TENGGER is a family of traveling musicians. The pair, Itta from South Korea and Marqido from Japan, create psychedelic New-Age drone magic using vocals, Indian harmonium, toy instruments, synthesizers and electronics. The duo started out as “10”, but since the birth of their son RAAI in 2012 (who accompanies them on tour and contributes vocals, synths, and also dances on stage), they have rechristened themselves TENGGER; which means “unlimited expanse of sky” in Mongolian, to mark the expansion of the family.
The family’s annual pilgrimages influence every aspect of their art.
FOREVER OVERHEAD
Forever Overhead is the meeting of head and sky, the in-between space where boundaries blur and anything seems possible. Seeking to recapture the utopian imagination of childhood wastelands, the brother-sister duo explore the infinite variations of songwriting and improvisation, weaving a pop-folk-noise landscape rich in contrasts and ambitious harmonies. With two voices, and playing every instrument they come across, their music is made up of suspended moments where sweetness rubs shoulders with the strange, and nothing is ever quite ordinary.
PROJECTION
“A Month of Single Frames” by Lynne Sachs 14mn
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer took up an artist residency in a shack with no running water or electricity. There, she shot films, recorded sounds and kept a diary. For decades, these documents remained in her personal archive, until, as she neared the end of her life in 2018, she entrusted her friend, renowned American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, with the task of making a film from them. Through her own film, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places the text on screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.
In Barbara Hammer’s memoir HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life she writes, “My films begin in what I call feeling images, an inseparable unity of emotion and thought/idea/image and internal bodily states of excitement.” Hammer’s desire to wed both emotion and thought, objects and bodies, could also be the epigraph to the experimental filmmaker and writer Lynne Sachs’s ongoing illustrious career. 2024 marks forty years since Sachs took her first video class at DCTV, where their June retrospective From the Outside In honors Sachs’s oeuvre of experimental shorts, cinepoems, and hybrid documentaries that explore feminism, family, New York City, labor, and “internal bodily states of excitement” with radical empathy and joy evinced in the act of their making.
From the Outside In features twenty-four films from Sachs’s body of work spanning 1983 to 2024, as well as an artist talk and workshop on uniting poetry with cinema. This preoccupation with language and translation—or the ever ongoing interplay between the aural, textual, and visual—is always at the forefront of Sachs’s work. In the very first program, “Performing the Real,” her short Fossil (1986) opens with a series of bodies in medium close-up performing various repetitive terpsichorean movements. The VHS camera, handheld, slightly unsteady, traces their shadows and gestures against the room’s white walls. Sachs then cuts to video footage of women in Ubud, Bali, packing sand into their baskets at a river bank. Through juxtaposition, the dance is both an interpretation as well as a translation of the Indonesian women’s labor. As Sachs elaborates in a recent phone interview, the cut is “another type of line break” that allows “the juxtapositions between shots … to have [what we’ll call] free song.”
The Washing Society (2018) expands upon the content and form of Fossil. Sachs initially began this projectwith her co-director/playwright Lizzie Olesker by informally interviewing various people who worked in laundromats to create the play Every Fold Matters, which was performed in laundromats all over New York. The composite of all those different conversations is also the content of her film. In between subjects candidly sharing their experiences of racism or overtime at work, The Washing Society also features actors delivering monologues about laundering or dancers bounding atop site specific washing machines with interpretive abandon. The Washing Society makes visible typically invisible labor both by conducting talking head interviews, as well as by lovingly translating folding gestures into emotive dance. The mix of registers (veering from participatory to performative modes of hybrid documentary), coupled with the chorus of voices, creates a powerful panoply of experiences on this historically marginalized, gendered, and racialized labor.
Swerve concludes “Performing the Real’s” program by deftly (and movingly) uniting Sachs’s interests in translation, language, and text on screen. Inspired by Paolo Javier’s (Queens Poet Laureate 2010–14) sonnets in his 2021 book O.B.B. a.k.a. The Original Brown Boy, Swerve takes place in both an Asian food market and a playground in Queens. As various actors recite Javier’s lines, the camera tracks their movements closely like a confidant; at times, text layers the images, language equally worthy of sight as a face or a hand. Sachs further underscores her love of language in her short A Year in Notes and Numbers (2017) where the camera cuts from marginalia to to-do lists to vital signs in rhythmic succession. Sachs describes A Year as a “concise, autobiographical poem … made from the detritus. [It’s all] about the micro coming together.” Text typically delegated to the margins—or reserved solely for medical spheres—takes center frame.
Elsewhere, like in E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021), the letter becomes another format from which to aurally and textually examine the power and politics of images. E•pis•to•lar•y begins with the white text “Dear Jean” against a black screen, ominously overlaid with the chatter of children and what sounds like a crackling fire. Sachs then cuts to black-and-white footage of the January 6th rioters descending on the Capitol before cutting back to the black screen where white text now states, “I don’t believe that childhood is swathed in innocence.” Each member of this mob was once a child—but children are equally capable of inciting chaos as adults. Sachs subsequently cuts to footage from Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963) as two young children push a large rock from a cliff. When the rock begins its descent, Sachs immediately cuts back to the rioters overturning a barricade; the objects, as well as the sound bridge of the rock falling, links the two disparate source materials. The result is a deeply unsettling collage of mob mentality that activates the viewer not just intellectually, but sensorially due to the match on action cuts and sound bridges. This is a film where the power of images surpasses the power of the written word. Through disquieting visual juxtapositions, Sachs’s E•pis•to•lar•y returns us to Hammer’s “inseparable unity” of embodied violence and political ideology.
Yet, politics—and the politics of identity—are never removed from any of Sachs’s work. She is always already attuned to bodies (both her own and others’), and their multiplicities, gradations, and variations. As Audre Lorde wrote, “It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences”; Sachs’s films live by Lorde’s tenet that difference is worthy of record—and celebration. Some films, like Your Day is My Night (2013), include both English and Chinese subtitles; others, like Tip of My Tongue / En la punta de mi lengua (2017), include Spanish subtitles on screen. Sachs does not always automatically assume her audiences are English speakers. Nor is she interested in documenting a single political or social experience. Nowhere is such a chorus of voices more personally rendered than in Film About a Father Who (2020). Filmed over thirty-five years, Sachs’s portrait of her charismatic yet unknowable father incorporates interviews with family members who provide loving, albeit troubling, insight into Ira Sachs Sr. as a father, husband, lover, and son. As additional facts come to light, Father reveals that sometimes the best story is told by multiple people, not just one.
Contractions (2024)1, a much more performative documentary than Film About a Father Who, stages its bodies, rather than observes them. As an obstetrician and reproductive rights activist narrate their time working in an abortion clinic offscreen, various performers congregate outside a closed abortion clinic in Memphis, Tennessee in a long shot, their backs to the camera. The decision to obscure the faces of the performers is both to protect their privacy as well as to formally gesture to collective solidarity. Though the bodies range in age, race, and nationality, the choreography (and current political landscape) unite them in a post-Roe world, as does the cinematography which holds each and every body in the frame. Though we do not know every person’s individual story, Sachs’s camera does not discriminate. The long shot makes it possible that every person’s body, however anonymous, is seen.
The reproductive politics of Contractions (2024) recalls Sachs’s 1991 film The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, a more formally embodied polyphonic collage film about women’s bodies. Incorporating archival footage as well as her own home movies, The House of Science is a scintillating examination of sexuality and science’s gendered biases. Whereas Contractions requires (necessarily so) a level of remove due to the anonymity of the actors, The House of Science is much more personal due to Sachs’s incorporation of her own story, as well as varied footage. On a formal level, I would argue Sachs’s works achieve Hammer’s “internal states of bodily excitement” when they are not as performative or tightly choreographed, but more interested in the power of montage, graphic matches, and the interplay between language and sound, because it is not just the actors, but the medium itself which activates new ways of seeing.
In The House of Science, Sachs’s diary chronicles receiving a diaphragm from “Dr. L.” in preparation for going to college, just as Esther Greenwood, in Sylvia Plath’s novel, receives a diaphragm to get out from under the bell jar’s oppressive dome. But Sachs’s doctor doesn’t tell her how to use it. Sachs’s text on screen elaborates:
My memory of being a girl includes a “me” that is two. I am two bodies—the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk.
While Sachs may have once described her body as leaky and porous, full of “dirty liquids” and “smells,” her overall filmography affirms a heuristic approach to radical self-acceptance, not just of herself, but of others around her, including friends, family, and fellow artists like the aforementioned luminary Hammer. Through such ongoing generosity at both the level of content and form, Sachs’s films arouse ongoing intellectual and emotional compassion through myriad actors, materials, and mediums.
Contractions will begin streaming in perpetuity on the NYT OpDocs page as part of their coverage of the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to end a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.
Join us at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts for a free invite-only screening of six 16mm prints of films by provocateur, collagist and found-footage whiz BRUCE CONNER. Hosted by New York filmmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs (XY Chromosome Project).
Thursday, May 16, 2024 6 – 8 PM (doors open at 5:30, limited seating) 40 Lincoln Center Plaza
Film Study Center, 3rd Floor | Free
Drawing byBrendan Winick
Street and Sachs first met in San Francisco in the late 1980s when Bruce Conner’s aura as an avant-garde filmmaker was legendary. They both watched everything he’d made, including “A Movie”, his brazen, sardonic salute to the detritus of popular culture and were smitten. “Report” is a kick in the gut, an indictment of media saturation, and a surprisingly elegiac commentary on the Kennedy assassination. “Valse Triste” moves beyond irony to create a dream-like tender world of the imagination. “Marilyn Times Five” pushes all our buttons, simultaneously titillating and infuriating the feminist in both of us. “Mongoloid” pre-curses the MTV era and stands as one of the first rock videos ever made. “Cosmic Ray” animates a Ray Charles tune with a witty mélange of unexpected recycled images. Please join us for this evening in celebration of the work of film artist Bruce Conner, an adept dumpster-diver into the trashcan of history!
LYNNE’S NOTES My background as Bruce’s intern in 1985: Trying to re-splice his films. Driving him around SF in his Cadillac convertible to look for geiger counters to buy – fear of radioactivity Love of gospel music Lunch Fear of dying My children’s birth Helping him interpret highbrow texts on his work Story of MoMA show His attendance at premiere of Sermons and Sacred Pictures
A MOVIE 1958, 16mm, b&w/sound, 12min. Music by Ottorino Respighi “Pines of Rome” (Pini di Roma)
“… a montage of found materials from fact (newsreels) and fiction (old movies). Cliches and horrors make a rapid collage in which destruction and sex follow each other in images of pursuit and falling until finally a diver disappears through a hole in the bottom of the sea – the ultimate exit. The entire thing is prefaced by a girl from a shady movie lazily undressing. By the time A MOVIE is over she has retrospectively become a Circe or Prime Mover.” – Brian O’Doherty, The New York Times” Using only found footage, Conner has created one of the most extraordinary films ever made. One begins by laughing at the juxtaposition of cowboys and Indians, elephants and tanks, but soon the metaphor of association becomes serious, as we realize we are witnessing the apocalypse.” – Freude
REPORT 1963-1967, 16mm, b&w/sound, 13min. Soundtrack: “Four Days That Shocked The World” (1963)
“Society thrives on violence, destruction, and death no matter how hard we try to hide it with immaculately clean offices, the worship of modern science, or the creation of instant martyrs. From the bullfight arena to the nuclear arena we clamor for the spectacle of destruction. The crucial link in REPORT is that JFK with his great PT 109 was just as much a part of the destruction game as anyone else. Losing is a big part of playing games.” – David Mosen, Film Quarterly
“Conner is the most brilliant film-editor of the avant-garde. In REPORT he has used newsreel footage and radio tapes of President Kennedy’s assassination to produce a thirteen minute movie that captures unbearably, yet exhilaratingly, the tragic absurdity of that day.” – Jack Kroll, Newsweek
VALSE TRISTE 1978, 16mm, sepia/sound, 5min.
“VALSE TRISTE is frankly and gracefully autobiographical of Conner’s Kansas boyhood. Here, the period of the 1940s of his source materials parallels his own life experiences.” A line of dark, wet cars file across a flooded road; a man and a boy ceremoniously burn leaves; a businessman at his desk turns to look over his shoulder to the photo of a locomotive on the wall behind him; a medium shot of an engineer in the cab of his locomotive; a shard of rock shears from a quarry wall and plunges into water …” – Anthony Reveaux
Nostalgic recreation of dreamland Kansas 1947 in Toto. Theme music from I Love a Mystery radio programs (Jack, Doc, and Reggie confront the enigmatic lines of railroad trains, sheep, black cars, women exercising in an open field, grandma at the farm …) Meanwhile, a 13-year-old boy confronts reality. Sibelius grows old in Finland and becomes a national monument.
MARILYN TIMES FIVE 1968-1973, 16mm, b&w/sound, 13.5min. With Arline Hunter
“A young woman, allegedly Marilyn Monroe, is seen with pitiless scrutiny in the arena of an old girlie film. The reiteration of five cycles rotates the commodity of her moon-pale body as her song repeats five times on the sound track … ‘I’m through with love.’ The last shot terminates a final reward of stillness as she is seen crumpled on the floor.” – Anthony Reveaux
The image, or Anima, of Marilyn Monroe was not owned by Norma Jean any more than it was owned by Arline Hunter. Images can sometimes have more power than the person they represent. Some cultures consider that an image steals the soul or spirit of the person depicted. They will dwindle and die. MARILYN TIMES FIVE is an equation not intended to be completed by the film alone. The viewer completes the equation.
MONGOLOID 1978, 16mm, b&w/sound, 3.5min. Music by DEVO “Mongoloid”
A documentary film exploring the manner in which a determined young man overcame a basic mental defect and became a useful member of society. Insightful editing techniques reveal the dreams, ideals and problems that face a large segment of the American male population. Educational. Background music written and performed by the DEVO orchestra.
Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, happier than you and me. Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, and it determined what he could see. Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, one chromosome too many. And he wore a hat, and he had a job And he brought home the bacon so that no one knew
COSMIC RAY 1961, 16mm, b&w/sound, 4.5min. Music by Ray Charles “What’d I Say” Live from Atlanta (1959)
“COSMIC RAY seems like a reckless collage of fast moving parts: comic strips, dancing girls, flashing lights. It is the dancing girl – hardly dressed, stripping or nude – which provides the leitmotiv for the film. Again and again she appears – sandwiched between soldiers, guns, and even death in the form of a skull positioned between her legs. And if the statement equates sex with destruction, the cataclysm is a brilliant one, like an exploding firecracker, and one which ends the world with a cosmic bang. Of course, the title also refers to musician Ray Charles whose art Conner visually transcribes onto film as a potent reality, tough and penetrating in its ability to affect some pretty basic animal instincts. But if such is the content of the film – that much of our behavior consists of bestiality – the work as a whole stands as insight rather than indictment.” – Carl Belz, Film Culture
The 19th edition of Ambulante Documentary Tour dedicates this year a retrospective to American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, in collaboration with the Cineteca Nacional México, the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, the Centro de Cultura Digital and Kino Rebelde. For the first time a selection of Sachs’ work is brought to Mexico, a must-see reference in avant-garde cinema in recent years. His work, as personal -sometimes even intimate- as it is political, is characterized by an uncompromising aesthetic search and experimentation that resorts to documentary, essay, collage and an endless number of formal and technical explorations.
A pioneer of experimental documentary in New York, Sachs’ work takes cinema into the realm of the poetic and beyond reflection. She introduces us to a personal and tireless search; she questions concepts so deeply rooted in the personal, the affective and the political. The border between work and life blurs, disappears and is molded into vital events where the body, death, war and feminism become vivid concepts that the sensitive and critical gaze of the artist questions.
There are many ways to approach Lynne Sachs’ poetics. On the one hand, her contemplation and respect for life allow things to be as they are; on the other hand, she is driven by a radical political action where her voice merges with other voices, where her gaze generates a collective rhythm: the poetic cry that cries out for kinder political places for all. In making the selection of films for the programs, we decided to focus on the theme of the family, as the tension between the biographical and the non-biographical brings us closer to the two main veins in Sachs’ work.
The section is comprised of two feature films: Your Day is My Night, a film that explores the collective history of the Chinese community in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues and theatrical pieces; and Film About a Father Who, in which Sachs films his father over 35 years to better understand her bond with him and her siblings.
In addition, two programs of short films are presented: the first is composed of endearing works about people intimately linked to Sachs’ own life, such as Work at the Window, Atlanta Thirty-two Years Later, A Month of Stills, With Wind in My Hair, And Then We Marched, Maya at Twenty-four, A Year in Notes and Numbers, and Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor.
The second program has a filmic character, as it is composed of films that will be screened in 16 mm: Attracted and Divided, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, Which Side is East: Vietnam Notebooks, A Biography of Lilit, Photograph of the Wind and The Nerves.
In these programs the political is transformed into a cinema of formal exploration, with no limits to perception. The materiality, which is detonated from the intimate, carries out dislocations from experimentation and critical thinking generates ruptures from the formal. The world is seen through the rhythm of a body moving in circles, as in Maya at twenty-four where the filmmaker films her daughter Maya at six, sixteen and twenty-four years old running in circles around her mother, as if she were propelling herself in time towards the future. Lynne reacts poetically and politically with movement to the systematic and violent territorialization that acts on our own bodies.
Manuel Trujillo “Morris Experimental Film Laboratory
The retrospective is made up of two programs of short films -one screened in film and the other in digital format-, and the following feature films:
Your Day is My Night | Your Day is My Night | Lynne Sachs | United States | 2013 | Chinese, English and Spanish | Color | 64′. Several immigrants living in a small apartment nestled in the heart of New York’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval.
Film About a Father Who | Lynne Sachs | United States | 2020 | English | Color | 74′. For 35 years, Lynne Sachs recorded her father to understand the ties that connected her to him and her sisters. She discovered much more than she imagined.
The Filmic Invocations Program consists of the following titles:
Drawn and Quartered
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
A biography of Lilith
Photograph of the wind
The Jitters
And the Digital Invocations Program is made up of the following titles:
Window Work
Atalanta: 32 years later
A month of single frames
With the wind in my hair
And Then We March
Maya at twenty-four
A year in notes and numbers
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor
Program of activities in Mexico City:
Thursday, April 11
Cineteca Nacional Mexico
17:00 h : Master class : Frames and stanzas. Lynne Sachs on film and poetry.
Lecturer: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
19:00 h | Function + Q&A | Your Day Is My Night
Lecturer: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Friday, April 12
Cineteca Nacional Mexico
7:00 p.m. : Screening + Q&A : Film about a father who is a father.
Featuring: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Saturday, April 13
Centro de Cultura Digital
11:00 h | Workshop: Opening the family album*.
By: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
*Only for registered and accepted participants.
16:00 h | Function + Q&A | Digital Invocations Program
Participant: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Sunday, April 14th
Digital Culture Center
Day | Invocations
11:00 h | Workshop: Opening the Family Album*.
By: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
*Only for registered and accepted participants.
4:00 p.m.: Filmic Invocations Program.
18:00 h | Screening of the results of the workshop “Opening the family album”.
Lynne Sachs: I’m just going to pour my tea and then we’re going to get going on this. We could just keep talking about the South.
Erin Zona: Do you ever go back?
LS: Well, I do because my mother lives in Memphis. But is it okay for me to tell you this? … Actually, this relates to Carolee. So, you know, Carolee was involved in various anti-Vietnam War efforts, collective efforts. Omnibus projects. Viet-Flakes [1962–67]. Do you know that film of hers?
LS: I think she was really interested in how artists came together [around] issues that they cared about. So I’m going to tell you about something that I’m doing next week. [It’s about the] control of women’s bodies. Very fundamental to Carolee. So once abortion, the whole abortion issue, was transformed by the passage of the Dodds decision in the Supreme Court [referring to the June 2022 decision in Dodds v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization]. As you know, many states in the United States now have proclaimed that women can no longer make their own choices about their bodies.
So a woman at UCLA put out a call for artists who work in film to join her in an omnibus project in which you would go to a state where abortion is no longer legal and make a short, sort of personal film. And the premise of it for everyone is the same. So someone’s going to North Dakota. Someone went to Kentucky, probably Arkansas. There’s about eight of us. I’m going back to Memphis and I’m doing this performative piece at a building which is called Choices, but it’s been shut down. I’m working with 12 probably, at the most, women. … They’re going to be in robes so from the back we’ll see their bodies, but you won’t see their faces at all. And they’ll be in different poses standing around the building. We have to shoot it very quickly because it’s on a busy street. And so if people see us there, especially women in robes, that could create a big … that could be potential for tension.
EZ: Yeah.
LS: So anyway, that’s what I’m doing. I have to get releases, even though we’re not seeing anyone’s faces … and they don’t even have to put their name in the credits. But I’ve learned from the women who helped me get the people together that they’re all so excited. They’re saying, “thank you,” because they care about it.
EZ: You’re doing that next week?
LS: Yeah, I’m doing it Saturday. A week from today. Everyone who’s shooting a film like this is shooting around a building or doing something related to a building that no longer provides these services. … Then the other part is that everyone has a voiceover of someone who’s been affected by this decision. I actually have two women. One was a woman who performed abortions through Planned Parenthood for years and is an activist in the Black community. She’s an OB-GYN. And then the other person is a woman who used to stand and accompany women who are getting out of their cars and walking to the front door of this building, protecting them. Now there’s no longer a reason to do that because there’s no services in the building. She’s now a driver, like what people [used to] call a Jane. And she drives people all the way to Illinois.
EZ: Wow. Amazing.
LS: Yeah. So she’s the other voiceover.
EZ: How exciting.
LS: It has to happen quickly, but I’m looking forward to it.
EZ: That’s great. Thanks for sharing. … Can you tell me a bit about who you are as a filmmaker and how you arrived at that choice as an artistic genre?
Listen 7:48LS: I have been making films for exactly 40 years. The very, very first film that I made was a Super 8 film in 1983. It really was a vessel into which I could discover something about myself. Now, I had never watched movies that way before. But a few years before that I had seen work by Chantal Akerman or even the author Marguerite Duras, and I had one of those “bing” moments where I said, “Oh, wait, women make films?” People make films that are personal in the way that writing a journal can be, or drawing or painting or taking a photograph? It had that intimacy and also that sense of autonomy, that it can be an extension of your imagination in this very interior way. But then it also takes you into the world and has a fluidity between your home space and your public self. And that was just a shock to me.
I actually took a Super 8 class at an art school in New York City. I’d already finished college and I finished the film. I remember the teacher said to me, “Oh, you must have been a liberal arts student,” because the film didn’t really depend on a kind of script with a punch line at the end. It was much more associative and textural and very much about process. I probably couldn’t have used any of those words before, and it actually featured my closest friend who had grown up with me in Memphis. We were both in New York at this moment. We were trying to figure out who we were going to be in our lives, and the film gave me that possibility. In some ways I’ve been doing that ever since. They’re not all in any way autobiographical, but they are imprinted with a moment in time. I love that working that way can give me solace and awareness and can give me an opportunity to think about politics and other things beyond my own sphere. And poetry does the same thing for me. I just like seeing how images and text can confront each other and embrace each other.
EZ: Is there a moment in time, as you were becoming the artist that you are today when you were … at the beginning of your professional career, where you remember a work of art or a film that was really influential to you? That still is part of your forming, I guess?
LS: Hmm. Okay, I’m going to answer this question and you’re probably going to say, “Oh, she planned that,” but I really do mean it. In 1986, I made a film called Drawn and Quartered, and the film was shot on the roof of the San Francisco Art Institute where I was a student. I asked my then boyfriend to take off his clothes. I took off my clothes and we each took the camera back and forth and filmed each other. And I used an old regular 8[mm] camera and didn’t develop or process it in the traditional way, so it [ended] up being a frame with four images … quartered. And so I played on that word “drawn” and that form of punishment, to draw. Like when you draw and quarter, you split someone into four pieces. It’s very violent. But in this case, it was actually kind of like a love poem.
Lynne Sachs, still from Drawn and Quartered, 1987.
I think I probably had seen Fuses [1964–67] by that time. And so the idea that you were both holding the camera and in front of the camera … oh, I’m almost positive. I had to have seen it, because in 1987 I went back to Memphis to teach a summer class–not that I really knew anything, but, you know–to some college students. … I was pretty young then. But anyway, I remember showing Fuses, and I can tell you that was actually problematic. So I know I’d already seen it, and I know that I had thought it was revelatory and that it was a film in which both the man and the woman were engaged with each other, celebrating each other. I guess I could say empowered in some ways, but also not empowered–just being. Should I tell you about showing the film?
EZ: Yes … and also I would like for you to speak to Fuses for you as an audience member and about [the film] in the wideness of the world.
LS: Fuses had been really important to me. But I have to say, at the same time, I read Laura Mulvey’s article [“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1973] … on the male gaze, and it was extremely important and very influential. [Mulvey] said that whether or not you’re a woman or a man or now we would say are nonbinary, you still pick up a camera and you replicate the male gaze because you’ve been so influenced by culture that you have to really reconfigure your way of seeing in order to confront that. And it’s not any more powerful for men than it is for women because we’re so conditioned that way. … [Mulvey asked,] What was it to frame the body with a camera, whoever’s body, and how was that presented in a somehow male inflected way? That was a really important essay. People still read it today. … And so, to read that and then to see Fuses at the same time was like finding a manifestation of what it was to make images from a female perspective. To say, “yes, we understand what you’re saying of popular culture, Laura Mulvey. But this is what it is to experiment.” That’s why I actually like the [phrase] “experimental film,” because you’re pushing, you’re trying out new things and you don’t know what the answers will be. So those two experiences coming together were so important to me.
Carolee Schneemann, still from Fuses, 1964-67
LS: I remember showing Fuses to, I think, a group of young women. And I was, gosh, like 25 or 26 at the time. I guess I was just teaching a workshop on filmmaking in Memphis. I showed Fuses and I didn’t frame it. I just showed it because I thought it could stand on its own; I wasn’t testing the audience or me. But you know how that is. Like, “let’s talk about who Carolee Schneemann is,” and the group of students were very critical of it, and they didn’t like that she showed her body in this very sensual way. I got very defensive. … I continued to show it–I never hesitated–but I wasn’t at that moment prepared for the nuances of what it is to be a feminist, and now I think I can acknowledge that different women have different ways of representing the body. And Carolee’s way suited so many people. She’s a hero, but other people have ambivalence about [the film], or, let’s say, critique. But that makes the work just as strong to me. So that was an interesting experience. And I was very deflated. I was, at the time, so upset. I couldn’t even find the words because I just wasn’t prepared to have to defend that film the way I had to.
EZ: And so was that a college class? …
LS: I think it was college students.
EZ: Okay. And it was even after you framed it and contextualized it within the theories that you said. Were people open to it or was there pushback?
LS: I think they were more open to it. But now, I have to say, I’m remembering it the way I want to remember it. I really don’t know. I don’t remember what happened afterwards. I just remember the film was over and I thought we’d have this really exciting, enthralled conversation. And they turned to me, and they were a bit hostile. We’re in a period of reflection on identity and gender right now. But that was also happening in the ’80s. So that was a period in which women probably thought [about] the ways you [could] dress to make yourself less sexual or less desirable. You know, like how to cut that, the male gaze.
EZ: Yeah.
LS: I think that was definitely an entry point for me, with Carolee. It was because of all the ways that she would continually prove to me that I have patriarchal eyes, even if I’m a lesbian, even if I have this much experience in the world, that her ability to stay sharply aware of that and constantly be ready to sort of flip the conversation to make you see, right, that way. And I think that combination of reading the Laura Mulvey piece and looking at Carolee’s just was an explosion in our ways of thinking about what we call somatic cinema. What is it to have the body centered but not objectified?
EZ: It’s very interesting. And I’m not a filmmaker, just so you know, but I understand large concepts around the male gaze. …
LS: I’m neither a theorist or historian.
EZ: Me neither.
LS: But, you know, I like to explore.
EZ: … I’m curious, do you go to the theater and see films a lot?
LS: These days … I watch a lot of film, but I would say honestly, I watch more at home. And I’m still excited by the moving image, and I love being in a room with people, but I don’t necessarily find that it’s compromised watching it in a more private space. On the other hand, I think for that absolute immersion, there’s just nothing like that separation you feel and the fact that a theater space is so hermetic and so you’re contained. It’s the psychic nature of the film. Like you’re at one with the film, or theater, or any performance experience of that sort. So I have to say I could go more. But luckily, in New York, we do have so many alternative venues that aren’t just for commercial cinema and …
I’m going to weave in a story about Carolee here. I always invited Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer to any kind of film that I had; they were on my New York email list, let’s say. And that could be hundreds of people. They were the only two people who consistently would write me a note saying, “Dear Lynne, I’m so sorry, I cannot attend your whatever it was. I wish you the best and I hope to come next time.” It was done in the most polite way, and it was like a deep acknowledgment. And both of them did that. It’s like their moms trained them to do it or their fathers. Something about them compelled them to show respect for the other person. To be kind of formal in that engagement across a generation. It just was very touching how consistent that was.
Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer at Schneemann’s home in New Paltz, NY, 2010s.
EZ: I love that.
LS: Have other people told you that she did that?
EZ: Well, it’s funny that you mention that. Would it be through email?
LS: Yeah.
EZ: I love reading correspondence in general, in archives and around individuals that I’m, for whatever reason, intellectually interested in. And I always have found myself admiring that when I am working in someone’s archive and I find evidence of a thank you note over something like this. I try to be like that. I wasn’t trained that way. We never did thank you cards in my family. It’s not as if it’s part of my …
LS: Yeah. Can I show you something?
EZ: I’d love to see it.
LS: I am obsessive about letters. Even emails. To me, emails are letters. So I save letters, all my letters. I have for a few years. … What I do every year is, if I get a good letter–I’ve saved everything from Carolee, for example–I just make a PDF of it immediately, especially if it’s a whole thread and then in January of the next year I print them. And I mean, that’s not a waste of paper. It’s only one [year]. That’s not that much paper.
EZ: I really admire that you’re doing that. …
LS: I think it’s really important. And you’re an archivist, so you would probably agree.
EZ: Do you have any pets? An animal that was meaningful to you for some reason?
LS: … I’ve had a cat, a couple of cats, for the last 20 years. And I used to talk to Carolee about cats. She had very strong opinions about what to feed your cat and the connections that you had [to] your cat. And I do have a very strong memory of being in the hospital with Carolee after she broke her hip in about 20–2016 or ’17 I think [referring to Schneemann breaking her hip during a lecture at NYU in 2014]. She actually gave a lecture that I invited her to give, and I saw her fall.
Carolee Schneemann and Lynne Sachs at NYU, 2014.
EZ: Oh, no.
LS: Yeah. She gave the lecture with the broken hip. Did you know that?
EZ: I think I did [hear about] that.
LS: And then she went to the hospital. She actually wanted to go out for dinner too!
EZ: Of course.
LS: Anyway, when I went to see her in the hospital, we talked about things. You know, what’s good to feed a cat? What do you do with an old cat? We had lots of conversations around cats. And of course, I knew about Fuses being sort of the point of view of a cat. But the other thing I’m going to say that she didn’t have is that I have three pet water frogs. I bought tadpoles in 2004 for my daughters to see how tadpoles turn into frogs, and I still have those frogs in basically a hamster tank.
EZ: Here?
LS: Here, upstairs. I just fed them today. So I have 19-year-old frogs, water frogs.
EZ: 19?
LS: Yeah.
EZ: Wow. I did not know that they lived …
LS: I think I should win some kind of award or recognition. Maybe some of the oldest frogs on earth and they’re upstairs.
EZ: And how big are they?
LS: They’re like the size of your palm.
EZ: Wow. What are their names?
LS: They don’t have names. They’re just called the frogs.
EZ: How funny. I love it. … I have three deer that eat in my backyard. And I just named them all Tina and I call them the three Tinas.
LS: Oh, that’s good. So it means that when we go out of town, somebody either comes by to feed the frogs and the cat. But a cat, you can’t leave for that long… a couple days. The frogs, you could leave as long as you want, as long as you just feed them. And they have marbles in the tank because well, to keep them entertained. I always think I’m going to forget to feed them, and so when I walk by the bathroom where they are, they’ll move a little bit and then it jiggles the marbles and it reminds me, I usually remember, but sometimes I think I might forget. And so those are my animals.
EZ: I love it. Thank you.
LS: You have three deer and I have three frogs.
EZ: You might have touched on some of this, but feel free to repeat yourself. How did you first become aware of Carolee? How did you meet for the first time?
LS: I first became aware of Carolee Schneemann because of Fuses and because I was living in San Francisco and she was so important to the whole pedagogy of the film department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Any course on avant-garde film would probably include a film of hers. It could be Plumb Line [1968–71], or it could be Viet-Flakes, but it would find its way into the syllabus, let’s say the curriculum. At that point, people, at least in San Francisco, were really talking about her as a filmmaker. They weren’t talking about her as a painter, that’s for sure. It just didn’t come up. And I think that happened to her disappointment, you know. … Then in 1991, she was a visiting artist at the San Francisco Art Institute and it just so happened that my friend Mark Street, who ended up becoming my husband–we’ve been together all these years–was in her class. Somebody suggested to her that she invite me because I had made a film called The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts. It was a collage film that explored how art and then science were culpable in forcing women to look at their bodies in a certain way. From menstruation to the shape of your body to how you imagine your future, things like that. … I don’t think she had seen it, but she asked me to come show it in the class. We sat in front of the class having a great old time talking, and we didn’t talk to the students that much, but they were there. And so that was the first time we met. And that was probably the fall of 1991. I did not have her as a teacher because I had already finished at the Art Institute a couple of years before, but Mark was in the class … [and] he got to know her as a student.
I was not in touch with her until years later because I moved here to New York and I was involved with the Filmmakers Co-op and so we would often show her films and sometimes she would come through. I ended up being on the board of the Co-op for 17 years. Carolee’s work was in the collection, and she was around a lot, and coming to some of the Co-op events. You know what, I kept wanting to go to her house to film with her, but she was so busy. And finally, she let me come film when I made Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor. We spent time together then and we kind of became close and spent a lot of time talking on the phone when she was going through a lot of struggles. She gave me some good advice about my own daughters. Sometimes admonishing, sometimes supportive. She was very open about those things. And I would go up to–what’s the name of the–
EZ: Springtown Road.
LS: Springtown Road. I would go through New Paltz and to her house and spend time there and shoot Super 8 film with her and go to the movie theater or out for dinner. Things like that.
Carolee Schneemann and Lynne Sachs at the Egg’s Nest in High Falls, NY, 2017.
EZ: I wanted to ask you about [the house], because Carolee had such an important relationship with her home.
LS: Yeah.
EZ: I would be curious about your first visit there. And maybe if there was anything significant about the tour that she gave you of her home and studio, and what animals were there at the time.
LS: I love that you asked about the animals. The first time I went to her [house] was probably 2016. … [We] went out to the other building, the studio, which she was very proud of. In some ways, I got the feeling that it was more storage than active. That it was too new and too kind of austere compared to her house. I didn’t necessarily get the feeling that she would go out there every day to her studio. But when I went to her house … I’ll never forget, one day we were sitting outside on the porch and I saw a blue jay that the cat had brought in. I have a picture of it. It’s so beautiful. The cat had brought and left [it] on the porch, the way cats do. And, you know, most people would see a dead animal and want to get rid of it and this dead animal was definitely going to stay there for a long time, because I think she admired the bird alive, but she also admired the bird as an object and as a connection to her cat and to nature, and to all the rites of passage for all of us. And it wasn’t sad at all. It was just kind of glorious that it was there.
Blue Jay at Carolee Schneemann’s home in New Paltz, NY, 2017. Photograph by Lynne Sachs.
EZ: I love that story because it is something that I think I learned from Carolee. Especially with relationships to animals that are our pets. That we are responsible for, but in Carolee’s world, the cats were themselves. It wasn’t as if they are a pet in the same way that someone else might have a pet. I mean, La Niña, probably the cat who was the one who killed the bird, had this agency. And, you know, magic, for lack of a better word, that Carolee would see in an animal. I love that. And that’s something that I learned, as you go through grieving processes with animals where they grow old and then they die. And you as a human have to you participate within all of that and observe death. And it’s her way of being in the world, with nature… [it] was something I really responded to, having known her as a person.
LS: So you did get to know her in the years that you…
EZ: I met her in 2017. I’m 43, so I think I was first exposed to her work through the Angry Women book; there’s a chapter about her.
EZ: … 1996 or whenever that book first landed in my hands, it was fairly new. When I got my job at Women’s Studio Workshop [residency and artist’s book publisher in Rosendale, NY] and was moving to the area, I discovered that she lived just down the street. She would make prints at the studio and knew the founders of Women’s Studio Workshop. I very quickly sort of forced people to introduce me to her and then we did a project together. We did a reprinting of Parts of a Body House Book that Women Studio published, and so I worked with her on it. She died while we were still making it, but we finished it after. She had given me permission to finish the book if she died while we were making it. We had just finished all of the creative components, the paper colors, all the ways that things were going to land in re-printing right before she died.
LS: What is the name of that book?
EZ: It’s called Parts of a Body House Book. It was originally published in 1972, and we did a pretty straightforward facsimile of the copy that she had that she has in her house. And I think it’s still in her home collection.
LS: Can I order it from you all?
EZ: It’s an artist’s book, so it’s a little more on the expensive side because it’s handmade …
LS: But there are still ones left?
EZ: Oh, yeah, … we still have a few. We only made 90. …
LS: Lucky for you to be involved.
EZ: Oh my gosh, I was so happy. I told her I wanted to do a project with her. I said, “What do you want to do?” And then she said, “I have a book that no one has seen.” And she went up and got this book and she said, “We should reprint this.” And I was really … I loved the project. It’s one of the proudest things I’ve done as publisher, for sure. Definitely.
LS: Oh my God, yeah.
EZ: La Niña actually finished the book because Carolee was going to do these paintings on the back of each book. She died before she was able to do that. So what we did was we had La Niña walk across with this beet-juice-and-mud mixture that we had made.
La Niña during production of Parts of a Body House Book, 2019. Photograph by Natalie Renganeschi.
LS: Oh, I love that. That’s totally in her spirit.
EZ: Let’s go back to … you mentioned the cat, the blue jay. I love that. That’s a great story. When you would visit her in New Paltz, you were filming, but would you sit in the house together?
LS: We did sit in the house, mostly in the kitchen. Sometimes I would sit and she would actually do work. … She was always very attentive to responsibilities that she had and phone calls she had to take care of and trips she was organizing and taking care of business and things like that. So sometimes I would just kind of be there. I don’t think she felt obligated to entertain me at times. And also, she was not well, so sometimes she would just lie down for hours, and maybe La Niña would be on the bed. And then she said I could film. That’s why I have some nice footage of the house without her in it, [and] some of it with her in it. I was just trying to engage and fill up my time and I knew it was special. I remember going upstairs with her and she really didn’t have the energy to go upstairs, you saw where she had all those pictures, you see it in the film, where she had all the pictures from the war in Syria and the devastation. She was trying to figure out how to integrate that and what the dialogue was between aesthetics and horror. I think she was very torn about that. She was–I’m being kind of literal–she was tearing those images. You’ve seen them, right?
EZ: I have … in the upstairs studio. …
LS: Yeah. And so you had that [studio] room and then you had that other room that was more like slides and archival things. But I could tell … maybe I’m reading into things, that it wasn’t just that she was feeling physically weak. It was that the images themselves were not just painful, but that she didn’t know. … I don’t want to say she didn’t know what her role was… she was trying to figure out how to be with them, supportive of them, critical of them. What was it to be… constantly to be an artist with such deep concerns about the world? The tearing of it seemed so important, because it’s also a violent thing to do, to tear an image. It’s both violent, but it’s also being willing to touch. I mean, you probably know that, right after September 11th, she made [an artwork] with the image of the person, the falling body [referring to photographic grid Terminal Velocity, 2001]. … It was a man jumping out of one of the World Trade Center buildings before it fell. And it was a kind of iconic image of, do you know about this story?
LS: It quickly became an iconic image of desperation. Someone throwing themselves out of a building, you know, from 90 stories above. I remember seeing [Terminal Velocity]. … Some people were very critical of it because they felt that 9/11 couldn’t be touched. But other people said, what more of an homage to the death than showing this figure, this last gasp before dying of this single person. And also, as we know, it’s much more possible to feel empathy towards one person than towards 2,000, in a way. You can be upset about the aggregate of 2,000 people dying, but to see one person jumping, you feel this cathartic relation. You feel, there but for the grace of God, “I would have jumped.” … You feel this individual. So it had all of that. But at the time, I think that she was criticized for using that image in an art piece.
EZ: And why do you think… I mean, why would that not work in a place like New York versus…?
LS: Especially in New York, people were very sacrosanct. You know, [taking on a mocking authoritative tone], “That is very precious, and you can’t touch that.” And, you know, the more people said you can’t do something, she was going to do it. She wasn’t trying to draw attention to how you might feel about the people who were responsible for the building coming [down] … it wasn’t an argument. It was pathos, right there in front of your eyes. But in New York, that was problematized or complicated. … Looking back on her work, her video work was often dealing with political subjects. And I mean this as different from her film work … for example, I’ll tell you [about] that piece at Eyebeam [Devour, 2003] … [When] I went to Eyebeam, it wasn’t quite set up. She was installing it herself. And this is in 2003. You know, [even] a person of that stature, because she went from painting to video to sculpture, she didn’t necessarily find her work at that point in the most lofty of situations. I mean, Eyebeam was a not-for-profit. It’s hard to imagine now because she just had that show at the Barbican [referring to Schneemann’s 2022–23 retrospective Body Politics] and, you know, her work is so elevated. But even in the early 2000s, she was definitely a one-woman band doing everything herself.
EZ: It definitely felt that way, at least when I met her. … I met her after the show at MoMA [referring to Schneemann’s 2017–18 retrospective Kinetic Painting]. Do you think, for you, that was a significant …?
LS: The PS1 [exhibition]?
ES: PS1, yeah.
LS: Well, I went to the show a couple of times, but one of the times I took my mom. She was here from Memphis, [and] it was so important to me to introduce my mom to Carolee’s work and to convince her that this was important to me as an artist and as a feminist and as a thinker. I pushed my mom. And in a way, it wasn’t the right way to do it. [The artwork] either speaks to you or it doesn’t. She had pieces in which she used index cards and she talked about … do you remember?
EZ: It’s ABC – We Print Anything – In the Cards [1977]. It’s one of my favorite works of art.
EZ: It’s an artist’s book. And I think that what you’re speaking to, there was a projection that was showing the cards. And then, I don’t know if [it was in] that exhibition, they had the film of her reading the cards. I know she’d done several iterations of it. … ABC is Anthony [McCall], Bruce [McPherson], Carolee. It is about 100 plus cards that are different colors that are her navigating through the relationship with Anthony ending and her relationship with Bruce starting. For that show they represented it through a slideshow of the images.
LS: But the cards, some of the cards were there in the vitrine.
Card from Carolee Schneemann, ABC–We Print Anything–In the Cards, 1976-77.
EZ: Some of the cards were there, yeah. And the book itself, outside of the performance …
LS: I want to get this book too!
EZ: Oh my gosh, I [am] on a waiting list for this one, where I say … “Collectors, if you ever find this book, a copy for sale, you have to let me know.” It’s so rare to find. It’s in collections.
LS: Oh, so I’m not going to find it.
EZ: It’s museum stuff. I don’t know what your collection budget is, but …
LS: No, I won’t find that unless you reprint it.
EZ: [Laughter.] But anyway, you were saying …
LS: It’s so interesting the way institutions can validate people. And yes, it was at PS1, so I have a feeling she probably felt that was one step down from being … like you said it was at MoMA.
EZ: I know I did.
LS: But it wasn’t at MoMA.
EZ: You’re right.
LS: It was at PS1 MoMA, and that’s in the borough and that’s a different thing. And I have a feeling she felt a little … and I’m guessing. I did not talk to her about it, so we’re just projecting. But that building has a quaintness. It’s very important, but … it’s not MoMA, you know? It’s not the international tourists. Museumgoers might go, they might not go. So it’s interesting it wasn’t at MoMA. And the other thing I’ll say, like when she got a recognition for lifetime achievement from the Venice [Biennale], I remember talking to her about it … and she wanted to go to Venice and get her lion or statue, but they weren’t even giving any money … but a prize. It was more like, “Yay! You get a lifetime achievement award.” And she said, “But I need the money.” But she still went because she wanted to be connected to that.
I have one other story to tell you about ways that Carolee really fought for herself. Is that okay for me to tell you?
EZ: Of course.
LS: In 2000 or so, I was living in Baltimore and teaching at Maryland Institute College of Art, and my husband taught at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Carolee was invited to come as a visiting artist, and two things happened that I’ll never forget. One was that she was giving an artist talk and at the end a student in the audience stood up and asked, ”Do you feel like you’re a failure because you didn’t have a child?” And you could tell that had been asked before, and it was not devastating to her–to Carolee–but it was insulting. I think the student, young woman, felt that she could ask it because so much of the work was autobiographical, so much was about the body, so much was about women’s anatomy, so she maybe felt that it was all in the same voice. I remember that was so–not naive–but so conventional as a way of thinking, of measuring a woman’s success. You know what I mean?
EZ: Yes. And what did Carolee say? I can imagine her.
LS: Like you’re horrified. She just said, “I didn’t want children. I was so focused on my work that you’re asking me the wrong question. I didn’t feel ever that I failed. It wasn’t part of what I was trying to do.”
EZ: Yeah.
LS: So that was one thing. But at the same time, she had to leave a little early because they were taking a picture at the Whitney Museum of important artists of the day, including Rauschenberg and probably Jasper Johns and others, and she had been invited to be a part of this big photograph, a group picture. And she knew that she’d probably be the only woman, or maybe there was one other, I don’t know who. So she had to rush back to be in the photograph.
EZ: Wow.
American Century Artists Shoot (detail), Whitney Museum, 1999. Photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
LS: And I think she knew that she needed to carve out her place for us. …
EZ: To go back, I have some questions about New Paltz and the house. When you visited her there, did you all go out to eat? You said you went to the movies. …
LS: We went to a movie. I don’t know why I remember this, but I feel like at some point we sort of held hands in the movie. I was just like, “Oh, this is so thrilling. I can’t believe this is happening.” And I mean, it was just affectionate. And then we whispered to each other that we hated the movie and we left early.
EZ: Do you remember what movie it was?
LS: No, I don’t remember. It was so bad. It was a totally mainstream commercial movie, and neither of us were interested. It was just like, you know, you asked if I like to go to movies. It was a nice ritual that actually wasn’t that good. And then we went to dinner. There was a place near town, sort of a farm-to-table, beautiful restaurant. And it was there where I was talking to her about what concerns I had about my girls’ love life because, you know, I was just kind of like letting it all hang out. And she said, “You need to let them have their own life.” She kind of admonished me in a sweet way.
EZ: Are there any other things that you would want … that come to mind if you think about her home or visiting her or the filming?
LS: Oh, let me think. I mean, I think one of the wonderful things about that house, just to me, was that it allowed the outside in and the inside out. Like the windows always being open and the sense of the vines almost coming through the window. I liked how it was in the land, and that she’d let it age without updating the oven or the ceiling or anything. I liked that you saw time pass there and it had that beautiful glow to it. I felt it was so connected to even the dirt outside, you know, and she wasn’t fussy in any way with all of that, even though she knew that people would treasure that building.
La Nina at Carolee Schneemann’s home in New Paltz, NY, 2015.
EZ: I can relate to what you’re saying, especially because there are a couple of scenes in Kitch’s Last Meal [1973-78] where she’s dumping water on the porch and sweeping the water off as a way of mopping dirt off of the porch and it’s kind of an old-fashioned mopping, way of cleaning an outdoor porch. And she’s hanging laundry in a couple of parts.
EZ: Me too. But the reason I bring that up in context to what you said is because there’s this way where the connection to the dirt and the land and the material and the aging of that house, and that Carolee lived there … I don’t know, it’s almost as if you could imagine women for hundreds of years pouring water and sweeping the porch, and everyone was important but forgotten because of society.
LS: Oh, I love the way you put that, yeah. Kitch’s Last [Meal] is a film that you watch and you just want to scream with excitement. I just can’t believe what an energizing experience that is. And the double screen. … It’s just absolutely brilliant.
EZ: I was thinking about it when you were speaking earlier about your film that you made with your boyfriend at the time and the multi-views and thinking about Fuses. There’s one part in Kitch’s Last Meal where she and Anthony [McCall, Schneemann’s partner during the making of the film] are walking in the snow and they switch camera views. So you see him, you see her, and it just has this timeless, ageless quality of two people in love walking in the snow. [It] is just perfectly captured.
Carolee Schneemann, still from Kitch’s Last Meal, 1973-76.
LS: I wrote something on Kitch’s Last [Meal]. I feel like I should look for it, but anyway. I just love the split screen and the dynamics between very precise texture and daily life. And I love that it’s supposed … to have slippage, where different things happen. I mean, I know there exists a file where they’re together now, right?
EZ: Mm-hmm.
LS: But originally it was shown as two projectors, I believe. Did you know that?
EZ: Yeah. Did you see it in that format?
LS: I think I’ve only seen it as a digital version.
EZ: The digital. Me too.
LS: But I can’t sit here and just recollect images. Can I just read something that I wrote? … [Reading from letter Sachs wrote to Carlos Kase] “Just a little over a year ago, you graciously sent me ‘Art, Life, and Quotidiana in the Observational Cinema of Carolee Schneemann,’ your Millennium Film Journal essay on Carolee’s Kitch’s Last Meal. I noticed in your text that you refer to CS as Schneemann and that is, of course, the right thing to do. But since she was a dear friend, I need to refer to her in a more personal way. I know that you too had a relationship with her, so I think you will understand, especially since what I’m writing here is not public. Watching this film was cataclysmic, spiritual, ecstatic for me. I was able to see it online during the Rosendale tribute to her work.” Do you know what I’m talking about?
There’s a woman who did a whole [referring to Women in Experiment: Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer, a film presentation at the Rosendale Theatre organized by Pam Kray, 2021]. … Anyway, [continues reading] “I assumed at the time that I’d seen it before. Maybe I had not, because I emerged proverbially–since I was at home of course–a different, slightly better human being. Reading your text was as close to being inside the film as I can think that I could ever be. I’m so taken with your precise eye, your willingness to allow. … This gave me a chance to think about the treatises she was offering us, which worked in contrast to the intimate domestic energy. Your article is a journey that runs so close to the film that it’s scary in the best of ways. You treat it as the time-based experience that it is. I happened to have read the 1953 panel discussion on the poetic in cinema, which included Maya Deren, Willard Maas, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas and Parker Tyler. Those guys just didn’t get it when Deren spoke about the vertical experience in non-narrative film. I think that having Schneemann there to pontificate with all the others would have done just the trick. Plus, her film breaks all expectations and is also kind of architecturally vertical as well.”
EZ: And that’s when you saw that film [referring to the presentation at Rosendale Theatre]? I had seen the film right before that. Actually Rachel [Helm], the manager of the Schneemann Foundation, played it for me in Carolee’s studio on an iMac after Carolee had died. It was a while after. I was sitting in her studio, second floor in the house, watching it on her computer.
LS: Oh, nice.
EZ: And I just thought, “Wow, this is really special.”
LS: I bet you had the shivers.
EZ: I did, because, you know, at a certain point when you see her working in her studio and things that are happening in that film, I would look and say, “Is that that door”? You know what I mean? That’s one of the experiences for me that comes through in her photography work and her artist’s books, but her film work also. …
LS: I think that Carolee let us feel excited about getting in front of the camera and getting behind the camera. Not doing it as an actor, but doing it in this tactile way that you were so present in the act of making something and you didn’t know where it was going to go. You just followed that journey. It’s the opposite of, in film, this notion of planning all the time. That’s how cinema works. That you execute something that comes out of a paper planner and she was just … this idea that you’re always present, just very present in the possibility of change. I love that.
EZ: Let’s go ahead and jump to your film. Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor. I’d like for you to talk about that.
LS: Sure. As I was saying earlier, I think one of the great things about filmmaking is being responsive to a moment and being in a moment. … So with that in mind, I never said “I’m going to make a film about three great women artists.” I just knew that it was nourishing for me and interesting and inspiring to spend time with artists whose work I deeply admire, but also whose process and immersion in their own investigations was so specific. I just wanted to spend time with Carolee. I just wanted to spend time with Barbara Hammer and I just wanted to spend time with Gunvor Nelson. And I took a camera because I knew it was a vital and special experience that I was having. But then I was actually involved in a performance installation presentation at Microscope Gallery, and at the time they were in Brooklyn, so I just put all the three films together. And I said, “that would be kind of interesting.” And in a sense it was like the opposite of how films are usually made about famous people, because usually it has to have this, you know, [taking on an authoritative tone] a famous biopic, and this is the story and this is how you get to know whoever it is better. But I didn’t pretend to think that what I had done was going to tell you an enormous amount about any one of these artists. What I did think was that they were all living in the world at the same time and all extremely focused and driven … and that the camera was always a muse and also a challenge for them.
Poster for Lynne Sachs, Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, 2018.
LS: I shot all the footage over a period of a couple of years. And then I said, “Oh, I’m going to make this movie. I better go talk to them.” And by that point, both Carolee and Barbara were not well, and we all thought that Barbara Hammer was less well, but Barbara was much more public about her illness than Carolee was. As you probably know, they died within a month of each other [Schneemann died on March 6, 2019 and Hammer died on March 16, 2019]. They had very different approaches to illness. That’s not in the film, but I will say that Carolee was more alternative about the medical system and more suspicious of it, and Barbara went through chemotherapy three times. I think they both wanted to live, but they wanted to deal with the institution of the medical system in different ways. Also, Barbara Hammer was much more political and forthright about the fact that when she wanted to die, she wanted to die, and she wanted it to be her own choice. And Carolee was much more hidden and sort of protective about that, you know.
EZ: Why do you think that is?
LS: That’s a good question. It’s interesting. Of the three women who are in the film, Barbara and Carolee were much more public people in the world than Gunvor Nelson was. And to my surprise, Barbara became extremely well recognized later in her life. There’s something happening now in the art world: like, “Let’s recognize older women artists.” I have another friend who’s in her early eighties and she said, “Lynne, I should have given you more paintings 20 years ago, because now they’re selling off the easel.” There’s a wonderful recognition, but also why is this happening? Is it being monetized too much by collectors? Let’s look at the invisible women and make them visible again–I’m definitely suspicious of that. And it’s interesting because both Barbara and Carolee painted [and] painting ultimately will always make more money than filmmaking … this kind of filmmaking. If you can sell a painting, you can get a different level of recognition in the marketplace, and the films will never have that. They both wanted recognition for their work that would give them more financial stability. And, you know, Barbara painted a lot. You probably don’t even know that.
EZ: No.
LS: She had gallery shows within the last ten years. Several. With hundreds of paintings. I actually didn’t realize that either. And I didn’t realize how important painting was to Carolee until the PS1 show. I think it was heartbreaking for both of them and also a wallet breaker that they didn’t sell more paintings. [Carolee would] say I’m a painter and I use a camera also. … I don’t think she ever said I’m a filmmaker.
EZ: No, I think if she was referred to as one, she would correct the person.
LS: And say, “I’m an artist.”
EZ: Or a painter.
LS: A painter.
EZ: And I think that [she saw] all of her work through the lens of “this is a painting.”
LS: Yes! I agree with you.
EZ: I do think that was something that was important to her. And I wonder if her decision to go through illness and even death in a more quiet way has something to do with those other ways in which she didn’t want to become these archetypes … not wanting to be identified as a dying artist who wasn’t recognized, and that becomes what you’re remembered for. Having control over that narrative.
LS: I’m just guessing that it was somewhat, probably quite disconcerting, all the focus on, [Interior] Scroll [1975] which she had done as a young woman. Every time she spoke, that piece would be discussed and so much of her more recent work wasn’t written about as much. That was upsetting.
EZ: I agree with you. It’s an important piece, and it becomes more amazing the more you know about all of her other work.
LS: Yes.
EZ: But on its own it’s easy to remember. You know, that’s one thing that when I try to tell someone about Carolee, something about her work, I say, “You know this artist. She did this.” … And you know that only, but now let’s talk about the other things.
LS: I don’t even know who took that photograph, but it is fantastic.
EZ: Anthony McCall did. He took the ones that are the most famous. But she did that performance [in 1975 and 1977]. Is there anything else about your film, about the experience that you’d want to have [on record]?
LS: I’ll just say, sometimes you just cannot predict how much work that you make, especially in collaboration with an artist, can transform your own life. That I’m having this experience, I think, is more because of the film than because I knew her–because there was a way that that film places her with her peers and gives you a sense of Carolee as a feminist but also as a woman of that generation. What they were discovering together, you know. She was so supportive of the film, as was Barbara, as was Gunvor, because I think they felt like their arms were locked together, like [they were] marching together. When I showed it at the Museum of Modern Art, Carolee came and we all went out with my daughter, with Kathy Brew [artist and videomaker]. We all went out. And Barbara. I’m trying to remember exactly. Together, for a 9-minute film, but we are all in that same space together and that was meaningful to me, and validating for my own relationships with other artists.
Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson, photo composite by Lynne Sachs.
I guess I’d say that the gifts that Carolee gave to other artists as a friend were always so critical … so essential. And they weren’t ever as a mentor, and I think that’s a really important distinction–that she wanted to have comrades of all ages and experiences who were working with passion. She saw herself as an equal, even though she had this lifetime of experience. I guess I would say she’s a role model for me in that way because I’m 61 and young men and women, but maybe more women, write to me. And you could say, “Oh, I don’t have time to talk to them,” but I really do my best because I learn from them and it also gets me excited about continuing the process. Even teaching, for her, I could tell was exciting. She didn’t necessarily want to teach in this sort of strictly scholarly way where she created … you know, I never saw a syllabus. I wasn’t a student of hers, but I think she liked imparting her thoughts and looking at work by younger artists. I think that’s really vital to me, and I hope I can do the same.
EZ: That’s amazing. I think that’s a great way to end, because people becoming acquainted with her work and who she was as a person through these types of stories. I think that everything that you just said says a lot about who she was as a person, as well as within the framework of her work. … And I think she always liked trying out new things and making mistakes.
LS: The sculptural piece that looks like a wing–some sort of Greek sculpture of a bird or an armature, a human armature that moves. It’s kinetic, that sculpture, but it has a very raw feeling to it. I think that when you were in her studio, you’d see something like that and you’d go “Oh, I had no idea that she was creating kinetic sculptures that were very much not female.” I mean, that’s another thing. She had so much work that wasn’t strictly exploring women’s bodies. And I think she would have felt that we were narrowing her if that was all that history gave her. That’s why, in some ways, I feel it’s problematic to say, “Oh, she was a great feminist performance artist, conceptual painter, thinker.” She is a feminist, but it didn’t define everything. Or maybe the point is to expand what is feminism, so that you’re not just looking at the canon. Which she knew very well.
With cinema as a focal point, Ragtag Film Society exists to captivate and engage communities in immersive arts experiences that explore assumptions and elicit shared joy, wonder, and introspection.
Embedded within this program are an array of storytelling approaches and diverse techniques, each offering a distinct lens through which to explore the themes of identity, community, and human connection. As this program unfolds, the films interweave these themes into a rich tapestry of narratives, inviting us to delve into the intricacies of the human experience. From the movements of experimental choreography to the vibrant art strokes that animate the frame, and the immersive worlds of fictional reenactments, these films showcase a spectrum of creative expressions, each contributing to the multifaceted exploration of our shared humanity. (Eynar Pineda, Artistic Co-Director)
Amma ki Katha | Dir. Nehal Vyas; 2023; India, USA; 21 min A creative and incisive look at how history is written and rewritten as a filmmaker unpacks the myth-making of her homeland, India.
L’Esquisse | Dir. Tomas Cali; 2023; France; 9 min Animated strokes blend with live-action, when an immigrant artist encounters a new muse who helps them make meaning in a new country.
Four Holes | Dir. Daniela Muñoz Barroso; 2023; Cuba, France; 20 min Filmmaker and subject find common ground in this humorous portrait of Pepe, the mastermind behind a DIY golf course on the outskirts of Madrid.
Two Sun | Dir. Blair Barnes; 2024; USA; 5 min A mood piece with its own rhythm, this evocative film explores the relationship to the self and our ever-evolving understanding of identity.
Contractions | Dir. Lynne Sachs; 2024; USA; 12 min Intimate confessions, paired with experimental choreography outside a woman’s clinic in Memphis, offer a glimpse into post Roe v. Wade America. (Plays in Shorts: Impossible Solution)
Producers Emily Berisso and Laura Goodman and Editor Anthony Svatek with Lynne Sachs at the Premiere of Contractions at True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri.
Lynne telling a Campfire Story at True / False Film Festival.
We need your help and support to raise money for our dear friend and beloved community member, MM Serra. We’re asking you to contribute to a fund that will pay her apartment rent for the next two years. This will guarantee MM’s security and well-being through December 2025.
MM Serra is a filmmaker, curator, and adjunct professor at The New School. Until recently, she was Executive Director of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the world’s oldest and largest distributor of independent film, where she served on staff for 32 years. She has taught courses on cinema at The New School since 1998 and has made over 34 films, which have screened at venues like MoMA, Sundance, and the Tribeca Film Festival. In March, the Society for Cinema & Media Studies’s annual conference in Boston will feature the roundtable discussion, “A Celebration & Reflection on Filmmaker, Curator MM Serra’s 30+ Years as Executive Director of Film-makers’ Cooperative.”
In the last year, Serra has experienced significant life changes, which have left her in a precarious financial position. Since transitioning off of the Coop’s staff, Serra has been living in New York City without a substantial source of income and has been subsisting on social security, a meager adjunct salary, and modest savings. In addition, Serra had a serious health scare last summer. She underwent emergency surgery in July and was hospitalized for several days afterward. This left her with thousands of dollars in medical bills, as well as an increased need for long-term medical care and home care.
Despite these issues, Serra has continued production on several new films. She has also maintained an active teaching schedule at The New School, and has worked to develop new programming projects to support artists in her community. Her philosophy of making art no matter what life throws at her has inspired us all. As her friends, we believe that giving her this rent stability will allow her to direct her income toward other material needs, while also enabling her to continue her active and necessary artistic practice.
The major reason we are working to raise money for Serra is because she has dedicated so much time and labor to supporting the independent film community in New York. As the Executive Director of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, for instance, Serra guided the organization through two major relocations, supported the distribution of films in the collection, secured grants and other forms of financial assistance for the organization, curated innumerable screenings of artists’ work, and oversaw numerous restorations of independent media. Serra’s work for the Coop involved long hours and little pay, but she did it with love and joy, giving her whole self to our community.
We are seeking to raise $27,000, as this would cover two years of rent for Serra’s apartment in the Lower East Side, where she is an active and celebrated presence in the neighborhood. The monthly rent will be paid from the fund directly to Serra’s landlord. Contributions made to Allied Productions, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non-profit arts service organization, are tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law. If you prefer to write a check directly, please make payable to Allied Productions,Inc. earmarked for MM Serra Fund and mail to PO Box 20260 New York, NY 10009.Donors will receive a letter from Allied Productions, Inc. with information confirming the tax deduction. An administrative fee of 9% has been calculated into the campaign’s target goal delegated for the administration of the funds of MM’s rent each month.
MM Serra has meant many things to each of us. Over the next few weeks, we, along with a few invited guests, will be sharing a range of narratives testifying to Serra’s remarkable contributions to our community. Stay in touch for some great slices of underground experimental film history!
In health, solidarity and enthusiasm,
Friends of MM Serra, Members of the Film-makers Cooperative(FMC), **FMC’s Advisory Board:
Peggy Ahwesh, Josh Guilford, Devon Narine-Singh, Lynne Sachs, Peter Cramer, Jack Waters
Narratives to MM Serra’s contributions to our community
A VALENTINE For MM. SERRA from Abigail Child
I first met Serra when she arrived from Los Angeles, wearing high heels, fabulously sexy black bangs (much like Pabst’s Lulu), and designer coats. I warned her about those heels, saying “you have to be able to run in NYC.” She was a fashionista then and still is. Together, along with Robert Hilferty (brilliant ex-student of mine from NYU and a filmmaker in his own right), we
co-curated Conspiracies over a weekend in May 1988 at Rapp Arts Center, a Catholic church and nun’s residency hall in the East Village (not incidently, where I had edited Mayhem (1987) in a 8’ by 15’ nun’s bedroom, with hardly space for the Steenbeck plus an editing chair.) MM being Catholic, particularly enjoyed screening our outrageous experimental films there. They had a remarkable theater with tragedy-comedy plaster masks centered above the proscenium arch. The line-up of filmmakers on those programs included Todd Haynes, Lewis Klahr, Mary Filippo, Joe Gibbons, Erika Beckmann and other key members of the downtown NYC avantgarde. The poster included Weegee’s famous photograph of a mobbed Coney Island, and our several shows, too, were mobbed and exhilarating. I should add our projectionist was Alex, then, the mixer at Duart Labs, who magnanimously volunteered to work the event. There we were, up in the booth, where things went a bit crazy, as they easily could do screening a long list of short experimental films!
It was successful and fun enough, so that in May 1990, we did another Weekend and then in 1991, Serra and I curated a Valentine’s Day Film Night at WEBO Gallery downtown. Later, Serra single-handedly curated another show, again at Rapp. The most memorable for me from that program was Nick Zedd’s War Is Menstrual Envy, which had Annie Sprinkle cuddling a burn victim. Disturbing and unforgettable. Just what MM loved: sex and shock.
We became fast friends. A bit later, MM was showing her films in S and M dungeons downtown. She had shared her sexual history with me, which involved abuse as a child, abuse that her mother denied. Around then, she showed me her film of her mother, Reel to Real Momma (1982), and the image of her mother staring out at the audience, so harsh, so cold—I felt for her. The person in her family whom she loved the most was her Dad, whom I was privileged to meet. He worked as a coal miner; small and round, he was the opposite of the mom. And he loved gardens. At that point I was a member of a community garden in the East Village, and he would come by and visit, talking about plants and gardening. He was happiest there. Serra has a plot now in the community garden at 6th Street and Ave. B. Digging in the garden is always a pleasure, grounding, quite literally.
There was a time when we tried to do a film together on bisexuality. It didn’t quite work out. But there she was, clicking in her heels across the wood floor at Westbeth where we were shooting. Either later or just before, Peggy Ahwesh and I shot for her film, Soi Meme, on female ejaculation. Quite fun, even if I remained skeptical about what we were seeing.
Serra took on the job at the film coop not long after. She remained always supportive, and always active. In many ways, she brought the Film Coop into the 21st century, getting the films out to an international audience, travelling with them and curating shows, often of women or lesser known and/or forgotten filmmakers. While working, she studied and graduated with an advanced degree from New York University, remaining dedicated, determined, and loving cinema. She moved ahead no matter the problems, curating shows abroad and establishing an ongoing tradition of exhibition at the Coop itself, continuing to make her own films. She was living on very constrained finances, yet still a fashionista, showing up in wonderful idiosyncratic style, discovering and befriending downtown designers, heralding them just as she did the Coop’s filmmakers. She remained an eccentric beauty, even as she switched from high-heels to baseball shoes. During this time, she was also teaching at the New School, enabling her to influence and bring to experimental cinema a new crop of devotees. She influenced so many people, building community. She worked with Michelle Handleman, Peggy Ahwesh, Jennifer Reeves, Tom Chomont and myself, among others.
Most particularly, I will never forget those incredible Rapp shows and the group of people we brought together in New York: this moment of unity, a fantastic cross-section of filmmakers just as New York was coming out of the 1980s, funky with drugs and a reputation for danger popularized by the film “Escape from New York”. We never ‘escaped’ but stayed, to continue our love affair with the city and cinema, sustaining experimentation, friendship and community.
This Sat., Feb. 17, at 12:00 p.m., we’ll be celebrating our annual Presidents Day weekend event, the Welcome to Boog City 17.5 Arts Festival. We will livestream the goings-on to
Documentation of Avant to Live! launch at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater May 28, 2023. Presentation by Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta. Readings by Jeffrey Skoller and Rick Prelinger. Craig Baldwin in conversation with Lynne Sachs. Video includes footage of You’re Not Listening by Jeremy Rourke. Footage captured by David Cox, edited by Mary Rose McClain at the instigation of Lynne Sachs.
To order: www.sfcinematheque.org/shop/craig-baldwin-avant-to-live-standard/ Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! documents the life and work of acclaimed filmmaker and curator Craig Baldwin (b. Oakland CA, 1952), an inspiring and influential figure in contemporary media arts. Meticulously detailed, with contributions from over 50 writers, artists, illustrators, and ideologues, Avant to Live! is the first critical text to examine the artist’s films analytically as a coherent and meaningful body of work and critical artist’s statement while also examining the cultural impact of Baldwin’s Other Cinema curatorial project.
AS A FILMMAKER, Baldwin’s works represent a radical fusion of form and content. Formally, his films are constructed largely from audiovisual material appropriated from pre-existing films. In this, they represent a radical stance toward media culture as a participatory field. As an artist, Baldwin engages with mainstream media as an adversary, using its languages in ironic opposition. In this way he talks back to corporately produced media and creates inspiring, wildly imaginative works which profoundly challenge the nature of one-way media consumption.
AS A FILM CURATOR, Baldwin is known for Other Cinema, an extensive and hugely influential series of film/video programs he has personally organized in San Francisco on a schedule of 36 programs per year since the late 1980s. Like his films, Baldwin’s Other Cinema represents a radically expanded approach to film exhibition, media consumption and cultural engagement in which ephemeral forms of film history coexist alongside expanded cinema performance, underground/experimental film screenings, speculative lecture presentations, in-person artists and more.
Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! is a collaborative project of San Francisco Cinematheque and INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media, representing INCITE #9-10-11.
Editors: Brett Kashmere and Steve Polta Project Archivists: Courtney Fellion and and Megan Needels Designer: Vivian Sming, Sming Sming Books
Contributors: Luisela Alvaray, Craig Baldwin, Irene Borger, Bryan Boyce, Stephen Broomer, Bill Brown, Anthony Buchanan, Joanna Byrne, Kristin Cato, Chris Chang, David Cox, Bill Daniel, Joan d’Arc, Manohla Dargis, Tom Day, Jesse Drew, Adam Dziesinski, Bradley Eros, Gerry Fialka, Adrianne Finelli, Kelly Gallagher, Max Goldberg, Sam Green, Molly Hankwitz, Joshua Leon Harper, Mike Hoolboom, Alex Johnston, Brett Kashmere, John Klacsmann, Caroline Koebel, Liz Kotz, Jesse Lerner, Chip Lord, Patrick Macias, Scott MacKenzie, Jesse Malmed, Dolissa Medina, Peggy Nelson, Steve Polta, Rick Prelinger, Vanessa Renwick, Jeremy Rourke, Catherine Russell, Lynne Sachs, Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa, Keivan Khademi Shamami, Jeffrey Skoller, Soda_Jerk, Valerie Soe, Kathleen Tyner, Federico Windhausen, Michael Zryd
Select images from the book:
Excerpt from Craig Baldwin: Avant to Live! of correspondences from Craig Baldwin to Lynne Sachs (1996-2019)
Blissfully Out of Context: A Collection of Letters from Craig Baldwin 1996–2019
Lynne Sachs
I met Craig Baldwin in 1986, soon after I moved to San Francisco. I was 25 years old and reeling from watching so many experimental movies during a thriving, nourishing period in the history of alternative, underground moviemaking in the Bay Area. Meeting Craig and falling into the vortex of his Other Cinema at Artists’ Television Access transformed everything I knew about images, from making them to editing them to projecting them. Craig and I quickly became ciné-compatriots. When I moved to New York City ten years later, our bond was tight enough to support a quarter-century of epistolary exchanges. Thus, my file cabinet drawer of letters and printed e-missives from Craig has become a repository of material, a document
of both our lives and our shared engagement with the kindred spirits of a rag-tag bi-coastal community of people who cook, bake, and devour the food of cinema. Here I share with you a smattering of Craig’s side of our correspondence. I have chosen not to include my own letters, but instead have added some personal annotations (in italics). For the sake of clarity and space, the editors and I have made some minor revisions to Craig’s writing; in general, however, all creative spellings and expressions by Craig are reproduced as composed.
1996
Hello my darling,
Happy? New year and all that. I’m just getting over a cold and enjoying that wonderful rough euphoria when you start to feel like a human being again. Oh yeah, being a human being can actually be fun. Use my so-called brain and move my body around. Yes, I can actually master my (at least immediate) environment. And now I’m ready to have sex! Might as well realize my full potential so to speak. Anyway, let’s take this transient optimism as the keynote to ‘96. Might as well. Actually, our Fall ‘95 was our most successful yet, an average of 56 paying customers per show. Lynne, bubala, can I show your magic lantern slides again for the April 27 show on the ecstasy of projection? I can only afford to pay for shipping though. It may be that someone can deliver by hand? I was just listening to your voice on Louise Bourque’s “Experimental Film” interview tape. Ann Arbor was awesome. Flying to Taos Fest in two weeks.
Craig
1997
Lynne (y) darling,
Thanks so much for the photo of [your daughter] Noa. I hope I live long enough and stay in your steady, strategic-arc, long-term, like, permanent world long enough to sooner or later know your children as they become adults. I’ll play the crazy uncle. If I ever did leave the world of the sensible, it would be out of nervous exhaustion from the fuss and fret over my film’s post-production. I keep thinking of – and feeling like – that photo of Artaud in Rodez. That’s why, little sister, I’m begging you for your help with the Cumberland Street studio. I’ll pay you whatever you want, I’ll leave it clean, I’ll give you credit, please Ms. Sachs, tell me that there’s hope for the sane. Uncle Craig
In the mid-1990s, I shared a house in the Mission District of San Francisco with my sister Dana Sachs. Craig rented a basement room from us for several years to use as his studio while he was editing Spectres of the Spectrum (1999) with Bill Daniel and others.
Dear Lynne,
Well, I really must say that things are at their very lowest out here. My only saving grace is… the studio where I can work late into the night, keeping busy so as not to be too mentally/emotionally overwhelmed by all the bad shit. My shoulder aches as I write this. I have truly suffered a major life-changing injury and I
pray that I’ll be able to recover. I’ll start some of the rehabilitation within two weeks, after the screw comes out. It took this physical trauma to completely and violently expunge any former expectations about any assumed identity or life. I could just as easily join a cult or go on Prozac… probably end up in Santa Cruz, where my father is fading fast.
But even accustomed to life at the bottom circle of hell, I was not prepared for the shock of seeing Eva Pierrakos at Mt. Zion Hospital… I’ve got to give her credit for her feisty electric-blue hair color, but seeing her skull coming through her skin in that 5th floor room, being fed by Samoan and Russian attendants – neither of whom knew much about her condition – made for a kind of ghastly surrender that my nervous system can hardly bear. She was apparently uncomfortable, but there’s no way she can be understood, beyond speech. I moved her this way, then I moved her that way, then back again. Then just gave up. Then she starts to cry. Absolutely without hope. I say give her drugs until she dies peacefully… The Other Cinema shows are consistently strong and well-attended, really those shows are my form of church. Looks like I’m doing a program for Visible Evidence at San Francisco State University that Bill Nichols is organizing this summer and maybe to Austria in September with some “Dead Media” programs.
All my love to Mark and the kids, Craig
Howdy,
Here’s the new calendar and thanks to both of you for being part of it. I’m settling into my groove at UC Berkeley, still hustling “Sonic Outlaws” across the globe, and now starting a sci-fi ‘time radio’ project based on old science-class kinescopes. Craig
Lynne-y,
Here are some OC calendars. I hope you don’t mind that we shortened your title to “Lilith.” The studio is absolutely wonderful. I love it and I could make some good movies in it – I think – if conditions were just a little different. The truth of the matter is despite your fabulously generous offer of studio access, the editing is going achingly slowly. As I might have told you, Bill drove his flatbed all the
way out from Texas to discover that it was fried. We’ve spent way too much time and money on long-distance calls for schematics for not only Bill’s but also your flatbed, with no success. We have managed to get yours going, but it does slip out of sync. It’s taken almost 14 days for Bill to get a place for a decent night’s sleep… It’s pouring rain, my studio is flooded with two inches of water, and this must certainly mark the low point in the whole production process. I thank you and a small circle of friends for sticking with me when it seems there’s hardly any energy left to carry on. More money keeps getting poured into the bottomless hole and over time as I look at the workprint it seems more and more a ludicrous idea to try to pull it off, especially as a feature… the only light of hope on the horizon is the incipient Other Cinema season. I pray for strength. Craig
Dear Lynne-y darling,
Vicky Funari’s “Paulina” was the hit of the Film Arts Foundation Festival. And now it’s going to Sundance! A wonderful, brilliant, excellent, exquisite film – both Mexican and Californian, both film and video, both doc and narrative – the kind of film that makes me proud to be a San Franciscan. Must see! Still no word from _________. Bury myself in work. Craig
1998
Lynne-y,
I promise to make a good film. Maybe there’s some good karma hanging around the studio from your early days of editing “Lilith.” Speaking of which, send all your picture poop and preview dub now. Don’t delay, don’t hedge, don’t fudge, just do it, as the capitalists say. I need all the help I can get in putting the calendar together and we both know that you’re already slotted in so follow thru, sis. Here’s some miscellaneous articles. I am trying to clear up all the papers on my floor. One of these days, I will slip on the glossy articles. We finished our most successful Other Cinema season ever. Average attendance 65! I’m supposed to be recording my voice-overs. Have to hire Steve Polta to get me through the back- log of pick-ups. He is a good man. My nerves are shot. Not enough sex. But I’m lucky to be alive, I tell myself. Just returned from my Dad’s – he’s ailing – havingangina attacks while we sit there watching the football game together!! And Eva, sorry to be the one to tell you, but sometimes I suspect that 1998 will be her last year. The disease has wasted her. I was very surprised to hear her half-legible voice on my machine yesterday. We’ll see “Boogie Nights” together tomorrow. Wheels are in motion. Craig
Lynne, Howdy, dear heart. Big May Day Weekend. Rallies during day, film at night. Did I tell you that I’m guest-curating an “Indelible Images” program at the San Francisco International Film Festival? Here’s my pitch. I have a coupon for 2400’ of free color processing at Bono Labs out your way. Could we somehow work a trade for continued access to the studio? It would help me so much! Craig
Sister girl… I’m off to Mexico City within 24 hours as part of a Bi-National conference on the short film. Hope it’s good for my nerves. Europe was great but stressful. Lots and lots of crazy, creative energy. Did four shows, got lost a couple of times, lost my glasses, journeyed into the Slovakian Republic and Hungary. Teaching at SFSU and Film Arts Foundation but haven’t found much time for “Specters of the Spectrum,” unfortunately. Craig
Howdy Lynne and Mark,
Hope you’re doing better than me! Actually, I am a little jazzed, owing to our successful benefit two nights ago. Probably the best Artist Television Access party ever – two bars, big crowd, live DJ, four simultaneous projections, etc., but that was just enough for one month’s back rent – still have to come with another. They’re cutting some of the dead weight from the staff, tho’, so a leaner, more Darwinian crew might pull this limping non-profit out of its nose dive yet. Bill and I will be editing by the time you get this, so maybe the film production front won’t look so hopeless either. And, of course, I am slamming together the next OC calendar. Having to go to the gym every other day for my shoulder. It’s going to be a long, slow recovery, but I do think I will get most of the use back. Still no word from _________. Lost, lost, lost, Craig
Lynne-y,
After my Pittsburgh N.A.M.A.C. show, I must have fallen into some sort of “post” lethargy depression – didn’t manage to get any work done in the studio during November. I did catch a cold, however, and despite it, move another 500 educational films into my basement from the College of San Mateo. Now David Cox is down there analyzing them for their media archeology value. And continuing with the “Other Cinema” screenings again in spite of the rain and the so-so turnouts, but the last three shows will be strong, I guess. Then a spate of holiday engagements, which may be fun, and may be remunerative (light show jobs), but will still distract from the #1 task of finishing my script. What I want for Christmas is PEACE AND SOLITUDE so I can organize my ideas and focus on my SOS project!!! What about yours, little sister? Craig
Lynne-y,
Thanks for the break on the studio rental. The good news is that I’ve been invited to the Rotterdam Film Festival and after that the Whitney Biennial!!! Craig
Lynne,
Today the lab told me that they were having some trouble with my A/B rolls. If the print does issue forth, then I’m in Vancouver or NY by the time you read this – or maybe we’ve crossed paths in NY, and then Olympia, Virginia, Pitzer, but sometime in there, I’ll hopefully be able to clear my shit out and turn in my keys to the studio. Craig
Lynne-y darling,
Well, we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, tho’ I suspect we’ll still have some technical problems with the lab, etc. Bill and I are both A/B rolling, very slow going, and audio-mixing at same time and I might have mentioned World Premiere at Vancouver Film Festival, then closing the New York Film Festival where I might see you guys. Then back home to Film Arts Festival and I will only be able to make it because of your help. Thank you. Thank you for your support during this long, arduous process. This movie is very important. I’m very convinced of that, and unfortunately your sis’s pillow was an unintentional accidental victim of this vigorous struggle with miles of 16mm that had to be tamed!! But now we’re all getting it under control. Craig
2000
Lynne-y, again, s’wunnerful hanging with you… you are my fairy godmother without whom Spectres of the Spectrum would never have been made, so my trip out to you in the fall should be just as much your party as mine. And I do look forward to critiquing your work-in-progress. Smooches, CB
Alas, I don’t have any of the emails that Craig and I exchanged between 2003 and 2007. After racking my brain and my file cabinet in search of these correspondences, it occurred to me that these were the last five years I was using AOL. When I desperately searched my extant but feeble AOL inbox, I discovered that nothing before 2011 remains.
2008
My darling sister, I am sorry to have to tell you that my good friend John Corser, one of my best friends in my entire life, died in a freak accident about six months ago. CB
2009
hello lynne-y!
Just wanted to let you know that I got a look at your “Last Happy Day”, and it’s not only brilliant, but beautiful! (just like you)… can’t say fer sure this early, but would prolly be very interested in finding a place for that on next OC (or oneafter that). Congrats … it is my favorite Lynne Sachs film.
2010
Working very hard here… led a found-footage workshop, showed [Mock Up On] Mu, had a big symposium all day yesterday at which Rick Prelinger and me and a bunch of other big-wigs spoke, and then saw the new Kenneth Anger film… FASCIST ART, totally!! The 9 younger brits clapped (was sold out), but I walked out. Am in the Newcastle Lib. now, before two interviews. Yes of course intend on staying with you. Let ME buy you some bottles. By the way, do you have a place to stay whilst in frisco? Mi casa es tu casa.
2011
L–believe it or not was just thinking about you last night. I saw a film so damn ‘push-pull’ discursive that it gave me nightmares.
2013
A lot going on here. I have a lot to write you, but not now, very precarious situation, wretched health, I am in agony right now but will slouch to the pharmacy in 20 mins to get some relief, but multiplying projects at same time! I am making an anti-gun short (out of ‘Bufferin’ commercial), and I made “Sight & Sound” magazine! (Tony Rayns article, with pic!). Am now crunching down the Fall OC cal… quite possibly the very last… cb
Lynne-y,
Glad you like the book… in fact I should send you more… I can’t indulge the idea of a personal library anymore; my books are all in boxes on the floor (and I trip over them). The situation is really pathetic… “abject” might be a more appropriate word. My health too is a total trainwreck. Maybe it is a good thing (though I really don’t think so) that OC/ATA is coming off the rails, so I would finally have the time to attend to my own failing body. Right now I can hardly hear… I went to the doctor, thinking that my nerve disease has finally risen to the level of ears… and that there was going to be permanent damage. Can you imagine walking around with that thought in your head?… B l e a k, baby. Well he says it’s just a bunch of wax! Gawd, I hope so, but don’t know how to fix that. I pour this de-waxer in my ears every day. I am going to have to get, for the first time in my life, an ear “lavage”… but that is minor compared to my other problems… but no time to whine!! But at this point I can hardly stop working for even an hour. So you finally returned to Wesleyan with your second-born, eh sis? What will be her major? (and what is Maya’s?). By the way, if you remember Gilbert Guerrero and Kathleen Quillian, from ATA crowd (and board)–they named their daughter Maya too! And now Kathleen is delivering her second kid in first week of Oct. And in third week of Oct., she is presenting Stereo Realist 3-D slides at Other Cinema!!!… On an evening with THREE kinds of 3-D!!!
mucho amor, cb
Ok, sis, by now you should be getting a little luv-gift in the mail, but anyway, I have a favor to ask of you: please be so kind as to reply with the name of your woman doctor friend, cuz I want to follow up. I need medical help. Thanks!
Craig
I am having a medicAL eMERGENCY HERe, BU I DOn’T WANT TO GO tO SF GENERAL’S eMeRGEncy ROOM… CB
L -For the short-term emergency, I was able to get in to see a GP… he took one look at my foot: Staph infection! But am taking my antibiotics now, and don’t have to go to work… thanks Lynne…
Darling! I am so happy that that bed footage is going to good use!! I still have that Jack Smith/Malanga bed stuff that I might ultimately sell for big bucks! Thank you for the connection to your doctor that we ate burrito with… the after effects from the staph infection have profoundly affected my life, perhaps permanently. Not to bring you down, but I am suffering the consequences of compromised lymph system after flesh-eating bacteria infection, see? They can’t really figure out what the prob is, and tomorrow I have to have a ($500) MRI.
It’s very discouraging, but I have so many other causes for panic in my life, I guess the health crisis takes its place among the many others. “The Panicked Life”… there’s a good book/movie title? “The Life Panic”. I could write that book, dear sister. When I see your grandmother at 102, or my own father at 98, I so immediately know that I am not going to come anywhere close to that. It will be a miracle if I get out of my 60s… but don’t grieve for any early death, sister! I want everybody to celebrate. I am declaring this loud and clear to you… Anyway, I am so happy for you and your wonderful film, Lynne. Tell us when you will next return to NorCal and we will do another show! Of course!… cb
Hello sister!
Thanks for all of your inquiries! I’m doing much better. As to your hardware help, that is also coming along. I have my eye on a beautiful laptop that will serve this gallery as a platform for exhibition. What I am salivating over is the film that you re-made with Chris Marker, “Three Cheers for the Whale” [1972; English version, 2007]. I hope that it is OK if we screen it again.
Mucho amor, Craig
Ever since I met Craig in 1987, he has allowed me to dig around amongst the archeological wonders of his 992 Valencia Street film archive. Usually, I am a spelunker rummaging around in his cave, presuming I am looking for something specific and discovering that what I am least expecting to find is what I most need. Over these three decades, I have nourished these films and my work as a filmmaker in ways that would never have happened without Craig and his basement resource: The House of Science (1991);
A Biography of Lilith (1997); The Last Happy Day (2009); And Then We Marched (2017); and Tip of My Tongue (2017).
2015
My darling sister, please know that EVERY DAY we are compiling your footage… I can see the light at the end of the tunnel: and it is next Tuesday, when I will mail shipment #3, which will have 2 rolls. Important: as I compile these shots and scenes, should I just white-tape them, or single-splice them? Also, just to let you know: I am keeping close track of the labor hours, and you will have a BIG payment coming up. But I will be more than fair with you, Lynne-y , because I owe you soooo much…
Howdy Lynne-y,
Here’s a Hanukkah present for you. Plus, a couple of straggles from our big “Tip of My Tongue” haul. Hope that stuff is working for you. Thanks for all the help this last year. I sure needed it. You came to my rescue, like a true friend. Love, Craig
Ok Lynne-y!
My laptop has raised my quality of life, though that is about to lower again as there are new calls for radically raised rent levels. All the help is absolutely essential. Craig
Ok Sis,
Another holiday gift for you. Things have settled a bit now, after ATA’s New Lease Navidad party this weekend. My oh so slick laptop continues to make the navigation of the treacherous interweb a much more comfortable process. Craig
Lynne,
One day I will tell you the story of how $8.25 was stolen out of my OVER-ALL pants during my first visit to NY. I was picked up by a con-man in Washington Square Park. I had to sleep in a Catholic hostel on the Lower East Side, my bunk- mate was Cool Breeze, the first time I ever heard that name. That would be mid/ late-70s, methinks. The rip-off artist and I walked up to the 4th floor on a Lower East Side tenement, and he robbed my little West Coast hippie self… (over-alls!) From the sum of $3 in change that he didn’t get from me, I hitch-hiked all the way back to SF by way of Vancouver, BC (and I had to both sneak into and out of Canada), both great stories!! I have even better stories, including the first time I had intercourse, as a hitch-hiker on the road to Santa Barbara (where I just now gave a big presentation… Constance Penley is a huge fan.) and the soundtrack was classical musician Antonin Dvzorak which IS PLAYING RIGHT NOW IN MY STUDIO!!!! Are you blowing your mind yet? If I was just 17, it still would not be rape, because it was consensual. Lynne–do not tell anybody about this story.
l only got into it because I was particularly intrigued with the Dylan legacy in NYC, see, as naive as I was… I had every record by Bob Dylan… I got a million of these stories, I am not braggin’… my life has been very risky, full of danger… my brothers don’t have a clue as to what a desperate level of experience I’ve endured. ciao babe… cb
In response to my quest for found footage material related to every year of my life, Craig wrote to me about his own personal investigations and reflections.
I have occasionally considered the project of pinpointing a certain day/event that my fellow humans – maybe a best friend or lover – have lived thru, completely separate and autonomous from me, and then exploring those separate passages of time – as if playing back separate tapes in a row of playback decks, and so get a cross-section layering of personal POVs across/thru a “universal” global event… to appreciate multiple ‘careers’ in the literal sense of the word, and
so to understand human life/relationships on a longitudinal/diachronic axis, as opposed to the synchronic “now” one that becomes dominant when you become lovers. It flirts with the idea of “fate” – that deepens the mystery of it – but it can be more formal, and is in fact a sort of sociology, affording an extra-personal/outside-of-the-self understanding across human society. This would be interesting enough as a non-fiction, with points-of-view and gestures placed next to each other particularly for a ‘cinematic’ rhythm effect (Coppola’s famous scene in godfather)… BUT! One could stray a little bit off ‘documentary’ and insert – as you do in your Your Day is My Night shiftbed movie – a fictional line(s) that ultimately crossed another ‘career’, and then the people have sex or get married or kill each other in a fight, whatever blah blah. cb
Hello Lynne-y!
Things here are pretty bad, and getting worse. The prospect of moving out is necessitating some very dirty labor, and of course stress, and a spirit of doom and gloom among roommates and ATA principals. Every day I have to reach deep for strength and peace of mind. Though we will not stop making art!!! Doing some of that tonight with Molly Hankwitz in my studio. Much amor, Craig
2017
lynne-y, thanks for your great letter!
Things are pretty horrible here – no toilet or shower for 2 months, and no electricity in many circuits… jack-hammering all day… one roommate has left, and because of cost over-runs, ATA is now broke, and crowd-funding. Programming group shows of short works around themes is a downright inspired curatorial move, I must say… but it is insanely labor-intensive! The way that
most programmers get thru it is to just Call for Submissions (and then charge the artists money just for the chance to submit, on top of that!). anyway, we are staying in the loop(s)… poopsie!!… Later, me sweets!!… cb
2018
In Spring 2018, I organized a retrospective of Craig’s films in New York City by working with programmers at UnionDocs, Light Industry, Metrograph Theater, and Bard College. Together, we put together seven sold-out screenings of his work on 16mm and digital. Craig attended each and every screening, introducing each program and taking questions from his extraordinarily enthusiastic audiences in New York.
L – well, lordie, I really can’t claim to be superman enough to throw together more than 2 or 3 shows … doing those things is very tricky and also technically worrisome. What I am saying is that we’d have to have more in the show than my own performance ‘acts’… I have a longer-form double-projection work, 3-D in fact, called “Nth Dimension”, and we can call that the anchor… let’s call that 20 mins. Then I have a blimp thang, maybe 7–10 mins., and that is double projection too… AH!! Just had an insight!!… I will build two reels, and they will be an hour each, and we will roll thru those reels on their respective projectors and embedded in there will be my 3 or so “discrete” pieces, but also there will be a lot of “fun” footage in there that will stand on its own, because it is, well, an odd artifact from the Archive… which is a distinctive feature of Other Cinema… the deep engagement with 20C industrial cinema!!
Ok, so I guess I am working up to this now in brainstorm mode… I will get back to you later with some bon mots about it… including some individual titles. And by the way, it would not ALL have to be in these “twin” reels, we could throw video on from time to time… (assuming there will be a video projector there, and playback devices–VHS would be required!! OC LOVES VHS!!)… I suppose – thinking out loud again – that those “secondary” video shorts would be typical tropes of the OC project… pieces that speak to the OC experience, maybe docs about the archive… for the most part, the Sat. show will be mostly 16mm, a lot of 3-D (I have the glasses), a looser feel, people drinkin’ and making out. Struggling very hard under heavy weight of my curatorial responsibilities right now, and can hardly look even 15 degrees off the necessary escape route, to swim out of this cave.
cb
I could live thru [seeing her], but she will be shocked at the pathetic shell of the old white man that she will see… I will be embarrassed, and her stomach will turn at the sight of what time can do to a loser beatnik living a borderline, absurdly unhealthy, preposterously precarious life… but I would not exclude her, of course not.
It would be easier if you might be close to my side sometimes, as an emotional support in the face of one of the greatest fails of my life… cb
2019
L – As to your text in A Month of Single Frames, your Hammer film… I thought it was wonderful! It was like a George Landow movie, just talking directly to the audience, in a sublimely wise admission that we are all just mortal human bodies, … here together for a short while… then all gonna die, like Barbara… It was her talking to us from behind the screen. It was like she was talking to us from beyond the grave. It was mystical, and yet structural.
I am in an incredibly strained, painful, rush to complete my own presentations, and all hell is breaking loose over here… we have an out-of-town visitor/sub-letter who is not really doing so well in the City, and an Other friend just out of hospital with gallbladder OPERation, and more continued ATA negligence and slacker- shit, and a zillion people (rock bands!) coming and going thru the doors, and the finale to Jeremy Rourke’s act is all about my archive, with my narration taken from a phone conversation… and it is a stand-alone genius tribute, utterly brill 4-screen hand-synced up with remotes (while he is playing music) – he made a song out of the titles to some films in there, and shows the cans and shows the frames animated that are in the cans (and that includes my O No Coronado!!)… and tomorrow I have a huge show with FOUR live performers, and then a 12-hr whole day after that of panic editing before I rush to airport.
I have just now been able (not really) to catch up with the clean-up and back-log of affairs after that HISTORIC venture into the Big Bad Apple… and now my heart is beating again in a rather dangerous way about upcoming gigs… AND please!! You must tell me again the history you had with Bruce Conner!? I will fold it
into my lecture!! [I got my start in experimental filmmaking during a 1985–86 internship with one of Craig’s and my greatest heroes of collage filmmaking, Bruce Conner.]
lynne-y!
Gee, THANKS SOO much for the chocolate-covered strawberries!!!!!!!! And it is a miracle that I got them, cuz I was just ready to jump on my bike and ride to office depot to pick up the newly printed calendar, but an intern came, and just as I was taking her into the editing-room-under the sidewalk, the phone started to ring, and well, I wasn’t going to be able to get back to it and pick it up, but after 2 rings I turned and bolted for it, and it was the delivery-woman at the door!… So the new intern and I gulped down the first two delicacies. An hour later, with 2000 OC cals in hand (with your name on the April 7 headline), the OC folding gang (including David Cox) came in for the task at hand, and the choco-berries were passed around and truly savored… so thanks for making our session a super sweet one, you sweet one!!
–cb
Lynne- well well, ok the cat is out of the bag… and that is alright for you and for me and for OC. And the whole world. OC still does want to show your film in spring, but if fest options open up, of course we will defer. IF IF YOU WAnt an OC gig… (so please let us know within a week) AND… WOW, sis, that SlamDance would OPEN with your movie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! well… I TOLD YOU SO!!! You got a zinger, girl!! HOoRAY HORRAY!! You/we won one!! I am very proud of you, and I am totally identifying with you, darling… please suggest to Slamdance peeps to accommodate your opening to the SUNdance fest so that those lazy lay-abouts-
From 1991 to 2019, I shot film, videotape, and digital images of my father. In 2020, I completed Film About a Father Who which premiered as the opening night movie at Slamdance and then at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight. Throughout the making of the film, Craig offered me the support of a dear friend and fellow artist.
in-Park-City could finally get energized about some things that are HUMAN-LY important…… and so moved to take a goddam Lyft down that wet road to spend 2 hours watching your masterwork!~ … and it is because of your vision, your strength, and your endurance, and your good faith, open-mindedness, your tolerance, your intellectual curiosity, your bottom-less generosity, and your full-frontal honesty to deal with issues that would formerly (and formally!) be considered too ‘personal’. your total fan, cb…
After spending months going through my own archive, I shared Craig’s letters with the man himself.
Lynne: Wowowowow! That is a great idea for an article. It is like you are doing ethnography, on that certain sort of urban, gig-economy, declassé white loser that is me, and that the letters are the “primary source material” … real media archeology… you, hunkering down with your little whisk broom, and excavating these written artifacts. And I will for sure eat it all (back) up… BUT it cannot be in next 48 hours, because I am rushing to pack for a (film fest) trip to Chile. I am so freaked out about packing that I literally threw up, 2 hours ago… So, my gawd, hopefully I can read on the plane (do they have internet connection on them these days?.)… I can prolly give you ‘some guidance’ eventually. But you don’t have to prove anything to Brett and Steve… they already know that you are in good faith. Even if all you have is that bare naked “raw source material”… cb
Sponsor: Co-sponsored by the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women
Location: Pembroke Hall
Room: 305
Magic Lantern Cinema presents a screening of THE WASHING SOCIETY, a film by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs.
When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? THE WASHING SOCIETY brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Collaborating together for the first time, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. With a title inspired by the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses, THE WASHING SOCIETY investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Drawing on each other’s artistic practices, Sachs and Olesker present a stark yet poetic vision of those whose working lives often go unrecognized, turning a lens onto their hidden stories, which are often overlooked. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of THE WASHING SOCIETY through interviews and observational moments. With original music by sound artist Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in THE WASHING SOCIETY creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
We will also screen other selected work by Sachs. After the screening, we will hold a panel conversation with the filmmakers and feminist activist Silvia Federici, whose work has inspired the filmmakers.
Lizzie Olesker is a playwright, dramaturg, and director. Her original works, exploring the hidden history and poetry of everyday experience, have been developed and seen at the Public Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, Ohio Theater, Invisible Dog, New Georges, and Cherry Lane Theater. Her recent collaborative, hybrid documentary film “The Washing Society” (2018) was shown at international festivals, BAM, the National Gallery, etc. and began as a site-specific performance in NYC neighborhood laundromats. She’s taught playwriting at the New School, Purchase, and NYU where she’s active with her adjunct faculty union, UAW Local 7902.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. Her films have screened at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, and festivals such as New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale and Doclisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at MoMI (Museum of the Moving Image), Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, Cork Film Festival, Havana Film Festival, among others. In 2021, both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center gave her awards for her lifetime achievements in the experimental and documentary fields. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
Silvia Federici is a feminist activist, writer, and a teacher. In 1972 she was one of the cofounders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women’s history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.
“I was naturally looking for connections across various films, be they thematic or stylistic and formal. The Washing Society, Fossil, Window Work, and Still Life with Woman and Four Objects all clearly reflect upon what in the first film you call “hidden labor.” This labor is of course gendered and raced in different ways. Formally—whether through closeup or still framing upon hands and limbs, through shadow and light, through match cuts—these films also seem to abstract or defamiliarize the bodies who perform such labor, as well as the tools and machines these bodies use or that sometimes replace such bodies. The affiliation between film, repetition, and labor of course has a long history in (experimental) cinema. But I like the way in which you describe in one of your emails what is effectively your contribution to this history: you attempt to capture “quotidian acts of labor as gestures in the devising of movement for the camera.”
Rewatching The Washing Society helped me consider other threads beyond these connections. One of the early shots in that film—one you repeat a few times—is of lint and hair, in soft focus, slowly being pulled apart. I am not sure if this was an intentional metaphor, but this image resonated with the tenuous yet material threads connecting different people that emerge throughout the film as you interview various workers, who are of different races and gender, and as these workers discuss the customers they service. The laundromat in this sense is a place through which disparate people of the city are materially interwoven, even if those connections are “hidden” or obfuscated through classed, gendered, and raced separations of labor. I wonder if these threads might offer a different way in which we might understand “intersectionality,” not only as the way in which (marginalized) identities overlap within a given person, but also as the material connections that weave across people as such in capitalist society. At one point in the film, this comes to the fore in a collage of multilingual voices that sound over shots in different laundromats.
The labor of women in Indonesia is geographically and temporally removed from the labor of laundromat workers in New York or from domestic labor in suburban homes, but how might we think across the material intersections and connections of these various people, or the ways in which we are all materially implicated in both neighborhood and global structures of hidden labor? How does cinema help (formally) represent these structures?”
Stephen Woo, PhD Candidate Department of Modern Culture and Media Brown University
