Tag Archives: Drift and Bough

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO & Short Films by Mark Street and Lynne Sachs / Ybor Microcinema

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO & Short Films by Mark Street and Lynne Sachs
Ybor Microcinema
July 22 & 23, 2023
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/film-about-a-father-who-2021-by-lynne-sachs-tickets-668483400847
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/short-films-by-lynne-sachs-and-mark-street-tickets-668484825107

Ybor Microcinema:
https://ybormicrocinema.org/

Film About A Father Who (2021) by Lynne Sachs

Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love.

Date and time
Saturday, July 22 · 7 – 10pm EDT

Location
Screen Door Cinema Kress Annex 1624 East 7th Avenue Tampa, FL 33605

About this event
In Horace’s Odes, one among many texts where this sentiment endures, the Roman poet wrote, “For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer.” It’s hardly an esoteric dictum, but nevertheless it’s duly reflected in experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ wholehearted documentary portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Something of a longstanding work-in-progress, the film draws from decades of footage shot by Sachs, her father, and her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (whose own 2005 film FORTY SHADES OF BLUE was inspired by the same so-called “Hugh Hefner of Park City”), plus others, documenting not just the sybaritic “hippie-businessman” patriarch, but also his numerous descendants. Sachs’ knotty chronicle reveals that her father has a total of nine children with several different women, two of whom the other siblings found out about only a few years back. (The film opens with Sachs brushing her elderly father’s hair, working out a particularly unpleasant snarl. “Sorry, dad,” she says. “There’s just one part that’s very tangly.” The irony is faint and benevolent, but present even so.) Sachs considers the enveloping imbroglio from her own perspective, but also takes into account the viewpoints of her eight siblings, her father’s ex-wives (including her own mother) and girlfriends, plus Ira’s mother, a gracefully cantankerous old woman in a certain amount of denial over her son’s wanton predilections and the role she played in his dysfunction. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO—the title an homage to Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…—is comprised of footage recorded between 1965 and 2019 and shot on 8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV, and digital; the fusion of all this material (by editor Rebecca Shapass) ranks among the most astounding use of personal archives that I’ve ever seen. It all exists in a state between documentary and home-movie footage, a paradigm that aptly reflects the conflict between reality and perspective, and the uncomfortable middle-ground that bisects the two. Sachs’ work often features her family, but this feels like an apotheosis of her autobiographical predisposition, likewise a question—why do the sins of the father linger?—and an answer. Among the most affecting scenes are round table discussions between the siblings where they consider revelations about their father and the implications of his actions. These scenes are heartrending not for their sadness, but rather for their naked honesty; it’s not just a film about a father who, but also a film about a love that defines a family. Sachs’ filmography is centered on infinite poetic quandaries (in voice over, she explores some of them here, such as when she muses on her father’s profession as a developer in Utah: “What happens when you own a horizon?”) and this feels like a logical conclusion to a lifetime of such profound impasses, though I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to probe life and its enigmas in a similarly masterful fashion. For all the suffering on display, Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love.

_________

Screen Door Microcinema celebrates the works of Lynne Sachs, along with her feature documentary, ‘A Film About a Father Who’

Followed by a special Q/A with Aditya Sudhakaran on Saturday, July 22, 2022

In a career spanning over 30 years of filmmaking, Lynne Sachs shares her collections of compassion with an introspective lens that often centers and returns to the filmmaker herself. As in many of her films, Sachs’ personal life and struggle are deeply connected with the themes she presents. In her latest work, ‘A Film about a Father Who,’ Sachs presents an intense study of her charismatic father and unravels the strands of his lasting impacts on their family.

There is something rhythmic and inexplicably resonant when a filmmaker can point the camera at a subject and examine familial connections and tensions just with someone’s face, body and words. For Sachs, her filmmaking affirms that it’s not just the characters who should be on an adventure, but the filmmaker as well. With her latest film, Sachs skillfully persists  in the sensation of being fragile while voicing that to be an artist is to be possibly caught in the conundrum of failure.

Lynne Sachs is no stranger to the Tampa Bay area and joins us for a special Q/A at Screen Door Microcinema. Her moving image work ranges from short experimental films to hybrid live performances to essay films, which have screened, won awards or been included in retrospectives at New York Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, Oberhausen, Viennale, Sheffield Doc/Fest.

In the spirit of great documentary filmmakers, Screendoor presents a screening of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo followed by Tampa’s own Les Blank and his study of the making of Werner Herzog’s feature in Burden of Dreams the following week.

By Aditya Sudhakaran

‘A Film about a Father Who’ plays at Screen Door Microcinema on Saturday, July 22 followed by a Q/A with Lynne Sachs. A collection of short films by Sachs’ and her spouse, filmmaker Mark Street plays Sunday, July 23.

Short Films by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street

Various Short Films introduced by the directors themselves.

Date and time
Sunday, July 23 · 3 – 6pm EDT

Location
Screen Door Cinema Kress Annex 1624 East 7th Avenue Tampa, FL 33605

The XY Chromosome Project follows the career paths of Lynne Sachs and Mark Street. To follow this path is to trace a blueprint on devotion. Working both together and individually for the past 30 years, each artist has carved out their own niche without the obvious influences of being married. They part ways to be left alone to their own creations. It is the respect for the other’s work that bonds them. Left alone, their work could not be more different. Lynne’s work is cerebral and emotional. As seen in her full length films “Your Day is My Night” and “Tip of My Tongue”. She collages the art of storytelling by layering stunning visuals while swimming between reality and performance.

Mark is the experimental film hero, a pioneer in film manipulation, an encyclopedia in the world of experimental films. His film work is solely connected to what is possible in the organics of film manipulation. They celebrate experimentation in its truest form. Yet both come down on the same line when it matters most. The line of captivation which as any artist knows is the hardest to achieve.

__________

Screen Door Cinema and Flexfest are hosting Lynne Sachs & Mark Street live and in-person at Screen Door this Sunday at 3pm! 16mm & digital program

Sunday 7/23/23
Doors 3pm
Showtime 3:30

THE X/Y CHROMOSOME PROJECT:
short films by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street

**an in-person conversation with Lynne Sachs & Mark Street follow the screening**

In 2010, Mark Street and Lynne Sachs created The XY Chromosome Project, an umbrella for their collaborative ventures. Together they have produced an array of collaborative installations, performances, and two-dimensional art works. To follow this path is to trace a blueprint on devotion. Working both together and individually for the past 30 years, each artist has carved out their own niche without the obvious influences of being married. They part ways to be left alone to their own creations. It is the respect for the other’s work that bonds them. Left alone, their work could not be more different. Lynne’s work is cerebral and emotional. She collages the art of storytelling by layering stunning visuals while swimming between reality and performance. Mark is the experimental film hero, a pioneer in film manipulation, an encyclopedia in the world of experimental films. His film work is solely connected to what is possible in the organics of film manipulation. They celebrate experimentation in its truest form. Yet both come down on the same line when it matters most. The line of captivation which as any artist knows is the hardest to achieve.” (Stephen Lipuma, Court Tree Gallery)

BLUE MOVIE, Mark Street, 1994, 5min, 16mm
DRAWN AND QUARTERED, Lynne Sachs, 1987, 4 min., silent, 16mm
ECHO ANTHEM, Mark Street, 1991, 8min, sound, 16mm
WINTERWEHEAT, Mark Street, 1989, 8min. 16mm
EPISTOLARY: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO, Lynne Sachs, 2021, 4 min., digital
GEORGIC FOR A FORGOTTEN PLANET, Lynne Sachs, 2007, 8 min., digital
THE GRAIN OF BELFAST, Mark Street, 2022, 6min Super 8 to digital
DRIFT AND BOUGH, Lynne Sachs, 2015, 6 min., 16mm to digital
CLEAR ICE FERN, Mark Street, 2023, 12min, Super 8 to digital
FLUTTER, Mark Street, 2022, 14min, digital

Metamorphosis of the Gaze / Ribalta Experimental Film Festival 2023

Emulsions – “Metamorphsis of the Gaze”
Ribalta Experimental Film Festival
April 30, 2023

“Metamorphosis of the gaze,” the title of Lynne Sachs’ film staff: from debuts to present days, from the decomposition of movement to time, from gesture to circle. Slitings of the gaze that transfigure the newspaper and make it “visual poetry.”

Planning for EMULSIONS on April 30th at Garagos in collaboration with Nassau Bologna thanks to the availability and generosity of Kino Rebelde. At the end of the screenings Q&A with Lynne Sachs via Zoom moderated by Eduoardo Parasporo and Giovanni Sabattini for translation.

Here are the upcoming titles:

  • Drawn and Quartered (4 min, 16mm, color, silent, 1986)
  • Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (9 min, 16mm, color, 1987)
  • Sound of a Shadow made with Mark Street (10 min, S8mm to digital transfer color, 2011)
  • Drift and Bough (6 min, Super 8mm to digital transfer, B&W, 2014)
  • Maya at 24 (4 min, 16mm, b&w, sound, 2021)

Non è un titolo per niente casuale metamorfosi dello sguardo. Per attraversare un’opera multiforme, ricchissima come quella di Lynne Sachs abbiamo scelto il tema dello sguardo. Come dagli esordi Lynne, nei suoi film, abbia attraversato le soglie del movimento, della “coreografia” (Drawn and Quartered); come, successivamente, riprendendo un gesto originario il reale e la quotidianità nella sua ritualità ed ordinarietà si aprano a sprazzi straordinari e poetici che solo il cinema può donare (Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning, Sound of a Shadow, Drift and Bough) ed infine come abbia fatto delle immagini in movimento una riflessione accorata ed intima sul tempo (Maya at 24). — Giovanni Sabattini

TRANSLATION

This is by no means a casual title Metamorphosis of the Gaze. To traverse a work as multifaceted, as rich as Lynne Sachs’, we have chosen the theme of the gaze. How from the beginning Lynne, in her films, has crossed the thresholds of movement, of “choreography” (Drawn and Quartered); how, subsequently, by taking up an original gesture the real and the everyday in its rituality and ordinariness open up to extraordinary and poetic flashes that only cinema can bestow (Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning, Sound of a Shadow, Drift and Bough); and finally how she has made moving images a heartfelt and intimate reflection on time (Maya at 24). — Giovanni Sabattini

Lynne Sachs Profile / 69th Oberhausen Short Film Festival

Lynne Sachs Profile
69th Oberhausen Short Film Festival
May 1, 2023
Program 1 – [girls with fast lane dreams]: https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets?v=1493
Program 2 – [Another baby girl drops down]: https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets?v=1494
Program 3 – [scars     muscles    curves of the spine]: https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets?v=1495

Lynne Sachs Artist Profile Trailer

Lynne Sachs 1 – [girls with fast lane dreams]

An overview of the films of the New York pioneer of experimental documentary. Sachs’ films are inseparably linked to events of life, though they are resolutely non-biographical. Inspired by her poetry collection Year by Year Poems, the central “topos” of these programmes is the body (and the bodies „in-between“). The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind leads from the Vietnam War to feminism to death.

Films in this Program

A Month of Single Frames
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2019

In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her archive. She gave her Duneshack materials to Lynne. ‘The words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film.’

Noa, Noa
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2006

Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand. Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic ‘Crawdad Song’.

Drift and Bough
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2014

A winter morning in a Central Park covered in snow. Graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The black lines of the trees against the whiteness become an emotional drawing. Stephen Vitielloʼs delicate yet soaring musical track seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to the sky.

Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1994

Lynne and her sister Dana travelled from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Their conversations with strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana’s travel diary revels in the sounds, proverbs, and images of daily life. Their film becomes a warm landscape that weaves together stories of people they met with their own childhood memories of the war on TV.

Lynne Sachs 2 – [Another baby girl drops down]

Films in this Program

The House of Science: a museum of false facts
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1991

Combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural collage, the film explores the representation of women and the construction of the feminine otherness. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming-of-age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.

Drawn and Quartered
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1986

Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium. A declaration of desire of and through cinema.

Maya at 24
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2021

‘My daughterʼs name is Maya. Iʼve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.’ Lynne filmed Maya at ages 6, 16 and 24, running around her, in a circle – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward.

A Biography Of Lilith
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1997

Off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, updating the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as a mother.

Lynne Sachs 3 – [scars     muscles    curves of the spine]

Films in this Program

The Task of the Translator
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2010

Three studies of the human body compose an homage to Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator. Musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind of cosmetic surgery for corpses. A group of classics scholars confronted with the task of translating an article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. A radio news report on human remains.

The X Y Chromosome Project
Mark Street, Lynne Sachs
USA, 2007

Sachs and her partner Mark Street use the split screen to cleave the primordial to the mediated. Their diptych structure transforms from a boxing match into a pas de deux. Newsreel footage brushes up against hand painted film, domestic spaces, and movie trailers. Together, Sachs and Street move from surface to depth and back again.

Starfish Aorta Colossus
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2015

Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8 mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns. Paolo Javier invited Lynne to create a film that would speak to one of his poems. She travels through 25 years of her 8 mm films.

The Last Happy Day
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2009

In 1938, Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian doctor, fled from the Nazis to Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army hired him to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Eventually he moved to Brazil where he embarked on the translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin. The film weaves together personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance.

BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND
Lynne Sachs Artist Profile
April 26 – May 1, 2023
69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
Curator: Cíntia Gil

Program notes by Cíntia Gil:

The title of this retrospective quotes Lynne Sachs in her 1991 film “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”. It speaks of a zone of experimentation that crosses Sachs’ work and grounds filmmaking as a practice of dislocating words, gestures and modes of being into open ontologies. What can be a woman, a word, a color, a shade, a line, a rule or an object? The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind is another way of saying that things exist both as affections and as processes of meaning, and that filmmaking is the art of not choosing sides in that equation. That is why Sachs’ work is inseparable from the events of life, while being resolutely non-biographical. It is a circular, dynamic practice of translation and reconnection of what appears to be separated.

There are many ways of approaching Lynne Sachs’ full body of work, and many different programmes would have been possible for this retrospective. Films resonate among each other. Like threads, themes link different times. Repetition and transformation are a constant obsession in the way images, places, people and ideas are revisited. While looking for an angle for this programme, I tried to look at some of the threads that seem to me the most constant, even if sometimes subterraneous, throughout the films. The three programmes are not systematically bound by themes or built around typologies. There are three different doors to the same arena where body (and the ‘in-between’ bodies) is the main ‘topos’: translation, collaboration, and inseparability of the affective and the political. Yet, none of these terms seems to truly speak of what’s at stake here.

Lynne Sachs knows about the disequilibrium that happens between words and concepts, and about the difference between the synchronicity of life and the linearity of discourse. She also knows that words can be both symptoms and demiurgic actors. That is maybe why she writes poems, and why this programme was inspired by her book, “Year By Year Poems”[1].

1975 [girls with fast lane dreams]

Teachers push us to the precipice –

trick us with conundrums we mistake for algorithms

catch us in a maelstrom of dizzying numbers.

Searching for the exit door

I discover quick methods for finding north –

solace in the gravitational pull of geography

and head for the first opening from a school

with too many ambitions

penalty points

and girls with fast-lane dreams.

Talking about the making of “Which Way is East”, Lynne Sachs said: “the most interesting films are the ones that ask us to think about perception, that don’t just introduce new material.”[2]. Both Lynne Sachs and her sister Dana, a writer, lived the Vietnam War through television – a middle-class childhood sometimes haunted by images of that war that seemed both far away and fundamental to their generation. When Dana moved to Vietnam in the early 1990s, Lynne visited for a month, and they made a film. The film begins with a sequence of movement shots, colors, fleeting forms, interrupted by a popular Vietnamese saying about a frog and the horizon. Three layers come together, predicting one of the strongest traits of Lynne’s work: the world seen through the rhythm of a moving body, and the dialogue between different modes of feeling and thinking. [Lynne’s childhood Vietnam War images were black and white, upside down; the Vietnam landscape in 1991 is crossed on a motorbike, and nature is motion and strangeness; “a frog sitting on the bottom of a well, thinks the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot”.]

A travelog in Vietnam became a dialogue of perceptive discoveries, glimpses of meaning and, most importantly, of the many ways of being just here and now, together, facing abysses that should not eat us alive. How to not be eaten alive by life’s infinite and sublime abysses?

Girls with fast-lane dreams is another way of referring to an impulse for joy.

Girls looking at girls, girls playing with girls, Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer collaborating on an impossible film. How to work on beauty, without monumentalizing it? How to work on death without freezing the life within? A kid once told me: “you have to pass it through the inside, and let it out through your smart eye”. Is that translation? Isn’t “A Month of Single Frames” the translation of a place and a body, the conditions of light seen through embodied solitude?

There is some kind of radical positioning of Lynne Sachs’ gaze (gaze is a pace and a gesture, and that is its politics): allowing things to unfold as they are, knowing that it is the very act of filming them that constitutes their becoming. Noa becomes play with light. Maya becomes time and unsurmountable individuality. Central Park becomes a porous membrane for the circulation between a musical movement and the event of an emotional form.

1997 [Another baby girl drops down]

(for my daughter, Noa)

Again, nine full moons leave bare

the dust against the sky.

Air fills up with brightness.

Another baby girl drops down.

Dice on a betting table

or rich, ripe fruit atop worn grass.

The political comes forward when things are dislocated from their assigned places, becoming eloquent. When a field of possibilities is problematized by different temporalities, different meanings attach to the same words. New symptoms (not symbols) emerge from the same myths. To the territorialization of body, Lynne Sachs responds with the unspeakable layers of desire, underpinning the history of the body. To the typification of identity, cinema responds with the history of gesture.

Feminism in Lynne Sachs’ work comes from an obsession with ontological fluidity – women as possibilities, bringing with them the memory of what has not been captured by politics, the promise of kinder political places. Such invention requires the deconstruction of the gaze, the transformation of language through the power of a thinking (collective) body. Collective as in-between, in circulation, in transition with others: the Lilliths who may or not become mothers in “A Biography of Lillith”, the enfolding body in “Drawn and Quartered”, the collage that renders old measures useless in “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.

Materiality is a key aspect in this cinema, it sustains the emergence of a filmic gesture. The presence of things in their most concrete form, be it a birth, a hand helping to translate an idea, a splash of light on a face, the astonishment of a baby in front of a camera. Things occupy a certain space, move in a certain way, and their sensuality is never sublimated or forced into metaphors. It is their material presence that saves them from their assigned roles and chains of meaning, revealing their vitality as a principle for a political imagination.

“Incendiary, but not arson.”[3]

2009 [scars     muscles    curves of the spine]

I hold the mirror just inches away and look

shy

detached

brave

I touch myself with knowledge

Scars muscles curves of the spine

I trace a path across my chest

searching for surprises I’d rather not find –

knots in the fabric

Translation comes, then, as a movement between transmitted memory, embodied experience, affective vocabulary and the never-accomplished labor of form. Nothing stays determined within a field of possibilities, but the field itself is in a constant motion, resignifying every aspect, reconnecting every moment in time, every glimpse of an image.  The work done around Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin, seems key to consider her full body of work. “The Task of the Translator”, presents three movements, three ways of looking for the body. It starts with the reassemblage of bones of dead American soldiers during WWII by Sandor Lenard, in a sequence that will come back in “The Last Happy Days”. Here, translation is both an effort to make sense of the materiality of time and history, and a question about the translatability of such. Like in “Which Way is East”, how can history be translated through the gestures of the present, of the living? Is the way the past escapes linearity and expresses its vitality?

The second movement in “The Task” shows a group of scholars translating an article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. Tentative words and articulations around a table, hands helping meaning through gestures. Is Latin a dead language? Sandor Lenard, after moving to Brazil, translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. What paradox lies in the gesture of translating a children’s story into a dead language? Translation is a game of materiality, of dislocating the world into another regime of forms and movements. Allowing language to pass through the materiality of the present time. In “The Last Happy Day”, children tell the story of Sandor Lenard while rehearsing Winnie the Pooh. Translatability through bodies and gestures, vitality: one does not simply look at the past, but rather invents a dialogue of embodied time. In “The Task of the Translator”, suddenly the camera leaves the scholars and focuses on the drops of rain on a foggy window, and on the gestures of a hand, before we start hearing radio news about human remains after an attack.

Translation keeps all things alive at the same time – even the matter of death.

Cíntia Gil

Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon Theatre and Film School) and holds a degree in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto). From 2012 to 2019, Cíntia Gil served as co-director and then director of Doclisboa – International Film Festival. From 2019 to 2021 she has directed Sheffield DocFest in England. In 2022, Cíntia started the programme of screenings and study groups “Artistic Differences”, at UnionDocs (NY), as a co-curator together with Jenny Miller and Christopher Allen. She is part of the programming team of Cannes Directors Fortnight.

Gil has curated a variety of contemporary and historical film series, retrospectives and exhibitions, besides publishing articles in various publications. In addition, she has taught seminars, lectures and workshop  in different institutions (Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico, EICTV in Cuba, HGK Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany among others), and she is a project tutor for the Master on Creative Documentary at the Pompeu Fabra University . She has also served on juries in international film festivals, such as Berlinale, Cairo Film Festival, Mar del Plata, Jerusalem Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, London Film Festival, IDFA, Taipei IDF, FidMarseille, Seville European Film Festival, DokuFest, Ficunam, DocsNYC, Guadalajara, among many others. She has been a member of the executive Board of Apordoc – Associação pelo Documentário, the Portuguese documentary film association since 2015.

[1] Lynne Sachs, “Year by Year Poems”, Tender Buttons Press, NY, 2019

[2] “Observe and Subvert”, interview by Inney Prakash for Metrograph, December 2021

[3] In “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.

Crucial Viewing / Cine-file by Kat Sachs

Crucial Viewing
Cine-file
February 17, 2023
https://www.cinefile.info/cine-list/2022/02/17/022323

CRUCIAL VIEWING

Lynne Sachs x 2
Gene Siskel Film Center

Lynne Sachs’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (US/Documentary) Review by Kat Sachs
Monday, 6pm

In Horace’s Odes, one among many texts where this sentiment endures, the Roman poet wrote, “For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer.” It’s hardly an esoteric dictum, but nevertheless it’s duly reflected in experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ wholehearted documentary portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Something of a longstanding work-in-progress, the film draws from decades of footage shot by Sachs, her father, and her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (whose own 2005 film FORTY SHADES OF BLUE was inspired by the same so-called “Hugh Hefner of Park City”), plus others, documenting not just the sybaritic “hippie-businessman” patriarch, but also his numerous descendants. Sachs’ knotty chronicle reveals that her father has a total of nine children with several different women, two of whom the other siblings found out about only a few years back. (The film opens with Sachs brushing her elderly father’s hair, working out a particularly unpleasant snarl. “Sorry, dad,” she says. “There’s just one part that’s very tangly.” The irony is faint and benevolent, but present even so.) Sachs considers the enveloping imbroglio from her own perspective, but also takes into account the viewpoints of her eight siblings, her father’s ex-wives (including her own mother) and girlfriends, plus Ira’s mother, a gracefully cantankerous old woman in a certain amount of denial over her son’s wanton predilections and the role she played in his dysfunction. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO—the title an homage to Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…—is comprised of footage recorded between 1965 and 2019 and shot on 8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV, and digital; the fusion of all this material (by editor Rebecca Shapass) ranks among the most astounding use of personal archives that I’ve ever seen. It all exists in a state between documentary and home-movie footage, a paradigm that aptly reflects the conflict between reality and perspective, and the uncomfortable middle-ground that bisects the two. Sachs’ work often features her family, but this feels like an apotheosis of her autobiographical predisposition, likewise a question—why do the sins of the father linger?—and an answer. Among the most affecting scenes are roundtable discussions between the siblings where they consider revelations about their father and the implications of his actions. These scenes are heartrending not for their sadness, but rather for their naked honesty; it’s not just a film about a father who, but also a film about a love that defines a family. Sachs’ filmography is centered on infinite poetic quandaries (in voice over, she explores some of them here, such as when she muses on her father’s profession as a developer in Utah: “What happens when you own a horizon?”) and this feels like a logical conclusion to a lifetime of such profound impasses, though I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to probe life and its enigmas in a similarly masterful fashion. For all the suffering on display, Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love. Followed by a post-screening conversation between Sachs and local filmmaker Lori Felker. (2020, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker’s THE WASHING SOCIETY (US Documentary)
Thursday, 6pm

Much like filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ acclaimed 2013 documentary hybrid YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, THE WASHING SOCIETY, a medium-length quasi-documentary she co-directed with performer-playwright Lizzie Olesker, penetrates the hidden worlds that exist adjacent to us. Just as in YOUR DAY Sachs explored the circumstances of immigrants living in “shift-bed” apartments in New York City’s Chinatown, she and Olesker here probe the mysterious world of urban laundromats, where workers—often immigrants or those from similarly disenfranchised groups—take on a task that’s historically been outsourced, at least in some capacity—that of washing and folding peoples’ laundry. The historical evocation is literal; the film’s title and one of its recurring motifs refer to a real organization from the 1880s called the Washing Society, which started in Atlanta and was comprised of washerwomen (most of them Black) who came together to demand higher pay and opportunities for self-regulation. A young actor, Jasmine Holloway, plays one such laundress, reading from texts written by the organization and whose presence haunts the modern-day laundromats. Soon other ‘characters,’ both real and fictitious, take their places in this mysterious realm, hidden away in plain sight. Ching Valdes-Aran and Veraalba Santa (actors who, along with Holloway, impressed me tremendously) appear as contemporary laundromat workers, representing ethnicities that tend to dominate the profession. It’s unclear at first that Valdes-Aran and Santa are performing, especially as real laundromat workers begin to appear in documentary vignettes, detailing the trials and tribulations of their physically demanding job. The stories are different, yet similar, personal to the individuals but representative of a society in which workers suffer en masse, still, from the very injustices against which the Washing Society were fighting. The actors’ scenes soon veer into more performative territory, a tactic which Sachs deployed, albeit differently, in YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT. Much like that film, the evolution of THE WASHING SOCIETY included live performances in real laundromats around New York City, some scenes of which, it would seem, are included in the film. There’s a bit of voiceover from Sachs, explaining the directors’ mission to go into many different laundromats, and from voice actors who read monologues that are tenuously connected to Valdes-Aran and Santa’s ‘characters.’ There are also visceral interludes involving accumulated lint that add another layer to the experimentation; there’s a bluntness to the filmmakers’ artistic ambitions, as with much of Sachs’ work, that makes the intentions discernible but no less effective. Sachs has previously employed egalitarian methods, such as considering the people she works with to be collaborators rather than subjects, cast, and crew. In a film about unseen labor, seeing that labor—notably in a self-referential scene toward the end in which a group of said collaborators prepare to exit a laundromat after shooting—is important. In light of what’s happening now, when so much essential labor is either coyly unseen or brazenly unacknowledged (or both), it’s crucial. Like the 1880s’ washerwoman, the victims (and, likewise, the combatants) of capitalism are ghosts that haunt us. Followed by a post-screening conversation between Sachs and Cine-File managing editor Kat Sachs. (2018, 44 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

—

Screening as part of a shorts program entitled “A Collection & a Conversation,” which includes Sachs’ short films DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, 6 min, Digital Projection); MAYA AT 24 (2021, 4 min, Digital Projection); VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, 3 min, Digital Projection) and SWERVE (2022, 7 min, Digital Projection).

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Steve Erickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Joe Rubin, Harrison Sherrod

:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16 :: →

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A Collection & A Conversation / Gene Siskel Film Center

A Collection & A Conversation
Gene Siskel Film Center
February 23, 2022
https://www.siskelfilmcenter.org/collection-conversation

A COLLECTION & A CONVERSATION
2018, 2022, Lynne Sachs, USA, 64 mins
In English | Format: Digital

Thursday, February 23 at 6pm | This program of four short and medium-length pieces highlights Sachs’ filmography from a poetic, personal perspective, as she uses her camera to capture the essence of people, places, and moments in time. The scope of this work includes DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, USA, 6 min., No dialogue / Format: 8mm on digital), an assemblage of 8mm footage from a winter morning in Central Park. Set to sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate and assured score, the contrasting darkness – of skyscrapers, fences, trees, and people – against bright snow, gives way to a meditative living picture. In MAYA AT 24 (2021, USA, 4 min., No dialogue / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs presents a spinning, swirling cinematic record of her daughter Maya, chronicled at ages 6, 16, and 24. As Maya runs, she glances – furtively, lovingly, distractedly – through the lens and at her mother, conveying a wordless bond between parent and child, and capturing the breathtakingly quick nature of time. Presented for the first time publicly, in VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, USA, 3 min., In English / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs visits poet Bernadette Mayer’s childhood home in Queens to celebrate Mayer’s work, through a reverent, flowing collage. Queens, New York is also the backdrop for the poetry of Paolo Javier in SWERVE (2022, USA, 7 min., in various languages with English subtitles / Format: Digital), a “COVID film” that documents people emerging – cautiously, distanced, masked – from the global pandemic, finding their way in the liminal space between “before” and “after,” and connected by language and verse. In collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker, THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018, USA, 44 min., In English / Format: Digital) explores the once ubiquitous but now endangered public laundromat. Inspired by “To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War” by Tera W. Hunter, THE WASHING SOCIETY is an observational study of lather and labor, a document of the lives of working class women who – largely overlooked and underappreciated – load, dry, fold, and repeat. Post-screening conversation with Lynne Sachs.

5 Questions with Lynne Sachs

(Interview from the January/February issue of the Gazette)

Your films are often so collaborative in nature – inspired by or featuring poets, authors, fellow artists, musicians. How do you forge these partnerships? 
From the very beginning of my life as a filmmaker, I resisted the traditional, pyramid structure for the industry. If film is an art, why does it have to embrace this kind of corporate model? I never wanted to direct movies. I wanted to make films. Rigid hierarchies just seem anachronistic and patriarchal to me. When I work with other people on my films, I look for kindred spirits with a shared passion and enthusiasm. In 1991, I shot film of a dear friend rolling nude down a sand dune in Death Valley. She only agreed to take off her clothes if I would stand nude while doing the filming. I had to agree, of course. That was a collaboration for THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE. In 1994, I traveled with my Bolex, a cassette recorder and a notebook through Vietnam with my sister to make WHICH WAY IS EAST, an essay film constructed around our sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent perspectives. That was another collaboration. In 2006, I asked a former student to exchange letters with me as we both contemplated the fraught situation in Israel/ Palestine. Our epistolary exchange became the foundation for a collaborative writing endeavor. In 2018, artist Barbara Hammer asked me to work with film material that she had shot twenty years before. She knew she was dying and that our friendship could transform her images into a collaborative experience. I completed this cross-generational collaboration and called it A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES. Perhaps my most sustained collaboration has been with sound artist Stephen Vitiello. His deeply inventive approach to making music continuously reminds me of how lucky I am to live in a world with other creative people who find sustenance from the shared joy of making work. When I look at DRIFT AND BOUGH, YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, THE WASHING SOCIETY, TIP OF MY TONGUE, and FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO, I am reminded of our connections, what we did together and what I learned from this vital human being.

Who are your cinematic heroes? 
Sometimes a person is lucky enough to experience a hero and a mentor all wrapped into one. That is what happened to me. The first time I witnessed (as opposed to just saw) Bruce Conner’s iconoclastic and irreverent collage films in 1984 (A MOVIE, VALSE TRISTE, and CROSSROADS), I was transfixed. Never before had I imagined that a short, experimental film could be so radical, so rhythmic and so inexplicably resonant. I wrote to him a year later expressing an interest in working with him as an assistant in his studio in San Francisco. To my surprise, he said yes. Though I had little to offer except for curiosity and enthusiasm, I spent a year at his side, helping him organize his archive, parsing through letters he’d received from fans and driving him around in his convertible looking for Geiger counters with which to assess the radioactivity in his neighborhood. Not long after I completed my work with Bruce, I began a two year assistant position with Trịnh T. Minh Hà. Her presence in my life pushed me in completely different ways. As a filmmaker, poet, and cultural theorist, Minh-ha showed me how artists with cameras could analyze the way that they look at the world. She really introduced me to the idea of self-reflexivity in cinema. An artist’s embrace of words and images should bring together observation and introspection through a constant lens of doubt. I recorded sound on her films (SURNAME VIET GIVEN NAME NAM and SHOOT FOR THE CONTENTS) and assisted in her editing room. Other filmmaker heroes whose set my mind a-spinning, include: Peggy Ahwesh, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Maya Deren, Jeanne Finley, Christopher Harris, Su Friedrich, Zora Neal Hurston, Lucretia Martel, Yvonne Rainer, Julia Reichardt, Mark Street, Reverend L.O. Taylor, Kidlat Tahimik, and so many more.

What advice would you give to students studying film/filmmaking?
Early in my career as a filmmaker, I gave up a volunteer job working for a the brilliant, progressive documentary filmmaker Barbara Kopple to take a paid job with a commercial company making Marine Corp promotional videos. It was horrible, and I cried every afternoon sitting at the telephone answering calls. I was an unglorified secretary. In retrospect, I wish I had continued waitressing (even after I spilled an entire tray on a woman’s lap) to pay the bills so that I could keep my production assistant position on Kopple’s AMERICAN DREAM, where I would have learned more and been more inspired. Continue to make short films throughout your life as an artist. Making features can be a deeply meaningful and totally immersive experience, but the joy of coming up with an idea and then seeing it to completion over a few months or a year is equally profound. It’s like deciding between writing a poem or a novel. Both are worthy, but one is certainly more likely to be cheaper and more liberating to produce. Plus interest in short films is soaring these days! Being part of an artist community is as gratifying as establishing yourself as a successful filmmaker. Create a collective for exhibiting your work as well as those of other artist friends by curating programs in alternative spaces like garages, attics, backyards and basements. Support each other by telling your friends about grant opportunities, bringing cupcakes to their set, or teaching them how to use a Bolex 16mm camera. Show compassion to other artists by engaging with them around their struggles and their joys.

What is a memorable moviegoing experience you’ve had? 
I had always wanted to see Czech New-Wave filmmaker Věra Chytilová’s 1966 feature film DAISIES, a renowned, anti-authoritarian send-up of insatiable desires and female friendship. My own friend Kathy Geritz, now a curator at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and I got hold of a 16mm print and invited anyone who was interested to join us in a small theater. For weeks, we were giddy with anticipation. The day arrived and both of us set ourselves up in the projection booth, happy to be responsible for what we saw as a historical event, at least in our lives. Together, we swooned with excitement in the booth, completely taken with Chytilová’s brilliant direction. From behind the glass between the booth and the theater, we caught site of two arms flailing in the air. Only once the credits started to roll, and the audience began to exit the theater did we discover that a man in the room had had a disturbing and mysterious episode that involved loud grunting and running around the room during the film. I never figured out if he hated the film or was, himself, so deeply moved by the exhilarating performance of its two female stars that he too chose to let it all hang out.

What film do you watch again and again? 
I have watched SANS SOLEIL by Chris Marker at least 20 times. I discover something about the punctum in an image – the accident that pricks, as Roland Barthes might call it – in his discursive, layered, evocative, astute essay film every time I watch it.

Lynne Sachs: A Poet’s Perspective

Committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry, and music, her films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent, and radical in their artistic conception.

Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations, and web projects. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Sachs’ films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, the New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale, and Doclisboa, among others. In 2021, Sachs received awards from both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center for her achievements in the experimental and documentary fields. 

The Film Center, in collaboration with Conversations at the Edge and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation program, is honored to welcome Sachs to the Film Center in person for two evenings of her work, followed by in-depth conversations. Photo credit: Inés Espinosa López. 

Lynne Sachs: A Poet’s Perspective / Gene Siskel Film Center – School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Lynne Sachs: A Poet’s Perspective
Gene Siskel Film Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
December 23, 2022
Screenings on February 20 & 23, 2023
https://www.siskelfilmcenter.org/lynnesachs

LYNNE SACHS: A POET’S PERSPECTIVE

Committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry, and music, her films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent, and radical in their artistic conception.

Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations, and web projects. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Sachs’ films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, the New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale, and Doclisboa, among others. In 2021, Sachs received awards from both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center for her achievements in the experimental and documentary fields. 

The Film Center, in collaboration with Conversations at the Edge and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation program, is honored to welcome Sachs to the Film Center in person for two evenings of her work, followed by in-depth conversations. Photo credit: Inés Espinosa López.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 6:00PM

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO

2020, dir. Lynne Sachs
USA, 74 min. In English / Format: Digital

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8mm 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. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. (Cinema Guild) Post-screening conversation with Lynne Sachs.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 6:00PM

A COLLECTION & A CONVERSATION

2018-2022, dir. Lynne Sachs
USA, 64 min., In English / Format: Digital 

This program of four short and medium-length pieces highlights Sachs’ filmography from a poetic, personal perspective, as she uses her camera to capture the essence of people, places, and moments in time. The scope of this work includes DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, USA, 6 min., No dialogue / Format: 8mm on digital), an assemblage of 8mm footage from a winter morning in Central Park. Set to sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate and assured score, the contrasting darkness – of skyscrapers, fences, trees, and people – against bright snow, gives way to a meditative living picture. In MAYA AT 24 (2021, USA, 4 min., No dialogue / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs presents a spinning, swirling cinematic record of her daughter Maya, chronicled at ages 6, 16, and 24. As Maya runs, she glances – furtively, lovingly, distractedly – through the lens and at her mother, conveying a wordless bond between parent and child, and capturing the breathtakingly quick nature of time. Presented for the first time publicly, in VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, USA, 3 min., In English / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs visits poet Bernadette Mayer’s childhood home in Queens to celebrate Mayer’s work, through a reverent, flowing collage. Queens, New York is also the backdrop for the poetry of Paolo Javier in SWERVE (2022, USA, 7 min., in various languages with English subtitles / Format: Digital), a “COVID film” that documents people emerging – cautiously, distanced, masked – from the global pandemic, finding their way in the liminal space between “before” and “after,” and connected by language and verse. In collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker, THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018, USA, 44 min., In English / Format: Digital) explores the once ubiquitous but now endangered public laundromat. Inspired by “To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War” by Tera W. Hunter, THE WASHING SOCIETY is an observational study of lather and labor, a document of the lives of working class women who – largely overlooked and underappreciated – load, dry, fold, and repeat. Post-screening conversation with Lynne Sachs. 

“Drift and Bough” Screens at MoMA’s “New York City Symphonies of the Millennium Film Workshop”

New York City Symphonies of
the Millennium Film Workshop
Feb 16–17, 2022
MoMA
https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/5433

For decades, Millennium Film Workshop has served as a hub for independent experimental film production and exhibition, a place to bring forth personal cinema, open to anyone seeking a different vision beyond the mainstream. The original Workshop, located in New York City’s East Village from 1966 to 2011, was a community space providing low-cost equipment rentals, access to a screening room and editing facility, and the independence traditionally associated with painters or poets. Such filmmakers and artists as Andy Warhol, James Benning, Bruce Conner, Todd Haynes, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, and Michael Snow screened their work at Millennium, some premiering their first films. Today, Millennium holds instructional workshops for students and adults around the city, and maintains a community of critical engagement through its long-running publication, Millennium Film Journal. Through digital platforms, and in collaboration with other like-minded organizations, Millennium continues to foster experimentation and artistic development in film and video, steadfast in its mission to highlight new and unknown visions from beyond the commercial world of film.

The many changes and adaptations Millennium has weathered over its long years of existence reflect the protean nature of the city it calls its home; though names and places may change, a certain character of filmmaking is always recognizably Millennium, just as our ever-changing city is always recognizably New York. Over the past few decades the filmmakers of Millennium Film Workshop have produced a wide range of films devoted to New York. These films can be understood as a continuation of the venerable “city symphony” genre and a modernization of the genre through new technology, interpretation, and techniques.

This series aims to invoke the spirit of the early City Symphonies and apply it to the New York of the late 20th century and the early part of this century. Each filmmaker in this program has been affiliated with Millennium over the years, some educated through its workshop programs, others active members of their ongoing screening community. Each film offers its own particular and idiosyncratic view of the city, but it is hoped that the screenings will offer something more than just a compilation. Rather, as with any great symphony, the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps, when these short films are viewed together, the viewer will gain a deeper understanding of the city, its inner workings, its organic growth, and the profound changes that it has undergone in its recent history.

With this series the Department of Film celebrates its acquisition of the Millennium Film Workshop and Howard Guttenplan Collections. Film selections and program text are by Joe Wakeman and Victoria Campbell.

Organized by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, with Joey Huertas, Joe Wakeman, Victoria Campbell, Roberta Friedman, Steven Siegel, and Paul Echeverria of the Millennium Film Workshop.

Millennium Film Workshop:
“Nighttime” NYC
Thu, Feb 17, 7:00 p.m.
MoMA
https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/7534

Dream City. 1986. USA. Directed by Steven Seigel. Digital. 18 min. “I made the film in the mid-1980s, which, of course, was a difficult and troubled time for New York. Just a few years previously, the city had barely avoided bankruptcy. In the ’80s the city was slowly recovering from its fiscal crisis. It was also a time when the city was suffering from the twin social crises of crack and AIDS—which exacted a terrible toll on some neighborhoods…. My aim was to show the indomitable spirit of New Yorkers in the face of adversity. Then too, this sometimes jarring counterpoint may have furthered the overall dream-like ethos” (Steven Seigel).

sweet pie—or,goodbyetoLoathing(—or,goodbyetoMetrograph). 2019. USA. Directed by cherry brice jr. Digital. 7 min. “I like to think of sweet pie as a romantic docu-fantasy—there were a few guys who I’d met at Metrograph who I found attractive—and who I would find myself often daydreaming about—but I was always too scared to act on my interest in them. So I made this short as an exorcism—to put the daydreams themselves out into the world as a way to free myself from some of the shame and self-loathing that originally got me stuck in those daydreams” (cherry brice jr.).

Love Letter to Pink. 2019. USA. Directed by Holly Overton. Digital. 3 min. “This piece was made at Rodrigo Courtneys 2019 Millennium Filmmaking Workshop, where he took us to the streets of Greenwich Village for three hours to shoot improvised footage on our cell phones or cameras. In those three hours, I began gravitating to things of a pink color palette with sensual textures, sounds and words. I edited these elements to have a unified tone, as if to say thank you to the experience of finding pink” (Holly Overton).

Night Portraiture. 2013/2021. USA. Directed by Nikki Belfiglio, David J. White, Joe Wakeman. Digital. 8 min. Night Portraiture was a series of experiments in improvised filmmaking, created during the hours between 1:00 and 6:00 a.m. across various New York locales (Gowanus, Kensington, the subway system). In semi-somnambulistic altered states, the artists play out scenes inspired by the night, the city, and found objects along the way. This eight-minute edit, recut by the filmmakers in 2021, comprises scenes from the first Night Portraiture.

N-York – a caminho do Anthology (N-York: On the Way to Anthology). 2021. USA/Brazil. Directed by Daniel Leão. Digital. 4 min. N-York: On the Way to Anthology is a reflection, both literal and figurative, of a brief but deeply impactful time spent in New York City and the hours filmmaker Daniel Leão spent absorbing the work of Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Joseph Cornell, and Stan Brakhage at Anthology Film Archives. Shot in an off-the-cuff manner, moved by the city night and the image of himself and his partner, Djuly Gava, in the auto glass, this film contains a pilgrimage of wonderment in a deceptively simple moment.

Fulton Fish Market. 2003. USA. Directed by Mark Street. 35mm. 12 min. Mark Street’s portrait of the late-night bustle of the historic Fulton Fish Market, filmed two years before its closing in 2005, shows a world not usually considered when people speak of “New York nightlife.” The textures of the gutted fish and trays of ice under the fluorescent light are complemented by Street’s hand-painted celluloid abstractions throughout the film.

Jack Smith’s Apartment. 1990. USA. Directed by MM Serra. Digital. 8 min. Shot urgently on a borrowed camera, days after the death of the legendary Jack Smith, MM Serra’s documentary records for posterity the sumptuous handmade beauty of Smith’s Arabesque décor in the ongoing art project of his home, where the phantasmagoric sets for his films were constructed. Penny Arcade narrates biographical details and romantic memories of Smith while the camera tours from room to room, examining nooks and artifacts in loving tribute to his life and legacy.

Saffron Mourning. 2005/2020. USA. Directed by Paul Echeverria. Digital. 5 min. “Saffron Mourning is an exploration of contrasting metaphors and sensibilities. The film illuminates a passionate canvas of color in combination with the dreary backdrop of winter. The waves of flowing saffron offer an array of potential emotions, including pleasure, happiness, and bliss. Conversely, the ripples of frost and shadow hint at an obscure outcome for the strolling participants” (Paul Echeverria).

Meet Me in the Meadow. 2021. USA. Directed by Erik Spink. Digital. 6 min. “Even downtown, I never stopped thinking of the Meadow. In 2021, I turned my eyes away from that familiar skyline. This film forced me to look again. As I traced my relationship to this city, I was drawn back to the one place that is most meaningful. Each frame is tied to a moment of joy and an abundance of hope. After about two decades of capturing images, I’ve realized each film is an excuse for something. Usually, love” (Erik Spink).

D-Blok Snag. 1995. USA. Directed by Joey Huertas. Digital. 5 min. “A land art film that examines the poverty of a residential block in the South Bronx. Torched stolen cars, abandoned mutt dogs and dirty laundry are a few of the visual anchors that weave this location study together. This film was shot on Tri-X film and in-camera edited using a 16mm Bolex camera” (Joey Huertas).

Condemned. 1976. USA. Directed by Jacob Burckhardt, Geoff Davis. 16mm. 6 min. The crumbling beauty of a soon-to-be-demolished, impoverished Red Hook neighborhood in the mid-1970s is revealed to us moment by moment, structure by forgotten structure. The circuslike brass music suggests a public face of “a city in progress” while the addicts, thieves, and other lonely people are shown to us as the human cost: those who will be left out of that development.

Drift & Bough. 2014. USA. Directed by Lynne Sachs. Music by Stephen Vitiello, Molly Berg (“Back Again,” from the album Between You and the Shapes You Take). Digital. 6 min. “I spent a morning this winter in Central Park shooting film in the snow. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness creates the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro, or a monochromatic ‘tableau-vivant.’ When I am holding my super 8mm camera, I am able to see these graphic explosions of dark and light” (Lynne Sachs).

Office Window Au Revoir. 2003. USA. Directed by David Reisman. Digital. 2 min. “Office Window is a view from my cubicle on the sixth floor of Thirteen/WNET’s old address at 450 West 33rd Street in the early 2000s, overlooking the current site of Hudson Yards. The music is from an acetate that I bought at a now-closed thrift shop on 10th Avenue and 46th Street. While not exactly nostalgic, the video is a tribute to my old workplace and the transience of things” (David Reisman).

Program run time: approx. 88min.

AEMI Presents- Day Residue: A Film-Making Workshop on the Every Day, in-person workshop in Cork (NOVEMBER 9)

aemi @ CIFF: Workshop with Lynne Sachs
9 November 2021 / 11am – 4pm / Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork
https://aemi.ie/event/workshop-with-lynne-sachs/

We are really excited to work with aemi’s Artist in Focus Lynne Sachs to deliver a workshop as part of CIFF 2021. This in-person workshop in Cork will focus on the interplay between poetry and cinema. Based in New York, Lynne Sachs is an award winning filmmaker whose work bridges personal experience and political concerns through her singular approach to filmmaking. Lynne uses both analogue and digital mediums, weaving together text, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design.

‘Day Residue: A Film-Making Workshop on the Every Day’ is open to both emerging and established artists interested in film and writing. The workshop is an excellent opportunity for film artists to deeply consider creative approaches to writing and film, both in relation to their own practices and within wider contexts.

Day Residue: A Film-Making Workshop on the Every Day
Lynne Sachs: 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 in writing for a personal film. 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 embraces the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.

The day will be structured by two sessions: in addition to introducing her practice and collectively watching Lynne’s programme of short films curated by aemi for CIFF (see film info below), Lynne will also lead a session on writing and film / writing for film, and the possible interplays between the two – extending to the role of poetry.

In-person screening programme within the workshop:

Lynne Sachs, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor, 2018, USA, 8 min
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three artists who embraced the moving image throughout their lives.

Lynne Sachs, Still Life With Women And Four Objects, 1986, USA, 4 minA portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a ‘character’.

Lynne Sachs, Drawn and Quartered, 1986, USA, 4 minOptically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections.

Lynne Sachs, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, 1991, USA, 29 min
A girl’s difficult coming-of-age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.

Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer, Girl is Presence, 2020, USA, 5 min
Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, a ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things.

Lynne Sachs and Moira Sweeney, Longings, 2021, USA/ Ireland, 90 seconds
A collaboration exploring the resonances and ruptures between image and language.

Lynne Sachs, Drift and Bough, 2014, USA, 6 minLynne Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper.

Lynne Sachs, Starfish Aorta Colossus, 2014, USA, 4 min
Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas.

Lynne Sachs, Maya at 24, 2021, USA, 4 minLynne Sachs films her daughter Maya at 6, 16 and 24.

Lynne Sachs with and for Barbara Hammer, A Month of Single Frames, 2019, USA, 14 min
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. She shot film and kept a journal. In 2018 Hammer, facing her own imminent death, gave her material to Lynne and invited her to make a film.

This is a free workshop, however as numbers are limited, prior booking is essential.

Please email Emer at info@aemi.ie in advance to secure a place.

Biography 
Lynne Sachs (Memphis, Tennessee, 1961) is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together text, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a feminist dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project. Her moving image work ranges from short experimental films, to essay films to hybrid live performances. Lynne has made 37 films, including features and shorts, which have screened, won awards or been included in retrospectives at New York Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, Oberhausen, Viennale, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, RIDM Montréal, Vancouver Film Festival, Doclisboa, Havana IFF, and China Women’s Film Festival. In 2014, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

aemi: Artist in Focus: Lynne Sachs (at the 66th Cork Film Festival)

66th Cork Film Festival
November 16-18, 2021
https://2021.corkfilmfest.org/films/aemi-artist-in-focus-lynne-sachs-615afd65aae68d005a5685ed

I will be heading to Cork International Film Festival in Ireland to present “Film About a Father Who” with 10 short films as part of their AEMI artist focus on my work. Honored to share four collaborative film poems: “Longings” made with filmmaker Moira Sweeney (who will be there with us!); “A Month of Single Frames” made with Barbara Hammer; “Girl is Presence” made with Anne Lesley Selcer; and, “Starfish Aorta Colossus” made with Paolo Javier.

Making work since the 1980s Lynne Sachs’ films have incorporated a cross-pollination of forms that extend to the essay film, documentary, collage, performance, and poetry. Deeply reflexive, Sachs’ films to date have outlined a rich interplay between the personal and the socio-political. aemi is delighted to present this overview of selected short works by Lynne Sachs at Cork International Film Festival, many of which are screening in Ireland for the first time. 

In addition to this shorts programme Lynne will also be in attendance at the festival for the Irish premiere of her celebrated feature Film About a Father Who.

CAROLEE, BARBARA & GUNVOR Lynne Sachs
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three artists who embraced the moving image throughout their lives.

STILL LIFE WITH WOMEN AND FOUR OBJECTS Lynne Sachs
A portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a ‘character’.

DRAWN AND QUARTERED Lynne Sachs
Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections.

THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE: A MUSEUM OF FALSE FACTS Lynne Sachs
A girl’s difficult coming-of-age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.

GIRL IS PRESENCE Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer
Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, a ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things.

LONGINGS Lynne Sachs and Moira Sweeney
A collaboration exploring the resonances and ruptures between image and language.

DRIFT AND BOUGH Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper.

STARFISH AORTA COLOSSUS Lynne Sachs
Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas.

MAYA AT 24 Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya at 6, 16 and 24.

A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES Lynne Sachs with and for Barbara Hammer
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. She shot film and kept a journal. In 2018 Hammer, facing her own imminent death, gave her material to Lynne and invited her to make a film.

aemi @ CIFF: Contested Legacies – Lynne Sachs and Myrid Carten

10 November 2021 / 8pm / Triskel Arts Centre Cinema
8pm Cinema screening and Q&A
https://aemi.ie/event/aemi-ciff-contested-legacies-lynne-sachs-and-myrid-carten/

The Irish premiere of Lynne Sachs’ celebrated feature Film About a Father Who screens here alongside the world premiere of Myrid Carten’s short film Sorrow had a baby. Both artists will be in attendance for a discussion of their work following the screening.

Both Film About a Father Who and Sorrow had a baby deal, in very different ways, with familial legacy incorporating personal archives and pushing against the traditional boundaries of documentary practice. Myrid Carten’s film Sorrow had a baby is also the first film produced through aemi’s annual film commissioning programme, supported by Arts Council of Ireland.


Myrid Carten, Sorrow had a baby, 2021, Ireland, 16 minutesaemi Film Commission 2021
‘I absorbed the women in my life as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face.’ – Vivan Gornick

Sorrow had a baby explores the mother-daughter relationship through multiple lenses: memory, beauty, inheritance. Who writes the stories in a family? Who can change them?

Lynne Sachs, Film About a Father Who, 2020, USA, 74 minutesOver 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.

Kino Rebelde to Represent Lynne Sachs’ Catalogue Internationally

http://www.kinorebelde.com/lynne-sachs-complete-filmography/

Kino Rebelde has created a retrospective that traces a delicate line connecting intimacy, power relations, violence, memory, migration, desire, love, and war in Lynne’s films. By looking at each of these works, we can see a director facing her own fears and contradictions, as well as her sense of friendship and motherhood.  Moving from idea to emotion and back again, our retrospective takes us on a journey through Sachs’ life as a filmmaker, beginning in 1986 and moving all the way to the present.

With the intention of allowing her work to cross boundaries, to interpret and to inquire into her distinctive mode of engaging with the camera as an apparatus for expression, we are delighted to present 37 films that comprise the complete filmmography, so far, of Lynne Sachs as visual artist and filmmaker. Regardless of the passage of time, these works continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception.

About Kino Rebelde

Kino Rebelde is a Sales and Festival Distribution Agency created by María Vera in early 2017. Its exclusively dedicated to promotion of non-fiction cinema, hybrid narratives and experimental.

Based on the creative distribution of few titles by year, Kino Rebelde established itself as a “boutique agency”, working on a specialized strategy for each film, within its own characteristics, market potential, niches and formal and alternative windows.

This company supports short, medium and long feature films, from any country, with linear or non-linear narratives. They can be in development or WIP, preferably in the editing stage.

The focus: author point of view, pulse of stories, chaos, risk, more questions, less answers, aesthetic and politic transgression, empathy, identities, desires and memory.

Kino Rebelde was born in Madrid, but as its films, this is a nomadic project. In the last years María has been living in Lisbon, Belgrade and Hanoi and she’ll keep moving around.

About María Vera

Festival Distributor and Sales Agent born in Argentina. Founder of Kino Rebelde, a company focused on creative distribution of non-fiction, experimental and hybrid narratives.

Her films have been selected and awarded in festivals as Berlinale, IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, New York FF, Hot Docs, Jeonju IFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sarajevo FF, Doclisboa and Viennale, among others.

María has a background as producer of socio-political and human rights contents as well as a film curator.Envelope

vera@kinorebelde.com

Lynne Sachs (1961) is an American filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances.

Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with renowned musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.

Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project.

Between 1994 and 2009, Lynne directed 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 perception. 

Over the course of her career, she has worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha.