About: The filmmaker attempts to make sense of her wayward father.
Named in homage to Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…, noted experimental filmmaker Lynne Sach’s constructs a study of her father, Ira Sachs Sr, from material shot over four decades. Ira, a hippie-turned-successful real-estate developer, was also an unrepentant womanizer, taking on younger lovers and producing more and more offspring, some kept secret from Lynne and her brother, Ira Jr, the acclaimed filmmaker. While the film is hardly experimental, its construction is somewhat fragmentary and decidedly personal, which initially makes it a bit difficult for the viewer, an outsider to this family affair, to engage. Despite this, the portrait that Lynne Sachs pieces together grows increasingly intriguing, not just of her father, but of his generation, and, really, of the broader idea of family.
Every father is a bundle of contradictions. But in Ira Sachs, Sr.’s case, the contradictions are more extreme than most. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs tries to make sense of them—up to a point—in “A Film About a Father Who,” an unraveling of her family’s complicated history, drawn from footage that she’s been gathering between 1984 and the present day.
Known as “the Hugh Hefner of Park City,” the Utah ski town where Robert Redford founded the Sundance Film Festival, Sachs at his life-force peak was a hotel developer, a devoted skier, a prodigious pot smoker, and a womanizer whose affairs ultimately produced nine children by five women. He emerges here as an infuriating but charismatic figure whose life holds many secrets, and who treats his children and ex-wife (and various girlfriends) with a mix of genuine warmth and shocking selfishness and manipulation.
The filmmaker has been directing movies for a long time, building an archive of experimental features and shorts. Some were offered, at the time this review was written, in a virtual film festival online at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York. Sachs is the sister of Ira Sachs (“Keep the Lights On,” “Love is Strange”), and based on the interviews collected here, the whole extended family has an artistic and/or literary mindset even when they make a living some other way. We hear a lot about how playful, adventurous and bold the father was back in the day, but also how emotionally remote (one child says that he seemed to exist in a detached-seeming middle-ground, rarely manifesting extremes of euphoria/happiness or anger/sadness).
There’s a lot of sardonic quipping about his sex life, which impacted the children (and his eventual ex-wife) in ways that troubled everyone but him. The ostensible trigger for this film was the 2016 revelation that there were two other children by yet another woman, beyond the ones who were already known about, their names blacked-out in an insurance document. The movie never gets into why this particular bit of information would shock the family into taking stock of things when the list of prior outrages and scandals was so prodigiously long. It’s not a failing, exactly, but it does momentarily cause the viewer to ask questions that fall beyond the scope of the film itself. One of the director’s siblings weeps as she talks of learning in youth that she had other siblings out there, but being made to wait to meet them, because her father was adamant that they not be connected until his own mother had passed on. Why? She wants to know. Why place such a restriction on truth? Who was being protected?
Kaleidoscopic in both its assortment of materials and its assemblage, this feature doesn’t so much sort out and organize all the different aspects of the father’s life as sift through them in a fixated, somewhat discombobulated way—like a detective poring over contents of a thick file that have spilled out all over the floor, properly impressed by how much work has to be done to even start to understand all the complexities. Or, to be more mundane, like a child who has learned a new, unpleasant truth about a parent, in addition to the other unpleasant truths she already knew, and is reeling in shock even as she tries to reframe the picture in a calm and rational way.
The array of formats displayed is so texturally diverse—encompassing Super 8mm and 16mm film, VHS and other low-resolution video formats, and more crisp, high-definition digital video in recent scenes—that the movie is always fascinating, even when it seems to lose or drop the threads of therapeutic/psychological understanding woven throughout the project.
It’s sometimes hard to tell if the fragmentation in the story and the more atmospheric and/or dislocating touches (such as sound dropouts, and dialogue-as-narration by witnesses who are heard speaking over silent footage of people in earlier time periods, sometimes with their own lips moving) are urgently necessary to aid our understanding and feeling, or if they are vestigial outgrowths of the way an experimental filmmaker typically works (intuitively and viscerally, without obsessing over linear clarity). But there’s no denying that these sometimes alienating touches add to our sense of the father as a towering presence in the lives of his children, not always for noble reasons.
One of the most striking things about the movie is how it reveals the way in which all adult children feel forever small when contemplating the life experience of their parents: the brave or reckless choices, the beneficial and destructive outcomes, the redactions and blank spots, and the mysteries that will never be solved.
Maya at 24 4 min., 16mm, b&w, sound 2021 a film by Lynne Sachs with editing and animation by Rebecca Shapass music by Kevin T. Allen
Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Eleven years later, I pulled out my 16mm Bolex camera, as she allowed me to film her – different but somehow the same. Recently, at age 24, Maya took another spin — we look at one another, moving, filling space, aware. Completed during the 2020 pandemic, the film includes the intimate yet awkward rhythms of our two voices while living together during quarantine.” – Lynne Sachs
Screenings: Museum of the Moving Image (Queens, NY), Indie Memphis Film Festival (Tennessee), Best Departures Short, 2022; Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival (Chicago); Black Maria Film Festival (New Jersey), Jury Citation Award, 2021; Northwest Film Forum (Seattle), 2021; Mill Valley Film Festival (California), 2021.
Featured on Beyond Chron’s Best of 2021 List by Peter Wong: Maya at 24 – Lynne Sachs’ short uses the simple image of her daughter Maya running in front of the camera to offer kinetic snapshots of how our children change physically and emotionally over the years.
Criterion Channel streaming premiere with 7 other films, Oct. 2021.
Lynne Sachs shot the footage that became “Film About a Father Who” from 1984 to 2019, and her ideas about what form the movie might take — along with her impressions of her father — must have changed during that time. (Even movies themselves evolved. “Film About a Father Who” mixes 8- and 16-millimeter film, home videotapes and, from the near present, digital material.)
This brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait finds Sachs assessing her relationship with her father, Ira Sachs Sr., described at one point as the “Hugh Hefner of Park City,” the Utah skiing enclave where the Sundance Film Festival is held. The filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr., Lynne’s brother, says their father can’t “be self-consciously sad or self-consciously joyful” — he always seems simply content. In his contemporary incarnation, their dad, with a bushy white mustache and shoulder-length hair, resembles an older version of The Dude from “The Big Lebowski.”
He comes across as genuinely warm — but also as having a huge blind spot. Sachs Sr. fathered children with multiple women, taking what the movie implies has been a casual approach to paternity. In 2016, Lynne and the others learned that they had two half-siblings in addition to the ones they already knew about.
It’s suggested that the elder Ira’s mother couldn’t take the “constant flow” of new relatives. The children’s economic circumstances also varied. A younger member of the Sachs brood says it’s difficult to be around siblings who grew up better-off than she did.
But Lynne, intriguingly, doesn’t render an uncomplicated verdict on her father. He’s a blank, filled in differently in each circumstance. As the title (inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s “Film About a Woman Who”) indicates, he defies being reduced to one word.
Film About a Father Who
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.
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.
At the center of Sachs’s work is often Sachs herself: her body, her voice, her words. And with those come the subjects that preoccupy her: family, feminism, language, place, and being. Over 30 years of making films, collage and installation art, writing prose and poetry, and orchestrating performances, often in conjunction with her moving-image work, Sachs has centered herself insomuch as she’s looking out at the world that encircles her, viewing it thoughtfully yet from a studied distance.
Throughout the retrospective’s five programs (as well as in her latest, Film About a Father Who, a documentary about her charmingly lubricious father that’s been decades in the making and is also available to rent through MoMI), Sachs never seems to intimate that her perspective is universal but, rather, that having a perspective is.
Program 1: Early Dissections
Sachs’s first three films reflect her distinctly feminist viewpoint, conveyed through cerebral experimentations with form; she employs such avant-garde structures to impart a female perspective, thereby challenging the omniscient male gaze. In Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986), Sachs assays the daily goings-on and considerations of a woman by positing her as a character in the de facto narrative. The foundation of Sachs’s practice is established here as she melds different filmic modes and intersects the representational and the confessional; poetry and narrative; and fiction and history, the latter through her inclusion of an image of anarchist Emma Goldman and a woman in voiceover reading and reflecting on Goldman’s letters. Sachs’s second film, Drawn and Quartered (1987), literally separates the female image from that of the male. Shot using her uncle’s Regular 8 Filmo camera, it presents four frames, two on each side of the screen. On the left is Sachs’s then-boyfriend, nude; on the right, Sachs herself, also nude—figurative delineations of separation between the sexes rendered literal. She notes in an essay on the making of the film that she originally extracted all images of her face from it, later splicing them back in as a way of claiming what’s being shown. Another recondite evocation of the cinematic gaze, Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987) connects an unseen female protagonist’s observation of a man to Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of movement. The dispassionate examination implicitly calls into question the reverse—the more typical obsession with the female figure by men. The trajectory of Sachs’s first three works culminates in The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), in which the director begins to merge a collage-like technique with essayistic qualities, resulting in a willful sort-of disparateness that considers womanhood as chastened by men (specifically doctors and scientists) and as experienced by women.
Program 2: Family Travels
Sachs’s family plays a central role in her work; one need only watch the end credits of any of her films to see that her siblings, spouse (filmmaker Mark Street), and their children are often listed as crew members or thanked for their involvement. In collaboration with her younger sister, writer Dana Sachs, she made the artfully evocative Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994), in which she and Dana, who’d then been living in Vietnam, take a trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Cinematic brushstrokes—blurry images of the country’s verdant landscape—punctuate this uncommon travelogue, throughout which both sisters relay their experiences in the country. In one sequence Dana remarks on a photograph of an elderly Vietnamese woman, revealed to be the irascible grandmother of one of her friends: “Once the photo lost its anonymity, it lost its meaning,” she says. “It wasn’t the long-suffering face of Vietnam anymore, the trophy face a tourist loves to capture. It was just [my friend’s] crabby grandmother.” Here the sisters contend with the legacy of the Vietnam war, a scrim against the backdrop of their childhood memories. Exploring similar themes, The Last Happy Day (2009) is about Sachs’s distant cousin, Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian doctor who was hired by the U.S. Army to reconstruct the bones of dead soldiers and who would later translate A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh into Latin. Sachs combines Lenard’s personal correspondence, interviews with his family, and guileless interpretations of Lenard’s story by her two daughters and their friends to construct a personal reckoning with the effects of war. Both short documentaries explore this theme—in Sachs’s life and in the world at large—each utilizing cryptic proverbs to make sense of difficult truths. Included in this program is The Small Ones (2007), described by Sachs as being a “short anti-war cine-poem” that originates the concept more fully explored in The Last Happy Day.
Program 3: Time Passes
One feels the weight of time, from seconds to decades, in Sachs’s output as each work seems to represent a culmination of the director’s life to date. Composed of films made over 20 years—and mostly shot on either super 8mm or 16mm, and largely silent—this program elucidates a prominent motif in Sachs’s oeuvre, that of fleeting moments crystallized through the creative process. Three works especially exhibit this: Photograph of Wind (2001), Same Stream Twice (2012), and Maya at 24 (2021), which feature Sachs’s daughter Maya at ages 6, 16, and 24, respectively. In each, Sachs records her running in a circle, thereby capturing the illusion of apogees in time. Along these lines, Noa, Noa (2006) depicts Sachs’s younger daughter, Noa, over three years between ages 5 to 8, a period of resourcefulness and ingenuity. Likewise, Viva and Felix Growing Up (2015) features her niece and nephew (the children of her brother, filmmaker Ira Sachs); Day Residue (2016) was shot during some time spent with her mother and stepfather in her childhood home in Memphis, Tennessee. Place figures most prominently in Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008), which is less a love letter to New York City (where Sachs currently resides) and more a poem about its natural and not-so-natural wonders, somewhat in line with the work that inspired it, Virgil’s Georgics. Tornado (2002) and And Then We Marched (2017) center on events—September 11 and the Women’s March in D.C., respectively—the former an appropriately melancholy commemoration and the latter a rousing paean. Collectively these films and videos create a portrait of an artist and emblematize the passing of time.
Above: Your Day Is My Night (2013)
Program 4: Your Day Is My Night
With this expressive 2013 non-fiction hybrid, Sachs melds her interests in documentary and performance art with her penchant for prose and poetry; all four modes combine into a beguiling narrative around the phenomena of shift-bed housing, the practice of multiple people sharing the same bed, in New York City’s Chinatown. Having first learned about “hot-bed” houses from her uncle—and expanding her knowledge on the subject by way of 19th-century photographer Jacob Riis’s book How the Other Half Lives—Sachs worked with several older Chinese immigrants who were intimately familiar with the custom, meeting with them on a weekly basis for a year and a half to flesh out their stories. What might seem like a relatively straightforward documentary is actually a blend of fact (the participants’ stories about life in China and the United States) and fiction (the quasi-dramatization of conversations and scenarios in which these experiences are conveyed). Throughout Sachs deploys stylized footage of the participants appearing in abstract live performances that involve beds; if that seems an overly simplistic description, it’s because the concept, the bed as a stage, “as an extension of the earth,” as Sachs has said, is so metaphorically apt. The cinematography in these sections is breathtaking—close-ups add further visual texture to the performers and the unlikely setting for their displays. Sachs and her collaborators also staged performances around New York City while making the film; this tactic extends the film outside of itself and back into the physical realm in which it originated.
Program 5: Tip of My Tongue
On the occasion of turning 50, Sachs gathered a dozen similarly aged friends and acquaintances, then spent a weekend making this documentary, in which participants recount memories and experiences from the five-plus decades they’ve been alive. (In conjunction with this effort, Sachs wrote fifty poems, one for each year of her life, and published them in the 2019 collection Year By Year.) The film is, like life itself, an amalgam of methods that aid in the processing and contextualizing of one’s experience of it. One woman tells the story of how she swam around Manhattan Island while she sits in a bathtub; a man, standing agape in the middle of a room, describes what it was like to realize that Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead. Some reminiscences are personal, while others broach sociopolitical events that defined their eras, from the aforementioned assassination to the moon landing, as experienced by many of those involved in the film from their respective locations around the world (Iran, Cuba, and Australia, among others). Some of the remembrances are even more location-specific, as when a woman from Iran talks about being a child during the Revolution of 1979 and a man from the U.S. talks about his family prospering under Reagan. Sachs intersperses nimbly assembled archival footage and audio clips between the recollections, adding further weight to the participants’ memories. Her artful scribbling (present also in Year By Year) often adorns the images, and Sachs and the participants write on various objects the years between 1961 (when Sachs was born) to 2011 (when she turned 50). Tip of my Tongue is an ideal synthesis of Sachs’s preferred modes: documentary, performance, essay, and poetry. The brilliant sound design adds additional layers to the material—subtle footnotes to the cinematic treatise. She notes in Year By Year that she was inspired by this line from Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet: “Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us.” Again, at the root of Sachs’s practice is a beguiling simplicity, which feels organic but reveals itself to be methodical under analysis. Her latest, Film About a Father Who, is a natural continuation of all this. “It seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and…,” Pessoa continues, “binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.”
***
A conversation between Lynne Sachs and assistant curator Edo Choi will be available along with the retrospective programs. Additionally, Sachs, her brother Ira, and cinematographer and filmmaker Kirsten Johnson will participate in a live online event on Tuesday, January 19, at 7 PM.
Lynne Sachs’ documentary “Film About a Father Who” circles around a hole. Her father Ira is now 84, and she’s old enough to be the mother of an adult daughter. But one can tell that she still doesn’t fully understand him. That’s the reason why she made this film, which follows the messiness of a man whose idea of freedom consisted of running from one short-term fling to the next with no regard for the fact that he kept fathering children.
“Film About a Father Who” incorporates footage newly shot by Sachs for the documentary, as well as home movies dating back as early as 1965 and material shot by her father and her brother, the accomplished, out gay director Ira Sachs, Jr. Almost every possible video format is credited, as well as 8mm and 16mm film. The result is a hodgepodge of textures and styles. To add to the mélange, Sachs often plays audio of people whose voices we can’t place on top of unrelated images. While the film begins with promotional video made by Ira Sr. in Park City, Utah in 1992, it spans his entire adult life. Ira, Jr. fictionalized aspects of his father’s life in his 2005 film “Forty Shades of Blue.” Lynne nursed this project for 30 years, then decided to complete it by recording a voice-over in January 2019.
Sachs refuses to pass judgment on a man who was neglectful and selfish. The film’s spectators probably won’t be so reluctant. Ira, Sr. never should’ve had children or agreed to participate in a monogamous relationship, although his lifestyle as “the Hugh Hefner of Park City” probably made the former inevitable. (Without using the word “vasectomy,” his mother tells him he should get one.) But while his appearances on screen don’t lead to any epiphanies about the sources of his behavior, Sachs is equally interested in the experiences of her siblings, who are better equipped to explain their lives.
She brings the whole family together to film a discussion on this subject. The class and racial differences of her siblings are apparent. While she’s white and Jewish, some of her siblings are of different races. In the end, he fathered nine children by six women, but concealed two because his mother threatened to cut him out of her will if he kept having kids. One woman contrasts her life of hunger and poverty with the middle class lives of Lynne and Ira, Jr.
While she doesn’t emphasize this part of her father’s personality or her own work, she’s best known for the anti-war films she made in the 2000s. She may have been influenced by Ira, Sr.’s “life-long interest in doing good in the world,” as she describes it in the press kit. Very early on, “Film About A Father Who” describes him as a “hippie businessman, using other people’s money to develop hotels named after flowers,” and mentions his resistance to defining himself by his job. But Ira, Sr. remains bound to a ‘60s idea of masculinity – he even looks like David Crosby today – that viewed women and children as impediments to his freedom.
Sachs is also receiving a five-program retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image starting Jan. 13th. It’s not complete, focusing on her family-themed work rather than her more political fare. But obviously that makes a fitting context for “Film About a Father Who.” She films children with a tenderness that seems to have been lacking from her own youth. She’s made three shorts reworking the same images of her daughter, Maya, as well as a depiction of her niece and nephew in the 2015 “Viva and Felix Growing Up.”
In Sachs’ most recent film, the four-minute short “Maya at 24,” she edits together film of her daughter at 6, 16, and 24. “Maya at 24” suggests that change is the only constant in life. It’s based around the image of Maya running in a clockwise circle as Sachs pans the camera to keep up with her. “Maya at 24” also uses superimposition to place earlier versions of the woman inside her head. While not exactly a subtle film, it suggests something real about the way we carry our pasts inside us as we race towards an uncertain future. “Film About a Father Who” expands that notion on a grander scale, with a nagging sense that Sachs is searching for emotions she never received as a child and her entire family wants answers from Ira Sr. while he’s still alive. They don’t seem likely to be forthcoming.
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO | Directed by Lynne Sachs | The Cinema Guild | Starts streaming through the Museum of the Moving Image Jan. 15
Twenty of the more than three dozen films Lynne Sachs has made since the mid-1980s have been selected for a virtual retrospective currently running at the Museum of the Moving Image through the end of the month. Even before she completed her first formalist experiments in 1986, Still Life with Woman and Four Objects and Drawn and Quartered, Sachs began shooting footage on 8 mm and 16 mm, and eventually, analog and digital video that she and editor Rebecca Shapass would shape into the centerpiece of the program. Film About a Father Who, which opened last year’s Slamdance, is a “brisk, prismatic, and richly psychodramatic family portrait” that “finds Sachs assessing her relationship with her father, Ira Sachs Sr., described at one point as the ‘Hugh Hefner of Park City,’” writes Ben Kenigsberg in the New York Times.
As Ira himself has put it, he’s a man with “one wife and many friends.” He’s fathered nine children over the years, and some of them have only recently become aware of the existence of others. Lynne grew up in Memphis with her sister, the writer Dana Sachs, with whom Lynne collaborated on the 1994 film Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam, and their brother, filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr. Talking to Conor Williams at Screen Slate, Lynne notes that the Memphis-based music producer played by Rip Torn in Ira’s 2005 film Forty Shades of Blue could be said to be loosely based on their father.
The younger Ira Sachs and his husband, the painter Boris Torres, coparent twins with Kirsten Johnson, who of course, has just made her own film about her father, Dick Johnson Is Dead. “It’s funny,” Lynne tells Williams, “I was going through my photos on my computer and I found four or five of them with my dad and Dick together. They’re holding hands up in the air, just last year.” Talking to Chris Shields at Reverse Shot, she explains why one sequence in Film About a Father Who is crucial. Ira Sachs Sr. himself shot the footage of three of his young children splashing in a stream. “In documentary work, it’s not just about seeing someone,” she says, “it’s how they see that can tell you just as much about them.”
The title echoes Film About a Woman Who, the 1974 film by Yvonne Rainer, one of the many influences Lynne Sachs is eager to cite, including Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, and Gertrude Stein. “Discovering ‘Lifting Belly,’ Gertrude Stein’s ever so physical, ecstatic belching of all things female, is critical to my work as an artist and poet,” she told Paolo Javier in Bomb Magazine in 2014. As a writer who would go on to stage multimedia performances, Sachs first discovered her love of filmmaking while studying in San Francisco, where she worked alongside Craig Baldwin, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha. In 2007, she helped Chris Marker create an English-language version of his 1972 short film, Three Cheers for the Whale.
For the best film-by-film guide to the retrospective, turn to Kat Sachs in the Notebook. No relation, by the way. “At the center of Sachs’s work is often Sachs herself: her body, her voice, her words,” writes Kat Sachs. “And with those come the subjects that preoccupy her: family, feminism, language, place, and being . . . Sachs never seems to intimate that her perspective is universal but, rather, that having a perspective is.”
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Among the most important, complex relationships are those with our parents, relationships often painful to probe. And yet, in “Film About a Father Who,” here’s documentarian Lynne Sachs courageously exploring thirty-five complicated, problematic years of interaction with her father Ira. In addition to archival 8- and 16-millimeter footage, she interrogates Ira, grandmother Maw-maw, brothers, sisters, an ex-wife, and Ira’s girlfriends.
And what she learns in her incredibly honest profile is deeply disturbing. For Ira was, though cheerful, emotionally detached and an unrepentant womanizer. His mother, Maw-maw, describes him as a cripple, handicapped, since he had a wife, a mistress, and, as much as he could, multiple women. Director Lynne, his daughter, explicitly asks Ira about his life and behavior, to which Ira repeatedly replies, “I don’t remember.” In her investigation, Lynne discovers two previously unknown siblings (Ira had nine children), Ira’s traumatic childhood, fueled by Maw-maw abandoning Ira to lead her own life, and his real name.
None of these details suggest the truly captivating appeal of “Film About a Father Who.” That resides in Lynne’s pursuit of an ever-elusive understanding of Ira, of his essence. In her quest, Lynne and her brother Adam describe Ira having “his own language and we were expected to speak it.” They concur that they loved him so much that they agreed “to his syntax, his set of rules,” though they always felt there was a dark hole somewhere in his youth. Significantly, Lynne and a sister also acknowledge a shared rage they couldn’t name for the man called the Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah.
“Film About a Father Who” is an emotionally wrenching scrutiny of another person, much less a parent. In voiceover narration, Lynne defines her grappling with her father best when she says, “This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry, a story both protracted and compressed.” That she worked on this film for decades acknowledges the critical role her parents, and probably most of ours, play in our lives, their impact inestimable. It may raise the question, “Can we ever really understand another person?” Whatever the answer, Lynne Sachs shows her effort results in a powerful, haunting film. “Film About a Father Who” is available on the Cinema Guild website and through a direct link at the Webster University film series website.
You can keep your MCU. You can have your… whatever DC’s is. For me, the only cinematic universe that matters right now is the Sachs and Johnson Cinematic Universe. What’s that you ask? Well, it’s the films of brother and sister pair Ira and Lynne Sachs as well as Kristen Johnson with whom the brother Sachs has children, all of whom seem to make movies about and/or featuring one another. I feel like I know these people in very intimate ways because of the way their works reflects each other’s. It’s a curious little enclave of filmmaking that only enriches each additional film that I see.
I lead off with this somewhat facetious observation because the latest film, Lynne Sachs’ Film About a Father Who is about her father, which only seeks to expand and enlighten the story of this fascinating bunch of New York filmmakers…
Film About a Father Who is probably also a bit tougher to discuss, being more experimental and fragmented than the documentaries I normally review. This isn’t a political thriller or a heartwarming tale of overcoming adversity. Well, not in those traditional ways. Having said that, I do think audiences are becoming more comfortable with this brand of doc that ebbs and flows in new and evolving ways—perhaps that’s thanks to filmmakers like Johnson whose Cameraperson and Dick Johnson is Dead stray far from the conventional paths, but which have proven popular with audiences.
I saw Film About a Father Who back in mid-2020 as a part of Sheffield Doc/Fest’s virtual festival alongside a Sachs tribute retrospective (of which my favourite is probably Which Way is East). But it is a film that sits so comfortably and so snugly in the cervices of one’s mind that it at once feels like a distant, beguiling memory and something so potently immediate. As its title suggests (cribbed from dancer and director Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 documentary, Film About a Woman Who…), Sachs’ film is about her father, Ira Sachs, Sr. A filmmaker of his own unique sort; a local character from Park City who enjoyed picking up a camera to film home movies.
The film traces his life in fragments, featuring the elder Sachs along with Lynne, Ira Jr. and some of their other siblings. It details how his penchant for a particular lifestyle (he was a philanderer for one thing) came at the cost of his family. The Sachs matriarch, Diane, is featured, as is Ira’s disapproving maw-maw, the 100-year-old Rose. You could say that Ira led a life of perpetual teenagerdom, who in his elder years comes across as something of an aging hippie. His hair long and grey with a thick moustache and who often wears clothing that you would likely call eccentric. I hope that Lynne would forgive a viewer for thinking her dad took a lot of acid in his time.
It’s a deeply personal work of biography (via autobiography), of course. One that may perhaps mystify some viewers who may feel as if they need a post-it notes with string wrapped around thumb tacks just to make heads or tales of its myriad of connections. But this isn’t necessarily a film that tells a linear portrait of its subject. Far from it. Sachs, in fact, builds her own cinematic grammar to help construct an understanding of her father, reckoning with the mistakes that lead to where they all are in 2020.
The film has a particular emotional revelation that not only comes uncomfortably close to unforgivable, but also speaks the class in a way that underlines many of the extended family’s concerns about Ira Sr. It isn’t unforgivable to Lynne who clearly has compassion for her father in spite of his (many) transgressions. It is in these closing sequences—and it should be noted the film is only a scoot over 70 minutes—that lessons of family really come into a new light. With Sachs’ strong if shaggy (in a good way) direction, Film About a Father Who makes for an essential, powerful work of documentary to open 2021.
Release: Opens in virtual cinemas this Friday via Cinema Guild. Museum of the Moving Image will also be host to a Lynne Sachs retrospective, Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression, from today until the end of the month also in their virtual cinema.
On the morning of Wednesday, January 6, I called up the poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs to talk to her about her new documentary, Film About a Father Who and online retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image, which starts today. The film — which takes its title from an early influence of Sachs, Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 experimental film Film About a Woman Who — is an attempt by the filmmaker to better understand her father, Ira Sachs, Sr. Ira was a man who had, as he put it, “one wife, and many friends.” He slept around almost obsessively with scores of young women. He fathered nine children, some of whom remained a mystery to Lynne and her siblings for decades.
After picking up the phone, Lynne chatted with me a bit about the crucial runoff election that had played out in Georgia the night before, in which Democrats regained control of the Senate. She expressed optimism about those results, and I offered a comment that the future of our country could now hopefully be “at least a bit better.” Neither of us predicted that a few hours after our phone call, a large mob including white supremacists, QAnon conspiracy theorists, and even a handful of GOP lawmakers, incited by the President, would storm the Capitol in an attempt to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the presidential election. It was an astonishingly surreal, terrifying siege that left five people dead.
But our conversation happened before all that, in a past still tethered to even the slightest bit of hope. It was a fascinating and moving dialogue in which we ruminated on the now-fading intimacy of in-person experience, documentary filmmaking’s power to amplify voices, and the beautiful ugliness of split pea soup.
This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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Conor Williams: In the late 80s and 90s, you started making films investigating things like gender and the body and the male gaze. I’m also thinking about other films that were made at the time, like Elisabeth Subrin’s Swallow, or Flat is Beautiful by Sadie Benning. They’re kind of similar in that they highlight these feminist perspectives through the modes in which they’re made. I remember reading one of B. Ruby Rich’s essays about the festival scene at the time, and Barbara Hammer’s journals about screening her films to different audiences. It seems like this zenith of a moment. Could you feel that at the time?
Lynne Sachs: That idea is very different from bigger-budget commercial films, where a film travels, and then you say goodbye to it and look for another producer. Even the idea of a producer — we produced our own movies! And we traveled with them, we distributed them. It was a homemade thing in all the best possible ways. Of course, Sadie Benning’s work was really important to me in its intimacy, in its rawness, its ability to talk about desire. You mentioned B. Ruby Rich — she wrote a book, Chick Flicks, and it was like, “We’re okay with ‘chick!’ We’re okay with ‘queer,’ we have a bond that way and we’re into it!” The whole idea of a women’s film festival…the idea was, will that time pass? Will we not “need” it? And it wasn’t just that we needed it, we wanted it. We wanted to spend time together. We wanted to see each other’s films. It wasn’t that we needed to be separate, it was that we needed to have that collective experience to be in conversation. If you could, you would make it to all these people’s films. You needed to be there for other people.
CW: I know things are especially different right now at this moment — but do you think there’s any vestige of that kind of closeness left?
LS: That’s a very interesting question to ask during the pandemic. Closeness has to be in a spiritual kind of way. I think that my moment, which is also your moment, allows us to have hope toward the future, but not just nostalgic about the past, but awed by the past, those collective interactions. I think there needs to be an effort to bring in younger people so they understand you can’t do it all by yourself through YouTube or Vimeo. There is something about being in the same room together. I mean, here we have UnionDocs, and Mono No Aware, these other groups that commit themselves to that spatial interaction and to that presence.
CW: Your movies feel like something that you need to just go sit in a room somewhere and see projected. There’s this texture to your work, because you’ve shot most of it on analog film cameras.
LS: I totally agree. I also am trying to be not just optimistic about the possibilities that the virtual offers, but that it shifts a kind of elitism that could have happened to the avant-garde. Accidents will happen in the best of ways. George Kuchar loved accidents. He’d shoot a whole roll of film and it’d be overexposed and he’d say, “Great, we’ll call it a snowstorm.”
Anyway, this is not an accident, it’s our destiny to be in this time. And when this period in our lives is over, that we’ll also go back to shared spaces. I kind of think we’ll do both.
CW: I hope so. Especially right now, I think there’s no excuse to not make something just as widely accessible for anybody to see it. Because we’re all just in our houses.
LS: For example, my film Your Day is My Night, which is a part of the retrospective, started as a site-specific installation, and we traveled with it to homeless shelters or community centers for seniors, and we also showed it in museums, and I took it to other countries like China. So it was clunky and big and unwieldy and unpredictable in the real world. And then it became a film, so that you can see it in your living room. But I’m really glad that I did that site-specific work. And in the course of making the film, people saw other parts of New York they’d never seen, and then the people who watched the film saw a side of Chinatown they’d never seen, and we got to talk about that in actual spaces.
CW: Your new film is called Film About a Father Who. Can you talk a little bit about what motivated you to begin this project and what you’d say the film does?
LS: I think it connects to that first question as to why I was drawn to art. Once I was drawn to art and really jumped full on into filmmaking, I saw the practice of shooting and editing and thinking about one movie after another as very much intertwined with my life. So if you said, Lynne, what were you doing in 2001, I could say, oh, I was making Investigation of a Flame —
CW: They’re markers for you.
LS: They’re totally markers. And that probably really became clear to me in the late eighties, early nineties. At the same time, I was trying to understand my relationship to my father, how he had shocked me and my other siblings in many ways, and was also very supportive and a present dad, and how there was a life full of constant contradictions. And I said, okay, maybe if I say I’m making a film about this, to kind of give myself an internal permission to ask my father more and more questions about his life and our relationship, maybe it also opens up this context by which he’ll work with me on something. I’ve found that throughout my life. You work on a project, you become collaborators, and have a kind of commitment. To a great extent, he did that, and I kept working on what everyone called my “dad film,” but I didn’t really know where it was going. I just knew I was trying to make this film as a way to understand another person. That was a deep dive for me, to be able to say, how can this medium help me to understand the way that we understand other people?
CW: So much of your film work is centered on your family, inspired by your family, made with your family. Your brother Ira is also a filmmaker. In Film About a Father Who, you and your siblings talk about a kind of family grammar. Was cinema another shared grammar for you and Ira?
LS: Oh, wow. In many ways, yes. Doing things through a visual practice was also sort of the start. My mother says, “I gave you all a bunch of crayons and that was the beginning.” Ira came to filmmaking more through theater. He did children’s theater. He definitely knew the movies that Betty Grable was in. He was more aware of the movie stars and the newest Hollywood kind of movies. And I was definitely coming at it through experimental film. In a way that gave us a lot of freedom, because it sort of took out the competition. I wasn’t in the same field as him. Or maybe it was the same field, but not the same stadium. Or maybe he was in the stadium, and I was in like, the backyard. (Laughs) It’s actually really fun now, because we can ask each other for advice. I probably ask him more often for advice. I’m the older sister, I should add. So we send each other lists and, “Oh, I think you should definitely see this.” But in a lot of ways our taste is quite different. He wouldn’t necessarily be in conversation with Bradley Eros and Jack Waters, though he knows them. There’s a lot of overlap and then a lot of difference. The other day, he said to me, “All my old work prints, I think I should throw them away.” And I said, “No! No, you can’t.” I understood what old work prints were. I said he’s gotta keep them.
CW: Yeah, please tell him he can’t do that.
LS: I said that I’d store them for him.
CW: So talking about, I guess, extended family, Kirsten Johnson, who is the mom of Ira’s kids, also made a film about her father recently, Dick Johnson is Dead, and I watched her film and your film together–
LS: It’s funny, last night, I was going through my photos on my computer and I found four or five of them with my dad and Dick together. They’re holding hands up in the air, just last year. And I don’t think that will happen again, for health reasons, really. I sent it to Ira and Kirsten late last night while we were watching the [Georgia election] returns. Actually, Ira made a film called Forty Shades of Blue, with Rip Torn, and in a kind of quasi-fictional way, you could say that Rip Torn kind of plays our dad. Though it’s very different, and he’s a music producer, there are similarities…
CW: That’s interesting. So those two films together, yours and Kirsten’s, it’s this kind of diptych of fractured fathers. Kirsten’s film uses fantasy to sort of preserve this image of Dick, and your film is really about a shared narrative of your siblings. It’s a family production in a way. But I watched Dick Johnson with my dad—
LS: Oh, gosh!
CW: Something that he was a bit uncomfortable with — and I understood — is that Dick is very obviously deteriorating mentally. It made me think of questions not necessarily about the nature of the relationship between a father and daughter, but between a documentarian and their subject. Questions of ethics. In your film, your dad doesn’t say too much. And from what I gathered, it’s because he was reluctant to speak about his lifestyle and he would get defensive and omit things. But you also said that he’s getting older and sort of losing his ability to actually speak. I’m just wondering how you thought about that when you were making the film.
LS: What you just said is completely true, about his health and his ability to speak. But I think that that started in his present even before that. For me, the leap in the making of this film was that I decided to look at the world through his eyes — not so much, by the way he explained it and articulated his memories or his interpretations of things — but when I found videotape that he shot. And that became very important to me. That’s an aspect of filmmaking that maybe opened up to me in this film. When you’re looking at another person, you’re also wondering how they’re looking at you. And that tells you as much about the way their mind works. You know, we have this paradigm of the interview. You sit down, and then you ask these questions that you planned, and then you get the words back. But maybe by including the camera as a conduit to understand the mind, you get something very different.
For example, in the film, there’s three parts of the same shot, of three of my siblings on the water, on a little stream. At first, when I saw that footage, I thought, “Well it’s so degraded, it’s on VHS, it was in a garage for 25 years. I can’t use this at all.” And then I looked at it again and I thought, “This is the most important image of the whole film.” Because there is this delicate visual conversation going on through eyes — his eyes looking at them, and he’s sort of bossing them around in an affectionate way, like any dad would do, so it’s kind of a classic gesture, but he leaves the camera on, maybe accidentally. Consequently, to my eye, you get this exquisite, almost Renaissance image of the children moving around in this triangle. And you have these colors that reminded me of the impressionists. it was exactly the opposite of HD where you get things so unmediated, this was very mediated. By time. Our skin is mediated by time. If you were talking about film, you might talk about scratches, but it’s something else that happens to videotapes. And it’s part and parcel with what happens to the body — his body, our bodies, and in film, the body within the image stays the same.
I have those short films with my daughter Maya running around, and she grows older, but the film — like, she’s young, I can still grasp her in that way. And with this, I get three of my siblings, I get my father, and he’s chatty, which he isn’t anymore. And I get to hold on to that. It’s not just a memory, it’s a relic, like in an archaeological way.
CW: That’s really beautiful. Your film with Maya is just gorgeous. I remember seeing it somewhere online. It was so good.
LS: You probably noticed that that’s a kind of love of mine, having a person make a circle around you. There’s this intense gaze, which I kind of insisted on, and so I had her do that at different ages. I actually had my father do that a few times, and my mom. So it’s become a kind of conceit that I find very interesting, because as the filmmaker or shooter, you become dizzy. You become compromised, because if you’re in the center, you get dizzier than if you’re running around somebody. So I think that’s kind of the punishment for making them do it. (Laughs)
CW: And you have to trust that they’ll spot you. Or maybe they won’t. Okay, one last thing — watching Film About A Father Who — it really felt to me not just to be about your father, but about so many different women who were entranced by your father, or around in his orbit, or who felt betrayed by him, and hidden by him—
LS: Including his mother. Yeah. You’re right.
CW: I was really struck by the generosity of space that you give to people like maybe some of his girlfriends that I assume you didn’t know super well, but you guys all have this bond, this shared point which is your dad. And that connection is different to all of the women in the film.
LS: It’s very helpful for me to hear you say that. I think that was the reason I was finally able to make the film. I could make it as a peer with the women. Honestly, I grew older and my father’s girlfriends changed. They didn’t grow older, necessarily (laughs) and so as I grew older, I would think, okay, instead of feeling resentful toward them because they have found themselves in these situations, I need to understand what it means to be this woman at this point in time, and the vulnerability that comes with it, and the expectations, and the need and the desire to change whatever situation is going on in your life. You know, people take different opportunities. And not to see it as opportunistic, but to see it as all of us caught in different webs of attempts to make our lives better or different or possible. And so, you know, as an 18 year old, the first time I went to a therapist was to talk about my dad. And I remember, she said to me, “Oh, God, how can you handle that? That’s terrible. You should talk to your father.” And I didn’t want to be that person. I just had to grow into my own maturity and live my life in a different way. When I finished this movie, I could say that I finally grew up.
CW: Well, nonfiction films, and films like this, you could’ve just kept the perspective in this very personal, subjective place of judgment or anger, and those things are felt in the film, for sure, but I think it’s so nice that you seized this opportunity to bring them into the conversation as much as they wanted to be.
LS: I appreciate your saying that. And it was the same with the two sisters, really. [Ira Sr. had hidden the existence of some of his children from their siblings.] At this second, I’m sitting on the bed where I shot with Julia, and I’d only just met her and Beth. They were other women in this vortex, and I wanted to hear about their lives. When we’re all together, that was most definitely the first time we’d all been together, and probably the third time I’d ever met her.
CW: Wow.
LS: So to hear her speak about her life was definitely a first.
CW: That’s incredible. And for a film to create that opportunity for all of you guys is so wonderful.
LS: It’s so interesting that you say that — to create an opportunity — because actually some really dear friends of my fathers wanted to see the movie, so I let them and they all got together on Zoom, they’re all in their eighties and wanted to talk to me about it. I was really really nervous about it, because I thought they’d be like, “Oh, this isn’t the Ira we knew!” but actually they said, “I wish my daughter would make a movie about me. And that we could go this deep.” And I was so relieved and shocked. Because basically, what they were saying was, this is the life he led, and we live different lives, maybe more expected and typical, but it’s not on film. And it didn’t generate all these conversations and deeper reflections on the part of all the members of our family. As you know, all of us have an ability, a self-conscious or forced amnesia and there’s things that don’t get talked about. And I don’t mean like we should all be in therapy together. I just mean that it’s kind of freeing to talk about things. And something about a movie sort of gives everybody that license. Because you’re doing it together! It’s a collaborative effort and it’s something that everybody deems worth doing.
Stills from Film About a Father Who. All images courtesy of Cinema Guild.
