Headroom + Vertical Cinema Present: Films by/ with/ for Barbara Hammer
For the last experimental film event of the season, Headroom and Vertical Cinema are appropriately teaming up to present a memorial screening of collaborations by Barbara Hammer, curated by Deborah Stratman!
With a career spanning fifty years, Barbara Hammer is recognized as a pioneer of queer cinema. A visual artist working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories, lives and representations. Stated Hammer, “My work makes these invisible bodies and histories visible. As a lesbian artist, I found little existing representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural record for future generations.”
Barbara Hammer was born in 1939 in Hollywood, California. She lived and worked in New York until her death in 2019.
This set of films, collaborations made by, with, and for Barbara Hammer was curated by Deborah Stratman, who will be in attendance at the screening.
By Lynne Sachs’ documentary Film About a Father Who has been tapped as the opening-night film of the Slamdance Film Festival, whose 26th edition is set for January 24-30 in Park City.
Sachs shot footage of her father, a pioneering Park City businessman, over a 35-year period from 1984-2019, seeking to attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent, and a sister to her siblings. The cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame, yet privately ensconced in secrets. As facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had hoped to reveal.
“It takes undeniable courage to discover and reveal shocking truths about one’s family,” said Slamdance festival manager Alina Solodnikova on Wednesday. “Lynne Sachs has done it with unique style, a dry sense of humor and honesty that captivates our programmers. A generation in the making, Film About A Father Who is pulling no punches. We couldn’t imagine a better film to open Slamdance 2020.”
The news comes as Slamdance is ramping up for its 2020 edition, adding more titles to a schedule that already includes the Narrative and Documentary Feature Film Competition and Breakouts sections which were unveiled earlier this month.
Lynne Sachs’ Film About A Father Who will open Slamdance 2020, set to run in Park City, Utah, from January 24-30, 2020.
Sachs shot her film about Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Utah, over 35 years from 1984 to 2019 using 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital.
“It takes undeniable courage to discover and reveal shocking truths about one’s family,” said Slamdance festival manager Alina Solodnikova. “Lynne Sachs has done it with unique style, a dry sense of humour and honesty that captivates our programmers. A generation in the making, Film About A Father Who is pulling no punches. We couldn’t imagine a better film to open Slamdance 2020.”
An evening of round-robin readings with Brooklyn writers Michael Ruby, Michele Somerville, Erik Schurink, and Lynne Sachs
Tuesday, Dec. 10, 7 to 9 PM Court Tree Gallery 371 Court St 2nd Floor (at Carroll St.) Brooklyn Free and open to the public.
“I’ve been working hard to think about what the four of us have in common and the one thing that came to mind is that we all have children who are now young adults. I happen to know for a fact that our distinct experiences of having children, being with children, and thinking about our own childhoods have been a great resource for each of us in our work. With this in mind, I invited Michael, Michele and Erik to join me to read from their collections.” – Lynne Sachs
Michael Ruby is the author of many poetry books, including Compulsive Words (BlazeVOX, 2010), American Songbook (Ugly Duckling, 2013), ebook Close Your Eyes (Argotist Online, 2018), ebook Titles & First Lines (Mudlark, 2018) and The Mouth of the Bay (BlazeVOX, 2019), as well as a trilogy in prose and poetry, Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices (Station Hill, 2012). He also co-edited Bernadette Mayer’s collected early books, Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words (Station Hill, 2015), and works as an editor of articles about U.S. politics at The Wall Street Journal.
“If ‘experiment’ means anything when we speak of experimental poetry, Michael Ruby’s gathering (in Memories, Dreams and Inner Voices) is a moving testament to the still real possibilities of such a venture/adventure. His project here—to explore “the varieties of unconscious experience” as they come to him—is an aspect of what Gary Snyder once described as “the real work of modern man: to uncover the inner structure and actual boundaries of the mind.” That Ruby’s workings with memory, dream, and the experience of language between sleep and waking issue in a new and powerful work of poesis is something to be celebrated and experienced by all of us in turn.” – Jerome Rothenberg
Michele Madigan Somerville is the author of two books of verse, Black Irish (2009) and WISEGAL (2001), and a third, Glamourous Life, which will be published by Rain Mountain early in 2020. She was born on the island of Manhattan and lives in Brooklyn.
“Somerville takes us on a grand cosmic ride on that fine line between the divine and the sacred. Along that ride, Madigan Somerville never loses her sense of humor and never stops having fun.” — Joanna Sit
Erik Schurink creates evocative art experiences and interactive exhibits to engage people and build community. He is Director of Exhibits at Long Island Children’s Museum.
Erik Schurink’s poetry is structurally driven by literary constraints and arrangements. His Cryptozoo (Proteotypes, 2012) is a journal in which he and eleven other writers respond to animalistic images he photographed. His work has been featured in AMP Always Electric, 13 Writhing Machines, Upstart: Journal of English Renaissance Studies, An Oulipolooza,and others. He is a contributing artist to Abecedarium NYC and Galerie de Difformité. He co-leads the monthly Writhing Society workshops at Brooklyn’s Central library.
Lynne Sachs often includes her poetry in her films (Tip of My Tongue, House of Science, Biography of Lilith), allowing her to draw in her reader through a play with language. She began Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019) as a half-century marker in her life, one for each year from 1961 to 2011.
“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.” — Phillip Lopate
Year by Year, the first book of poetry by filmmaker Lynne Sachs, is the result of a deep collaboration with designer Abby Goldstein. Typeset in Study with headings in Freight Sans, the poems are presented adjacent to handwritten journal pages, emphasizing the relationship between content and form. The author’s eccentrically-lettered dates are isolated and collected on the book’s cover to create a cacophony of numbers that reflects the movement of time.
With one poem for each year from 1961 to 2011, the collection began as a half-century marker in Sachs’ life, reflecting on history and memory. The handwritten poems themselves became the basis for her 2017 documentary Tip of My Tongue.
The 100 greatest films directed by women: Who voted? L-Z
11/26/2019
BBC Culture polled film experts around the world for their favourite films directed by women. In total, 368 critics, academics, industry figures and film programmers, from 84 countries responded. Each critic voted for 10 films, ranking them 1 (favourite) to 10 (10th favourite). We awarded 10 points per first ranked film, 9 per second ranked film, and so on down to 1. We then summed the points. The film with the most points won, and films with more individual votes in total ranked higher.
Irina Trocan – Freelance film critic (Romania)
1. Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991)
2. White Material (Claire Denis, 2009)
3. The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, 1998)
4. Shoot for the Contents (T Minh-ha Trinh, 1992)
5. Zama (Lucrecia Martel, 2017)
6. The Meetings of Anna (Chantal Akerman, 1978)
7. Which Way is East (Lynne Sachs, 1994)
8. Things to Come (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016)
9. Nuts! (Penny Lane, 2016)
10. Sex Is Comedy (Catherine Breillat, 2002)
“Usually when I decide to write a poem, I immediately begin a fight with myself over whether I actually have something to say. This argument can open turn into a capitulation of my creative self to my practical self, resulting in my opening up my checkbook, changing the cat litter, emptying the dishwasher, or simply filling my day with the tasks of a so-called productive life. If I still feel tugged by a desire to write but can only allocate a few minutes, I turn to punctuation. When you don’t know what to write, return full circle to what you’ve already written and begin to experiment and play. Like a musician at the piano or a florist giving shape to an ikebana arrangement, exploring the shifts of intonation and meaning that come with reevaluating your punctuation can result in the sensation of creating something new.”
—Lynne Sachs, author of Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press, 2019)
Oct. 11, 2019
Anthology Film Archives, New York City
“For most of my life, my films have been the marriage of external circumstances as seen through the needs of my own psyche. There is no other plan as such. Occasionally these explorations result in a film that is not quite what I would call a public film, something, perhaps, to be shown as camera original in the privacy of one’s apartment. I would like to use the rare opportunity of this lecture format to show two of these intimate works as original Kodachrome, each quite different from the other. One is called Lux Perpetua II and the other, Ossuary. They are made up of outtakes from decades of shooting 16mm Kodachrome.” – Nick Dorsky
Since 2008, the Experimental Lecture Series has presented veteran filmmakers who immerse themselves in the world of alternative, experimental film. Our intention is to lay bare an artist’s challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, and M.M. Serra. Programmed by Lynne Sachs and Dan Streible.
Lynne’s Intro:
“I am thrilled to welcome Nathaniel Dorsky today to present our 10th Annual Experimental Lecture. Nick comes to us after a decade of talks and screenings by Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, and M.M. Serra. In this series, artists have explored their own process, their own investigation of the shift from discouragement to realization – the why and the how that allows them to continue. My intention has always been to ask each artist to lay bare their challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. I remember Barbara Hammer coming to her lecture ten years ago, “fresh” from a round of chemotherapy, with much hair on her head, of course, she draped the hall with a paper film and then picked up a very heavy Pagent Projector and proceed to create a work of expanded cinema in which all four walls and our skin became screens. I remember Craig Baldwin’s lecture on Cinema Povera and his uncomfortability with actually talking about his own process. Bradley Eros brought in a chorus of poets and performers to accompany him as he stood in the back of the room and spoke in the darkness. Carolee Schneemann gave a lecture that was both introspective and hilarious at time minutes after she had fallen downstairs and broken her hip. MM Serra gave a wonderful lecture that included her own feminist journey exploring her embrace of the erotic image. And Jonas Mekas spoke to us for three hours, without notes or any films whatsoever – about everything from the history of underground cinema in NYC to his own approach to the camera. There were so many people we had to create an overflow hall where the audience watched Jonas on the screen. I would like to dedicate tonight’s program to Barbara, Carolee and Jonas, dear friends, and loving artists.” Lynne Sachs
With additional introductions by poet Lee Ann Brown and UGFTV teacher Darrell Wilson.
When filmmaker Lynne Sachs turned fifty, she dedicated herself to writing a poem for every year of her life, so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in Sachs’ life and the swirl of events beyond her domestic universe. Published by Tender Buttons Press, Year by Year Poems juxtaposes Sachs’ finished poems, which move from her birth in 1961 to her half-century marker in 2011, with her original handwritten first drafts. In this way, she reveals her process of navigating within and alongside historical events such as the Moon Landing, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., streaking, the Anita Hill hearings, the Columbine shootings, and controversies around universal health care. In Year by Year Poems, Lynne Sachs realizes the long anticipated leap from her extraordinary career in filmmaking to this, her first book of poems.
With an introduction by Paolo Javier,former Queens Poet Laureate and author of Court of the Dragon, and book design by Abby Goldstein.
Lynne Sachs reads from “Year by Year” at Beyond Baroque (LA)
#12 on Small Press Distribution’s October 2019 Best Seller List! Favorite Poetry in 2019 – Dennis Cooper Year End List Praise for Year by Year Poems:
“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.”
–– Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and Against Joie de Vivre
“The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. Year by Year distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life.”
–– Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and When the World Was Steady
“In Year by Year, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate.” – Michael Collier author of Dark Wild Realm
“Renowned experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs wrote one of 2019’s best books of poetry. In 2011, after deciding to write one poem for each of the fifty years of her life, Sachs asked herself, “How have the private, most intimate moments of my life been affected by the public world beyond?” The graceful, diaristic poems that she went on to produce successfully distill events and themes in the poet’s life and simultaneously, magically, reflect larger movements of history and culture. Intimate and imagistic, the poems unfold a series of miniature stories with sensuous rhythms, telling visual detail, and gentle humor. Thus, in “1969” a young Sachs imagines Neil Armstrong calling on the telephone, then turning “to look at all of us (from the moon).” This beautifully designed book includes facsimiles of many of the poetry’s initial drafts, which subtly illumine this artist’s creative process.” – John Smalley, 2019 Staff Pick, San Francisco Public Library, Poetry Librarian
“As an artist, Sachs keeps playing, again and again, with each of the thirty-three films she has made over the decades and now, with her first book of poems, which are just as inventive and fresh, just as delightfully playful with form. These poems are innovative but never intimidating or deliberately opaque. Instead, they invite us in, encouraging us to play along. They give us a structure to enter into our own retrospective lives, our own distillations of time, our own superimpositions of the newsworthy world onto our most intimate moments.” – Sharon Harrigan, Cleaver: Philadelphia’s International Literary Magazine (excerpt)
“Powerful collection! We’re loving Year by Year, a rich poetry collection and visual journey of ideas by filmmaker Lynne Sachs. The book includes original handwritten first drafts with each finished piece. Unique process immersion. Fascinating to view the first drafts with the complete pieces, exploring them together like a map, what is gained (& lost) as we move through time and ideas. Elegant and elegiac.” – Margot Douaihy, Northern New England Review (posted in Twitter)
“The poems of Year by Year led Sachs to create a feature-length hybrid documentary called ‘Tip of My Tongue”, an indication of how richly resonant these poems are, with their skillful intermingling of private and public.” – John Bradley, Rain Taxi (championing aesthetically adventurous literature)
About the Author: Lynne Sachs makes films and writes poems that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Her work embraces hybrid form and combines memoir with experimental, documentary, and fictional modes. In recent years, she has expanded her practice to include live performance with moving image. Lynne was first exposed to poetry by her great aunt as a child in Memphis, Tennessee. Soon she was frequenting workshops at the local library and getting a chance to learn from poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Ethridge Knight. As an active member of Brown University’s undergraduate poetry community, she shared her early poems with fellow poet Stacy Doris. Lynne later discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneeman, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Lynne has made thirty-five films which have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. Festivals in Buenos Aires, Beijing and Havana have presented retrospectives of her work. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship. In early 2020, her newest movie, Film About a Father Who, will premiere on opening night at the Slamdance Film Festival and in NYC at the Museum of Modern Art. Lynne lives in Brooklyn. Year by Year Poems is her first book of poetry.
Selected Readings: Maysles Documentary Center – Film Video Poetry Symposium, New York City (6/19); Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires w/ films (9/19); Penn Book Center, Philadelphia (9/19); Brooklyn Book Festival (9/19) Montez Press Radio with Tender Buttons, 9/19; Unnameable Books, Boog Festival, Brooklyn (9/19); Other Cinema with films, 11/19; Topos Books w/ films, Brooklyn (12/19); Burke’s Books, Memphis (1/20); Volume Writers’ Series, Hudson, NY (1/20); Greenlight Books Celebration of Tender Buttons Press (2/4); Bar Laika w/ films, Brooklyn (TBA); San Francisco Public Library National Poetry Month (2021); Mana Contemporary, Jersey City (4/25/20); McNally Jackson Books, NYC with Valery Oisteanu (TBA); KGB Bar with Paolo Javier, NYC (TBA); Maysles Documentary Center Film & Poetry Conference (5/3/20); Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles.
About the Press: Founded by poet Lee Ann Brown in 1989, Tender Buttons Press publishes experimental women’s and gender-expansive poetry through innovative forms that play with the boundaries between life and art, generations and generativity.
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C Scape Duneshack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal.
In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack images, sounds and writing to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
“While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film. My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once.” — Lynne Sachs
Support provided by Wexner Center Film/ Video Studio and Artist Residency Award – Jennifer Lange, Curator. Additional Editing by Paul Hill; with gratitude to Florrie Burke.
“The result is an incredibly potent study of life in all its many forms and the difficulty of facing one’s own mortality … Sachs deliberately contrasts Hammer’s shots of the gorgeous sun-dappled ridges with her close-ups of plants and insects, setting the grand majesty of the world against its delicate minutiae to form a rich tapestry of life among the banks. Crucially, the film never feels manufactured or over-structured. Sachs successfully maintains the feeling of an off-the-cuff journal that captures Hammer’s ideas as they come to her… At the beginning of the film, Hammer reads from her diary “I didn’t shoot it, I saw it,” and it is this feeling of spontaneous observation and meditation that Sachs manages to recapture so successfully here.”
–Robert Salsbury, One Room With A View
Winner of the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen at the 66th Annual Oberhausen Film Festival
“In the age of necessary social distancing, we would like to highlight a remarkable film which fulfills the noblest vocation of art, fostering an emotional connection between people from different times and geographical locations. For the ability to find poetry and complexity in simple things, for its profound love for life and people, and for attention to detail in working with delicate matters, we decided to award the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen to A Month of Single Frames by Lynne Sachs.”
Statement from Oberhausen Jury
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
