I will be in Memphis on Saturday, April 24 at 6 pm for a “Lynne Sachs Retrospective” at the On Location: Memphis Film Festival at the Malco Ridgeway Theater (5853 Ridgeway Center Parkway). One of the films, The Last Happy Day, began in Memphis with the story of my family’s Hungarian cousin Alexander Lenard. I would love it if you all could join me that evening.
The Last Happy Day and Investigations of a Flame screen at SF Cinematheque.
Screening of a selection of films by Lynne Sachs at the Pacific Film Archive.
New York University’s Kimmel Center will display Last Address, an exhibition eulogizing a generation of New York City artists who died of AIDS, by the New York-based brother and sister filmmakers Ira Sachs and Lynne Sachs, with designer Bernhard Blythe, Sofia Gallísa, and Andrei Alupului. The exhibition, comprising 13 translucent, color photographs (67 x 42 in.) will be installed on the exterior of the Kimmel Windows Gallery, located at La Guardia Place & West 3rd St. Last Address will open April 9 and remain on view through May 31, 2010.
Working since the mid-1980s, variously on lyrical formal shorts and long form experimental documentary, Lynne Sachs’ body of film and video work has explored the relationships between individual memory and experience in the context of large historical forces. Foregrounding personal history and autobiography, Sachs exalts the intimate gesture as perhaps the most heroic of poetic and political acts. With a keen grasp on cultural theory and media history, Sachs’s films avoid academicism in their celebration of life and mindful political engagement, presenting complex pictures of the world with lyrical grace and even joy.
How do you make a doc that’s not a doc? How do you make an experimental film that is not one? How and why do moving image experimenters and documentarians combine their genres? Howard Guttenplan’s Millennium Film Journal (Spring/Summer 2009, #51) deeply penetrates these questions and creative cross-fertilizations. Guest editors, Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs have gathered innovators to fill 100 pages of insights. Jill Godmilow’s advice to abandon “truth claims, intimacy and satisfying forms” recalls genre-bending pioneer Luis Bunuel’s “I have always been on the side of those who seek the truth, but I part ways with them when they think they have found it.” Reading MFJ raises new questions. Richard Fung queries, “What kind of truths can be communicated better in documentary than in fiction – and vice versa?” This echoes Faulkner’s “Sometimes the best fiction is more true than journalism.” The essays provoke us to examine the motives and consequences of these media practitioners.
“TALES FROM SOUTH AMERICA”
Lynne Sachs @ Chicago Filmmakers 3/12/10
Here is an interview I did in Pamplona, Spain during the Punta de Vista Film Festival.
NYU’s Cinema Studies Department and Undergraduate Film & TV Department present the 3rd Annual Experimental Lecture.
A filmmaker who started work in the second half of the Eighties, Lynne Sachs effortlessly saunters between film, video, the internet and gallery installations. Principally concerned with the involvement of individuals in History, Lynne Sachs’ films often adopt the film essay form to explore the interrelationship between collective and subjective memory. Her films mix the most experimental and poetic of approaches with live recording, archive material and a range of narrative sources, all with the same air of ease.
