Tag Archives: A Month of Single Frames

The Flow Chart Foundation presents “Films + Poems = Lynne Sachs”

Films + Poems = Lynne Sachs
The Flow Chart Foundation
https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/events-public-programs-2021
Monday, September 13, 6 – 7PM (EDT), via zoom

Filmmaker/poet Lynne Sachs will share a selection of short films and read selections from her poetry collection Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press). This free public event precedes an encore presentation of our Text Kitchen workshop—Frames & Stanzas: Video Poems, which begins the next day, Tuesday, Sept. 14.

The Flow Chart Foundation explores poetry and the interrelationships of various art forms as guided by the legacy of American poet John Ashbery. Through programs for both general and scholarly audiences showcasing innovative work by a diversity of artists of various kinds, The Flow Chart Foundation celebrates Ashbery and his art as an inspirational and generative force. We see poetry in particular as a conduit to exploration, questioning, and resistance to the status quo, and work to offer new ways to engage with it and its interplay with other artistic modes.

On Year by Year: Poems:
“The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.” —Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and Against Joie de Vivre

“The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. Year by Year distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life.” —Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and When the World Was Steady

“In Year by Year, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate.” —Michael Collier author of Dark Wild Realm

Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her highly self-reflexive films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trihn T. Min-ha. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since. In tandem with making films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.

From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.

Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019 film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of Short Films in 2020. In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.

The Flow Chart Foundation’s “Text Kitchen” with Workshops by Lynne Sachs

https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/workshop-checkout/0xwihp0y2zgaxgr0tgxgjs3gsrukqr

The Flow Chart Foundation’s Text Kitchen hands-onWorkshops provide writers and other art-makers opportunities for deep exploration into poetry and interrelated forms of expression.

UP NEXT:

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems—encore presentation!
a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop with Lynne Sachs

Tuesday, September 14 & Tuesday, September 21, 2021 (registration includes both sessions)
6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT) on Zoom

In this two-part virtual workshop, Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words over the course of two three-hour evening meetings (participants must be able to attend both sessions). Lynne will guide the workshop on a creative journey that will include writing several poems in conjunction with shooting moving or still images using an iPhone and simple editing software. Lynne has always been fascinated by the conversation between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent, internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence.

Participants are encouraged to join us for a free, public presentation of Lynne’s short films and poetry taking place virtually at 6PM (EDT) on Monday, September 13th. More info here.

Workshop fee (includes both three-hour sessions): $80

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Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems
a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop with Lynne Sachs

Thursday, June 10 & Thursday, June 17, 2021 (registration includes both sessions)
6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT) on Zoom

When award-winning Brooklyn filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs first discovered The Flowchart Foundation’s enthusiasm for poetry as a conduit for an interplay with other artistic modes, she knew that we would be a great place to offer a workshop that would nourish a deeply engaged dialogue between the written word and the image.

In this two-part virtual workshop, Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words over the course of two three-hour evening meetings (participants must be able to attend both sessions). Lynne will guide the workshop on a creative journey that will include writing several poems in conjunction with shooting moving or still images. Lynne has always been fascinated by the conversation between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent, internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence.

We encourage those with backgrounds in either or both poetry and image-making to sign up. Participants will need only a smartphone for creating their short films. Because creative collaboration between participants is a vital part of the experience, Lynne will carefully pair participants based on a questionnaire sent after registering. Note that this is not a tech-focused workshop, though some basic tech instruction will be shared.

Lynne’s virtual workshop will include the screening of some of her own recent short film poems, including “Starfish Aorta Colossus” (2015), “A Month of Single Frames” (2019), “Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” (2020), and “Girl is Presence” (2020) as well as excerpts from her feature “Tip of My Tongue” (2017).

Join us in this 2-week multimedia investigation of the sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences that all come together in a video poem. We could not be more delighted to be launching the Text Kitchen workshop series with this event.

Workshop fee (includes both three-hour sessions): $80 [event SOLD OUT]

Edinburgh International Film Festival screens “A Month of Single Frames”

Edinburgh International Film Festival
18 – 25 August 2021
https://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/2021/shorts-interconnections/08-21_16-00/

SHORTS: INTERCONNECTIONS
Part of the Shorts Strand
71 mins

Body

A programme of short films, exploring collaboration, communication and interrelation.

With their fluid approach to structure and close attention to rhythm, the films in this programme demonstrate different ways of expressing connection and interconnection – with oneself, with another, between humans and non-humans, and with both the urban environment and natural surroundings. They ask us to be attentive to the relationship between exterior and interior worlds, transforming perception through new languages of observation and contemplation. 

A Month of Single Frames / Lynne Sachs / USA / 2019 / 14 min / English
A poetic dialogue between two female filmmakers from different generations – Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer. Sachs reworks Hammer’s unfinished film project, weaving together a tapestry of interconnected subjectivities that reflects on the memory and legacy of the iconic lesbian artist.

Autoficción / Laida Lertxundi / USA, Spain, New Zealand / 2020 / 14 min / English, Spanish with subtitles
Employing her signature deadpan style and experimenting with the boundary between fiction and documentary, Lertxundi allows a series of intimate perspectives on the female experience to emerge against a backdrop of urban ennui.

Signal 8 / Simon Liu / Hong Kong / 2020 / 14 min / No dialogue
The flux and flow of everyday life on the streets of Hong Kong is transformed into a mysterious spectacle of discovery in Liu’s celebration of 16mm film.

Tri-Alogue #4 / Caryn Cline, Linda Fenstermaker, Reed O’Beirne / USA / 2020 / 3 min / No dialogue
Masking the frame to divide the image, three filmmakers collaborate on the same roll of 16mm film. A compelling triptych portrait of Seattle in summer.

Redbird and other birds / Julieta María / Canada / 2019 / 13 min / English
Reflecting on the relationship between the natural and the manmade, and between the human and non-human, this experimental documentary offers new perspectives on the practice of birdwatching.

LE RÊVE / Peter Conrad Beyer / Germany / 2020 / 8 min / No dialogue
Semi-abstract and dreamlike impressions of natural forms, both animate and inanimate, are interwoven in a tapestry of tactile encounters that open up new forms of perception and understanding.

Of This Beguiling Membrane / Charlotte Pryce / USA / 2020 / 5 min / English
Pryce’s poetic observations of the natural world continue with this investigation of striders that inhabit the surface of water. What lies beneath this delicate boundary between one world and another?

Mimesis Documentary Festival to host “Film About a Father Who” and “Day Residue” workshop

Mimesis – Documentary Festival
August 2021
https://www.mimesisfestival.org/2021-program/#opening-night

Opening Night: Lynne Sachs + Workshop

Film About a Father Who
by Lynne Sachs (2021, 74’)Wednesday 4 August 6:00 PM
Boedecker Cinema

Drawing on a painstaking personal archive of images, home movies, and interviews, Film About A Father Who is a rare kind of cinematic portrait: one that succeeds in expanding our understanding of the filmmaker, her protagonist, and their relationship through its structure, aesthetic, and method. A beautiful accumulation of time, contradictions, and a multitude of perspectives reflects the all-too-familiar operatic dynamics of family.

This screening will be followed by a conversation with the artist and a reception with light refreshments.

Recorded by Marc Vidulich.

Mimesis Documentary Festival, Aug 4 2021
Q & A with filmmaker Lynne Sachs for Opening Night screening of “Film About a Father Who”
moderated by Maryam Muliaee, PhD
Post-doctoral AssociateDepartment of Critical Media PracticesUniversity of Colorado Boulderwww.maryammuliaee.comEditor, MAST journal www.mast-journal.org

Can you talk a little about the process of archiving for Film About A Father Who in the course of three decades? My emphasis is on the word archiving (rather than archive) with an interest in the process, duration and change — a quality that also involves encounters with the unexpected and unplanned. I can imagine it must be an incredibly enormous amount of footage, images and sounds that needed your considerable time, patience and focus for re-listening, re-watching and final selection. How did you manage these demanding processes of archiving, organizing and reviewing your materials within three decades?
There is sometimes this wrong assumption that films made up of home movies and family footage are hard to be directed or involve less direction. However, as a director you have sculpted the film with incredible attention to details. Your orchestration of the materials and visual rhetoric are so strong, thoughtful and distinct, revealed as an individual touch. How did you direct the film, and come to decision(s) about selection, order and function of home movies and family footage in your film?
There is an aesthetic of fragmentation in your film. You also mentioned to cubist paintings in your statement referring to your film and way of portraying your father. This fragmentation brings in dynamic variation, multiplicity and process – embodied in your way of engaging a variety of different materials (in terms of format, quality, time, order, aspect ratio, cut, collage, etc.); in a fragmented and unfinished image of your father; in the voice and view of multiple narrators the viewers encounter such as siblings some of whom remained disconnected for twenty years. I also find a meaningful association between this fragmental or fragmentary aesthetic and the way memories are always in pieces, ephemeral and collective. Can you talk more about the aesthetic of fragmentation (or variation) in your film, and why does it matter to you as a filmmaker?
While the film title gives this assumption that your main protagonist is a man — obviously your father — I was surprised by and enjoyed far more and many encounters with women in the film, from your grandmother to your mother, your sisters and your father’s other wives, and of course yourself as a woman (as well as a mother and a daughter). Discovering this distinct feminist standpoint through which you connect the viewers more strongly with the female characters in the film was so remarkable for me. Can you talk about this feminist touch?
Can you talk about your use of aging/decaying videotapes? How did you find it aesthetically important or meaningful to deploy the disintegration of videographic materials? What is at stake in their tactile qualities (e.g. blurriness, incoherence, failure and dispersion) and how have their grainy textures helped your film narrative or aesthetics?

Workshop: Day Residue
A filmmaking workshop on the every day with opening night artist Lynne Sachs.
Thursday 5 August 9:30 – 11:00 AM
Grace Gamm Theater

According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, our day residue is composed of the memory traces left by the events of our waking state. In this workshop, we explore the ways in which fragments of our daily lives can become material for the making of a film poem. While many people in the film industry rely upon a chronological process that begins with the development phase and ends with post-production, our Day Residue workshop will build on an entirely different creative paradigm that encourages artists to embrace the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.

The workshop will include screenings of some of Lynne’s recent short film poems, including Starfish Aorta Colossus (2015), A Month of Single Frames (2019), Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home (2020), and Girl is Presence (2020) as well as excerpts from her feature Tip of My Tongue (2017).

“A Month of Single Frames” Reviewed in Echinox– Romanian Cultural Magazine

“I am overwhelmed by simplicity”
By. Georgiana Bozîntan
JUNE 18, 2021
https://revistaechinox.ro/2021/06/i-am-overwhelmed-by-simplicity/

Echinox is a Romanian Cultural Magazine published by the students from “Babeş-Bolyai” University. It has been published since December 1968.

A Month of Single Frames is a short film by Lynne Sachs, released in 2019. The filming belongs to the director Barbara Hammer, who made it in 1998, during an artistic residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, when she lived for a month in a shack in the Duneshacks, without electricity and running water. The short film is a collage of the shots filmed there.

In voice-over , Barbara Hammer reads from the diary she wrote during her residency, describing how she feels, what she sees, recounts dreams or explains the process and filming techniques she uses, for example, to capture the light of sunrise, “This forever wonder of sunshine”, or to superimpose colored lights over the filmed landscapes.

In her speech there are also phrases that remain in your head like a poem: “I am overwhelmed by simplicity. There is so much to see ”. Nothing happens in the movie. Barbara Hammer just shows us what she sees in her time spent alone: a dragonfly, shadows, landscapes, blades of grass in the wind, clouds and planes crossing the sky, the sea, dunes, raindrops, lichens, insects, tree trunks, leaves, flowers , plastic toys.

Text also appears on the screen, as a dialogue between Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer, through which the intimacy between the two occupies the space of the film: “You are here. I am here with you ”,“ You are alone. I am here with you in this film. ”

Experimenting with filming techniques, the short film then increasingly turns into a meditation on the artistic view of nature, mediated by the camera and which Barbara Hammer questions, asking “Why is it I can’t see nature whole?” and pure, without artifice? ”

The film finally flows towards a discussion about time, about the process of aging and death, “the sadness of departure, the inevitable ending breath, […] the complete and thorough blankness”. As explained at the end of the short film, “in 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive”, and the film made by her friend is part of this process.

A Month of Single Frames is a short film about many simple and emotional things, but especially about how we perceive, through different artistic or emotional filters, the places where we live and how they are always changing.

Argus Courier: Answering unanswerable questions through art

Argus Courier
by CLARK MILLER
June 17, 2021
https://www.petaluma360.com/article/entertainment/answering-unanswerable-questions-through-art/?fbclid=IwAR0yzTPffW_3H-Eu–DxJ0gBh1e7s1vRUx_WgOZQ1bGLsgSqhSt1vWWICTY

When Petaluma artist Carol Ceres succumbed at 56 to cancer last January, the quick rise of COVID-19 prevented any public memorial or retrospective exhibit of her work. Now, thanks to a new group show at the Petaluma Arts Center, art lovers can meet Ceres through her work and that of her circle of mostly LGBTQ artists.

The show’s title, Undertakes to Answer, is a phrase taken from the poem “Conversation” by Elizabeth Bishop. When visitors step into the center’s lobby, the first thing they see is a large reproduction of the 12-line poem, which begins “The tumult in the heart keeps asking questions. And then it stops and undertakes to answer.”

This is the center’s first Pride Month-related exhibit.

“What I love about the show’s title is that there are so many unanswerable questions in the world, but art undertakes to answer them anyway,” said Brittany Brown Ceres, the spouse of the artist, who passed away just 20 days after her diagnosis. The Ceres’s moved to Petaluma with their two young children in 2017.

The subtitle of the show, which runs through July 10, is “LGBTQIA+ Artists (and Allies) of the U.S. West & East [Carol Ceres and Her Circle].”

It brings together 23 artists, with 37 works in varied media. While most of the artists in the show identify as members of the LGBTQ community, curator Jonathan Marlow urges visitors to not bring their preconceptions. The show is neither sexualized nor thematically about identity.

As a program director for the center, Marlow recruited Ceres to teach at summer art camps for several years. With assistance from painter Mary Fassbinder, he put together the show to pay tribute to both Ceres’ art and her character.

Marlow’s own background combines art and technology. Formerly of Seattle, he was one of the first 100 Amazon employees. He later moved to San Francisco, where he and two others founded Fandor, a subscription service and social video sharing platform that operated from 2011 to 2019. He now works in film distribution.

The heart of the show is the five-piece “Trust Series” by Ceres, which takes up much of a long wall in the gallery. Each painting features an intense closeup of two bodies, cropped to achieve a near-abstract quality. The images variously suggest caring, sensuality, grieving — and dance, appropriately enough, given Brown Ceres’ background as a dancer and choreographer.

There are three other pieces by Ceres in the show.

Bookending the long wall where “Trust” hangs, two large paintings by East Bay artist Christine Ferrouge evoke an aspect of LGBTQ culture that is finally in the ascendant — that of family and children. The Ferrouge and Ceres families were neighbors until the latter moved to Petaluma.

In “The Day After the Costume Party,” the artist’s two young daughters are joined by Ceres’ young daughter in a garden. Still in their costumes, the girls smile at the viewer, exuding camaraderie and joy.

The other Ferrouge painting, “The Huddle,” suggests the mystery of childhood. A group of five young girls, most with their backs to the viewer, conspire together while one of them keeps a watchful eye on us.

“Christine’s work is exploding in the art world,” said Brown Ceres. “It’s exciting to see.”

Petaluma artist Garth Bixler is represented by a series of color studies he has done during COVID-19. Previously on the center’s board of directors, Bixler is also an art collector, and several of the works he loaned the show are intriguing. There are three photos created by John Dugdale using an updated version of cyanography, a 19th century photographic technique. Instead of black & white, the images emerge in tones of blue. The effect is old-and-new and rather uncanny. In “The Stairway,” a ghostly shadow hovers near the top of a steep, plain stairway.

Bixler also loaned the show two works by David Linger, who achieves a similar old-new effect by silk-screening dim, dark photo portraits he took in Russia onto thin porcelain.

There are many such delights in the show.

“Lota and Bishop,” a small construction-collage by Barbara Hammer, pays tribute to the poet Bishop (1911-1979), who lived in Brazil with Maria Carlota de Macedo Soares for many years. Hammer, who died in 2019, and filmmaker Lynne Sachs, also created “A Month of Single Frames,” one of the two short films that run continuously in the background of the show. The other film, “Eastern State,” was made by Talena Sanders, an assistant professor at Sonoma State University.

Petaluma artist Robin Bordow’s large painting “23 Blue” suggests the ultimate diamond, cut with hundreds of facets to hypnotic effect. Bordow is the director-manager of City Art Gallery in Petaluma. She is also a professional drummer.

Ceres had many friends in the art world, several of whom are in the show. In addition to Ferrouge, there is Russell Ryan, with the painting “Deer Jawbone with Cast Iron Rabbit and Poppies,” and Oakland artist Hadley Williams, who has three abstract paintings on display.

Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Ceres attended the Art Institute of Chicago on scholarship and moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s, eventually becoming a member of City Art Gallery. She met Brittany Brown in 1998. When Mayor Gavin Newsom announced the legalization of gay marriage in February 2004, Ceres and Brown were 11th in line to get married. The couple spent a decade in Oakland, where their children were born.

During the pandemic, Ceres painted at the dining room table every day.

“Up until a few weeks before her terminal diagnosis and despite COVID, Carol was also teaching art to the Grant Elementary kids here in our open-air driveway,” said Brown Ceres. “I was thrilled for her to be using art as healing, weaving her painting in between school and meals with our kids.”

Initially, she assumed this daily art meditation was primarily a coping mechanism during such a stressful period.

“At the time, I did not understand that it was a part of her dying,” said Brown Ceres. “But then again, she was such a unique soul and never failed to surprise us — especially with her profound wit and imagery. What was so important to Carol was that young artists, especially LGBTQ artists who may feel marginalized, have the chance to make art.”

Throughout her life, Carol Ceres’ goal, remarked Marlow, “was always to help younger, emerging artists find their way in a competitive art world.”

To that goal of supporting artists, as part of the Undertakes to Answer show, there will be a panel discussion at the center on June 19 at 2 p.m. Several artists will discuss how the artist makes the work and the work makes the artist. The Zoom-platform panel will be moderated by Josephine Willis, a niece of the Ceres family and an art student in Milwaukee.

Inspired as it is by the work and legacy of Carol Ceres, the gathering of artists to discuss what art matters seems a fitting and appropriate way to honor someone who was constantly inspired by and actively inspired others, though her art and through the example of how she lived her life.

“You never know when a piece of art will influence or change someone,” said Brown Ceres. “If it changes one person’s life, doesn’t that matter?”

Clint Roenisch Gallery presents “A Month of Single Frames” as a part of the exhibition “A Temple Most August”

10 June – 1 September
https://clintroenisch.com/

Clint Roenisch Gallery is pleased to present our summer group show, A Temple Most August. The exhibition brings together artists from London, Vienna, Moncton, Brussels, Toronto, Santa Fe, Montreal and Brooklyn, presenting paintings on silk and linen, glasswork, photography, an amphora, photocollage, textiles, embroideries, and a mesmerizing film. After a trying winter and reluctant spring the exhibition heralds the unfurling of more canicular days, verdant and open, the senses receptive. In 1672 a haiku master in Edo began to attract a steady following of disciples, who supplied him with a small hut in which he could write and teach. A banana tree, exotic to Japan, was planted in front of the hut, and pleased the poet so much that he took for his writing name “Bashō,” the Japanese word for “banana plant.”

“Temple bells die out.
The fragrant blossoms remain.
A perfect evening!”

– Bashō, circa 1688

Featured Artists
Abdul Sharif Baruwa
Anna Torma
Emma Talbot
Heather Goodchild
Jennifer Murphy
Lorna Bauer
Lynne Sachs
Sarah Cale
Willard van Dyke

#ATempleMostAugust

Mubi Notebook: Experimenting and Expanding at Prismatic Ground

Experimenting and Expanding at Prismatic Ground
MUBI Notebook
By Caroline Golum
May 31, 2021

https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/experimenting-and-expanding-at-prismatic-ground

An exhibiting filmmaker’s thoughts on the recent online festival, Prismatic Ground.

It began, as so many things do these days, with a tweet: in October 2020, Inney Prakash, programmer of the Maysles Cinema’s “After Civilization” series, put out a call for experimental documentary films. The resulting festival, Prismatic Ground, debuted in early April with a diverse line-up of new and repertory non-fiction films that ran the gamut of genres, styles, and techniques. Imagine: a programmer directly engaging with his community of filmmakers with an open-hearted all-points-bulletin was the antithesis of conventional festival gatekeeping. The refreshing prospect was a beacon to filmmakers struggling to create and exhibit work during a traumatic and hostile time.

Prakash’s call for submissions caught my attention on that fateful October night: for once, my endless Twitter scrolling put me in the right place at the right time. For the last four years, I’d been dutifully at work on a narrative feature concerning Julian of Norwich, an obscure 14th-century woman mystic. With development and production on indefinite hold, I resolved to keep in “fighting shape” by making whatever I could—however I could—about Julian’s ecstatic religious experience. I had originally set out to make a companion piece, a sort of altar to this long-overlooked religious icon. What began as a few standalone tableaux eventually turned into The Sixteen Showings of Julian of Norwich, a bricolage of stop-motion animation, back-projection, and collage.

I was very fortunate to have a job for most of last year, but working well beyond the customary 40 hours a week in these new circumstances was disastrous for my mental health and creative practice. For the first few months of this solitary arrangement, I was lucky if I ended each day with just enough energy to bathe and feed myself. Readers, no doubt, will recognize this feeling immediately—a pervasive fogginess, a dearth of initiative, contained on all sides by fear, dread, and exhaustion. The immediate reaction for many of us possessing an artistic temperament is to heal through the work, to create from a place of self-preservation as a therapeutic exercise (because, to be perfectly honest, very few working artists can afford traditional talk therapy).

After a nights-and-weekends work schedule, I finished a short film in my little office consisting of whatever I had on hand. It’s a wild departure from my usual narrative practice of snappy dialogue and meticulously-designed sets, edging my practice into a heretofore unexplored aesthetic and style.

Sixteen Showings was my first attempt to make a film without in-person collaborations: Tessa Strain’s narration, Matt Macfarlane’s original score, and Eliana Zebrow’s rich sound mix were directed entirely over email. The film was tangential to my would-be narrative feature, but very much apiece with my overarching vision. Finishing this solo effort was a balm—somehow I had made something new despite… well, you know, everything. But what now? Surveying the fruits of this months-long process, I struggled to conceive of a suitable afterlife beyond the customary Vimeo upload. Where could I screen this? What context could there possibly be for a theological exploration of isolation, plague, and revolt? Calling it a “shut-in watercolor movie,” or “moving altar,” while elegiac, didn’t quite fit the bill.

Enter Inney Prakash’s well-timed tweet and timely festival. Emboldened by his transparency and programmatic voice, I steeled myself for yet another humbly-toned inquiry. When Sixteen Showings was selected, I was shocked, ecstatic and, in a way, relieved: if there was an audience for this film, surely I would find it at Prismatic Ground. Having never enjoyed a virtual premiere, I went into the experience as a total neophyte. But for every gripe there was praise in equal measure: the pleasure of connecting with an otherwise distant viewership, public recognition for work made under great duress. Prismatic Ground helped me recontextualize what felt like a moving target. More than a descriptor or genre, “experimental documentary” affords artists a wide berth to do just that: experiment with cinematic and journalistic techniques within a nonfiction framework. To that end, I began to understand the dual significance of Sixteen Showings as a documentary about Julian of Norwich’s life and, by extension, my own.

In a festival space laid low by last year’s pandemic, Prakash saw an opportunity to challenge “the toxic or tedious norms governing festival culture, and to emphasize inclusivity and access.” Where the year’s higher-profile festivals sought to replicate the exclusivity of their in-person events with geo-blocked premiers and Zoom happy hours, Prismatic Ground promised viewers a deliberate antithesis. Its programming, ethos, and even web presence were tailor-made for the online space, prioritizing widespread access and a filmmaker-centered focus on screenings and Q&As. Prakash’s curation was mission-driven: “It was important to me to strike a balance,” he said, “between early career and established filmmakers, palatable and challenging work, passion and polish.” The line-up generously gave equal weight to artists at every stage of their process. Instead of single-film, time-sensitive screenings, audiences enjoyed free reign to explore and engage of their own accord, a heretofore unheard of format—online and off.

Organized in a series of “waves,” Prismatic Ground was structured around four separate collections touching on simultaneously personal and societal themes. It was reassuring to screen Sixteen Showings alongside equally intimate works, each with a different visual and philosophical approach. I was, and still am, grateful to Prakash for including my film. Despite being a newcomer to experimental filmmaking and documentary, I never once felt like an impostor. That feeling carried over to my experience as a viewer as well: these were films unlike any I’d seen, whether due to their newness or, in the case of repertory titles, my own lack of access. I am grateful to the festival for offering an avenue through which to engage with the work of other like-minded artists.

I was eager to hear from my fellow filmmakers about their road to the festival and experience as participants in this bold experiment in public exhibition. While we all arrived through different avenues, I immediately noticed a shared resonance. A wide net-approach to programming naturally attracted filmmakers reeling from the exclusionary nature of the mainstream festival circuit. Filmmaker Angelo Madsen Max (Two Sons and a River of Blood, 2021) was quick to note how “Inney was able to really access all of the different layers of what the piece was doing.” For director Sarah Friedland (Drills, 2020) it was the fervor of how Prakash had “created the festival he wanted to exist, instead of trying to reform an established festival” that drew her to the event.

For filmmakers navigating constraints brought on by the pandemic, and its ongoing economic aftermath, social media provided the sense of community missing from in-person festivals. Elias ZX (You Deserve The Best, 2018) was already familiar with Prakash’s programming work on “After Civilization” when they submitted their film. “We became friends through Twitter, [and] he told me about his plan to make an experimental documentary festival.” Screening online “gave my film space to breathe in a way that is really uncommon for festivals. Every viewer was allowed to have a completely unique experience with the film.” Virginia-based filmmaker Lydia Moyer (The Well-Prepared Citizen’s Solution, 2020) saw the festival as a chance to broaden and strengthen these seemingly disparate filmmaking communities. “As a person who lives in a rural place, it’s great that so much interesting work has been available this year to anyone who’s got enough bandwidth (literally and figuratively).” Moyer said. “The way this is set up is for online viewing, not just trying to transfer an in-person experience online.”

Programming the work of early career filmmakers alongside more established artists was more than a canny curatorial choice. The variety presented across these four waves expanded the audience’s access to repertory titles, while simultaneously reiterating the connection between both older and more recent offerings. Prismatic Ground’s streaming platform and presentation stood out for director Chris Harris (Reckless Eyeballing, 2004), who “had some streaming experiences that weren’t so happy in terms of the technical aspects.” The festival’s creative exhibition format was especially taken by “the mix of programming, special live events, and the flexibility of accommodating filmmakers with the option of live and recorded Q&As.” For prolific filmmaker Lynne Sachs, Prismatic Ground represented “an entirely new, unbelievably adventurous, compassionate approach to the viewing of experimentally driven cinema,” emphasizing that the festival itself was “beyond anything I have ever seen in my life.”

Among the filmmakers I spoke with, Prismatic Ground’s liberal approach to exhibition belied a tremendous sense of potential for artists navigating a post-COVID festival ecosystem. Harris noticed an “[increasing] festival bandwidth for underseen/emerging Black experimental filmmakers,” a tendency that he “[hopes] to see continue after COVID.” In lieu of a return to in-person only screenings, the general consensus saw streaming as a fixture in future festivals. “I don’t think it is going to be possible to put the toothpaste back in the tube here,” noted Zx, emphasizing that “more access will be good for filmmakers… and will challenge programmers to be more competitive, to release more obscure films that are harder to find.”

Prakash’s groundbreaking work has already heeded the call, citing critic Abby Sun’s Berlin Critics’ Week essay “On Criticism” as a guiding principle. “Festivals aren’t merely reacting to social conditions,” Sun writes. “They are often the primary creators of them.” Prismatic Ground’s focus on diverse curation and access reaches well beyond the artistic ramifications. Prakash’s end goal is emboldening, a manifesto of sorts: “Enough of premiere politics, prohibitive pricing, playing only the same handful of films at every festival. Let’s create better conditions. There is a moral imperative to keep doing virtual screenings now that we know we can and how.”

“A Month of Single Frames” at Vienna Shorts

Vienna Shorts
May 27, 2021
https://www.viennashorts.com/en/programs/feed-me-kjvrxdtrmq

FOCUS

In these times of crisis we are getting so much information we would probably have ignored if things were different. Such tidbits include details about aerosols that potentially spread viruses and how they disperse in a room when we exhale, or the necessity of good ventilation in spaces where we like to spend time — like a movie theater.

As a festival whose films often directly reflect the events around us, it’s hard to get around a subject as all-encompassing as the pandemic. At the same time, we wanted to avoid a sensationalistic gaze and tried to take the pandemic as a departure point to throw open the windows and follow our desire and curiosity to let in the bizarre, the drama, the memories, the journeys toward everywhere and nowhere — in short: to let in some fresh air for once and take a deep breath. How does that pretty song by the Hollies go? Sometimes / All We Need Is THE AIR THAT WE BREATHE … (de)

MEMORIES OF TRAVELING
Oh, to finally pack our travel bags again! Approaching this semblance of freedom and experience via memories, five female filmmakers let us partake in their journeys—whether it’s with their own footage of past travels, found footage of the travels of others, or footage they’ve been given by someone to work with. We tour Austrian lakes, an American beach, the Middle East, the big blue on a big ship, and elsewhere—also in search of ourselves and our place in this world. Let’s embark on this journey together! (db)

CURATED BY
Doris Bauer (Vienna Shorts)

SEEEN SEHEN
Bady Minck
AT 1998, 5 min 12 sec

A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES
Barbara Hammer, Lynne Sachs
US 2019, 14 min 9 sec

THERE ARE NO WRONG CHOICES
Anne Collet
BE 2015, 30 min

PASSAGEN
Lisl Ponger
AT 1996, 10 min 46 sec

OCCIDENTE
Ana Vaz
FRPT 2014, 15 min 15 sec

“Severing the Impact on Memory” at PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art

Severing the Impact on Memory – Online Video Program
PHI Foundation for the Contemporary Arts
May 19-26, 2021

https://fondation-phi.org/en/event/severing-impact-on-memory/

About

The PHI Foundation presents Severing the Impact on Memory, an online video program in conjunction with the exhibition Lee Bae: UNION.

Through processes of reimagination, preservation and transformation, memory allows us to narrate reality and a fictionalized memory, to look into the past, the feeling of belonging, and death. This video program explores the memory of what makes life tangible, and considers how both the body and nature experience, measure and translate the impact of change. This program includes videos by Patricia Domínguez, Jean-Jacques Martinod, and Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer.

A podcast in conversation with Patricia Domínguez, Jean-Jacques Martinod and Lynne Sachs was launched in complement to the online video program.

La Bala de Sandoval (Jean-Jacques Martinod, 2019, 17 min 10 sec, Spanish, English subtitles)
A Month of Single Frames (Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer, 2019, 14 min, English)
La balada de las sirenas secas (The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids) (Patricia Domínguez, 2020, 31 min 39 sec, Spanish, English subtitles)
La balada de las sirenas secas (The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids) by Patricia Domínguez was commissioned by TBA21 for st_age.

Curated by Victoria Carrasco, PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art
The videos will be presented in their original language.

Synopses

A Month of Single Frames
Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer, 2019
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.

La Bala de Sandoval
Jean-Jacques Martinod, 2019
Isidro meanders through the rainforest while he and his brother remember the times he found himself face to face with death itself.

La balada de las sirenas secas (The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids)
Patricia Domínguez, 2020
For La balada de las sirenas secas (The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids), Patricia Domínguez collaborated with Las Viudas del Agua, a group of water defenders, educators and herbalists who are devoting their lives to the fight for liberating the water resources within their communities in Petorca, Chile. The Ballad of the Dry Mermaids examines the complex flows of water in terms of the possibilities for crying, actualizing memory in the digital era and creating multi-species myths of resistance in the capitalist system.

Biographies

Victoria Carrasco
Born in Montreal, Victoria Carrasco is a Canadian and Chilean curator. She currently occupies the role of Gallery Management and Adjunct Curator — Public Programs at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art. She holds an MA in Performance Curation from the Institute of Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University; a BA in Environmental Design from Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and a BFA with concentration in Photography from Concordia University. She was awarded the 2019 Ford Foundation ICPP Leadership Fellowship from Wesleyan University.

Her research examines the limitations of public art as performance as a utopian concept through notions of space, medium, and legacy. Her curatorial practice extends from gallery management— challenging processes and promoting equality within workplace culture, and studying the visitor experience in a mediatory context of discussion and transmission of knowledge—as well as developing collaborations and relationships for the presentation of performance.

Patricia Domínguez
Bringing together experimental research on ethnobotany, healing practices, and the corporatization of wellbeing, the work of Patricia Domínguez (b. 1984, Santiago, Chile) focuses on how neoliberalism perpetuates colonial practices of extraction and exploitation.

Recent solo exhibitions include Madre Drone, CentroCentro, Madrid, and Cosmic Tears, Yeh Art Gallery, New York (both 2020); Green Irises, Gasworks, London (2019); Llanto Cósmico, Twin Gallery, Madrid (2018); Eres un Princeso, Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio; Los ojos serán lo último en pixelarse, Galería Patricia Ready, Santiago; and Focus Latinoamérica, ARCOMadrid, Madrid (all 2016). Recent group exhibitions include Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Transmediale, Berlin (both 2021); MOMENTA | Biennale de l’image, Montreal; The trouble is staying, Meet Factory, Prague (both 2019); What is going to happen is not ‘the future’, but what we are going to do, ARCOMadrid; Working for the Future Past, SEMA, Seoul (both 2018).

She has recently been the recipient of the SIMETRIA prize to participate in a residency at CERN, Switzerland (2021), among others. Her work has appeared in books such as Younger than Jesus: Artist Directory (New Museum/Phaidon Press, 2009); Health (MIT Press/Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art, 2020), Technics Improvised: Activating Touch in Global Media Art University of Minnesota Press and Contemporary Art and Climate Change, Thames & Hudson’s World of Art series (both 2021). Her studies include a Master’s Degree in Studio Art from Hunter College, New York (2013) and a Botanical Art & Illustration Certificate from the New York Botanical Garden (2011). She is currently director of the ethnobotanical platform Studio Vegetalista.

Jean-Jacques Martinod
Jean-Jacques Martinod is an Ecuadorian-American filmmaker and multimedia artist originally from the city of Guayaquil. His works oscillate between modalities of hybrid cinemas using methodologies that experiment with archival materials, celluloid film, analog tape, digital media, synesthetic operations, personal mythologies and travelogues, in bifurcations that stand out among the ramifications of the aforementioned. His work has been exhibited at the Cinemateca Nacional del Ecuador Ulises Estrella, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, and festivals that include FIDMarseille, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Images Festival, Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, European Media Arts Festival, Les Inattendus film festival (très) indépendants, Sheffield Doc/Fest, ULTRACinema Experimental Festival de Cine Experimental y Found Footage, among others, as well as galleries, cultural centers, and clandestine DIY screenings. He is also co-founder of EVIDENCE, a micro-publishing project that releases radical poetry, visual arts, photography, and also para-essayistic works within the world of avant-garde cinema. He received his MFA from Concordia University in Montreal where he was a member of the Global Emergent Media Lab, Fabrique-mondes and the Centre for Expanded Poetics.

Lynne Sachs
Between 1994 and 2006, Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Witnessing the world through a feminist lens, she expresses intimacy by the way she uses her camera. With the making of Your Day is My Night (2013) and The Washing Society (2018), she expanded her practice to include live performance. As of 2020, she has made 37 films. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/Fest have all presented retrospectives of her work. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems in 2019. On the occasion of the 2021 virtual theater release of her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist’s maddeningly mercurial father, the Museum of the Moving Image presented a career-ranging survey of Lynne’s work. Lynne lives in Brooklyn with her husband filmmaker Mark Street. Together, they have two daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs. lynnesachs.com

Severing the Impact on Memory – Conversation with Artists Patricia Domínguez, Jean-Jacques Martinod, Lynne Sachs, and curator Victoria Carrasco

Severing the Impact on Memory – Conversation with the Artists
Thursday, May 13, 2021
PHI Foundation
https://fondation-phi.org/en/audio/severing-impact-on-memory-conversation/

In this podcast, Victoria Carrasco (adjunct curator of public programs, PHI Foundation) meets with artists Patricia Domínguez, Jean-Jacques Martinod and Lynne Sachs. This conversation took place in the lead up to the event Severing the Impact on Memory, an online video program presented in conjunction with the exhibition

Through processes of reimagination, preservation and transformation, memory allows us to narrate reality and a fictionalized memory, to look into the past, the feeling of belonging, and death. This video program—Severing the Impact on Memory—explores the memory of what makes life tangible, and considers how both the body and nature experience, measure and translate the impact of change.

In this conversation, the curator and the artists explore the topic of memory within the context of this program as well as the pandemic, and respectively, through the creating process of the videos and their impact. They discuss reimagining and re-enliving, how to preserve moments, either through the impermanence of video art, and how the body can connect and reconnect to memory, nature and the future.

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

Body

Opening Night: Lynne Sachs + Workshop

Severing the Impact on Memory – Conversation with Artists Patricia Domínguez, Jean-Jacques Martinod, Lynne Sachs, and curator Victoria Carrasco