively no longer exists, conducted at the conclusion of a film year that can barely be said to have happened? Movie theaters in many major cities have been dormant since last March, and the Village Voice, which established the original freewheeling critics’ poll back in 1999, went dark three years ago (though it was recently purchased by the same guy who transformed LA Weekly into a haven for sponsored content). Yet I still went ahead and solicited top ten lists from most of the writers and programmers who used to participate in the Voice poll, in my continuing effort to reconstruct what its results for Best Picture, at least, might roughly have been.
The shutdowns and lockdowns definitely took a toll. Last year, 91 people responded; this year, the number fell to 78, with several people expressly noting that they chose to abstain because they’d seen significantly fewer films than usual. Those who did submit a list had to decide for themselves what qualifies as a 2020 “release,” given that the already-fading standard—one week’s run in Los Angeles and/or New York City—would have rendered most of the year’s notable movies ineligible. (As it turned out, the film that won technically did get a standard theatrical release, just a week before everything closed.) I opted not to police this in any way, which is why you’ll see a few titles that really only had virtual-fest screenings last year (and may or may not become more widely available this year). Why arbitarily deny attention to a three-hour Romanian philosophy seminar? Making folks aware of such marketplace anomalies is arguably the whole point of year-end rankings, assuming one believes that there’s any point at all. (See? Reflex.)
Tabulation rules were once again taken straight from the Voice poll itself. Each ranked list produced 55 total points, with ten allotted to the film at #1, nine to the film at #2, and so on down the line. Those too cowardly, indecisive or “principled” to engage in strict hierarchy (sorry, I have strong feelings about this) submitted unranked lists, for which every film received five points—thereby totalling just 50, a small but not insignificant waffling penalty. Seems fair. Once all ballots had arrived, it shook out as follows:
[parenthetical numbers = points/votes]
First Cow (286/41)
Lovers Rock (249/38)
Nomadland (182/31)
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (153/27)
The Assistant (149/29)
Time (138/25)
Dick Johnson Is Dead (128/23)
Martin Eden (128/20)
Bacurau (119/21)
Vitalina Varela (118/18)
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (108/18)
Collective (103/17)
Da 5 Bloods (90/14)
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (81/15)
City Hall (64/11)
Sound of Metal (59/11)
The Nest (57/11)
Kajillionaire (55/8)
Beanpole (53/12)
Promising Young Woman (53/9)
Another Round (52/9)
David Byrne’s American Utopia (52/9) [tie for #21]
Driveways (51/9)
Fourteen (50/9)
Wolfwalkers (38/7)
Days (37/5)
Minari (36/7)
I Was at Home, but… (36/6)
To the Ends of the Earth (35/5)
The Grand Bizarre (34/6)
The Whistlers (34/5)
The Father (30/5)
The Vast of Night (30/5) [tie for #32]
Tenet (29/6)
Shirley (27/5)
Soul (26/4)
Possessor (24/5)
She Dies Tomorrow (24/4)
Sorry We Missed You (24/4) [tie for #38]
Saint Frances (24/3)
Let Them All Talk (23/6)
The Invisible Man (22/6)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (22/5)
Mangrove (22/5) [tie for #43]
A White, White Day (22/4)
Malmkrog (22/3)
The Painter and the Thief (22/3) [tie for #46]
Swallow (21/3)
An Easy Girl (20/4)
Bad Education (19/5)
As usual, there are no big surprises up at the top. First Cow (#1) was named the year’s best film by the New York Film Critics Circle; Lovers Rock (#2) received that honor from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (jointly with the rest of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe project); Nomadland (#3) took home the National Society of Film Critics’ Best Picture prize. Throw in Never Rarely Sometimes Always and you’ve also got the exact same top four that Indiewire’s much larger poll (230+ critics) produced, albeit in a slightly different order. On the other hand, David Fincher’s Mank placed 10th among Indiewire’s voters but failed even to crack the Pseudo-Voice top 50, amassing fewer points than Rebecca Zlotowski’s comparatively unheralded An Easy Girl (#49). One Night in Miami (Indiewire #17) suffered the same fate, receiving just two votes from this crew…which liked The Assistant considerably more than their counterparts (5th place vs. 22nd place). Ammonite and News of the World got dissed in favor of borderline avant-garde works like The Grand Bizarre and I Was at Home, but… People often refer monolithically to “the critics,” but clearly it depends which critics you’re talking about, even when they’ve been amassed into groups of many dozens.
In any case, my own interest in year-end polls has always been weighted more toward the bottom than the top. The fun lies in browsing through individual, idiosyncratic choices—the comparative orphans, beloved by only a handful, sometimes the light of just one lonely critic’s life. (See #8 on my own list.) At the very least, give us all the data, so we can CTRL-F to our heart’s content. That’s what you’ll find below.
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
Film About a Father Who is an intimate, innovative auto-doc about wounded people finding solace in the company of fellow stragglers.
Film About A Father Who is Lynne Sachs’ latest, and evidently most personal, feat of documentation. Patched together from various conversations and intimate moments inked on 16mm film, camcorder tapes, and digital masters — cleverly staggered to disrupt any linear timeline, and, by extension, any discernible narrative sequence — the film traverses the emotional interstices passed down by an absent father who radiates a kindly, domesticated charm in our first glimpses at him. This towheaded wayfarer is Ira Sachs Sr., a self-styled refusenik liable to one-time flings that conveniently fall within his orbit — affable though he may be, but waning in physique. This impression of the man — when contrasted with preceding home movie clippings, depicting scenes of play and hiking vignettes, tinselled in noise and unnaturally variegated — seems to complicate an expected narrative of old-age sentimentalism.
Ira Sachs Sr., we soon learn, is the center of a criss-crossing matrix of ill will and soured affections, the painful afterlives of his philandering excursions that persist to this day. The torment suffered by Ira’s former partners, as in the case of his second wife Diana and the children he fathered, is on full display as each party takes center-stage to voice the burdens foisted upon them as a result of both his romantic and familial derelictions of duty. During these soul-baring interactions, occasional lapses in the clarity of the recording (and overdubbing), along with stretched-out J-cuts, serve to deny us the affective impact of a more continuous, metered equilibrium. The effect of these techniques is made uncanny in an early sequence with Lynne’s mother, Diane, where the audio momentarily peters out as she relates an important transition in the relationship, and elsewhere, such as in a scene with Rose (affectionately nicknamed Maw-Maw) that connects the comingled love and disdain of her bond with Ira to the sequence’s separation of speech and thought.
The film’s title takes direct inspiration from sterling fellow filmmaker, choreographer, and theorist Yvonne Rainer’s sophomore feature Film About A Woman Who…, but tellingly drops the ellipsis. Per Lynne’s assertion that her father had “his own syntax, his own set of rules,” the film offers an enticing vantage point from which to take in the teeming life of another, before suggesting that any resultant observations cannot perfectly capture the complexity and unknowability of even the most flawed among us. As a rudimentary support circle is formed within Lynne’s expanding family unit, and contextual light is shed upon experiences previously assumed to be singular, Ira recedes into the background. The film refuses moral pronouncement and takes shape as an act of witness to disparate individuals working through unresolved bogies in real-time — strained even further by the abrupt introduction of two relatives unknown to the rest for decades. There are inevitable difficulties faced by the family members identifying with, and caring for, blood relations they know only through a traumatic history of neglect — as Lynne herself muses at one point, “How can you look for something you don’t even know is lost?” This makes for a shaky incompleteness that dogs the closing moments, an aleatoric cinema of sorts open to inopportune discoveries and inconvenient questions bubbling up long after its composition, complemented wonderfully by Lynne’s filmmaking background. Her experimental influences (there’s even a flicker-film insert near the end!) aid the sculpting of a collage film that parlays the misshapen specificities of its different media into an impressionistic flow of images, at once dissonant and eerily familiar. It is a work ever in progress, moving to the clip of life’s uncertainties and conveying well the difficulties of gingerly re-establishing one’s bearings while reckoning with a loved one’s severe failings, and the degree to which all can be forgiven. Film About A Father Who lurches forwards slowly but surely, a study of those who wander, wounded and lost, finding solace in the company of other stragglers.
Lynne Sachs in conversation with the Belcourt Programming Staff: Allison Inman Mae Moreno, Toby Leonard, and Zack Hall on the occasion of “Film About a Father Who”‘s virtual theatre release.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Digging into family secrets can be a tricky affair.
That’s what veteran filmmaker Lynne Sachs learned with her latest documentary “Film About a Father Who,” which tells the story of her pioneering Utah businessman father, Ira.
While the new documentary touches upon themes of fatherhood and masculinity, the director along the way discovers some surprising hidden truths about her dad, who fathered numerous children after divorcing her mother.
Using family videos and digital images of her father dating back decades, Sachs created an autobiographical essay movie in an attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.
We recently caught up with the filmmaker to discuss the impetus behind the documentary and her father’s story.
Lynn, congrats on the film. Is it safe to assume you’ve been working on a documentary of your father for decades?
It all depends on what you would call work. If you started with the idea that one’s relationship with your parents is kind of working, there’s film footage going back to the mid-’60s so it kind of started there. But it also truly started with me as a filmmaker in 1991 when I decided that I wanted to make a film that helped me understand the medium and how it could give you an opportunity to get to know another person better. I actually made a film about a total stranger a few years later. Then I made a film about a distant relative. I thought the easiest one would be about my dad and it was definitely the hardest.
Despite trying your best to get answers about his past, your father proves successfully elusive in providing any concrete details about his actions — especially as it relates to other women.
With my dad, overt introspection wasn’t really part of his way of being. It just took me a long time to realize that. Maybe I evolved as a documentary filmmaker, where I saw that model as having a lot of limitations. I started to think about how you understand a person by the company they keep or how you understand them by the way they interact with the world or — even more — how they look at you. If they’re holding a camera and you have access to that material, then see something about their perception.
The film touches upon what was more than likely a traumatic incident your father experienced as a 3-year-old. Despite the fact he claims no memory of it, one could argue that defines his life and behavior.
My father always said he didn’t dream. I eventually realized he wasn’t keen on doing something that probably we do, which is to look at your childhood and figure out how that left an imprint on who you are. Now, I do believe that ruptures for children have a lasting impact. That’s the thesis or suggestion I want the film to have, which is not to say it makes excuses for behavior, but it gives context.
“Film About a Father Who” doesn’t shy away from casting your dad in unfavorable light regarding his philandering, which led to fathering numerous children with different women. Finally, how did he react to seeing the film?
He actually cried and he said to me, “I’ll try to do better in the future.” I don’t think he has any more kids, and I know he’s not going to have more. So far no one has materialized saying, “I’m the 10th child of Ira Sachs.” He never told me he had shame, but I don’t think shame is part of his vocabulary. The hardest thing for me was, I had two sisters that I didn’t know anything about. One is almost 40 years old, and I just met her a couple of years ago. I can say there were clues. I asked about them, I tried to follow those clues years ago and didn’t go anywhere with them. Am I culpable or complicit in that? I did my best.
A daughter explores her feelings about, the biographical landmarks and the explosion of family begotten by her father in Film About a Father Who, a free-flowing documentary whose title might lack the literal ellipsis that is nevertheless implied. For here is director Lynne Sachs, a veteran experimental filmmaker, reflecting upon exactly who her father, Ira Sachs Sr., is, and, more importantly, how she came to understand the who, when and why of his legacy. This is remarkably candid about a man who is, in many ways, anything but candid.
Legacy is at the forefront of study for Sachs, whose career has spanned the last three-and-a-half decades. Indeed, filmmaking kind of runs in the family. Keen observers will recognize the elder Sachs’ son and namesake, Ira Sachs, whose films (the most recognizable, perhaps, being 2008’s Married Life and 2014’s Love Is Strange) commonly explored marriage and relationships in flux and under strain. The younger Ira shows up only a few times in the framing device of the film, shot in the year 2019, but one can imagine that such a filmography was in answer to the tumultuous nature of his father’s relationships.
Those relationships have certainly had an impact, and if a minor disappointment here is that Sachs is not entirely able to communicate whose children were born to which woman, perhaps that is part of the point. Ira has lived a full life (he was 83 at the time of filming this documentary, and a spot of investigative work reveals that he is still alive now) – one of contradictions and blessings and hypocrisies and riches. A pioneering developer who, among other accomplishments, established the Yarrow Hotel (now the Doubletree by Hilton) in Park City, Utah, Ira was also a famed womanizer and was raised by a domineering mother who taught her son to push off all emotional maturity.
The result is a man who smiles through everything, who hides a whole lot of himself, and who seems unable to face anything that might present the opportunity for catharsis. At one point, when asked the question about when he knew that one of his daughters was his daughter, he cannot answer. Moreover, he would rather not try to remember, either. He says all of this with something of an empty smile on his face – remembering the good times and trying to push away the part that actually means anything.
Somehow, Sachs has made a documentary that is as comprehensive as it can be about a man who is almost the opposite of a generous subject. When we meet his mother, by the way, the interview is even more hostile about revealing any truth. That isn’t surprising, considering what we have come to learn about the woman, but it is a significant achievement on the part of Sachs to have shaped any of this material – culled from, as one could only imagine, hundreds of hours of home-video footage over the course of 35 years – into a workable motion picture. It is quite a moving one, too, especially on the level of personal introspection and reflection.
There is occasionally the feeling that this project is too personal to Sachs to translate for those looking from the outside in. Film About a Father Who still resonates as a reflection on a life lived and the love that has lingered.
Kat Sachs explores the Museum of the Moving Image’s new retrospective in MUBI’s Notebook: “Someone introduced themselves to me at a film festival where one of Lynne Sachs’s films was screening. I introduced myself in return, and their eyes lit up. ‘Are you Lynne Sachs?’ they asked, having apparently heard only my last name. No, I am not Lynne Sachs (obviously), nor am I related to her. But I enjoy relaying this anecdote, in part because it’s so flattering to have been momentarily mistaken for the experimental filmmaker, writer, and artist whose work I greatly admire. While I have no direct connection to Sachs, after recently watching so many of her films in such a brief period of time—on the occasion of the Museum of the Moving Image’s inspired retrospective, ‘Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression,’ organized by assistant curator Edo Choi and available to stream online here between January 13 – 31, 2021—I do feel as though I know her.”
“Beyond attempting to come to terms with Ira the philanderer and the ways his laissez-faire approach to relationships with women has shaped her life and those of her siblings, Film About a Father Who also explores the relationship between recording and remembering, the way past and present inform each other as the stored memories of film and video footage are brought together into a coherent shape. It’s an evocative distillation of some truth from the sprawling m
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options—not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves–each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit platforms. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.
Film About a Father Who (Lynne Sachs)
While director Lynne Sachs admits her latest documentary Film About a Father Who could be superficially construed as a portrait (the title alludes to and the content revolves around her father Ira), she labels it a reckoning instead. With thirty-five years of footage shot across varied formats and devices to cull through and piece together, the result becomes less about providing a clear picture of who this man is and more about understanding the cost of his actions. Whether it began that way or not, however, it surely didn’t take long to realize how deep a drop the rabbit hole of his life would prove. Sachs jumped in to discover truths surrounding her childhood only to fall through numerous false bottoms that revealed truths she couldn’t even imagine. – Jared M. (full review)
When encountering the societal and economic structures of everyday life, it’s not a rare dream for many to wonder what life may look like off the grid and out of the hands of a bureaucratic entity that doesn’t have your best interests in mind. For one family living in the vast water reservoir of the Bucharest Delta, they have made this their reality for the last eighteen years. The Enache family and their nine children call this abandoned area their home, sleeping in their homemade hut, fishing for food, and taking gentle care of this slice of nature directly outside the hectic Romanian capital. As outside interest in their homeland grows, Acasă, My Home director Radu Ciorniciuc captures the forces of civilization that cause an upheaval of their lives with a well-rounded eye, painting an empathetic, complex portrait of the costs of independence. – Jordan R. (full review)
Though in many respects unpolished, late Chinese director Hu Bo’s first–and only–feature is a cry into the void so raw and resounding it shakes you out of a stupor you never even realized. The breathlessly long set pieces build up a sense of suffocation in real time, while the subtle music and camerawork evoke the constant, unspoken despair of a billion nobodies. This is the work of a keenly observant storyteller who bared his last outrage on screen and who probably proved too perceptive for the moral bankruptcy of this world. – Zhuo-Ning Su
Tyler Taormina’s singularly woozy debut about a group of teens making their way toward some cryptic rite of passage spins the high-school genre like a top. Purposefully devoid of clarifying exposition, it builds narrative mythology out of the dual uncertainty and excitement felt by young people making their initial crossing into adulthood. The result is a mysterious mash of sinister possibilities and forlorn melancholy that lingers like the smoky air so prominent in its central celebratory sequence inside a portal-like sandwich shop. – Glenn H.
One of Hong Sangsoo’s greatest works, Hill of Freedom is a showcase par excellence in how the director adds complexity to a structure that seems simple on the surface: a woman reads a man’s letters about his adventures in Japan, only to have them fall on the ground, and thus his story is now told out of order. The playful conceit of the 67-minute film finds ample room to explore comedy, heartache, cultural identity, and more. Like most Hong films, it plays as a breath of fresh air, and even moreso during this time of immense unease. – Jordan R.
With his hands on the steering wheel driving down the highway, Scott (Pete Davidson) closes his eyes, ready to crash into what lies ahead and explode into flames. This is the opening of Judd Apatow’s The King of Staten Island, a quasi-comedy that is less interested in finding the funniest punchline for every situation and more curious about the search for the scattered, missing pieces of one’s soul. It’s the director’s most emotionally attuned and narrowly focused work, a film in which our attention is not pulled along by heavy dramatic shifts or distracted by a mountain of subplots, but rather how trauma can form a life of complacency and it’s only slivers of progress that hint at a more promising future. – Jordan R. (full review)
From The Bourne Identity to Mr. & Mrs. Smith to Edge of Tomorrow, Doug Liman’s scale has come a long way since his smaller-scale breakouts Swingers and Go. With Locked Down, the director’s filmmaking style is pared down once again, focused on a couple quarreling during the COVID-19 lockdown in London. Reminding us he’s more than just an action or franchise director, Liman’s latest finds him going back to his roots, drawing eyeballs with a stacked cast led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, and supported by Stephen Merchant, Mindy Kaling, Ben Stiller, Dulé Hill, and Lucy Boynton. – Michael F. (full review)
MLK/FBI shows the lengths J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI went to “neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader,” according to a bureau memo from 1963. Sam Pollard’s concise new documentary wrestles with King’s legacy as a Black Christian-pacifict freedom fighter and philanderer. If the last noun makes you tense up, the documentary is doing its job. The FBI’s ruthless campaign to discredit MLK Jr. with dirt on his affairs is at the center of Pollard’s story. It poses two questions: do King’s affairs discredit his legacy? And was J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI acting outside the bounds of the law, or as an apparatus of the political order? Using research from David J. Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Dr. King, testimonials from King’s inner circle, and recently declassified FBI documents, MLK/FBI shows––despite the FBI’s best efforts––the substance of King’s legacy is not his affairs, but his righteous cause for equality. – Josh E. (full review)
My Little Sister (Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond)
Nina Hoss and Lars Eidinger, two of Germany’s preeminent acting talents, play twins coming to terms with a diagnosis of terminal illness in My Little Sister, the second narrative film by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond. It’s a film that carries emotional power more in its moments of natural reflexiveness than the weepie genre’s more conventional emotional beats, anchored by two focused lead performances that thankfully don’t succumb to melodrama. – Ed F. (full review)
When things get tough, I’ve always turned to the Western for clarity and reassurance. Maybe it’s because most of these films are about finding solace during uncertain times, pursuing peace where none has existed before. Though central themes of sacrifice and redemption are certainty well-trodden in the genre, filmmakers from Budd Boetticher to Kelly Reichardt remind us why they can be infinitely tweaked and subverted to reveal something new within the familiar. Watching Paul Greengrass’ sturdy new saddle opera News of the World in the late stages of 2020 felt thoroughly cleansing in this regard. – Glenn H. (full review)
The power behind Regina King‘s directorial debut One Night in Miami … is epitomized by an exchange about halfway through that ultimately lands on the topic of personal duty within the civil rights movement. Malcolm X saw his friends as leaders armed with the voices and platforms to shift its tide—a fact emboldening playwright Kemp Powers to hypothesize the breadth of socially- and politically-charged conversations Malcolm and friends Jim Brown, Cassius Clay, and Sam Cooke may have shared. With four impeccable performances bringing these men to life with boldness both in their ability to impersonate physically and embody spiritually, King lets her cast carry the drama by providing them the room to scream when necessary and cry when there’s nothing left to give. – Jared M. (full review)
Unafraid of putting off audiences, Emerald Fennell’s feature debut is the rare movie that understands rage. It knows the feeling of welcoming scorched earth; it sees the inability of truly moving past trauma. Carey Mulligan does stellar work and the bubblegum costume design makes for an addictive viewing, but it’s so much more than that. It’s cynical and hopeless—just as it should be—and its looks at the aftershocks of rape ring cathartic and exhausting in equal measure. – Matt C.
The draws of living inside The Villages, the largest over-55 retirement community in the country, are readily apparent. For the nearly 115,000 veterans planted within the insulated Floridian suburban sprawl, there is no reason to be bored with life. Its complex contains golf courses and pickleball courts, swimming pools and volleyball beaches, acting and dance classes and plenty of tricked out golf carts. The sherbert sunset backdrops each night suggest this place is paradise. – Jake K. (full review)
This is the third film from director Justine Triet, whose last feature In Bed with Victoria, while markedly more comic in tone, also featured a headstrong, successful woman dealing with a complicated personal life. It’s clearly something Triet prioritizes, and she gets strong performances from her two female leads, especially Efira, whose character’s poise and confidence slowly breaks down as she loses grip of her personal and professional responsibilities. There’s also a small, funny role for Sandra Hüller as an exasperated director of the chaotic film shoot that brings together Margot and Igor. – Ed F. (full review)
Legend has it that when Laika died on November 3, 1957, following a 5-hour journey that turned the dog into the first living creature to orbit the Earth, her spirit returned to Moscow, roaming the streets where Soviet scientists had plucked her. Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter’s entrancing Space Dogs begins where the legend ends, and hangs in that same mystic region all through its hour and a half. It’s an odyssey that keeps seesawing between the terrestrial and the astral, trailing behind a couple of Muscovite mongrels to connect their earthly meanderings with a larger question about the ways in which humans have colonized space, and recruited other species as martyrs in the pursuit. – Leonardo G. (full review)
When two paramedic best friends in New Orleans discovered the first unexplainable injury on their route, they didn’t really think much about it. The second? Well, it was a body. They shouldn’t have even been called. What about the third, though? A snake bite in a hotel room without a snake alongside a disappeared boyfriend? That’s when you start looking for the connective tissue holding everything together besides Steve (Anthony Mackie) and Dennis (Jamie Dornan) having the bad luck to catch them all. That’s when the label of a designer drug comes into focus. The name? Synchronic. Rather than a reference to “meaningful coincidences” (since coincidence was ruled out), directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead lean towards Carl Jung’s “togetherness” definition. They’ve simply defined the cause along with the meaning. – Jared M. (full review)
Jordan Raup is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Film Stage and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic. Track his obsessive film-watching on Letterboxd.
In the opening moments of Lynne Sachs’ personal documentary “Film About a Father Who,” we see the filmmaker carefully detangling her octogenarian dad Ira’s unruly, hippie-holdover locks. It’s a quiet slice of caretaking intimacy, but it also doubles as prologue to the knotty family journey to follow, which in no small part involves Sachs making sense of a free-spirited parent’s complicated legacy.
Ira Sachs Sr. was no ordinary father. Marked by wide-ranging business ventures, grand gestures and righteous causes, his peripatetic life was driven by the joy in whims. But it also created nine children over 30 years with six different women, where various kids were often unaware for long stretches about others’ existences.
Sachs, the oldest sibling, has been filming her bon vivant dad for decades. (The Museum of the Moving Image is currently hosting a virtual retrospective of her work, and her younger brother Ira Jr. is also a director.) Of course, if you were an experimental documentarian driven to explore the interplay of experience, communication and history, and your bohemian father was at the center of an especially sticky web, wouldn’t you, too, readily hit “record” at get-togethers? Keeping up with Ira Sr. meant there was always a moneymaking scheme, always a girlfriend or wife, always a laugh, and possibly a secret child. What there weren’t necessarily were forthcoming answers when any family member pried too much.
The result is a sharply assembled multiformat collage of memory and investigation that starts like a trip any of us might make into a what-made-him-tick past, but ends in the present with scattered feelings and tenuous bonds. In voiceover, she tells us at one point, “This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” The more she learns about her dad, the more she struggles with the emotional debris of it all, and the mysteries of familial love.
In corralling stories about her father from exes and her extended brothers and sisters (she poignantly leaves off the descriptor “half”), then positioning them amidst archival footage and up-to-the-minute scenes, Sachs achieves a poetic resignation about unknowability inside families, and the hidden roots never explained from looking at a family tree.
They say the bond between fathers and daughters is quite special. Just ask Brooklyn-based artist Lynne Sachs, who was so determined to find out what made her enigmatic dad tick, she created an observational documentary about him.
The feminist filmmaker/director seems to view life through the lens of a painter/poet: a winning combo that has resulted in a series of artistic experimental and avant-garde works that draw the audience into Sachs’ private world. Her newest boundary-crushing offering, titled “Film About a Father Who,” has been 30 years in the making. And now, she’s sharing this fascinating, family-focused doc with viewers across the country.
In Queens, the acclaimed film — a Cinema Guild release — will debut Friday, Jan. 14, in the Museum of the Moving Image’s Virtual Cinema. The feature is part of a 20-film online retrospective of the artist’s celebrated body of work, which spans more than three decades. You can experience “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression,” now through Jan. 31. To learn more about the artist’s films and how to watch them, click here.
“Over a 30-plus-year career, Lynne Sachs has charted a formal path defying conventional categorization. Each of her films is a self-reflexive meditation into the psychic origins and intellectual process of its own making, issuing from a space between thought and expression,” said Edo Choi, MoMI’s assistant curator of film, who organized the retrospective.
“This is true of her work as early as ‘The House of Science’ and as recent as her latest and most personal film so far, ‘Film About a Father Who.’”
During a recent interview, Sachs spilled about her papa’s escapades.
“He has a spirt of adventure, refuses to follow any rules, relishes seeing his children grow up, and seems to be very capable of keeping a lot of secrets,” she told QNS.
When asked to complete this sentence: “This film is about a father who,” she offered, “… is a different man for everyone who knows him, whether you have eaten dinner with him, hiked with him or only met him on the movie screen. He adds another dimension to the word complicated.”
“My film tries to understand one father through the eyes of nine children. We each have our own experiences, memories and interpretations of his place in our lives,” Sachs added. “For me, my father was continuously supportive of me as a woman, an artist and a mother. He always treated me with respect. Unfortunately, this was not true for all of my siblings. This is often the case in families, and it’s the job of the sisters and brothers in the family to find a terrain on which they can love each other on their own terms.”
The art of filmmaking is really about how well you tell a story, and Sachs injects a dose of nostalgia, family dynamics and a sprinkling of psychology into her film. She paints an interesting, semi-revealing portrait of a secretive bon vivant from Park City, Utah, as seen through the eyes of his children, grandchildren, ex-girlfriends, ex-wives and especially his own mother.
The film features Ira Sr., who back in the day, made a modest living as a hippie entrepreneur, and eventually became a proud father of nine (now aged 25 to 59). Also featured in the film are the artist, her brother Ira Sachs Jr., who is also a filmmaker, and their immediate family (including their mom and grandma), as well as many half brothers and sisters.
For this 74-minute work, developed between 1984 and 2019, the artist — who had been experimenting with different filmmaking modes — shot 8mm and 16mm film, videotape and digital images. “I feel most comfortable with 16mm because I need to shoot with this kind of camera without sound. My eyes are always more observant with this camera,” she said. “Furthermore, I have had the same $400 wind-up, non-electric Bolex camera since 1987, so it’s an extension of my soul.”
Judy Garland once said, “I can live without money, but I cannot live without love.” When asked why her dad was always searching for amoré, Sachs explained, “It took me a long time to realize that his traumatic childhood, which included being separated from his mother for 13 years, left an indelible mark. In the film, he also claims that ‘I am not like a swan. I don’t stay with one partner my whole life.’ So, maybe long-term romantic love was never really his goal.”
Sachs explores not only the qualities she loves most about her father, but also the challenging aspects of their relationship.
“My father has boundless compassion, but he compartmentalizes his life so much that you have to share this love with so many people you will soon lose count,” Sachs shared. “I love that he is an iconoclast, that he only likes to hike on mountains that have not yet been tamed and that he lets his hair and life become tangled. Since he always did what he wanted when he wanted, many people got hurt along the way … even me, and this continues to leave a wake of pain.”
Describing her family members’ reactions to her latest project, Sachs told QNS, “My sisters and brothers have really rallied behind the film and it has in a way brought us closer. My father cried the first time he saw it. He told me he hoped to ‘do better in the future.’ I also think he got a kick out of seeing a feature-length film all about the life he led, all the unusual paths he followed. Most of us will never have this chance.”
She added: “I actually completed making the film after my grandmother’s death, which ultimately was an opening to my discovering my two ‘hidden’ sisters.”
Sachs believes that her film has changed some people’s perceptions of her now-84-year-old father.
“Many people who thought they knew Ira Sachs Sr. very well announced to me that my film provided more layers to his life than they could ever have imagined. Everyone knew a part of him, but none of us did or even now do know the whole story. It is important to me to recognize that he is not a ‘character’; therefore, like all of us, he maintains some parts of him that are his and his alone.”
Three of Sachs’ key early works – “Drawn and Quartered” (1987), “The House of Science: a museum of false facts” (1991), and “Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam” (1994) – will also be presented.
Along with the screenings, the museum will present a new recorded dialogue between Sachs and Choi, covering the breadth of Sachs’ career. This exclusive video will be available to those who purchase tickets to any of the screenings.
We revisit our conversation with the remarkable and highly acclaimed feminist, experimental filmmaker and poet, Lynne Sachs on the occasion of her upcoming retrospective curated by Edo Choi at the Museum of Moving Image in New York.
In this episode, we discuss ideas present in Sachs’ work, including feminist film theory, experimental filmmaking, and her collaborative approach. We also discuss her previous films, THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE, TIP OF MY TONGUE, and FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO which are available through the Museum of Moving Image Virtual Cinema until January 31st. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO opens January 15th in virtual cinemas nationwide via distributor Cinema Guild.
Lynne Sachs is a Memphis-born, Brooklyn-based artist who has made over 35 films. 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.
Sachs films have been screened all over the world, including New York Film Festival, Sundance, Oberhausen, Viennale, BAMCinemaFest, Vancouver Film Festival, DocLisboa and many others. Her work has 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, including retrospectives in Argentina, Cuba, and China.
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.
