In October 2018, Filmwax Podcaster Adam Schartoff interviewed Lynne and two participant/performers in her film “Tip of My Tongue”. Adam himself was an integral part of the film, since he two turned 50 in the early 1960s and was ready, willing, and able to open his soul and his memories to our creative process.
You can listen here or go to the Filmwax website:
[39 mins. 12 secs.]
To celebrate her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathered together other people, men and women, who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where Sachs grew up. She invites 12 fellow New Yorkers – born across several continents in the 1960s – to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they discuss some of the most salient, strange, and revealing moments of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive examination of the way in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are. All caught in her fabulous film “Tip of My Tongue”.
In this podcast discussion, we re-unite 4 of the 12 people from that unforgettable weekend a few summers back, including myself, Accra Shepp, Andrea Kannapell and Lynne. The film will have a screening this evening, Thursday, October 18 at 7PM at The Film-makers Cooperative in Manhattan. The film is also available on DVD and blu-ray through Cinema Guild, and for streaming on Kanopy.
“When Capitalism Sets the World on Fire: Vancouver International Film Festival takes a sobering look at today’s economic reality with a handful of powerful docs.”
Thanks to The Georgia Straight for this thought piece on our film “The Washing Society”, which screened at the 2018 Vancouver Film Festival. “Directors Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker visit a number of laundromats, where women (except for one man originally from China) talk about their experiences at the bottom end of the service industry. Most of these washeterias have been shuttered since the movie wrapped, to be replaced by faceless pickup services built on even cheaper labour. “For us,” Olesker informed the Straight, “these are on-the-street observations reflecting larger changes in the city, due to demographic shifts, and not unique to laundromats.”
“Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs’ film is a creative, often lyrical study of laundromat service workers in New York City – women who do a hard job for far too little money. Using a mixture of actors and real industry workers, the directors create a portrait of economic oppression and human resilience that provokes dismay and empathy in equal measure – and yet the hard dose of reality is leavened with poetic visual touches and a warm, humanist tone. What we hear – sometimes without subtitles – rings with authenticity, and it’s the details as much as the general situation of these workers that are alarming. One woman calculates that she washes around 1,000 articles of clothes a day; a “part-time” worker says she’s worked in laundromats for 45 years. How many socks is that? In voiceover, we hear that one of the goals the directors have is “calling attention to something that isn’t paid attention to – hidden labour.” On that score, their film is a success, but there is much else of value here besides journalistic advocacy; with their playful stylistic touches and creative approach to storytelling, Olesker and Sachs have turned politics into art – and vice versa.” Alan Franey, Vancouver International Film Festival, 2018.
Here are two great documentaries about work in the age of what some, perhaps hopefully, call late capitalism. Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs’ Washing Society is a creative, often lyrical study of laundromat service workers in NYC—women who do a hard job for far too little money. Sophie Bruneau’s haunting Dreaming Under Capitalism has its subjects recount their work-related dreams; we hear of waking anxieties turned into dark, often scary symbolism. Together, the films form a downbeat but soulful duet.
Dreaming Under Capitalism
Director: Sophie Bruneau / Belgium, 2017, 63 min. Sophie Bruneau’s haunting Dreaming Under Capitalism has its subjects recount their work-related dreams; we hear of waking anxieties turned into dark, often scary symbolism.
Friday 07th, September 2018
Written by Cynthia Ramsay in TV & Film
Faced with the challenge of making a documentary for which the voices of undocumented immigrants were crucial, filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker had to push the boundaries of convention. The result is The Washing Society, which will see its Canadian première at the Vancouver International Film Festival, as part of the festival’s Impact programming.
“For this year’s Impact stream, we decided to foreground films that represent prominent themes found in the festival at large – themes that are extremely topical at this historical moment,” said Alan Franey, director of international programming at VIFF, in a release. “Refreshing in their cinematic artistry, insights and lack of platitudes, these films have the power to inspire actual change.”
The Washing Society combines research, interviews, acting, dance, artistic images and other elements to introduce viewers in 45 minutes to some of the laundromats in New York City, which are disappearing, and the people who work in them. Olesker and Sachs, who both live in Brooklyn, will be in Vancouver for the festival and the Independent interviewed them by phone in anticipation of their visit.
The filmmakers are practically neighbours, and they met each other through their daughters, who are about the same age and have the same piano teacher. It was at a piano lesson where they first crossed paths. “Then we saw each other’s work, and really admired what each other were doing,” said Olesker.
The origins of the documentary are in a performance Olesker was commissioned to do in a laundromat, upon which she wanted to expand. Thinking that film would be a good element to add to it, she contacted Sachs.
“We had a series of conversations, which led me to unexpected places in how to think about laundry and women doing laundry, and so it became a deeper, more fruitful collaboration,” said Olesker.
Over a span of about two years, the pair researched the topic, then co-created the play Every Fold Matters with the actors performing it, as well as writing their own text. The site-specific performance and film project – which was performed in laundromats and various venues throughout New York from 2015 to 2017 – formed the basis for what has become The Washing Society.
“We’ve been working together now for probably over four years,” said Sachs, “because we spent almost a whole year traipsing all over New York City – mostly Brooklyn and Manhattan – trying to do the convention of documentary practices, ‘Let’s go into laundromats, let’s talk to workers.’ But the issues in New York are that so many of those workers are undocumented, so they’re very hesitant to have a conversation in front of a camera. So, we would have conversations and we would go back and write pieces and create characters based on all of those interviews we did, which we didn’t film. But then, over the course of time, as it shifted from being a live performance with media to a film, we got better at finding people who were willing to speak in front of the camera.”
They did this, in some cases, with the help of an actor or a translator, who then became more involved or involved in other ways. “One of the things both of us are really interested in,” said Sachs, “is breaking down the conventions of roles in the project.”
Both Sachs and Olesker have done cross-disciplinary work before.
“It’s been exciting for me to work in film and also to engage in questions like, What is a documentary? What does it mean to inquire into a subject or have a question and pursue it in different ways? As a creator of film or theatre, you’re always looking for a truth, not necessarily the truth.”
“I’m really interested in how documentary crosses over into fiction, and how fiction informs the documentary aspect,” said Olesker. In this project, she said, “It’s been exciting for me to work in film and also to engage in questions like, What is a documentary? What does it mean to inquire into a subject or have a question and pursue it in different ways? As a creator of film or theatre, you’re always looking for a truth, not necessarily the truth.”
The Washing Society contains a lot of theatre. “That’s an issue that raises questions with audiences in good ways and in challenging ways,” said Olesker, for whom this film is her first foray into documentary-making.
Sachs, however, has made this type of documentary before, mixing lived experience with fiction; for example, Your Day Is My Night, which she brought to the Vancouver International Film Festival in 2013. “Working in this way,” she said, “has started to make me to question all forms of documentary, or even narrative film, because you see a narrative film and it’s really a document of a bunch of people getting together and making a fictional story.”
One passion “that has been very nourishing for both of us in our work is our relationship to history, to the historical document,” said Sachs.
“With this film,” she explained, “when we came across the story of the Atlanta washerwomen, we found it absolutely riveting and astonishing that there was this moment in American history in which a group of 3,000 black women had enough power or wherewithal or vision … to organize and to change their working lives. Any art project that gives you an excuse to research, I think, is pretty exciting.”
The title for the documentary is inspired by what these washerwomen accomplished in 1881. As for more recent history, The Washing Society both exposes the harsh working conditions in laudromats and laments the loss of these neighbourhood establishments.
“I think it’s interesting to explore that contradiction,” said Olesker. “It is grueling, underpaid, under-recognized work. It’s also necessary work – not necessarily in the form that it’s taken, of dropping off your laundry and paying someone to wash and fold it, but someone is always going to have to do the wash, so that sense of broad history and the roles that women have had in doing that work is something that was behind the project, as well.”
“My nostalgia,” said Sachs, “is any space where there is an intersection.… It’s what makes cities great, the idea that there is a space in which there are intersections, and that people who have less and people who have more are in the same space and they’re spending time [together]. And that all has changed so much now. The thing is, though, that the basic infrastructure – of there being a large group of people who are hidden in some way, and they are doing service work for other people, who have much more access or means – isn’t going to change because, even if it [laundry service] becomes an app, like we show at the end of the film, there are still people doing the work, they’re just not as visible.”
One purpose of the film is to make that invisibility visible. But, said Olesker, “What’s interesting about the film to me is that we’re not so much leaving you with something that we think should happen. We’re opening it up as a question and saying, ‘Look inside this.’ We looked inside and now we’re taking you inside, what is this about?”
There is a challenge to making a documentary when the “people who we would want to have in the movie are undocumented, therefore, they don’t want to be documented by us – they want to be documented by the government….”
In the United States, added Sachs, the idea of the document “comes down to a sense of security.” There is a challenge to making a documentary when the “people who we would want to have in the movie are undocumented, therefore, they don’t want to be documented by us – they want to be documented by the government, and so there is this resistance to being in front of our camera until they can find something that legitimizes their status here in another way that will serve them.
“And it actually comes down to the whole project of making art,” said Sachs. “To whose advantage is it? For example, we’re getting to go to Vancouver and we were talking about, Could we manage to bring one of the people from the film? There is a lot of questioning about what access the artwork gives. We’ve tried to bring along the people in the film as much as possible, but we aren’t always able to.
“There’s even a point in the film where we have Chinese and Spanish … sometimes we translated that and sometimes we didn’t, because we wanted to give opportunity for people who are in the audience who had access to those languages to feel that they were in positions of strength over the rest of us. There’s something about subtitling that, if you subtitle everything, you bring it all into the English window, and people stop listening.
“A big part of the film,” she continued, “is to go outside of issues of work and of cleaning in an urban situation, which becomes involved in service … [and to delve into] all the layers of existence or the layers of identity that happen in cities these days, and who listens to whom. We hear Spanish all the time [in the United States], but are we really listening to it or is it something we can just pass by? Same with Chinese.”
Both Olesker and Sachs are Jewish.
“I’m from New York so, growing up, it’s been a part of my life,” said Olesker. “Not in a religious way, but certainly in the culture of my family and my world. And specifically around labour and labour history, union organizing – not that anyone was an organizer in my family, but there was always an awareness of that, so that is part of my identity in terms of the work I’m interested in making.”
Sachs is a member of Kolot Chayeinu. “The rabbi and founder of the congregation – her name is Ellen Lippmann – she’s always been a hero of mine,” said Sachs. “She’s just retired, about a month or so ago, after 25 years running Kolot Chayeinu. It’s a very, very progressive congregation and I worked with her just a couple of years ago on something that I found very moving.”
Lippmann would often ask Sachs to film various activities for the synagogue and, in 2016, when B&H photo and video store, which is run by ultra-Orthodox Jews, was challenged by labour activists for the company’s treatment of its warehouse workers, “a bunch of people from Kolot decided to organize with the workers in front of B&H,” said Sachs. “I was there to videotape it and so were some television stations. And I think that Ellen Lippmann really wanted to say, this is not, to our mind, following an ethical frame of reference that we want to claim as Jewish.”
Olesker pointed out that the B&H walkout was organized by the Laundry Workers Centre. “So, we actually made a little film, which is kind of a postscript to The Washing Society, where they organize this march through east Harlem to a laundromat … where two of the workers who were part of the Laundry Workers Centre went in and presented a list of demands to the owners … to talk about unfair labour practices and long hours and being underpaid and no breaks. We were part of that march and demonstration, which Lynne shot on film and we edited.”
The video epilogue, as well as teasers for The Washing Society, can be found on vimeo.com. For the film festival lineup, visit viff.org. The festival runs Sept. 27-Oct. 12.
“On Writing the Film Essay” by Lynne Sachs Published in Essays on the Essay Film, edited by Nora M. Alter and Tim Corrigan Columbia University Press, 2017
Note: All of the films I discuss in this essay can be found on www.lynnesachs.com
I feel a closeness to writers, poets and painters, much more than to traditional film directors. For one thing, we ciné experimenters are not bound by the plot-driven mechanics of cause and effect that, for me, often bring the transcendent experience of watching a movie to a grinding halt. The kinds of films I make give the space for mysterious – at least initially — sequences that don’t simply illustrate why one event or scene leads to another. More like an artist than a traditional documentary maker, I am interested in a kind of meaning that is open to interpretation. Once a film is complete, I often learn things about it from my audience — how the convergence of two images actually expresses an idea or how a non-diegetic sound expands the meaning of spoken phrase. I hope it’s doing one thing, but I might discover that it’s doing something completely different. In this way, the films are kind of porous and flexible; they are open to interpretation. My essay films, in particular, are full of association. Some are resolved and some are adolescent; they’re still trying to figure out who they are. Through the making of the film, I learn about myself in the context of learning about the world. My job is not to educate but rather to spark a curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out. The texts for these films come to me in both public and private spaces: on a long train ride, during a layover in a strange city, at a café, in a hotel room, on the toilet.
Throughout the 1990s, I gravitated toward the simultaneously visceral and cerebral French feminist theory of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. As a moving image artist searching for a new discourse that spoke to radical issues with an equally radical form, I embraced this kind of writing as it led me toward the non-narrative, unconventional grammar of experimental film as well as the self-reflexivity of the essay. My first essay film was “The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts” (1991), a personal rumination on the relationship between a woman’s body and the often-opposing institutions of art and science. While I was shooting this film, I was also keeping a diary:
“My memory of being a girl includes a “me” that is two. I am two bodies – the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk. Of course there was the skeleton. This was assumed and only reconsidered upon my very rare attempts at jumping farther than far enough, clearing the ditch, lifting the heave-ho. But the body of the body was not the bones. This body wrapped and encircled the bones, a protective cover of flesh, just on the other side of the wall I call skin.”
I will never forget a cross-country plane ride I took near the end of editing this film. Throughout the time I was in the air, as I flew across the Mississippi, the Great Plains, and the Rockies, I was searching frantically for the hidden skeletal structure of the film. I’d committed to a premiere at the Los Angeles Film Forum, and I only had a couple of months until my screening date. (Stupid me. I’ll never do that again!) Midway into the flight, I realized it was all laid out before me in the form of the poetry journal I carried in my backpack. The writing had been with me all along; I simply hadn’t realized that this text was more than a dispensable traveling partner in the “journey” that was the production of the movie. Over the next few weeks, my poems began to guide my editing of the images and sounds,. Ever since that early period in my filmmaking career, I’ve kept a handwritten journal during the making of my films. In addition to contributing an often times essential narrative element, this kind of writing can also be the critical link to the “naïve” yet curious person I may no longer really “know,” the person I was when I embarked on the intellectual and artistic adventure that is the creation of a film.
In my 1994 essay film “Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam” (1994), I built a voice-over narration out of two surprisingly oppositional perspectives on post-war Vietnam. My sister Dana Sachs, one of the first American journalists to live for an extended period of time in Vietnam, offered expansive, highly informed insights on Vietnamese daily life. In contrast, my writing traced my own transformation from earnest, war-obsessed American tourist to more keenly observant traveler:
“Driving through the Mekong Delta, a name that carries so much weight. My mind is full of war, and my eyes are on a scavenger hunt for leftovers. Dana told me that those ponds full of bright green rice seedlings are actually craters, the inverted ghosts of bombed out fields. At Cu Chi, we pay three U.S. dollars so that a tour guide will lead us through a section of this well-known 200-kilometer tunnel complex. This is the engineering masterpiece of the Viet Cong, a matrix of underground kitchens and living rooms and army headquarters. As I slide through the narrow, dusty passageway, my head fills up with those old war movies Dad took us to in the ’70′s. My body is way too big for these tunnels. I can hardly breathe. After five minutes, I come out gasping. We decide not to spend the extra ten dollars it costs to shoot a rifle.”
Only by reconnecting to the developing stages of my awareness through my journal could I provide an opening to my American audience. The narrative trajectory of this half-hour film follows our evolving understanding of the landscape and the people of Vietnam. Honestly, my sister Dana and I fought all the through the shaping of the film’s voice over. If she hadn’t been my sister, I probably would have fired her as a collaborator! The fundamental tension between the two of us grew out of several distinct differences between our points of view. While she had very much completed her own reckoning with the destruction of the war between Vietnam and the United States, I, like most tourists, was still dealing with the war’s echoes and the guilt that came with that psychic burden. While she wanted to follow the order of events to the letter, I felt free to articulate our experiences by distilling our stories into anecdotes that could function like parables. By recognizing the inherent tension between my position as a non-narrative experimental filmmaker and my sister’s commitment to a more transparent commentary, we were able to find a rhetorical strategy that mirrors the most fundamental conflicts around discourse and truth facing an essayist in any format. In several quintessentially self-reflexive moments, my sister expresses exasperation with almost every aspect of my production process:
“Lynne can stand for an hour finding the perfect frame for her shot. It’s as if she can understand Vietnam better when she looks at it through the lens of her camera. I hate the camera. The world feels too wide for the lens, and if I try to frame it, I only cut it up.”
In 1997, I completed “Biography of Lilith” (1997), a film exploring the ruptures both women and men must confront when transitioning from being autonomous individuals to parents with responsibilities. I began making this film when I discovered I was pregnant with my first daughter and by the time I finished three years later I was able to punctuate the final sound mix with the cries of my second child. Inspired by the theoretical texts of Julia Kristeva and Antonin Artaud, in particular, this film celebrates my most intimate and abject concerns about the changes in my body and my place in the world as a woman. My film on Lilith, Adam’s first mate, is also a portrait of a female archetype who boldly wanted to be on top during sex. The film matches a non-authoritative exposition of Lilith in a multiplicity of cultures – both ancient and contemporary – with my own pre and post-partum writing. In this way, I juxtaposed two years of historical and cultural research and interviews with intimate ruminations on my own sexuality and motherhood.
“I’m learning to read all over again. A face, this time, connected to a body. At first, I feel your story from within. Nose rubs against belly, elbow prods groin. Your silent cough becomes a confusing dip and bulge. You speak and I struggle to translate. I lie on my side, talk to myself, rub my fingers across my skin, from left to right. I read out loud, and I hope you can hear me. I’m learning to read all over again, but this time I have a teacher.”
In “States of UnBelonging” (2005), my fourth film in a five-film body of work I call “I Am Not a War Photographer”, I turned to Terence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” and to the “Hell” section of Jean Luc Godard’s “Notre Musique” for lessons from makers who were capable of articulating the horror of war. I constructed this film around an epistolary friendship I had with an Israeli student who moved back to Tel Aviv during an extremely volatile period in Israel-Palestine. A meditation on war as well as land, the Bible, and filmmaking, this essay film is built from over three years of emails. With enormous hesitation and intimidation, we reveal our anguish and bewilderment in the film’s soundtrack as well as on the screen as text. With an awareness of my own position in this charged political landscape, I start the film with a kind of meta-historical lamentation on the way that human beings organize time:
“Do you ever have the feeling that the history you are experiencing has no shape?
Even as a teenager I was obsessed with history’s shifts and ruptures. Wars helped us order time. A war established beginnings and endings. There is “before.” There is “during.” There is “after.”
I am currently working on “Tip of My Tongue”, a film on memory that began with 50 autobiographical poems I wrote about each year from my birth in 1961 to my 50th birthday. Unlike my previous films, in which the research and shooting themselves prompted the text, this project grew directly from my poetry. Without the slightest concern for how the poems would eventually shimmy their way into one of my movies, in 2012 I gave myself the unencumbered freedom to write about my own life. In each poem, I looked at the relationship between a large public event and my own insignificant, yet somehow personally memorable, connection to that situation. Now, three years later, I am working with a cast of eleven people from almost every continent, each of whom was born around the year 1961. Together we are creating an inverted history of our collective half-century through a series of spoken story distillations that place the grand in the shadow of the intimate. From glimpsing a drunken Winston Churchill on the streets of London to watching the Moon landing from a playground in Melbourne to washing dishes during the Iranian Revolution to feeling destitute during the Recession, we are working collaboratively to construct our own recipe for a performative sound-image essay film.
Excerpt from Review by Tanya Goldman in Cinema Journal:
“There is often a poetic dialogue extending between sections when a voice of the past rhymes with the present. In 1948, Alexandre Astruc wrote of a cinema that should function as “the seismograph of our hearts, a disorderly pendulum inscribing on film the tense dialectics of our ideas.” This quality is echoed in Lynne Sachs’s 2016 reflections on her own practice through which she feels a stronger sense of kinship with writers, poets, and painters than film directors. She states that her job “is not to educate but rather to spark curiosity in my viewer that moves from the inside out.” Observations such as these bestow the essay film with a distinct emotive quality much at odds with classical documentary’s association with sobriety.”
Tanya Goldman Cinema Journal, Volume 57, Number 4, Summer 2018, pp. 161-166 (Review) Published by University of Texas Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2018.0064
Thrilled to be hosting our 9th Experimental Lecture. This year we are proud to present the brilliant and inimitable filmmaker Mary Magdalene Serra. Join us for MM’s “Art (Core) & The Explicit Body” at NYU Tisch School of the Arts 6th Fl. on Wed. Sept. 26 at 7 pm. Free and open to the public.
In addition to excerpts from MM Serra’s films, we will see a rare screening of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth.
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.
MM Serra ignites the world of avant-garde film. For three decades in New York City, she has produced some of the most thought-provoking work on women and erotics in cinema today. Serra’s unwavering passion for experimental cinema extends beyond her practice as an artist. Since 1993, she has worked as the Executive Director of the Filmmakers Coop where she distributes, preserves and exhibits an extraordinary collection of films and videos.
Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas and Carolee Schneemann.
The Tang Teaching Museum’s series Whole Grain explores classic and contemporary work in experimental film and video. Whole Grain is programmed by Educator for College and Public Programs, Tom Yoshikami. All events are free and open to the public.
Join us on Thursday, September 13, at 7:00 PM, for a screening of Investigation of a Flame: A Portrait of the Catonsville Nine, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Lynne Sachs.
Investigation of a Flame (2001, US, 45 min., 16mm) is an intimate, experimental documentary portrait of the Catonsville Nine, this disparate band of resisters who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience. It follows nine Vietnam War protesters led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, who, on May 17, 1968, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm.
This screening is part of our series Whole Grain: Experiments in Film and Video and is held in conjunction with the exhibition Give a damn., on view at the Tang through September 30.
Lynne also taught a workshop in the
THE JOHN B. MOORE DOCUMENTARY STUDIES COLLABORATIVE (MDOCS)
“The Reproduction of Labor-Power”: Thoughts on “The Washing Society” by Ana Almeyda Cohen
“As it relates to my comment/question about a possible Marxist interpretation of the interviews with the laundromat workers, I was thinking about Jean Rouch’s interviews with factory workers in Paris from his 1961 film Chronicle of a Summer. In the film, the anthropologist Edgar Morin interviews a Renault factory worker who explains his condition of exploitation and the reproduction of his labor that is necessary to be able to work the next day. He says, “I feel like I work 24 hours. I have a 9 hour shift and the rest of the time, I’m sleeping to work” (rough translation) which means that for the revival of his labor, he needs to eat, sleep, and take care of himself, thus replenishing his ability to work for his boss the next day. One can say, there is also the unpaid reproductive labor of women in the home that traditionally have provided this nurture to male laborers, in addition to providing the new generation of laborers that will enter the workforce. In Marxist theory, this can be understood as “the production of labour-power [which] consists in [the individual’s] reproduction of himself or his maintenance” also analyzed in feminist critique as “the reproduction of labor-power” as it relates to women, discussed in detail by Silvia Federici. This reproduction time comes free of charge for capitalists. The point is – as it relates to The Washing Society – I felt like the laundromat owner’s explanation of his workday and daily routine (being out of the house by 7am, working until 7:30pm, to then do it all again the next day), is shy of expressing this deeper proletariat consciousness of his hours of reproduction, which, in turn, can be heard in the Renault factory worker’s response in Chronicle of a Summer. The laundromat worker/owner does not go into great detail about what he does when is not working. Does he say that he eats and replenishes himself to be able to work the next day (“the reproduction of himself or his maintenance”)? I’d need to watch the film again to see. Margarita, on the other hand, inches closer to acknowledging and recognizing her need to replenish herself (to tend to her herniated disc, her family), but she does not quite draw attention to these non-working/reproductive hours more specifically, or does she? I just thought this Marxist framing is an interesting way to draw attention to what the workers do not say about the reproduction of their labor-power that is expressed in Chronicle of a Summer. However, once you mentioned in class, Lynne, that the Chinese laundromat worker is also the owner, his comment can have another weight. I’d have to think about it a little more.
Response to ¡Depertar!:
I just watched the video ¡DESPERTAR! It’s a great short film. In such a short time frame, you were able to capture the spirit and fervor of the laundromat workers’ movement. I think this is best captured in the woman’s remarks standing outside the laundromat. She situates the struggle within a historical time frame, referring to the ’87 and the ’90s when immigrants had less rights. Has the role of the owners also changed since then? I think the film leaves open the role and (changing?) function of the laundromat owners. For example, the final shot of the film shows the young owner standing at the door in what appears to be him holding the door open for the workers and protesters as they leave. This courteous (or not) gesture stands in juxtaposition to the exploitation his role engages in. Also, his stoic posture and lack of facial expression seem to stand in contrast to the energized protests of the workers. His posture also seems to suggest that the protesters’ claims have fallen on deaf ears. The film leaves unanswered the owners’ response to the movement. What does he think? Perhaps we need another epilogue that serves as a response to the workers. What happens, though, when the owner is also the worker, as we see with the owner featured in THE WASHING SOCIETY? Is the owner-worker then part of a weird form of labor-driven self-flagellation? Does he/she recognize his/her own self-exploitation? Just some thoughts.
The year 1968 signaled revolution, but that call for change was heard differently, unevenly. In the streets, it was louder than a bomb and echoed with joy; in mansions and police precincts, an incomprehensible tune sung in an impossible language. A student in Mexico City goes to a demonstration, a communist in Tokyo buys a saxophone, a CIA operative spies on Black nationalists in Cleveland, and the Los Angeles rich look in the mirror and don’t recognize their faces. This film series explores the many manifestations of this global upheaval through cinema.
Series programmer: Austin McCann
Investigation of a Flame and El Pueblo Se Levanta are two documentaries centered around the church as a site of community organizing.
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Investigation of a Flame
(Lynne Sachs, US, 2003, 43 min)
In her elegiac tribute to the Catonsville Nine, acclaimed documentarian Lynne Sachs ponders the moral dilemma that moved nine middle-class Catholics to break into their local Maryland draft office and burn 378 draft records with homemade napalm. The film combines insightful interviews with a more abstract visual sensibility attuned to the quotidian spaces of the resisters. A beautiful portrait of faith in opposition to war featuring Daniel and Philip Berrigan.
El Pueblo Se Levanta
(Prod. Third World Newsreel Film Collective, US, 1971, 42 min)
The Young Lords were a US-based Puerto Rican militant organization dedicated to improving the lives of their communities through direct action and community programs. In this hard-hitting 1971 newsreel, we witness the Young Lords organizing in Harlem in the late ’60s, including an extensive church occupation.
*Co-presented with the Seattle Chapter of the DSA!* Post-screening discussion to follow with Dae Shik Kim Hawkins Jr., who is a local reporter, youth pastor, and organizer with the Seattle Peoples Party. He does most of his organizing around Seattle’s unhoused community and the brutal sweeps that the city continues. Hawkins recently co-wrote the “Bruised But Not Broken: Tales of a Korean Immigrant Church” series for Inheritance Magazine. You can find his writing in the South Seattle Emerald, the Seattle Weekly, and the Atlantic.
