Hello fellow documentartians, We are gathering CINEMA OF RESISTANCE videos from all over the US/ World beginning with the historical Jan. 21, 2017 Women’s March. Be a part of our video/film collective. It’s extremely easy. Just post anything you have recorded with your camera or cell phone to Youtube. Any length. Then send me the link via FB message and I will add it to the growing collection. It’s extremely important to save and share this material for our history, for posterity, for solace. We have images from Arizona and Nebraska, no lie, proving that there is passionate objection to the direction the US is going in the red-est of states. Inspired by the words Woodie Gutherie wrote on his own guitar in 1941, we must remember that our cameras can fight fascism.
Here is And Then We Marched, the film I made for the collection:
Take a look at my essay “This Camera Fights Fascism” here on Otherzine:
Viva and Felix Growing Up
by Lynne Sachs
10 min. Black and White 16mm on Digital, 2015
Available from Canyon Cinema, Film-Makers Cooperative, and Kino Rebelde.
Capturing fragments of the first three years of her twin niece’s and nephew’s lives with their two dads (her brother Ira Sachs and his husband Boris Torres) and their mom (Kirsten Johnson), Sachs affectionately surveys the construction of family.
Screened in “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression Retrospective” at the Museum of the Moving Image in 2021.
A hybrid experimental film and live performance that looks into the charged intimacy of washing clothes in a neighborhood laundromat.
EVERY FOLD MATTERS is a live performance and a film project that looks at the charged, intimate space of the neighborhood laundromat and the people who work there. Set at the crossroads of a Brooklyn neighborhood, we meet four characters in a real laundromat — a uniquely social and public space that is slowly disappearing from our changing urban landscape. Based on interviews with New York City laundry workers, the project combines narrative and documentary elements as it explores personal stories of immigration, identity, money, stains and dirt.
“The legacy of domestic work, the issues surrounding power, and the exchange of money for services are all potent themes which rise to the surface and bubble over in dramatic, thrilling escalations of the everyday.” (Brooklyn Rail)
“Spotlights the often-invisible workers who fold the clothes, maintain the machines and know your secrets.” (In These Times)
“The intersection of film and performance, reality and imagination, employee and customer, historical fact and personal anecdote…You made us rethink the laundromat as a site of urban convergence, where strangers (of different races, religions, languages and classes) make ritualistic visits to a public space that’s also a functional extension of their own homes.” Alan Berliner, filmmaker
EVERY FOLD MATTERS has received support from New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (through Dirty Laundry/Loads of Prose), Women and Media Coalition, and Fandor FIX Filmmakers.
Our collaborators include acclaimed downtown actors Ching Valdes-Aran, Jasmine Holloway, Veraalba Santa, and Tony Torn, film editor Amanda Katz, cinematographer Sean Hanley and sound artist Stephen Vitiiello.
EVERY FOLD MATTERS began as a site specific performance with film presented by Loads of Prose at the New Lucky Laundromat in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn in early 2015. The Workers Unite! Film Festival later hosted a performance and awarded us the Best Feature Narrative prize. We are now developing our performance into a film, and recently received support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Women and Media Coalition. This summer Fandor.com awarded us a $5,000 matching grant for the creation and distribution of the film.
“I remember each and every face of every customer.”
We are excited to bring EVERY FOLD MATTERS into a more purely cinematic realm by weaving together additional documentary material collected in interviews, original text, and both raw and impressionistic images.
You can read press on our EVERY FOLD MATTERS live film performance here:
Jasmine Holloway 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 in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
Ching Valdes-Aran 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.
Our Collaborative Team
Lynne Sachs is a co-director. She makes films, performances, 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. Supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at NYU and lives in Brooklyn. www.lynnesachs.com
Lizzie Olesker is a co-director. She is a playwright, director and performer. Her plays have been developed and presented at New Georges, Invisible Dog, Ohio Theater, Dixon Place, HERE, Cherry Lane, and Public Theater. Her work has received support from the Brooklyn Council for the Arts, the Dramatists Guild, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published by Heinemann Press and in the Brooklyn Rail. She teaches playwriting at NYU and the New School, and lives in Brooklyn.
Sean Hanley is our Cinematographer. He is a non-fiction filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. His short works have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the New Orleans Film Festival. Sean teaches cinematography at Hunter College and was a cinematographer and co-producer on Lynne Sachs’s Your Day is My Night (2013). He is the Assistant Director of Mono No Aware.
Amanda Katz is our Associate Producer and Editor. She works professionally as a Film Editor, and is currently working with Lynne Sachs to craft her latest feature film. Her own work has screened at The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Doc NYC, Encuentros del Otros Cine Festival International, and Microscope Gallery. Her most recent film received funding from the New York State Council On The Arts and The Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. Amanda is a MFA candidate in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College.
Stephen Vitiello is our composer, 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.
Interns and web design: Christine Dickerson, Mars Marson, Boyd Chayanon
I spent a day with my mother and stepfather shooting Super 8mm film in my childhood home in Memphis, Tennessee. Sigmund Freud believed that the instigation of a dream is often to be found in the events of the day preceding the dream, which he called the “day residue.”
Taught in Alex Broadwell’s Collective Dream Lab at CalArts – Winter 2021
Workshop description:
This workshop will explore how dreams fit into our lives and into cinema, and how we might develop collaborative practices that eschew traditional models of authorship using the dreamscape as our soil. Through readings, screenings, discussion, and practice we will approach the dream from a variety of angles, including representation, embodiment, and creative methodology, taking care to go beyond modes of psychological interpretation that dominated 20th century dream discourse. Students will be asked to keep dream journals and participate in an exquisite corpse style assignment with classmates.
Day Residue – Lynne Sachs Blue – Apichatpong Weerasethakul Aquarius – Kevin Jerome Everson Ritual – Joseph Bernard Of this Beguiling Membrane – Charlotte Pryce Secret Goldfish – Bi Gan Mahogany Too – Akosua Adoma Owusu
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.
