Climate stickers, blockades, demonstrations and spray attacks. Is this law or crime? Does democracy need civil disobedience? “Investigation of a Flame” by Lynne Sachs documents an anti-war action by Catholic activists, the Catonsville Nine, against the Vietnam War – and interviews those involved about it thirty years after their action. The Frankfurt lawyer Samira Akarbian has just published her award-winning doctoral thesis on “Civil Disobedience as a Constitutional Interpretation”. We watch the film with her in the Kurbelkiste cinema and discuss civil disobedience today. Afterwards there will be Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” at the Münster Theater, which was inspired, among other things, by the action of the Catonsville Nine. Audience discussion following the performance.
This is the third event in Heaven, Hell, Happy End , the new series that accompanies musical theater productions. The deputy chairwoman of QueerBw, Lieutenant Colonel iG Anastasia Biefang, was a guest at the first event. At the second appointment we already had a conversation with the director Lynne Sachs about her film Investigation of a Flame.
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne Sachs filmed her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her raw and eye-opening attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
“[A] brisk, prismatic and richly psychodramatic family portrait.” – Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times
Filmmaker Michael Gitlin will moderate a conversation with Lynne Sachs, after the film.
“A Line Break is Like a Cut: The Impulse for Disruption in Poetry and Experimental Film” Lynne Sachs The New School Graduate Program in Creative Writing Oct. 25, 2023
Organized by Margaret Rhee Assistant Professor of Writing Across Media and Chair of Arts Writing
Working with memoir text as lines of poetry, Using the 2nd person as the subject “how do you ….?” Gives some distance from the subject.
Film About a Father Who 74 min. 2020 a film by Lynne Sachs
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.
Short Poetry Films by Lynne Sachs
Celebration of words and sounds of words in rhythm with images, not working with interpretation in anyway, no precise intersection, instead there is parallel reading. “Starfish Aorta Colossus” (Lynne Sachs, 4 1/2 min, unsplit 8mm to digital transfer, 2015) Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of rediscovered film journeys. NYC poet Paolo Javier invited Lynne to create a film that would speak to one of his poems. In response, she travels through 25 years of her 8 mm films.
Listening to poetry as action, playing with objects in response to words, working with someone else as performer who also interprets. “Girl is Presence” by Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer (4 min, HD Video, 2020) During the global pandemic, Sachs and Selcer collaborated remotely to create Girl is Presence, a rhythmic visual poem tinged by gender and violence. Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, a ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things. As the words build in tension, the scene becomes occult, ritualistic, and alchemical. Website:http://www.lynnesachs.com/2020/05/28/girl-is-presence-by-lynne-sachs-anne-lesley-selcer/ Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/412447077
Homage to Mayer’s home. My shooting and reading is entering Bernadette’s life experience. “Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” (Lynne Sachs, 3 min, 16mm, B&W, 2020) In July 1971, avant-garde writer and language poet Bernadette Mayer produced Memory, a multimedia project in which she shot one roll of 35mm film each day and kept a daily journal. In honor of the project’s compilation and release as a book, Sachs embarks on a study of the memory and language of place. Journeying to Mayer’s childhood home in a Queens neighborhood of New York City, she pays homage to Mayer in a collage of architecture, light, and rhythm. Website:http://www.lynnesachs.com/2020/11/02/visit-to-bernadette-mayers-childhood-home-2020/ Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/440075830
Poetry meets painting. I timeless image lands at a moment in history or a current event through the text. “Orange Glow” by Lynne Sachs and Laura Harrison(1 ½ min, HD Video, 2021) “Orange Glow” began in September 2020 as an exchange between two friends in two different cities who decided to come together in the making of a film. From her home in Chicago, Laura Harrison animated each stroke of a painting. She then sent her 90 second video to Lynne Sachs in Brooklyn. Horrified by the television images of San Francisco enveloped in wildfire smoke at the time, Lynne interpreted Laura’s painting gestures with these thoughts in mind. She hit the play button of the video and began writing a poem in response to what she saw. Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2020/12/31/orange-glow/ Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/460167751
I wanted poetry to become language, like a mode of communication but sometimes also not. Place it in Queens. Place it in the pandemic. “Swerve” (7 min, HD Video, 2022) a film by Lynne Sachs with poetry by Paolo Javier A Queens market and playground become the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five NYC performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/ cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next Website: http://www.lynnesachs.com/2021/10/12/swerve-with-paolo-javier/ (trailer only) Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/629421455 (full film)
FILMS TO WATCH IN CLASS that DO NOT explicitly use language
This could be an installation or a performance with language used like the music as punctuation.
“Window Work” (9 min, video, color, 2000)
A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery within and beyond the image. Sometimes one hears the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets on a Baltimore summer night. Other times jangling toys dissolve into the roar of a jet overhead, or children tremble at the sound of thunder. These disparate sounds dislocate the space temporally and physically from the restrictions of reality. The small home-movie boxes within the larger screen are gestural forms of memory, clues to childhood, mnemonic devices that expand on the sense of immediacy in her “drama.” These miniature image-objects represent snippets of an even earlier media technology — film. In contrast to the real time video image, they feel fleeting, ephemeral, imprecise.
Again the quotidian actually becomes pictures and words at the same time. If you look, you find poetry where you don’t expect it.
“A Year in Notes and Numbers” (4 min, HD Video, silent, 2018) A year’s worth of to-do lists confronts the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone. Museum of the Moving Image, Museo de Arte Moderno Buenos Aires.
I used loud whispering and humming as poetry that moves across a generation, btwn a mom and her daughter. “Maya at 24”(4 min, 16mm to digital transfer, b&w, 2021) Lynne films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.
How might we use poetry here? This is titled from a poem.
“She Carries the Holiday in Her Eyes” 4 min., silent, 2023 A picture of parallels and swirls, two women touch with eyes closed, use cameras in motion, discover a holiday of optics.
“I have seen an individual, whose manners, though wholly within the conventions of elegant society, were never learned there, but were original and commanding, and held out protection and prosperity; one who did not need the aid of a court-suit, but carried the holiday in his (her) eye.” — From Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Manners”
“E•pis•to•lar•y: letter to Jean Vigo” (5 min, HD Video, B&W, 2021)
In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Lynne Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic “Zero for Conduct” in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, Sachs wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can turn so quickly into chaos and violence.
Discuss how this connects to YEAR BY YEAR POEMS. Poetry on screen and voice. Who is reading?
“Tip of My Tongue” (80 min, HD Video, 2017)
To mark her 50th birthday, 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. .
Sponsor: Co-sponsored by the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Location: Pembroke Hall
Room: 305
Magic Lantern Cinema presents a screening of THE WASHING SOCIETY, a film by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs.
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. Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses, THE WASHING SOCIETY investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Drawing on each other’s artistic practices, Sachs and Olesker present a stark yet poetic vision of those whose working lives often go unrecognized, turning a lens onto their hidden stories, which are often overlooked. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of THE WASHING SOCIETY through interviews and observational moments. With original music by sound artist Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. 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.
We will also screen other selected work by Sachs. After the screening, we will hold a panel conversation with the filmmakers and feminist activist Silvia Federici, whose work has inspired the filmmakers.
Lizzie Olesker is a playwright, dramaturg, and director. Her original works, exploring the hidden history and poetry of everyday experience, have been developed and seen at the Public Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, Ohio Theater, Invisible Dog, New Georges, and Cherry Lane Theater. Her recent collaborative, hybrid documentary film “The Washing Society” (2018) was shown at international festivals, BAM, the National Gallery, etc. and began as a site-specific performance in NYC neighborhood laundromats. She’s taught playwriting at the New School, Purchase, and NYU where she’s active with her adjunct faculty union, UAW Local 7902.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. 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. Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. Her films have screened at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at MoMI (Museum of the Moving Image), Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival, among others. In 2021, both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center gave her awards for her lifetime achievements in the experimental and documentary fields. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and a teacher. In 1972 she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.
“I was naturally looking for connections across various films, be they thematic or stylistic and formal. The Washing Society, Fossil, Window Work, and Still Life with Woman and Four Objects all clearly reflect upon what in the first film you call “hidden labor.” This labor is of course gendered and raced in different ways. Formally—whether through closeup or still framing upon hands and limbs, through shadow and light, through match cuts—these films also seem to abstract or defamiliarize the bodies who perform such labor, as well as the tools and machines these bodies use or that sometimes replace such bodies. The affiliation between film, repetition, and labor of course has a long history in (experimental) cinema. But I like the way in which you describe in one of your emails what is effectively your contribution to this history: you attempt to capture “quotidian acts of labor as gestures in the devising of movement for the camera.”
Rewatching The Washing Society helped me consider other threads beyond these connections. One of the early shots in that film—one you repeat a few times—is of lint and hair, in soft focus, slowly being pulled apart. I am not sure if this was an intentional metaphor, but this image resonated with the tenuous yet material threads connecting different people that emerge throughout the film as you interview various workers, who are of different races and gender, and as these workers discuss the customers they service. The laundromat in this sense is a place through which disparate people of the city are materially interwoven, even if those connections are “hidden” or obfuscated through classed, gendered, and raced separations of labor. I wonder if these threads might offer a different way in which we might understand “intersectionality,” not only as the way in which (marginalized) identities overlap within a given person, but also as the material connections that weave across people as such in capitalist society. At one point in the film, this comes to the fore in a collage of multilingual voices that sound over shots in different laundromats.
The labor of women in Indonesia is geographically and temporally removed from the labor of laundromat workers in New York or from domestic labor in suburban homes, but how might we think across the material intersections and connections of these various people, or the ways in which we are all materially implicated in both neighborhood and global structures of hidden labor? How does cinema help (formally) represent these structures?”
Stephen Woo, PhD Candidate Department of Modern Culture and Media Brown University
In partnership with San Francisco Cinematheque | October 21, 2023, 3–5 PM
Join us for nine works by ten contemporary Bay Area filmmakers, a cross-section of the Bay Area’s ever-vibrant multi-generational community curated by Steve Polta, artistic director of San Francisco Cinematheque. These works present a compelling mix of contemplative landscape study, critiques of consumerism and media representation, poetic considerations of solitude and connection, and an abiding love for the physical and chemical charms of the filmic medium itself. Full program details, program notes, and artist bios available at sfcinematheque.org →
Curated by BAN9 Curatorial Counsel member Gina Basso, the ongoing BAN9 Film series will span the entirety of the exhibition, featuring acclaimed Bay Area filmmakers, collectives, and new media artists. Offerings will vary monthly, reflecting BAN9’s curatorial themes and diving into the breadth and depth of the Bay Area’s vibrant film scene by highlighting the local organizations and individuals who contribute to the shape and form of the region’s rich cinematic landscape.
Films
(sans)(image) (arc and Sophia Wang, 7 min, 2023, 16mm, black and white, sound)
Light Signal (Emily Chao, 11 min, 2022, 16mm screened as digital video, color, sound)
We are a group of Jewish American writers, artists and academics. We oppose what the Israeli government is doing with US assistance
President Joe Biden:
We are a group of Jewish American writers, artists and academics. Being Jewish means different things to all of us, but we all have at least one Jewish parent, which means we could move to Israel and qualify for Israeli citizenship.
We condemn attacks on Israeli and Palestinian civilians. We believe it is possible and in fact necessary to condemn Hamas’ actions and acknowledge the historical and ongoing oppression of the Palestinians. We believe it is possible and necessary to condemn Hamas’ attack and take a stand against the collective punishment of Gazans that is unfolding and accelerating as we write.
Cutting off resources to more than 2 million people, demanding families flee their homes in the north, indiscriminately bombing a trapped population – these are war crimes and indefensible actions. And yet the United States government is offering “moral” and material support for the dehumanization and murder of innocent Gazans. We write to publicly declare our opposition to what the Israeli government is doing with American assistance. We call on the US government to seek an immediate ceasefire and to use our resources towards providing aid ensuring the safe return of hostages and building a diplomatic path towards peace.
As Jews, as Americans, we will be made to feel a sense of safety in our communities, and in the world, not by unequivocal US support for Israel, but by our government’s insistence on the universal human rights that so many of us take for granted.
The city of Paderborn is ready to celebrate the highlights of international short film art when “Oberhausen meets Paderborn” opens its doors for an unforgettable short film night. The event will take place on Wednesday, 18 October at 8pm at Pollux by Cineplex (Westernstraße 34, 33098 Paderborn). Tickets are available online from Cineplex or directly at the box office.
The Short Film Night offers the opportunity to discover emerging talents and renowned filmmakers from all over the world. The programme includes new works by filmmakers such as Lynne Sachs from the USA and artists from Colombia as well as German and Austrian productions. The diverse selection reflects the global range of cinematic art and invites the audience to explore new perspectives and stories.
A special highlight of the event is the presentation of short films carefully selected by students of Paderborn University. Within a seminar, the students were able to experience the “69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen” and have then put together a programme. These films are the result of passionate work and creative inspiration, covering a wide range of genres and narrative styles.
The 14th “Oberhausen meets Paderborn” Short Film Night is not only an opportunity to enjoy art and culture, but also a platform for filmmakers and the audience to exchange ideas and network. Film enthusiasts in particular will have the opportunity to see short films that are otherwise rarely seen on the internet or even on the big screen.
About “Oberhausen meets Paderborn
“Oberhausen meets Paderborn” is an annual short film night that presents the best short films from around the world. The event provides a platform for emerging filmmakers and established artists to present their work to a wide audience and celebrate the magic of short film.
Annette and LynneAnnette BrauerhochLynne Sachs at PaderbornStudent CuratorsStephan Ahrens Stephan Ahrens Lynne Sachs Annette B and projectionistsPorn CollectionPorn Collection
In May 1968, the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic priests and laypeople who wanted to stop the Vietnam War, burned draft records. They used homemade napalm. They had previously stolen the files from a district military replacement office in broad daylight. For some it was a crime, for others it was civil disobedience. For the composer Leonard Bernstein, this action, which caused a lot of attention in the public and also in the Catholic Church, was an important impulse for his musical theater piece Mass. He was friends with Father Daniel Berrigan, who was sentenced to prison for this action.
The feminist filmmaker Lynne Sachs made a film about this action in 2001 and allowed the activists, but also employees of the authority, jurors and the public prosecutor to have their say: How do they see the action in retrospect?
She comes to Münster for the premiere of the film (with German subtitles) and speaks to Professor Dr. Oliver Tolmein after the screening about the film and the meaning and consequences of civil disobedience.
This is the second event in “Heaven, Hell, Happy Ending”, the new series that accompanies musical theater productions.
For the final PETROPRESENTS at Petrohradská 13, we have invited American poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs for two evenings of hand-picked short film screenings and one workshop, which are free for the public. Curated by Christopher Small and Daniela Hanusová.
TUESDAY 10 19:30 Program 1: Film is a Collaborative Art (90 mins)
THURSDAY 12 18:00 Lynne Sachs: Making Films Personally and Politically (Workshop, 60 mins) 19:30 Program 2: Feminism as Filmmaking (90 mins)
Lynne Sachs will be present for two nights of screenings, on Tuesday 10th and Thursday 12th October. Before the second program on the 12th, Lynne will give a special workshop to the students of Film Studies at Charles University, which is also open to the public, at Petrohradská kolektiv in Prague, Czech Republic.
Admission to the screenings and the workshop are free of charge, but the capacity of the workshop is limited, so please register if you wish to take part.
Lynne Sachs’s work — both cinematic and poetic — and theoretical thinking teeter on multiple edges; somewhere between the deeply personal and the general, the corporeal and the abstract, the introspective yet always relatable. Kino Petrohradská will screen two blocks of her short documentaries: one exploring feminism as a method of filmmaking, the other Sachs’ frequent tendency to make films collaboratively and communally – whether with her family or with other filmmakers (as in her collaboration with queer cinema pioneer Barbara Hammer on A Month of Single Frames).
In her talk, Sachs will combine film and feminist theory with labour history, focusing on the concepts of reproductive labour, performativity and somatic cinema. The lecture will be based on her forthcoming collaborative publication (with contributions from, for example, the prominent feminist theorist Silvia Federici). The book analyses the process of making her film The Washing Society, exploring the milieu of New York’s laundries and the intersections of immigration, race and capitalism. The talk will be followed by a discussion.
DRAWN & QUARTERED (3 min., 1987) Recently read Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Male gaze challenged. Talk about French feminist theorists Helene Cixous, Luce Irigeray and Julia Kristeva.
WINDOW WORK (9 min, 2000) I was performer, cameraperson, and director – one woman band so to speak. Talk about domestic work, being a mother, Silvia Federici (who came into my life much later), “Wages for House Work” and her theories of Reproductive Labor. Talk about Chantal Ackerman’s “The Bed”.
ATALANTA: 32 YEARS LATER (5 min., 2006) Revision of mythic story of the princess Atlanta whose father, the King, wanted her to marry a prince. She refused, unless he organized a competition of princes around the kingdom who would race to see who was the fastest. The fastest could marry her. I rewrite this, “queer” it, feminize it as we might say today. Dedicated to Barbara Hammer.
AND THEN WE MARCHED (3 min. 2017) How do we as artists participate in the swirl of mainstream politics. Can we change thinking? How does our witness make a difference?
CONTRACTIONS (10 min. 2024) Working collectively to speak out for reproductive justice. Just the act of coming together can make a difference at least amongst ourselves. Talk about Fred Moten’s concept of “hesitant sociology”. Talk about Meredith Monk’s “Elis Island.”
THE JITTERS (3 min. 2023) Coming full circle with Drawn and Quarted almost 40 years later. Talk about Carolee Schneeman’s “Fuses”.
Interactive Section – how do we move a concern, concept or conundrum from just being an idea to being a visual or oral experience of very short duration?
Listen to topics from our volunteers and brainstorm on a film they really could make with their cell phone and a computer editing program they probably already have.
The Jitters 3 min. 16 mm, black and white, silent by Lynne Sachs
I wanted to create a film with my Bolex 16mm camera that reflects who I am at this moment in my life. I bought my camera in 1987, used. It has lived with me for four decades, and it has witnessed pretty much every aspect of my existence. I decided to shoot my roll of black and white film one frame at a time. With 24 frames in a second, this gave me the chance to work more expansively with the Bolex, pushing its capabilities as far as they might go. “The Jitters” includes three very specific performative elements. My partner Mark Street and I wiggle around, watching and celebrating who we are independently and together. I also include my three pet frogs because I like the way that they wiggle in unison and on their own. These small reptiles have been part of our family’s life for 19 years, they needed to be memorialized on film. Lastly, I bring two bonsai trees into the tableaux, because they too should be applauded, for their persistence and longevity. Strangely enough, they wiggle too, that’s part of the magic of film.
