Tag Archives: the washing society

Review of “The Washing Society” in Otro Cine Europa

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Revolution in the Air & Theories of Weightlessness
review in Otro Cines Europa by Victor Esquirol
Punto de Vista International Film Festival, Pamplona, Spain
March 9, 2018

Original at: www.otroscineseuropa.com/aires-revolucion-teorias-la-ingravidez

“Yesterday (International Women’s Day) at Punto de Vista International Film Festival in Pamplona everything got scrambled.  Or, better yet, revolutionized.  Several screenings had to be postponed because even the festival bubble isn’t completely impenetrable, or, if it is, it at least feigns the same kind of openness to the world that we ask of our finest films.  Out in the streets, women were saying Time’s Up, and Festival Director Garbiñe Ortega’s competition joined their cry.  That cry resounded not only through the programming, but also in the many voices conjured up on such a historic day.  Men and women reached parity. Not numerical parity but the very best kind. Balance—hell, justice—was achieved.  It came mainly by way of the most noble and honest of gestures: that of underlining the importance of something we never imagined had any importance at all, in this case the operation of washing machines.

The Washing Society, by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs, makes the rounds of some of New York City’s more than 2,500 laundromats, local businesses that serve as a sociological laboratory.  Through the eyes of the two directors—and with apologies to Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette, 1985)—these unassuming storefronts take on the character of strategic observation posts occupied by Mandarin- and Spanish-speaking sentinels.

Olesker and Sachs zoom in—at a microscopic level—on the idea of the melting pot.  It’s an astonishing image: a skein of fibers and threads badly woven together.  So much so that there isn’t anything left to do but send the whole mess to the laundry.  What follows is an attempt to make sense of a nebula of colors that run circles around themselves, an image that, by its centrifugal force, creates an illusion of homogeneity.  Nonetheless, far from cohering, the elements emerge shaken up, not mixed together.  It’s an exercise in high-concept cinema to which Olesker and Sachs devote three quarters of an hour of film stock and many more quarters in tips, revealing the stains (of racism and classism) on an American Dream that seems to want to scrub away every last trace of its own identity.  Later, a few more turns around the neighborhood and their documentary morphs into performance art.  The voices go silent and the people we just heard interviewed get caught up in a cathartic dance that culminates in one final act of fading out, if not utter dissolution.  All they have left are the clothes they’re wearing.  Simple, comprehensible, and without question terrifying.”

 

 

 

 

The Joy of Filming – a program of films by Lynne Sachs / Athens International Film + Video Festival

Lynne Sachs — In Person
Athens International Film + Video Festival
April 10, 2018, 7:00pm
http://athensfilmfest.org/lynne-sachs/

The Joy of Filming
a program of films by Lynne Sachs

In the spirit of classics like the The Joy of Cooking or The Joy of Sex, Lynne Sachs will present an interactive lecture in which she will share her own process (or recipe) for making films. From the very first moment, Lynne will begin a conversation with her AIFVF audience, learning from them (us?) about their (our?) own projects, dreams and experiences. She will then spontaneously live-curate a program of her own films that could include early works such as “Drawn & Quartered” (1986) or “House of Science” (1991) or extremely recent films such as “And Then We Marched” (2017) or “A Year of Notes and Numbers” (2018). The intention of this performative presentation is to engage so deeply with the festival community that an organic, collaborative program will emerge.

Third Man Records to feature experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs

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Third Man Records to feature experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs
by Joe Nolan
2015 

Knoxville-born Quentin Tarantino is argu- ably Tennessee’s most important contribution to popular film, but there’s another filmmaker whose personal, sometimes mesmerizing, body of work has made her the Volunteer State’s most visible ambassador to the world of ex- perimental film. Lynne Sachs is currently a New Yorker, but the Memphis-born director will be in Nashville for The Light and Sound Machine’s presentation of Yes/No: The Cinema of Lynne Sachs on Thursday, Sept. 17, aTt 8 p.m. in the Blue Room at Third Man Records. Sachs will be presenting a selection of films from her 30-year career followed by a Q&A event.

Sachs divides many of her movies into two categories: “Yes” films and “No” films. In film- maker and critic Kevin B. Lee’s short video essay, Yes and No Films, he interviews Sachs about the distinctions between the two:

“I have a group of films I’ve made called my Yes films and I have a group of films called my No films. The Yes films are films where absolutely anything goes… Then I have the No films—but, No is not bad. The No films have a really clear idea, and I’m like quite focused.”

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986) is one of the Yes films Sachs will show on Thursday. It pictures a woman putting on a black-and-white-checkered houndstooth coat. She then takes an avocado from a pantry and peels it before balancing the pit on the top of a glass of water. She sits at a table eating a meal—a man stops briefly at the table. The last scene pictures the woman putting on the coat again, inter-cut with shots of her sitting on the bed, seeming to comment about the author of a letter.

That might sound like a rather random ar- rangement of events, and it is, and that’s part of the beauty of Sach’s “anything goes” Yes films.

But it’s not the content that makes Still Life notable, it’s the context Sachs creates around it that lashes these rituals and actions into a more dynamic whole: During the first coat shots, a voice-over sounds like it’s reading from a script, describing “scene one” and then “scene two,” while the coat shots repeat themselves— the lack of repetition in the ongoing voice-over tells the viewer that the shot has been cut that way on purpose. This makes the viewer aware of the script and the editing as well as the woman and her coat. The film was made in the late 1980s but it speaks directly to the French New Wave films of the 1960s with their mischievous love of techniques that pointed cinema back at itself, not allowing audiences to get lost in the illusion of a seamless narrative. The use of mismatched scenes and voice-overs seems specifically out of Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema and it’s no surprise that Sachs credits his Vivre Sa Vie as an influence here.

The poetic intimacies of nude images and naked interactions are the subject of the silent study of male and female forms, Drawn and Quartered (1986). I love the punning title here—the camera crawls around the “out- line” of necks and shoulders, along fingers and feet from the point of view of an artist’s hand drawing the figures. Sachs also divides her screen up into four quarters, nodding to male/female duality while also disorienting the viewer and turning the experience into a sensual confusion of androgynous play. Drawn is a No film that Sachs directed with strict limits she illuminates at the Fandor.com streaming film site:

“I shot a film on a roof with my boyfriend. Every frame was choreographed. Both of us took off our clothing and let the Bolex whirl and that was it. Pure and simple.”

Thursday’s screenings will also include Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987), which is a companion piece to Still Life; Investigation of a Flame (2001), an experimental portrait of Vietnam War peace activists; Photograph of Wind (2001), Sachs’s meditation on passing time and her growing daughter, Maya; Noa, Noa (2006), Sach’s exploration of childhood play with her daughter, Noa. Sachs will also show selected scenes from Every Fold Matters (2015) and screen her newest work, Starfish Aorta Collosus (2015).

Lynne Sachs Spotlight – “Women of Fix” on Fandor

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We are Spotlighting the “Women of FIX” on Fandor.

-What are some of the major obstacles you’ve met as a filmmaker?Convincing my 103 year old grandmother that what I do is worthy. I don’t think she will ever understand that creative pleasure, dare I say artistic recognition, has any worth whatsoever.  She measures success in $$.  One day, I hope she will applaud the fact that I have found something I simply love to do.

 

-What are some awesome moments you’ve had as a filmmaker?Spending weekly Tuesday mornings talking with Bruce Conner in his San Francisco studio; introducing my crying baby to Stan Brakhage; learning to edit from Gunvor Nelson; recording sound and syncing dailies with Trinh T. Minh-ha; dancing with my boyfriend and now husband Mark Street in a George Kuchar movie; hanging out with Craig Baldwin in his editing cave; taking my young daughters to Paris to spend a day with Chris Marker.

 

-What are your views on women in film and how the industry can help solve the problem of diversity?
Twenty years ago, I asked a group of college age students to name their favorite film directors.  No woman was on the list.  Then I asked them to name one woman director.  They found that task very difficult.  Then I asked them to name a single film made by a woman.  That resulted in a very short list, and for the most part they only knew a few female movie stars who had tried their hand at directing.  Not much has changed in the last two decades. Women filmmakers must make work that reflects their vision rather than embracing the point of view of a commercial industry ethos that, for the most part, refuses to recognize our view of the world.

 

-Tell us how Fandor’s FIX program has helped you!
Fandor’s FIX program has put my work in a eclectic, unpredictable, thought-provoking context where people discover my work through direct search and absolutely hilarious randomness. My most popular Fandor film is A Biography of Lilith, an experimental documentary about Adam’s first mate in the Garden of Eden. Lilith was expelled from the Garden, and thus history, because she wanted to be on top in sex.  Who knew that a feminist movie about gender politics, sensuality and the Bible would draw so much attention?