June 7, 2024
https://www.instagram.com/p/C77U14Zs0S2/
“A delightful visit from Lynne Sachs! This weekend begins a great retrospective of her films—Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In—at DCTV in New York! Sachs will be in attendance for Q&As alongside special guests.
Lynne’s Picks:
Wim Wenders’ PARIS, TEXAS
Chris Marker’s SANS SOLEIL
Claudia Weill’s GIRLFRIENDS”
Alex Fields
June 7, 2024
https://notreconciled.substack.com/p/lynne-sachs-from-the-outside-in
For forty years, Lynne Sachs has produced adventurous work at the intersection of documentary, essay, and avant garde film. Though they vary greatly in form, all of her films seek novel ways of questioning dominant perceptions of gender, work, and artistic representation. A career-spanning retrospective of her work, From the Outside In, screens this weekend (June 7-11) at DCTV in New York City and includes approximately two dozen films, from the early 80s to brand new films.
The earliest of these films are interested in our gendered perception of the movements of human bodies. The strongest of these, Drawn and Quartered (1986), uses 8mm film stock in a 16mm projector to display a “split” screen of four frames on one reel of celluloid. The top and bottom rows are identical, but the left and right show difference scenes, initially with a man on the left and a woman on the right. The figures, both naked, engage in a series of ordinary activities: squatting and standing, speaking and gesturing. The quadruple frame, along with the film’s silence, create a choice and push the audience into awareness of where we direct our attention, including how we may interpret the man’s and woman’s body language differently despite their essential similarity.
Other early films employ different devices toward comparable ends. Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986) films a woman putting on a coat, peeling an avocado, and so on, but adds a soundtrack seemingly unrelated to the images. A voiceover reads what sounds like a screenplay–“Scene 1. Woman steps off curb and crosses street”–but these actions never occur on screen. Similarly, Fossil (1986) cuts back and forth between video of women performing modern dance and women in a Balinese village working along a river. Both films break down barriers between what we perceive to be scripted performances of art and what we perceive to be mundane performances of work.
Over the following decades, Sachs’s work expanded this interest in representation into an examination of scientific and medical literature. One of her most ambitious and complex works, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991) assembles a whirlwind collage of texts and images dealing with (pseudo)scientific accounts of women’s physiology and and women’s experience in medical contexts. Women’s efforts to speak for themselves–in poetic written memories or seemingly documentary audio records–are interspersed with supposed expertise speaking for and about them, from Renaissance art to images from science books and documentaries. The sheer variety of source material, combined with the fact that images and sound rarely match, means that the materials are never able to settle into a clear narrative, and instead are presented in their character as representations. The overall effect mimics something of the confusion of a lifetime of contradictions taught to women as demeaning frameworks for understanding their own bodies, with the clarity of lived experience struggling to emerge from among this morass. This is sometimes played as comedy, such as when the laughter of children is played over a patently stupid text describing women’s brains and criminal tendencies.
Questions of meaning and textual representation get a much darker and less playful treatment in The Task of the Translator (2010), named for Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same name. Sachs is arguably less concerned with the problems of translation between two written languages and more so with how one appropriately translates the horrors of war into a journalistic text or art work. In the film’s first section, the voice of a doctor describes the work he did during a war to preserve and present human remains while we watch footage of kids at play. In the second section, scholars sit around a table translating a horrifying article about burials in the Iraq War into Latin. In the third and final section, a radio report describes a woman’s effort to recover the remains of her husband who died in the war, while a laundry machine spins on screen. All of these segments pose an unanswerable question about how the meaning of these wartime texts can possibly be grasped by their intended audience living in an utterly different context.
In a very different way, A Month of Single Frames (2019) also deals with the idea of translation, this time between two artists. A posthumous collaboration between Sachs and Barbara Hammer, the film incorporates reels from an uncompleted 90s work by Hammer with new footage and audio recordings by Sachs. Hammer speaks through her own voice and through her work, and Sachs is implicitly in dialogue through her editing and her own footage. It’s partly a documentary, partly a completion of a once abandoned project, but its real magic is in the present tense interaction of these elements.
Sachs seems drawn to these ambiguous and open-ended forms, even in her more apparently conventional documentary work. Your Day Is My Night (2014) portrays residents in a Chinatown apartment who take turns using the same beds according to their different work shifts. The scenes are poignant, so much so that they begin to feel too perfect, raising the question of how scripted some of this might be, particularly when new characters arrive and introduce themselves without ever noticing the camera. Later in the film it becomes clear that the action is partly staged, even explicitly revealing the set as a literal stage. The film was created collaboratively with its actor-participants, who played versions of themselves and other actual interview subjects in both live and filmed performances, blurring the already soft lines between documentary reenactment and scripted fiction. The film itself emerges as only one document of a process which was, arguably, a more expansive art work in its own right. It therefore frames itself as a contingent and partial view, as interested in the political nature of representation and translated meaning as in the specificity of its subject, raising more questions than it attempts to answer.
See also this interview with Sachs published by my friends at Ultra Dogme.
1972 – France – [30′ reduced to ?] 18′ – 35 mm – Color
After Mario Ruspoli’s Les hommes de la baleine (1956), with commentary written by Chris Marker, the two men decided to work together on a new film about cetacean fishing: Vive la baleine.
This time, however, there was no question of showing traditional sperm whaling. It’s purely and simply about denouncing an unacceptable massacre, that of the blue whales, the largest animal that has ever existed.As the 2004 La Rochelle Film Festival aptly summed it up, “for a part of humanity, the whale initially represented an essential means of survival. Then came industrialization, and with it big business. Whaling became a means of making a profit. The slaughter could begin. That’s the story told in this no-nonsense documentary.” Although today a moratorium prohibits whaling, and despite the fact that Japan, Iceland and Norway continue their exactions under scientific pretexts, the figures are there.
Indeed, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), founded in 1948, had set up a whaling management system that proved to be a total failure. “The conversion system known as the Blue Whale Unit (BWU), which establishes equivalence between the different baleen whale species according to the average quantity of oil that can be extracted from them (1 blue whale = 2 fin whales = 2.5 humpback whales = 6 Rudolph’s whales), as well as the establishment of a global quota for all whaling nations, led to the massacre of the largest whales and brought their populations to the brink of extinction. It wasn’t until the 1960s that country quotas were adopted, and in 1972 the Blue Whale Unit was abolished.“
Mario Ruspoli, always passionately involved in his projects, didn’t stop there. In addition to his film, he published a second book on the subject entitled Whale Men (1972), in reference to his first film of the same name (1956), which had been released shortly after his book In Search of the Sperm Whale (1955).
In this second opus, Ruspoli takes stock of the hunt, following the Stockholm Conference in June 1972, which called for a ten-year halt to whaling to allow cetaceans to renew themselves. He tells us, among other things, that in 1964, the peak of the massacre, 357 gunboats and 23 floating factories killed 33,001 cetaceans, including 372 blue whales, and that of the 150,000 blue whales alive in 1930, less than 1,000 remained in 1966, a massacre mainly due to the Norwegians.
In 2007, Icarus published a heavily revised English version, as Lynne Sachs, who worked actively on the translation with Chris Marker, tells us.
“Three years ago, Jon Miller, president of our mutual distributor Icarus Films, contacted me to see if I would be willing to assist Chris in the making of a new English version of his 1972 film Vive la Baleine, a passionate, collage-based essay film on the plight of the whales. Of course, I was honored and immediately said yes. For one whole year, Chris and I corresponded weekly as we re-wrote and updated the narration and I searched for a male and a female voice-over actor to read the two parts. He renamed the new 2007 version of his film Three cheers for the whale. It is distributed with other “bestiary” films he has made including The case of the grinning cat.
Be that as it may, Three Cheers for the Whale is an exemplary documentary in its didactic approach, as well as being a scathing pamphlet against the mercantilism of the fishing industry. It’s also worth noting the scarcity of documents concerning this film, about which little or nothing is known. In 2016, Argos Films and Éditions Montparnasse released a remarkable boxed set of Mario Ruspoli’s films, including Vive la baleine and Les hommes de la baleine, with an extensive, well-detailed booklet.
Finally, in the “Nota filmografica” inserted at the end of the volume (pp. 193-196) of Scene della terza guerra mondiale 1967-1977, the Italian version of Fonds de l’air est rouge, published in 1980, mention is made of a film entitled Vive la banlieue (Long Live the Suburbs), co-directed by Marker and Mario Maret in 1972. There’s no doubt that it’s actually Mario Ruspoli’s Vive la baleine.
Livre – 1972 – 148 p.
Coffret dvd – 2007
Coffret dvd – 2011
Générique (début, dans l’ordre d’apparition, complété par le site du Festival de La Rochelle)
Argos Films – 1972
Vive la baleine
baleines: Mario Ruspoli
vivats: Chris Marker
assistés par: Germaine et Mario Chiaselotti
[voix off:]
voix magistrale: [Louis] Casamayor
voix intérieure: Valérie Mayoux
voix musicale: Lalan [van Thienen]
générique: Timour Lam
[montage, son_et commentaire: Chris Marker]
[image: Michel Boschet]
[production: Argos Films]
Version anglaise (2007):
(sous titrage du générique début)
Three cheers for the whale
whales: Mario Ruspoli
cheers: Chris Marker
master voice: Leonard Lopate
interior voice: Emily Hoffman
(ajout générique de fin en anglais)
English version supervisor: Lynne Sachs
English sound mix: Bill Seery
original title drawings: Timour Lam
English titles: Kelly Spivey
English translation: Liza Oberman
A first run Icarus release
By Chris Shields | June 4, 2024
https://www.hammertonail.com/features/lynne-sachs-retrospective/
Lynne Sachs’ latest film, Contractions, exists, like much of her work, at the intersection of experimental and documentary film practices. In the 12-minute work, superimposition, narration, and choreography are intermingled–all captured using a graceful and haunting camera language that lends what we see the spirit of poetry. The subject of the film is an abortion clinic in Memphis in the wake of the overturning of Roe vs.Wade by the supreme court in 2022. In Sachs’ film, we see sky and then the unglamorous concrete of the clinic’s parking lot, and eventually, people. The figures we see are shot from behind, and appear to be wearing hospital gowns. They stand staring at the single, freestanding building, surrounding it almost like Romero’s living dead. But these aren’t monsters. Sachs explains, “The women in the film were local activists who had agreed to be in the film without really knowing what they would be doing. I had them for one morning only. To give them more anonymity, I shot them from behind, and that released them from being easily recognized, and, honestly, from feeling super self-consciousness.”
The film necessitated a different approach for Sachs for practical reasons. As she explained, “We were all very worried about security issues in Memphis, since standing in front of a women’s health clinic anywhere in Tennessee can become rather contentious. So having a very tight plan was really critical.” In order to make sure things went smoothly and quickly, Sachs used storyboards for the film, “I storyboarded all of the visuals for Contractions in a way that I usually don’t do,” the filmmaker said, “I had never been to the building where we shot, so I had to imagine it as I drew each image.”
The results Sachs achieves are somber and elegant. The entire film evokes modern dance with its pared down language of bodies in space and simple gesture from both performers and the camera. And while the subject of Sachs’ film—the ongoing attack on women’s rights by the U.S. government—is monumentally important, so is its form. Like her film Investigation of a Flame, which chronicles the history of the Catonsville 9 (a group of nine catholic activists who protested the Vietnam War), Sachs’s documentary integrates the poetic and handmade. Through this, she creates an intimacy with her subject that denies traditional documentary objectivity in favor of a more organic, personal and artistic truth.
Contractions and Investigation of a Flame are just two of the films being screened at Manhattan’s DCTV Firehouse in June as part of “Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In.” The retrospective, running from June 7-11, breaks up Sachs’ work thematically into programs. This novel approach is in large part thanks to DCTV’s Dara Messinger, who Sachs says, “brought her exquisite cinematic sensibility to every program, juxtaposing longer and shorter films in ways that bring out our themes in really inventive ways — from “Bodies and Bonds” to “Flightless” to “It’s a Hell of a Place”, it’s proof of her understanding of cinema as a collective art form.”
Sachs, who is celebrating the 40th anniversary of her association with DCTV, has been making films since the early 1980s. Her work spans a variety of subjects and modes, from purely poetic and experimental work, to personal travelogs and emotionally candid documentaries. Throughout all Sachs’ work, however, the artist’s unseen (and sometimes seen) presence endures.
Sachs is a part of the films she makes and because of this, there is a unity of vision and consistent personal themes to her corpus, such as family, activism, travel, women, and others. A Film About A Father Who and A Year in Notes, while wildly different in scale and form, both stem from the artist’s life. A Film About a Father Who is Sachs feature-length exploration of her charismatic and mysterious father. The film utilizes an array of formats and footage as well as interviews and newly shot vérité to create an ambitious and moving work of personal documentary.
A Year in Notes and Numbers condenses a year in Sachs life to four minutes through a montage of handwritten notes from daily life, many of them detailing family, health, and work. Despite their marked formal differences, both films clearly bear her authorial stamp–a personal candor and a nimble handling of materials and themes. This is often where Sachs’ films evoke the work of other independent film artists of the past. In her words, “All films are documents of people gathering together to make something. I think of film artists like Hollis Frampton or Michael Snow who recognized in a very astute and invigorating way that they weren’t doing anything more than documenting and then subverting the world as they experienced it. They were refracting reality while witnessing it.”
This understanding of the nexus where documentary and experimental film practices meet might seem obvious but these two cinematic modes have not always interacted. As Sachs notes, “The documentary and experimental communities were not mixing at all until about ten years ago. From the experimental world there was snobbery and from the documentary world there was bewilderment. Now there’s a sense of curiosity and sharing between the two.” Sachs’s work, however, offers a great example of the hybrid approach, one that is being more readily recognized by filmmakers and audiences. A leading exponent of this new trend is Prismatic Ground, a film festival that focuses on experimental documentary. In 2021 the festival bestowed their inaugural Ground Glass Award on Sachs for “outstanding contribution in the field of experimental media.”
Sachs’s fluid practice started early. “I have a long relationship with DCTV, beginning in 1984 when I took my first video class there.” Sachs says, “While a student there, I created an expanded cinema piece with video and dance […] I sort of thought it would be my first documentary, but it really became more about the body, work and viewing, feeling of being an outsider in an unfamiliar place. I created it all there at DCTV.” Now, with this exciting new retrospective, Sachs has returned to DCTV, a 50-year-old community initiative in lower Manhattan that uses filmmaking tools to empower communities, to share her career-long dance with experimentation and documentary with New York audiences.
Sachs’ enthusiasm for her world of films and people is infectious. She understands independent and artist made films as a community organism of sorts, one that needs to be nourished and that thrives on interconnectivity. For her, communication is key, even when her work confronts notions of impossibility. Often her work serves as testament to the creativity and frustration of translation (made explicit in her film The Task of the Translator). Despite these ongoing existential and linguistic struggles, there is an ineffable hope that permeates her films. With each new work there is the possibility of communication–the communication of a life lived, of a vision, of a time on earth captured in new and unique ways by a singular artist.
Ep 807: Vanessa Hope • Lynne Sachs
https://filmwaxradio.com/2024/05/31/episode-807/
Frequent Filmwax guest filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to discuss a retrospective of her work to be presented by DCTV. The series, called “From the Outside In“, runs June 7th — 11th at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in Lower Manhattan. 2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV. In From the Outside In, we traverse Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.
June 4, 2024
https://mysterycatalog.com/2024/06/40-years-of-lynne-sachs-at-dctv/
By Herbert Gambill
“40 years ago, Lynne Sachs took a video class at Manhattan’s DCTV (Downtown Community Television Center). In the next four decades she made dozens of remarkable films and beginning this Friday, June 7, DCTV will present From the Outside In, seven programs showcasing the variety of her important work with the artist present at each screening. Go here for program and ticket information.
Her films have been influenced (either cited by her or by my estimation) by many great artists and movements: Vietnamese filmmaker and professor Trinh T. Min-ha (whose classes I also attended while at San Francisco State University), Chris Marker (“Sans Soleil”), the dance/film aesthetics of Yvonne Rainer and Meredith Monk, early underground filmmakers like Bruce Baillie, body art performance artist Carolee Schneeman, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, American feminist documentary filmmaker Martha Rosler, left politics, the French avant-garde lettrism movement, post-colonial studies, Nina Menkes and much more. She is one of the most important American experimental filmmakers still active today.
Here are my personal and political notes on ten of her films I viewed or re-viewed recently. All of them are included in the DCTV programs.
Ladies Wear (1983) Lynne and her brother (film director Ira Sachs) both paint their nails while on a subway car. (An ‘80s subway decorated by graffiti; they get off at the Spring street stop.) Themes: NYC, gender, graffiti as a form of public cosmetics. Her first film.
Fossil (1986) In Mambai in Bali, Indonesian female workers dredge sand from the river onto containers they balance on their heads. This is contrasted with a dance performance by Sachs and other dancers as response to the movements of the Bali workers. Mixing the workaday rhythms of laborers with a modern dance interpretation is a tactic she will employ in many of her films.
Drawn & Quartered (1987) A nude male and female are separated into four quadrants of the film frame. Sachs says this was the year she “first encountered Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’, seen Carolee Schneeman’s ‘Fuses’, pondered Yvonne Rainer’s ‘Lives of Performers.’”
Investigation of a Flame (2001) We are in Chris Marker territory here. (And please see his incredible 1977 film, “The Grin Without a Cat.”) Stock footage of the Vietnam War is intercut with the story of the Catonsville Nine. In 1968 Daniel Berrigan and eight other Vietnam War protestors stole boxes of selective service records to a park and burned them with homemade napalm. Sachs interviews the participants, including a female clerk at the selective service office who explains why she felt she failed American soldiers who wouldn’t be relieved by new recruits. A moving exploration of our moral responsibility to confront the foreign policies of our country, no matter the cost to us.
Tornado (2001) A short meditation on 9/11. She folds a torn calendar of September 2001 while explaining how her daughter’s response to the tragedy was to “mourn the twins.”
The Task of the Translator (2010) Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” this short contrasts the improbable assignment of Latin scholars translating a newspaper story about Iraqi burial rituals with accounts wartime cosmetic surgery and human remains.
The Washing Society (2018) Co-directed with Lizzie Olesker, this 44-minute film is one of my favorites. Workers at a few of the thousands of NYC laundromats talk about their work days as ghosts from an 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta reappear. Intimate connections (like the one I have with my local laundromat workers) are being replaced by “super laundries” where conditions are more factory-like. (Recall that a super laundry was atop the meth lab in the TV series “Breaking Bad!”) Required reading: Chapter 10 (“The Working Day”) of Karl Marx’s “Capital: Volume 1.”
A Year in Notes and Numbers (2019) Closeups of to-do notes are combined with test results from her annual physical. This is a beautiful example of making art out of miscellaneous documentation.
E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021) What does Jean Vigo’s great 1933 film “Zero for Conduct” have to do with footage of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol building? When is anarchy good and when is it bad?
Swerve (2022) I have written about this short film here.
Go here for program and ticket information.
Listen to a new interview with Lynne Sachs on FilmwaxRadio!”
Cat Radio Cafe is a live salon of the arts, exploring the politics of art and the creative bounty of New York. Hosted by Janet Coleman and David Dozer (“The Displaced Playwright”), it features conversation, performance, new and archival radio theater, and news on The Rialto (and Ludlow Street).
https://www.wbai.org/upcoming-program/?id=9938
Tue, Jun 4, 2024 9:00 PM
A FILMMAKER’S RETROSPECTIVE: LYNNE SACHS
LYNNE SACHS: FROM THE OUTSIDE IN
On tonight’s show we’ll be joined by experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs to discuss Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In the upcoming retrospective of 24 of her experimental films, including Film About a Father, The Washing Society, Investigations of a Flame, Swerve, Your Day is My Night, and a new one, Contractions, commemorating the fall of Roe v. Wade. The presentations run from June 7-11 at the Firehouse Cinema – DCTV – where she took her first video class forty years ago.
Hosted by Janet Coleman and David Dozer
Janet Coleman is an author and actor.
Her publications include The Compass, the definitive history of improvisational theatre in America; and (with Al Young) Mingus/Mingus: Two Memoirs.
She is a founding producer of the seminal off-off Broadway’s Loft Theatre Workshop. She appeared as Evelyn Lincoln in the film 13 Days and as Emily Ann Andrews in David Dozer’s long-running radio comedy series, Poisoned Arts. She is also a founding member of the Christmas Coup Comedy Players (CCCP) and The Atlantica Radio Empire.
David Dozer is a playwright and actor.
His long-running radio comedy series, Poisoned Arts, debuted on WBAI in 1967 and has been published in Scripts and The Best Short Plays of 1999-2000.
His dada plays and poems currently play in the repertoire of The Dada NYNY Dadas. He appears as Sergeant Groves on the classic TV series M*A*S*H. He is a founding member of the Christmas Coup Comedy Players (CCCP) and the Atlantica Radio Empire.
June 1st, 2024
Media archives, a frozen prawn, skipping school, a women‘s clinic in Memphis, Tennessee, a greenhouse, and a lavish dinner among mothers are the settings for the women and girls of this program. They should all have the basic right to make decisions about their own behavior and their bodies, including the right to an abortion. This is not always the case, as we will see, especially when legal restrictions, patriarchal systems, or social stigma are at play. (mm)
https://www.viennashorts.com/en/films/contractions
Lynne Sachs, US 2024, 12 min 42 sec
English with English subtitles, Color, Austrian premiere
Franzis Kabisch, DE/AT 2023, 21 min 49 sec
German with English subtitles, Color, Vienna premiere
Elina Huber, Jill Vágner, Noémi Knobil, Sven Bachmann, CH 2023, 5 min 13 sec
French, Color
Elli Vuorinen, FI 2023, 8 min 31 sec
English with English and German subtitles, Color, Austrian premiere
Édith Jorisch, CA 2023, 16 min 57 sec
No dialog with No subtitles subtitles, Color, Austrian premiere
IMAGEN TV PLUS INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
LYNNE SACHS
And as far back as I can remember, dad engaged with the world in ways that inspired, excited and sometimes confused me. How do you feel, dad? Very funny. Oh, let me go do my hand.
NICOLE RIVERA
So nice to meet you. I’m glad to have you here for Imagen TV Plus. And tell us a little bit about the documentary that you present these [films from] 2024 to and for Ambulante. Yes. Go ahead.
LYNNE SACHS
Well, actually, I’m having a retrospective, so I showed 15 films in four programs. Okay. And then, some of them were feature length films, and some of them were short films. And then I also taught a master class where I showed some films and talked about the relationship between film and poetry. And then lastly, I taught a workshop, called Opening the Family Album, which covered a whole month of interactions with 16 participants, 16 artists, filmmakers from Ciudad de México. We met several times on zoom, and then we met in person, and then we created a live expanded cinema documentary performance. So I was very involved with Ambulante.
NICOLE RIVERA
Wow. It’s amazing. I totally… I didn’t know that, but it’s amazing. And I feel like it’s really on the line of the work you made that is really personal. So tell us more about… about you, about how you become a part of the cinema environment. how you decide to create the personal masterpieces.
LYNNE SACHS
I don’t know if I have made any masterpieces, but I have made a lot of films. and some of them are very short. The shortest one is 90s, and the longest one is 83 minutes. So it’s a full range of films. But I got involved in filmmaking because I was very interested in images. I was very interested in history, but I was also interested in what’s going on in the world and how we as artists can engage in very deep ways and begin to ask people to question their reality. And so film seemed like the right place for that, because film can contain all of those sensibilities in one space
NICOLE RIVERA
And of course, actually this topic that you, mentioned about to question your reality, it’s really interesting for me talking about your job because, the documentary that I have the chance to check, it’s, to the, I mean, okay, the documentary that present, it’s about the Chinese community in New York. It’s amazing to see it because I feel like, like Mexican, like people who didn’t live in New York. We had this image of New York that the American cinema and Hollywood sell to us. So to see another perspective of New York is pretty interesting, because it’s a reality that we don’t know and we don’t even imagine.
So how… how do you feel to share with the world this, this other side of, of places that we think we know, we don’t know. And we can see the other faces of the cities that are so famous. But this place is not. Tell me, tell me more about that.
LYNNE SACHS
Really love your question. I think that is exactly why I make films. I want to look at the other side of reality. Because in our culture, the global culture, sometimes we think the reality that is produced by commercials, by Hollywood is an opportunity to understand how a place or a person lives. It exists. But that’s not true. And that’s the job of a documentary filmmaker. And so actually, I’ve been making many films before I made your Day Is My Night, but I decided that I wanted to commit myself to looking at my own city and not to need an airplane ticket to make a documentary film. A lot of people think the job of a filmmaker who works with reality is to first buy a plane ticket and go somewhere exotic, and to begin to understand that maybe I’ve done that enough in my life. So I wanted to understand the reality that’s around me all the time. And also to see that my city, New York City, has many different layers of experience. So I decided I wanted to understand the experience of immigration and what it is like for people who are living in a place but only temporarily, or people who are having to share a home in order to make it possible to be where they want to be. And a new understanding of what family is. The family isn’t just a father, mother, and three kids.
A family is… can be something more, surprising. And it can be where you feel calmest and where you feel that you can be yourself. And I saw that when I started to talk to the people in Your Day is My Night, many of whom came here decades ago. So they were reenacting their lives from before, and some of them were articulating their lives from the present course. And actually, I think that’s a beautiful part of your job. It’s not about, like, to go somewhere exotic is to go inside to understand, the, the places that form part of your own life in case of New York as part of your life, because you’re from Brooklyn, and I think this this is so personal because you you have to go inside of these people lives. And I think that could be really telling you more than to cross the world, to go to another place you used to contact with the people next to you sometimes could be really challenging.
NICOLE RIVERA
Can you tell me more about…
LYNNE SACHS
That’s exactly true, because, for example, I rode the subway yesterday in the metro here in Mexico City, and when you’re on the train, you’re very close to other people. But you don’t say, excuse me, could you tell me about your life? Yeah. And, so I think that it’s very delicate because in documentary film, you don’t want to knock on the door or the window and say, open up your life to me because I’m powerful, or I carry the camera, or I’m from another part of this society, and I want to know how you live your life, which is very different from mine, because you don’t want to be voyeuristic. You don’t want to just look in and exploit. So for me, it’s very important to establish relationship and to work with people who are your subjects also as your collaborators, as the people who can also come up with creative ideas and they can say, this is good for me, this is not good for me. and so I think there’s a lot of listening and collective, processing that can happen within a documentary that usually doesn’t happen in a narrative film, because in a narrative film, you have the executive producer, then you have the director, and then you have all those other people. Oh, I forgot way up here… the movie stars. So you have the executive producer, the movie stars, and the director, and everybody else is kind of secondary. so I think that you need to break up that hierarchy. Yes. Because it’s not about telling a story that you want to tell. It’s to hear a story and to let others talk through your camera.
NICOLE RIVERA
You it’s like, yeah, it’s like, work. They work together. Yeah. So I think it’s… it’s beautiful. But I don’t know what you think. This is the way I see documentary. You are not just entering the life of this person. You let them enter into your life. So true, so true. So I want you to know, to tell us about how this process had been for you to let them enter into your life.
LYNNE SACHS
Yeah. I loved when you said that in a documentary, you don’t go to the set with an agenda. You don’t go with a thesis. I’m trying to prove something. You go to listen. Not well… I think there’s a difference between listening and hearing. You always hear. But when do you listen? And I think you brought up that distinction. So, for example, with Your Day is My Night. I made that film over about a year and a half, but then I have remained in contact with the people in the film. So we have lunch, and we meet for additional screenings. There are ways that we can try to stay in contact. Two of the women in the film are now in their early 90s there, and they’re still doing well. So I feel very honored that I met them in their early 80s. Now they’re in their early 90s, but their role models, for me, they’re heroes. I think that’s beautiful about great documentaries like the way your life, the story. You know, you experience the story when you are telling it to the others. It’s different than cinema that you just tell a story.
NICOLE RIVERA
You finish this and that’s all… know you did you become part of that. So I want you to tell us all your story. That would be…which how would you feel about the experience that you have been in all this process? Who was main, learning about this, the oldest project in your life to be a documentary?
LYNNE SACHS
Like, who was a mentor or an inspiration? Yeah. Well, I was very inspired by a French filmmaker who’s extremely famous. He died, his name was Chris Marker, and he made films going back to the late 1950s. And he was very much an observer. But he also brought another side that’s very important to me, which is he had a lot of introspection and he had a lot of doubt. And I think when you’re making these kinds of films, you have to maintain your doubt. So you have to always question your assumptions and. Find yourself with your subjects and, and realize that the obstacle to working with that person might be what’s most important and that that questioning of yourself, the ability to cry because you think you’ve almost failed.
But then to say, well, what did I learn from that person is something I learned from Chris Marker and, something I hope I keep.
NICOLE RIVERA
And it’s amazing. And yeah, I feel like to have always this though it lets you continue with this constant learning, not to impose a story. You let the story flow. But tell me in all this process through all these years, who did it, the biggest challenge for you?
LYNNE SACHS
Oh, the biggest challenge. Let me think. Oh, the challenge that took me 35 years, actually, was to make a film about my father, which is a film I showed here at Ambulante and we showed it at the Cinemateca Nacional. And, that film actually has probably been seen by more people than any of my other films. It was…distributed theatrically.
So it went to theaters and it was on some major streaming services, and it was very hard. And it’s definitely my most personal film, because in a way, it’s easier to ask questions of the people you know the least, but to ask the questions of your own parent is very vulnerable and a little scary.
NICOLE RIVERA
I hope we can be there in your projection, because this sounds like a really interesting project because. Yeah, actually. And that’s what I tell you before something, sometimes it’s harder to go inside of us than to the other side of the world. Yes. So that’s amazing. And so we are really glad to have you here for Imagen TV Plus, there’s something else that you want to share with us to recommend some of your screenings during the festival. Feel you’re free to talk to the camera.
LYNNE SACHS
Well, I made many films in my life, and I haven’t had that many opportunities to show so many of them together. And I feel very, very, very supported by Ambulante and also by the Centro de Cultura Digital. Both of those organizations have worked very hard to think about curating my work. I also, I should say, brought five films in their original format on 16mm, which many people in Mexico City are thrilled about. They like to see analog. So that has been very, very important. And, I thought I would share this t-shirt.
NICOLE RIVERA
Yes. You want to tell us a little bit more about her t-shirt?
Because it’s pretty and can you tell me the story? Okay, I seen okay.
LYNNE SACHS
Cinema Que Agita, Cinema that agitates which to many people, that sounds… not very good. But actually to agitate is to stir, to create a motion is to bring new ideas, is to change you. And this t-shirt is from the Costa Rica Film Festival, which presented a retrospect of my work also. So I thought it would be a good t-shirt to wear in another country where people speak Spanish and to have this way of thinking about what cinema can do to us.
NICOLE RIVERA
Yes. Because the main topic about this t-shirt, it’s the possibilities to “agitar” the world through the cinema, through the documentary. So that’s the special thing about this t-shirt.
So thank you to share that with us, to agitar with us.
LYNNE SACHS
You’re very welcome. I know it’s so good to meet you. And I appreciate it.
https://www.olhardecinema.com.br/en/film/contractions-2/
Contractions screens 6/16/24 and 6/18/24
Olhar de Cinema – Curitiba IFF began its activities as an independent film festival. Since 2012, the festival has attracted more than 200,000 people to movie theaters, 30,000 people watching movies online and exhibited more than 1,000 films from all over the world.
In 2020, it completed its ninth edition with the screening of more than 78 films, enabling online access for more than 30,000 people to these works.
After nine years of experiments, risks and accurate shots, Olhar de Cinema is already part of the cultural scene of independent cinema in Paraná, Brazil and around the world.
The event aims to highlight and celebrate independent cinema made around the world through the official selection of films with inventive, engaging and thematic commitment, ranging from addressing contemporary concerns about the daily micro universe of relationships, to interpretations and positions on politics and world economy. Films that venture into new forms of cinematographic language, which are open to experimentalism and which, nevertheless, have a great potential for communicating with the audience.
Amidst these requirements, it is possible to compose a program of great thematic and aesthetic diversity, which does not reject genres, formats and durations. A universe composed of approximately 90 films per year, Olhar de Cinema always seeks to value Brazilian and Paraná cinema as well, by digging up what is most precious and urgent in these cinematographies, ensuring special care when programming such works.
The festival seeks to compose shows that mix Brazilian and foreign films, enabling dialogue and exchange between all these universes. Alongside the shows that make up the event’s official selection, the festival also sheds light and pays tribute to masters of world independent cinema, restored classic films and also new directors who, even with a short filmography, already have a strong artistic identity.
With this proposal, the programming carried out by Olhar de Cinema has the vast majority of selected films that are still unpublished in Brazil. In this way, the event is intended not only to provide the public with unique cinematographic experiences, but also to encourage reflection on the language and history of cinema. We thank everyone who made this story possible, who are part of our present and contribute to making the event’s future even more vivid.
Film Description:
In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court granted several states the authority to revoke women’s right to autonomy over their bodies, resulting in 21 states, including Tennessee, criminalizing abortion. In Memphis, Tennessee, Lynne Sachs draws upon her decades of experience in producing feminist counter-images to orchestrate a performance involving 14 women and some of their partners. Together, they evoke invisible visibilities and silenced discourses in front of an abortion clinic whose operations were halted following this decision. (C.A.)