INTERVIEWS Maggie Dubris: A Prayer for St. Clare | interviewed by Zack Kopp Wanda Smalls Lloyd: Creating Family Along the Way | interviewed by Jessica Sparks Sue William Silverman: The Now-ness of Memory | interviewed by Tatiana Ryckman
FEATURES Louise Erdrich: An Appreciation | by James P. Lenfestey Resurrecting Leo Tolstoy | by Tim Brinkhof The New Life | a comic by Gary Sullivan
FICTION / DRAMA REVIEWS A Beginning at the End | Mike Chen | by Jessica Raskauskas Black Girl Unlimited | Echo Brown | by Linda Stack-Nelson The Resisters | Gish Jen | by George Longenecker The Shape of Family | Shilpi Somaya Gowda | by Rajiv Ramchandran The Sweet Indifference of the World | Peter Stamm | by Susann Cokal In The Beginning: A Stage Play | David Heidenstam | by Bryon Rieger
NONFICTION REVIEWS Asemic: The Art of Writing | Peter Schwenger | by Jeff Hansen Me & Other Writings | Marguerite Duras | by Fran Webber The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny | Daisy Dunn | by Walter Holland The Devils | New Juche | by Alex Kies Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life after Which Everything Was Different | Chuck Palahniuk | by Chris Via The Painted Forest | Krista Eastman | by Dustin Michael Wine Girl: The Obstacles, Humiliations, and Triumphs of America’s Youngest Sommelier | Victoria James | by Jack Sartin
POETRY REVIEWS
DMZ Colony | Don Mee Choi | by John Wall Berger Elementary Poetry | Andrei Monastyrski | by Michael Workman The Elegy Beta | Mischa Willett | by Lee Rossi Year By Year | Lynne Sachs | by John Bradley Maids | Abby Frucht | by Nick Hilbourn Cement | Sarah Menefee | by Patrick James Dunagan The Hospice Orgy | Phillip Lee Duncan | by Zack Kopp Black Case Volume I & II: Return From Exile | Joseph Jarman | by Greg Bem Amalgam | Sotère Torregian | by Patrick James Dunagan The Distant Sound | Eliot Schain | by Lee Rossi Hull | Xandria Phillips | by Tyrone Williams The Last Love Poem I Will Ever Write | Gregory Orr | by Mandana Chaffa
COMICS / ART REVIEWS The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. IV: The Tempest | Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill | by Greg Baldino In Dreams | Dennis Hopper | by Ruth Andrews The Man Without Talent | Yoshiharu Tsuge | by Jeff Alford
Lynne Sachs is an extraordinary filmmaker with a distinct and unique approach to documentary filmmaking. Each one of her films is an exploration into a secret hidden world as well as an experiment with the medium of visual storytelling. Currently, the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival is running a ‘Directors in Focus’ showcase of Sachs’ work where you can catch pieces like “Your Day is My Night”, “The Washing Society” and her latest film “Film About a Father Who”.
It’s been a real delight to explore Sachs’ work as part of the festival and when the opportunity arose to speak to Lynne personally, I jumped at the chance. Here’s our interview where we discuss how she approaches documentary filmmaking, her friendship with Barbara Hammer and the art of editing.
Bianca: Hello Lynne, lovely to chat to talk. I just want to say how much I’ve enjoyed exploring your work as part of the Sheffield Doc Fest “Directors in Focus”, you have such an unique approach to filmmaking. I find it to be this unusual blend of traditional documentary style filmmaking meets the avant-garde artistic style of filmmaking of allowing imagery and sound to tell the stories. How did you develop this approach and style of filmmaking, and what was it about documentary filmmaking that appealed to you as a filmmaker?
Lynne: I’ll guess I’ll start by admitting that I don’t even know if I would be able to make a traditional documentary, that might be because of when I invest myself into an investigation or a story I take such a deep dive and I am always looking for a visual or an oral method by which I can comment on that particular theme in a way that hasn’t been done before. Sometimes it’s the topic that guides me.
The more conventional approach would be to have a template or a formula or maybe even a time-limit like 58 minutes so you would have time for the commercial breaks, then you would take your subject and frame it by those expectations. However, that approach never really interested me and I wonder whether I have the skill or the commitment to do that style of filmmaking.
My desire to work in the documentary realm came from a convergence of the love of art and the love of politics. My background was as an undergraduate in history, I never expected to be an academic historian but it feeds my way of thinking. I wanted my creative juices to fly but the limitations of being a historian weren’t appealing to me.
Lynne Sachs, dir. of Film About a Father Who
Bianca: Did you always strive to have a personal connection with the people and the subjects you film?
Lynne:It’s very important to me to have a complex relationship with the people in my film, just like the one I would have normally with a friend. It takes work, and often in the field of filmmaking there’s the sense of jumping in as quickly as possible then leaving. You actually leave with this gift: the interaction you had with the people you filmed. You then own that gift, but those people don’t have that anymore. I think the whole process has to take a whole circle where you work to find the right participants for your film, you work on that film and then you come back to them after completion and during distribution.
With “Your Day is my Night” we worked on that film for a couple of years and it became a live performance and I was bringing the people from Chinatown, to places in New York City where they hadn’t been before. I was organising cars for them as they were older people and we couldn’t expect them to travel via Subway. I wanted them to experience that pleasure, and two years after we had finished shooting we took the film and the live performance to a public library in Chinatown where we had an afternoon matinee where all of their friends came.
It was actually quite a sad moment because one of the participants in the film had died since we made the film, so when his face came up in the film everyone in the audience started crying. So, it was a memorial for him in a way. There are ways films can function outside the function of building your career or taking you to film festivals. I really feel committed about the idea of having movies been shown on all different kinds of screens.
Bianca: People often overlook the importance of sound and audio infilmmaking because film is a visual medium. What I find fascinating about your films is that often the audio doesn’t always match up to what’s being depicted on-screen. I think this is brilliantly showcased in your latest film “Film About a Father Who” where we see one version of your father being shown but the narration is discussing a different aspect of his character.
Lynne:I just want to touch on something I hadn’t thought about, the formal connection between the way you understand a human being and the way that film works, and how you process what you see and what you later discover. I think that’s very particular to this medium. We have this notion that the visual and the sound should be married but we all know that marriage is just an agreement that can fall apart. It’s through that use of ‘falling apart’ where we begin to see that what something appears like isn’t actually what it is in reality, and we build in doubt.
I think doubt should be a part of any filmmaking experience, whether you’re talking about fiction or non-fiction, do we believe the ideology that is intact. If you’re a doubtful viewer in any way then you start to engage with it in a deeper way, you start to question everything and as a result you become more intellectually engaged. What I wanted to say about “Film About a Father Who” that there were times where maybe I was uncomfortable in a situation where I did have doubts, but I wanted to believe that things were more acceptable than they actually were and worked with how I thought a father should be.
If you think about the foundations of who we think we are as children and the notions of how we fit into that micro community it’s usually pretty transparent. However, maybe that’s no longer the case today. I used to think my family was very atypical, but now that I’ve screened the film quite a lot of people have either come up to me or written to me to share their own experiences. I think our notions of family are now more evolved than how it was when I was a kid.
Ira Sachs Sr. w Painting in Film About a Father Who
Since making the film I’ve been able to have some really profound conversations with those who have watched it. Whether or not it’s your mother or father who have secrets it’s their way of protecting themselves, but it also leaves an imprint on us and we’re left with a sense of confusion about how we’re supposed to process this new information and emotions.
Bianca: The impression I got from your film was that this was not only a self-discovery for you but also a self-discovery of who your father is. It was a self discovery of a family too.
Lynne: It took me a year of going through all the videos and super-8 films and I realise I had a lot of content about my father. The traditional approach to documentary filmmaking is that you take all the footage and make a character so people leave the movie thinking they really know that person. I thought about whether that was what I really wanted to do, as what I was really interested in was the interrelationships between people and the way we yearn for a part of our parents in ourselves and how we are always looking for stability. I know I have very distinct relationships with my parents and I value that in its own way.
Bianca: What’s something you want the viewer to take away from “Film About a Father Who”?
Lynne: I’m very interested portraying the layers of expression especially in terms of being a woman, that include your anger and your rage as well as your ability to integrate forgiveness because I think it’s very hard to go on living your life if you hold onto the pain of your own rage. Forgiveness isn’t about saying that something didn’t happen, there are parts in my film where I realise that I’ve become very good at training myself to have forced amnesia. If you can find forgiveness and realize that the person who hurt you or made mistakes, made those mistakes because of the things they went through themselves that can help you move forward.
Photo collage from Film About A Father Who
I am also interested in showing my family’s story so others can investigate their own stories. I showed the film to a group of fifteen men in their 80s who were in a fraternity with my father and all idolised him. After the film, they said to me that they wished their daughters had made a film about them which surprised me. I think it was because the film elevated my dad to a full person and his entire life was told. He came to the premiere in New York and he was happy with the film. And he’s told me that he wants to do better in the future.
Bianca: Another recent film of yours is “A Month of Single Frames”, a beautiful collaboration with the late filmmaker Barbara Hammer. How did that film come around?
Lynne: I met Barbara in the late ‘80s as we were both in San Francisco during that time. At that time and well into the 1990s, San Francisco was a mecca for experimental filmmakers. I think that’s the place where my style really evolved as it’s not a commercial film centre like New York or Los Angeles. There was a place called the Film Arts Foundation where you could go and learn different skills or edit your films on a 16mm flatbed and Barbara was there teaching a class. I took a weekend class with her and we hit it off! We became friends and both ended up moving to New York City.
Twelve years ago, Barbara found out she had ovarian cancer. She was going through chemotherapy and we would take meals to her and talk to her. She actually lived a lot longer than she thought she would. During that time we became deep friends, and I think she appreciated that me and my husband (Mark Street) were not intimidated by the word ‘cancer’. She asked Mark and me to make a film with the material she gave us when she saw her life coming to an end.
When she gave me the footage she hadn’t told me she’d also kept a journal. Her health was declining but she was quite active in terms of filmmaking in her last year, so I had to squeeze in my visits with her between chemotherapy and her trips to the Berlin Film Festival for a premiere of a film she made. And, when she went to Berlin in 2018 she lost one of her vocal chords so when we were recording her narration for the film we had to use an amplifier. What’s amazing about making a film is that it’s a sustained experience and a gift with that person you’re collaborating with. It was also a gift in the sense that we could share all that time together.
Barbara passed away in March 2019, and I’d hadn’t yet written the text you see in the film. I really wanted a way so you could dive into the film on a personal level, and on a level where I could be talking to her, the audience, the Earth, to the future and to anyone who could be watching the movie. What’s so specific about film, that it can transport you back in history but can also propel you forward in time too. I wanted there to be an active presence which is why I talk to the audience.
Bianca: That’s what is so special about “A Month of Single Frames” is that feeling of conversation between you, the audience and Barbara. In the way it felt like therapy and a precious way of capturing someone’s memory.
Lynne: We think of film as a closed system where you enter it but you don’t affect it although it may affect you in a psychological way. I wanted that system to be more open, the screen is no longer a closed system.
Bianca: Do you think we’ve lost something special about the art of shooting on film compared to how we now seem to shoot everything on digital, especially in terms of the craft of editing?
Lynne: It’s funny that you mention editing because it made me recall Dziga Vertov’s “The Man With a Movie Camera” because many people believe that the director’s wife (Yelizaveta Ignatevna Svilova) really made the film, I believe her work helped give the film it’s rhythm. There’s an image of her in the film where she’s sat at the editing table and she looks like she’s sewing. This image reminds us that analogue film was constructed in a method that was very identified with women. There has been a revived interest in the materialistic qualities of the medium and the fact you can go from something three-dimensional to something two-dimensional.
In terms of my own filmmaking, “Which Way is East” was shot all on film and so was “A Month of Single Frames” and “The Last Happy Day” was digital and film. It’s a real mix. In terms of the images I shoot on Super-8 and 16mm, well I just like them better. Digital can be so pristine. There’s a sense of physicality to analogue film. Sometimes you see a strand of hair or dust, and that’s part of the real world that we’ve left behind like a fossil.
“Film About a Father Who” is to be screened in Sheffield in Autumn, and online on Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects in parallel. The Filmmaker Focus- retrospective films are streaming now in the UK and their accessibility has been extended through August 31st.
Lynne Sachs gives a biography of her father, Ira, using footage she’s captured over the last 30 years in Film About a Father Who. It’s an investigative process as Sachs inspects, discovers, and unpacks what she knows and has learnt of her father, but it becomes something more than a biography as she discovers the many relationships her father has had and the siblings she has.
Film About a Father Who is aesthetically interesting. Sachs compiles footage she’s taken over the last 30 years to bring together moments that are rich and reveal more about what was going on at the time than maybe anyone knew. It’s really impressive what she’s compiled here. She layers that with interviews of Ira’s children, often against shots of conversation, creating something that feels like a memory and that we aren’t sure if we can trust.
The film is moment after moment of revelation and as we learn of Ira’s relationships and offspring. Ira’s children keep discovering each other right up until the end, and so it’s not until Film about a Father Who is over that we realize as much as this is a biography of Ira, it’s an exploration of family dynamics. What are the obligations of a sibling to another sibling when they only share one parent?
We hear how Sachs’ grandmother wouldn’t meet the children from Ira’s second marriage because she couldn’t handle forming the bonds for more and more people the way she thought she was supposed to, and that’s really Ira’s story. He’s constantly making new relationships, and he leaves his mother, children, and his partners having to discover for themselves what his new relationships mean for them.
That’s not to say that Ira is a villain by the end of the story. Sach’s lens and writing are compassionate while being honest, an impressive balance when she is so close to the story herself. Sach’s truth-seeking makes for a compelling experience and while we only feel like we’re beginning to open the book on who her father was by the end of the film, we get the sense that we have arrived at the same spot of Sachs and her siblings.
Sheffield Doc/Fest Director, Cíntia Gil is joined by director, Lynne Sachs to discuss her films and to take questions from the audience for a live Q&A.
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs, in conversation with Festival Director Cíntia Gil, discuss 5 films that form her Director’s Focus within the Ghosts & Apparitions strand and her upcoming international premiere of Film About A Father Who which screens as part of Doc/Fest in October. Lynne Sachs’ films explore the notion of translation as a poetic and political tool for widening the world. Together with the focus, Doc/Fest presents Sachs’ video lecture My Body, Your Body, Our Bodies: Somatic Cinema at Home and in the World, a fascinating journey through her themes and work.
Her films are currently available to watch on Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects and Doc/Player through August 31, 2020:
The Last Happy Day, 2009, 37’ Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam in collaboration with Dana Sachs, 1994, 33’ Your Day Is My Night, 2013, 64’ The Washing Society, co-directed by Lizzie Olesker, 2018, 44’ A Month of Single Frames, made with and for Barbara Hammer, 2019, 14’
Lynne Sachs has always eluded easy labeling. Since her first short films in the late ’80s — the black-and-white character study Still Life With a Woman and Four Objects and the Laura-Mulvey-inspired observation on gendered bodies that is Drawn and Quartered — she’s eschewed traditional film grammar. She’s focused instead on capturing gestures, inches of skin, fragments of conversations, casual moments in time, personal memorabilia, and weaving them into unexpected patterns. This year, Sheffield Doc/Fest has celebrated Sachs with a long-overdue retrospective.
A recurring theme in Sachs’s filmography is the elliptical tension of translating spoken language into visual language. From her video travelogue of two clashing cultures in Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994) to the visual haiku of Sound of a Shadow (2010), she grounds her work in using aesthetics to decipher how people communicate. For Sachs, translation is frequently as much a vessel for encountering others as it is a tool to mold her films’ forms.
Two titles in the retrospective use this approach to give voice to the marginalized. The Washing Society (2018) documents both the contemporary and historical invisible labor in New York City laundromats, mostly performed by Black and brown women. Their repetitive gestures are performed in tempo to the words of the Atlanta black laundresses’ manifesto of 1881, and their unappreciated work is eventually exalted by artistic performances in the laundromats. Similarly, Your Day is My Night (2014) steps into the overcrowded apartments of immigrants in New York’s Chinatown. Their beds and common rooms are turned into stages on which they recount their pasts and talk about their current experiences. Sachs sublimes the personal into the theatrical.
Translation is more directly approached in Which Way Is East. Visiting her sister Dana in Vietnam, Sachs acts as both an outsider enchanted by the unfamiliar (while trying to avoid succumbing to Orientalist tropes) and a displaced explorer. She does not perceive her inability to speak Vietnamese as a barrier, even though communication would be arduous without Dana acting as an interpreter. Meanwhile, the peculiar The Last Happy Day (2009) explores the intricacies of the Sachs family genealogy. Sachs and her daughters peruse the letters of a distant cousin, Alexander Lenard, trying to piece his life together. The result is a fragmented series of floating imagery which gradually coheres into a portrait of an interesting man, a doctor who fought World War II and later translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin.
Sachs’s mentor and friend Barbara Hammer inhabits A Month of Single Frames (2019), her moving tribute to the late filmmaker’s work and inspiration. Some of Hammer’s personal materials were given to Sachs with absolute freedom regarding what form they would take in her hands. With fondness, she merges 16mm film shot by Hammer during an artist residency at Cape Cod in 1998 with a 2018 recording of Hammer reading excerpts from her journal. On-screen text sporadically appears to further dialogue with the source material, and perhaps Hammer herself as well. It is cinema as a conversation between generations, and between the living and the dead. Translation is not merely a utilitarian mediation for mutual understanding, but also a political act. Sachs embraces variegated renditions of filmic language, recording the world, digesting it, and offering it to viewers in its performative beauty.
Lynne Sachs’ documentaries are quite unlike anything else you will ever see. Poetic, impactful and moving journeys into unique worlds which are rarely captured on-screen, whether it’s the hidden world of laundrettes in her film “The Washing Society” or the world of immigrants sharing a ‘shift-bed’ in “Your Day Is My Night”. Every film feels like it has a personal connection to Sachs, but it is perhaps her latest film, “Film About a Father Who” that is her most personal yet.
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., an eccentric businessman from Park City, Utah. What the film ultimately becomes is a study, or rather, an investigation into this mysterious man that Lynne and her siblings (both known and unknown) call father. This is clearly an attempt to separate the man from the myth, but it becomes evidently clear that this is not an easy task to conduct.
Film About a Father Who still
“Film About a Father Who” opens with the present day, we open with a close-up shot of an elderly man (Ira) having his hair combed. Compared to the different versions of Ira that we see throughout the film, this version seems almost a shadow of his former self, but he still holds onto his secrets, playing his cards close to his chest. Throughout the film we are introduced to the many faces and personas of Ira, but like Lynne and her siblings it’s hard trying to discover the real Ira.
There’s the savvy businessman, the man we see skiing whilst talking on a cellphone. This version of Ira, we are told, worked from a shoebox and called himself a ‘hippy businessman’ who didn’t want to be defined by his work. It wasn’t really about his work, but the stuff that surrounded his work life. There was the husband to Lynne’s mother, Dianne. In interviews we hear how she had her doubts about the wedding but loved him and overlooked those issues. “I tried to convince myself that this was what marriages were.” Ira isn’t a “swan” in his own words, he can’t settle down with one mate for life, “I wasn’t suitable for marriage, I didn’t want to burden your mother with that.”
Ira Sachs, Sr. in Park City Utah. From FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (2020) by Lynne Sachs.
There’s the ‘playboy’ version of Ira. The man who is dubbed the ‘Hugh Hefner of Park City’ and would throw lavish parties. The man with a revolving door of girlfriends and wives. During the documentary Lynne and her siblings comment on how difficult it was to recall all their names. Lynne also contains interviews with some of the prominent wives and girlfriends, such as Diana, his second wife from Bali. Her tale is a tragic one, she was in her own words “naive and so innocent” when she married him and came to the States. However, it isn’t hard to see why women are drawn to Ira, he has this magnetic charm and charismatic presence that Lynne brilliantly captures with her camera.
Photo collage from Film About A Father Who
And, then there’s also the ‘son’. A son that didn’t want his mother to know that he owned two red Cadillacs and say that he was extragevant. The son who bickers with his eldery mother but also seems to dote on her too. The son who was separated from his mother at an early age only to be reunited years later. Without giving away too many details in this review, this glimpse into the early life of Ira and the trauma that he endured does allow us to gain some understanding into the mystery that is Ira Sachs Sr.
Watching the documentary you can understand Lynne and her siblings’ frustrations and maybe even resentment towards their father especially when it concerns certain details about half-siblings. With “Film About a Father Who” we are presented with the fundamental truth that people are complicated creatures who are sometimes impossible to understand fully. This may frustrate some viewers because we aren’t granted all the explanations and the details are confusing to follow at times, but real life is a tangled mess of names, dates and distant memories.
Ultimately, “Film About a Father Who” is a family home-video like nothing else you’ve ever seen before. This is an interesting film to experience, presented in Lynne Sachs’ beautifully abstract and artistic approach to filmmaking, which some viewers may find alienating but I encourage you to stick with it. I must offer gratitude to the Sachs’ family for allowing us access into their world and to experience it with them even if it’s just for a short period of time. Raw, honest and eye-opening. “Film About a Father Who” is just like its subject matter, something quite extraordinary.
Please Note: “Film About a Father Who” is to be screened in Sheffield in Autumn, and online on Sheffield Doc/Fest Selects in parallel.
Premiering Lynne Sachs’ latest feature, A Film About A Father Who, Doc/Fest 2020 has taken the opportunity to curate a few of the director’s most intriguing films. Spanning over decades of empathetic, experimental filmmaking, Festival Director Cintia Gil mentions that the overarching theme of these works is “translation”. Sachs elaborates that while her films often feature other countries and languages, the experience isn’t meant to feel seamless, but instead explore the sense of dépaysement, of being out of your own comfort zone, and revelling in that unfamiliarity and curiosity.
Which Way is East (1994) In which Lynne joins her sister Dana in Vietnam, and documents their travels north. Primarily she is connecting with the country: eating copious amounts of fruit, bonding with friends and strangers alike, examining the damage left behind from the war. There are layers beyond the direct translation of Vietnamese as peppered throughout are proverbs, which connect with the discussions and reveal how cultures perceive life differently. On another level she’s reconnecting and collaborating with a sister who she’s been separated from, and building a bridge between her own fictional, creative inclinations as a filmmaker and her sister’s political, non-fiction perceptions as a journalist. At 33 minutes, it feels like a whirlwind, footage zooming past on the roads, but one that really feels shared by all who feature in it.
The Last Happy Day (2009) This title is a quote from letters received by Sachs’ uncle referring to the day before the outbreak of WWI, marking a shattering of naïvité and the start of a century of disillusionment. In an incredibly liminal and fascinating piece of exploration, Sachs’ children tell the story of Sandor Lenard, a distant Hungarian cousin who fled a small town in Germany in 1938.
Surrounded by death as he worked for the US to identify the broken bones of soldiers, his later project is intriguingly different: the translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin. A so-called dead language, that he said best expressed dread, was applied to the philosophical exploits of children’s characters. Having watched many young men become soldiers, seeing Sachs’ kids interpret his letters and his translation brings out a deeper meaning within them. It’s a patchy portrait of a mysterious man that brings about a sense of existential crisis and a permanent exile from security.
Your Day Is My Night (2013) My personal favourite, a window into the world of Chinese immigrants in New York City, who rent “shift-beds” in order to afford to live and work there. It’s a carefully orchestrated blend of performance art to highlight the nocturnal, upside-down lifestyle and monologues perfected to best tell the stories of each inhabitant. One stand out is Huang, a wedding singer who lives with his father, who shares his unique passions and fears. It is a tactile, emotional approach with many dimensions that helps the viewer begin to comprehend these experiences, and brings this hidden side of the city to light.
The Washing Society (2018) Co-directed with playwright Lizzie Olesker, this team effort is the culmination of a performance piece named ‘Every Fold Matters’, detailing and valuing the efforts of laundry workers. This film is named after the original Atlanta Washing Society of 1881, where thousands of African American laundresses unionised and demanded better pay and agency over clients. This revolutionary spirit is carried on, as the film juxtaposes three actresses with three workers, folding and carrying thousands of garments a day, unappreciated and undervalued. Through the combination of conversation and performances, the intimacy and volume of their work is brought to light.
A Month In Single Frames (For Barbara Hammer) (2018) As filmmaker Barbara Hammer was undergoing chemotherapy, she gave certain filmmakers free reign with her unpublished work. In this case, Sachs plays with the footage taken on Hammer’s month long residency at Cape Cod. Particularly hypnotic are past Barbara’s meticulous and beautiful attempts to capture new colours in the sun, the sea and the sand, and the spontaneous originality with which she saw the same cabin and its surroundings. Here the translation is very much inter-generational, as Hammer reads from her journal at the time, and we overhear discussions between the two. Sachs revisits this time of creativity in an organic way and carefully scrapbooks it into a philosophical homage.
Note: this particular film makes a beautiful double bill with Lynne Ramsay’s Brigitte which will be out on Doc/Fest Selects in the autumn. She profiles a prolific portrait photographer, trying to see what Brigitte sees in her subjects, and turns that mirror towards her own life and approach to art.
Full film available as part of Doc/Fest Selects here.
Throughout all these works, the partnership between Sachs and her subjects shines. Often she remains in contact with them, continuing to campaign alongside them. The collection boasts celebrating “translation as a political and poetic tool” and through this glimpse into her career, it is clear that the bridges she builds last. By the end of her films, it feels like both an honour and a necessity to inhabit these spaces and listen to these stories.
From launderettes to abortion, Ania Ostrowska compiles a nuanced selection of documentaries from women filmmakers
It is that time of the year again: The F Word reports from Sheffield Doc/Fest, the UK’s biggest international documentary film festival.
Since 2013 we have managed to send one, sometimes two, journalists to Sheffield to watch films and interview filmmakers (and party!). This year, like so many other film festivals, Sheffield Doc/Fest moved almost entirely online with some screenings tentatively planned for cinemas in the autumn, like British director Lynne Ramsay’s portrait of photographer Brigitte Lacombe. As I can stop and rewind the films as I please (but also just abandon them half-way…) and as all Q&As and sessions take place on Zoom, this year’s experience is very different from the exciting festival buzz.
The opening good news is that two women filmmakers are subject of special focus this year. First, the festival pays tribute to Sarah Maldoror, pioneering filmmaker from French West Indies who died on 13 April of Covid-19 at the age of 90. One of the first women to direct a feature film in Africa, she went on to make more than forty films, mainly documentaries. Seeing cinema as a tool of revolution, in her work she sought to encourage radical changes in society. Maldoror’s anticolonial short Monangambée (1969) will be hopefully shown on the big screen in the autumn.
Secondly, the festival presents a selection of five films by American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs (from 1994 to 2018), mostly involving creative collaboration with others. I watched The Washing Society (2018), co-directed with Lizzie Olesker, which peeks behind the scenes of some of Atlanta’s surviving downtown launderettes, highlighting invisible and often unacknowledged labour of launderette attendants through performance and re-enactment. With its title a tribute to the 1881 manifesto by an organization of African-American laundresses, the film also looks into the future, documenting the disappearing world of laundrettes as large facilities on the outskirts of the city take over.
Albeit set in very different contexts, the films draw attention to the ongoing struggles contemporary women face, and not just in the countries depicted.
There is no such thing as unskilled labour—only unseen, or unappreciated. Inspired by the Atlanta Washing Society of 1881, where African American laundresses united for better pay and agency, The Washing Society inspects modern laundromats, haunted by ghosts of past and present, toiling unobserved.
Margarita, having worked in laundry for four years, now suffers from a herniated disc, and when she does the maths this is hardly surprising. Thousands of pieces a day, tens of pounds gently arranged and carried—the enormity of this load is pressed upon the viewer. Nonetheless, the intimacy is still there; a stranger’s washing is very telling, a one-way window into a life, where the other side is usually in shadow.
Having performed this material in laundromats and venues in New York City under the title Every Fold Matters, Olesker and Sachs now adapt it for the screen. Centring on three laundresses and three actresses, the delicacy of these repetitive movements is mirrored by the preciseness of interpretive dance. The soundscape combines bells and chimes, fast-paced and constant, with the sliding of quarters, the sloshing of machines and the otherwise imperceptible sounds of folding.
Over several generations, these women have been poorly paid and fighting for recognition. From Jasmine Holloway’s performance as the spirit of the original 1881 movement, to her real-life matriarch Lulu who talks of striking in 1968, a thread of solidarity binds the piece together. It crosses language barriers too, through monologues in English, Chinese and Spanish, all echoing the same complaints.
Like Your Day is My Night, Sachs once again uses domesticity as an entry point into the life of New York City’s immigrant working class. Running like clockwork, the hands hidden from the customer are given centre stage in a beautiful translation of lived experience.
RATING: 4/5
INFORMATION DIRECTORS: Lynne Sachs, Lizzie Olesker SYNOPSIS: An investigation into the history, unpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry, weaving together observations, interviews and performances.
Film Scratches is a blog by David Finkelstein focusing on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays.
Serial Seduction: Film About a Father Who (2020) by David Finkelstein
Film About a Father Who is Lynne Sachs’ absorbing feature length film about her unconventional father. She worked on the film for almost 30 years, shooting on a variety of analog and digital formats. The film begins with Lynne Sachs laboriously combing and disentangling her elderly father Ira’s long gray hair, an occasionally painful process, and the film is likewise an extensive process of trying to disentangle the many confused and hidden strands of her father’s complex relationships, hidden lives, and bewildering behavior. The examination is painful at times as well.
The film plays out as a detective story, as Lynne uncovers layer after layer of information about her father’s many contradictions and secrets. A free spirit and compulsive womanizer who spent most of his adult life picking up as many young women as he could, he pursued so many women at once that he had to keep elaborate lists and diagrams to keep track of them. Lynne admits that there are so many girls that she doesn’t even learn most of their names. Ira Sachs was adept at closing his eyes to the havoc he created in the lives of his various wives, girlfriends and children, and expert at keeping parts of his life hidden.
An extremely willful, volatile person, Ira acts on every passing desire and impulse he feels, heedless of the consequences. By contrast, Lynne’s mother and the other young women in his life seem so passive and fatalistic it is as if they don’t even know what it is like to identify one of their own needs or desires, let alone to act on it. Her mother says she didn’t make major decisions in her life, things “just happened.” She describes herself, in retrospect, as “purposefully blind” to Ira’s infidelities.
Ira’s instinct is to be courtly and attentive to all women: wives, girlfriends, daughters, his mother. They are each treated like queen for a day. Ira is seen dancing with his mother to Autumn Leaves, and her face lights up with a smile. (Perhaps this is why Lynne’s brother Ira Jr. comes across as having a more clear-eyed, less conflicted view of his dad: Ira Sr. doesn’t typically turn the charm on for men.)
A scene where Lynne discusses her parents with her brother and sister reveals that the three siblings act like close, trusting family allies. All three identify as artists: Ira Jr. is a filmmaker and Dana is a writer, and not only are they comfortable analyzing their family dynamics, they all relish it. Their father might refuse to see the uncomfortable truth of the people he has hurt, and their mother might close her eyes to her husbands philandering, but these three offspring do not believe in living an unexamined life. They have each made careers out of what amounts to a survival technique in the Sachs household: shining a light on the murky darkness.
Lynne Sachs builds her story with the consummate skill which viewers have come to expect from her films: seamlessly weaving together diverse fragments of sound and picture so that they tell a complicated and ambiguous story in a way that constantly draws you in. She circles around her elusive subject, viewing him from multiple angles, but always moving in towards the center of the story. The film’s nonlinear form, intercutting between time periods, pointedly calls attention to the disconnect between Ira’s perceptions and the real consequences of his choices.
The revelations pile up, and some of them are devastatingly ugly. Yet as Lynne brings the different branches of her family together for the film, it is clear that their frank discussions provide them with a powerful source of trust and healing. The film’s title, a reference to a Yvonne Rainer film, perfectly sums up a man so full of contradictions that he is impossible to sum up. The film wisely refrains from providing judgements or pat conclusions about Ira, and it ends with Lynne and her sister realizing that forgiveness is the only possible attitude to take towards this dynamic, creative father who offered inspiration and dismay in equal measure. When you dig deep enough into family histories, they can seem like an unending chain of cruelties suffered and inflicted in turn, but Lynne Sachs’ spirit of intelligent compassion lights up the film, giving voice to the anger and pain, but also providing the space and distance needed to recover from it. It’s a spectacular gift to the viewer, and one that will provide insight even to those with more conventional parents.
