Podcast Interview with Lynne Sachs in July, 2009
https://spoileralertradio.libsyn.com/lynne_sachs_experimental_documentary_filmmaker
Lynne Sachs: 10 Short Films
1987-2007
Purchase>>>
http://film-makerscoop.com/rentals-sales/search-results?fmc_authorLast=sachs&fmc_title=&fmc_description=&x=48&y=15
Film and Videos on DVD
“XY Chromosome Project” 12 min. 2007
“The Small Ones”, 3 min. video 2006
“Noa, Noa”, 8 min. 16mm, 2006
“Atalanta 32 Years Later” 5 min. video, 2006
“Tornado”, 4 min. video 2002
“Photograph of Wind” 4 min. 16mm, silent, 2001
“Window Work” 9 min. video, 2000
“Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning”, 9 min. 16mm. 1987..
“Still Life With Woman and Four Objects”, 4 min. B&W 16mm., 1986
“Drawn and Quartered”, 4 min. color 16mm., 1987
“Lynne Sachs is best known for her spirited and lyrical essay films—films defined by an unwavering woman’s inflection and a commitment to pry the cracks in official history. However, throughout Sachs’s career, we’ve been treated to a succession of short experimental works that tease out the details of the everyday with the same clarity of vision and instinct for the hand-nurtured image as her much-lauded lengthier works. These films and videotapes, whether they be mystified glimpses of childhood, reinventions of films past, or formal excursions into the poetic, surrender the wonder of a world seen by an artist with a soulful eye and a conscientious heart.”
–Steve Seid, Film-Video Curator, Pacific Film Archive
“Equal parts humanist and formalist, poet and historian, telling tales that are both timeless and political, Lynne Sachs creates film worlds in which the textures of daily domestic life are seamlessly connected to the realms of war, political activism, and our response to terrorist attacks. In one film, a grid becomes a secret map for understanding the difference between male and female. In another, an affectionate portrait of her young daughter becomes a study of whirling circular energy. For each of these ten shorts, Sachs creates a unique film language, by weaving together images, sounds, and words that evoke a particular way of viewing the world. All of these works reveal a sensibility that refuses to flatten either life or art, insisting on a multilevel reality in which the personal and the universal become doorways to a broader consciousness.”
–David Finkelstein, writer for filmthreat.com
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.”
— Fred Camper, Chicago Reader
“Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings.”
–George Kuchar, filmmaker
“Profound, the soundtrack amazing….the image of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful.”
–Barbara Hammer, filmmkaer
“In Sachs’s theatrical, microcosmic worlds, the everyday is defamiliarized. Objects — toys, hands, a cherry pie, a miniature Empire State Building — resonate and tremble.” Bosko Blagojevic, Flavorpill.net
Reviews
“Curled Up” Review >>>
(http://www.curledupdvd.com/documentary/lynnesachs10.html <http://www.curledupdvd.com/documentary/lynnesachs10.html> )
“Salon.com” Review >>>
(http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/02/13/dvd_roundup/ <http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2008/02/13/dvd_roundup/> )
Educational Media Reviews Online
http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu/emro/emroDetail.asp?Number=3352
Selected Screenings:
TriBeca Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Tate Museum of Art London, Whitney Museum of Art
“Ventana al Sur: An Evening of Argentine Experimental Films”
curated by Mark Street and Lynne Sachs
ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES, NYC SATURDAY FEBRUARY 21, 2009 8PM
http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
We will serve Yerba Mate tea in a communal gourd and sweet dessert churros in the lobby before the show.
This rollicking evening of challenging, expressive and oppositional Argentine cinema offers a window onto makers shredding formal niceties, relishing in risk and daring to access the sublime. From an achingly beautiful evocation of an hourglass to a darkly humorous evisceration of the tenets of the stock market, this program will take us to the land where summer is winter and winter is summer and render our souls topsy-turvy for a bit too. Last summer NYC experimental filmmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs immersed themselves in the Buenos Aires film community through a variety of collaborative cinematic endeavors. In addition to shooting Super 8 movies with their artist peers in town, Street and Sachs spent time meeting and watching the works of local moving image makers – some young bucks and some veterans who have been expanding the parameters of the medium since the early 1960s. (72min TRT.)
“Los Angeles” (5 min., 16mm, 1976) by Leandro Katz
Portrait of a small community living by the railroad tracks in the banana plantation region of Quiriguá, Guatemala. Originally a single take, this film is composed of alternating equal number of moving frames and frozen frames as the camera tracks alongside the train station.
“Workshop” (10 min.,16mm 1977) by Narcisa Hirsch
A structuralist vision as conceived by one of South America’s most beloved experimentalists, Narcisa Hirsch. One wall of the filmmaker’s studio as seen through a fixed camera. We see photos she’s stuck on the wall, then there is a dialogue with a male friend to whom she is describing the rest of the walls that you don’t see. A “one upmanship” of a similar film by Michael Snow where he describes a wall of his studio- workshop, by describing what one CAN see.
“Aleph” (1 min., 16mm) by Narcisa Hirsh
In the blink of the eye – 1440 frames in one minute – the rituals of childhood and adolescence give a magical and haunting rhythm to daily life.
“El Eroticismo del Tiempo” ( 1 min., video, 2005) by Narcisa Hirsch
Like the curves of the body, an hour glass can both seduce and repel us.
“Bajo Tierra” (4 1/2 min., Super 8, sound on CD, 2007) by Pablo Marin
A film portrait of filmmaker Claudio Caldini: in the industrial town of General Rodriguez, Buenos Aires, a man makes a new cinematic offering in front of the no-longer-industrialized Kodachrome.
“Sin título(Focus)” (4 min., Super 8, b&w, silent, 2008,) by Pablo Marin
Shot on a rooftop in Buenos Aires, this film truncates space in ever inviting ways using a dizzying array of formal tropes.
“Equivale a mentir” (3 min, Super 8 to video, sound, 2001) by Macarena Gagliardi.
A meditation on the four elements, and various aspects of fusion—a sensual evocation of the process of change.
“Espectro” (6 min, super 8 with separate sound on CD, 2008) by Sergio Subero.
Abstract images shimmer and shift on the screen. We are invited to look within as we enter an unfamiliar and unpredictable realm.
“Montevideo” (4 minutes, DVD, 2008) by Leandro Listorti
The capital of Uruguay reveals, briefly, its characteristic of a Doppelgänger City: a single place cut in two spaces where two pairs of creatures explore the limits of the travelogue.
“Stock” (5 minutes, 2007, mini DV ) by Ruben Guzman
A boy from La Cruz walks to school to read aloud the stock market report from the newspaper. We are witness to the last day of capitalism.
“El Guardian” (5 min., video, 2008) by Ruben Guzman
A fantasmic guardian coddles and keeps the images of the world.
“Nunca Fuimos Allah Luna” (7 min., 35mm, 2008) by Ernesto Baca
Two characters on split screens collide, converse and argue as the city unspools kinetically behind them.
“For You/Para Usted” (16 minutes, video, 1999) by Liliana Porter
A witty and wry comparison of linguistic and visual modes of expression through a series of pithy and provocative animated vignettes.
The Last Happy Day
37 min. 2009 by Lynne Sachs
a portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran
The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
“A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story … a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.” George Robinson, The Jewish Week
“Exquisite…Sachs reclaims (Lenard’s) dignity and purpose using letters, newsreel footage, and recreations of his environment as if to channel him back from the past.” Todd Lillethun – Program Director, Chicago Filmmakers
For password to Vimeo link, please write to info@lynnesachs.com.
Premiere: New York Film Festival, 2009
Broadcast: Hungarian Public Television, Spring 2010.
Website on Alexander Lenard: http://mek.oszk.hu/kiallitas/lenard/indexeng.html
Credits:
Cast:
Sandor Lenard voice: Israel John Gerendasi
Sandor Lenard performance: Donald Moss with Ivan Moss
Winnie the Pooh Performers: Lucas Fagen, Isabel Reade, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs
Camera: Ethan Mass, Lynne Sachs
Latin Consultation: Michele Lowrie
Interviews by Lynne Sachs
Hansgerd Lenard, Dusseldorf, Germany
Andrietta Lenard, Sao Paolo, Brazil
Selected Screenings and Honors: Indiewire.Com: Nominated One of the Best “Undistributed Films” of 2009 (Phillip Lopate); Director’s Choice Award, Black Maria Film Festival 2010; San Francisco Cinematheque; Pacific Film Archive; Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival, Spain; University of Chicago; Chicago Filmmakers; Closing Night Film Singapore Film Festival; International House University of Pennsylvania; Museum of the Moving Image, NYC, 2021; Criterion Channel Streaming.
Criterion Channel streaming premiere with 7 other films, Oct. 2021.
For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema, Film-makers’ Cooperative, or Icarus Films. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.
Still from Coney Island of the Mind by Lynne Sachs
A three minute silent film by Lynne Sachs in celebration of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s great poem “Coney Island of the Mind”.
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs looks for umbels in New York City. An umbel is a flower cluster in which all stalks arise from the same center point.
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs wanted to understand the word SELENOGRAPHY so she traipsed around New York City from Fresh Kills State Park in Staten Island (the darkest place in the city) to the Lower East Side looking for the moon. Made for the Abecedarium:NYC Project (www.abecedariumnyc.org).
Co-directed by Lynne Sachs and Susan Agliata with the support of the New York Public Library
Abecedarium:NYC is an interactive online exhibition that reflects on the history, geography, and culture – both above and below ground – of New York City through 26 unusual words. Using original video, animation, photography and sound, Abecedarium:NYC constructs visual relationships between these select words and specific locations in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.
Each word – whether it’s A for audile or Z for zenana – leads to a different short video and a location in the city that you may never have experienced before. In selenography (the study of the moon), amateur astronomers celebrate the wonders of the night sky at Staten Island’s Great Kills State Park. In open city (a metropolis without defense), the ruins of military installations throughout the five boroughs decay with time. Chatty teenagers in a Flushing, Queens cafe drink bubble tea in xenogenesis (the phenomenon of children markedly different from their parents). In diglot (a bilingual person), a Chinese accountant, Albanian baker, Palestinian falafel maker, Argentine film archivist and Cuban cigar maker speak candidly about their daily routines. In mofette (an opening in the earth from which carbon monoxide escapes) mysterious gases flow from gaps in the streets of Manhattan.
The experience of visiting Abecedarium:NYC is more than watching, listening and learning. Visitors to the project are invited to respond to existing content as well as to share their own experience of New York City by contributing original videos, soundscapes, photos or texts to the project Abecedarium:NYC Blog. As more users contribute, the project grows in size, scope and experience, and transforms into a destination for sharing and learning about every facet of the city.
See some of the Abecedarium:NYC word videos I’ve made at:
FOUDROYANT “Coney Island of the Mind”
NOSOGEOGRAPHY
NOSOGEOGRAPHY: Gowanus Canal on Earth Day
SELENOGRAPHY “Moon Watching in the Big Apple”
UMBEL “Umbels in Brooklyn”
YASHMAK “The Veil in New York City”
