NYU Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts 721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Rm. 674 Free and open to the public
LISTEN TO ERNIE GEHR’S LECTURE HERE:
For nearly fifty years, artist Ernie Gehr has transformed his deep knowledge of the moving image into a distinct vision of cinema’s potential for interpreting and fragmenting reality. With an astute, often humorous, appreciation for the limits and possibilities of the frame, Gehr has, since the mid-1960s, created a large, radical body of work that continues to challenge and surprise audiences. He uses his camera as a tool for creating new modes of perception. With few words, no characters, and no plots, his films, video work, and installations push us to re-imagine our own relationships to time and space.
There are a multiplicity of adjectives that fit Ernie Gehr’s experimental film and digital work: abstract, beautiful, mysterious, invigorating, utopian. — Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 11/11/11
In Gehr’s hands, the camera seems to take on magical properties, able to transform the most quotidian object or environment –– the pattern of sunlight on a wall, a busy street — into marvelous and unexpected phenomena. — Ernie Gehr’s Marvelous Cinema, Harvard Film Archive
Join us for screenings at 5:30 and Gehr’s Experimental Lecutre at 7:00.
5:30 Pre-lecture 16mm screening of Serene Velocity (1970), Shift (1972-74) and Rear Window (1986/1991)
6:30 Artist reception
7:00 Experimental Lecture with screenings of Lisa and Suzanne (1969-79), Untitled: Part 1 (l981), On the Coney Island Boardwalk (2010)
For the last half century, Jonas Mekas has been a passionate filmmaker. His love for the moving image is expressed in his subversive, intimate, and lyrical diary films. Mekas is also a devout and productive advocate for personal cinema, having founded two of New York City’s most active film institutions, Anthology Film Archives and the Film-Makers Cooperative.
Each year, we invite one veteran experimental filmmaker to present his or her work. The lecture itself is a performance in which the artist explores his or her creative process. Past artists include Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Craig Baldwin, Peggy Ahwesh, and Carolee Schneemann.
Curated by Lynne Sachs.
This event is free and open to the public.
Seating is available first come, first served.
Starfish Aorta Colossus
poem by Paolo Javier
film by Lynne Sachs with Sean Hanley
5 min. 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 filmmaker Lynne Sachs to create a film that would speak to one of his poems from his newly published book Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books). Sachs chose Stanza 10 from Javier’s poem “Starfish Aorta Colussus” and then traveled through 25 years of her 8 mm films — including footage of the A.I.D.S. Quilt from the late 1980s, a drive from Florida to San Francisco, and a journey into a very untouristic part of Puerto Rico. Throughout the process, Sachs explores Javier’s celebration of nouns and the haunting resonances of Javier’s poetry.
“Sachs’ latest, “Starfish Aorta Colossus” (made with Sean Hanley), is based on a poem by Paolo Javier. An eerie, fractured meditation on loss, the poem is visualized with another foray into multiplied imagery. Although formally “Starfish” echoes “Drawn and Quartered,” the new film features striking footage of the AIDS quilt, as well as partial, disrupted portions of bodies and landscapes. The structural play that enlivened Sachs’ film from 30 years ago is now mournful, staggered. This speaks not only to Sachs’ inevitable maturity as an artist, but no doubt to her assessment of the three decades we have collectively traversed to arrive where we are now.” – Michael Sicinski, Nashville Scene
Transient Visions Festival of the Moving Image; Anti-Matter Media Arts Festival (Vancouver); Haverhill Experimental Film Festival; Anthology Film Archives, Spectacle Theater; Black Maria Film Festival Third Place Jury Award; San Francisco Film Festival; Bay Area Book Festival; Images Contre la Nature (France); Los Angeles Center for the Digital Arts; Korean Society of Media Arts Seoul; Festival Experimental Rio de Janeiro; Kino Palais & Lumiton Museo del Cine Buenos Aires; Camera Lucida, Cuenca, Ecuador; Enguage Festival, San Francisco; Revolutions per Minute Film Festival, Boston.
EVERY FOLD MATTERS
a site-specific performance about working in a laundry
by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs
“All you get is their name and their bag of dirty stuff- you write it on a tag. A tag for all the sweat, blood, food, coffee stains, and whatever….”
EVERY FOLD MATTERS is a collaborative, site-specific performance with film about the work of doing laundry by playwright/director Lizzie Olesker and experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs. With text developed from interviews with NYC neighborhood laundromat workers, EVERY FOLD MATTERS looks at the charged, intimate experience of cleaning other people’s clothes in a public workspace. Presented by Emily Rubin’s Wash and Dry Productions, performances of EVERY FOLD MATTERS unfolded at the New Lucky Laundromat on Lafayette Avenue in Clinton Hill Brooklyn, February 12-14, 2015. The Manhattan Community Arts Fund and the Brooklyn Arts Council awarded initial support for EVERY FOLD MATTERS, After the New Lucky Laundry performances, we will produce an EVERY FOLD MATTERS film, a hybrid work that will incorporate both our performance and documentary materials.
“Sometimes they hide the stains. They’ll put it in a bag and won’t tell you. Maybe they think you won’t take it?”
EVERY FOLD MATTERS looks at the seemingly mundane, everyday world of laundry through a personal and social lens, providing new insight into the way we take care of the things most close to our bodies. Stories around intimacy, clothes, dirt/stains, money, and time are revealed through heightened dialogue and gestural, choreographed sequences — all set amidst the washers and dryers of a working laundromat. EVERY FOLD MATTERS provides an opening into a historic form of domestic work which is mostly unseen, or at least unnoticed, tended to by those who go unrecognized and undervalued.
“My customers count on me. They think we do magic.”
EVERY FOLD MATTERS was originally commissioned by Emily Rubin as part of Wash and Dry Productions’ Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose series, with support from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, and presented on the Lower East Side at Gentle Wash Laundromat. In 2014, Lizzie Olesker was awarded $2200 from the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) to further develop and perform EVERY FOLD MATTERS. Lizzie then invited Lynne Sachs to collaborate on the project, bringing her innovative approach in creating hybrid documentary work. After early showings in Brooklyn at the Old Stone House and Atlantis Superwash Laundromat, Lizzie and Lynne continued developing the piece through further interviews and collaborating on a new script. Emily recently secured a new site-specific venue at the Lucky Laundromat in Brooklyn. Acclaimed, multi-talented performers Veraalba Santa, Ching Valdes-Aran and Jasmine Holloway have joined the production. Musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello will create a responsive sound design for the upcoming performance and film.
“My mother in Hong Kong, she showed me … no dryers. We would just hang them. I helped her with the easiest stuff, like folding underwear. And then you practice, practice, practice…”
Lead collaborating artists Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker have long admired one another’s work. Each has over 30 years experience making original performances and films, following their own path in making their projects happen. Taking the chance to bring a hybrid, experimental performance into a surprising, real-world environment inspires both artists and their audience.
“I remember each and every face of every customer.”
Through local press, social media, online publicity, and neighborhood flyers, the EVERY FOLD MATTERS team reached out to both NYC audiences at large and the Clinton Hill community.
“The laundromat is one of those places you think will be there forever. It’s one of the only places where you still talk to strangers.”
Emily Rubin’s Wash and Dry Productions has been producing Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose since 2005 when it started as an experiment in a laundromat in the East Village. Since that time, Rubin has presented more than 150 emerging and established writers and performers amidst the washers and dryers of neighborhood laundromats throughout NYC. EVERY FOLD MATTERS will be Wash and Dry Productions’ first event in the year-long 10th Anniversary Celebration of Loads of Prose.
Lizzie Olesker (co-director, writer) is a playwright, director, and performer whose work focuses on finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Plays and performances have been developed and presented at New Georges, HERE, the Ohio Theatre, Invisible Dog, Dixon Place, Old Stone House, Cherry Lane Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Intiman (Seattle) and Public Theater.
Emily Rubin (producer) founded Wash and Dry Productions in 2005 to produce Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and performance series that takes place in laundromats around the country. Rubin is the author of the novel STALINA (Mariner Books) and is at work on another novel and memoir about urban homesteading. www.emilyrubin.net
Lynne Sachs (co-director, writer) is fascinated by the intersection between documentary film explorations and live performance. Her hybrid film works have screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance, Punto de Vista, the China Women’s Film Festival and the Vancouver Film Festival. She is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow in the Arts. www.lynnesachs.com
Stephen Vitiello (music) is an electronic musician and media artist. Vitiello’s sound installations have been presented at MoMA, MASS MoCA, the Whitney Biennial, and on the High Line in NYC. Vitiello has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Scanner, Steve Roden, Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto. www.stephenvitiello.com
Sean Hanley (film production), Amanda Katz (performance and film assistance) and Luo Xiauyuan (research and translation).
Our Performers
Jasmine Holloway (performer) is a singer and actress who has performed in productions at the Harlem Repertory Theatre as well as in the highly acclaimed GENERATIONS at Soho Rep. Jasmine was nominated for the Richard Maltby Jr. Award for Musical Theatre Excellence during the 2013 Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival.
Veraalba Santa is an actress and dancer and a member of Caborca Theater. She has degrees in Theater and Dance from the University of Puerto Rico and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. In New York City, Veraalba has worked with Sally Silvers, Rojo Robles, Viveca Vazquez and Rosa Luisa Marquez.
Tony Torn was last seen on stage in the title role of Ubu Sings Ubu at The Slipper Room, a rock opera adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi which he created and co-directed. An actor and director known for his extensive work with Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, Tony recently made his Broadway debut Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
Ching Valdes-Aran (performer) is an Obie award-winning actor who has appeared on and off Broadway, including The Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, La Mama, Women’s Project, CSC, Mabou Mines, Ma-Yi Theater Company, La Jolla, Center Stage, Yale Rep, and ACT. Her film work includes roles in Lav Diaz’s FROM WHAT IS BEFORE (Golden Leopard Award, Locarno Int’l Festival) and Julie Taymor’s ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.
Thank you for all of your hard work on this amazing project!
Here is the corrected information you requested.
LYNNE SACHS-MARK STREET, At Home in the Darkness / USA / English text and dialogue / Dur: 4.14”
Text and dialogue: 00:00:07 Intertitle: We’ve always encouraged our daughters to walk on well-lit streets for safety. 00:00:14 Intertitle: But we also want them to embrace the dark.
00:00:22 Intertitle: Dad visits his museum of nocturnal artifacts.
00:00:26 Intertitle:The girls have better things to do.
00:00:31 Audio dialogue: All right Mr. Street. Now, I would like to ask you, what do you think you are going to do with this little movie?
00:02:06 Intertitle: Mom wants to go moon watching.
00:02:12 Intertitle: So the girls come along.
00:02:13 Audio dialogue: what´s your idea of darkness or why did you choose this idea of darkness? – Can you tell her how to look too?
– Oh I see it!
– See the sort of cloudy area.
– See it right in the middle, but don’t look right in the middle. Look around.
– Oh yeah.
– They separate from the cloud.
00:02:51 Audio dialogue: Can we look? Girls do you want to see it? Maya! I will pick her up. See two stars? Wait.
00:03:07 Audio dialogue: Where do I look into?
THREE QUESTIONS FOR GENERAL INFORMATION, JUST ANSWER WITH A PAIR OF LINES PLEASE
Where did you film your darkness?
New York City at the Fulton Fish Market; our backyard in Brooklyn; on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn; Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn; Manhattan; and, Freshkills Park in Staten Island
How was the shooting or let me know some details about it?
Mark Street carried a camera almost every day for a year, and this footage comes from that period. Part of it is shot through a corrugated filter purchased at an office supply store. Lynne spent a year trying to see and photograph the stars in the heart of New York City.
What´s your idea of darkness or why did you choose this idea of darkness?
Mark: “I worked the night shift in a restaurant 30 years ago and it changed my life. Children are afraid of the dark, famously. Maybe learning to embrace the nightly shroud is all they need to know; to appreciate the mystery and subtlety of the sublime and primal.”
Lynne: “We take our daughters to places in the city that are dark enough to see a planet or a very bright star. We want them to appreciate the other worlds beyond our own. We hope they will always find their way when they feel apprehensive in the dark.”
Where Did I Make the Wrong Turn? The 5th Annual Experimental Lecture by Carolee Schneemann
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Curated by Lynne Sachs
Carolee Schneemann is a visual artist and moving image maker known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She has been a leader and provocateur in the American avant-garde community since the mid 1960s when she created her ground breaking performance Meat Joy. From Interior Scroll to Plumb Line to Mortal Coil to Vespers Pool, Schneemann’s work pushes form and consciousness like no other artist working today. Ever since Fuses (1965), her landmark exploration of the female body, Schneemann has pushed visual perception in radical directions that awe, disturb and mystify audiences.
In her Experimental Lecture, Schneemann travels backwards and forwards in time. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she will analyze recurring formal properties in her film, sculpture and installation work. The mysteries of a notched stick, paper folds, indentations, the slice of line in space are followed as unexpected structural motives, up to and including her recent photographic grids and objects.
Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Undergraduate Film and Television and the Department of Cinema Studies.
2014 International Festival of Documentary Cinema: Encounter with Other Cinema, Quito, Ecuador
Scenic Ruptures: Experimental Documentaries from New York City and Los Angeles
Co-curated by Alexandra Cuesta and Lynne Sachs
Synopsis for NYC program by Lynne Sachs
Ten New York City artists ranging in age from 24 to 80 bring their personal impressions of the place they call home to Quito’s EDOCS screen. This program of experimental documentaries transforms a “bigger than life” metropolis into a place full of delicate, sometimes dirty, occasionally shiny images that will certainly complicate the more famous, monolithic images created by the mainstream media. Because these films are shot “from the inside out” by people who know the city well and are sensitive to the weave of the urban fabric, they reveal a fresh, intimate view from the ground up. Where and how do we engage with the city’s flora and fauna in our daily lives? How might the omnipresent trash of the streets reveal something about our quotidian rituals? When does the simple task of walking along a sidewalk become a surprising piece of radical performance art? Where are the silent, hidden workers who make the things we wear everyday? Together we will answer these questions during and after the screening of the NYC section of “Scenic Ruptures”.
Dear Alexandra,
Some people believe that the world looks better through “rose colored glasses.” I am not sure if this expression has any meaning in the Spanish language, but in English the implication is that these glasses are able to trick us into thinking that the bad things in life are not really so bad. It’s a kind of strange, optically generated false optimism. I’ve been living in New York City for eighteen years, and I must admit that ever since I arrived here I refused to put on those proverbial rose-colored glasses. I always wanted to see the dust, grime and shine of this major metropolis for what is was, in the same way that I truly prefer to see people without makeup, finding the lines of aging far more compelling than the smooth surface of cosmetics. I suppose this is the reason I make experimental films. I don’t want to cover up the brilliant, scary, intimidating surprises that the world offers, but instead prefer to look head-on with my eyes open. In this program, I have chosen a suite of short films that I think will show you and the audience at EDOCS a side of New York City that is rarely depicted through those big mainstream Hollywood movies that travel so easily across borders.
We will start the program by diving into the under water world. “Living Fossil” reveals a thriving beach side “community” of sea crabs, lovingly deposited on our local coastline by the Atlantic Ocean. Then in “Fulton Fish Market” you’ll see the nocturnal activities of the workers at the renowned, though now sadly defunct, South Street Seaport market. Next we will visit the cluttered, colorful streets of Manhattan by way of the object animations in “Early 12 New York Song”. Here, we will look at the magnificent detritus of the sidewalks, transforming the trash of our city into an archeologist’s treasure box. After that, we will take a pastoral detour to Central Park where, believe it or not, you will witness the Christmas time ritual of SantaCon. “Extinction Becomes Us”is an exquisite film portrait ofanannual, anarchic event in which thousands of New Yorkers prance around the city dressed like, you guessed it, Santa Claus. Oh, and I better add, they are all drunk! From this nonsensical, apolitical reverie, we will move onto something far more dialectic. “Capitalism: Child Labor” is radical in every sense of the word. The film is an aggressive visual diatribe against all that New York City has come to represent in the world arena. The next two films on our visual journey will take us downtown to Chinatown. Through “Chinaman’s Suitcase”, we’ll experience a riveting, darkly humorous performance piece in which a somber traveler from Chinatown walks all the way to Midtown and then back again. As a finale to his low-key pedestrian adventure, our protagonist delivers one of the most outlandish film finales I have ever seen. “Night Scene New York” then carries us on a breathtaking, yet contemplative magic carpet ride through the same neighborhood. Moving north just a few blocks to the starkly different Lower East Side, “Bitch Beauty” gives us a candid portrait of a downtown woman artist who has lived a life full of heartbreak, disappointment, creativity and revelation. Our last image of New York City is my own “Drift and Bough”. We had an extremely cold and long winter this season, so I thought the only way I could reckon with its challenges was to make a movie.
I hope you will enjoy this cinematic voyage through the place I call home. I certainly had a great time designing your itinerary.
All the best,
Lynne Sachs
Quito, 9 de marzo, 2014
Querida Lynne,
Gracias por tu carta. Tengo mucha curiosidad de ver a Nueva York a través de los filmes que has escogido. Me identifico con tu mirada porque, al igual que tú, pienso que la esencia de un lugar esta detrás de lo que se percibe en el exterior. Como dices, hay infinitas perspectivas desde donde explorar una ciudad, y en mi caso el entendimiento de Los Ángeles está ligado a mi contexto personal. Viví ahí durante siete años, siendo este el tiempo más largo en que he vivido en un solo lugar. Desde temprana edad me he trasladado de ciudad en ciudad, llevando conmigo diversas culturas. Por esto, mi relación con el lugar es una experiencia simultánea entre pertenecer y ver desde afuera, adaptarme y observar, siempre desde algún lugar en la mitad. Es desde ahí desde donde construyo mi descripción de esta gran urbe. Una mirada que se fija en los márgenes, en los intersticios y en lo invisible. Paradójicamente también es la razón por la que mi práctica e interés en el cine están enraizadas en lo experimental, justamente porque este proceso permite construir perspectivas permeables y abrir significados.
Al no disponer de un centro definido en un amplio territorio, una de las características más impactantes del imaginario urbano de Los Ángeles es el urban sprawl, “esparcimiento urbano”. Partiendo de esto, el espacio de la ciudad y de sus habitantes no se puede definir con fronteras trazables. Es así que he creado un programa de obras poéticas y personales que crean una descripción abierta y ambigua, proponiendo una oportunidad para imaginar a la ciudad. Además, esta selección servirá como una introducción a las diversas tradiciones experimentales en el cine.
El primer filme en el programa, My Tears Are Dry, es un homenaje al cineasta experimental Bruce Baillie y también una oda al ideal californiano: palmeras y el cielo azul en una tarde de descanso. Después, observaremos la decadencia suburbana en un paisaje nocturno donde imágenes de películas viejas evocan al pasado en el filme Vineland. Continuando con un paisaje diurno, estaremos visualmente estimulados con la gran cantidad de vallas, sonidos, música y letreros que aparecen en Get Out of the Car, una sinfonía de ciudad del gran cineasta Thom Andersen, quien describe la nostalgia en el presente y visibiliza el maquillaje multicultural de la ciudad. Seguimos con The Electric Embrace, un estudio formal y estético filmado en película blanco y negro de alto contraste, sobre estructuras eléctricas e industriales particulares en las afueras de la ciudad. Continuamos con Everybody’s Nuts, un filme-ensayo sobre la presencia forzada de corporaciones agrícolas en la tierra de un trabajador mexicano, en un filme altamente personal. Regresamos a la urbe con mi película Piensa en mí, que incluí porque visibiliza a la gente que utiliza el transporte público mientras recorre la ciudad de Este a Oeste en una trayectoria visual. Finalmente, salimos a la frontera y nos encontramos en el muro que separa a Estados Unidos con México en Crossings, una obra altamente experimental del cineasta Robert Fenz.
Este es el recorrido. Por supuesto, es una pequeña muestra en un inmenso territorio. Siempre habrá más que mostrar y quedan infinitas miradas por incluir. Sin embargo espero que disfrutes de este fragmento y que te dé una idea de esta gran ciudad.
Con mucho cariño,
Alexandra Cuesta
NYC Program:
Living Fossil
dir. Sean Hanley 16mm, 2 min., 2014
It is springtime along the coast of New York’s Long Island. Thousands of horseshoe crabs spawn on beaches under the glow of the full moon. This film offers a brief glimpse of a 450 million year old ritual. (SH)
Sean is an educator and filmmaker pursing experiments in the documentary genre. His work as a director and/or cinematographer has shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Images Festival, the Pacific Film Archive, the Vancouver International Film Festival, FLEXfest, and the Black Maria Film + Video Festival. He is the Assistant Director of Mono No Aware, an annual exhibition of expanded cinema and film-installation.
Fulton Fish Market
dir. Mark Street
35mm, sound, color, 12 min., 2003
Until 2005, New York City’s Fulton Fish Market exploded with movement, sound and color between the hours of midnight and 7 AM, Monday through Friday in lower Manhattan. Fishhooks flailed, crates were ripped open, and tens of thousands of fish were arrayed in ice as discerning retailers and restaurant owners made the rounds. This lyrical, visually vibrant documentary reveals a profoundly tactile material world tucked away in the shadow of the digital age. (MS)
Mark Street graduated from Bard College (B.A, 1986) and the San Francisco Art Institute (M.F.A., 1992). He has shown work in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series (1991, 1994), at Anthology Film Archives (1993, 2006, 2009), Millennium (1990,1996), and the San Francisco Cinematheque (1986, 1992, 2009). His work has appeared at the Tribeca (5 times), Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense (Spain), Mill Valley, South by Southwest, and other film festivals.
Early 12 New York Song
dir. Amanda Katz and Anthony Svatek Video, 3 min. 2012
Objects and sounds collected on an early morning walk through Brooklyn, New York billow against a sun-struck floor. The smallest parts of the city are up for grabs. (AK & AS)
Amanda Katz is a professional film editor who teaches 16mm filmmaking at the Mono No Aware workshops in Brooklyn, NY. She remains endlessly inspired by the urban environment, and this is reflected in her personal work. Georg Anthony Svatek is a documentary cinematographer and producer who seeks to inspire estrangement from the familiar and create a sense of awe within the viewer. Aside from working at BBC World as a shooter and researcher, Anthony is currently co-creating an experimental documentary tentatively titled The BQE Project.
Extinction Becomes Us
dir. Josh Lewis Super-8mm, color, silent, 3 min., 2010
Shot at Christmas time in New York’s Central Park with Lewis’ last roll of Super 8mm Kodachrome, this film was born from a chance encounter with the post-irony holiday bacchanalia known as SantaCon. Sad to say, it is no longer possible to process this exquisite film stock, so the very look of the film is a relic from an age gone by. (LS & JL)
Working freely in abstraction, documentary, performance, and narrative filmmaking, Josh Lewis creates work that engages with the mechanics of human need, guilt, desire and transcendence. His film-based work revolves heavily around chemical experimentation and an unconventional, often derelict approach to darkroom procedures. He is a firm believer in manual knowledge and the transformative potential of an immediate bodily struggle with the elements of the natural world.
Capitalism: Child Labor
dir. Ken Jacobs Video, color, sound, 14 min., 200
“A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great sky-lit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by their bosses! ‘Boys,’ they will say, ‘Have we got a war for you.” (KJ)
“For more than fifty years, Ken Jacobs’s work has inspired the sense of awe and mystery that nineteenth-century audiences must have felt when confronting motion pictures for the first time. Jacobs’s lifelong project has been the aesthetic, social, and physical critique of projected images.” (Museum of Modern Art) In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic -rather than demagogic- cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant.
Chinaman’s Suitcase
Dir. Miao Jiaxin Performance Video, 6 min., 2012
In a performance, the artist Miao Jiaxin brings hanging ducks to Zuccotti Park (famous as the site of Occupy Wall Street) in downtown Manhattan, sprays them with color, hangs them back in Chinatown. (LS)
From his early practice, starting as a street photographer tracking Shanghai prostitutes to the development of a pseudo-transvestite web celebrity, Miao Jiaxin has evolved an edgy and protean practice. Beginning in Shanghai, Miao then immigrated to New York, expanding his view of urban streets towards a more conceptual public stage, where his works travel across different media.
Night Scene New York
dir. Jem Cohen 16mm, 10 min., 2009
A sleepwalker’s circumnavigation becomes a chance observation of New York’s Chinatown. (JC)
Jem Cohen is a filmmaker especially known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats (16mm, Super 8, video) and collaborations with music artists. Cohen found the mainstream Hollywood film industry incompatible with his sociopolitical and artistic views. By applying the do-it-yourself ethos of Punk Rock to his filmmaking approach, he crafted a distinct style in his films.
Bitch Beauty
dir. M.M. Serra 16mm & Super 8mm, 7 min. 2011
This film is anexperimental documentary profiling the life of Anne Hanavan, who experienced the underground scene in the East Village of the Eighties. It is a time capsule of addiction, the perils of street prostitution, and subsequent renewal through cathartic self-expression. (MS)
Filmmaker, writer, teacher, curator, director of the Film-Makers’ Co-op and all around dynamo, MM Serra has been central to the East Village experimental film scene for two decades. Her raven-black Betty Page hairdo, starlet sunglasses, sexpot leather pants and outrageous laughter make her one of downtown’s most unforgettable personalities.
Drift and Bough
dir. Lynne Sach Super 8mm, 6 min. 2014
“I spent a morning this winter in Central Park shooting film in the snow. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness creates the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro, or a monochromatic tableau-vivant. When I am holding my Super 8mm camera, I am able to see these graphic explosions of dark and light.” (LS)
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design.
Drift and Bough dir. Lynne Sachs Super 8mm, 6 min. 2014
Music by Stephen Vitiello + Molly Berg “Back Again” from the album “Between You and the Shapes you Take” Courtesy 12k
“I spent a morning this winter in Central Park shooting film in the snow. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness creates the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro, or a monochromatic tableau-vivant. When I am holding my Super 8mm camera, I am able to see these graphic explosions of dark and light.” — Lynne Sachs
“There I was disarmed by the quiet, unassuming succession of art-photo shots of snowy Central Park, which seemed pretty ordinary, but which again drifted little by little into a richer and richer collection of elements, such as the lines that did various things like scale shifting and–with the lines of duck trails through the ice-pack–lines that “drew” a kind of benign insinuation into a cold world…which seemed to help effect an insinuation into my affect in my reception of the film. By the time the film ends I have been drawn, partially consciously, into a meditative state that I wanted to resist at its beginning. The ending–with the people moving about and the bicycle taxi and camera both drifting to the right–was a slight break in that mood, perhaps because of the people moving about and doing things, but it still maintains some of the meditative mood through my realization that a barely perceptible superimposition of nothing very distinguishable has occurred mysteriously for the first and only time in the film.” – Ron Green, in letter to filmmaker Lynne Sachs
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
