“The wonderful thing about NYC is that you can experience so many different kinds of environments. This uncharacteristically sunny November afternoon I catch up with Lynne Sachs, who has had work screened at the last two VideoFest. I compliment her on her beautiful website and we talk about the use of text and media and history in her work.” Raquel Chapa, Managing Director Dallas Video Festival
See full Dallas Video Festival Link: http://dallasvideofest.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/lynne-sachs/
Lynne Sachs:
I’ve become very, very interested in the way that translation works, and I was thrilled to read several years ago, and then to revisit an essay by Walter Benjamin, the European philosopher and 20th century cultural thinker. He wrote this essay called The Task of the Translator, where he kind of thought about translation as creating an afterlife for an original text. So, I took that as license and encouragement for doing something more with translation.
And so, when I use text on a screen, I like to have the place on the screen and the rhythm of the text as it becomes part of your visual consciousness to add a kind of energy to the reading. So, the reading is not so passive, it’s more engaged. So, when you see the text, you know that it’s a translation, but you’re also thinking about the way it plays on the math of the image. So, where the text finds itself on that, on the screen has a relationship to what the image is. It’s not just always strictly at the bottom of the screen. It’s placed as unobtrusively as possible.
I was a history major in college, so I love history. I love the ways that the past kind of informs our way of thinking, but I never was quite disciplined enough to just embrace history and only interpret it. So, when I discovered experimental documentary, I thought, “Oh, I can bring in history and poetry.” So, there can be maybe, something that you said earlier, there can be sort of like the poetry of research, that you take distillations of things, that you take parts of things, parts of what’s happened in the past, and then you juxtapose different moments in history and then you create new meaning in the present.
I think about an audience that gets excited about that liminal space between two images or the space of thinking that happens between sound and image that’s very special in film, that doesn’t exist in anything else. That it has to be activated by the audience. Otherwise, it’s just a tape or otherwise it’s just a file, but when the audience sees it and listens to it, another dimension is created. So, I guess, that’s my audience.