Fresh from her early 2021 retrospective at New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image, filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to San Francisco where she lived and went to school (SFSU & SFAI) between 1985 and ‘95. It was here that Lynne really immersed herself in our city’s experimental and documentary community, working closely with local artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson and Trinh T. Minh-ha and spending time at the Film Arts Foundation (RIP), Canyon Cinema, SF Cinematheque, and Other Cinema.
“For more than thirty years, artist Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political conflict; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” – Edo Choi, Assistant Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image.
Accompanying our Bay Area premiere of Sachs’s Film About a Father Who, the Roxie offers two accompanying shorts sidebars programmed by filmmaker and Other Cinema curator Craig Baldwin.
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. (74 min., 2020, A Cinema Guild Release)
Critic’s Pick! “[A] brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait.” – Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times
“Sachs achieves a poetic resignation about unknowability inside families, and the hidden roots never explained from looking at a family tree.” – Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
“Formidable in its candor and ambition.” – Jonathan Romney, Screen International
Tickets for FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO will be available on February 12
SACHS SHORTS SIDEBARS
Sidebar 1: INQUIRIES INTO SELF AND OTHER
Still from “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (4 min., 1986) Sermons and Sacred Pictures (29 min., 1989) The House of Science: a museum of false facts (30 min., 1991) Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (made with Dana Sachs) (33 min., 1994)
“As sidebar to her fresh Father feature, here is the first of two shorts programs, showcasing the astonishing cinematic artistry of Lynne Sachs…all made during her san fran years and recently digitally restored. Her ‘89 Sermons offers an early glimmer of her sensitivity to both marginalized communities and their archives, as she gracefully threads ultra-rare ‘30s & ’40s footage from Rev. LO Taylor into a tapestry of visibility and respect for Memphis’ Black community. Her facility for celluloid extrapolation is demonstrated in even more creative ways in House of Science, a personal essay on female identity, told through found footage, poetic text, and playful experimental technique. Which Way is East raises its eyes to engagements in international waters, and to insightful exchanges with her expat sister Dana, towards new understandings of and in the oh-so-historically charged Republic of Vietnam. Opening is Lynne’s first ever 16mm, Still Life.” – CB
TRT: 96 min.
Tickets for Sidebar 1: INQUIRIES INTO SELF AND OTHER will be available on February 12
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Sidebar 2: PROFILES IN COURAGE
A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (14 min., 2019) Investigation of a Flame (45 min., 2001) And Then We Marched (4 min., 2017) The Washing Society (co-directed with Lizzie Olesker) (44 min., 2018)
“Characteristically, Sachs speaks in first person to cultural difference and dissent, here particularly valorizing acts of resistance and struggles for justice. Her collaboration with the recently deceased lesbian maker Barbara Hammer keynotes this ‘Solidarity’ set, with Lynne literally framing/finishing her mentor’s last project. Younger allies are also acknowledged in Sachs’ inspiring 2017 celebration of women’s political power on contested Washington, DC turf. The 2001 Investigation is a tribute to the courage and conscience of the epochal Berrigan-led burning of Baltimore draft records, made while Sachs was teaching in that town. And the local debut of The Washing Society, produced with playwright Lizzie Olesker, stakes their support of NYC’s low-paid laundry workers—mostly women of color—in even another radiant illumination of the little-seen truths of contemporary race/class inequity.” – CB
TRT: 107 min.
Tickets for Sidebar 2: PROFILES IN COURAGE will be available on February 12
A conversation with the US filmmaker Lynne Sachs about the importance of the autobiographical in her films
From the beginning of your career as an artist and filmmaker you were in one way or another present in your films: as a body, as a voice, or with certain‚ chapters’ of your own (family) history. Why was this personal or autobiographical approach important to you, why is it still relevant?
Presence in a film comes in a variety of forms. When I used to cut the actual film footage with a guillotine splicer, I felt that my finger prints on the celluloid were the beginning of my engagement with both the celluloid material and the moment that it signified through the images I had collected with my camera. Of course, that haptic connection has now disappeared with the intervention of the digital. Still, in our current time, every image or sound that you collect, be it your own or a found one, is a document of a thought. During the first decade of my filmmaking practice, almost every film I made included some image of my own body, sometimes clothed, sometimes not. It almost became a joke in my family. ”Oh, there she is again!” But, for me, this was a way to subvert the subject/object paradigm of the camera. I needed to flow back and forth, as if through the mechanism of the lens itself. The presence of my body paralleled the presence of my words, whether experienced aurally as voice-over or on the screen through my hand-written gesture. Today, we all recognize the inundation of media in our lives. With the sensation of feeling this material as either an assault or caress (depending on your mood as you scroll through your cell phone just before going to sleep at night), each of us must find a way to register awareness and critique.
Although you choose a personal approach, you represent yourself (and others) more in a fragmented way than as ‚authentic’ characters. What is the idea behind this?
Seeing my work through your eyes is a revelation, actually. I would not have articulated my approach this way, and yet I completely agree with your assessment. I have never identified with storytelling and, in turn, the effort to create a character. This homage to narrative tradition I find reductive and limiting, in the same way that I would find writing a conventional feature film script to be deeply restrictive. One of the words I despise most in today’s parlance is the word “template”. When I discovered that there are templates for writing feature film screenplays, I felt like weeping. When one uses the word “personal” to describe their work, I think they are claiming ownership for all aspects of the creative process, from the structure to the content. Yes, I do feel an affinity for a more fragmented depiction of another person because I want to make clear that my ability to understand is determined by my point of view. These fissures give someone watching the film the possibility of providing the glue, the connections, the linkages that always circle back to their own life experiences.
How do you deal with the double position of being the author and the figure of your films at the same time?
Sometimes I make films that are very clearly an outgrowth of my own identity as a white Jewish woman born in the United States in 1961. I can’t change any of that and I can’t simply hide one part and flaunt another. Other times, I make films that don’t make those ingredients so apparent, even though they are always there. Even when my voice, my writing or my body are not there, we all know that my position is influencing every decision I make, how person is framed, how a sound is heard, which music is included, which images are given the space to thrive and which are punished for their very existence.
When speaking about her autifictional novel The Cost of Living, the British writer Deborah Levy characterized her literary (female) subject as a person who is not herself, but who is ‚close’ to her. Who are you in your films?
Deborah Levy’s sense of her own presence in her work is very intriguing, even candid. This reminds of a cultural theory observation by filmmaker, poet and teacher Trinh T. Minh-ha in her essay “Speaking Nearby” (1992) which I quote here:
“There is not much, in the kind of education we receive here in the West, that emphasizes or even recognizes the importance of constantly having contact with what is actually within ourselves, or of understanding a structure from within ourselves. The tendency is always to relate to a situation or to an object as if it is only outside of oneself. Whereas elsewhere, in Vietnam, or in other Asian and African cultures for example, one often learns to “know the world inwardly,” so that the deeper we go into ourselves, the wider we go into society.”
Trinh was a professor of mine in graduate school. I am convinced that her practice of transposing her understanding of herself to her earnest, but always recognizably incomplete, effort to project on others had an enormous impact on my work.
In your films about family members like your father in Film About a Father Who (2020) or The Last Happy Day (2009), which tells of a distant cousin of yours, you sometimes seem to dissolve as the authorial voice, or to put it another way, you pass on your voice – for example to your siblings or children. Is this also a form of giving up some of the power that one has as a narrative authority?
Hmmmm. This makes me think very hard about my process. That’s what a good interview does. Thank you for giving me this chance to be introspective. On one level, I am very committed to a non-hierarchical way of working, one that does not privilege my perspective over another person’s. On another level, perhaps I am ashamed of expressing my thoughts or feelings in a singular voice so I depend on others to prop me up. Both of these films are part of a triptych of films, the third of which is States of UnBelonging (2005). The intention with this three-part endeavor was to grapple with the ways we can and cannot understand another human being. States of UnBelonging looks at a woman in Israel-Palestine who was total stranger to me. The Last Happy Day is a fragmented portrait of a distance relative, so one degree closer, in a way, to me. Film About a Father Who is, obviously, about my dad. That was supposed to be the easiest, and ultimately it was the most difficult. Closeness and intimacy somehow became an obstacle. I end up relying on others to give me clarity.
In A Month of Single Frames, your film with images, sounds and notes by the now deceased experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer, I was very taken with your expanding the First Person Singular. What gave you the idea of this grammatical shift?
Oh, I am thrilled to be talking about voice, language and grammar all in one question. In A Month of Single Frames I decided that I would use the expanded Second Person that includes an ambiguous “you”. It could be the “you” that we usually find in a correspondence with another person. Or, it could be the “you” that embraces all of us in one sweeping address. When I write the word you, the viewer might think I am talking to Barbara Hammer, who is no longer alive but through cinema can be included in this dialogue. Or, the viewer may feel that I am addressing them. It’s kind of wonderfully unclear, which might be an accident or might be intentional. I will never tell.
This is how I see you. This is how you see yourself.
You are here. I am here with you.
This place is still this place. This place is no longer this place. It must be different.
You are alone. I am here with you in this film. There are others here with us. We are all together.
Time less yours mine
(On Screen text by Lynne Sachs from A Month of Single Frames)
For some time, personal or autobiographical narratives are strongly present in documentary filmmaking. How would you explain the strong interest in the personal in these times?
My interpretation of this current enthusiasm for the personal narrative has to do with our interest in knowing who is speaking to us. So much media in our lives is delivered to us without this clarity of positionality. We are forced to discern and to guess how who someone is affects what they are saying to us. Maybe it is refreshing to have this kind of transparency.
The American filmmaker Barbara Hammer, who died in 2019, was considered the grande dame of queer-feminist cinema. Her experimental documentary films, which deal with topics such as identity, sexuality and physicality, have shaped several generations of women filmmakers. Lukas Maurer visited her friend and collaborator, the director Lynne Sachs, in Brooklyn and had a conversation with her about the avant-garde icon as well as her “Tribute to Barbara Hammer”. For this obituary, Sachs used DYKETACTICS, OPTIC NERVE and VITAL SIGNS selected three exemplary films and combined them with the very personal obituary A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES.
2020 comes to an end, and with it, a great twist of the screw that seems to return the world to a primitive state, to recognize its own fragility and the precariousness of an economic and social system that crumbles like a house of cards. In the midst of chaos, at home, we take refuge in the light pulses of the cinema, in the rhythmic variations, in the echo of the sounds of our televisions, computers, screens. This is the record of a cinephilia that resists, that remains and reinvents itself. Within the chaos, the light of the cinema continues to shine on us.
2020 llega a su fin, y con el, un gran giro de tuerca que parece devolver al mundo a un estado primigenio, a reconocer su propia fragilidad y lo precario de un sistema económico/social que cae como una casa de cartas. En medio del caos, en casa, nos refugiamos en los pulsos lumínicos del cine, en las variantes rítmicas, en el eco de los sonidos de nuestros televisores, computadoras, pantallas. Este es el registro de una cinefilia que resiste, que permanece y se reinventa. Dentro del caos, la luz del cine nos sigue alumbrando.
Ivonne Sheen Filmmaker, Film critic, staff Desistfilm (Peru)
After a year of many symbolic and real deaths, my relationship with cinema is also changing. A year full of emotional oscillations, due to constant changes and / or uncertainties. A year with limited emotional storage space, with nearby suffering and with radicalized inequalities. A year that feels multiplied in its duration. I share this list as an acknowledgment to those filmmakers and artists, whose work has given me experiences of wonder, questioning, learning, thinking, of encountering in the distance.
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Luego de un año de muchas pérdidas vitales, mi relación con el cine también se viene transformando. Un año lleno de oscilaciones emocionales, debido a los constantes cambios y/o incertidumbres, un año con poco espacio de almacenamiento afectivo, con mucho sufrimiento circundante y con mucha desigualdad radicalizada. Un año que se siente multiplicado en su duración. Comparto esta lista como un agradecimiento a aquellas y aquellos cineastas/artistas, cuyos trabajos me han dado experiencias de asombro, de cuestionamiento, de aprendizaje, de pensamiento, de encuentro a la distancia.
En orden alfabético (alphabetical order):
A month of single frames (2019) – Lynne Sachs Asparagus (1979) – Suzan Pit Como el cielo después de llover (2020) – Mercedes Gaviria E Unum Pluribus (2020) – Libertad Gills Heimat ist ein Raum aus Zeit (2019) – Thomas Heise Judy versus Capitalism (2020) – Mike Hoolboom La obra audiovisual de María Galindo (vista en Youtube y Vimeo). La obra de Sarah Maldoror (vista en muestras del Museo Reina Sofía y de Another Gaze). Les Prostituées de Lyon parlent (1975) – Carole Roussopoulos Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2019) – Eliza Hittman Oh My Homeland (2019) – Stephanie Barber Río Turbio (2020) – Tatiana Mazú Self-portrait film series (2010-2019) – Zhang Mengqi So many ideas impossible to do all (2019) – Mark Street Thorax (2019) – Siegfried A. Fruhauf Variety (1983) – Bette Gordon Vision Nocturna (2019) – Carolina Moscoso
In addition to top 2020 releases, we invited our friends and contributors to submit lists of 2020 “first viewings” and discoveries, broadly defined. Below, please find their wonderful, weird, and endlessly fascinating responses, along with their individual 2020 lists as applicable.
Here are the critics who listed it:
SARAH FENSOM
Film About a Father Who Portrait of a Lady on Fire (You’ll Make It In) Florida Losing Ground War and Peace (1968) House of Games How to Beat the High Cost of Living The Skin The Potluck and the Passion Cactus Flower Dry Summer Last Hurrah for Chivalry Wolfen Happy Go Lucky The Pilgrim (1923) The Big Country Benji In Heaven There Is No Beer? Under the Volcano How the West Was Won A Midwinter’s Tale (aka In the Bleak Midwinter) Grandma’s Boy (1922) Jack-o The Pruitt-Igoe Myth Great Expectations (1946) Images
CHRIS SHIELDS Babyteeth Film About a Father Who Sonic the Hedgehog Portrait of a Lady on Fire
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES is also listed:
INNEY PRAKASH
1. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
2. Infinity Minus Infinity (The Otolith Group)
3. Circumstantial Pleasures (Lewis Klahr)
4. I’ve Been Afraid (Cecelia Condit)
5. A Month of Single Frames (Lynne Sachs)
6. Shirley (Josephine Decker)
7. Talking About Trees (Suhaib Gasmelbari)
8. Mangrove (Steve McQueen)
9. Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnsonn)
10. The Giverny Document (Ja’Tovia Gary)
From intimate meditations on nature’s healing and drug-induced becoming, to radical deconstructions of cinema, language and architecture, this programme showcases film’s potential to both abstract and interpret a chaotic world.
Whilst some makers experiment with form and format, disrupting the image itself through corrupted DCPs and violated stock, others look to articulate the political and personal, using film as a vessel for self-expression.
For this edition, we welcome back LSFF regulars Max Hattler (Collision) and Lynne Sachs (Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor) with collaborative work “made with and for” Barbara Hammer, alongside new additions in collective Telcosystems (Louthings) and talents-to-watch Henny Woods and Nicky Chue. Programmed by Philip Ilson. 75′
This programme contains flashing images. Please note, the film A Month Of Single Frames can only be accessed by UK audiences at the request of the filmmaker.
Films
TESTFILM #1 Telcosystems, 14’, 2020, Croatia Exploring the creative possibilities of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) – the new global infrastructure for film projection in cinemas. Can one upset the default behavior of the DCP system, or is the system designed to exclude any possibility of human intervention?
THE PHILOSOPHY OF HORROR – PART I. Péter Lichter, Bori Máté, 8’, 2020, Hungary An abstract adaptation of Noël Carroll’s influential film theory book of the same title, using hand painted and decayed 35mm strips of classic slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street.
APPLEFIG Louise Ward Morris, 4’, 2020, United Kingdom A study of internet search algorithms’ potential to irreversibly alter how humans form meaning and understand concepts.
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES Lynne Sachs, 14’, 2020, USA In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one month artist residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder and kept a journal.
PLANT PORTALS: BREATH Nicky Chue, 4’, 2020, United Kingdom An experimental meditation on the unspoken history many queer and trans people of colour carry daily, connecting bumblebees, colonial trauma, alternate universes and the complicated concept of ‘rest’ to ask: can nature heal us?
GLF LSD Jordan Baseman, 13’, 2020, United Kingdom Narrated by Alan Wakeman, an early member of the Gay Liberation Front, discussing the connection between the GLF and LSD as an essential part of becoming.
ECHOES OF DIFFICULT CONVERSATIONS DURING LOCKDOWN Henny Woods, 5’, 2020, United Kingdom A recreation of uncomfortable conversations from its filmmaker’s past in a time when socialising is impossible.
SERIAL PARALLELS Max Hattler, 9’, 2020, Hong Kong Hong Kong’s signature architecture of horizon-eclipsing housing estates is reimagined as parallel rows of film strips.
CUT UP UP CUT Kristian Baughurst, 5’, 2020, United Kingdom An experimental visual poetry film created in response to the 2020 global pandemic and William S. Burroughs’ cut-up poem, Formed in The Stance.
Cámara Lúcida has the purpose of being the convergence of cinematography surrounded by poetry, politics and sensitivity; like the main axis of their aesthetic and narrative being; purposes that deserve being preserved in a society that, slowly but strongly, tries to disappear the criticism and meditation through the overwhelming homogenization.
Cámara Lúcida distinguishes itself for showcasing films that show the mixture of regards and identities, turning the screening into an empathic place to the public, through film inquiries that acquire their own free voice; making cinephilia a space of coexistence and political mindfulness.
PROGRAM: Ground transmissions · 4 They shoot letters, they write movies.
Notes, Charms: part I 2020 – USA / Ecuador – 27 ‘ Alexandra Cuesta An autobiographical accumulation of instances that describe inhabiting a post-industrial landscape, the end of a love story, and the politics of the intimate and the public. The camera as an annotation and remembrance device, beyond evoking the past, becomes a tool for the appearance and exorcization of specters. A movie as an act to forget.
Playback. Essay of a farewell. 2019 – Argentina – 14 ‘ Agustina ComediFar from the Argentine capital, in Córdoba, the end of the dictatorship predicts a spring that will last very little. “” La Delpi “” is the only survivor of a group of transvestite and transvestite friends who, towards the end of the 80s, began to die, one after another, of AIDS. In a Catholic and provincial city, the Kalas Group made playbacks and improvised dresses their weapon and their trench coat. Today the images from a unique and unpublished archive are a farewell letter, a manifesto to friendship.
Antonio valencia 2020 – Ecuador – 6 ‘ Daniela Delgado Viteri An imaginary dialogue.
Here and there 2019 – Argentina – France – 21 ‘ Melisa Liebenthal Here and there is an essay that asks about the meaning of being at home. The filmmaker uses photographs, maps and Google Earth to connect sites around the globe, not only belonging to her past, but also to her family’s complex migratory history, dating back to Hitler’s Germany and Mao’s China. . The real and the virtual are equally confusing: here or there? Maybe both at the same time.
A Month of Single Frames 2020 – USA – 14 ‘ Lynne SachsIn 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a month-long art residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The hut had no running water or electricity. While there, he shot a 16mm film, recorded sounds, and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own death process by reviewing her personal file. She gave all her images, sounds, and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a movie.
ENGLISH TRANSLATION: Try about the encounter. This year’s Sheffield Doc / Fest, which took place exclusively online due to the pandemic, dedicated a carefully curated retrospective to the filmmaker Lynne Sachs. This shows the community-creating moment of Sachs’ films, which are often the result of close collaborations – whether with family members, migrant communities or artistic companions like Barbara Hammer or Carolee Schneemann – especially under the restrictions of the pandemic: like the film critic Esther Buss argues, these films are always evidence of the ambivalence between ‘lonely’ art production on the one hand and shared experience on the other.
Lynne Sachs’ films usually begin with a tactile approach: touches with surfaces and textures of bodies, landscapes and fabrics – touches that always include or even affect the materiality of the image. Her most recent work, Film About A Father Who (2020) – the title refers to Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 film About a Woman Who… – begins with a close-up of two hands untangling the tangled white hair in a head of hair . Lynne Sachs cuts the hair of Ira Sachs, her father, who is over 80, the main character in the film and the center of gravity in a complex network of family relationships. From this concrete and symbolically legible entrance image, a fragmentary narrative unfolds that spans 35 years.
Between 1984 and 2019, Sachs repeatedly filmed his own father: a man who is still difficult to decipher for his family members to this day. A promiscuous hippie businessman who had the reputation of being “Hugh Hefner of Park City”, Ira Sachs, father of nine children from different women, is entirely a product of the 1960s. Sachs is only marginally concerned with the finding of a patriarchal order that was carried forward in a break with existing moral and sexual norms. The film About A Father Who is rather an attempt to decenter the enigmatic figure of the father in the form of a polyphonic, sometimes contradicting essay and to let it merge into a horizontal narrative of family connections. With every new memory, every new face, another mesh is woven in the fabric of the Sachs family, which has grown steadily over the course of the film. The result is a collage of different perspectives and voices, which also remains fragile on the level of the material. Grainy 8 and 16 mm images and muddy VHS line up with high-definition digital material, old and new recordings for interviews and home movies – a significant part of which was shot by Ira Sachs and Ira Sachs Jr., Lynne Sachs’ younger brother and filmmaker too. [1]
As part of Sheffield Doc / Fest, the film About A Father Who was shown to an international audience for the first time in early October. The documentary film festival, which took place exclusively online this year, also dedicated a carefully curated program of five films from 1994 to 2018 to Sachs. The selection focused on the term “translation”, with which Sachs is sometimes more, sometimes less explicit in her work (the first in The Task of the Translator, 2010, a film that answers Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same name with three body studies). What was meant was not just translating from spoken to visual language or transferring from a source to a target language. [2] The thematic bracket here was, in general, translation as a practice of encounter and communication and, connected to it, as an awareness of difference. There is a vivid picture of this in the film About A Father Who: The mother had mastered grammar, Sachs said in an interview with her siblings Dana and Ira. Everything was transparent, linear and in the right place, there were commas and points. The punctuation marks with the father, on the other hand, are exclamation marks and question marks.
The work of Lynne Sachs, born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1961 and trained at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she a. a. collaborated with artists such as Bruce Conner and Trinh T. Minh-Ha are hybrid structures. Since her first films, Drawn and Quartered and Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (both from 1987), which are strongly determined by Laura Mulvey’s feminist essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), she has made more than 30 mostly short and medium-length films. The aforementioned “encounter” is essential for Sachs’ artistic practice. Her films are often the result of close collaborations: for example with close or distant family members, migrant communities or artistic companions such as Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann or Gunvor Nelson – she dedicated the film Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor to them in 2018.
As an experimental documentary filmmaker, Sachs always seeks the permeability of authorial authority and filmic subject. In relation to the concept of “fly on the wall” – the most invisible observer – that is decisive for US American direct cinema, she programmatically distanced itself: “As a documentary filmmaker, I am always reckoning with what it means to shoot ‘from the outside in ‘, using my camera to peer into the lives of people from other places, cultures, or communities. Honestly, it’s the foundation of the documentary paradigm that most disturbs me, “said the artist in an interview with the documentary film magazine Modern Times Review. [3] Sachs is always present in her films: as a body, as an off-voice, as a text. There are also fictional and performative elements.
Your Day is My Night (2013) and the film The Washing Society (2018), made in collaboration with playwright and director Lizzie Olesker, both provide insights into the undocumented cultural microcosms of New York, which has been Sachs ’hometown for many years. The subject of Your Day is My Night is a so-called shift-bed apartment in Chinatown – an apartment in which Chinese immigrants from the working class share a bed in layers (i.e. in coordination with their respective day and night jobs), sometimes over many years. With a precise and poetic eye for the economy of the rooms, Sachs portrays a household with seven residents, or rather ‘characters’, on the corner of Hester Street. In the form of autobiographical monologues and re-enacted conversations, these provide information about political upheavals and family separations, talk about exhausting journeys, fears and longings. In an abstract setting that looks like a theater room, the beds become a stage for a stylized body game. The camera touches lying, sleeping and stretching bodies in haptic movements.
The Washing Society is a document of the invisible work that has increasingly come into the public eye with the outbreak of Covid-19 ‘. The setting is in the laundromats that are increasingly being displaced by large laundries in urban areas. With a mixed cast of actresses and real laundresses, Sachs observes the repetitive gestures of reproductive work and gives a voice to the experiences of the predominantly African-American and Hispanic workers. The laundromat is increasingly contouring itself as a space in which underpaid work, racism and classicism become just as evident as solidarity and community. The historical anchor of the film is the eponymous “Washing Society”, an organization founded in 1881 by 20 African-American laundresses that fought for better working conditions. Looking at the remains of the washing process – the camera keeps pointing at an abject mixture of dust and hair – and the omnipresence of touch, Sachs also defines a moment of physical intimacy – “… there are still two hands … washing your skirt, your shirt, your socks, almost touching you, almost connecting with your skin. Another layer ”, it says from the off at the end.
A completely different touch takes place in A Month of Single Frames (2019), a 14-minute short film “made with and for Barbara Hammer”. Sachs processed the 8 and 16 mm film material that the pioneer of lesbian avant-garde cinema, who died in 2019, shot in the late 1990s during a month-long residency in a lonely hut with no electricity or running water on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. When Hammer began to organize her estate because of her progressive cancer, she handed the recordings over to her younger colleague with the invitation to make a film out of them. Sachs assembles tape recordings that she made in her studio shortly before the death of her mentor and on which she had them read from her Duneshack journal with Hammer’s pictures: recordings of insects, the barren vegetation in the dunes, of light reflections, shadow play and weather changes as well of banal everyday things that transform into lyrical objects when the camera looks at them. “I am overwhelmed by simplicity”, one hears Hammer say to the image of a shred of plastic film blowing in the wind. Another time she looks fascinated at a fly, in which she recognizes a miniature of the army helicopters patrolling the coast. Despite all the amazement, A Month of Single Frames is far from an essentialist view of nature. “Why is it I can’t see nature whole and pure without artifice?” Hammer wonders once. She experimented extensively with the possibilities of camera technology: for example, by slowing down the flow of film material to the point of taking individual images and playing with colored foils that throw colored lights in the sand or immerse the landscape in shimmering magenta. The most striking sign of the posthumous treatment by Sachs are the inserted text panels in which she addresses her girlfriend, who is both present and absent.
The ambivalence of isolation and, lonely ‘art production on the one hand, and shared experience on the other, could seldom be experienced as physically as in this film. A Month of Single Frames is a contemplation of nature, an homage to analog cinema and a testimony to a friendship between women without any claim to exclusivity, quite the opposite. The you in the film is always directed towards a counterpart who is invited to join together to form a community across social and geographical distances. [4] “You are alone” – “I am here with you in this film” – “There are others here with us” – “We are all together”.
Some of Lynne Sachs ‘films can be seen on her website: https://www.lynnesachs.com. A Film About A Father Who will soon be showing at various festivals, including Indie Memphis. The restrictions caused by the pandemic make online viewing possible.
Esther Buss works as a freelance film critic in Berlin. She writes u. a. for kolik.film, Jungle World, Der Tagesspiegel and Cargo. Last publication in: A story of its own: Women Film Austria since 1999, ed. by Isabella Reicher, Vienna 2020.
The seemingly seamless transition from the ‘other’ to one’s own language is repeatedly questioned by Sachs. In her Travelogue Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994) there are decidedly untranslated passages that make one aware of the linguistic difference. In this film, Sachs also works with Vietnamese parables, the translations of which remain puzzling.
When A Month of Single Frames was presented as part of the digital edition of the 66th Oberhausen Short Film Festival during the lockdown, its community-promoting message took on a larger dimension. The jury awarded the film the main prize.
A Month of Single Framesscreened in the MODES2 program at the 2020 Vancouver International Film Festival. Here Lynne Sachs speaks with curator Tammy Banister about the film.
Explora Works of any genre and nationality. A section that focuses on the search for new filmmaking signatures. Pieces that can hardly be catalogued in specific genres, and that dilute the traditional idea of cinema by exploring innovative avenues that are close to video art, documentary or avant-garde cinema
Explora – Programme 1
Look Then Below Ben Rivers 2019 22:00 United Kingdom EXPCOL
The film conjures up futuristic beings from an eerie smoke-filled landscape and the depths of the Earth. Look Then Below was shot in the vast, dark passages of Wookey Hole Caves in Somerset. The netherworld of chambers, carved out over deep time, once held remnants of lost civilisations and now foretells a future subterranean world, occupied by a species evolved from our environmentally challenged world. Part three of a trilogy of speculative films with text written by Mark von Schlegell.
Da morte nace a vida Adrián Canoura 2019 12:55 Spain EXPCOL, B&W
The film forms part of the project CINEGALICIA 2019, inspired by the film Urxa, by Carlos A. López Piñeiro and Alfredo García Pinal. Extracting the film’s most mystic elements, in a journey between impressionism and expressionism, a path is recomposed through the ritual where life emerges from death.
Mikä aika on? What Time Is? Niina Suominen 2020 07:15 Finland ANI, EXPCOL, B&W
What Time Is? places the experience of time in the centre of contemplation. The human figures act as reference points for meditation on the passage and ending of time. The work gives us a chance to reflect on the transient nature of time and the relationship of the viewer to the conflict-ridden epoch in which we live.
AQUAMARINE Billy Roisz, Dieter Kovacic 2019 05:00 Austria EXPCOLQ
‘Aquamarine’ means not only the well-known light blue hue, but also what the colour is based on, the mineral beryl. Translated literally: the colour of the sea. The film Aquamarine takes a constellation of (blue-green) colour, maritime, liquid, and of course, mineral, as a starting point for setting the cited components in a jolting, undulating balance based on the track of the same name by MOPCUT.
A Month of Single Frames
Lynne Sachs
2019 14:00 USA EXP, DOCCOL
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an art residency without water or electricity. In 2018, she began her own process of dying. She gave material from the residency to Lynne Sachs who explored Barbara’s experience of solitude. Lynne places text on the screen as a confrontation with somatic cinema, bringing us all together in multiple spaces and times.
Houses (for Margaret) Luke Fowler 2019 05:00 United Kingdom EXPCOL
Luke Fowler constructed this tribute to Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait on the occasion of her centenary. Setting off to Tait’s native Orkney, Fowler creates a record of her life and work through images of her past dwellings and filming locations, excerpts from her production diaries, and the reciting of her poem ‘Houses’ in which she reflects on the meaning of home.
