MOJO 338 – January 2022: The Rolling Stones / The Best Of 2021
Latest MOJO magazine features The Rolling Stones, Best Of 2021 CD, Best Of The Year lists, Laura Nyro, Neil Young and more.
BY MOJO STAFF | POSTED ON 11 11 2021
Life World is an ephemeral cannery-adjacent event space for performance, cinema, and more. We are located in Brooklyn, NY.
The address will be revealed upon RSVP :)
Get tickets here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeENjTlx6etMCFRVhEs9SaAdTqSanW0xw11YD7szHnb9r8ymQ/viewform
The Film Stage
By Jordan Raup○
September 21, 2021
https://thefilmstage.com/mubi-unveils-october-2021-lineup/
The U.S. lineup at MUBI next month has been unveiled, featuring films by Claude Chabrol, Paulo Rocha, Ulrich Köhler, and more. Notable new releases include Pedro Costa’s striking Locarno winner Vitalina Varela as well as the Julia Fox-led PVT Chat (check out our extensive interview with director Ben Hozie here.).
As part of their series Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors, the Martin Scorsese favoriteWake in Fright joins MUBI, along with Fabrice Du Welz’s Alleluia, Nicolas Winding Refn’s underseen Fear X, and Ben Wheatley’s trippy A Field in England.
Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.
October 1 | Alléluia | Fabrice Du Welz | Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors
October 2 | Styx | Wolfgang Fischer
October 3 | The Green Years | Paulo Rocha | Double Bill: Paulo Rocha
October 4 | Change of Life | Paulo Rocha | Double Bill: Paulo Rocha
October 5 | Your Day Is My Night | Lynne Sachs
October 6 | Hey, You! | Péter Szoboszlay | Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations
October 7 | The Wall | Julian Pölsler
October 8 | Vitalina Varela | Pedro Costa
October 9 | The Third Lover | Claude Chabrol | A New Wave of Suspense: A Claude Chabrol Double Bill
October 10 | Landru | Claude Chabrol | A New Wave of Suspense: A Claude Chabrol Double Bill
October 11 | Moving On | Yoon Dan-bi | New South Korean Cinema
October 12 | In Search of the Famine | Mrinal Sen | Voice of the Unheard: A Mrinal Sen Retrospective
October 13 | Corporate Accountability | Jonathan Perel | Undiscovered
October 14 | I Like Life a Lot | Katalin Macskássy | Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations
October 15 | Two Gods | Zeshawn Ali | MUBI Spotlight
October 16 | Fear X | Nicolas Winding Refn | Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors
October 17 | Séraphine | Martin Provost | Portrait of the Artist
October 18 | Cosmos | Manon Briand, Marie-Julie Dallaire, Denis Villeneuve, André Turpin, Jennifer Alleyn, Arto Paragamian
October 19 | Lucky Chan-Sil | Kim Cho-hee | New South Korean Cinema
October 20 | Endless Night | Eloy Enciso | The New Auteurs
October 21 | Panic | Sándor Reisenbüchler | Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations
October 22 | Potiche | François Ozon | Performers We Love
October 23 | PVT Chat | Ben Hozie | MUBI Spotlight
October 24 | In My Room | Ulrich Köhler | Double Bill: Ulrich Köhler
October 25 | Bungalow | Ulrich Köhler | Double Bill: Ulrich Köhler
October 26 | Play It Safe | Mitch Kalisa | Brief Encounters
October 27 | Hidden | Jafar Panahi | Opéra de Paris Meets Cinema’s Auteurs
October 28 | Sweetgrass | Lucien Castaing Taylor, Ilisa Barbash
October 29 | There Is No Evil | Mohammad Rasoulof | MUBI Spotlight
October 30 | Wake in Fright | Ted Kotcheff | Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors
October 31 | A Field in England | Ben Wheatley | Thrills, Chills, and Exquisite Horrors
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lynnesachs2
https://www.crypto-fiction.com/on-demand
Cryptofiction is excited to present five films by Lynne Sachs including: “Which Way is East” (1994); “Investigation of a Flame” (2001); “States of UnBelonging” (2005); “Your Day is My Night” (2013); and “Epistolary: Letter to Jean Vigo” (2021).
Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trihn T. Min-ha. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since.
From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019 film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of Short Films in 2020. In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.
Cryptofiction is an international distribution and production platform based in London, UK.
With over 25 years of combined experience as filmmakers and over a decade as distributors, our team is devoted to bring the attention and viewership deserved by the remarkable and courageous titles that we represent. In addition to distribution services, we offer a wide range of production support for rising and established moving-image makers.
We are dedicated to supporting and representing independent cinema from around the world.
Our top priority is to foster excellence amongst an intergenerational community of visionaries and to help younger talent meet and rise in conjunction with established filmmakers. Our on-demand platform is a virtual extension of our distribution agenda. Dedicated to supporting and promoting excellent independent cinema from around the globe, we have carefully curated an exciting set of programs consisting of a mix of young and established filmmakers. As part of our ongoing programming, we offer a new range of films and thematics every 3 months. Unlike similar commercial platforms, we do not and will not operate on a subscription basis. Our viewers are encouraged to browse and watch their desired programs whenever they wish. We are hoping this platform would become a viable means to generate passive income for the remarkable artists and filmmakers that we represent.
In addition to our on-demand services, we run an annual virtual film festival also dedicated to global intergenerational discourses on relevant thematics and contemporary issues. Supplementing these platforms are a series of one-off events and surprise programmings that bring timely attention to the work of filmmakers as unique socio-political struggles arise.
Mania Akbari (b. Tehran, 1974) is an internationally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Her provocative, revolutionary and radical films were recently the subject of retrospectives at the BFI, Lon- don (2013), the DFI, Denmark (2014), Oldenburg International Film Festival, Germany (2014), Cyprus Film Festival (2014) and Nottingham Contemporary UK (2018). Her films have screened at festivals around the world and have received numerous awards including German Independence Honorary Award, Oldenberg (2014), Best Film, Digital Section, Venice Film Festival (2004), Nantes Special Public Award Best Film (2007) and Best Director and Best film at Kerala Film Festival (2007), Best Film and Best Actress, Barcelona Film Festival (2007). Akbari was exiled from Iran and currently lives and works in London, a theme addressed in ‘Life May Be’ (2014), co-directed with Mark Cousins. This film was released at Karlovy Vary Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary at Edinburgh International Film Festival (2014) and Asia Pacific Film Festival (2014). Akbari’s latest film ‘A Moon For My Father’, made in collaboration with British artist Douglas White, premiered at CPH:DOX where it won the NEW:VISION Award 2019. The film also received a FIPRESCI International Crit- ics Award at the Flying Broom Festival, Ankara.
Lighthouse International Film Festival
Masterclass on the Every Day by LYNNE SACHS
June 6, 2021
https://www.goelevent.com/LIFF/e/MasterclassontheEveryDaybyLYNNESACHS
FREE for filmmakers and IN&OUT PASS HOLDERS!!
According to Freud’s theory of dreams, our day residue is composed of the memory traces left by the events of our waking state. In this workshop, we explore the ways in which fragments of our daily lives can become material for the making of a 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 interaction will build on an entirely different creative paradigm that encourages participants to embrace the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.
FREE for Filmmakers and IN&OUT PASS HOLDERS
Three of Lynne Sachs films are available at Lighthouse Virtual Festival:
Your Day is My Night (64 min., 2013)
Tip of My Tongue (80 min.,2017)
Film About a Father Who (74 min. 2020)
Lynne Sachs Retrospective: Between Thought and Expression [Online]
May 14-31, 2021
https://nwfilmforum.org/films/lynne-sachs-retrospective-between-thought-and-expression-online/
Lynne Sachs • US • 2001-2021
About
“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.” (Edo Choi, Assistant Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image)
The following three programs are from Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression, the Museum of the Moving Image’s retrospective series of five programs of her films.
Films in this series:
Your Day Is My Night
(Lynne Sachs, US, 2013, 64 min)
“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.
Tip of My Tongue
(Lynne Sachs, US, 2017, 80 min)
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.
Short film program: Time Passes
(Lynne Sachs, US, 2001-2017, 51 min TRT)
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.
About Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who grew up in Memphis, Tennessee and is currently living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from short experimental films to essay films to hybrid live performances. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Minh-ha.
Between 1994 and 2006, she produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany – sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Looking at the world from a feminist lens, she expresses intimacy by the way she uses her camera. Objects, places, reflections, faces, hands, all come so close to us in her 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 her work with every new project. With the making of Your Day is My Night (2013), Every Fold Matters (2015), and The Washing Society (2018), Lynne expanded her practice to include live performance.
As of 2020, Lynne has made 37 films. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival, and Sheffield Doc/ Fest have all presented retrospectives of her films. Lynne received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
About Edo Choi
Edo Choi is Assistant Curator of Film at the Museum of the Moving Image. Previously, he served in the dual capacity of programming manager and chief projectionist for the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem. He has organized programs as an independent curator for the New York Public Library and the Documentary Film Group, film society at the University of Chicago, where he held the position of Programming Chair between 2008 and 2010. He also works as a freelance projectionist at venues around New York City.
STREAM OR PURCHASE THE ALBUM HERE:
https://stephenvitiello.bandcamp.com/album/soundtracks-for-lynne-sachs-volume-2-your-day-is-my-night-the-washing-society-tip-of-my-tongue
Lynne Sachs first reached out to me in 2012, asking if I could recommend someone to work on the soundtrack for an upcoming film. I probably paused for a polite moment and then offered my own services. Since that time, I’ve created music for several projects by Lynne, including 4 feature-length films, a performance work (created in collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker) and a short film that uses a track I did with Molly Berg for a 12k CD. Over the years, I’ve amassed an archive of pieces made for these projects, some used in the films, some excerpted, some proposed. In some cases, Lynne would be looking for a 30-second clip for a transition and I’d use that as an excuse to record a 10-minute piece, figuring we’d find the 30-seconds somewhere in there.
This second volume of soundtracks works are from three films ….
Your Day is My Night, is set in NY’s Chinatown and follows the lives of Chinese-Americans living in shifted apartments. The Washing Society, is a collaboration between Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker, it “brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there.” Tip Of My Tongue, a piece on events of the last 55 years as remembered by a collection of friends and colleagues. As much as these musical tracks were created for the films, I don’t believe one has to have seen the films to enjoy them. That said, running out, or jumping on your computer, to watch and listen to the films would be a very good thing to consider.
releases March 5, 2021
Stephen Vitiello – guitar, piano, modular synthesizer, field recordings
Molly Berg – clarinet and a bit of voice (YDMN)
Michael Raphael – washing machine recordings (TWS)
Amanda Katz and Jeff Sisson – Sound recordings (YDMN)
Cover art – Lynne Sachs
Mastering – Lawrence English at Negative Space
Your Day is My Night, directed by Lynne Sachs, 2013
Camera, co-producing and editing: Sean Hanley
The Washing Society, a film by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs, 2018
Editor – Amanda Katz
Tip Of My Tongue, directed by Lynne Sachs, 2017
Editor – Amanda Katz
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.
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.
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
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.
“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.” (Edo Choi, Assistant Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image)
This five-part retrospective offers a career-ranging survey of Sachs’s work and includes new HD transfers of Still Life With Woman and Four Objects, Drawn and Quartered, The House of Science: a museum of false facts, and Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam.
Note: The following programs can be rented individually or as a package. A new video interview and between Lynne Sachs and series curator Edo Choi is also available as part of the rental fee.
For rental and pricing information, please contact: info@canyoncinema.com
All films are directed by Lynne Sachs.
Program notes by Edo Choi.
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.) – New HD transfer
Drawn and Quartered (1987, 4 mins.) – new HD transfer
Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987, 9 mins.)
The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991, 30 mins.) – new HD transfer
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 transfer
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.)
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.).
Thanks to:
Lynne Sachs & Stephen Vitiello: Sound Engagements – Program 1: Four Films
https://www.lafilmforum.org/schedule/winter-2021/lynne-sachs-four-films-with-stephen-vitiello/
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Lynne Sachs & Stephen Vitiello: Sound Engagements
Part 1: Four Films
Films Screening February 12-22, 2021
Live Q&A with Lynne Sachs on Friday, February 19, 7:00 pm PST (10:00 pm EST) by Zoom
Conversation with Lynne Sachs and Stephen Vitiello moderated by musician and music critic Sasha Frere-Jones on Sunday February 21, 5:00 pm PST (8:00 pm EST) by Zoom
Online via Los Angeles Filmforum
Filmforum is delighted to kick off 2021 by welcoming back our friend Lynne Sachs with her new film and several past works, all of which include original music by sound artist Stephen Vitiello.
“In collaborating on the soundtracks for my films, Stephen Vitiello somehow recognizes the interior sounds of objects and releases them for us to hear. Together his music and his sound designs push audiences toward a new way of experiencing cinema.” – Lynne Sachs
In these two programs, Los Angeles Filmforum explores the seven-year collaborative relationship between filmmaker Lynne Sachs and sound artist Stephen Vitiello.
Admission will include receiving links to both Zoom conversations!
Four films are covered by this admission, which is on a sliding scale, and which takes you to a screening room set up by Canyon Cinema. You also get a free link to the live Q&A with Lynne on Friday February 19 and the tripartite conversation on Sunday Feb 21.!
Ticketing for Four Films: Sliding Scale, $0 for members, $5 for students, $8, $12, $20
at https://lynnesachs4films.bpt.me
We hope that, if your means allow, you might go for $20, as you will be getting to see 4 wonderful films and attend two discussions!
Film About a Father Who is distributed by Cinema Guild, and has its own virtual cinema admission charge, listed on its own Filmforum webpage at https://www.lafilmforum.org/schedule/winter-2021/film-about-a-father-who/
Special Thanks to Brett Kashmere, Canyon Cinema, Tom Sveen, Cinema Guild.
Films by Lynne Sachs with music and sound design by Stephen Vitiello
2013 – 2020
Biographies:
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and a poet born in Memphis, Tennessee but 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 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 work ranges from the very personal, as in her early experiments that are reminiscent of Bruce Connor’s found footage films and Chris Marker’s essay films, to documentary, as in her film on the Catonsville Nine’s antiwar-activism in Investigation of a Flame. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco where she worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, George Kuchar, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Between 1994 and 2006, she produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war — where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Sachs has made 37 films, which have screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance, Oberhausen, Viennale, BAMCinemaFest, Vancouver Film Festival, DocLisboa and many others nationally and internationally. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other venues. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, China Women’s Film Festival and Sheffield Documentary Festival have all presented retrospectives of Lynne’s films. She received a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first collection of poetry, Year by Year Poems. Lynne lives in Brooklyn with filmmaker Mark Street. Together, they have two daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs. www.lynnesachs.com
Stephen Vitiello is an electronic musician and sound artist who transforms incidental atmospheric noises into mesmerizing soundscapes that alter our perception of the surrounding environment. He has composed music for independent films, experimental video projects and art installations, collaborating with such artists as Nam June Paik, Tony Oursler and Dara Birnbaum. Solo and group exhibitions include MASS MoCA, The High Line, NYC, and the Museum of Modern Art. https://www.stephenvitiello.com/
Solo exhibitions include All Those Vanished Engines, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2011-(ongoing)); A Bell For Every Minute, The High Line, NYC (2010-2011); More Songs About Buildings and Bells, Museum 52, New York (2011); and Stephen Vitiello, The Project, New York (2006). He has participated in such group exhibitions as Soundings: A Contemporary Score, Museum of Modern Art, NY (2013); Sound Objects: Leah Beeferman and Stephen Vitiello, Fridman Gallery, New York (2014); September 11, PS 1/MoMA, LIC, NY (2011-2012); the 15th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2006); Yanomami: Spirit of the Forest at the Cartier Foundation, Paris; and the 2002 Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2002). Vitiello has performed nationally and internationally, at locations such as the Tate Modern, London; the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival; The Kitchen, New York; and the Cartier Foundation, Paris. In 2011, ABC-TV, Australia produced the documentary Stephen Vitiello: Listening With Intent. Awards include Creative Capital (2006) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011-2012). Vitiello is a professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University. He lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.
Sasha Frere-Jones is a writer and musician from New York.
Los Angeles Filmforum screenings are supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts & Culture, the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, the Wilhelm Family Foundation, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.
The Washing Society
Directed by Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker
2018, color, sound, 44 min.
When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there by observing these disappearing neighborhood spaces and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in THE WASHING SOCIETY creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
“The legacy of domestic work, the issues surrounding power, and the exchange of money for services are all potent themes which rise to the surface and bubble over in dramatic, thrilling escalations of the everyday.” – Brooklyn Rail
“Spotlights the often-invisible workers who fold the clothes, maintain the machines and know your secrets.” – In These Times
Featuring: Jasmine Holloway, Veraalba Santa, and Ching Valdes-Aran
Cinematography: Sean Hanley, Editiing: Amanda Katz
Trailer: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2017/08/23/the-washing-society/
“Drift and Bough”
2014, Super 8mm on Digital, B&W, sound, 6 min.
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. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painterʼs chiaroscuro. Woven into this cinematic landscape, we hear sound artist Stephen Vitielloʼs delicate yet soaring musical track which seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to the sky.
Tip of My Tongue
2017, color, sound, 80 min.
“To mark her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers a group of her contemporaries—all New Yorkers but originally hailing from all corners of the globe—for a weekend of recollection and reflection on the most life-altering personal, local, and international events of the past half-century, creating what Sachs calls ‘a collective distillation of our times.’ Interspersed with poetry and flashes of archival footage, this poignant reverie reveals how far beyond our control life is, and how far we can go despite this.” — Kathy Brew, Museum of Modern Art
“A mesmerizing ride through time, a dreamscape full of reflection, filled with inspired use of archival footage, poetry, beautiful cinematography and music. Raises the question of how deeply events affect us, while granting us enough room to crash into our own thoughts, or float on by, rejoicing in the company of our newfound friends.” — Screen Slate, Sonya Redi
“A beautiful, poetic collage of memory, history, poetry, and lived experience, in all its joys, sorrows, fears, hopes, triumphs, and tragedies … rendered in exquisite visual terms, creating an artful collective chronicle of history.” Christopher Bourne, Screen Anarchy
Trailer: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2017/04/25/tip-of-my-tongue/
Featuring: Dominga Alvarado, Mark Cohen, Sholeh Dalai, Andrea Kannapell, Sarah Markgraf, Shira Nayman, George Sanchez, Adam Schartoff, Erik Schurink, Accra Shepp, Sue Simon, Jim Supanick
Cinematography: Sean Hanley
Editing: Amanda Katz
Your Day is My Night
2013, HD video and live performance, color, sound, 64 min.
Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.
“A strikingly handsome, meditative work: a mixture of reportage, dreams, memories and playacting, which immerses you in an entire world that you might unknowingly pass on the corner of Hester Street, unable to guess what’s behind the fifth-floor windows.” -The Nation
In Chinese, English & Spanish with English Subtitles.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pks0_IRHek
Featuring: Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Qing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, Sheut Hing Lee, Kam Yin Tsui, & Veraalba Santa.
Camera by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass
Winner, Best Feature Documentary, San Diego Asian Film Festival, 2013 * Winner, Best Feature Film, Workers Unite! Film Festival, 2013 * Winner, Best Experimental Film, Traverse City Film Festival, 2013
