2024 WMWIFF / Interview by Huei-Yin Chen
https://funscreen.tfai.org.tw/article/38821
https://www.wmw.org.tw/en/title/1009
In October 2024, Women Make Waves International Film Festival in Taiwan invited US experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs to lead an interactive workshop “The Body in Space” and attend the QA sessions for her latest short film Contractions and accompanying sound piece We Continue to Speak. Workshop participants attended one online and one in-person workshop. Over a period of a few weeks, each of the 30 participants produced a one-minute video which was then compiled into a single half-hour compilation that was integrated into a live performance as the final presentation for the festival public.
Under the very limited time constraints of the workshop, Lynne Sachs generously shared eight of her own films with the students in advance. Through these films, she encouraged the participants to think about the relationship between the body and space from the perspective of performance and imagery. Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has been rigorously pushing boundaries as an experimental filmmaker and poet. These eight films became an excellent entry point for understanding her recent creative trajectory.
Starting with Contractions (2024) and We Continue to Speak (2024), which were screened during the film festival, we also talked about four works out of the eight works shared in the workshop——Your Day Is My Night (2013), A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (2019), Maya at 24 (2021 ), and Film About A Father Who (2020). These works can be connected to the discussion of the body, space, and framing during the workshop: the spectrum of the subject matter shifting from works that are more socially engaged and in collaboration with local activist groups or residents; the creative relationship between her and other experimental filmmakers; and, finally to her closest inner circle, herself and family members. Such assumptions lead to a process that moves from the outside toward the inside, like drawing a circle. As time goes by, the overlapping trajectories become more dense, all the issues, subject matters, and emotions are intertwined with each other, and the inside and outside becomes intertwined with each other. All come together. In her practice, Lynne Sachs invited her family members to run and walk in a way that deviate from their daily routine. In the face of the most embarrassing situations or creative difficulties, she mentioned the preciousness of collaboration with others.
Sometime while we talked, a lot of words were left out of the formal interview, and later picked up in random chats, or during a follow-up online interview when she suddenly turned her computer around and let me see the New York street scene through her window.
Q: Maybe we can start from a more social dimension of your work. Let’s start with Contractions, which is very outspoken about the legal situation in US.
You know, in some ways Contractions is outspoken. And in some ways Contractions is a film that recognizes silence. It recognizes that those people who are most affected by any kind of political upheaval often don’t know how to speak, don’t have access to the microphone that would allow them to be heard, and so they had this sensation of being silenced. When I decided to make this film, I was trying to think of a form that could recognize an erasure as much as a presence.
Initially, there was this 2023 call from a filmmaker in California [Kristy Guevara-Flanagan] who was very upset about the end of Roe vs. Wade (the 1973 law that gave women the right to an abortion throughout the US), the new Supreme Court decision which gave each state the right to make its own laws about a woman’s right to have an abortion. She put out an announcement looking for people who wanted to make a film about abortion clinics that no longer offer services. And so about five or six of us responded, and formed the Abortion Clinic Film Collective. I realized that this was an opportunity to go back to my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, because I’m very interested in this relationship we have to the place where we grew up.
I was very upset that something we had taken for granted about the decision-making process about our own bodies had been taken away. We all make assumptions about living in a civil society. You don’t know what you have until you lose it.
I felt like it wasn’t just that our rights were taken away. It was like our faces were taken away and our voices were taken away. I wanted to figure out how I could visualize that. I was actually inspired by Meredith Monk’s Ellis Island (1985) in which she took a group of performers and dancers to an island off the coast of Manhattan. There was this decaying old building. She took performers there and had them interact with the building. The way that performance activates real spaces is very interesting. Kristy Guevara-Flanagan had one requirement for all of the participating filmmakers: we all needed to go to a clinic that used to offer abortion services and no longer does. So I thought, how do I interact with a building? My cousin is an activist in reproductive justice, she performs in the Vagina Monologues every year in Memphis. So she helped me find the people who were in the film.
I actually just finished a part two to Contractions, called This Side of Salina. I collaborate with a Black women’s empowerment group [Layla’s Got You] for that. The film was projected outdoor in Syracuse, New York onto an exterior façade of the Everson Museum of Art, which was designed by the renowned Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei. I have their voices in the film and they also perform in it, a similar spirit to Contractions.
Contractoins
Q: One thing I am also curious about is the covering of faces in Contractions.
Even in New York now, there are religious protesters every single day in front of clinics that offer women’s health services, including mammograms! Abortion is only a small part of what these clinics offer. People are also coming there for urinary tract infections, for example. All of those women are photographed by the protesters because the protesters don’t know who is actually coming to have an abortion. So they film everybody and invade everybody’s privacy.
I could give two answers about the covering of faces. One, the practical answer, is that someone choosing to be in this film was making a decision that was a little bit precarious. I asked everyone to sign a document stating that they were willing to be photographed, but I promised them there would be no faces. And then accidentally, we had one shot where we didn’t turn the camera off after people had already turned their bodies. And I love that shot because I love little mistakes. I needed to go back and ask everybody’s permission to include the shot. So I made a screenshot and I sent it to each person individually. In the film, you see women not only covering their faces but also are bowing. Maybe there’s a little ambiguity here: I’m bowing with strength, but also maybe you’re asking me to be subservient too. Are the performers bowing to the power? And, who’s bowing. I wanted to spark these questions.
Q: Did you come up with the sound piece We Continue to Speak after finishing Contractions?
I realized that personally I was uncomfortable with not letting the women speak because the whole idea was they were silenced. I think they have a lot to say, so I went back to Memphis just a few months later. I got all the women in the film together, plus one of the men in the film. I also interviewed a woman named Dr. Kimberly Looney, who had been the director of medicine for Planned Parenthood in Tennessee, as a central part of the voice-over. She’s very respected in the state of Tennessee and she’s very involved with Black women’s health. But I had told her from the start, you don’t have to put your name in the film because it could cause problems at the hospital where she works. And then she decided that she wanted her name in it. We’ve only shown the film once in Memphis. She came with her mother and her daughter. And she said, “My mother is scared for me, but I’m not scared.”
Q: How long did it take to shoot the film?
About three hours, since it was potentially dangerous to do so. In fact, when we were organizing the production, I had every shot drawn out because I knew we had very little time. I had never seen the building before, but I had drawings imagining it. My cousin and her friend were helping organize everything. She brought a volunteer marshal for security, in case we had protesters or something worse. Keep in mind, this clinic was known for offering abortions. Yes, it was closed, so why would 14 women in patient medical robes be standing in front of that building? People who were very much against abortion might have done anything. One of the local co-producers later told me during the QA of True/False Film Fesitval that we actually had 14 security marshals in different places, like in cars or and behind windows. It just shows you that this issue is very charged. Just a few years ago, several abortion doctors were basically assassinated in the US.
Q: In both Contractions and This Side of Salina you collaborated with the local activist groups and individuals. In Your Day Is My Night, this layer of collaboration transferred to that of the local Chinese community in New York City. This film looks at the shift-bed (temporary) housing phenomenon in Chinatown as a backdrop, resulting in a hybrid documentary-performance project.
One thing that became kind of joyous in the film was that the people in the film found pleasure in playing with the camera. In documentary, there’s a way of emphasizing the moment of the reveal. There’s also this way of developing a trust. And I think both of these systems can be kind of formulaic and manipulative. I just tried to get the participants in the film excited to do something that was different and might bring something new to their own lives. I never wanted them to feel “I’m doing this because this story hasn’t been told before, or people outside the community need to see it.” In fact, there was an exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum we went to yesterday called “Enclave.” I really like the word “enclave.” You could look at Chinatown as an enclave, or this women’s film festival as an enclave. This very thought-provoking exhibition made me reflect on a seemingly hermetic space that can transform into a more porous one.
Your Day is My Night
For this film, I’d conducted audio interviews that became the basis for our film script, distillations you might say of these much longer interviews. In a sense, each member of the cast was able to have fun performing their own lives. If someone is in my film, I like to find ways that they get to be inventive or to harness their own imagination. We were working on this film as a live performance for about two years before it became a film. I thought it was going to be a film, but I didn’t know how to make it. Honestly, I went through a kind of creative desperation, trying to figure what to do. Your Day is My Night was a live performance first, and then it returned to being a film. This is the film that got me excited about working in this way.
Q: It’s a very hybrid film that blurs the docu-fiction boundary. Can you also talk about the Puerto Rican performer?
Well, we’d been working for a year, and one day we all got together – our cast and crew – and the cast told me that audiences would be really bored with our movie because they thought their own lives were really boring. As a group, they suggested that our film needed a better story that people would care about, perhaps some romance. I proposed this idea: What would happen if someone outside, like me or a Puerto Rican woman, moved in? Remember, we were talking about that idea of disrupting a hermetic space! So, I invited a Puerto Rican actress who had worked with me on other projects to join our filmmaking community. Everyone had a much better time once I made it hybrid. We needed to free ourselves from the limitations of our own reality, you might say.
Q: I really like the way you mentioned ‘enclave’ and the idea of porous relationship. I would like to mention A Month of Single Frames here, because in this case, you are dealing with someone else’s materials. The film is made up of Barbara Hammer’s film footage and sound recordings shot in the 80s.
I love finding out that Barbara Hammer came here to Taipei, two times. I didn’t know that until I arrived here. I made two films with Barbara. Barbara and I had known each other since the 80s because we both lived in San Francisco and we were involved in the Film Arts Foundation. And we both moved to New York, so we kept up a lot over that period of time.
In around 2006, she found out that she had ovarian cancer. That was about the time when she turned 60, and I promised to give her a birthday present, which was to shoot a roll of film with her and her wife, Florrie Burke. But she was so busy that it took me years to set up an appointment with her. And by that time, I was quite involved in her life through her cancer. So each time she had chemotherapy, my husband Mark Street would cook and I would deliver, so we were getting closer through that experience.
In 2018, I finally got to shoot the roll of 16mm color film with her. You can see that footage in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor. I asked all three of these remarkable women artists who also happen to be dear friends, “How does the camera allow you to express yourself?” They all knew each other, but they never expected to be in one cinematic vessel together. Let’s call the film a female bonding moment perhaps. Thinking across generations, Carolee and Barbara were exactly the same age as my mother. They were all born in 1939. Gunvor Nelson was ten years older.
In 2018, when Barbara really knew that she was dying, she asked me and three other filmmakers, including my husband Mark Street, to make films with material that she wasn’t able to finish. So what happened was that she gave me the footage of material she had shot during an artist residency in Cape Cod in 1998, but at first she’d forgotten she kept a detailed journal as well. I asked if I could record her reading out loud from her journal. I thought I’d be able to take it home and pick the parts. But she was in a hurry. She knew that life was not long for her. She asked me to go in the other room and pick out what she was going to read, right away.
One thing that was important to me was to actually find a way to communicate with her, maybe in a kind of transcendent way outside of the film, because she passed away while I was making it, so she never saw it finished. And the text becomes my communication with her and with the audience.
Q: I really like the on-screen texts. They are very beautiful.
Thank you. She never saw that. I felt that I needed to enter the material with her. But also it allowed me to understand something that’s very specific to film. When you’re inside a film, you’re actually in another period of time. We leap from the now to the then or to the future. And as you’re watching the film, you’re actually watching it with Barbara and me next to you. That’s a cosmic thing that film can do that, that you feel like you were in the room with Barbara. And it doesn’t have to do with her being dead or being a ghost. She’s very present in the film. And I knew that and I wanted to celebrate that.
A Month of Single Frames
In fact, Barbara had arranged for all of us to have some funding for the post production from the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. I flew from New York City to Columbus early one morning so that I would arrive in Ohio ready to start. As I was heading there, I fell asleep on the plane. I woke up and I wrote all the text. It came to me in a dream.
I was thinking about the environment, she had filmed in, the sand dunes in 1998. So it’s kind of like your epidermis, the top layer of your skin. Your skin is the same as the sand, both have evolved over many years; your skin is slightly different, scarred or wrinkled, same with the land. In film, we feel as if we can go back in time. That’s what I was thinking about with Maya at 24. We can go back or simulate going back, and we can feel that there is also a here and now for us. You are here, I’m here. We’re all here. Because it’s activated by you, the audience.
Q: Speaking of Maya at 24, its sense of time is very unique. You film your daughter Maya running in circles, clockwise, at ages 6, 16 and 24, while a sense of time is simultaneously embodied through the movement. Can you talk about this gesture of running in circles?
I like that there’s a way that the person holding the camera loses power and control, while the person running gets to have fun. I like that disorientation. And also I like the eye contact that happens. The person who’s following your directions doesn’t really have to do much, but they’re definitely doing something that’s out of character. Even a little gesture, you notice how the camera is able to see how my daughter moves a piece of hair behind her ear, in a mature kind of way. There’s a moment when she’s 24 where she self-consciously makes this gesture. When she’s 16, she’s more defiant. And when she’s 6, she’s kind of more playful with me, more physical. In fact, I made three films, all shot in 16 mm. The first one is called Photograph of Wind, referencing an expression that I heard the renowned American photographer Robert Frank use. Maya as a word also means illusion. I was trying to hold onto her childhood, but it was ephemeral and it was going away like the wind. I called the second iteration Same Stream Twice. It came from the Greek philosopher Hiraclitus who wrote you can never step in the same stream twice, but in film you can step in the same stream twice. Maya at 24 was shot when she was 24 years old. It’s also about film itself running at 24 frames per second. So it’s a little reference to the materiality of the medium.
There’s something I find very energizing and unpredictable, about the flow of two circles running almost in opposite directions or two circles spinning at different rates so that you have this sense of being behind and ahead. And there’s an unpredictable register, which has to do with the person filming, with my energy, my ability, my stability, and the person who is being filmed. If you are in motion, sometimes you lose a little bit of self-consciousness. You’re just thinking about working together on this very unambitious and unfamiliar project, which is running in circles. So I took that way of working into Film About A Father Who. There’s a point where my father’s walking along in a circle. And my mother did that too.
Q: For Film About A Father Who, I really have to say it was a bountiful watching experience, with materials that span 35 years of documentation and creation that also encompass different mediums including 16 and 8 millimeter, video , and digital. As an experimental filmmaker, how do you perceive the medium in this film?
So, it’s interesting to me to consider that as I was making the film, technology kept changing. There’s an assumption that as technology changes, it witnesses and documents our lives. We assume it gets better, that there is a pure, mimetic relationship to what you see with your eyes and what you record. Even though I see myself as an experimental filmmaker who likes the degraded or imperfect image, the more I looked at my old material, the more critical I was of it. I was critical of the medium, but I was even more critical of my skills. But deeper than that, honestly, was a kind of aesthetic critique of my father and of our lives. I had a lot of embarrassment. I was deeply embarrassed about my work as an artist and about my role as a daughter. That was one of the reasons I couldn’t finish it. I could shoot it, but I couldn’t look at it. I just had a lot of shame.
And I did have anger. Initially, I started the film because I thought my dad was really interesting. He was an iconoclast. He was a rule breaker. He was maybe one of the reasons I found myself making the kind of films that I make. I wasn’t intimidated by odd situations, and that’s the way he was. But then as things kept happening, I became more and more uncomfortable. Sometimes I wanted to make a critical film, sometimes an introspective film. In fact, I discovered that at different points, different camera registers or modalities worked better for different subjectivities.
Film About A Father Who
Q: About degraded image, there is one certain sequence that repeats: kids playing in a little stream. The timing of repetition is quite crucial, too.
I show that little stream three times at three different moments pulled from one long shot, and it’s critical to the narrative of the film. But what is more interesting to me is that each time you as a viewer are thrown back into that scene, you know more. You have gained knowledge, and you have shifted your position from being an outsider to being omniscient. You realize that you have been privy to information and to a complexity that not everyone in the film is aware of, so that’s compelling to me to let the viewer grow with that image. To me, it’s probably the prettiest image in the film.
In Hito Steyerl’s article, In Defense of the Poor Image, her writing is a celebration of how images travel through culture and become changed in the ways that our bodies change. We get wrinkles, and we get less vibrant, and images do the same thing. They reveal something about the time in which they were made, but also the time in which we as viewers currently live. But I didn’t understand how important this was to me as an artist until I made this film. Because, the first time my editor and I went through all the footage, that kind of image (the stream image), was one that I probably dismissed. It was on a degraded, improperly archived tape that my father had shot on Hi 8 in the 1980s. Time had not been kind to the material.
So with Hi 8, you had these tapes that were like the size of your palm. They went into the camera and you would shoot. And then you would go home and you would connect your camera with a cable to a machine with a VHS tape, and you would transfer the original to a VHS tape. And then, you would reshoot over the original tape with new material. There was no original anymore! Everything was just a copy, and each copy was more degraded than the one before it. Since I had forgotten this technical fact, I spent a couple of years trying to find the original of that tape. Then I finally realized that my dad wouldn’t care about the original. He just wanted to collect images and watch them.
I went back to the VHS tape, which was just a considered a viewing format, not of serious historical importance to archivists anywhere. But when I had it digitized, I realized it is a lot prettier than the digital images of today. It looks more like an Impressionist painting. It has more of an essence than a more precise, better preserved image would ever have, plus it’s got Dad’s voice speaking to his children.
There you see these three children, my half siblings. My father was probably standing behind a camera using a tripod. I guess he forgot he was even recording! Consequently the shot was about 8 minutes long, long enough for him to reveal something very loving, stern in a fatherly way, which my dad usually wasn’t, and very relational. He was dealing with children in a very traditional parent-child way. And the other thing about the image is that it had become pink and yellow and soft blue. The image is truly painterly, so beautiful. Everything about it was meaningful to me.
We’re always using the camera to witness other people’s presence in the world, but it’s also such a gift to see how they frame their own world. So that shot of the children in the little stream is how my father saw his younger children, the ones from the 1980s, my half-siblings. And it’s very loving.
Q: As the film attempts to unveil various “truths” in one family, it also unveils another kind of complexity itself, which turn the clear distinction between good or bad totally upside down, maybe that’s where all the love and hate come from.
That was exactly the gateway I had to go through to make this film. It wasn’t a simple judgment or any emotional realization that came to me. I needed to find a place for something else. I think almost everyone has a person in their family that they’re constantly trying to figure out — where to place them in their consciousness. With our parents, for example, they each choose what they want to share with us in the cosmos of family.
In the film, I wanted to find formal ways of articulating transparency, obfuscation, even covering up. But I think what’s more interesting is giving a viewer the ability to understand that everything we interpret comes with layers of meaning. For example, when you see my father in a tuxedo going to these ostentatious galas with my grandmother dressed in a fancy ballgown, what you realize is that there is no transparency here. It’s all performance. That’s why I intentionally use a little bit of Disney music. This scene actually feels very unreal.
Before my father would go see my grandmother, he would always cut his hair. This way his way of being who he wasn’t. And that’s actually one of the most poignant things in the film. Here’s someone whom generally society does not approve of, at least in term of how he conducted his life. But then parallel to it this is a son who could never be himself with his mother. And there’s pathos there. I think where you find pathos in a film is like an entry point. Not pity, not disgust, not just elation because something great happens, but where you find pathos is really important to me.
Film About A Father Who
As a filmmaker, I need to find an interesting moment between every cut. Even in my longer films, I never want a cut to be simply the result of cause and effect. I want an edit between two shots to be an entry point of activation for a viewer, then there’s possibilities of pathos, as well so many other sensations.
Q: In this film, you are not the only person who was filming. Other than the stream sequence shot by your father, we can constantly see your brother filming. In a way, it seems that your family members are quite used to having someone in the family who is filming. Nevertheless, I am really curious what made you want to finish the film?
My brother [Ira Sachs] is a filmmaker who makes narrative films. But there was a period of time where he went with my father to Moscow, and he would sometimes go down to Florida with my father for my grandmother’s birthday.
There was a way that my father would talk to my brother, in that man-to-man kind of way, even though he knew my brother was gay. He would show Ira a list of all the women he’s trying to date or sleep with. My brother found that to be a turnoff, but he kept the camera going.
So that occurred to me. When I was trying to work on this film, I asked my brother if he could look for the outtakes from Get It While You Can (2002), the short film he made from his Moscow footage. In this way, Film About a Father Who would not offer just a single perspective on a man.
Let me tell you one of my favorite images that was shot by Ira. He’s on the bed and he’s listening to our father in the other room with a young woman, during their trip to Russia. Ira’s holding the camera, you see his feet and a floor lamp, and he’s humming to himself. And it’s amazing because you feel like you’re in this young man’s head. It’s so internal. Both scenes are really gendered, but play out by revealing something complex going on between a father and a son.
For me, this all plays out like a Cubist painting, let’s say a Picasso’s painting of his daughter Maya. He’s trying to articulate different planes of perception, and that’s how a family works. That’s what this film is recognizing. Those different points of view. I am trying to see how a family works anthropologically. For example, I got very interested in how lying works in our family. I think all families are built around a series of white lies. People try to protect the ones they want to protect, but they also try to protect themselves.
But the thing is in a film like this, you’re still journeying, since, as a filmmaker, you’re hiding behind the camera too.
Q: This film also tackles some of hard situations. I remember there is a scene where his girlfriend and second wife sit side by side.
I remember the year I shot that scene, in 1992, and I was shooting with a really good 16 mm Arriflex camera. I had just started dating my now husband Mark, who is also a filmmaker, and I asked him to record sound. I looked at that footage right when I got it back from the film lab, and I knew it looked “pretty.” I also knew that it was very dramatic, and very disturbing. It showed two women being very honest about their feelings and their assessment of their situation. But once I looked at it after I got the film footage back, I didn’t look at it for probably 25 years, and it moved around with me in carboard boxes from California, to New York, to Maryland. It moved with me everywhere, and it became this Pandora’s Box saying “Look at me!” And, I couldn’t look at it.
And then, I reconnected with a former student of mine named Rebecca Shapass. She started working with me as my studio assistant, and I just said, “let’s look at the footage together.” For some reason, I never felt embarrassed, and it was a breakthrough. We went through every tape and every roll of film. And that was kind of a watershed moment. I was able to explore ideas with her, as we sat side by side, so she ended up being the editor for the film. We did it together, and it was very freeing for me. I’ll never forget that connection that we had.
註1：本文中文版本原載於國家電影及視聽文化中心出版之《放映週報》776 期
註2: 本文所有劇照皆由琳恩・薩克斯提供
Note 1: For the Chinese version, please refer to Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s Funscreen Weekly No. 776: https://funscreen.tfai.org.tw/article/38821
Note 2: All the film stills used in this interview are provided by Lynne Sachs.