ARTICLES

2019

Thoughts on Jonas Mekes

Jonas Mekas died yesterday, but with this close to a full, feisty and mostly extraordinarily fun life, he leaves us all with so much. From an early age, Jonas came to understand that living the life of an artist to the very fullest meant that you were expected to create something that would last beyond your last breath. Before anyone was really using the word “community”, Jonas was building a formidable infrastructure that would be the very foundation for the survival of the personal cinema he loved so dearly.

2018

Tran Trang’s Blindness Series: My Letter to Helene Cixous

Dear Helene, …I begin by conveying to you the shock of what I have witnessed. These words are a translation of the visual experiences I had last night an early this morning. My words will be absolute, nothing left to interpretation. From my lash to your lobe.

2018

Cinema of Resistance Collection of Films

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.

2017

On Studio: Remembering Chris Marker

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.

2017

Screen Anarchy’s Christopher Bourne Reviews Tip of My Tongue

Lynne Sachs’ latest film Tip of My Tongue, which has its world premiere as the festival’s closing night selection, is a beautiful, poetic collage of memory, history, poetry, and lived experience, in all its joys, sorrows, fears, hopes, triumphs, and tragedies.

2016

Time and Light : Gunvor Nelson’s Vision of Editing by Lynne Sachs

Gunvor Nelson was an extremely influential teacher of mine. Between 1985 and 1995 I lived in San Francisco and was deeply inspired and supported by other artists and curators in the Bay Area experimental film community including Trinh T. Minh-ha, Karen Holmes, Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, Jeanne Finley, Craig Baldwin, and George Kuchar. It was in San Francisco that I met Mark Street my soulmate and collaborator. In 2015, I traveled to Sweden with Mark to visit and shoot film with Guvnor Nelson in her home studio, two decades after she had left the Bay Area.

2015

Is, Was and Will Be: Living with the films of Chantal Akerman

Discovering Chantal Akerman’s films was such a vital part of my becoming a filmmaker. While I did not know her personally, I feel that I grew up with her as my guide for how to be in the world, as a woman filmmaker trying to articulate some aspect of my life and other women’s lives in the medium of film. I first saw Chantal’s films, along with those of Agnès Varda and Marguerite Duras, as a student in Paris in the 1980s.

2015

The Peculiar Intimacy of a NYC Laundromat

When it was a reading series staged in laundromats around the country, The New Yorker described “Every Fold Matters” as a “collaborative, site-specific performance exploring the strange intimacy of the everyday ritual.” The series used performers to act out themes of gendered work, gentrification, and the intermittent weirdness of city life. Playwright and director Lizzie Olesker and filmmaker Lynne Sachs are reuniting to turn the live performance into a film. For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with them to find out more.