A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ “TORNADO” is a poetic piece shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these singed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
“Photograph of Wind”
by Lynne Sachs 16mm, b&w and color, 4 min. 2001
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
San Francisco Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival
Investigation of a Flame: A Portrait of the Catonsville Nine by Lynne Sachs
45 min. color and B&W, 2001
plus 5 min. Sundance Channel documentary on Daniel Berrigan and the making of the film
On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War protesters led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm.
“Investigation of a Flame” is an intimate, experimental documentary portrait of the Catonsville Nine, this disparate band of resisters who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience.
How did the photos, trial publicity and news of the two year prison sentences help to galvanize a disillusioned American public? “Investigation of a Flame” explores this politically and religiously motivated performance of the 1960’s in the context of extremely different times — times in which critics of Middle East peace agreements, abortion and technology resort to violence of the most random and sanguine kind in order to access the public imagination.
“BEST DOCUMENTARY in 2001”, Phillip Lopate, Village Voice Critic
“One of the ten best films released in 2002” Phillip Lopate, Film Comment
“A complex rumination on the power of protest…..the trauma of the past, the continued mistakes of the present and the necessity to reflect actively on our government’s wartime antics.” The LA Weekly
“A film to rave about, as well as reckon with.” The Independent Film and Video Monthly
“Sachs’ elegant, elliptical documentary visits with surviving members of what became known as the Catonsville Nine, humble architects of this purposeful yet scathingly metaphoric act of civil disobedience.” The Village Voice
“Investigation of a Flame captures the heartfelt belief behind the Nine’s symbolic action of civil disobedience that sparked other (actions) like it across the nation. (The film) provides a potent reminder that some Americans are willing to pay a heavy price to promote peace.” Baltimore City Paper
“This is a documentary about the protest events that made Catonsville, Maryland, an unpretentious suburb on the cusp of Baltimore, a flash point for citizens’ resistance at the height of the war. Sachs found assorted characters still firm to fiery on the topic. She came to admire the consistency of the mutual antagonists in an argument that still rages (today).” The New York Times
“This poetic essay offers the perfect antidote to PBS: there is no omniscient narrator talking down to the viewer, reciting facts and explaining what to think, yet the story is perfectly clear. Brothers Phil and Dan Berrigan, who led the protest, appear both in the present and in archival footage, a mix that makes their commitment palpable.” Chicago Reader
“To those who think that everything in a society and its culture must move in lock step at times of crisis, (this film) might seem to be ‘off-message.’ But it’s in essence patriotic… saluting U.S. democracy as it pays homage to the U.S. tradition of dissent.” The Baltimore Sun
Screenings: National Broadcast on the Sundance Channel; Maryland Film Festival “Opening Night”; Museum of Modern Art, Documentary Fortnight “Opening Night”; Rhode Island Film Festival; Art Institute of Chicago; Mill Valley Film Festival; San Francisco Cinematheque; Pacific Film Archive; Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Olympia Film Festival., Providence Women’s Film Festival, Denver Film Festival; Harvard University Film Archive; Cornell University Cinema; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; NY Underground Film Festival; Vassar College; Ithaca College; Massachusetts College of Art; Catholic University; Maine Film Festival; Florida Film Festival; Georgetown University; Brooklyn Academy of Music, Portland Doc. Festival, Wisconsin Film Festival, Georgetown University’s Jesuit Week, American University Center for Social Media
Awards: Black Maria Film Festival; San Francisco International Film Festival: New Jersey Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; First Prize Documentary Athens Film Festival
Supported with funding from the Maryland Humanities Council, the Maryland State Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation and a Media Arts fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Window Work by Lynne Sachs 9 minute, color, sound video 2000
Music by Tom Goldstein Sound Recording by Mark Street
A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery within and beyond the image. Sometimes one hears the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets in a Baltimore summer night.. Other times jangling toys dissolve into the roar of a jet overhead, or children tremble at the sound of thunder. These disparate sounds dislocate the space temporally and physically from the restrictions of reality. The small home-movie boxes within the larger screen are gestural forms of memory, clues to childhood, mnemonic devices that expand on the sense of immediacy in her “drama.” These miniature image-objects represent snippets of an even earlier media technology — film. In contrast to the real time video image, they feel fleeting, ephemeral, imprecise.
“A picture window that looks over a magically realistic garden ablaze in sunlight fills the entire frame. In front, a woman reclines while secret boxes filled with desires and memories, move around her as if coming directly out of the screen.” Helen DeWitt, “Thresholds of the Frame”, Tate Modern Museum of Contemporary Art, London
“On screen images of ordinary objects seem weirdly evocative. A duster complete with a bushy top of feathers begins to resemble a palm tree. You will discover that a great deal is happening, some of it inside your own mind. The magic of the piece occurs in the moments between sounds.” “Art Portfolio”, The Baltimore Sun, Holly Selby
Dallas Video Festival; Delaware Art Museum Biennial; Athens Film Fest; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck, Germany; New York Film Expo; Black Maria Director’s Citation; Moscow Film Festival; Tate Modern, London
“New Experimental Film Works”
at the Fells Point Creative Alliance. Baltimore, Maryland
Presented by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
Thursday – December 9, 1999
From Ann Arbor to Austin to Arcata, local fimmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs have been travelling to film festivals around the country and in Europe this year showing their own work and watching an amazing selection of new alternative cinema. Tonight they will bring back to Baltimore some of the most compelling, ground-breaking experimental films being made in America today. A surreal allegory on a Canadian farm, a meditation on Cuban streetlife, an Eastern European tease on the notion of history– the work is audacious, lyrical and on occasion sublime. Two of the filmmakers — Paula Froehle (Chicago) and Jenny Perlin (New York City) — will attend their Baltimore premieres in order to discuss their work and to answer questions from the audience.
“Chemistries”, Daven Gee, 10 min.
“Meditations on Revolution, Part I” by Robert Fenz, 10 min.
“The Whole History of That” by Jenny Perlin, 17 min.
“We are Going Home” by Jennifer Reeves, 10 min.
“Fever” by Paul Froehle, 6 min.
“Flight” by Greta Snider, 7 min.
“Twilight Psalm II: Walking Distance” by Phil Solomon, 15min.
—————————————————————————
DIS PLACE MENT:
5 States of UnBelonging
LINK Film and Video Program
March 31, 2000
Curated by Mark Street and Lynne Sachs
“Fells Point 99”, Isaac Cynkar, 1999
(4 min. excerpt)
“Sight Unseen (a travelog)”, Jonathan Robinson, 1990
(5 min. excerpt)
“Land Without Bread”, Luis Bunuel, 1932
(6 min. excerpt)
“Mercy”, Abigail Child, 1989
(3 min. excerpt)
“The Past is a Foreign Country”, Joanna Racynskza, 1998
(5 min. excerpt)
“A Biography of Lilith” 16mm Color Sound 1997 35min.
In a lively mix of off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, A Biography of Lilith updates the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman and for some, the first feminist. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale with present-day Lilith (Cherie Wallace) musing on a life that has included giving up a baby for adoption and work as a bar dancer. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as a mother. With music by Pamela Z and Charming Hostess (Jewlia Eisenberg and Carla Kielstadt).
Partially supported by a finishing fund grant from the Experimental Television Center, as a project of the New York State Council on the Arts.
“The true story of this not so mythical, mythic first female. Sachs’ film conveys the real experience — bloody and poetic — of Lilith alive and now in every woman. Bravo! A film felt, imagined, and informed by life.” – Barbara Black Koltuv, Ph. D. Clinical Psychologist, Jungian Analyst, and Author of The Book of Lilith
“Sachs’ art for fusing documentary and experimental narrative is unquestionably enormous. In this new film, her combination of an interview with a friend, the myth of Lilith and beauteous images of things like jelly fish (which float like iridescent breasts on screen) culminates in stunning cinema.” Molly Hankwitz, Art Papers
Screenings: Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; San Francisco Cinematheque; Women in the Director’s Chair Film Festival, Chicago; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Charlotee Film Fest (prize) Onion City Film Festival, Chicago; Humboldt Film Festival; Big Muddy Film Festival; Anthology Film Archive, NY; Fordham University; University of Maryland; California College of Arts and Crafts; Maryland Institute of Art; University of South Florida; Millennium Film Workshop, NY; Madcat Women’s Film Festival
Prizes: NY Film Expo; Black Maria; New York Women’s Film Festival
“I just tumbled into filmmaking,” Lynne Sachs admits. “It made so much sense to me. It gave me a chance to pull in poetry, looking at trees, listening to the sounds of grasshoppers, cars, and babies. The words go with reflections on politics to parables. And all of it can fall into this vessel that’s a film I might make. Film is completely full of possibilities.”
A bicoastal artist and teacher, Lynne Sachs is presently teaching film at Rutgers University while in process with her fourth short feature, A Biography of Lilith. Last week she participated in The Roxie Cinema’s Madcap Women’s Film and Video Festival, screening two early 1990s works, The House of Science and Which Way is East, as well as excerpts from Lilith. The new film combines narrative, documentary, and experimental techniques to tell the story of Adam’s first partner, who was thrown out of the garden of Eden for, as Sachs puts it, “wanting to be on top in sex.”
“Lilith has been demonized throughout the history of Jewish and Middle Eastern culture,” Sachs explains. “She is pretty much absent from the Bible, except for a cameo appearance as a minor demon in the Book of Isiah, but she is a character that has moved through Jewish mysticism for centuries. The Cabala discusses her. And she turns up as a character on the TV show Cheers. For all different reasons people feel connected to Lilith.”
At first, Sachs was having difficulty capturing on film the sequences that would convey her main character’s story. The experienced actress cast in the role “had not lived a Lilith life,” Sachs discovered, so she was recast as Eve and a New York stripper was hired. The woman, although not trained as an actress, inhabited the role so perfectly that Sachs was inspired to film her in a series of documentary style interviews that greatly expand the themes of the piece. Poetry and music have also been included – personal poems by the director, songs of the East Bay a cappella trio Charming Hostess, and music by San Francisco composer Pamela Z, for instance. All of this – combined with a running narrative of Sachs’ own reactions to the emotional complications of her two pregnancies, and filmed sonograms and footage of the birth of her first child, Maya – will make for an extremely affecting movie.
“Every film I’ve made has involved a total immersion in a subject,” Sachs explains. “That’s why they take so long. I have done an incredible amount of research for Lilith because I want it to be not only about the most personal things, but also about aspects of life that are out there in the world that I have no knowledge of. So the film explores certain aspects of Judaism, while it has also been about accepting the precariousness of being a mother and an artist.”
“A film goes with you wherever you go,” Sachs concludes. “It’s similar to how some people want religion to be. It can be both a solace and a place of incredible emotional controversy. You can’t put you finger on it. Its about a way of being. You live inside it.”
Note: To watch the full film, click here or scroll to the bottom of this page.
by Lynne Sachs in Collaboration with Dana Sachs 33 min.
“A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.”
In 1994, two American sisters – a filmmaker and a writer — travel from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Together, they attempt to make a candid cinema portrait of the country they witness. Their conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary revels in the sounds, proverbs, and images of Vietnamese daily life. Both a culture clash and an historic inquiry, their film comes together with the warmth of a quilt, weaving together stories of people the sisters met with their own childhood memories of the war on TV.
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt. “Which Way Is East” starts as a road trip and flowers into a political discourse. It combines Vietnamese parables, history and memories of the people the sisters met, as well as their own childhood memories of the war on TV. To Americans for whom “Vietnam” ended in 1975, “Which Way Is East” is a reminder that Vietnam is a country, not a war. The film has a combination of qualities: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history’s scope, and a critical ability to discern what’s missing from the textbooks and TV news.
from The Independent Film and Video Monthly, Susan Gerhard
“Captures the Vietnam experience with comprehension and compassion, squeezing a vast and incredible country into an intriguing film.”
Portland Tonic Magazine
“The sound track is layered with the cacophony of bustling city streets, the chirps of cicadas and gentle rustles of trees in the countryside, and the visuals, devoid of travelogue clichés, are a collage of pictorial snippets taken from unusual vantage points…. What comes through is such a strong sense of the place you can almost smell it.”
The Chicago Reader
“It’s really a magnificent film about translation, with the play of light and shadow mirroring the movement between language, cultures, and moments in time. It brought back memories of my own years in east Asia, too. The light was exactly the same!”
Sam Diiorio
“Before Sachs experienced her epiphany, she made Which Way is East (1994), an arresting, painterly exploration of Vietnam. As one of the first American filmmakers granted permission to shoot in Vietnam, Sachs had the weight of responsibility and expectation on her shoulders. Despite this, the film has a sense of lightness and freedom, especially in its aesthetic and aural approach: it begins with a stilted photographic trajectory, literally rendering the moving image as a series of broad brush strokes, while the almost endlessness of the cicadas’ chirrup pitch moves the image along, though not necessarily forward. It is a sensory introduction, rather than a history lesson, and here Sachs’ work is at its most successful, inviting us, as viewers and listeners to be in this depiction of Vietnam, not to look at or hear a presentation of it. Eventually, Sachs and her camera will arrive somewhere static, she will then switch to a show and tell mode, which is informative but less awesome. She flits between the two with relative ease for the remainder of the film, letting her observations and those of her sister, Dana, interpolate the experience. It is as much about making her own memories as it is the chasing of those left behind by others. Her sister’s remarks are among the most revelatory, “I hate the camera,” she muses, “The world feels too wide for the lens and if I try to frame it, I only cut it up.” Holding a camera and being a filmmaker are not one and the same, “Lynne sees it through the eyes of its lens,” she continues, “It’s as if she understands Vietnam better when she looks at it through the lens of her camera.” For Sachs, the practice has always been the pursuit. She instinctively knew, even before it occurred to her laterally, to share the filmmaking in order to make it more accessible, more honest and more like the world it hopes to offer. It may have taken her another almost twenty years to fully understand and break with the idea of documentary as an act or approach, but there is a silver lining of melancholia inside Which Way is East? It makes me wonder if 1) she already knew and 2) if the practice, though expressive and creative as an outlet is also overwhelming, as there is some sadness here.”
Ubiquarian: “The Process is the Practice: Prolific and poetic, experimental and documentary filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, lights up this year’s online edition of Sheffield Doc” by Tara Judah, June 21, 2020 http://ubiquarian.net/2020/06/the-process-is-the-practice/
Criterion Channel streaming premiere with 7 other films, Oct. 2021.
Library Collections: Amherst College; Arizona State University; University of California, Berkeley and Irvine; Duke University; Hong Kong University of Science; New York University; New York Public Library; Penn State; Rutgers University; University of Iowa; Minneapolis Public Library; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of Virginia; Northwestern; Seattle Public Library
Experimental Filmmaker Lynne Sachs
The Independent Film and Video Monthly
March, 1994
By Susan Gerhard
Lynne Sachs calls her latest film, Which Way is East?. A “work-in-process.”She uses the phrase to describe those of her experimental documentaries that evolve over time.This particular one started as a road trip and flowered into a political discourse:It’s a half-hour travel diary of her trip to Vietnam – a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt.
That warmth is no accident.For Sachs, film is folk art.Pieces are crafted much as they’re conceptualized.Her work is hands-on everything, from the film itself to the machines she reshapes it on.“I was welding electronics on this machine one hour ago,” Sachs notes casually as we settle in to watch Which Way Is East? on a portable six-plate flatbed.She later describes the optical printer – the machine she uses to double-expose and linger over particular frames – like it’s a family heirloom.“An optical printer is sort of from that era of the sewing machine.You hear every single stitch.”
Sachs sees film as a mutable thing, as her phrase “film-in-process” indicates.She’s turned two of her films into installations: The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), in which she torches a doll house and the anti-feminist myths contained inside it, metamorphosed into a three-dimensional exhibit at Artists’ Television Access in 1991.And work-in-process States of UnBelonging turned up as an installation in 1992 at Buffalo’s Hallwalls Center for the Arts.
Like most of Sachs’ films, Which Way Is East? is personal.In 1992 Sachs slipped her Bolex camera into her backpack and went to visit her sister in Vietnam.There she shot 40 minutes of film, much of it a few frames at a time out the window of a room where, due to illness, she was confined to her bed.When she returned to the United States, she put together a 30-minute film that combines Vietnamese parables, history, and memories of the Vietnamese people she met, as well as her own childhood memories of the TV war.
In the film, Sachs recalls visiting Vietnam’s Museum of War Atrocities.While standing in the American Wing, she looks across the street and notices that another part of the museum is closed.Her sister explains that Vietnam’s relations with China are good, so there are no visiting hours for viewing China’s war atrocities.
To Americans for whom “Vietnam” ended in 1975, Which Way Is East? is a reminder that Vietnam is a country, not a war.The film has a combination of qualities that make Sachs well admired among Bay Area experimental filmmakers: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history’s scope, and a critical ability to discern what’s missing from the textbooks and TV news.
A 1979 graduate of Brown University, Sachs traded her history degree for a Bolex camera.She moved to San Francisco in 1985, got a Masters in Cinema from San Francisco State, and earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.Since then, she’s worked her way from office temp and sound technician to filmmaker and lecturer, and has exhibited in festivals ranging from Atlanta to Oberhausen.
Which Way Is East? continues a practice she began with he 1989 project, Sermons and Sacred Pictures.This half-hour film depicts the life of Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Memphis preacher and filmmaker who, in the 1920s, gave witness to the idea that film, as a medium of self-representation, could affect people.He made and exhibited films of his congregations’ baptisms and daily lives.
“[Taylor] preserved something; [he used] that relationship of being an artist to bring something back to the place,” says Sachs, who has a similar modus operandi.She showed Taylor’s films to a congregation in San Francisco when she was collecting sounds from the church for Sermons and Sacred Pictures.The churchgoers recognized scenes from Taylor’s films: aunts, uncles, places.It brought their South back to them.
Making Which Way s East?, she made another connection – this time across continents.Sachs asked a number of Vietnamese Americans to help her decipher parables and read the stories she gathered from conversations in Vietnam for the film’s narration.In the process, many recognized their own stories.Sometimes, Sachs gets a personal invitation to dinner when the day’s work is done.
Sachs’ populism is not a hobby.In her daily double-life, she’s a teacher.She’s constantly impressed by the visions and skills of first-time film and videomakers in her courses at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.She’s also pleased to be able to watch her favorite films (works by former San Franciscan Bruce Conner, for one) again and again – and get paid for it.But it’s in the six months between teaching gigs when the real work gets done; when she descends into her studio and concentrates, uninterrupted, on her film craft.
“I like the term ‘filmmaker,’” she told the San Francisco Bay Guardian, “because it’s like the word homemaker,” Sachs has reinvented that word in the same way she reinvents film.
Susan Gerhard
Susan Gerhard is a film critic for the SF Bay Guardian.
“The House of Science: a museum of false facts” 30 min., color, sound, 1991
“Offering a new feminized film form, this piece explores both art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural college. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.” (SF Cinematheque)
“A disturbing discovery and a remarkable exposition. The film demonstrates Sachs’ natural gifts as an autobiographer, a philosopher and a true artist.” (Melbourne Film Festival)
“The film takes off on a visual and aural collage…combining the theoretical issues of feminism with the discrete and personal remembrances of childhood.” ( San Francisco Bay Guardian)
“Throughout ‘The House of Science’ an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title –house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space — without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.'” (Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archives)
Charlotte Film Festival, First Prize Experimental; Atlanta Film Festival, Honorable Mention Experimental; International Audiovisual Experimental Festival, Arnheim, Netherlands; Black Maria Film Fest, Juror’s Award; Hallwalls Center for the Arts, Buffalo, NY; Humbolt Film Festival, Teffen Filter Award; Museum of Modern Art, Cineprobe; Portland Museum of Art, “Icons, Rebels and Visionaries”; Athens Film Festival, Experimental Prize; Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; Utah Film Festival, First Prize Short Film.
In The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), Lynne Sachs curates a moving-image exhibition of womanhood, carefully sampling artifacts from the past (fabricated truths built to sustain male dominancy), intertwined with empirical artifacts of her own history (personal truths and memories). Through the power of visual and aural association, several domains of the exhibit simultaneously unfold in front of us: the personal, the public and the historical. Sachs drifts between these domains smoothly until a whole network of information is gently bestowed upon us. We start with the image of a doctor guiding a woman into a glass booth, followed by him setting a model house on fire, and the sound of Sachs’ voice, telling us about her experience of being examined by an apathetic gynecologist while pregnant. The image of the detached male doctor lingers with us for the whole length of the movie, along with his perverse power over a female body, over her right to “bare armor”—as in, contraception—and over her right to give birth. Together with Sachs, we wince at the story of her obtaining a contraceptive diaphragm. The doctor has no issue sending her off into battle with her new armor and zero instructions on how to do it. “I leave his office fully equipped, protected, and completely incapable of placing that plastic sheath over my cervix. Where is my cervix?” Next, we see a naked woman rolling up and down a sand dune unceasingly.
Another moment sat with me throughout the movie, that of a little girl. A little girl learning to read, stumbling through the grotesque words of Dr. Cesare Lombroso, naively walking us through his diagnosis of a nine-year-old female, a “born thief”. Sachs explores the concept of criminal atavism by juxtaposing her daughter’s voice with the delusional criminalization of women based on their physical appearance. By pairing images of female child-like playfulness and purity with delusional artifacts of the late 19th century, she amplifies the gap between the male study of women and women themselves. She flows between the public, mainstream, male rationale and the private, subjective female counter-experience. We are left with the uncomfortable ambiguity of child-like giggles of lightness and historical screams of darkness.
At the core of Sachs’ exhibit lies her most intimate gaze upon womanhood. It is articulated into unspoken words on the screen:
“I am two bodies—the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk.” (We hear pencil scratches.)
The body of the body of a woman is biologically destined to be softer and therefore more fluid. All this fluidity, open space, holes, smells are often psychologically coupled with shame. Sachs’ words here represent the experience of most girls becoming women. This body of ours is too visceral for both us and the world to accept.
“The body of the body moves in cycles, and with every repetition there is a sensation of pain. The arrival of the body of the body forces the body of the mind to take notice, begrudgingly so. With legs crossed, the blood is caught just before it crosses the border into the public domain” (We hear a person peeing and a loud flushing of the toilet.)
Not only is the body of the body full of liquids and smells, but they threaten to spill over into the public domain. Our bodies and all their products are trained to be confined.
“Filled with infectious, infected liquids, we hold in the blood, the water, the sneeze, the wax, the hair, the pus, the breath. All that is ours to let go, to release onto this earth is held in, contained. I am the cauldron of dangerous substances.”
To defeat this imposed belief system of male ideas which we were fed throughout our lives is to inspect and observe your body for yourself. It takes a lot of courage to look into your own body with curiosity, rather than shame.
“I trace a path across my chest, searching for surprises I’d rather not find, knots in the fabric.”
Women are being re-educated to examine themselves instead of being examined by the cold metal-handed gynecologist. However, self-examination carries a burden of unforeseen surprises. Releasing our juices into the public, into the mainstream. Bravely facing the knots in the fabric as early signs of our bodies decaying.
“Undressed, we read our bodies like a history. Scars, muscles, curves of the spine. We look at ourselves from within. Collect our own data, create our own science. Begin to define.”
Built from the inside out, this new laboratory pushes against the walls of the old structure. An incendiary effect, but not arson.
When we are brave enough to look into the stretch marks, the scars, the wobbles, the curves, we own our space, our fluids and our bones. We collect and process our data, introduce new terminology. We allow for the soft to be malleable, buoyant, rather than flaccid and weak. We allow for differences. We allow for change. We allow for expression to re-place suppression. We become safely vulnerable instead of avoidant or anxious. We spit our words and meanings out instead of swallowing them.
In between the personal and the public domain lie Sachs’ women. These are real, physical women, subjects of anatomical studies, as well as women in paintings, subjects of the male painter’s gaze. The first, forced silent, the latter, painted static, confined to a space in history, “to be taken”. We witness a female artist looking at men looking at women.
Despite the immanently observational, passive and saddening tone of the movie, there is a promise in this exhibit. A promise that by carefully unfolding and studying the history of womanhood, one is already shaking the habitual. Sachs’ voice is not passive at all, it is rather filled with precisely focused meditative anger, an eloquent scream for justice, live from the gynecologist’s office, calling for help and cooperation.
To aid and support this novel conception of womanhood, we seek out new imagery, new viewpoints, new forms. Sachs’ filmography is a great start. The House of Science shifted my gaze to earlier works of art, predating celluloid. I searched for an alternative museum of womanhood. In particular, the Viennese modernist painters Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka stood out as engaging with the representation of women: as neither virgins nor whores, allowing their female subjects to escape this demeaning cage. They let their subjects move around freely, be comfortable, take up space, lie down wrapped up in themselves. Schiele went one step further: painting anger and anxiety on the faces of his subjects. “By exploring such subjects, the three artists simultaneously exhumed their own sexuality: their fears, sorrows, hopes, and ecstasies…their women do not necessarily submit passively to the male artistic gaze. They look back and demand to be understood on their own terms.”1 These were not the only attempts by men to redefine womanhood in a feminist way. However, the others were often buried and forgotten, most likely because they were single, isolated sprouts of change.
Although revolutionary, the idea that cooperation could displace competition has certainly taken root lately. This idea insinuates that equality is actually a lot more functional and productive for all parties involved. A very timely example would be the evolution of a virus (or a random constituted body of persons, empowered by the state, with a specific aim, e.g. to enforce the law). If a virus were to survive, it would have to evolve in a cooperative manner with its host. Eventually, many highly infectious and pathogenic viruses have decreased their pathogenicity in order to keep their hosts alive. Some have even been completely eradicated over time. This gives me hope, both for us as a species and us as women. However, to put this into practice, we need both the unspoken voices to be heard and the destructive, competitive voices to fade out. It would have to be a cooperative effort.
EINDNOTEN
Jane Kallir, ‘Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka – Men Looking at Women Looking at Men’, p. 59, in: Agnes Husslein-Arco Jane Kallir and Alfred Weidinger, The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, 2015
