A Letter to the World: Experiments in Essay Filmmaking
In the words of renowned film avant-gardist Hans Richter, essay films “’make problems, thoughts and even ideas’ perceptible … they ‘render visible what is not visible.’”
From Chris Marker and Agnes Varda to Travis Wilkerson and Trinh T. Minh-ha, filmmakers and artists have been using the genre of essay filmmaking to explore new modes of blending fact, fiction, and experience to capture essential truths. A constantly evolving and flexible form, essay films are used to document cultural and historical moments, evoke a feeling, unravel an auto-biography, and respond to critical social turning points with a challenging mix of traditional documentary conventions, personal nuance and experimental artistry.
Join UnionDocs and filmmaker Lynne Sachs to explore the history, theory and practice of this shape-shifting genre. Open to filmmakers, students, artists, scholars and more, this three-day intensive enables artists to articulate their ideas and explore new methodologies in crafting their work.
Join UnionDocs and filmmaker Lynne Sachs to explore the history, theory and practice of this shape-shifting genre. Open to filmmakers, students, artists, scholars and more, this three-day intensive enables artists to articulate their ideas and explore new methodologies in crafting their work.
Participants in this intensive workshop will have the chance to work with a wide range of scholars and practitioners: Lynne Sachs will lead the course with help from filmmakers Alan Berliner, Akosua Adoma Owusu and Roger Beebe. Scholars and co-writers of “Essays on the Essay Film”, Timothy Corrigan & Nora M. Alter will join and provide a window into the theory and history of the form. Through seminars and work-in-progress critiques, together participants will each, in their own way, push the boundaries of reality-based work, questioning truth and fact as they are conveyed and represented, and learn how to put this new knowledge into practice. Current projects are not required to attend, but encouraged!
Dec. 2017 Essay Film Workshop withLynne Sachs, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Jacqueline Goss, Jim Finn, Sky Hopinka & Su Friedrich
The Lantern – The Ohio State University
by Chase-Anthony Ray November 2017
When Lynne Sachs celebrated her 50th birthday, she wasn’t concerned about an impending midlife crisis. Instead, she decided to celebrate with 11 New Yorkers she had never met.
For her latest documentary, “Tip of My Tongue,” Sachs gathered a diverse group of men and women from different countries including Iran, Cuba and Australia, who shared one thing in common: age.
Together with Sachs, the group discussed strange and revealing moments of their lives in which uncontrollable events –– outside their own domestic universe –– have impacted who they all have become.
“Tip of My Tongue” will screen at the Wexner Center for the Arts Wednesday in the latest installment of its “Visiting Filmmakers” series.
Sachs is known for creating films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. She also has a habit of weaving together poetry, collaging, painting, politics, and layered sound design.
Sachs wrote her own series of 50 poems for every year of her life, and guided her collaborators across the landscapes of their memories from the Vietnam War protests, to the Anita Hill hearings, to the Columbine massacre, and all the way to Occupy Wall Street, according to her website.
“I am happiest when my film ‘characters’ explore storytelling from various subjectivities,” Sachs said. “[To explore their] various selves and other selves … is a more authentic portrayal of being alive during a specific time, situation or place.”
The Wexner Center prides itself on bringing acclaimed filmmakers like Sachs to screen their works because it believes it is one of few institutions supporting this type of work, said David Filipi, director of film and video at the Wexner Center.
“We make it a priority to support personal filmmakers like Lynne, both by screening their films as well as providing post-production support to some through our studio program,” Filipi said. “There are fewer and fewer venues supporting this type of work, which makes it all the more imperative that we provide an opportunity for these types of films to be screened and seen by audiences in our region.”
Sachs said she chose to screen “Tip of My Tongue” because she believes Ohio State is in the small minority of universities with acclaimed museums.
“There are only two state universities in the United States that have extraordinary, world-class museums — the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive [at University of California, Berkeley] and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State,” Sachs said. “I have had the honor to screen my films at both institutions, and have been deeply moved by my interactions with the students and members of the public who fill the seats in these theaters.”
Filipi said Ohio State students might be surprised and intrigued by what Lynne captures with her film.
“Right now, you’re surrounded by your friends and peers, and your shared experiences are immediately recognizable… [but eventually], your friend and peer group isn’t always as present and there are other commitments and distractions that accumulate as you get older,” Filipi said. “Lynne has a very personal approach to documentary, and this is one of the traits that sets her films apart from others.”
Gathering a group of middle-aged adults from all backgrounds allows the theme of self-reflection and recounting one’s own memories to drive the entire film.
“In ‘Tip of My Tongue’ I tried to dig down into my own and my collaborators’ pain and joy … I was looking for surprising intimacy that is different from simply ‘telling the truth,’” Sachs said. “To bare my own soul, I needed to begin with my own poetry and then move onto something more visual –– I wanted my camera to express this intimacy.”
The screening of “Tip of My Tongue” will take place Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Wexner Center. Admission is $6 for students and $8 for the general public.
Read the full interview below: Can you explain the title a little bit? Well, tip of my tongue is an expression that people use for the experience of trying to remember something but not being able to verbalize it, knowing that it is there in the recesses of your consciousness but not having complete access to it. I like the physicality of the expression, the way it connects to our anatomy and to our bodies. I feel that this sensation – which can be both exhilarating and frustrating – articulates the communal memory experiment that I conducted in the making of the film.
Why bring your film to Ohio state? In my opinion, there are only two state universities in the United States that have extraordinary, world-class museums – the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive at University of California Berkeley and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State. I have had the honor to screen my films at both institutions, and have been deeply moved by my interactions with the students and members of the public who fill the seats in these theaters.
What can OSU students expect from this film? To celebrate my 50th birthday, I 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 I grew up. I invited 12 fellow New Yorkers — born across several continents in the 1960s — to spend a weekend with me making a movie. Together we discussed some of the most salient, strange and revealing moments of our lives. As a group, we talked about the ways in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe have impacted who we all have become. Together, we all move from the Vietnam War protests to the Anita Hill hearings to the Columbine Shootings to Occupy Wall Street. Using the backdrop of the horizon as it meets the water in each of NYC’s five boroughs as well as abstracted archival material, TIP OF MY TONGUE ultimately becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. We replace traditional timelines with a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression.
In addition, OSU students are going to hear music from Stephen Vitiello, one of the most recognized sound artist in this country!
How did you manage to find all these participants among the same age and get them to participate? I used all sorts of methods for finding the people in the film. I posted on Facebook stating that I was making a film project that needed people who were born around the same time that I was – in 1961. I also asked everyone I knew for suggestions because I was really committed to working with participants in the film who came from as many different continents as possible. I wanted as diverse viewpoints and life experiences as I could possibly find.
You wrote 50 poems for every year of your life. Explain to me why you did that and how easy/difficult that process was? When I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1970s, I had a great aunt named Isabel. Aunt Isabel was passionate about poetry. She was a devout aficionado of the works of poets such as Marianne Moore, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, and Cathy Acker and expressed her love of the marriage of poetry and image through her life-long acquisition of artist made books. She had hundreds of these books and was thrilled to share her collection with me throughout my teenage years. Little did I know how affected I would be by the hours we spent together turning the pages of her books. It was during these exhilarating moments of discovery that I began to find my own artistic muse.
I’ve been making experimental and documentary films since 1983. When I turned 50 in 2011, I decided to return to my love of poetry, painting, drawing and photography – to further explore a conceptual thread I had been developing in my films for many years: In what ways are the private, most intimate moments in our lives affected by the public world beyond? While visiting the Museum of Modern Art, I discovered the work of Serbian conceptual and media artist Sanja Ivekovic. In one black and white video piece made over a period of 14 years in the 1970s and early 80s, she created a remarkable visual dichotomy between her existence as a mother at home with her child and her observations on the Yugoslavian police state. She simply cut back and forth between a tall glass of milk and a street tussle with soldiers, or an infant’s eye and some form of state TV propaganda and the effect, for me, was breathtaking.
Why did you choose self-reflection and recounting ones own past memories as a main theme for the film? I am happiest when my film ‘characters’ explore storytelling from various subjectivities,” various selves and other-selves, opening up, perhaps ironically, a more authentic portrayal of being alive during a specific time, in a specific situation or place.”
In “Tip of My Tongue” I tried to dig down into my own and my collaborators’ pain and joy. Then I tried to articulate these experiences as a shared exploration for the camera. I was looking for surprising intimacy that is different from simply ‘telling the truth.’ To bare my own soul, I needed to begin with my own poetry and then move to something more visual. I wanted my camera to express this intimacy through textures, objects, places, reflections, faces, hands. (from a conversation with Kelly Spivey, Brooklyn College Film Professor)
Last October, I invited Bradley Eros to give the 8th Annual Experimental Lecture at NYU. Here is his entire spectacular, collaborative, visionary performance/lecture. He called it “Disappearing soon at a theater near you (ephemeral cinema & other acts of life)”.
I’d like to say a bit about the history of the Experimental Lecture. From the beginning, I imagined this talk to be one in which someone who had immersed him or herself in the world of alternative, experimental film would reveal something about the process of making their work by visiting pieces that were either unfinished, unresolved, bewitching or even untouchable. The intention was to lay bare the challenges rather than the successes, the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art.
Barbara Hammer was our first invited guest. In 2006, she sauntered into the largest lecture hall in this building, weeks after her first round of chemo therapy, carrying an enormously heavy Pagent projector which she then proceeded to carry up and down the stairs as she projected her own 16mm films on every surface of the room in her “The Cinema of the Optic Nerve”.
Craig Baldwin tore himself away from his underground film archive, his artistic practice and his 30-year old alternative media series “Other Cinema” in San Francisco to present “The Collage Essay: From Compilation Film to Culture Jam”.
Ken Jacobs took us on an odyssey from his early romps in NYC to his most recent obsessions with the state of our world as manifested by the beings that live in the dirt and grime of it all in his “Cucaracha Cinema”.
Peggy Ahwesh suggested her own “Parler Femme” by regailing us with her own take on a hard scrabble, experimental ethnography that has taken her to places she never intended on going but somehow found herself – in bliss.
In her “Where Did I Make the Wrong Turn?”
Carolee Schneemann traveled backwards and forwards in time like a archeologist who understands that a cherry pie is more than something to eat. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she analyzed those clues from her past that pushed her toward her life’s work.
Jonas Mekas recounted the entire history of the avant-garde cinema and the fragile but so vital institutions that sustain us in NYC and beyond, like a bard unraveling the secrets of his mind and his community.
In 2016, Ernie Gehr gave his talk “What is an Unfinished Work?”, allowing us into his studio practice, revealing the moments of doubt and stubbornness that he, like all of us, need to continue making our work.
In many ways an animating spirit and catalyzing agent of the NYC underground film scene from the 1980s to the present, Bradley Eros’ radical, sumptuous expanded cinema works stand at the forefront of a movement to redefine our understanding of film as an art form. For his Experimental Lecture, Eros “dismantled a few beliefs, by prying history loose, not nailing it down.” His lecture will take the form of a series of questions, interrupted by quotations, collaborations, expanded and contracted cinema, jokes & aphorisms, music, poetry, and surprise. Eros will talk on the nature of process, the immaterial, unfixed forms, hybrid works, resistance, desire & its discontents.
Eros works in myriad media, in addition to film, including video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, and installation. His conceptual framework includes: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, cinema povera, poetic accidents and musique plastique. Recent works & obsessions include: Black Hole Cinema (‘zine & lecture), eau de cinema (perfume & exhibit), Narcolepsy Cinema.
Thank you to Dan Streible, Cinema Studies at NYU, Cristina Cajulis and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Working with Humanity Now: Direct Relief Program
Athens & Thessaloniki, Greece
July 2 – 12, 2017
Lynne Sachs
I am in Greece with my sister Dana Sachs, my brother-in-law Todd Berliner and friend Jennifer Maraveyais, as part of Humanity Now: Direct Refugee Relief program. While in Athens, I am teaching English and running a sunprint art workshop at Orange House, a center for refugees “with a focus on unaccompanied minors, single women, and mothers with children. United with volunteers from around the world, its guiding purpose is to assist refugees who are searching for a safe haven.”
The first day, I taught English to two young fellows. This actually gave me the opportunity to hear their personal stories as a way to practice speaking. The first man was an Arabic-speaking Palestinian nurse who was about 30 years old. His name is Mohammad and he comes from a family of nine, all of whom are educated and live in Aleppo, Syria. They seem to have careers, like engineers, and administrators, etc. He is the only one who left, and he did this after 1 1/2 years in jail in Syria. We spent about five minutes talking about President Assad because he kept using the word “president,” and then I finally figured out that he was trying to say “prison.” After his release, he went to Turkey first and then tried to get on six different boats from there before he was able to make his way to Greece. By the way, I was correcting his English all the way through his story. He was giddy to learn from someone who was so attentive to his speaking, and he was able to make the corrections on the spot. I often interrupted his very dramatic story to explain how complicated English prepositions can be.
I also met a 19-year-old Afghan man. I gleaned from his very few words of spoken English that he is from a small town near Kabul, Afghanistan, speaks Farsi, is 19, and was born on Feb. 21. If I understood correctly, he has never been to school, so I was even more impressed by how determined he was to use his language workbook. His notebook indicated that he could tell the difference between the past and the past perfect. Impressive. Just from these two interactions, I learned so much about how developed Syrian society is (the intensity of the war there has not been as long) and how fragmented and chaotic Afghan society is (generations of war).
By the second day of my art workshop at Orange House, both children and parents participated while they were waiting for their own English, German or French lessons (depending on where they are anticipating having their families resettled in the future). One of my student participants is a young man named Anas Saidi from Syria who speaks English fluently and has already been resettled in Germany. He had returned to Athens for a few weeks to volunteer. He told me that he is an aspiring filmmaker, and that he wants to make a film about his own journey from Damascus, including the two weeks he lived in the woods in transit. We talked a lot about films we had seen and our own work. He is living in a small German town, so he is a bit frustrated because this is a place where actually very few people speak English and there is no film community. Then I impulsively asked if he is interested in coming to the United States, to which he answered very sweetly, “It is not possible for me to come to the US now.” Oh yes, how could I forget? You can see him holding his amazing sunprint below. Here are several images from the workshop. This is the translation of the Arabic words in Anas’s image: Love, Bread and Freedom.
In the late afternoon, I went to a community center where we made 60 turkey sandwiches with some other volunteers — three British nurses, two 17-year-old Iraqi boys, one Iranian boy who is obsessed with film history, and the Albanian male organizer. A group of six of us walked around the center of Athens giving out sandwiches and cups of tea to homeless people, all of whom the Albanian man knows by face since he does this three times a week. The homeless people are mostly, but not all, refugees from neighboring countries in flux. One young Pakistani man was sleeping on a piece of cardboard in a city park. He had a fabulous, bouffant Elvis-like hairstyle, and skinny jeans, but he seemed quite delirious and had some sores on his arm, so one of the nurses in our group cared for him right there on the ground.
The other morning, I got up early and walked to the top of the Acropolis. There are, of course, thousands of tourists at this most famous spot. I am not sure how many of them realize the human turmoil that is swirling around them. It would be easy not to notice, strangely enough.
One day, we visited an abandoned farm about an hour and a half from Athens that could become a home for two refugee families who have recently arrived here. There were figs, quince, and pears growing among the shambles. As fecund as the land appeared to be, it looked to me as if the possible renter was wondering how he and his family might make a go of it in a rural area, far from their community and the access that a city allows. The project is an experiment in home building for people living in squats or on the street or in a camp, offering something new and full of possibility, like a new “used” shirt that is clean and ready-to-wear but somehow you feel may not suit you, that everyone says makes you look so good, but you know you will never feel comfortable wearing. We took a walk up a hill full of sage bushes and olive trees to a small bee hive that we were told had produced 12 kilos of honey. Everyone was so impressed, but perhaps learning this new skill might be intimidating to the family, perhaps they are scared of bees. I am not sure the father in the family was convinced that the property was really salvageable, at least for him. And so, the search for a home continues. Here you see me holding freshly picked herbs near the farm and sinks from a refugee camp that will be reused somehow. Everything is recycled. Everything.
One evening, Dana, Todd and I ate dinner with some Palestinian friends of hers. There was a wonderful mom from Syria who has five adorable, perky children. About a year ago, she traveled to Greece from Aleppo, Syria all by herself on a boat with a woman smuggler because her husband had already escaped the war with their oldest child and she and the younger ones were hoping to follow them. So far, that has not worked out. Through Dana’s translator, I learned that her family is originally from Palestine but that her grandparents had been forced to leave in 1948, at which time they made their way to Syria. The other man at our table comes from Gaza where his entire family still lives, but they are not able to leave and he is not able to return since Gaza is currently completely closed off. Both situations are directly connected to the history of Israel/ Palestine and, in many ways, were deeply disturbing to me.
In Greece, at least for me on this trip, you are asked to imagine how a place might have looked when there were once people there. Imagine, in the shadow of the columns at the Arcropolis, a symposium of supine thinkers relaxed on marble benches in 204 B.C.E. Imagine a thousand refugees in tents camped out on the grounds of a gas station near the village of Idomeni in the winter of 2016. Dana came to the Idomini refugee camp for two weeks in 2016 to help serve food and deliver much-needed clothing to thousands of Syrian men, women and children living in tents. Forced from their country by the ravages of a cruel chemical war, these displaced people were seeking asylum in Europe, attempting to pass through Greece across the northern border. They were stopped head-on just before the mountains of Macedonia, and so found themselves in a rural village in Greece that was completely unprepared for the magnitude of such an international crisis. Anyway, Dana was so moved by her witnessing of this situation that a year later she brought me and her fellow Humanity Now friend Jennifer back to Idomini, which is about an hour and a half north of Thessaloniki, to see the site of the camp where she learned to cut herbs, vegetables and other ingredients for savory soups for 5000.
Based on conversations we had over the last few days, I am starting to put together a mental image of this place since all we have now to remind us are a few leftover signs in Arabic and English. We made a special stop at the Eko Gas Station where hundreds of displaced families and single people set up camp. I chatted with a Greek woman who worked in the convenience store on the grounds, wondering how she felt about that intense disruption of their quiet lives. In her very few words of English, she told me how interesting it was for her to watch an impromptu Syrian cook make falafel in her kitchen. She seemed a bit sad that the excitement at the gas station is now over. We drove just a few miles away, down a desolate industrial road and stood outside the barbed wire fence of a smaller camp where the people who could not find passage to other parts of Europe or retreat to the urban squats of Athens are now living indefinitely in Isoboxes in an arid setting where, rumor has it, snakes are reported to rear their ever-threatening heads.
Thessaloniki is a lovely, “bohemian” (as the travel posters promote) city on the Aegean Sea, with a plethora of archeological ruins, student cafés and museums. It has also become a hub around which many refugee camps and volunteer services have appeared in the last two years. If you are not looking for these kinds of places, you would most definitely not find them accidently. We visited the Help Refugees/ Get Shit Done support center where 150 fresh, hot meals are prepared, a gymnasium-size room is filled with completely organized used clothing, wooden bicycles are designed, playground equipment is constructed and more, much more. You can see how this center of activity functions so fluidly, with almost no bureaucracy or NGO-style oversight. When need is determined or problems recognized, this group of about 50 people – mostly in their twenties from all over Europe — responds incredibly quickly.
Visiting a temporary refugee camp is not like visiting a prison. I know this. I can see that the front gates to the grounds of the two camps on the industrial outskirts of Thessaloniki are not locked. But there are military guards and there is barbed wire along the fence. So, I am trying to reckon with the flow, the ostensibly free movement in and out. I visit two camps today with Jennifer to see what kinds of direct relief they could offer. Are there enough diapers for the babies? Is there any kind of communal space? Is there a playground which would give the children a reason to go out of doors? We are actually able to enter only one of the two camps. In some ways, guards are more tough on foreign outsiders, though it is not clear if they are protecting the “residents” from voyeurs or self-appointed reporters who might take pictures of things they don’t want the world to see. I really don’t know. One of the camps is actually set up inside an old factory, so the ceilings are very high and the acoustics are daunting. Each family has set up their make-shift home in a partitioned area that is about 10’ by 10’. Of course, you don’t look behind the curtain, but it is very moving to see the shoes outside the fabric covered doorway. In the back of the camp, we talked with people in a multi-purpose room where kids were making masks with their parents and college age volunteers from Europe and the US. Next to that was a surprisingly well appointed kitchen with about 20 stoves where women were preparing beautiful meals for their families. To my surprise, all of the tables were pushed to the side wall, clearly not used at all. One person explained to us that Syrian and Kurdish people prefer to prepare their meals on tables that are close to the ground, so it is awkward for them to cook with these donated tables. Luckily, we were walking with Jeni from the Get Shit Done Team. She said she would come back soon to cut the legs off all of the steel tables. No problem. No problem? Really.
In our visit to another camp outside Thessaloniki, the situation seemed far less supportive and accommodating as revealed by the graffiti about food and water on the walls you can see here. It’s interesting to see the writing in both English and Arabic. Do people write on walls to express their feelings for themselves or for the passerby? Who is your audience? Who is reading? Who is taking pictures? Who is listening?
During my workshop at Orange House, I met Anas Saidi, an outgoing and talented young filmmaker from Damascus who decided to record the step-by-step process of our sunprint workshop with other refugees at the center. While he was shooting his time lapse images (which takes a long time), we had the chance to talk about his escape from the ravages of the war in his country. I asked Anas to write a short bio, and here it is along with his spectacular video:
“My name is Anas Saidi from Syria/ Damascus, I lived in Damascus my whole life. Three years ago I fled to Germany like other Syrian did in a death migration which we don’t know if it’s our last destination or not. I’ve lived and felt the near death experience in every inch of my body and my soul and it has totally changed my life. I am an actor and Filmmaker and my dream is to share everything I’ve seen to the world in a movie. I live in Germany now and I want to study filmmaking and make my dream come true, it’s too hard but I made it here, I make it everywhere.”
Personal and independent, experimental films represent the height of filmic subjectivity, maybe most notably expressed in the work of Stan Brakhage, who sought to recreate the physical act of seeing with his first person films. These works run the gamut from Brakhage’s physiological reconstructions of vision through a range of more poetic and metaphoric approaches, be they perceptual, emotional, historical or material. So the conceit of XY Chromosome Project’s presentation of Lynne Sachs & Mark Street: A Marriage of Remakes at Brooklyn’s Microscope Gallery represents a perspectival place of particular interest in that it itself is an attempt to give material form to intersubjectivity.
Sachs and Street have been a couple for nearly 30 years, and have both made works independently (Street’s 2016 documentary Oiltowns) and together (XY Chromosone Project 2007). The films on view at Microscope Gallery however, which lend the concept and name to A Marriage of Remakes, are somehow neither by one filmmaker or the other: they are remakes, reconstructions, reimaginings, re-realizations of each other’s work. Sachs and Street have each remade films by her or his partner, creating a new dimension in both their work, elucidating through the nature of the project both the translatable and the untranslatable.
In her 2012 16mm work, Same Stream Twice, Sachs films her and Street’s young daughter, Maya, moving in a circle. The camera stands at the center point tracing her circular trajectory. The image is high contrast black and white, grainy and evokes a stoic femininity reminiscent of Gunvor Nelson’s gorgeous and haunting 1969 film My Name is Oona—both are filled with strength and dignity, an almost pagan vision of female power. Street’s video, Boys To Men, is constructed largely around the same axis of movement and the same conceit, with the wheel of time turning as children, in this case boys, become adults. The short video however, is devoid of Sachs’ haunting photography and solemnity, instead taking place in any old park in Brooklyn. It seems more a video document than a poetic vision. From these two works, qualities which distinguish Sachs’ work from Street’s begin to become clear, the revelations moving in both directions—Sachs favors grainy 8 and 16mm film with even, or completely absent, soundtracks, while Street favors more documentary like images and isn’t afraid of jarring sound or colliding frames. What unifies them however is somewhat more nebulous. Is there a shared idea or approach, or is this experiment in “remaking” evidence that a relationship creates it’s own intersubjective perspective, where two independent visions meet? At the very least, Sachs and Street’s project is an intriguing and worthwhile attempt to give this phenomenon a unique expression and form of its own.
Chris Marker’s studio on the Rue Courat, Paris, April 4, 2007. Photo by Adam Bartos. Courtesy of the artist.
In San Francisco in the mid-1980s, I saw French filmmaker Chris Marker’s expansive, enigmatic ciné meditation Sans Soleil (1983). I witnessed his mode of daring, wandering filmmaking with a camera. Alone, he traveled to Japan, Sweden, and West Africa where he pondered revolution, shopping, family, and the gaze in a sweeping but intimate film essay that shook the thinking of more filmmakers than any film I know. Marker’s quasi-autobiographical movie blended an intense empathy with a global picaresque. It presented the possibility of merging cultural theory, politics, history, and poetry—all aspects of my own life I did not yet know how to bring together—into one artistic expression. I wrote my own interpretation of the film and then boldly, perhaps naively, sent it to Marker in Paris.
Several months later, his response arrived with a slew of cat drawings along the margins. Marker also suggested that we continue this conversation in person, in San Francisco. Not long afterward, I found myself driving Chris from his hotel in Berkeley to Cafe Trieste, one of the most famous cafes in North Beach. There we slowly sipped coffees in the last relic of 1960s hippy culture, talking about his films, his travels, and my dream to become a filmmaker. As the afternoon came to a close, I politely pulled out my camera and asked if I could take his picture. “No, no, I never allow that.” And then he turned and walked away, leaving me glum, embarrassed, and convinced that my new friendship with Marker was now over.
American film scholar Colin MacCabe struck up a similar friendship with Marker, one that began in 2002 with the transport of an obscure VHS tape from film enthusiast and producer Tom Luddy in Berkeley (once again) to Chris’s studio home in Paris. Over the next ten years, MacCabe would welcome any excuse for traveling from his home in Pittsburgh across the Atlantic Ocean to France. MacCabe’s longing was not for the food, wine, River Seine, or joie de vivre, but rather for the sheer pleasure of conversing about history, the dilemma of the twentieth century, cinema, technology, and the French actress Simone Signoret with Chris Marker. From the very first moment that MacCabe crossed the threshold into the lair of this quiet lion in the world of personal and political cinema, he knew it would change his life. The range and depth of topics these two men discussed is exhilarating. In reading MacCabe’s new short, anecdotal memoir, Studio: Remembering Chris Marker, we can easily glean that the passage of thoughts from-lip-to-ear-and-back-again between these two cerebral fellows left an indelible imprint on MacCabe. Marker’s place of creation, his home on the Rue Courat in a less-than-famous but spectacularly diverse neighborhood of Paris was a magnet for Macabe; he would travel there whenever possible, even if the two men’s tête-à-tête only lasted an hour. MacCabe explains that as revered as he was by filmmakers, essayists, poets, thinkers of any kind, Marker had two fundamental qualities: “a generosity of spirit and… a genius for friendship.” Having read many a text on Marker, never have I come across such an intimate, respectful recounting of his personal life. Little did I know, for example, that the highlight of his studies at the Sorbonne was working with Poetics of Spaceauthor Gaston Bachelard; that his admiration with the French Resistance network was grounded in his infatuation for its beautiful leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcard; or that “The experience of fighting as an American soldier, for which he received a personal letter of thanks from Eisenhower, meant that Marker could not countenance any of the knee-jerk anti-Americanism that so disfigures the thought of the European left.”
Both MacCabe’s and my communications with Chris evolved simultaneously. Chris made extraordinarily good use of the new epistolary canvas: email. I can only guess how many people around the world cherish such correspondence (most often with the subject heading News from Guillaume, Guillaume being his cat.) In 2007, I assisted Chris on the creation of an English version of Three Cheers for the Whale, his short 1972 film. There in the same loft apartment Adam Bartos so exquisitely photographed for Studio, we talked about everything from his friends Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and American documentarian Robert Kramer to Russian films he’d pulled from the Internet, cats, and tea—themes he would explore deeply with MacCabe as they parsed through texts they each were writing or reading.
“It was one of Marker’s absolute principles that he could not appear in public alongside his works. It was an ultimate taboo. I have often surmised that it was linked to a fantasy of death— that were he and his work to appear together his death would ensue,” explains MacCabe. Marker’s aversion to being photographed was profound. Type his name into Google and the only pictures you will find are in black and white, an archeological tracing that probably ends in the 1960s. And so it is that we turn each delicately folded folio page in Studio to reveal the place where Chris Marker lived and collected and edited the media-based projects of the last decade of his life. Here, in all its ecstatic detail, we are able to take account of a visible manifestation of the artist’s mind, a mind turned inside-out, the components of his practice revealed through the detritus and treasures of our technological culture. In Bartos’s images, we see numerous Apple computers, catalogues from Marker’s 2005 Museum of Modern Art installation “Owls at Noon,” an array of electronic keyboards, a signed photo of Kim Novak, and a 9/11 Commission Report. Of course, these are only the things I saw, what other viewers would notice would be completely different. While we do not witness Chris Marker in a photographic portrait, I would claim that we learn far more from this precise documentation of objects. They testify to the vitality of Marker’s personal space, to the grandness of his editing process and appreciation for the culture in which he was born.
Just before I left Marker’s home, he showed me a scrapbook he’d been compiling for several years, one he probably shared with MacCabe too. Marker had accumulated hundreds of pictures and articles on a young African-American politician who had just embarked on a campaign to become the next president of the United States. Chris was one of the wisest and most prescient human beings I have ever encountered; he was convinced that this virtually unknown candidate could stand up to a historically racist country and win. I was doubtful at the time.
Now, upon rereading Ben Lerner’s eloquent introduction to Studio, I realize that MacCabe’s text and Bartos’s photos are here together to articulate the multi-faceted ways that Chris Marker attempted to “depict old futurisms, a special case of anachronism.” From his wordless narrative science fiction film La Jetée (1962) to his epic reflection on the turmoil of the ’60s Grin Without a Cat (1977) to his visionary CD Rom Immemory (2002), he was committed to pulling us forward and backward in time through both celluloid and digital forms. Studio: Remembering Chris Marker is a testimony to this remarkable quality, albeit in an old-fashioned yet expansive book form.
Lynne Sachs makes films, performances, and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, politics, and sound design. Her most recent film, Tip of My Tongue, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art’s 2017 Documentary Fortnight. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
Beta-Local is an organization, a working group, and a physical space in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Beta-Local is a study and production program, an experimental education project and a platform for critical discussion and production immersed in our local reality (San Juan, the tropics, the Caribbean, the unplanned city) and our present moment (the economic crisis, the infinite potential, the skills and ideas of people who live here, now). There are some local variables such as the stagnation of local cultural institutions, the lack of an MFA program in the arts, a debilitating “brain drain”, and the prohibitive costs of higher education outside of Puerto Rico, as well as the peddling of the generic-as-international by many art schools and cultural institutions. We view these as opportunities for generating new forms. Beta-Local does not aspire to become another node in the globalized art market or academic spectrum. We are not interested in a mimetic practice.
Lynne Sachs at Beta Local
In March and April, 2017 I was invited by co-director Sofia Galisa to be an artist-in-residence in Beta’s Harbor program:
Puerto Rican filmmaker José Rodriguez Soltero (1943 – 2009) was a significant figure in the New York underground art scene during the mid-1960s and early 1970s. His films were frequently included in Filmmakers’ Cinematheque programs. He was featured in Film Culture and written up in Jonas Mekas’s Movie Journal column in the Village Voice, and was the friend and collaborator of Mario Montez, Charles Ludlam and Jack Smith.
Before leaving New York, I shot this video of MM Serra, Executive Director of the Filmmakers Cooperative in New York City, discussing the 1960s Queer, count-culture, underground films of Rodriguez Soltero with friend and filmmaker Lynne Sachs. The Coop has recently preserved and digitized his films for the world to see! This interview was conducted in March, 2017 prior to Sachs’s presentation of “Lupe” at Beta Local (www.betalocal.org) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which may be (we are not sure) the first screening of the film in its entirety in the filmmaker’s “mother” country.
Lynne Sachs Beta Local Rodriguez Solterno Screening
And the during my last weekend in San Juan, I taught a workshop called “Film as a Collaborative Art”:
Film as a Collaborative Art
What kinds of creative surprises can happen when artists who don’t know each other come together for a day to make a film? In this workshop, we will work together for a day as a group to create a series of single shot videos using complex mise-en-scene, unusual camera movements, and recycled or hand-made props from home. Each participant will have a chance to direct their own piece. Throughout the day, Lynne will present a series of experimental performance videos by artists such as Vito Acconci, Howardena Pindell, Eadward Muybridge, Chanal Ackerman and more. At the end of the day, we will have a show and, of course, participants are encouraged to invite their friends.
One day, while I was in San Juan, I went to the local Impresora (https://www.facebook.com/laimpresora.pr/) to make a broadside with two laundry themed poems — one by me and the other by my collaborator Lizzie Olesker and a drawing I made of lint. We used the wonderful risograph process of printing three colors with three different passes through the machine. Here are pictures of the project which produced 300 cards.
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 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. For this project, I am not necessarily looking for polished works by people who call themselves filmmakers, but rather documents of resistance, beginning with the Women’s March, by anyone with a camera. There are already a whole range of videos in the collection now, 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 to add to the collection. [Please find my email address below.]
And Then We Marched by Lynne Sachs (Cinema of Resistance, footage from the Women’s March on Washington, 2017)
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. In 2016, PS1/Museum of Modern Art presented an exhibition of Acconci’s media work in New York City, 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 8mm 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 “Cinemas 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 Ghraib and Guantanamo.
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, amongst 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.
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.~Vito Acconci
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 Hirsch, 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’ films. This was to be my first opportunity to see a selected program of Harris’ work while he was there to discuss those issues that are most near and dear to him as a maker. Harris’ 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’ radical approach to historiography itself places his performative works in a new category of cinema’s counter culture.
In Harris’ Hallimuhfack (2016), a performer lip-syncs 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-sync 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 “re-stages 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 thirteen 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 expand 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 Woody Guthrie placed on his guitar in 1941,which inspired many subsequent artists.
To be included in our Cinema of Resistance collection, upload your video to YouTube and send your link to:
