Category Archives: SECTIONS

Wide Angle Vol. 14: Feminist Polemics through Film Poetry by Marilyn Fabe / The House of Science

Wide Angle Volume 14, published in 1992. The House of Science: Museum of False Facts / Feminist Polemics through Film Poetry by Marilyn Fabe.

In The House of Science:A Museum of False Facts, Lynne Sachs exposes the edifice of scientific “facts” with which the male-dominated disciplines of science and medicine have constructed an image of what a woman is. Through-out the 30-minute film, Sachs traces the unfortunate interface between women and science, a terrain in which men are supposed to have all the knowledge, defining and mapping out women as their territory, while women are alienated from their own bodies.

This synopsis of the film’s thesis doesn’t begin to convey the wit, complexity and visual brilliance with which Sachs approaches her subject. Indeed, I would argue that she achieves in this film what Sergei Eisenstein sought through intellectual montage: “to restore to the intellectual process its fire and passion … to give back to emasculated theoretical formulas the rich exuberance of life-felt forms.” Through associative montage, superimposed collage, and sound in counterpoint to image, she launches an attack on the presumed objectivity of western science, and exposes the limitations of verbal language in expressing “the truth.” Sachs does this by replacing the language of logic and science with a complex film poetry. The House of Science is a passionate feminist film that makes its point through poetry rather than polemics.

Even as Sachs depicts the house of science into which women have been locked, she subtly and subversively dismantles it-or, in a metaphor more appropriate to the film’s denouement, burns it down. The manner in which the first sequence works suggests the structure of the film as a whole. Before the titles appear, Sachs counterpoints found footage of a man in a white jacket-a Doctor with a capital 0-escorting a woman into a glass booth. This image is accompanied by a voiceover of a woman describ- ing the cold, perfunctory manner in which she was treated during her pregnancy by her gynecologist. Here the disparate sound and image tracks uncannily mesh, the glass booth becoming a symbol of the sterile House of Sci- ence in which women have been enclosed, objectified and observed. At the same time, the voice of the woman reflecting on her pregnancy reminds us that everyone’s original dwelling is the woman’s body. In a flash of recognition an idea bursts forth: because men come from a mysterious house (the womb), they have a compulsive

need to put women back into one (the doctor leading the woman into the glass booth). The sadistic implications of this are played out associatively when the same doctor detonates a fuse which causes a model of a house to burst into flames. Sachs adds her own heat (her anger) to this image by tinting the black and white image of the burning house with flashes of orange.

This foregrounding of the filmmaker’s feelings, superim- posed in color on the black and white image, resonates suggestively with the pregnant woman’s description of her gynecologist: “He always struck me as short, cold and with glasses and he may not look like that at all.” At issue here is the questioning of any kind of objective reality. Unlike the authoritarian certainty with which men speak throughout the film, this woman acknowledges how feelings filter our perceptions of reality.

Sachs exposes the hidden feeling behind the language of science by quoting one Lombroso, a 19th century “expert” on criminality in women, who pontificates on the “irrefutable physical signs of a born thief” in a nine-year- old girl. The ignorance, prejudice and insanity of Lombrasso’s words, which appear irr subtitles, are rendered even more ridiculous because they are read on the soundtrack by a female child who mangles the text by stumbling over the pronunciation of the words. On the image track is an exuberant nine-year-old girl in a Batman costume, a superhero in her resistance to the misogynist science of men. The image of the little girl changes to one of a dancing woman, who, unlike the child, is not free but contained in a crudely chalk-drawn frame of a house, reminding us of how adult women lose the liberty of girlhood only to be confined in the constrictive House of Science.

Sachs places frames around men as well, play- fully asserting the power of the woman artist to turn the tables. In one instance a man stands before a picture frame lecturing on anatomy. As he discusses the framework of the body, he himself appears in a frame, and the prurience underlying his pompous abstractions is exposed when the picture in the frame within a frame turns into a nude woman.

As the film progresses, Sachs increasingly presents images of women defining themselves. Three adult women, who earlier had dutifully mouthed Lombrasso’s certainty that female thieves and “above all prostitutes” have a cranial capacity inferior to that of “moral women,” begin to speak for themselves. For example, a woman art critic offers insight into why the pubic hair was removed from Renaissance representations of Venuses: ”fhe more the visual image can be disarmed the better the male artist feels.” And the filmmaker’s journal entry expresses the exhilaration and power of a woman with a speculum looking into herself.

Yet Sachs offers no smug sense of victory for women. The latter images in the film, like those at the beginning, are riddled with ambiguity. The woman with the speculum lives in dread of the cancer she might find now that she has the power to examine herself. And little girls, who through- out the film resist the confinements of their culture, are given the gaze-they become spectators in movie houses-only to witness hauntingly beautiful images of graceful south sea island women spoiled by a sexist and racist voice-of-god commentary.

Although Sachs does not posit any material or transcen- dent victory for women, her film does offer a model of witty, exuberant, sensual and subversive film language that questions and subverts the patriarchal structures of thought and representation that for centuries have impris- oned women. Thus, at the end of the film the blazing house reappears, but now it takes on a new meaning: the fire that bursts forth and collapses the walls of the house becomes a powerful metaphor for the incendiary power of the woman poet/polemicist to destroy from within the oppressive structure of the House of Science.

Marilyn Fabe teaches Film Studies and Women’s Studies At the UniversityofCalifornia-Berkeley. She is The Co-author Against theClock:Career Women Speak on the Choice to Have Children (RandomHouse, 1979).

Review of House of Science in Wide Angle

Wide Angle, Volume 14, Numbers 3 & 4 (July-October 1992).

The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts

Feminist Polemics Through Film Poetry

By Marilyn Fabe

In The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, Lynne Sachs exposes the edifice of scientific “facts” with which the male-dominated disciplines of science and medicine have constructed an image of what a woman is. Through-out the 30-minute film, Sachs traces the unfortunate inter-face between women and science, a terrain in which men are supposed to have all the knowledge, defining and mapping out women as their territory, while women are alienated from their own bodies.

This synopsis of the film’s thesis doesn’t begin to convey the wit, complexity and visual brilliance with which Sachs approaches her subject. Indeed, I would argue that she achieves in this film what Sergei Eisenstein sought through intellectual montage: “to restore to the intellectual process its fire and passion … to give back to emasculated theoretical formulas the rich exuberance of life-felt forms.” Through associative montage, superimposed collage, and sound in counterpoint to image, she launches an attack on the presumed objectivity of western science, and exposes the limitations of verbal language in expressing “the truth.” Sachs does this by replacing the language of logic and science with a complex film poetry. The House of Science is a passionate feminist film that makes its point through poetry rather than polemics.

Even as Sachs depicts the house of science into which women have been locked, she subtley and subversively dismantles it—or, in a metaphor more appropriate to the film’s denouement, burns it down. The manner in which the first sequence works suggests the structure of the film as a whole. Before the titles appear, Sachs counterpoints found footage of a man in a white jacket—a Doctor with a capital D—escorting a woman into a glass booth. This image is accompanied by a voiceover of a woman describing the cold, perfunctory manner in which she was treated during her pregnancy by her gynecologist. Here the disparate sound and image tracks uncannily mesh, the glass booth becoming a symbol of the sterile House of Science in which women have been enclosed, objectified and observed. At the same time, the voice of the woman reflecting on her pregnancy reminds us that everyone’s original dwelling is the woman’s body. In a flash of recognition an idea bursts forth: because men come from a mysterious house (the womb), they have a compulsive need to put women back into one (the doctor leading the woman into the glass booth). The sadistic implications of this are played out associatively when the same doctor detonates a fuse which causes a model of a house to burst into flames. Sachs adds her own heat (her anger) to this image by tinting the black and white image of the burning house with flashes of orange.

This foregrounding of the filmmaker’s feelings, superimposed in color on the black and white image, resonates suggestively with the pregnant woman’s description of her gynecologist: “He always struck me as short, cold and with glasses and he may not look like that at all.” At issue here is the questioning of any kind of objective reality. Unlike the authoritatian certainty with which men speak throughout the film, this woman acknowledges how feelings filter our perceptions of reality.

Sachs exposes the bidden fooling behind the language of science by quoting one Lombrosso, a 19th century “expert” on criminality in women, who pontificates on the “irrefutable physical signs of a born thief” in a nine-year-old girl. The ignorance, prejudice and insanity of Lombrasso’s words, which appear in subtitles, are rendered even more ridiculous because they are read on the sound track by a female child who mangles the text by stumbling over the pronunciation of the words. On the image track is an exuberant nine-year-old girl in a Batman costume, a super hero in her resistance to the misogynist science of men. The image of the little girl changes to one of a dancing woman, who, unlike the child, is not free but contained in a crudely chalk-drawn frame of a house, reminding us of how adult women lose the liberty of girlhood only to be confined in the constrictive House of Science.

Sachs places frames around men as well, playfully asserting the power of the woman artist to turn the tables. In one instance a man stands before a picture frame lecturing on anatomy. As he discusses the framework of the body, he himself appears in a frame, and the prurience underlying his pompous abstractions is exposed when the picture in the frame within a frame turns into a nude woman.

As the film progresses, Sachs increasingly presents images of women defining themselves. Three adult women, who earlier had dutifully mouthed Lombrasso’s certainty that female thieves and “above all prostitutes” have a cranial capacity inferior to that of “moral women,” begin to speak for themselves. For example, a woman art critic offers insight into why the pubic hair was removed from Renaissance representations of Venuses: “The more the visual image can be disarmed the better the male artist feels.” And the filmmaker’s journal entry expresses the exhilaration and power of a woman with a speculum looking into herself.

Yet Sachs offers no smug sense of victory for women. The latter images in the film, like those at the beginning, are riddled with ambiguity. The woman with the speculum lives in dread of the cancer she might find now that she has the power to examine herself. And little girls, who throughout the film resist the confinements of their culture, arc given the gaze—they become spectators in movie houses—only to witness hauntingly beautiful images of graceful south sea island women spoiled by A sexist and racist voice-of-god commentary.

Although Sachs does not posit any material or transcendent victory for women, her film docs offer a model of witty, exuberant, sensual and subversive film language that questions and subverts the patriarchal structures of thought and representation that for centuries have imprisoned women. Thus, at the end of the film the blazing house reappears, but now it takes on a new meaning: the fire that bursts forth and collapses the walls of the house becomes a powerful metaphor for the incendiary power of the woman poet/polemicist to destroy from within the oppressive structure of the House of Science.

Marilyn Fabe teaches Film Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of California-Berkeley. She is the co-author of Up Against the Clock: Career Women Speak on the Choice to Have Children (Random House, 1979).

THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE: A MUSEUM OF FALSE FACTS is distributed by

Canyon Cinema (415/626-2255).

Film & Doba / THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE Script

Images from Film & Doba 1991, text by Stanislav Ulver.

“In Film a Doba, Stanislav Ulver started publishing texts about animated films in the early eighties. In 1989, he became a member of the editorial staff and four years later the editor-in-chief. During his tenure, Film a Doba was one of the few periodicals that consistently reflected non-fiction, animated and experimental cinematography. In addition to professional articles, Ulver has published countless reviews, festival reports, interviews and translations here. His texts were also published in Illumination , Analogon , ASIFA News and a number of domestic and foreign catalogs.

He worked as a teacher at FAMU, where he taught the history of animated and avant-garde film and led seminars on film aesthetics and media criticism. He was the editor of the anthologies Film and Time: 1962–1970 (1997), Light in Us. Experimental Film (2003) and Animation and the Time 1955–2000 (2004). Editorially prepared the release of the screenplay by Marketa Lazarová (1998). In 1991, his monograph Western Film Avant-Garde was published.

On May 14 2022, film theoretician, columnist, educator and former editor-in-chief of Film and Time Stanislav Ulver passed away. Honor his memory!” –Film a Doba

The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts

“The House of Science: a museum of false facts”
30 min., color, sound, 1991

“Offering a new feminized film form, this piece explores both art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural college. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.” (SF Cinematheque)

“A disturbing discovery and a remarkable exposition. The film demonstrates Sachs’ natural gifts as an autobiographer, a philosopher and a true artist.” (Melbourne Film Festival)

“The film takes off on a visual and aural collage…combining the theoretical issues of feminism with the discrete and personal remembrances of childhood.” ( San Francisco Bay Guardian)

“Throughout ‘The House of Science’ an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title –house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space — without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.'” (Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archives)

Charlotte Film Festival, First Prize Experimental; Atlanta Film Festival, Honorable Mention Experimental; International Audiovisual Experimental Festival, Arnheim, Netherlands; Black Maria Film Fest, Juror’s Award; Hallwalls Center for the Arts, Buffalo, NY; Humbolt Film Festival, Teffen Filter Award; Museum of Modern Art, Cineprobe; Portland Museum of Art, “Icons, Rebels and Visionaries”; Athens Film Festival, Experimental Prize; Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; Utah Film Festival, First Prize Short Film.

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

“The job required her to eat like a bird.”
“Only decades later did the three tennis players learn of the dangers of the sun.”
“She was beginning to wonder how to reconcile the seemingly incompatible differences between the rhythm of her heart and his.”
“At night they gathered together on the mountain.”
“Tracing a topographical map of her chest proved far more interesting than she’d expected.”
“Four mismatched birds perched for a single moment in the crevices of her midwinter mind.”
“Her eyes followed us with great intensity as we wearily traipsed through the final gallery of the 18th Century French Wing.”
“The House of Science: a museum of false facts”

RECLAIMING WOMANHOOD – ON LYNNE SACHS’ ‘THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE’

Cinea Berlin
By Tijana Perović
July 1, 2020
https://cinea.be/reclaiming-womanhood-on-lynne-sachs-the-house-of-science/

In The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), Lynne Sachs curates a moving-image exhibition of womanhood, carefully sampling artifacts from the past (fabricated truths built to sustain male dominancy), intertwined with empirical artifacts of her own history (personal truths and memories). Through the power of visual and aural association, several domains of the exhibit simultaneously unfold in front of us: the personal, the public and the historical. Sachs drifts between these domains smoothly until a whole network of information is gently bestowed upon us. We start with the image of a doctor guiding a woman into a glass booth, followed by him setting a model house on fire, and the sound of Sachs’ voice, telling us about her experience of being examined by an apathetic gynecologist while pregnant. The image of the detached male doctor lingers with us for the whole length of the movie, along with his perverse power over a female body, over her right to “bare armor”—as in, contraception—and over her right to give birth. Together with Sachs, we wince at the story of her obtaining a contraceptive diaphragm. The doctor has no issue sending her off into battle with her new armor and zero instructions on how to do it. “I leave his office fully equipped, protected, and completely incapable of placing that plastic sheath over my cervix. Where is my cervix?” Next, we see a naked woman rolling up and down a sand dune unceasingly.

Another moment sat with me throughout the movie, that of a little girl. A little girl learning to read, stumbling through the grotesque words of Dr. Cesare Lombroso, naively walking us through his diagnosis of a nine-year-old female, a “born thief”. Sachs explores the concept of criminal atavism by juxtaposing her daughter’s voice with the delusional criminalization of women based on their physical appearance. By pairing images of female child-like playfulness and purity with delusional artifacts of the late 19th century, she amplifies the gap between the male study of women and women themselves. She flows between the public, mainstream, male rationale and the private, subjective female counter-experience. We are left with the uncomfortable ambiguity of child-like giggles of lightness and historical screams of darkness.

At the core of Sachs’ exhibit lies her most intimate gaze upon womanhood. It is articulated into unspoken words on the screen:

“I am two bodies—the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk.” (We hear pencil scratches.)

The body of the body of a woman is biologically destined to be softer and therefore more fluid. All this fluidity, open space, holes, smells are often psychologically coupled with shame. Sachs’ words here represent the experience of most girls becoming women. This body of ours is too visceral for both us and the world to accept.

“The body of the body moves in cycles, and with every repetition there is a sensation of pain. The arrival of the body of the body forces the body of the mind to take notice, begrudgingly so. With legs crossed, the blood is caught just before it crosses the border into the public domain” (We hear a person peeing and a loud flushing of the toilet.)

Not only is the body of the body full of liquids and smells, but they threaten to spill over into the public domain. Our bodies and all their products are trained to be confined.

“Filled with infectious, infected liquids, we hold in the blood, the water, the sneeze, the wax, the hair, the pus, the breath. All that is ours to let go, to release onto this earth is held in, contained. I am the cauldron of dangerous substances.”

To defeat this imposed belief system of male ideas which we were fed throughout our lives is to inspect and observe your body for yourself. It takes a lot of courage to look into your own body with curiosity, rather than shame.

“I trace a path across my chest, searching for surprises I’d rather not find, knots in the fabric.”

Women are being re-educated to examine themselves instead of being examined by the cold metal-handed gynecologist. However, self-examination carries a burden of unforeseen surprises. Releasing our juices into the public, into the mainstream. Bravely facing the knots in the fabric as early signs of our bodies decaying.

“Undressed, we read our bodies like a history. Scars, muscles, curves of the spine. We look at ourselves from within. Collect our own data, create our own science. Begin to define.”

Built from the inside out, this new laboratory pushes against the walls of the old structure. An incendiary effect, but not arson.

When we are brave enough to look into the stretch marks, the scars, the wobbles, the curves, we own our space, our fluids and our bones. We collect and process our data, introduce new terminology. We allow for the soft to be malleable, buoyant, rather than flaccid and weak. We allow for differences. We allow for change. We allow for expression to re-place suppression. We become safely vulnerable instead of avoidant or anxious. We spit our words and meanings out instead of swallowing them.

In between the personal and the public domain lie Sachs’ women. These are real, physical women, subjects of anatomical studies, as well as women in paintings, subjects of the male painter’s gaze. The first, forced silent, the latter, painted static, confined to a space in history, “to be taken”. We witness a female artist looking at men looking at women.

Despite the immanently observational, passive and saddening tone of the movie, there is a promise in this exhibit. A promise that by carefully unfolding and studying the history of womanhood, one is already shaking the habitual. Sachs’ voice is not passive at all, it is rather filled with precisely focused meditative anger, an eloquent scream for justice, live from the gynecologist’s office, calling for help and cooperation.

To aid and support this novel conception of womanhood, we seek out new imagery, new viewpoints, new forms. Sachs’ filmography is a great start. The House of Science shifted my gaze to earlier works of art, predating celluloid. I searched for an alternative museum of womanhood. In particular, the Viennese modernist painters Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka stood out as engaging with the representation of women: as neither virgins nor whores, allowing their female subjects to escape this demeaning cage. They let their subjects move around freely, be comfortable, take up space, lie down wrapped up in themselves. Schiele went one step further: painting anger and anxiety on the faces of his subjects. “By exploring such subjects, the three artists simultaneously exhumed their own sexuality: their fears, sorrows, hopes, and ecstasies…their women do not necessarily submit passively to the male artistic gaze. They look back and demand to be understood on their own terms.”1 These were not the only attempts by men to redefine womanhood in a feminist way. However, the others were often buried and forgotten, most likely because they were single, isolated sprouts of change.

Although revolutionary, the idea that cooperation could displace competition has certainly taken root lately. This idea insinuates that equality is actually a lot more functional and productive for all parties involved. A very timely example would be the evolution of a virus (or a random constituted body of persons, empowered by the state, with a specific aim, e.g. to enforce the law). If a virus were to survive, it would have to evolve in a cooperative manner with its host. Eventually, many highly infectious and pathogenic viruses have decreased their pathogenicity in order to keep their hosts alive. Some have even been completely eradicated over time. This gives me hope, both for us as a species and us as women. However, to put this into practice, we need both the unspoken voices to be heard and the destructive, competitive voices to fade out. It would have to be a cooperative effort.

EINDNOTEN

Jane Kallir, ‘Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka – Men Looking at Women Looking at Men’, p. 59, in: Agnes Husslein-Arco Jane Kallir and Alfred Weidinger, The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, 2015

https://cinea.be/reclaiming-womanhood-on-lynne-sachs-the-house-of-science/

Review of Sermons and Sacred Pictures by J. Hoberman

The Village Voice, vol XXXIV No. 49 December, 1989

Choices: Film by J. Hoberman

1989 Margaret Mead Film Festival

The first two days of this annual event include documentaries on Japanese war brides and Native American vets, Lapps and Papuans, Vienna remembering the Anschluss, and tourists in Yosemite. Among the highlights: Arthur Dong’s Forbidden City, a portrait of a venerable San Francisco tourist attraction with all Asian entertainment, and Lynne Sachs’ Sermons and Sacred Pictures, which recycles the 50-year-old amateur films of a Memphis Baptist minister.

December 4 through 7, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79^th Street, 769-5305. (Hoberman)

Sermons and Sacred Pictures

Trailer:

Full Film:

“Sermons and Sacred Pictures: the life and work of Reverend L.O. Taylor”
29 minutes, Color and B&W, sound, 1989

2015 Screening at the Museum of Modern Art

An experimental documentary on Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister from Memphis, Tennessee who was also an inspired filmmaker with an overwhelming interest in preserving the social and cultural fabric of his own community in the 1930′ s and ‘ 40’ s . I combine his films and music recordings with my own images of Memphis neighborhoods and religious gatherings.

Taylor photographed and filmed businesses and schools in the black community, trips to the National Baptist Convention, baptisms, funerals, social events, and individuals in the quiet dignity of their everyday lives. Over the years he compiled an extraordinary record of black life in the South before the Civil Rights movement captured the attention of the nation. Sermons and Sacred Pictures combines Rev. Taylor’s black-and-white films and audio recordings with color images of contemporary Memphis neighborhoods and religious gatherings. Commentary by his widow and others who knew him forms an intertwined narrative focusing on Rev. Taylor as a pioneering documentarian and social activist. Taylor emerges as a man of humor, piety and intelligence, vibrantly involved in the community he loved.

Supported by a Pioneer Fund Grant for Emerging Documentary Filmmakers and a Film Arts Foundation Development Grant.

“Sermons and Sacred Pictures has a magical quality….It brings to life the work of Rev.. Taylor through his community filmmaking efforts. The film in turn affirms African-American identity and spirit.” Elaine Charnov, Margaret Mead Film Festival

“Viewers will be fascinated by this half hour documentary…among the highlights of the Margaret Mead Film Festival.” J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Screenings and Festivals include:
Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989 and 2015)
“Best Short Documentary” 1989 Athens (Ohio) Film Festival
CINE Golden Eagle
Margaret Mead Film Festival
Robert Flaherty Film Seminar
American Anthropological Association honoree, 1991
Black Cultural Expo (Memphis) honoree
National Education Film Festival Award
“Best Documentary” Sinking Creek Film Festival, Nashville
WKNO Memphis, WYBE Philadelphia

In the library collections of: Duke, Los Angeles Public Library, Memphis State University, Newark Public Library, Northwestern, New York University, Reed College , Stanford and Temple

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Icarus Films, Canyon Cinema, or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

Department of the Interior / Cinematograph Vol. 3

Department of the Interior

Lynne Sachs, Cinematograph Journal of Film and Media Art, 1988

“There is a shadow cast across Nina Fonoroff’s Department of the Interior. It is the shadow of the Founding Fathers, those luminous figures to whom we give credit for creating our laws, our language and our rational mode of thinking. Much to their possible chagrin, however, this office of the Executive Branch (which is given the responsibility of maintaining public land) is no longer completely intact. Instead, the irrationality of the Mother and the child has begun to take control.

Whether a relic of the state or the family, Fonoroff’s white wood panel suburban house leaves us with no more than a skeleton of a way of life.Through the apparatus of the camera lens, this sign of stability, propriety and happiness is read but never understood, visited but never entered. Time after time, I-as-a-spectator-am-brought-to-the-front-door-of-this-house. Yet I am excluded (as a woman?)from the very place I was told was mine to shape and to manage.I am left outside with my memories and my dreams.

•••

The hysteric, whose body is transformed into a theater for forgotten scenes, relives the past, bearing witness to a lost childhood that survives in suffering. (from The Newly Born Woman by Helen Cixous and Catherine Clement)

The various codes contained within the film tell us how to read practically every element involved in its construction as a text. The exchange between the music (Gian Carlo Minotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors) and the domestic banging around, for example, establishes a tension between those sounds created by culture and those that are natural expressions of human unrest. Eventually, the opera is destroyed – cut to pieces by ringing bells, furniture thrown to the floor, knocking.

There is a compelling, almost consuming quality to the overall tone of Department of the Interior. Perhaps it is the enigma of these particulars. Fonoroff deposits a curious array of clues into the floating, evolving box we call a film. Then we (as spectators or researchers) are left with the intriguing task of compiling these facts and creating a narrative, our own “theater of forgotten scenes’.’

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker living in San Francisco. She is currently working on an experimental documentary based on the life of a minister from Memphis, Tennessee who made his own films in the 1930s and ’40s.”

The Randy Band Film (1988)

The Randy Band Film
3 min. 1988
Directed by Lynne Sachs

In the mid 1980s, I heard Memphis’s very own RANDY BAND and decided I would collaborate with their bass player Randy Chertow on a movie. Tommy Hull wrote this song “You” and I shot this Super 8 Movie to go with his great melody. In this movie, you will see band members Chertow, Tommy Hull and George Reineke. You will also see my wonderful sister Dana Sachs and great friend Kathy Steuer. I too have a small cameo you might catch. Some of the film is shot in the Fairgrounds in Memphis and some in the now long gone but dearly cherished MUSEUM OF THE UNKNOWN in Marin County, California.

Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning

“Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning”, 9 min. color 16mm. 1987.

Like an animal in one of Eadweard Muybridge’s scientific photo experiments, five undramatic moments in a man’s life are observed by a woman. A study in visual obsession and a twist on the notion of the “gaze”.

Presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “American Century”, 2000.

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

Drawn and Quartered

“Drawn and Quartered”, 4 min. color 16mm. by Lynne Sachs
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, 1987

“Images of a male form (on the left) and a female form (right) exist in their own private domains, separated by a barrier. Only for a moment does the one intrude upon the pictorial space of the other.” – Albert Kilchesty, LA Filmforum

San Francisco Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, Installation at Pacific Film Archive “Way Bay 2” Survey of Bay Area Art 2018; Camára Lucída Festival de Ciné 2021 , Museum of the Moving Image 2021

MAKING AND BEING “DRAWN & QUARTERED”
an essay by Lynne Sachs

My great Uncle Charlie was a prominent Memphis businessman who took a giddy pleasure in shooting some of the most elegant, compassionate photographs I’ve ever seen. I remember his close-up portrait taken in the late 1950’s of a wizened black man looking into the lens. I would sneak into the back hall of his house to look at this image, as if those large eyes revealed to me all the horrors of a segregated South that was beginning, thank god, to disappear. The face still haunts me.

None of Uncle Charlie’s children or even grandchildren took much interest in photography. My teenage obsession with the camera thus became the reason we developed such a long-lasting relationship. He and I would spend hours together looking at the photographs we’d both taken. These were the first rigorous, aesthetic dialogues around image-making I’d ever had.

One afternoon in 1984, when were sitting side-by-side in Uncle Charlie’s study pouring over some travel slides, I announced that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was 22 years old. Uncle Charlie’s response was immediate and silent. He got up abruptly, pulled an object from a bureau drawer, and handed me a heavy, brown camera that looked and felt like an army hand grenade. This was the first time I had ever seen a Regular 8 Filmo camera. He carefully explained to me how a 50 foot reel fit into the casing, that I needed to shoot half the reel one way, then open the camera, flip the reel and camera and shoot the rest. “Beware,” he warned me, “if you forget to shoot the second half with the camera right-side up the world will appear topsy-turvy. After you shoot all three minutes, send the film to a lab to have it processed and split down the middle.”

“SPLIT IT DOWN THE MIDDLE?” I thought to myself, “How violent, how intriguing, how corporeal.” Strangely enough, I didn’t actually use the camera until three years later. It was the fall of 1987, and I was a new graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute. By this time, I’d aligned myself with the film avant-garde. Every normal way of doing anything with a camera was anathema. My little Filmo cine hand grenade still had an aura I couldn’t resist. It finally beckoned me to be used. On one of those rare, warm San Francisco afternoons I convinced my new boyfriend John to follow me to the roof of the Art Institute to make the first movie I would ever shoot in Regular 8mm. Despite having no experience whatsoever with the camera, I’d meticulously planned every shot we would make together. Perhaps I’d been inspired by the organized fluidity of Maya Deren’s “Choreography for the Camera”. Just as significant, I believe, were the mechanical properties of that Filmo. What would happen if I didn’t rip apart the spinal chord of the film itself?

Once we reached the roof, I surprised John by informing him that we would both have to take off our clothes. I then explained that I would shoot images of him for the first 1 1/2 minutes of film and that he would shoot the second half of me. He wasn’t happy with the rules, but he accepted them for the three hours it took. That must have been the year I first encountered Laura Mulvey’s theory of the “male gaze”, seen Carolee Schneeman’s “Fuses”, pondered Yvonne Rainer’s “Lives of Performers”. The artistic practice of being a feminist in the late 1980’s was whirling wildly in my mind.

When I took the roll to the lab, I begged them NOT to split the film as they normally would, to leave it all in tact after the processing. The resulting 8mm footage was simultaneously thrilling (artistically) and humiliating (personally). There were our two nude bodies on the same screen but also divided by four equilateral frames. I looked at John (fine…); John looked at me (yikes!). Within the parameters of the image gestalt, we are dancing together without ever touching. Our two bodies remain totally distinct and apart.

My immediate reaction took me directly to the editing room where I cut out all the frames of my face. I wanted to erase myself from the film. I held these “out takes” in my hand, breathing a sigh of relief at knowing that my nude body could never be identified. Then I felt strangely ashamed at my own un-hip cowardice. A few days later, I returned to the splicer and “reconstituted” my body by replacing my face, owning up to what I’d made, and, in a way, accepting my own body with all its flab and flaws. This was years before the time of “nondestructive” (digital) editing, so if you were to look closely at the finished film print now on 16mm you would see those cuts (SCARS!!). You would see the mark making that reveals so much about my apprehension in those days.

At that moment, the technological limitations of Uncle Charlie’s hallowed regular 8mm Filmo movie camera lead me to a know place as an artist. Scared and anxious but also aware of a burgeoning excitement, I named my little movie “Drawn and Quartered”. Months later, I screened the silent movie to a packed audience at San Francisco’s Red Vic Theatre on Haight Street. Within those few painful minutes, the crowd went from absolute silence, to raucous laughter and back to an exquisite quiet. I was shaking.

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Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

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