On this show, we are joined by the experimental filmmaker, feminist and poet Lynne Sachs whose new autobiographical film, “Film About a Father Who” – 26 years in the making – will premiere on January 15 as part of a 20-film retrospective, “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression,” presented by The Museum of the Moving Image.
Lynne Sachs grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with such artists as Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Her moving image work ranges from short experimental films, to essay films to hybrid live performances. She has made 37 films, retrospectives of which have been presented at The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Doc/ Fest. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts and, in 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. Currently, Lynne lives in Brooklyn with her husband, filmmaker Mark Street, and their two daughters.
Links to 1) “Film About A Father Who” film page with streaming information: http://www.cinemaguild.com/theatrical/filmaboutafatherwho.html;
2)Museum of the Moving Image retrospective Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression – which runs from January 13-31: http://www.movingimage.us/lynnesachs;
and
3) for more on Lynne Sachs’ work in general: http://www.lynnesachs.com/
Throughout, Lynne Sachs undercuts the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.
Though the title of Lynne Sachs’s Film About a Father Who is inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 avant-garde feature Film About a Woman Who, a deconstruction of the “ideal” domestic unit, this long-gestating documentary takes a more personal and certainly less abstract look at a less-than-stable family life. Composed largely of conversations with her family that Sachs has captured over the last few decades, the film often feels like the coherent story everyone wishes they could assemble out of the neglected boxes of old home video tapes in the garage. But Sachs goes places that most amateur moviemakers avoid, undercutting the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.
Sachs’s father is outwardly easygoing, a self-styled “hippie businessman.” In most of the time periods covered in the documentary, Ira Sachs Sr. sports a handlebar mustache and a stringy mop of unkempt hair. Film About a Father opens with an early-‘90s conversation with him that comes off like some kind of early promotion for cellphones: While the wealthy real estate developer talks about how much he enjoys the mobility that cellular technology allows in his business dealings, we see him skiing and relaxing, hanging around in his trademark Hawaiian shirts. Methodically but not without affection, the film undermines this projected image of the ambitious yet insistently casual, essentially harmless man.
At first, it’s easy enough to believe that Ira, whom Sachs describes at the outset of the documentary as a loving father, has committed crimes with few victims other than a resentful lover or two and his morally scandalized mother, Rose, known as Maw-maw, who appears occasionally in older footage to gripe about her son’s behavior, which she colorfully describes as a kind of sexual handicap. But it becomes clear that not all of the women who Ira has been with were equal players in his lifelong game of libertinism. As a decades-old tearful conversation with his second wife, Bali native Diana, makes evident, the man leveraged his largesse to maintain a privileged position in all of his relationships, one that kept him shielded from dealing with the emotional distress that his actions were spreading.
For her part, Sachs approaches the looming but seemingly unassuming figure of her father with a frankness that, if not quite unsparing, couldn’t have been easy for her. She structures Film About a Father as an ongoing investigation of his character, with the existence of two offspring he kept hidden from his other children coming as a late-film reveal. Sachs’s interrogation of her emotionally reticent father repeatedly brings her back to fuzzy home videos captured in her childhood or young adulthood, seeking in them some explanation for his behavior, or at least signs of the stories she wouldn’t be able to assemble until later. “How can you look for something you don’t even know is lost?” she ponders over early-‘90s footage of her younger half-brothers playing in the woods, referring to two additional secret half-sisters who were growing up at the same time, unbeknownst to the other Sachs children.
Given the nature of its construction, Film About a Father can feel insular to a fault, but Sachs nonetheless finds her most affecting imagery in her old snippets of home video, with its indistinct lines, color distortions, and instances of “snow.” Part of this comes from the metaphorical redeployment of her footage—like the glimpses we get of the small mountain located on a property that Ira was developing in the ‘90s. Early in the film, the large, grassy mound symbolizes the serenity and ease of his personal and professional life, but footage later depicts the dynamiting of that mountain, just as the Sachs family’s sense of their past is upended. There’s also something specific about analog home video that Sachs exploits here. It’s much hazier and harder to interpret than the crisper present-day digital footage, or the warm 16mm she used to interview her Maw-maw before the latter passed; it speaks much more to the instability of memory, the faultiness of the images we keep with us from the past.
Only implicitly connecting the Sachs family’s problems to the distribution of privileges and indignities under patriarchy, the film lays emphasis on the personal side of “the personal is political.” Beyond attempting to come to terms with Ira the philanderer and the ways his laissez-faire approach to relationships with women has shaped her life and those of her siblings, Film About a Father Who also explores the relationship between recording and remembering, the way past and present inform each other as the stored memories of film and video footage are brought together into a coherent shape. It’s an evocative distillation of some truth from the sprawling mess of documents that a family always leaves in its wake.
Film About a Father Who examines a problematic relationship.
Among the most important, complex relationships are those with our parents, relationships often painful to probe. And yet, in Film About a Father Who, here’s documentarian Lynne Sachs courageously exploring thirty-five complicated, problematic years of interaction with her father Ira. In addition to archival 8- and 16-millimeter footage, she interrogates Ira, grandmother Maw-maw, brothers, sisters, an ex-wife, and Ira’s girlfriends.
And what she learns in her incredibly honest profile is deeply disturbing. For Ira was, though cheerful, emotionally detached and an unrepentant womanizer. His mother, Maw-maw, describes him as a cripple, handicapped, since he had a wife, a mistress, and, as much as he could, multiple women. Director Lynne, his daughter, explicitly asks Ira about his life and behavior, to which Ira repeatedly replies, “I don’t remember.” In her investigation, Lynne discovers two previously unknown siblings (Ira had nine children), Ira’s traumatic childhood, fueled by Maw-maw abandoning Ira to lead her own life, and his real name.
None of these details suggest the truly captivating appeal of Film About a Father Who. That resides in Lynne’s pursuit of an ever-elusive understanding of Ira, of his essence. In her quest, Lynne and her brother Adam describe Ira having “his own language and we were expected to speak it.” They concur that they loved him so much that they agreed “to his syntax, his set of rules,” though they always felt there was a dark hole somewhere in his youth. Significantly, Lynne and a sister also acknowledge a shared rage they couldn’t name for the man called the Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah.
Film About a Father Who is an emotionally wrenching scrutiny of another person, much less a parent. In voiceover narration, Lynne defines her grappling with her father best when she says, “This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry, a story both protracted and compressed.” That she worked on this film for decades acknowledges the critical role her parents, and probably most of ours, play in our lives, their impact inestimable. It may raise the question, “Can we ever really understand another person?” Whatever the answer, Lynne Sachs shows her effort results in a powerful, haunting film.
Film About a Father Who is available on the Cinema Guild website.
GoIndieNow Presents is an occasional column featuring the third Plotaholics, Joe Compton. In these columns, Joe will discuss that state of indie film and offer suggestions for worthwhile media to consume in that market. This iteration of GoIndieNow Presents is a three-part exploration of 2020’s indie film landscape.
Hello, Plotaholics faithful. Joe Compton (the third Plotaholic) here.
Let’s be honest: 2020 sucked. Who knows what all of it means as far as 2021 goes, especially when it comes to Independent Film, which is something I cover over at Go Indie Now. But as for now, I am here to continue discussing the best in indie film from 2020.
Today, we kick off my Top 10 list with entries 10-6.
10. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO – DOCUMENTARY (USA)
SYNOPSIS: From 1984 to 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot film, videotape and digital images with her father, Ira Sachs, a bohemian businessman from Park City. This film is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to eight siblings, some of whom she has known all of her life, others she only recently discovered. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, her film offers sometimes contradictory views of one seemingly unknowable man who is always there, public, in the center of the frame, yet somehow ensconced in secrets.
WHAT THIS FILM DOES WELL: Lynne is a legend, and her style and abilities are at the top of the list in terms of Documentarians and their storytelling styles, but this one is so different. It is almost by nature that this has to be presented as it is, but it serves as a triumph and not a crutch or gimmick. There is no avoiding the fact that not every shot was composed and lit or mic’ ed properly. Yet, in true Lynne Sachs form, she weaves such an intricate and intimate narrative that twists and turns with the best of them. You almost expect there might have been some prior planned composition to those “home movie” shots.
It is also striking because the one being most affected in and throughout is her and her family. So, in a weird and interesting way, this film that starts looking into a family patriarch becomes a character-driven, dilemma story that interweaves the documenter with the subject matter and creates a mystery cloaked in a soap opera-type drama. The fun aspects are the ratio and framing of a lot of raw footage that gets shot over time on many different devices and how it enhances the experiences of the narrative–a skill set that editor Rebecca Shapass clearly possesses in spades.
Documentaries are often that idea that what you see is not what you will get in the end, and in a way because of the brave way in which Lynne chooses to put herself out there, comfortable or not, we really see a 4th wall crash that presents such a compelling and shocking result. In talking to her, I know this was a choice that was not easy to make. Yet this film has very few moments of bleakness and never are they overt–another display of the skill set that Lynne possesses as a proven Documentarian. Instead it chooses naturally to highlight and enhance the positive aspects of the reveals, which makes you wish your family or life was half as interesting as this one.
Women and Hollywood Feature – January 2021 Preview December 31, 2021 By Tatiana McInnis and Shayna Maci Warner
2020 has been an exercise of endurance, unspeakable loss, tragedy, anxiety, and rage, the scale of which cannot be addressed in any piece of writing. Many truths have been exposed this year, including that we are deeply invested in the stories we tell about our world — and other worlds! Many of us sought and found solace on screen, whether through binge-watching, virtual cinemas, or Zoom. While the challenging truths and issues laid bare in 2020 will not leave us when the clock strikes midnight on the 31st, we are hopeful about the stories we will tell, hear, and see in 2021.
Premiering January 1, Roseanne Liang’s “Shadow in the Cloud” follows Chloë Grace Moretz as Captain Maude Garrett, a female flight captain navigating the challenges of WWII air warfare and the sexism of her crew.
Viewers can get an in-depth look at the life, loves, and career of beloved star Audrey Hepburn in Helena Coan’s “Audrey” (January 5). In a similar vein, they can learn more about an acclaimed artist and the eccentric collectors who will do anything to get ahold of his work with Oeke Hoogendijk’s “My Rembrandt” (January 6). Meanwhile, Yu Gu’s “A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem” (January 26) chronicles two former NFL cheerleaders’ legal fight for fair pay.
The month rounds out with two family dramas, Fernanda Valadez’s “Identifying Features” and Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s “Our Friend,” both out January 22. The former sees a Mexican woman trying to find out what happened to her son, who crossed the border into the U.S. and hasn’t been heard from since. “Our Friend” is about a family rocked by their matriarch’s terminal cancer diagnosis, and the friend who offers to help them in their time of need.
Here are the women-centric, women-directed, and women-written films debuting in January. All descriptions are from press materials unless otherwise noted.
JANUARY 15
“Film About a Father Who” (Documentary) – Directed by Lynne Sachs (Available in Virtual Cinemas)
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. 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.
There’s no denying that 2020 was an unprecedented year, so I’m doing something unprecedented: combining film and TV into one year-end list.
Best Documentary: Film About a Father Who
More than 35 years in the making, Lynne Sachs’ portrait of her mercurial father, legendary Memphis bon vivant Ira Sachs Sr., is as raw and confessional as its subject is inscrutable. Rarely has a filmmaker opened such a deep vein and let the truth bleed out.
From The Father to Dick Johnson Is Dead to Falling to Minari, 2020 has been an exemplary year for films exploring all facets of fatherhood. Premiering at Slamdance Film Festival earlier this year and now arriving in Virtual Cinemas next month, another poignant entry in this category is Lynne Sachs’ documentary Film About a Father Who. Featuring materials shot over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019 by Sachs herself, the film explores her father Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah, which leads to many unexpected discoveries. Set for a nationwide Virtual Cinema release beginning on January 15, Museum of Moving Image will also hold a a director retrospective that features five programs in their Virtual Cinema, from January 13-31.
Jared Mobarak said in his Slamdance Film Festival review earlier this year, “While director Lynne Sachs admits her latest documentary Film About a Father Who could be superficially construed as a portrait (the title alludes to and the content revolves around her father Ira), she labels it a reckoning instead. With thirty-five years of footage shot across varied formats and devices to cull through and piece together, the result becomes less about providing a clear picture of who this man is and more about understanding the cost of his actions. Whether it began that way or not, however, it surely didn’t take long to realize how deep a drop the rabbit hole of his life would prove. Sachs jumped in to discover truths surrounding her childhood only to fall through numerous false bottoms that revealed truths she couldn’t even imagine.”
At first glance, Lynne Sachs’ latest documentary comes across as another iteration on the now all-too-common work of ‘personal archaeology’ in which filmmakers trace their roots through public and private archives, at times rending open the specific ways their unhappy families have been dysfunctional. Sachs, for one, employs home movies shot over half a century in half a dozen formats—8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV and digital—by herself, her father and her siblings, filmmakers Dana and Ira Sachs. The material turns around their father, Ira Sachs Sr., a ‘hippie businessman’ who sowed his wild oats across the world and virtually birthed a baseball team. Senior’s constant womanizing comes down heavily upon his children, some of whom have known the existence of the others only after decades, but also upon his mother, with whom he nevertheless shares a close but complicated relationship. Sachs weaves through years’ worth of footage and layers it carefully into a simple, direct account with a voiceover addressed at the audience. She takes what could’ve been a narrow family melodrama into much stickier territory. As she says, the film isn’t a portrait of her father, but a meditation on relationships with this man as the connecting element. Sachs and her siblings sit with their father, now infirm with age, and ask him to recollect episodes from the past. What do they expect? Confession? Reckoning? Simple testimony wrought from a gradually vanishing consciousness? Sachs goes beyond all gut responses to her father’s behaviour—disappointment, rage, disgust—towards a complex human reality that can elicit only inchoate sentiments, as suggested by the film’s incomplete title. She isn’t filming people or their stories, but the spaces between people, and how these spaces are always mediated by the actions of others. Senior’s wayward life, itself rooted perhaps in a traumatic childhood, profoundly shapes the way his children look at each other. Two living room discussions are intercut as though they are unfolding in the same space, the only way the filmmaker is able to bridge these invisible branches of the family tree. Sachs’ film is ostensibly a massive unburdening project for her; that she has been able to draw out its broader implications is a significant accomplishment.
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)
ONLINE RETROSPECTIVE
Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression
January 13–31, 2021
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 trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts. On the occasion of her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist’s maddeningly mercurial father, the Museum is pleased to present a career-ranging survey of Sachs’s work, including new HD presentations of Drawn and Quartered, The House of Science: a museum of false facts, and Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam, as well as the premiere of Maya at 24, the third edition of Sach’s temporal portrait of her daughter.
Organized by Assistant Curator of Film Edo Choi. Special thanks to Canyon Cinema and Cinema Guild for their support in organizing this program.
All films will be presented in MoMI’s Virtual Cinema, including a new video interview between Lynne Sachs and Edo Choi, which will be available exclusively to ticket holders.
Tickets: An all-series pass (including Film About a Father Who) is available for $30 ($26 MoMI members). A pass for just the repertory portion is $20 ($16 members) / individual program tickets are $5. Tickets for Film About a Father Who are $12 ($10 members).
All films are directed by Lynne Sachs.
Program 1: Early Dissections
In her first three films, Sachs performs an exuberant autopsy of the medium itself, reveling in the investigation of its formal possibilities and cultural implications: the disjunctive layering of visual and verbal phrases in Still Life with Woman and Four Objects; un-split regular 8mm film as a metaphorical body and site of intercourse in the optically printed Drawn and Quartered; the scopophilic and gendered intentions of the camera’s gaze in Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning. These experiments anticipate the range of the artist’s mature work, beginning with her first essayistic collage The House of Science: a museum of false facts. Itself an autopsy, this mid-length film exposes the anatomy of western rationalism as a framework for sexual subjugation via a finely stitched patchwork of sounds and images from artistic renderings to archival films, home movies to staged performances.
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986, 4 mins.) Drawn and Quartered (1987, 4 mins. New HD presentation) Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987, 9 mins.) The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991, 30 mins. New HD presentation)
Program 2: Family Travels
One of Lynne Sachs’s most sheerly beautiful films, Which Way Is East is a simultaneously intoxicating and politically sobering diary of encounters with the sights, sounds, and people of Vietnam, as Sachs pays a visit to her sister Dana and the two set off north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The film is paired here with a very different kind of family journey The Last Happy Day, recounting the life of Sachs’s distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Jewish Hungarian doctor who survived the Second World War and was ultimately hired to reassemble the bones of dead American soldiers. Here Sachs journeys through time as opposed to space, as she assembles a typically colorful array of documentary and performative elements, including Sandor’s letters, a children’s performance, and highly abstracted war footage, to bring us closer to a man who bore witness to terrible things. This program also features The Last Happy Day’s brief predecessor, The Small Ones. Program running time: 73 mins.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994, 33 mins. New HD presentation) The Small Ones (2007, 3 mins.) The Last Happy Day (2009, 37 mins.)
Program 3: Time Passes
Twenty years unspool over nine short films: portraits of Lynne Sachs’s children; visits with her mother, brother, niece and nephew; a tribute to the city where she lives; and scenes of sociopolitical trauma and protest. Nearly all shot on super 8mm or 16mm, and often silent, each work is at once a preservation of a moment and a record of change, seamlessly weaving together the candid and the performed gesture, the public and the private memory, in a simultaneously objective and subjective posture toward the passing of time. Program running time: 51 mins.
Photograph of Wind (2001, 4 mins.) Tornado (2002, 4 mins.) Noa, Noa (2006, 8 mins.) Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008, 11 mins.) Same Stream Twice (2012, 4 mins.) Viva and Felix Growing Up (2015, 10 mins.) Day Residue (2016, 3 mins.) And Then We Marched (2017, 3 mins.) Maya at 24 (2021, 4 mins. World premiere)
Program 4: Your Day Is My Night
2013, 64 mins. “This bed doesn’t necessarily belong to any one person,” someone says early in Your Day Is My Night. It could be the metaphorical thesis of this film, perhaps Lynne Sachs’s most self-effacing and meditative work. A seamless blend of closely observed verité footage, interpretive performance, and confessional monologues and interviews, the film doesn’t document so much as create a space to accommodate the stories and experiences of seven Chinese immigrants from ages 58 to 78 who live together in a “shift-bed” apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Sachs’s quilted sense of form achieves a new level of refinement and delicacy in collaboration with her cameraman Sean Hanley and her editor Amanda Katz, as she works with the participants to exhume a collective history of migration and struggle.
Program 5: Tip of My Tongue
2017, 80 mins. Sachs’s richly generative Tip of My Tongue finds the filmmaker responding to her 50th birthday by gathering twelve members of her generational cohort—friends and peers all born between 1958 and 1964, and originating as far as Cuba, Iran, and Australia—to participate in the creation of a choral work about the convergent and divergent effects history leaves upon those who live it. From the Kennedy assassination to Occupy Wall Street, the participants reveal their memories of, and reflections upon, the transformative experiences of their lives. Set to an ecstatic, pulsing score by Stephen Vitiello, the film interweaves these personal confessions with impressionistic images of contemporary New York, obscured glimpses of archival footage, and graphically rendered fragments of text to create a radiant prism of collective memory. Preceded by Sachs’s frantic record of accumulated daily to-do lists, A Year in Notes and Numbers (2018, 4 mins.).
