Praised by the New York Times as “one of the leading New York independent filmmakers,” Brooklyn-based artist Lynne Sachs has—in a career spanning over twenty years—woven together poetry, collage, painting, politics, layered sound design, and a myriad of cinematic formats to explore the intricate relationship between her personal observations and broader historical experiences.
“Naming an international film festival after a term for subjectivity is, in my mind, a radical stance. Rather than taking the more obvious city or country identified name, which brings attention to the community, the Punto de Vista festival celebrates a first person cinema based on the documentary practice of working with reality, that privileges the expression of ideas over the dissemination of information.”
Our cinematic relationship to Argentina began in 2007, when the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) invited Lynne to show a retrospective of her films. During the one week she was in this film-crazy city, she met Pablo Marin and Leandro Listorti, two extraordinarily active Argentine experimental filmmakers with a commitment to making movies and screening and writing about their thriving alternative film community.
For over seventy years, a steady stream of letters was exchanged between Alexander Lenard and members of my family in Memphis, Tennessee. Most of these reflections on everything from stock market prices to family trips, to the legacy of war to the cost of cranberry seeds, were exchanged between Sandor (he was called in the family by his Hungarian first name, without the accent) and my great-uncle William (a.k.a. Bill) Goodman.
Wellesley College Cinema and Media Studies Program presents “Inventions and Interventions,” the New Film and Media Visiting Artist Series.
Lynne Sachs has invented a unique hybrid cinema between the investigative documentary and the personal poetic film. Her work explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences Sachs’ films have screened most recently at the Museum of Modern Art and the Sundance Film Festival. On Feb. 2, see two films and a conversation with Sachs, co-sponsored by the Davis Museum and the Art Department.
Sachs’ films are searching, inquisitive projects — quests of discovery (and self-discovery) that yield facts and insights that become even more meaningful when they are shared with audiences as art.
The driving force of the documentary has been a true desire on the part of its makers to shed light on the very issues that make our global society so complex.
Examples are consistently appearing in this post-modern era that make one rethink what the term “documentary” might mean. However, films still retain the ingredients of tradition: history and images in real time through which each one of us can make that crucial aesthetic decision as to what may be true and what is open for question. Views of a Changing World features new works that demonstrate many of the technological and formalistic changes in the making of today’s documentaries.
“Native Memphian Lynne Sachs, an experimental documentary filmmaker based in NYC, presents I Am Not a War Photographer, a two-night presentation exploring her artistic fascination with the resonance of war.”
“Anthology groups together shorts by the experimental filmmaker, offering a diverse look at her studies of people undergoing change. It’s dense, difficult, and allusive, but Sachs has a fundamental mastery of tone that makes the films worthwhile, even for relative avant-garde novices.”
Three Films by Lynne Sachs (Friday and Saturday) This review of recent work by one of the leading New York independent filmmakers includes the local premiere of “Wind in Our Hair,” a 41-minute video, made in Argentina with the collaboration of Leandro Listorti and Pablo Marin, that explores the world of four teenage girls, both as they imagine it and as it exists within the restraints of social reality.
