Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (2018). 8:00 minutes. Directed by Lynne Sachs.
It was deep into her artistic practice that Lynne Sachs shifted to a collaborative style of filmmaking. As she recounts on her website, Sachs was in the midst of recording a project when it struck her that those in front of the camera were performing. Aware that such hyperbolic displays might betray the authenticity of her subjects, Sachs invited the subjects to participate with her. No longer was her process about filming and being filmed. Rather, filmmaking became a joint effort that softened the camera as an intermediary and aloof barrier.
It’s this approach to filmmaking that makes Sachs’ most recent work, Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, such a particularly wonderful piece. The short film doesn’t expose the stories of just any subjects; it looks at the lives of three creative giants who work with the moving image: Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson. With filmmakers balancing out both sides of the lens, the collaboration between filmmaker and subject reaches superheroine proportions.
Shot on 8mm and 16mm film, the soft colors and square aspect ratio of the film pull the viewer out of contemporary times. In the first image of the film, a cat is perched on a tree limb. In the next, the cat is acting as sentinel on a porch. The camera looks from the inside of a house out, framing the cat in a doorway. This moment jars me. I hear the voice of Schneemann discussing her entry into the medium of moving images, but the picture quality, the cat, the framing—it all conjures images of Schneemann’s own Fuses. For a moment, I wonder if I’m actually looking at Schneemann’s footage, but the tell-tale painted film frames, frenetic cuts, and abstraction of her work are absent.
Sachs’ camera casually captures mundane moments at Schneemann’s upstate New York home with beautiful, compositional precision. Schneemann describes moments ranging from her first experience with a Bolex camera to her desire to film the ordinariness of light coming through a hospital window. While she describes it, Sachs captures the sentiment; Schneeman is seen talking on the phone, hanging laundry, looking at mail. Sachs also prioritizes otherwise subtle images in and around the home: a dead bird on the porch, light coming through the window, and shots of greenery around the yard. In this piece, collaboration comes in the form of homage and interpretation.
Next, the film moves to the voice and image of Barbara Hammer. Of the film’s three subjects, Hammer is perhaps the most performative of the bunch. In a compositionally stunning scene, Hammer, at turns, walks and jogs the length of an iron fence in New York’s West Village. She repeats this several times, her body mingling with the long shadows cast by the iron slats. Eventually, she addresses the presence of Sachs’ camera. She stops, stares into it—challenges it—until Sachs pulls the camera skyward. A moment later, Hammer is on the ground, bathed in the fence’s shadows and smiling. Accompanying these images is Hammer’s forever youthful voice, explaining her love of performance both with and without her camera.
From here, the viewer moves into Hammer’s studio space to watch her toy with window blinds and choreograph film cameras as she slides them across her table. She discusses identity, and that discussion is punctuated with another challenge to Sachs’ camera; Hammer points the lens of a camera right back at her.
The final section of the triad takes the viewer to a montage of images that focus on the natural: flowers, ducks, a pond, and landscape greenery. There is no audio soundtrack for the first portion of this section: no music and no narration. The faintest sound of birds in the distant background can be missed unless the volume is set to high. Finally, the voice of Gunvor Nelson cuts the silence. It joins the images, describing Nelson’s entry into film and her impending exit from it as well. The images in this section of the film seem crisper, perhaps to reflect the camera Nelson holds in her hands—a digital Nikon. As Nelson and her camera interact with flowers and landscape, Sachs’ camera watches. Eventually, the two artists end up lens to lens, looking down a barrel at one another’s craft.
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an exquisite dance shared by filmmakers and their literal and metaphorical lenses. It’s also a wonderful journey of nostalgia. The look of the 8mm and 16mm film paired with the subject matter easily takes the viewer back to the innovative first moments of women’s experimental filmmaking.
by Gonzalo de Pedro
Ciné Dore/ Filmoteca Español Programmer and Professor of the University of Carlos III
Feb. 2018
The extensive experimental and North American film tradition, which is interwoven with the history of documentary filmmaking and deeply rooted in political struggles, is full of names to be (re)discovered, in most cases women who continue the formal, poetic and political explorations of the avant-garde film, but broadening the space of what can be filmed and rewriting, in their own way, the old school feminist moto: “the personal is political”. Lynne Sachs’ case, filmmaker, professor at Princeton University, friend and collaborator of the French filmmaker Chris Marker (she worked with him in Three Cheers for the Whale), is symptomatic of a certain kind of cinema that has been for years focusing on intimate spaces as places in which social issues can resonate. These social concerns intertwine with what is most intimate and personal, along with the physical portrayal of bodies in dialogue with spaces, memories, desires, dreams and voices.
This March session of ‘Free Radicals’, titled “ Peculiar Intimacy” and with the presence of the filmmaker, is centered around a selection of Sachs’ pieces that were created throughout more than thirty years of work. This selection is organized around several portrayals of intimate spaces, mainly feminine, in which Sachs’ camera, without abandoning formal experimentation, tries to find the precise distance to portray those spaces. In addition to what is visible, physical and audible, the director also tries to capture what people imagine, dream, or desire. As she says: “That is the key of the documentary for me. When you can work with people in your film and their imagination breaks free […]. I think that one of the keys to work with reality and people is to allow the extraordinary to seem familiar, instead of exotic.”
Sachs’ work with the protagonists of her films, in some cases they are relatives (her daughters, her parents…) or even herself, always establishes a singular dialogue that subverts the traditional categories of actor and director: “Since I started to make films, I have always resisted the production hierarchy of the traditional pyramid, of the director and her team, or the director and her obedient cast of actors. In both sides I wanted to develop a more porous relationship, in which everybody listens and learns from each other.” That relationship, based on work that is in dialogue with what’s intimate, is also the way of integrating those other spaces of the real that remain invisible to the camera: what is dreamt of, what is desired, what is imagined.
The five pieces presented in this session, are tied together by an awareness of the passing of time and a concern for the way this can be contained in the cinematographic matter. They are also a way of traveling the diverse formal and aesthetic paths of Sachs’ work: from the portrait of her filmmaker sisters, with whom Sachs establishes a legacy and homage rapport, to the spaces that her parents inhabit; to the portrait of one of her daughters which is produced in two very distant moments in time, and finishing with a medium-length film, which is created following the steps of Julio Cortázar and his short story book End of the Game, which captures the lives, real or imagined, of a group of teenagers from Buenos Aires. Cortázar wrote in A yellow flower, “It seems like a joke, but we are immortal”. We probably are, in the suspended intimacy and peculiarity of Lynne Sachs’ films.
Declarations by Lynne Sachs were extracted from the interview with Karen Rester, published in The Brooklyn Rail in 2013.
Translated by Marichi Scharron.
Written by Pablo Castellano Garcia
Translation by Ana Almeyda-Cohen and Maria Scharron
Inspired by Julio Cortázar’s short stories House Taken Over (Casa tomado, 1951) and End of the Game (Fin del juego, 1956), Lynne Sachs has created Wind in Our Hair (Con el viento en el pelo, 2010), a film that explores the everyday lives of four girls. Girls being girls, they carry themselves with the spontaneity that only joy can bring, and which probably will never come back. This easiness seems to derive from the sensation or belief that playing will never end. It is as if they are able to bug and annoy everybody around them without any major repercussion but a light smack. By revealing flashing images of contemporary Buenos Aires, Lynne Sachs presents four girls who reminded me of Gummo’s Bunny Boy (Harmony Korine, USA, 1997), but instead of cars they have trains, and instead of pure decadence these girls project pure life. All four girls dress up in order to see life pass them by. It is in this kind of irrational search for the contrast between stillness — as much physical in its statue-like pose as psychic — and the interruption of life the play entails. The adult world is suggested by the brute images and sounds of the passing trains. From the train, a boy who want to meet them observes the young girls and transforms their world.
Lynne Sachs then establishes three voyeuristic relationships given by different observers who are at different levels. The first relationship, which takes place within the narration, relates to the correspondence established between the statues—the girls understood as characters in the game that they are playing, and not as much as girls understood in the terms established by adults—and the boy who observes them daily. This relationship is mediated by idealization, love and a feeling of belonging to the same group / world. The second relationship, as I have already stated, operates on a different level, one that concerns the bond generated between the characters and the film director. This relationship, points to a common artistic end, and is also a confrontation, since there is always a camera following the girls, and one adult that interferes with what is supposed to be a private game.
In contrast, (we also saw) Same Stream Twice (USA, 2012), another piece by Lynne Sachs in which the game that the girl is playing, (the girl is Maya Street-Sachs the artist’s daughter and also protagonist of the film being reviewed), is designed in advance to show a protagonist who is not afraid to hide her true condition or artifice, that of “performing for the camera”. Therefore there is complicity and an implied pact. It is quite different in Con viento en el pelo in which the camera movement, whose flow it seems is going to crack at any moment, becomes perverse.
Third, and much more crazy and perverse is the relationship between the characters and the viewers. At this level, where there is neither desire nor inclination to produce a whole artistic piece, the union is reduced to the abandonment of the adult who, in having the possibility of feeling bored, in the case of some, or the need to desperately seek knowledge or aesthetic feeling, in the case of others, takes the option of putting their life in parenthesis to observe without being observed. In the three types of relationships mentioned, we are the only observers that the girls cannot see—unfolding ourselves in the world through the play of these girls who ignore us and whose privacy is violated without even being able to defend themselves. In the three levels of relationship described, the audience is the only subject that observes but is not observed back by the girls. We are able to watch these girls — who ignore who we are and whose intimacy is transgressed — playing and not being able to defend themselves from being observed. At this crossroad of simple elements, Lynne Sachs manages to combine the intimacy of the movie theater with that of a children’s game in the same space, and at the same time, as the only way of making a sincere reconciliation with an already disappearing childhood.
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Tomando como apoyo Casa tomada (1951) y Final del juego (1956), ambos cuentos de Julio Cortázar, Lynne Sachs construye con Con viento en el pelo una obra que explora el día a día de cuatro niñas que, como niñas que son, se encuentran en ese período en el que se pueden permitir tanto desenvolverse en el mundo con la naturalidad que produce el sentimiento —que luego ya no vuelve— de felicidad que deriva de la sensación de tomar el momento del juego como eternidad, como el tocar las pelotas a todo cristo sin tener repercusión alguna más allá de la hostia light. Es así como, revelando de manera intermitente imágenes del Buenos Aires contemporáneo, Lynne Sachs nos presenta a este grupo de niñas que, como el niño-conejo de Gummo (Harmony Korine, EEUU, 1997), pero cambiando los coches por trenes e invirtiendo la decadencia de este por la aceptación pura de la vida, se disfrazan para ver la vida pasar. Es en esta especie de búsqueda irracional del contraste entre la quietud, tanto física en su pose de estatua como psíquica en esa interrupción de la vida que supone el juego, y la velocidad bruta del mundo adulto que les ofrecen la imagen y el sonido del tren que pasa, en la que las crías serán observadas por un chico que querrá entrar en su mundo, aunque sea para transformarlo.
Lynne Sachs establece entonces tres relaciones de carácter voyeurístico dadas por diferentes observadores que se encuentran en diferentes niveles y que fijan su retina en las niñas como único elemento observado. La primera de ellas, que tiene lugar dentro de la propia narración, se correspondería con la correspondencia que se establece entre las estatuas —las niñas entendidas como personajes del juego en el que participan, y no tanto como niñas en plan término medida establecido por el adulto— y el chico que las observa diariamente, quedando mediada la relación por la idealización, el amor y el sentimiento de pertenencia a un mismo grupo o mundo. La segunda relación, que como decía arriba afecta a otro nivel, atañe al vínculo que se genera entre las intérpretes y la directora. Esta relación, que tiene su base en el interés de señalar a un mismo fin artístico, supone un choque en el sentido de que ya tenemos a una cámara que las sigue en todo momento, a un adulto que se entromete en ese juego que se entiende como algo privado. A diferencia de otra obra de Lynne Sachs, Same Stream Twice (EEUU, 2012), en la que el juego de la niña —Maya Street-Sachs, hija de la artista y protagonista también de la película que aquí se reseña— está diseñado de antemano para mostrar su carrera alrededor de la cámara como producto que no quiere ocultar su condición de “ser para la cámara” y de artificio, y en el que por lo tanto hay complicidad y se presupone el pacto, el seguimiento de la cámara de Con viento en el pelo, que parece que en cualquier momento va a resquebrajar el flujo que registra, resulta perverso. En tercer lugar, y mucho más perversa y loca que la anterior, surge la relación que une a personajes y espectador. En este nivel, donde no hay ni deseo ni inclinación de producir como un todo una pieza artística, la unión queda reducida al abandono del adulto que, en su tener la posibilidad de sentir el aburrimiento, en el caso de algunos, o la necesidad de buscar a la desesperada el conocimiento o el sentimiento estético, en el caso de otros, toma la opción de poner entre paréntesis su vida para observar sin ser observado —en los tres tipos de relación enunciados, somos el único sujeto observador al que las niñas no ven— el desplegarse en el mundo mediante el juego de esas niñas que nos ignoran y cuya intimidad es vulnerada sin ni siquiera poder defenderse. Y es así como, con este cruzarse tantas cosas a partir de elementos tan sencillos, Lynne Sachs consigue juntar la intimidad de la sala de cine con la del juego infantil en un mismo espacio y en un mismo tiempo como única vía de reconciliación sincera con la infancia ya pasada.
Revolution in the Air & Theories of Weightlessness review in Otro Cines Europa by Victor Esquirol Punto de Vista International Film Festival, Pamplona, Spain March 9, 2018
“Yesterday (International Women’s Day) at Punto de Vista International Film Festival in Pamplona everything got scrambled. Or, better yet, revolutionized. Several screenings had to be postponed because even the festival bubble isn’t completely impenetrable, or, if it is, it at least feigns the same kind of openness to the world that we ask of our finest films. Out in the streets, women were saying Time’s Up, and Festival Director Garbiñe Ortega’s competition joined their cry. That cry resounded not only through the programming, but also in the many voices conjured up on such a historic day. Men and women reached parity. Not numerical parity but the very best kind. Balance—hell, justice—was achieved. It came mainly by way of the most noble and honest of gestures: that of underlining the importance of something we never imagined had any importance at all, in this case the operation of washing machines.
The Washing Society, by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs, makes the rounds of some of New York City’s more than 2,500 laundromats, local businesses that serve as a sociological laboratory. Through the eyes of the two directors—and with apologies to Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, 1985)—these unassuming storefronts take on the character of strategic observation posts occupied by Mandarin- and Spanish-speaking sentinels.
Olesker and Sachs zoom in—at a microscopic level—on the idea of the melting pot. It’s an astonishing image: a skein of fibers and threads badly woven together. So much so that there isn’t anything left to do but send the whole mess to the laundry. What follows is an attempt to make sense of a nebula of colors that run circles around themselves, an image that, by its centrifugal force, creates an illusion of homogeneity. Nonetheless, far from cohering, the elements emerge shaken up, not mixed together. It’s an exercise in high-concept cinema to which Olesker and Sachs devote three quarters of an hour of film stock and many more quarters in tips, revealing the stains (of racism and classism) on an American Dream that seems to want to scrub away every last trace of its own identity. Later, a few more turns around the neighborhood and their documentary morphs into performance art. The voices go silent and the people we just heard interviewed get caught up in a cathartic dance that culminates in one final act of fading out, if not utter dissolution. All they have left are the clothes they’re wearing. Simple, comprehensible, and without question terrifying.”
The Joy of Filming a program of films by Lynne Sachs
In the spirit of classics like the The Joy of Cooking or The Joy of Sex, Lynne Sachs will present an interactive lecture in which she will share her own process (or recipe) for making films. From the very first moment, Lynne will begin a conversation with her AIFVF audience, learning from them (us?) about their (our?) own projects, dreams and experiences. She will then spontaneously live-curate a program of her own films that could include early works such as “Drawn & Quartered” (1986) or “House of Science” (1991) or extremely recent films such as “And Then We Marched” (2017) or “A Year of Notes and Numbers” (2018). The intention of this performative presentation is to engage so deeply with the festival community that an organic, collaborative program will emerge.
Hello fellow documentartians, We are gathering CINEMA OF RESISTANCE videos from all over the US/ World beginning with the historical Jan. 21, 2017 Women’s March. Be a part of our video/film collective. It’s extremely easy. Just post anything you have recorded with your camera or cell phone to Youtube. Any length. Then send me the link via FB message and I will add it to the growing collection. It’s extremely important to save and share this material for our history, for posterity, for solace. We have images from Arizona and Nebraska, no lie, proving that there is passionate objection to the direction the US is going in the red-est of states. Inspired by the words Woodie Gutherie wrote on his own guitar in 1941, we must remember that our cameras can fight fascism.
The film I contributed is called And Then We Marched which you can see here:
And here is an article published by Otherzine I wrote related to this movement of filmmakers:
“This Camera Fights Fascism: A Personal Survey of Cinemas of Resistance”
by Lynne Sachs
It’s been one horrible beginning of the year in America, and as you read this piece you will certainly know more than I do about the first few days, weeks, months and (aargh!) years of a Trump presidency. After marching with hundreds of thousands of other women and men in Washington D.C. on January 21, 2017, I decided that I would put out a call for films of any kind that would become a publically accessible collection of moving image pieces we would call Cinema of Resistance. Through a public social media request, I asked people from anywhere in the world to send me their video-witnessing of resistance beginning with the Women’s March, wherever they experienced it, and after that to send any manifestations of public challenges to the message and the actions of our new president. I’m not necessarily looking for polished works by people who call themselves filmmakers, but rather documents of resistance by anyone with a camera. There are already a whole range of videos in the collection, including powerful material from Red States like Alaska and Nebraska – real proof that oppositional viewpoints exist where you least expect them and most respect them. Take a look at the growing collection HERE and send your own Youtube links to me at lynnesachs@gmail.com to add to the collection:
As a filmmaker and a long-term progressive activist, I have been thinking and talking about the connection between our media practice and the crisis that is our current political situation. From the environment to reproductive health to immigration, Donald Trump is trying to dismantle every aspect of the Obama legacy. And so, with this in mind, I decided to turn to a selection of performance related acts of resistance going back as far as the 1960s that have shaken my own weltanschauung, and forced me to think about the responsibilities of an artist during times of tumult.
In Kazuo Ishiguro‘s novel An Artist of the Floating World (1986) a Japanese painter reflects on his life during and after World War II. In his candid first-person narration, Ishiguro‘s protagonist confronts his own complicity with the totalitarian state as a producer of propagandistic paintings. Once we as readers realize that the narrator is struggling to understand his own confusion about his relationship to the political and commercial institutions around him, we begin to compare his ambivalence to our own, as artists, citizens, and human beings.
This series of reflections represents my personal survey of political actions, films, and performances that push our understanding of the delicate, potentially explosive impact of art, specifically media, in repressive environments, states, and institutions.
On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. This disparate band of activists chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience – what I would call a performance piece with profound consequences. Led by renowned priests and brothers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, the Catonsville Nine planned their action as a visual statement against the Vietnam War, knowing full well that their collective decision would lead to years of imprisonment. An integral part of their planning was their notification to the press. Each phase of the action was documented by a local television crew that had been notified well ahead of time. Without a bona fide news agency’s filming of this production, the political resonances of this visionary gesture would be lost to us now, almost a half-century later. Ever since I first saw this archival material, I knew that its importance would echo in both the world of politics and art, as a manifestation of a radical form of resistance. In 2001, I made Investigation of a Flame, an experimental documentary on the Nine’s action and the aftermath.
Around the same that the Catonsville Nine were encouraging a Baltimore television news crew to film their ritualized act of civil disobedience, performance artist Vito Acconci was producing his own form of self-reflexive photography-based disruptions. Last year, PS1/Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition of Acconci’s media work in New York City.
See Vitto Acconci: Where We Are (Who Are We Anyway?)
In a rare, extraordinarily comprehensive display of his autobiographical performance work, viewers were able to see a wide array of Acconci’s photo series and Super 8 films. As his distributor Video Data Bank writes, Acconci “positioned his own body as the simultaneous subject and object of the work,” in a radical calling to question of male identity and hegemony. Looking back at his Drifts, for example, forces us to think about the current immigration blockades facing so many foreigners trying to enter the United States – legally – from Mexico to multiple countries in the Middle East. With the theme of OC’s Cinema of Resistance in mind, I share three of Acconci’s works:
In 1970, Acconci created Drifts by documenting himself doing the following action:
Rolling toward the waves as the waves roll toward me; rolling away from the waves as the waves roll away from me.
Lying on the beach in one position, as the waves come up to varying positions around me.
Using my wet body: shifting around on the sand, letting the sand cling to my body.
This eloquent series of photographs of Acconci’s body rolling in the waves slapping against the beach compels us to reflect upon the flow of human beings coming and going from sea to land, from nowhere to somewhere, from one country to the next – either with the same ease as the waves or struggling against artificial borders created by the whims of a state – be it only vaguely democratic or fully totalitarian.
In two Super 8mm films, Acconci again simultaneously performs and directs an action that forces us to think about the position of audience and actor. In Blindfolded Catching, we look at the complex relationship between a performer/entertainer and the spectators who are watching him. Acconci challenges the conventions of this relationship in a startlingly violent dynamic that makes us think about the activating presence of the camera in torture scenarios we’ve witnessed recently through public media from Abu Gharib and Guantanemo.
Fixed camera shoots me, full-body, standing blindfolded with my back to the wall; from off-screen, rubber balls are thrown at me, one at a time, over and over again. I’m trying to catch the ball I can’t see … I’m raising my arms up in front of my face, I’ve anticipated when the next ball will be thrown. I’m wrong, my motions are wasted. I’m hit by a ball, my body doubles over, it’s too late to protect myself.
And lastly, amongs the many thought-provoking films created by Vito Acconci in the early 1970s, I find Conversions to be one of the most fascinating interpretations of sexuality, pornography, and power. In this film, Acconci shakes up everything you know about male/female relations.
Conversions (Super-8 film, b/w, 6 min., 1970)
Two naked bodies on the screen: we’re all bodies – my head is out of the film frame, her face is lost in my body. The camera jerks around us, zooms in and out, looking for the right shot. Kathy Dillon, kneeling behind me, takes my penis in her mouth. With my penis confined, with my penis gone, I’m exercising (running in place, kicking, bending, stretching, jumping) – all the while, she’s trying to keep my penis lost in her mouth. As the camera moves in front of us, as the camera zooms in to my groin, my body has a vagina.
I first saw the films of Marie Louise Alemann (1927 -2015) in a 2016 screening at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. This one-evening exhibition marked the premiere of her oeuvre in the United States, roughly 40 years after its creation in the mid-1970s. Alemann, an emigré from Germany, understood the potential that film had for articulating anger and resistance. Knowing that her work was created during Argentina’s “Dirty War”, a time in which military forces and death squads hunted down and killed left-wing dissidents, I was curious to see what kind of work she was able to create in this era of national dictatorship. In Autobiográfico 2 (1974), she filmed herself bound by ropes and then releasing herself in an act of sensual, self-appointed liberation.
While in Buenos Aires in 2010, I spent an afternoon talking with Narcisa Hirsh, who worked closely with Alemann, about Marabunta, their performance and corresponding film collaboration. A marabunta is a gigantic Brazilian ant that lives in the Amazon. Hirsch explained that their interpretation of this small but ferocious insect “served as a metaphor for people eating everything that they could find in their way.” Hirsch, Alemann and the other women in their artist collective made a huge sculpture of a human skeleton and covered it with food. Inside the skeleton were live pigeons painted with fluorescent colors. They mounted this sculpture in Buenos Aires near the doors of a movie theater showing Antonioni’s film Blow-Up (1966), and all the audience members were forced to look at the sculpture as they exited the film theater. Because the collective filmed the day-long creation and spontaneous exhibition of the Marabunta, their act of defiance against the male-dominated European Art Cinema of the 1960s is available to us today. Since the movie-goers were encouraged to eat the food that comprised the sculpture, they became complicit participants in this “biting” yet hilarious production. On many levels, Alemann and Hirsch’s resulting experimental film becomes an early example of a kind of expanded cinema that would, in our own imaginations, cannibalize Antonioni’s more “bourgeois” production.
Marabunto film (16mm ) by Narcisa Hirsch, Marie Louise Alemann y Walther Mejía
In the spring of 2016, I attended Microscope Gallery’s Brooklyn screening exhibition of Florida-based experimental filmmaker Christopher Harris’s films. This was to be my first opportunity to see a selected program of Harris’s work while he was there to discuss those issues that are most near and dear to him as a maker. Harris’s films are visually arresting, politically provocative, and sensitive — rarely have I watched such a nuanced, ambitious series of films that make you think for the hours, days and years that follow. His films and installations offer a remarkable opportunity to think about the ways that personal cinema can challenge assumptions about the acquisition of historical knowledge. Harris’s radical approach to historiography itself places his performative works in a new category of cinema’s counter culture.
In Harris’s Hallimuhfack (2016), a performer lip-synchs to the actual voice of renowned African-American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston as she describes her method of documenting early Black folk songs in her home-state of Florida. According to Harris, “The flickering images were produced with a hand-cranked Bolex so that the lip-synch is deliberately erratic and the rear-projected, grainy, looped recycled images of Masai tribesmen and women become increasingly abstract as the audio transforms into an incantation.”
In A Willing Suspension of Disbelief ( 2014), Harris “restages slave daguerreotype in order to examine scientific racism.” Both pieces embrace the challenges, unpredictability and evanescence of 16mm filmmaking as a form of anachronistic “resistance” to the more commercial, precise high-production “values” of digital. By working with Black women performers who become collaborators in his charged resurrection of the past, Harris offers both his female actors and us as an audience the chance to examine and confront the evils of our shared American story.
And finally, I’ll address Julian Rosenfeldt’s Manifesto which I saw in early 2017 in perhaps the largest single-room exhibition space in New York City, the Park Avenue Armory. According to the catalogue, material for this 13-screen installation is drawn from the writings of Futurists, Dadaists, Fluxus artists, Suprematists, and Situationists. Rosenfeldt weaves together their ideas with the musings of individual artists, resulting in a collage of artistic declarations. Hollywood actress Cate Blanchett performed all 13 different protagonists as each screen attempts to articulate a contemporary call to action. Manifesto is by far the grandest, most expensive, most polished of the film works I have discussed in this essay. Clearly, critics, curators and the European and American art-going public are keen on celebrating the theoretical and historical foundations on which the Rosenfeldt builds his query into historical, political and social dialectics. We learn a great deal about the echoes of a fantastic array of thinkers, but do we come away from this work ready to engage with the world? In the exhibition catalogue, it seems to me, the emphasis is on the work’s “style that beautifully pays tribute to iconic film directors,” rather than to the ideas that he is ostensibly embracing. This is, sadly, a cinema about resistance but not a cinema of resistance.
I first met Father Daniel Berrigan (1921 – 2016), the Jesuit priest whose defiant protests helped shape a bold, grass-roots opposition to the Vietnam War, in 1998, when I was making Investigation of a Flame (2001). Little did I know that my interview with him about his role in the Catonsville Nine would lead to one of the deepest and most meaningful friendships of my life. Daniel was a poet and an activist, and both of these aspects of his being contributed to his life-long commitment to speaking out against injustice. Today, in this America of 2017, all of us must grapple with how to integrate our creative work into our lives as politically engaged members of a society in a disturbing moment of flux. We can certainly turn to the films of Acconci, Alemann, Harris and others as examples of work that expands our understanding of the way that a moving image – be it elliptical or explicit – can become a spark for thinking and action.
Note on Title: “This Machine Kills Fascists” is a message that Woodie Gutherie placed on his guitar in 1941,which inspired many subsequent artists.
“I could make the inside of myself show on the outside,” Barbara Hammer says in Lynne Sachs’s documentary Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), explaining how a lighter movie camera, developed in the Sixties, helped her convey intimacy, and thus became a useful, malleable tool of expression. The short, in which Sachs pays a visit to pioneering women artists who used moving image in their practice — Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson — will enjoy a weeklong run as part of “Doc Fortnight,” the Museum of Modern Art’s annual showcase dedicated to nonfiction film. (Ela Bittencourt)
“Lynne Sachs’ Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an 8-minute triptych of brief encounters with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson filmed at the artists’ homes or studios. Sachs has a really well-attuned photographic eye, and she captures the trio in a series of easygoing domestic situations. The three artists discuss their artistic lives, how they came into their practice, how their gender identities factor in, where their work comes from. It’s a simple premise with intimate results, especially good at giving a sense of the artists’ environments. ” (Tyler Maxin)
A Morning with Jack Waters (2018) HD Video, 46:34, color, sound
In conversation with filmmaker Lynne Sachs, multi-disciplinary artist Jack Waters discusses his career and experiences as a part of the downtown New York City art scene from the early 80s to the present.
Jack Waters works as a visual artist, filmmaker, writer, media artist, choreographer and performer. As a versatile and multi-faceted artist, his work has been celebrated in all of its forms, showing at the La Mama Galleria (NYC), Fales Library and Special Collections (NYC), Frise (Hamburg, Germany). His films have screened internationally and have been aired on the Sundance Channel and PBS amongst others. Recently, he performed as Jason in Stephen Winter’s highly acclaimed feature film “Jason and Shirley”, a historical re-imagining of the making of Shirley Clarke’s 1967 landmark film “Portrait of Jason”.
With his partner, Peter Cramer, Waters helped to establish and foster various collectives and projects such as POOL, a dance and performance collective which “explored contact and other forms of improvisation… creating performance work, choreography, and ephemeral events in NYC” and beyond.
Additionally, Waters and Cramer are co founders of Le Petit Versailles, a Green Thumb Garden on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that is “committed to providing a space for performers, filmmakers and visual artist to show their work.” In this way Waters continues to engage with and support the downtown community arts scene.
Three renowned women artists discuss their passion for filmmaking.
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
Hi dear Lynne, What a beautiful compilation…. I love my section and so appreciate the triple-visions within your camera life. It really is a lyric and incisive triple-portrait. I thank you so much for this clarity, visual richness. And I loved seeing Barbara with those old Bolex cameras! Your subtle inclusion of our personal surround has rhythm, shadow, light, momentum and quietude. How do we celebrate with you for this splendid work?
With love and admiration! Carolee
——
Hi Lynne,
I finally had a chance to watch your lovely film! I was surprised at how energetically I performed for your camera, I was so happy when Gunvor finally spoke! She is as beautiful as ever. I’m honored Lynne, to be grouped with such strong and remarkable filmmakers.
Love, Barbara
Artist Statement:
What is a body? What can a body do? How is a body rendered an object? And, how does this “object” have agency?
I believe these questions are at the root of a female guided exploration of art making. As a young filmmaker and student, I remember reading Laura Mulvey’s ground-breaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she proposes that “sexual inequality is a controlling social force in the cinematic representations of the sexes; and that the male gaze is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy.” As I hold my camera and frame our world, I work extremely hard to keep her words in mind, knowing that gripping my own Bolex 16mm camera or writing my own scripts does not necessarily mean that I would produce images that came from my own experience as a woman. I needed to find a personal, somatic cinema that embraced a new physical relationship to this apparatus. It wasn’t just that I wanted to produce images that spoke to women’s lives, liberation, love, struggle, awareness or consciousness. When I first watched “Fuses” (1965) by Carolee Schneemann (https://vimeo.com/12606342), “Optic Nerve” (1985) by Barbara Hammer (https://vimeo.com/49508330) and “My Name is Oona” (1969) by Gunvor Nelson (https://vimeo.com/242768525) in the late 1980s, my own camerawork was catapulted into an expanded, self-aware, performative mode of working. Their radical, improvisational and totally physical cinematography pushed me and other women artists to dive deeply and fully into our bodies and ourselves.
Over the following decades, I became very close to all three women. They were dear friends, fellow artists, and mentors. Making “Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor” is my gift to them, and theirs to me.
“Lynne Sachs’ Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an 8-minute triptych of brief encounters with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson filmed at the artists’ homes or studios. Sachs has a really well-attuned photographic eye, and she captures the trio in a series of easygoing domestic situations. The three artists discuss their artistic lives, how they came into their practice, how their gender identities factor in, where their work comes from. It’s a simple premise with intimate results, especially good at giving a sense of the artists’ environments. ” (Tyler Maxin)
“I could make the inside of myself show on the outside,” Barbara Hammer says in Lynne Sachs’s documentary Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), explaining how a lighter movie camera, developed in the Sixties, helped her convey intimacy, and thus became a useful, malleable tool of expression. The short, in which Sachs pays a visit to pioneering women artists who used moving image in their practice — Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson — will enjoy a weeklong run as part of “Doc Fortnight,” the Museum of Modern Art’s annual showcase dedicated to nonfiction film. (Ela Bittencourt)
“A similarly brief and similarly enchanting encounter followed with the world premiere screening of Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, (2018) Lynne Sachs’s nine-minute cinematic collage exploring the distinctive styles and approaches of three artists. She delicately weaves them together by positioning them each in a place of familiarity and inner personal power to themselves and their work. Schneemann interacts with a film camera as a prop which becomes an inducer of memories in her Hudson Valley home; documentary maker Barbara Hammer moves around various sources of inspiration in her West Village studio and Gunvor Nelson shares glimpses of the village where she spent her childhood in Sweden. Each artist is gracefully and uniquely introduced via different relationships they have created with themselves, their environments, the filmmaker, and the audience.”
It was deep into her artistic practice that Lynne Sachs shifted to a collaborative style of filmmaking. As she recounts on her website, Sachs was in the midst of recording a project when it struck her that those in front of the camera were performing. Aware that such hyperbolic displays might betray the authenticity of her subjects, Sachs invited the subjects to participate with her. No longer was her process about filming and being filmed. Rather, filmmaking became a joint effort that softened the camera as an intermediary and aloof barrier.
It’s this approach to filmmaking that makes Sachs’ most recent work, Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, such a particularly wonderful piece. The short film doesn’t expose the stories of just any subjects; it looks at the lives of three creative giants who work with the moving image: Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson. With filmmakers balancing out both sides of the lens, the collaboration between filmmaker and subject reaches superheroine proportions.
Shot on 8mm and 16mm film, the soft colors and square aspect ratio of the film pull the viewer out of contemporary times. In the first image of the film, a cat is perched on a tree limb. In the next, the cat is acting as sentinel on a porch. The camera looks from the inside of a house out, framing the cat in a doorway. This moment jars me. I hear the voice of Schneemann discussing her entry into the medium of moving images, but the picture quality, the cat, the framing—it all conjures images of Schneemann’s own Fuses. For a moment, I wonder if I’m actually looking at Schneemann’s footage, but the tell-tale painted film frames, frenetic cuts, and abstraction of her work are absent.
Sachs’ camera casually captures mundane moments at Schneemann’s upstate New York home with beautiful, compositional precision. Schneemann describes moments ranging from her first experience with a Bolex camera to her desire to film the ordinariness of light coming through a hospital window. While she describes it, Sachs captures the sentiment; Schneeman is seen talking on the phone, hanging laundry, looking at mail. Sachs also prioritizes otherwise subtle images in and around the home: a dead bird on the porch, light coming through the window, and shots of greenery around the yard. In this piece, collaboration comes in the form of homage and interpretation.
Next, the film moves to the voice and image of Barbara Hammer. Of the film’s three subjects, Hammer is perhaps the most performative of the bunch. In a compositionally stunning scene, Hammer, at turns, walks and jogs the length of an iron fence in New York’s West Village. She repeats this several times, her body mingling with the long shadows cast by the iron slats. Eventually, she addresses the presence of Sachs’ camera. She stops, stares into it—challenges it—until Sachs pulls the camera skyward. A moment later, Hammer is on the ground, bathed in the fence’s shadows and smiling. Accompanying these images is Hammer’s forever youthful voice, explaining her love of performance both with and without her camera.
From here, the viewer moves into Hammer’s studio space to watch her toy with window blinds and choreograph film cameras as she slides them across her table. She discusses identity, and that discussion is punctuated with another challenge to Sachs’ camera; Hammer points the lens of a camera right back at her.
The final section of the triad takes the viewer to a montage of images that focus on the natural: flowers, ducks, a pond, and landscape greenery. There is no audio soundtrack for the first portion of this section: no music and no narration. The faintest sound of birds in the distant background can be missed unless the volume is set to high. Finally, the voice of Gunvor Nelson cuts the silence. It joins the images, describing Nelson’s entry into film and her impending exit from it as well. The images in this section of the film seem crisper, perhaps to reflect the camera Nelson holds in her hands—a digital Nikon. As Nelson and her camera interact with flowers and landscape, Sachs’ camera watches. Eventually, the two artists end up lens to lens, looking down a barrel at one another’s craft.
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an exquisite dance shared by filmmakers and their literal and metaphorical lenses. It’s also a wonderful journey of nostalgia. The look of the 8mm and 16mm film paired with the subject matter easily takes the viewer back to the innovative first moments of women’s experimental filmmaking.
Is this a feminine sensibility? (This question) is at play in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), Lynne Sachs’ portrait of three trailblazing experimental filmmakers, which premiered at MoMa’s Documentary Fortnight last year. In a Derenesque wink, the opening image is a cat, as Schneemann’s voice drifts in from the space offscreen. She remembers her first camera – a Brownie – and how holding it made filmmaking feel like “an inevitability”. Sachs’s camera, as if searching for Schneemann, pans around an empty room—a nod to Deren’s Meshes, andtinged with Akerman, too. Before any of the film’s titular subjects even appear on camera, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor pulsates with the energy of feminist experimental cinema’s kindred trailblazers. Common threads are explicated, teased out by the subjects’ accounts, yet left open-ended as brevity is forced by the film’s short runtime.
In her section of the triptych, Schneemann recalls the challenge of convincing a male friend to lend her his Bolex: he resisted “as if I would bleed on this precious machinery”. She admits that she didn’t really know how to use it. Yet we know that the spirit of determination – so distinct in her oeuvre – won out, because now she’s on the other side of the camera. Next, we see Hammer. In contrast to the disembodied voice from Vever – made frail by poor cell connection and increasingly-advanced cancer – she is vivacious, running through the West Village, clowning for the camera. She recounts a foundational anecdote of her practice: on a detour from another motorcycle ride she was sidetracked by a crop of leaves in striking red. As if compelled by the goddess, she took out a bifocal lens from her optometrist and placed it in front of the camera, moving while she filmed. The finished project was a sublime manifestation of exactly how she’d felt when the leaves first caught her eye. , This embrace of openness and contingency was, for Barbara, fundamentally feminine – “I could make the inside of myself show on the outside” – and a release from the schizophrenic pull of rigidly-gendered rules for expression.
The last and longest section of Sachs’s film opens with a series of lingering close-ups of flowers. “After seeing a few of Bruce Bailey’s films, I understood that I, also as a single artist, could try.” In her childhood village in Sweden, Gunvor Nelson paces herself through what she has decided will be the final three projects of her career. There is a certain and deliberate slowness in her approach. She struggles to find tech support for her DSLR, but adapts to this challenge, finding eagerness and excitement in “calmly working” with stills. Sachs opts for a drawn-out rhythm in this vignette, as meandering shots of the surrounding nature recall the particular intimacy of Nelson’s work. This extends to her current process: even amidst technological change, she is invested in listening to her images, we sense, not bludgeoning them into some preordained vision.
These two shorts give us insight into seven women: Barbara Hammer, Maya Deren, Carolee Schneemann, and Gunvor Nelson as subjects and speakers; Lynne Sachs and Deborah Stratman from behind the camera. Watching both films, I wonder what connections there are to be drawn. Does the recent surge in filmic portraits of female trailblazers point towards a ‘feminine sensibility’, long overdue for historical recognition? I’m hesitant to speak about any ‘shared themes’ across the layered, nuanced careers that constitute this genealogy, lest these similarities be construed as an essentialised roadmap. How can we identify the beauty that comes from rejecting the strictures of masculine ways-of-being in the world without mummifying it, crystallizing these artists’ irreducible vibrancy into a prescriptive binary formula?
The key might lie in situating their work within experimental cinema’s challenging, unfeminist history. Reflecting on her mid-Sixties collaboration with Stan Brakhage, Schneemann laments: “Whenever I collaborated, went into a male friend’s film, I always thought I would be able to hold my presence, maintain an authenticity. It was soon gone, lost in their celluloid dominance.”Cat’s Cradle is hardly the only masterwork of structural film to suggest a sort of Abstract Expressionist-adjacent machismo. Against this backdrop, the nexus of similarities between Schneemann, Deren, Nelson, Sachs, and Stratman becomes explicable not as the record of some intrinsically-female way of seeing and filming the world, but as the product of work: a shared undertaking invested in upending experimental cinema’s more problematic attitudes and replacing them with a new hierarchy of aesthetic values: adaptability, intimacy, and tenderness. Only when we honour these values, in all their many manifestations across these seven artists’ careers, can we begin to construct the kind of feminist genealogy¹ that film history so urgently requires.
Barbara Hammer and Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs shoots with her Bolex camera with Barbara Hammer.
Barbara Hammer
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneeman in her studio.
Carolee and Lynne in Rosendale, New York.
Gunvor Nelson in her studio.
In Search of a Feminst Sensibility: Two New Films by Deborah Stratman and Lynne Sachs (excerpt)
Is this a feminine sensibility? A similar question is at play in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), Lynne Sachs’ portrait of three trailblazing experimental filmmakers, which premiered at MoMa’s Documentary Fortnight last year. In a Derenesque wink, theopening image is a cat, as Schneemann’s voice drifts in from the space offscreen. She remembers her first camera – a Brownie – and how holding it made filmmaking feel like “an inevitability”. Sachs’s camera, as if searching for Schneemann, pans around an empty room—a nod to Deren’s Meshes, and tinged with Akerman, too. Before any of the film’s titular subjects even appear on camera, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor pulsates with the energy of feminist experimental cinema’s kindred trailblazers. Common threads are explicated, teased out by the subjects’ accounts, yet left open-ended as brevity is forced by the film’s short runtime. In her section of the triptych, Schneemann recalls the challenge of convincing a male friend to lend her his Bolex: he resisted “as if I
would bleed on this precious machinery”. She admits that she didn’t really know how to use it. Yet we know that the spirit of determination – so distinct in her oeuvre – won out, because now she’s on the other side of the camera. Next, we see Hammer. In contrast to the disembodied voice from Vever – made frail by poor cell connection and increasingly-advanced cancer(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMeoAx9dZkI) – she is vivacious, running through the West Village, clowning for the camera. She recounts a foundational anecdote of her practice: on a detour from another motorcycle ride she was sidetracked by a crop of leaves in striking red. As if compelled by the goddess, she took out a bifocal lens from her optometrist and placed it in front of the
camera, moving while she filmed. The finished project was a sublime manifestation of exactly how she’d felt when the leaves first caught her eye. This embrace of openness and contingency was, for Barbara, fundamentally feminine – “I could make the inside of myself show on the outside” – and a release from the schizophrenic pull of rigidly-gendered rules for expression. The last and longest section of Sachs’s film opens with a series of lingering close-ups of flowers. “After seeing a few of Bruce Bailey’s films, I understood that I, also as a single artist, could try.” In her childhood village in Sweden, Gunvor Nelson paces herself through what she has decided will be the final three projects of her career. There is a certain and deliberate slowness in her approach. She struggles to find tech support for her DSLR, but adapts to this challenge, finding eagerness and excitement in “calmly working” with stills. Sachs opts for a drawn-out rhythm in this vignette, as meandering shots of the surrounding nature recall the particular intimacy of Nelson’s work. This extends to her current process: even amidst technological change, she is invested in listening to her images, we sense, not bludgeoning them into some preordained vision.
These two shorts give us insight into seven women: Barbara Hammer, Maya Deren, Carolee Schneemann, and Gunvor Nelson as subjects and speakers; Lynne Sachs and Deborah Stratman from behind the camera. Watching both films, I wonder what connections there are to be drawn. Does the recent surge in filmic portraits of female trailblazers point towards a ‘feminine sensibility’,
long overdue for historical recognition? I’m hesitant to speak about any ‘shared themes’ across the layered, nuanced careers that constitute this genealogy, lest these similarities be construed as an essentialised roadmap. How can we identify the beauty that comes from rejecting the strictures of masculine ways-of-being in the world without mummifying it, crystallizing these artists’ irreducible vibrancy into a prescriptive binary formula? The key might lie in situating their work within experimental cinema’s challenging, unfeminist history. Reflecting on her mid- Sixties collaboration with Stan Brakhage, Schneemann laments (https://www.revolvy.com/folder/Films-directed-by-Stan-Brakhage
/544076): “Whenever I collaborated, went into a male friend’s film, I always thought I would be able to hold my presence, maintain an authenticity. It was soon gone, lost in their celluloid dominance.” Cat’s Cradle is hardly the only masterwork of structural film to suggest a sort of Abstract Expressionist-adjacent machismo. Against this backdrop, the nexus of similarities between Schneemann, Deren, Nelson, Sachs, and Stratman becomes explicable not as the record of some intrinsically-female way of seeing and filming the world, but as the product of work : a shared undertaking invested in upending experimental cinema’s more problematic attitudes and replacing them with a new hierarchy of aesthetic values: adaptability, intimacy, and tenderness. Only when we honour these values, in all their many manifestations across these seven artists’ careers, can we begin to construct the kind of feminist genealogy that film history so urgently requires.
