Keeping Alive the Spirit of Vietnam War Protest

By Francis X. Clines, New York Times, May 3, 2001

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CATONSVILLE, Md. May 2 — As they round out their eighth decade, the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, are entitled to retire from the protest wars, but they are still up to their fervid old ways of getting arrested in nonviolent resistance to American military policy.

No one is more delighted at their constancy than Alva Grubb, one of the jurors who reluctantly convicted Phil Berrigan 33 years ago in one of the brothers’ then-famous protest trials — the “Baltimore Four” resisters who spilled pig’s blood on military draft records and helped stoke the furious national debate over the morality of the Vietnam War.

Never ones to protest once, the Berrigans, amid that trial, organized the Catonsville Nine act of resistance: They walked into the Knights of Columbus Hall here in their Catholic clerical garb, seized documents from the Selective Service military draft board and burned them in the parking lot.

“This little village never got over the audacity of their protest,” said Ms. Grubb, a 79-year-old resident who opposed the Vietnam War then and now. “But just look at Phil Berrigan all these years later, still getting arrested for the courage of his convictions. He had very strong opinions and that’s what this country is about.”

Two years’ fresh imprisonment in Ohio for nonviolent interference with a modern weapons system is the reason Phil Berrigan, 77, will miss the Maryland Film Festival’s premiere on Thursday of “Investigation of a Flame.” This is a documentary by Lynne Sachs about the protest events that made this unpretentious suburb on the cusp of Baltimore a flash point for citizens’ resistance at the height of the war.

“Phil’s been consistent; he’s been faithful; he’s been stalwart;” said Elizabeth McAlister, his wife. She awaits his next return from prison to Jonah House, a Baltimore religious residence for eight people who are still dedicated to a level of nonviolent protest forged in the Catonsville Nine days.

“Phil’s been amazing,” said Ms. McAlister, who noted that Daniel Berrigan, who will be 80 on Sunday, has not lost his protest edge either. “Dan was last arrested Good Friday” at a demonstration in New York.

After the film is shown at The Senator theater in Baltimore, there will be a discussion featuring protest participants, law enforcement principals and assorted adherents of the Berrigans’ tradition.

“I left the seminary in ’67 to protest the war,” said Brendan Walsh, a gray-haired activist just up the road in West Baltimore at Viva House, once a sanctuary for conscientious objectors and now a soup kitchen for the city’s teeming poor. “The war keeps coming back; it’s forever,” said Mr. Walsh, noting how it retains a definitive power in American life, exemplified lately by former Senator Bob Kerrey’s admission of killing Vietnamese women and children.

“Back then, we thought Vietnam was some terrible aberration but the country would come to its senses so that we could engage the poverty of the cities,” Mr. Walsh said, grimacing. “To see 250,000 flee this city since then and things get worse for the poor — that’s the craziest thing of all about that war.”

Ms. Sachs, who created an earlier documentary in touring post- war Vietnam, lives here and decided to explore the protest story as Catonsville’s asterisk in history. She found assorted characters still firm to fiery on the topic. The Selective Service clerk, Mary Murphy, once a famous figure here for signing every eligible male’s draft card, remains opposed to what she views as the Berrigans’ intrusion on the government’s war mission, just as Ms. McAlister remains proud.

“This has been an odyssey,” said Ms. Sachs, a 39-year-old who has been fascinated since childhood by the war’s divisiveness. “I’m interested in pivotal choices people make in their lives, the moments from which there’s no turning back,” she said, noting she came to admire the consistency of the mutual antagonists in an argument that still rages.

At the Knights of Columbus hall, the only contentious event in sight lately was a bingo game. But Wilbur Baldwin, a 79-year-old veteran of World War II, recalled the Catonsville Nine days and his distaste for the behavior of the dissenters.

“The Berrigans are troublemakers,” Mr. Baldwin said. “That’s a war we never won,” he said, looking back and glowering as he blamed the use of the defoliant Agent Orange for the death of his brother, Frankie, in Vietnam. This was exactly the sort of war technology decried by the Berrigans, but Mr. Baldwin was adamant. “The Berrigans are troublemakers.”

And on a good day, they remain troublemakers, by the accounting of Tom Lewis, one of the Baltimore Four who, like the Berrigans, has been arrested many times over the years. Most recently Mr. Lewis, a 60-year-old artist close to the Catholic Worker movement in Worcester, Mass., was arrested at a Raytheon weapons factory where he prayed and blocked a road to protest against a part of the Star Wars research program known as the “Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle.”

“My feeling is the Vietnam War was a war against the poor,” said Mr. Lewis. He views Star Wars as a continuation of the same issue from his protest youth, contending that it shows military spending as overshadowing the unmet needs of the poor. “There’s been a certain consistency in making nonviolent creative statements against the madness,” the aging protester said as he took inventory on all the troublemaking still sparked by the Catonsville Nine. “An important consistency.”

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Putting Clutter to Rest
Baltimore Sun, Sept. 24, 2000

Using a camera as her paintbush, Lynne Sachs has created a place to quietly confront our need for constant clamor.

By Holly Selby

When was the last time you heard yourself think?

Probably not on the way to work Friday; you were playing the radio and returning a few phone calls.  Probably not at dinner last night, either.  Remember?  You watched CNN while you ate.  Probably not the last time you visited a museum: You listened to an audio-guide while gazing at the art.

Lynne Sachs, a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker, has created an exhibit with special resonance for people in the era of multi-tasking.  Her School 33 video installation, “Horror Vacui: Nature Abhors a Vacuum,” makes us ponder why we seek constantly to fill our minds with words, music, clatter, stuff.

Sachs thinks of film as painting.  She painted, drew and wrote poetry as a teen-ager in Memphis, Tenn. But it was not until she was a history major at Brown University – and spent a year studying in Paris – that she discovered film as an art form.  “When I found out people could use film in the same way as a paint brush, it just blew my mind,” says Sachs, who for three years has lived in Catonsville with her partner Mark Street, an associate professor in film at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.  “I discovered the idea of being a ‘filmmaker,’ that it wasn’t about a crew and a director and a hierarchy of people.”

The artist’s work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at the Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington and has won awards at the New Jersey Film Festival, the Athens (Ohio) Film Festival, and the New York Film Expo.

Now Sachs, who this fall is teaching a video class at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, is working on a documentary, funded in part by the Maryland Humanities Council, about the Catonsville Nine, a pioneering group of protesters against the Vietnam War in 1968 came to be called.

Since 1998, when she began the project, she has been haunted, she says, by the story of Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, who with seven other people went into a Catonsville draft board office, removed records and burned them in front of a crowd of reporters and onlookers.  They were convicted and sentenced to prison.

When not working on the documentary, Sachs shoots other images incessantly, saving them, sometimes for years, until they begin to form patterns in her mind.  “The idea for this installation didn’t evolve at once,” she says.  “Part of being an experimental filmmaker is that you shoot all the time.  It’s like a painting:  You don’t know where you are going.”

A meaningful phrase

She heard the term “horror vacui” for the first time about a year ago.  “It means fear of emptiness, or a compulsion to fill,” she says.  The notion struck a chord.

“I wondered about my own restlessness.  As an artist you have this compulsion to create all the time.  And I wondered about being able to live with my own thoughts.  I heard the words and I looked at this work I had been collecting and I realized this is something that I had been thinking about for almost a decade.”

Sachs has created a deceptively simple installation at School 33.  Step behind a heavy black curtain and into a small, dimly lighted bedroom.  At first glance, the installation seems to consist only of a bedroom and three ever-changing videos.  Stay awhile.  You will discover that a great deal is happening, some of it inside your own mind.

The walls and ceiling are white; the floor gray.  A four-poster bed sits in front of a window.  The bed’s white sheets and coverlet are turned down – ready for someone to retire for the night.  Two chairs painted ghostly gray line the wall.

As you soak up your surroundings with its soft lighting, constantly moving images and shadows that flicker against the sparse furnishings – your mind wanders.  On-screen images of ordinary household objects seem weirdly evocative.  A duster complete with a bushy top of feathers begins to resemble a palm tree.  A siren can be heard.  Is that part of the installation, or the muffled sounds of real Baltimore?

Just what is real?

Sachs plays with this question: real or unreal?  You are inside the white bedroom, shut away from the “real” world, yet everything here – bed, chairs, television set – is entirely familiar one minute and peculiar the next.  You can look out the window, but it is really a video screen.

Through the window, an image appears of the artist performing mundane household activities: sweeping the floor, talking on the telephone, reading a newspaper, washing a window.  Peer through this “window” to a point beyond her and you see an image of tree branches dancing in the breezes of a sunny summer day.

Sachs plays the role of producer, camera operator and actor.  She filmed herself while watching her image on a monitor, choreographing her movements in reaction to the play of light and shadow and line.  “I could watch myself as I did it so, just like when you are painting, you can change the paint or the brushstrokes, I was moving my body for graphic effect.” he says.  “It is going back to still lifes.  That is how I set it up.”

There also is an image above the real bed: that of a large, white bed.  On one pillow, a crimson azalea flickers like a fragment of a dream.  This image, the artist says, is “all about the lushness of the flowers, desire, and the empty pillow next to you.”

At the foot of the real bed, a small television sits atop a table.  The black-and-white scenes on its screen have the eerie familiar/frightening qualities of film noir.  With her camera, Sachs allows you to glimpse a lamp and its shadow, the edge of a telephone, the silhouette of a person reading a newspaper.  Light and shadow change the arrangements of ordinary objects into painterly compositions.

The longer you stand inside the installation, the more your see, or think you see.  Stare at the sheets of either of the beds – the one you can touch or the image of the bed on the wall – and you begin to notice how the light plays on the wrinkles in the sheets, or how shadows seem to form shapes on the pillow.  A dialogue occurs between images.  You occasionally see the artist reading a newspaper in the window as the shadow of a person reading a newspaper appears on the smaller television screen.  “At times, these images are about specific things,” says Sachs.  “At other times they are really about textures and light.”

No sounds of silence

Sound plays a role, too.  As the images flicker, you hear crickets chirping, rain falling, cheerful voices, a pop song – noises that can be heard on a Baltimore summer evening.  Sachs gives each sound equal weight: “It is as though the thunder has the same value as a pop song and as a child crying.  It is more about the play between the sounds than the sounds themselves.

Percussive sounds, created by Baltimore composer and musician Tom Goldstein, are woven into the sound track.  Goldstein watched the window several times, adding sounds, one by one, that correspond to particular gestures.  Sachs says, “The piece has several layers of sound and yet it is really spare, which I really wanted.  That was the challenge: To find real world sounds and sounds that are musical that work.”

But the magic of the installation occurs in the moments between these sounds.  “The sounds in your head happen when there is no sound,” the artist says.  “I would love it if someone sat down for awhile to think about the installation.  I would love it if someone would lie down on the bed and just think.”

What would happen if you put down your newspaper right now and listened?  You hear the rustle of paper, the clink of a coffee mug being placed on the kitchen table, a siren in the distance, the happy shrieks of a child next door, the rush of a shower running upstairs, the thump of a dog’s tail on the floor, the hum of a refrigerator, your breath.

The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Friday March 31, 2000

Memphis Inspirations Come Home in Films by Two Sachses

By John Beifuss

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This weekend’s Memphis International Film Festival will be a homecoming of sorts for brother-and-sister filmmakers Ira Sachs and Lynne Sachs.

“Ira and I, we’re in the same field, and that’s thrilling,” said Lynne, in a telephone interview this week from Baltimore, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.  “But even though Memphis in a real sense is responsible for us getting into filmmaking, we have a totally different approach.”

Ira, 34, is earning recognition as a director of fiercely personal and uncompromised independent narrative films.

Lynne, 38, whose interest in film was fueled by a student job at the Center for Southern Folklore, is a creator of what she describes as “experimental” documentaries that merge “history and memory and the artistic gesture.”

“We both have sort of insider-outsider relationships with the city,” said Ira, who plans to return to Memphis this fall to shoot his second feature, Forty Shades of Blue, for executive producer Sydney Pollack, director of The Firm.

“I’m incredibly familiar with every shopping center and every liquor store and every new construction project, so it’s very real and intimate, but I haven’t lived here in 12 to 15 years,” said Ira, in a phone interview from his home in New York.  “That outsider status allows me to come back to the city and look at it and try to understand it, and maybe see some things that people who live here don’t always notice.

Ira will be at Rhodes College on Saturday and Sunday to present screenings of three of his productions: Lady (1994), a 28-minute film focusing on a sexually ambiguous redhead; Vaudeville (1991), a 55-minute roundelay about a group of dysfunctional musical revue entertainers stranded overnight in small-town America, and The Delta, a critically acclaimed 1996 feature about the relationship between a privileged young Memphian and a mixed-race Vietnamese refugee.

Lynne won’t be in town, but the film festival will present two of her documentaries: the 33-minute Which Way Is East (1994), an autobiographical chronicle of a journey through Vietnam made in collaboration with her sister, Dana Sachs; and Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989), a half-hour portrait of the late Rev.  L.O. Taylor, a popular Baptist minister in Memphis who owned a movie camera and filmed baptisms and other events in the African-American community in the 1930’s and ‘40s.

The two Central High School graduates both return to Memphis from time to time to visit their mother, retired Rhodes College professor Diane Sachs.  Their father, Ira Sachs Sr., now lives in Park City, Utah, site of the Sundance Film Festival, where, coincidentally, both The Delta and Which Way Is East have been screened.

“I think my dad gave us this spirit of jumping into situations and taking risks,” Lynne said, “And my mom had this sensitivity, and an appreciation of poetry and all things artistic.”

Ira and Lynne both credit their father with much of their movie education, however.

“We were children of divorce,” Ira said, “and I would say every weekend we went with my dad to the movies.”

Said Lynne: “That was the divorced dad thing to do – go to El Chico and have cheese dip and then go to the movies.”

Said Ira: “And that usually meant going to the movies he was interested in seeing – Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation, Death Wish.”

Lynne: “ He didn’t want to see The Love Bug.”

Ira: “I still feel like ‘70s films are the best, and a lot of that I think is because I had pretty organic reactions to those movies when I was a kid.”

The Malco Highland Quartet wasn’t the only influence on the future career of the siblings, however, Ira learned about acting, producing and dramatization as a student involved in the Park Commission-sponsored Memphis Children’s Theater, “the only truly integrated environment I’ve ever been in in my whole life.  I still think of it as this magical place where because we were all kids and we were all doing theater together, there was this real sense of community.”

Lynne, meanwhile, was exposed to landmark motion pictures like Mr. Hulto’s Holiday when longtime city schools teacher Lore Hisky formed a film society at Central High.  Lynne had always written poetry and painted, but she began to feel that film was “a place where I could put all of these passions together.”

In the early 1980s, Lynne got a job at the Center for Southern Folklore, and one of her first assignments was to catalog about 15 hours of film footage photographed by Rev. Taylor and donated to the center by his widow, Blanche Taylor.

“That place had a big impact on me,” Lynne said of the currently homeless Center.  “I never even knew that film could have such an impact and be so oriented toward the community.”

Lynne became fascinated by the silent footage of these “Taylor Made Productions,” as hand-lettered title cards called the works.  She learned that Taylor would travel from church to church and show his short films to eager crowds, who enjoyed seeing themselves and their neighbors without ever considering that what they were looking at would prove to be rare and invaluable historical footage of the Memphis black community.

Taylor became “my main inspiration as a filmmaker.  I shoot almost everything myself, and he did, too.  He had this total immersion in the making of his films, and that’s how I work,” said Lynne, who said it takes her about two years to finish one of her short films.

Lynne’s other “filmic discourses” include such nonfiction aural-and-visual collages as A Biography of Lilith (1997), described as “an evocative meditation” on “Judaism and patriarchal history”; The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), “a new feminized film form” that explores “art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage”;  and Blasted Into Consciousness (1984), which uses news clippings to examine a group rape in Fall River, Mass.

Needless to say, you won’t find these works on the shelves at Blockbuster Video.  But they have carried Lynne to festivals, screenings, seminars and teaching jobs at the Art Institute of Chicago, Temple University, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Sydney Film Festival in Australia, to name just a few locations.

Which Way Is East, in fact, recently was screened during a prestigious program at the Whitney Museum in New York titled “The American Century:  Art and Culture 1900-2000.”  Reports Lynne: “There were seven people in the audience.  Who goes to museums on a Wednesday afternoon?”

Lynne’s current project is The Catonsville Nine, a documentary look at what has happened to the two women and seven men in a Catholic activist group in Baltimore who went to a local draft office in 1968, grabbed hundreds of Selective Service records, took them outside to a parking lot and burned them with napalm.  All of them went to prison for up to three years for this act of protest against the Vietnam War.

Ira, meanwhile, is working on he casting of Forty Shades of Blue, from a script he and co-writer Michael Rohatyn developed last year at Robert Redford’s Sundance Writers Lab.

Ira described Blue as the story of a woman in her mid-30s who lives with “an older man who’s a rock and roll legend – sort of a cross between Sam Phillips and Jim Dickinson, but a real boozer and a womanizer.”  The focus is on “the woman you always see in the movies but the story never really looks at.  She’s on the arm of the wealthy man, but she’s over to the side.  She’s the blond.  Not the powerful masculine center, but the woman on the periphery.”

Like his sister, Ira has a very impressive resume, with press clippings that include a laudatory two-page review of The Delta (now available on VHS from Strand Home Video) by Newsweek’s David Ansen, who called the extremely low-budget work “the most memorable film in competition at Sundance” in 1997.  In addition, Ira’s films have been screened at festivals around the world; and he was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Grant for Media Artists,

And all of that will earn you less money than directing Leprechaun in the Hood.  “The difficult thing is to keep making films,” Ira said.  “The Delta was helpful for establishing me with a certain identity in the professional world, but you can’t make a career out of films like The Delta.  You have to try to bridge the distance between being independent and being commercial.  Sydney Pollack being involved in Forty Shades of Blue was a great moment.  He really loved the scripts and saw what could be done with it.”

As for the third Sachs child: Dana’s only film project was Which Way is East, but the 37-year-old sibling is awaiting the release this year of her first book, The House on Dream Street: A Memoir of Hanoi, to be published by Algonquin Press.