This year marks the second installment of Prismatic Ground (May 4 – May 8), a new festival focusing on experimental documentary and avant-garde film and video. Last year’s inaugural edition was a completely virtual affair, but this year the festival returns in a hybrid version with in-person screenings and online viewing available for most of the films in its impressive 14 programs. Co-presented by the Maysles Documentary Center and Screen Slate, Prismatic Ground brings festival-goers a wide range of politically engaged, formally challenging new work by up-and-coming artists alongside established ones like Bill Morrison, Jodie Mack, and this year’s Ground Glass Award recipient, Christopher Harris. In the world of experimental film where visibility and opportunities to premiere new work can be hard to come by, the festival is poised to make a significant splash.
Founded by Inney Prakash in 2021, last year’s edition consisted of four programs of films, as well as a program devoted to its first Ground Glass Award recipient, the avant-garde filmmaker and experimental documentarist Lynne Sachs. The festival honored Sachs, whose career has spanned some three decades, for her sustained contribution to experimental film. In her recent breakthrough film, Film About A Father Who, Sachs collaged decades worth of home movies and new interviews to craft a film about her father, his secret life, and its impact on the people surrounding him (namely Sachs and her siblings). Work like this—intimate, engaged, and formally daring with a documentary slant—similarly characterizes Prismatic Ground’s continued curatorial mission.
“What an honor it was for me to be given the first annual Ground Glass award.” Sachs wrote via email. Sachs was quick to mention the excitement she felt surrounding the new festival’s place in the landscape of experimental film, writing, “Something altogether surprising happened when Prismatic Ground opened its virtual curtains to the world in 2021. People from all over the globe were watching and writing about experimental, underground, international, radical, poetic, and personal cinema in numbers none of us could ever have imagined. Film festivals across the globe have always been nourished by the elite aura of inaccessibility. With Prismatic Ground, those days are over.”
This year’s Ground Glass award recipient is Christopher Harris, graduated from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000, and has spent years as an educator (this writer counts himself as one of his proud former students) and continues to make challenging and meticulous films, like his most well known work, 2004’s haunting and powerful Reckless Eyeballing (its title taken from a Jim Crow-era prohibition on Black men looking at white women), which uses reappropriated footage from D.W. Griffith’s racist epic Birth of a Nation as well as from Foxy Brown to explore the gaze and Black identity in a cinematic context. The filmmaker, who is now the head of film and video production at the University of Iowa, says recognition of his work is welcome. “It’s been a slow build, kind of a slow burn situation,” Harris said. “now it’s even sweeter to have the recognition after just grinding away on my work overtime.” But Harris is quick to add: “I’m more eager and energized to make work now than ever before. So the timing is really great because it just helps to re-energize the passion that’s already there.”
Dreams Under Confinement, Harris’ contribution to this year’s Prismatic Ground, showcases his resolve. The short video, made using Google Earth images, street view, and audio from a police band radio, is the filmmaker’s first all digital work. “This is the first thing I’ve ever made that does not have any analog materials involved,” Harris said. “I’ve never worked this way. But for this work, it was right. For me, whatever materials are used, there has to be an internal logical justification for those materials. I’m not going to use them as if it’s a neutral format and it’s just a content-delivery medium. I don’t treat materials that way.“
The artist’s latest work finds the horror and beauty in the panopticon; surveillance materials create a fugitive, exhilarating race through digital images of Chicago, as the voices of police officers pursuing a suspect frantically blast through static on the soundtrack. Eventually the video’s frenzied journey stops short at the impenetrable walls of Chicago’s Cook County Detention Center. The viewer sees the clouds above as the audio shifts from shrill shouting to peaceful ambience. In a frenetic work about the police, violence, and the racist carceral state, it’s a poignant moment of profound transcendence and tragic wonder. Harris’ approach, with its daring ambition and inherent artistic riskiness, seems to reflect the adventurous spirit found in the best of the festival’s programming.
Referred to as “waves,” Prismatic Ground’s programs are organized on a loose thematic basis rather than by running time or region of origin. Program titles, like “memory of a memory,” “to report an incident,” “touch me don’t touch me,” and “love as cry of anguish,” are often, if not always, taken from one of the program’s films. The monikers are both specific and flexible enough to create a poetically evocative space for a variety of aesthetics, subjects, and approaches.
Wave 1, titled “look at that round ass shit,” takes its name from Sim Hahahah’s Memory Playthrough in which rapid, fragmented narration and early PC game-like graphics work together to create a sarcastic video poem. The video, which clocks in under two minutes, is a splash of brief but biting reflection on personal stories, the reality of the perceived world, and the medium itself. It’s a playful but incisive opening salvo for the program.
In G. Anthony Svatek’s Global Fruit, 16mm photography gives the short a timeless feel. The images of globally sourced fruit covered with the frost of a New York city blizzard create a clear and dynamic visual metaphor. With both Svatek and Hahahah’s films, the image of the globe (both figuratively and literally) emerges, and the program’s thematic concept begins to take shape.
Also in the program, Experimental filmmaker and animator Jodie Mack’s Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons is filled with grotesque images of biomatter undergoing a timelapse transformation. The subjects are organic but the rhythm of the piece is smooth and deliberate. There is something funerary about the flowers and plants we see, and their possible thaw or submersion has visceral impact, evoking cellular happenings on a larger scale. The (possible) thawing we witness rhymes nicely with the frosted fruit of Global Fruit and continues wave 1’s theme in an albeit more (welcomely) obtuse way.
Wave 2, titled “wings,” focuses on identity. Paige Taul’s Goat is a sweet ode to a pair of Air Jordan’s and the woman who wears them. Black and white photography shows detailed images of a basketball net, a woman’s hair, and her sunglasses, as a voice unhurriedly narrates a description of her shoes and her feelings about them. Yashaddai Owens’ D’Homme A Homme is a fun 8mm exploration of proud Blackness and masculinity set to hip hop. Filled with exuberant and memorable images, it has a decidedly vintage feel with a modern sonic twist.
Iván Reina Ortiz’s autoethnography, a filmic meditation on sexual orientation, gender, art, and personal history, continues wave 6’s theme in both a reflective and reflexive way. The artist mixes potent poetic imagery with, somewhat less effective, home video footage. Ortiz’s self-interviewing leads to the film’s most powerful moment. We see an image of the filmmaker’s bare chest with the shadow of a hand moving across it, attempting to grasp it in some way, the film’s earlier questioning about the place of the body on screen materializing into visual substance.
While Prismatic Ground does boast a feature length centerpiece, the excellent and unsettling essay film Nuclear Family, the waves seem to uniquely represent the festival’s novel, surprise- filled approach. Wave 4 features Razah AlSalah’s gloriously transcendent Canada Park, a playfully ethereal exploration of both the flatness and three dimensionality of street view imagery from off the beaten path. The narration seems to be from the perspective of the all-seeing digital camera and its (seemingly) unlimited purview. But quickly the cheap, halting imagery of the park becomes pure form and color melting before the viewer’s eyes. The representational digital images reveal themselves for what they really are—the malleable data behind their mundane facades. It’s an elegant variation on glitch set to a swelling synth that lifts the imagery from the practical to the profound as we “see” as the machine “sees.” When representational images of trees and fields return, the viewer seems to soar over them in golden light through space and possibility, seeing beyond mere landscape. But all the while the piece pushes up against the limits of digital imagery, sometimes zooming into its furthest reaches and encountering flatness. The film seems to joyfully revel in its idiosyncratic oscillations and the viewer can’t help but be swept away by it.
Other festival highlights include Gloria Chung’s True Places from wave 5, in which hazy, impressionistic landscapes seen from an airplane window are slowed and abstracted as a calm voice narrates. The words come from a New Yorker article about the changing landscape of Indigenous arctic hunters and the cumulative feeling is mournful but curious. Wave 6 includes cherry brice jr.’s This Is A Pornographic Film–or,goodbyetoArt, a sparse and delicately photographed film in which men masturbate. The images we see are a collection of details: mouths, chests, arms, and close-ups of the surrounding room. There are some candid conversations as well as a more pointed one about high art that serves as, perhaps, a counterpoint to some of the more mundane and graphic images we see. It’s a small, intimate work of the everyday with dual dimensions of irony and candor.
Wave 6, “touch me don’t touch me,” takes its name from Rhea Storr’s Madness Remixed. The film is a well-composed combination of what appears to be single frame abstraction, glitches, and photographs. A few key moments of spoken audio connect what we are seeing, including the film’s images of Josephine Baker, to the issue of cultural appropriation and exploitation of Black bodies in labor and images. The message echoes a slogan seen on signs in various forms during the George Floyd uprising: you love Black culture but not Black people. It’s an impressive mix of formalism and explicit political meaning.
In Edgar Jorge Baralt’s A Thousand Years Ago, from wave 10, images have double lives. We see the world as it is, but the film’s conceit posits what we are seeing as the world that was, the narration reflecting back on what we see from a possible future. Poetic images take on a double meaning as well. An image of the sun reflecting on water evokes the sepia tones of a sonogram. The narration muses on the origins of life long, long ago, as we watch the shape of light on the water resembling the grainy image of a fetus.
Baralt, whose previous film, the gentle Ventana, screened in the Berlin International Film Festival’s Berlinale Shorts in 2021, said in a conversation of his most recent film, “I felt the impulse to make this film after reading Mario Benedetti’s semi-autobiographical novel, Andamios. I didn’t set out to adapt this novel at all, but it helped me arrive at this framework by which to look at the present and all of its spiraling contingencies.” About the film’s use of everyday images for expansive fictive purposes, he explained, “I’ve always admired filmmakers whose raw material is ‘the everyday.’ I think it gets to an essential aspect of my fascination with cinema both as filmmaker and audience: the questioning of what reality is. What we take for granted, what we choose to look at, and what we choose to believe about it all.”
As far as being included in Prismatic Ground’s 2022 edition, Baralt is thrilled, saying, “Aside from the programs being filled with filmmakers whose work I love, I sense an enthusiasm from the programming team for reimagining what a festival is and how it’s experienced.” What Prismatic Ground is adding to the world of experimental cinema is essential and exciting, and in Baralt’s words, “It means everything. Whenever you read about the state of cinema these days, it is all doom and gloom stories of an industry in decay. So it is in these alternative outlets that you see resilience and passion. It’s always inspiring to see work bursting with possibilities, attempting to redefine what cinema can be for the years to come.” To quote the filmmaker’s new work, Prismatic Ground is a spark “illuminating the emptiness.”
Prismatic Ground runs May 4 – 8, 2022 online and in various locations around New York.
We’re thrilled to finally announce the screening line-ups for our inaugural Canyon Cinema Discovered programs, which will debut this fall in San Francisco and online. Stay tuned for details!
Prime Time Reverie Curated by Aaditya Aggarwal From cosmetic commercials to women-led talk shows to narrative melodrama, television catered to feminized viewers is a formally diverse genre, nudging, socializing, and mirroring its spectators in intimate and discerning ways. Capturing the urgent, anchoring spirit of prime time telecasts, Prime Time Reverie stages a fragmented history of television as a women’s medium. The works in this program engage multiple tides of broadcasting, from soapy to confessional, from sensationalist to documentarian. Weaving an absent or corporeal presence through each work, televised portrayals of womanhood—hermetic, large, versatile—incite daydreams among a mass populace, flirting with histories of technology, desire, and visuality.
Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (Cauleen Smith, 1992)
No No Nooky TV (Barbara Hammer, 1987)
Removed (Naomi Uman, 1999)
Waiting for Commercials (Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, 1966-72, 1992)
No Land (Emily Chao, 2019)
MTV Artbreak (Dara Birnbaum, 1986)
Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (Dara Birnbaum, 1979)
That Woman (Sandra Davis, 2018)
10:28,30 (Paige Taul, 2019)
Still Life with a Woman and Four Objects (Lynne Sachs, 1986)
Playing in the Dark: Watery Experiments Curated by Chrystel Oloukoï Playing in the Dark engages the various ways in which blackness haunts the sea and is haunted by the sea. Borrowing from Toni Morrison, “playing in the dark” references the subdued Africanist presence which mediates imaginations of water in the wake of variegated yet entangled transoceanic slave trades but also takes seriously darkness as a subversive ecological milieu, against lures of transparency. In the works gathered here, nothing is left untouched by the confounding qualities of water and its corrosive opacities, from bodies to the environment, to the materiality of film itself. As such, “playing in the dark” also references attempts in Black experimental filmmaking to chart paths in which cameras do not write with light but probe shadows in search of “an aesthetics of turbulence whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation).
By the Sea (Toney W. Merritt, 1982)
What the Water Said Nos. 1-3 (David Gatten, 1998)
Aqua (Samba Félix N’diaye, 1989)
The Dislocation of Amber (Hussein Shariffe, 1975)
Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) (Ja’Tovia Gary, 2017)
Pattaki (Everlane Moraes, 2019)
What the Water Said Nos. 4-6 (David Gatten, 2006-07)
Towards the Colonies (Miryam Charles, 2016)
Song for the New World (Miryam Charles, 2021)
Trajectories of Self-Determination: Experimental
Cinema’s Embrace of Jazz
Curated by Juan Carlos Kase
Experimental cinema has long embraced American vernacular music as a generative
model, whether it supplied a formal template, an affective inspiration, or a
point of cultural reference. From the collective polyphony of Charles Mingus’
kinetic ensembles to the gale and squall of Joe McPhee’s storming cornet, the
improvisational energies of jazz – as well as blues and other popular-modernist
musics – have continued to inspire American avant-garde filmmakers.
Collectively, the films in this program explore the myriad ways in which
experimental cinema has drawn from African-American improvised music and
embraced its spontaneous, collaborative, polyrhythmic, and lyrical energies.
Insurgent Articulations
Curated by Ekin Pinar
A strong interest in the social, political, and cultural contexts has always
been part and parcel of a good variety of experimental filmmaking practices,
even though canonical works on experimental cinema tend to focus solely on the
formal explorations that supposedly reflect the filmmaker’s own (hermetic)
subjectivity. Because of this exclusive focus on formal experimentation, the
socio-historical, cultural, and representational politics, ethics, and concerns
of much experimental work remained unnoticed until recently. Focusing on the
theme of the aesthetics of socio-political unrest and protest, this program
showcases examples of experimental filmmaking that fictionally constructed or
experimentally reconstructed in formally explorative and reflexive ways demonstrations,
rallies, marches, and sit-ins.
Pig Power (Single Spark Films, 1969)
Demonstration ’68 (Dominic Angerame, 1968-74)
Solidarity (Joyce Wieland, 1973)
Sisters! (Barbara Hammer, 1973)
New Left Note (Saul Levine, 1968-82)
Gay Power, 1971/2007/2012 (Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett, and The Women’s Liberation Cinema, 2012)
On the nature of the bone (Elena Pardo, 2018)
A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message (Rhea Storr, 2018)
San Francisco, CA—Canyon Cinema (est. 1961 in the Bay Area), one of the world’s foremost advocates for and distributors of independent moving-image art, announces the full line-up and screening schedule for its inaugural curatorial fellowship, Canyon Cinema Discovered, taking place throughout the month of October 2022. Four newly-curated programs will premiere at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater across two Sundays: October 2nd and 16th. In addition, each program will be available to view online for a week, free and worldwide, on Canyon’s new online screening and publishing platform, Connects.
Launched in 2021, Canyon Cinema Discovered is a multifaceted fellowship program that aims to engender fresh perspectives on experimental cinema. For its first iteration, four curatorial fellows were invited to assemble programs from Canyon’s unique collection of artist-made films, as well as works from outside the collection, for in-person screening and online streaming; with the goal of instigating critical engagement with experimental cinema’s evolving legacy.
From a pool of nearly 200 international applicants, curatorial fellows Aaditya Aggarwal (Toronto and New Delhi), Juan Carlos Kase (Wilmington, NC), Chrystel Oloukoï (Lagos and Richmond, VA), and Ekin Pinar (Ankara) were selected on the basis of their ability to provide original insights on avant-garde and artists’ cinema and media; to illuminate unheralded or forgotten film and videomakers; to organize programs that speak to contemporary social, political, and artistic concerns; and to forge strong intergenerational connections between legacy films in Canyon’s catalog and contemporary work by today’s moving-image artists.
In continuation with Canyon Cinema’s commitment to providing access to rare artworks in their original medium, fellows had the opportunity to catalyze the creation of new exhibition prints and digitizations of works from the collection. The newly struck 16mm prints made for Discovered will ensure that audiences can continue to experience these works in the best possible light. Meanwhile, the creation of new digital copies of additional films from Canyon’s catalog will help to expand the availability of, and cultivate new audiences for, artist-made cinema. As an outcome of the Discovered project, we are pleased to present new 2K digitizations of political documentation films Demonstration ‘68 (byDominic Angerame), Pig Power (by Single Spark Film, former film unit of the Revolutionary Communist Party), and New Left Note (by Saul Levine); Donna Cameron’s breathtaking handmade film, The Clown, with music by Charles Mingus; and Doug Wendt’s hilarious and charming, Up and Atom, which showed on Saturday Night Live in 1980. Brand new 16mm prints and digitizations of By the Sea and Not A Music Videoby Bay Area filmmaker Toney W. Merritt, and What the Water Said Nos. 1-3 and What the Water Said Nos. 4-6, made by renowned experimentalist David Gatten in collaboration with the ocean, will also premiere as part of Discovered.
Other program highlights include a new English-language translation of the 1975 film The Dislocation of Amber, by celebrated Sudanese artist Hussein Shariffe, which will help make this important work accessible to a wider viewership; a rare presentation of Gay Power, 1971/2007/2012by Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett, and The Women’s Liberation Cinema, featuring a live performance of the film’s script; Duet for Trumpet and Camera, a collaboration between trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and filmmaker Robert Fenz, long out of distribution (courtesy Harvard Film Archive); groundbreaking work by video legends Dara Birnbaum and Nam June Paik & Jud Yalkut (courtesy EAI); restorations of Harry Smith’s Mirror Animations(courtesy Anthology Film Archives), and Mike Henderson’sDufus (aka Art) (courtesy Academy Film Archive); recent work by acclaimed artists such as Ephraim Asili, Miryam Charles, Sandra Davis, Everlane Moraes, Cauleen Smith, and Rhea Storr; filmmakers new to Canyon’s collection including Emily Chao and Elena Pardo; and much more!
The programs created for Discovered are further enriched and contextualized by new essays written by the curatorial fellows. A full color exhibition catalog, designed by Helen Shewolfe Tseng, accompanies the series, available in both print and digital formats.
Curators: Aaditya Aggarwal • Juan Carlos Kase • Chrystel Oloukoï • Ekin Pinar
Artists: Dominic Angerame • Ephraim Asili • Bruce Baillie • Dara Birnbaum • Donna Cameron • Emily Chao • Miryam Charles • Julie Dash • Sandra Davis • Robert Fenz • Ja’Tovia Gary • David Gatten • Barbara Hammer • Christopher Harris • Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett, and The Women’s Liberation Cinema • Mike Henderson • Saul Levine • Toney W. Merritt • Everlane Moraes • Samba Félix N’diaye • Nam June Paik & Jud Yalkut • Elena Pardo • Lynne Sachs • Hussein Shariffe • Single Spark Film • Cauleen Smith • Harry Smith • Rhea Storr • Paige Taul • Naomi Uman • Doug Wendt • Joyce Wieland
Streaming Schedule (Canyon Cinema Connects website) October 2-8:Insurgent Articulations October 9-15: Prime Time Reverie October 16-22: Trajectories of Self-Determination October 23-29: Playing in the Dark
About Canyon Cinema Canyon Cinema Foundation is dedicated to educating the public about independent, non-commercial, experimental, avant-garde, and artist-made moving images. We manifest this commitment by providing access to our unrivaled collection to universities and cultural organizations worldwide, as well as cultivating scholarship and appreciation of artist-made cinema. We ensure the experience of rare film works in their original medium while also reaching new audiences through our growing digital distribution program.
Canyon Cinema Discovered is made possible with generous support by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation, and the Owsley Brown III Philanthropic Foundation.
When Inney Prakash was making a decision on an opening night film for the second edition of Prismatic Ground, the experimental documentary festival making its triumphant return this week in New York and online, he looked for something you couldn’t see anywhere else, quite literally.
“I still really value the in cinema experience, so the opening night film can only be in person because it’s a movie by Charlie Shackleton called ‘The Afterlight,’” said Prakash. “And it exists on a single 35mm print as a conceptual nod to the ephemerality of all film and media.”
In many respects, there couldn’t be a more ideal introduction to what Prakash has in store for the four-day fest than Shackleton’s tapestry of scenes from old films that have been thoughtfully stitched together after the original reels they hailed from were destined for decay, an appreciation of cinema and the role it can play as collective memory, a recontextualization of the past in bold new terms and unique as an experience. However, it might be a surprising choice for an event that was initially founded in response to the cloistered world of film festivals in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as Prakash, a programmer at the Maysles Documentary Center in New York, seized the opportunity of stay-at-home orders to remove many of the barriers to entry for both filmmakers and audiences to worthwhile films that may have been seen as too radical or arrived without the attendant connections that usually give a leg up in a submission pile.
Being able to livestream over Twitch, there was a democratization of the festival, which was presented for free and though programming fell on Prakash’s shoulders alone, the lineup that didn’t discriminate between shorts and features, combining a number of both into thematically-driven programs called waves, brought out such well-known innovators and agitators such as Bill Morrison, Anand Patwardhan, Lynne Sachs and the Ross Brothers, whose making-of documentary for Benh Zeitlin’s “Wendy” “Straight On ’Til Morning” may not have fit Fox Searchlight’s plans as a DVD extra, but found a home at Prismatic Ground. But equally crucial was the number of up-and-coming filmmakers that the festival gave a much-needed platform to such directors as Sarah Friedland (“Drills”), Sophy Romvari (“Still Processing”), Emily Packer and Lesley Steele (“By Way of Canarsie”) and Anthony Banua-Simon (“Cane Fire”), and Prakash inspired connections that were bound to make one more curious about voices that you were unfamiliar with based on the savvy selections elsewhere.
That sense of adventure remains even if Prismatic Ground has taken the shape of a more traditional festival as it moves into the physical realm in 2022 with the wind at its back. After daring institutions to look beyond their typical circles, many have become partners — the Criterion Channel is concurrently hosting a selection of last year’s festival titles and “The Afterlight” will make its bow at the Museum of the Moving Image on May 4th while the May 6th centerpiece screening of Erin and Travis Wilkerson’s “Nuclear Family” and the May 8th closing night film Rainer Kohlberger’s “Answering the Sun” will be at Anthology Film Archives. Yet Prakash is continuing down a distinctive as any of the filmmakers he’s featuring when the bulk of the lineup is once again being made available for free online alongside its in-person presentation at the Maysles Documentary Center, enabling audiences to travel anywhere in the world from Thailand to Chile and bereft of geoblocking, allows those audiences to really come from anywhere as well.
While an entire wave “The Blessings of Liberty” is devoted to how America has attempted to shape the rest of the world in its image, often through violent means, a critique of cultural hegemony is complemented by an expansive vision of what riches lie in other perspectives, turning what may seem mundane into the extraordinary. From Isidore Bethel and Francis Leplay’s “Acts of Love,” which finds humor in the painful aftermath of a breakup as Bethel tries to literally reconstruct the relationship dramatically, to Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s “Constant,” where a history of the standardization of the meter becomes a recalibration of the senses, the program is filled with immersions into places and situations that might feel out of reach for the casual viewer but extends a notion of inclusivity as much to those seeing the film as those who are behind the camera.
On the eve of an ambitious second season, Prakash spoke about bridging gaps within a program that now transcends the physical/virtual divide, and blurring the lines between other traditional demarcations such as time, country of origin and when a work was created.
From last year’s experience, was there any takeaway to do this all over again?
Yeah, last year, I was responding to a very specific moment in time. That moment has passed, but I’m carrying things over because of lessons I learned. For example, I love the in-cinema experience. I’m a theatrical moviegoer, but I was able to reach so many more people than I had anticipated by making the fest available for free online, not geoblocked worldwide. I realized it would be a shame to alienate all those enthusiasts for experimental documentary by reverting to a purely physical experience, so I’ve decided to make it a hybrid and that’s an experiment really. I’m betting that if I show films in the cinema and have them available for free at the same time, people will still come in person for love of the cinema experience.
And I’ve had to learn how to translate [the festival’s] values into a different realm. It’s a learning experience. For example, something I wanted to do in the first year was try to break down the hierarchy between feature and short films by placing them side by side on the page. A big question I had this year was how do I do that in person? I played with a few different ideas, but what I landed on was having thematic groupings the way you would at many other film festivals, but instead of just including shorts, those programs will include a feature and several shorts or a mid-length and a feature and a couple shorts. If they happen to be too long because of that, I’ve inserted breaks where people can choose to come or go.
The organizing principle of waves is a beautiful way to describe the programs, given the flow of them. How does that idea actually help you curate?
I view curating as an act of creative expression, as a collaboration with the filmmakers and for me, the most exciting way to do that is by creating these instinctual, gestural groupings based on these themes. That’s nothing new. A lot of festivals do it, and [for me] a lot of it is homage to artists and ideas I love and a lot of it is an embodiment of values I hold, including various leftist politics and celebrations of the human spirit. But I think that I have a particular outlook and a particular flavor to the way I group films and I hope it’s one that filmmakers appreciate.
An example [this year] is Joële Walinga’s “Self-portrait,” which is a montage of surveillance footage essentially footage taken from webcams around the world for the purposes of surveilling and protecting property to create an incidental portrait of humanity’s impact on earth. This got me thinking a lot about the way that landscape and technology interact and I saw a lot of other films that with some of the same ideas and questions. That ended up building into a wave called “Industrial Capitalism and the World.”
Last year, there was a great dialogue between the newer films that were selected and the older films you programmed. When you start receiving submissions, do you start thinking of older titles to include?
Unfortunately, I ended up not including as much older work this year because there was so much new work that I wanted to show. I was overwhelmed by the quality of submissions and I wanted to show as many of them as possible. I also wanted to honor the submissions base by primarily programming the festival from submissions, which I didn’t have enough to do last year and which most festivals don’t do. Even if they accept submissions, they tend not to build the bulk of their program from there. I wanted to push back against that and I calculated about 63% of the films in this year’s festival were programmed through blind submissions — people that I didn’t know who haven’t played the festival before who happened to just submit. And I’m happy to say that number is way higher than most festivals. But there will still be older work represented online in the form of the Ground Glass Award, which is being given to Christopher Harris this year in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the field of experimental media and a selection of his filmography will be available online.
There is a real global scope to the selection, which I wondered you actually feel was a benefit from not geoblocking the festival and making it so accessible.
Yeah, a global perspective is something that is entirely exciting to me, but I don’t think that I’m there yet. A lot of submissions that I’m getting are still from the “western world.” There are definitely counter-examples for that, but a big concern for me moving forward is how to create a more globally representative program while still maintaining the community spirit on the ground.
Still, you’ve got to start somewhere in terms of building traditions and community and one way appeared to be the return of Erin and Travis Wilkerson with “Nuclear Family” after they participated in a conversation about the making of the film at last year’s festival and screening Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s “Constant” after “A Demostration” played last year. Are those kinds of callbacks exciting?
Absolutely. The waves we mentioned, there were fewer last year because I didn’t have to deal with the practicality of them being in-person programs also, but a lot of the ideas and those themes are carrying over [too] and I think people who responded to those will see similar ideas in this year’s festival. The Wilkersons’ movie is representative of a lot of those themes in terms of its content and I appreciate having them involved again, but it’s [also about] striking a balance between returning filmmakers but also making room for new voices and new ideas.
Prismatic Ground will run through May 4th-May 8th both in person in New York at Maysles, Anthology Film Archives and the Museum of the Moving Image with filmmaker Q & As and available to stream online worldwide here. A full schedule of events is here.
Greenlight is thrilled to invite to our events stage for the first time New York photographer and author Accra Shepp. Radical Justice, Shepp’s first monograph, brings together two bodies of socially engaged photographic portraiture that document New York City’s Occupy Wall Street movement starting in 2011 and its racial justice/Black Lives Matter protests since 2020. Working in the style of August Sander with a large format camera and black and white film, Shepp pictures New Yorkers on their city’s streets in acts of sit-ins and active protest, both unplanned and highly organized, independent and unified, to address notions of the 99% and 1%, which have come to define the American political vernacular. Shepp will present and read from this rich, essential volume and talk with poet, experimental filmmaker, and our Brooklyn neighbor Lynne Sachs; join us for an evening looking out onto the past and future through Shepp’s singular lens.
Radical Justice brings together two bodies of socially-engaged photographic portraiture by Accra Shepp, who has documented New York City’s Occupy Wall Street movement starting in 2011 and its racial justice/BLM protests since 2020.
Working in the style of August Sander with a large format camera and black and white film, Shepp pictures fellow New Yorkers on their city’s streets in acts of sit-ins and active protest, both unplanned and highly organized, both independent and unified, to address notions of the 99% and 1%, which have become part of the American political vernacular. Bearing witness to defining events of the last decade that echo the United States’ longer historical arch, Shepp’s empathetic depictions of fellow citizens standing up for the fair protection of the Constitution provide a prophetic mirror of current events, which reflects back centuries to where the American experiment began, to suggest where we’ll find ourselves in the years to come.
Lynne Sachs will give a workshop on autobiographical family portraits at La Casa Encendida Posted on 04/26/2022 – 12:37:22
The director of “Film About a Father Who” will give this theoretical-practical workshop from May 24 to 26, and will present a monographic session of her work on May 25.
The training program of the cultural center La Casa Encendida (Madrid) will receive the visit of the American filmmaker Lynne Sachs next May, who will give a workshop on the autobiographical family portrait . According to La Casa Encendida, in the workshop “we will explore the ways in which the images of our mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, grandfather, aunt or uncle can become material for the making of a personal film. Each participant will come the first day with a single photograph that she wants to examine. She will then create a cinematic rendering for this image by incorporating narration and acting. In the process, we will discuss and question the notions of expressing the truth and the language necessary for it.”
This workshop is inspired by the work Family Lexicon by the Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, whose writing explores family relationships during fascism in Italy, World War II and the postwar period. Ginzburg was a perceptive artist who unified the usual distinctions between fiction and nonfiction: “Whenever I have found myself inventing something according to my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled to destroy it immediately. The places, events and people are all real.”
Lynne Sachs is the creator of genre-defying cinematic works through the use of hybrid forms and interdisciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of essay film, collage, performance, documentary, and poetry. Her highly self-reflective films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and larger historical experiences. Sachs’s recent work combines fiction, nonfiction, and experimental modes. She has made more than 25 films that have been screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, the Toronto Images Festival, among others. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts, and other national and international institutions. The Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), the New Cinema International Festival in Havana, and the China Women’s Film Festival have all presented retrospectives of her films. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and is a part-time professor in the Art department at Princeton University.
The workshop will be given in English and Spanish, an adequate level of the language is recommended. Students will have free access to the screening of the Monograph of the filmmaker Lynne Sachs, on Wednesday, May 25 at 7:30 p.m.
SPANISH:
Lynne Sachs impartirá en La Casa Encendida un taller sobre el retrato autobiográfico familiar
Publicado el 26/04/2022 – 12:37:22
La directora de “Film About a Father Who” impartirá este taller teórico-práctico del 24 al 26 de mayo, y presentará una sesión monográfica de sus trabajos el 25 de mayo.
El programa formativo del centro cultural La Casa Encendida (Madrid) recibirá el próximo mes de mayo la visita de la cineasta estadounidense Lynne Sachs, quien impartirá un taller sobre el retrato autobiográfico familiar. Según apuntan desde La Casa Encendida, en el taller “exploraremos las formas en que las imágenes de nuestra madre, padre, hermana, hermano, primo, abuelo, tía o tío pueden convertirse en material para la realización de una película personal. Cada participante acudirá el primer día con una sola fotografía que quiera examinar. A continuación, creará una representación cinematográfica para esta imagen mediante la incorporación de la narración y la interpretación. En el proceso, discutiremos y cuestionaremos las nociones de expresar la verdad y el lenguaje necesario para ello”.
Este taller está inspirado en la obra Léxico familiar de la novelista italiana Natalia Ginzburg, cuya escritura explora las relaciones familiares durante el fascismo en Italia, la Segunda Guerra Mundial y la posguerra. Ginzburg fue un artista perspicaz que unificó las distinciones habituales entre ficción y no ficción: “Cada vez que me he encontrado inventando algo de acuerdo con mis viejos hábitos como novelista, me he sentido obligada a destruirlo de inmediato. Los lugares, eventos y personas son todos reales”.
Lynne Sachs es la creadora de obras cinematográficas que desafían el género mediante el uso de formas híbridas y la colaboración interdisciplinaria, incorporando elementos de la película de ensayo, el collage, la actuación, el documental y la poesía. Sus películas altamente autorreflexivas exploran la intrincada relación entre las observaciones personales y las experiencias históricas más amplias. El trabajo reciente de Sachs combina los modos de ficción, no ficción y experimental. Ha realizado más de 25 películas que se han proyectado en el Festival de Cine de Nueva York, en el Sundance Film Festival, en el Images Festival de Toronto, entre otros. También han sido exhibidas en el Museum of Modern Art, el Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts y en otras instituciones nacionales e internacionales. El Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI), el Festival Internacional Nuevo Cine en La Habana y el Women’s Film Festival de China han presentado retrospectivas de sus películas. Actualmente vive en Brooklyn, Nueva York y es profesora a tiempo parcial en el departamento de Arte de la Universidad de Princeton.
El taller será impartido en inglés y castellano, se recomienda un nivel adecuado del idioma. Los alumnos tendrán acceso libre y gratuito a la proyección del Monográfico de la cineasta Lynne Sachs, el miércoles 25 de mayo a las 19.30.
Available on DAFilms: https://americas.dafilms.com/director/7984-lynne-sachs Drawn and Quartered The House of Science: a museum of false facts Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam States of UnBelonging Same Stream Twice Your Day is My Night And Then We Marched Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor The Washing Society A Month of Single Frames Film About a Father Who
Available on Fandor:https://www.fandor.com/category-movie/297/lynne-sachs/ Still Life With Woman and Four Objects Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning The Washing Society The House of Science: a museum of false facts Investigation of a Flame Noa, Noa The Small Ones Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam Atalanta: 32 Years Later States of UnBelonging A Biography of Lilith The Task of the Translator Sound of a Shadow The Last Happy Day Georgic for a Forgotten Planet Wind in Our Hair Drawn and Quartered Your Day is My Night Widow Work Tornado Same Stream Twice
Available on Ovid:https://www.ovid.tv/lynne-sachs A Biography of Lillith Investigation of a Flame The Last Happy Day Sermons and Sacred Pictures Starfish Aorta Colossus States of Unbelonging Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam Your Day is My Night Tip of My Tongue And Then We Marched A Year of Notes and Numbers
When Pacific Film Archive curator Kathy Geritz invited me to give the 2022 Les Blank Lecture, all of my experiences, challenges, obstacles and revelations regarding what constitutes the real came tumbling into my mind. I immediately confronted and embraced the life I’ve lead in the cosmos of the cinema, and more specifically my I.O.U, my gratitude, to that real for simply providing me with so much to think about and so much to record with my camera.
Tonight, I will share with you a selection of observations I have made in the course of creating approximately 50 films, installations, live performances and web art projects. Whether a 90 second ciné poem or an 83 minute feature, I learned early-on that my process of making films must push me to engage directly with the people with whom I’m working in a fluid and attentive way. I’ve never been truly comfortable with the term “director” or the hierarchical configuration of a movie set. I am a filmmaker who looks for other committed artists who are willing to collaborate with me in an adventure. These inventive souls are not my crew. We talk. We listen to each other. I pay them for their time and expertise. And then we set off on a journey.
Of course there are the people in front of the camera, what many documentary makers refer to as their subjects. In narrative film, these are the actors or, thinking in the aggregate, the cast. Again I find both of these monolithic terms anathema, an insult to their human presence. From my very first 16mm film “Still Life with Women and Four Objects” made in 1986, I asked the woman, the star in the film, to extract herself from “the objects” in order to shake things up for me. I wanted her to shift away from simply being a living, breathing prop. I invited her to bring something from her home that meant a great deal to her to our first day of shooting. She delivered a framed black-and-white photograph of early 20th century feminist-anarchist Emma Goldman. At the time, I had no idea who Emma was. I quickly learned. I, and with my four minute film, were forever changed. I’d claim for the better. I’ve been listening and learning from all the people involved in my films ever since.
This leads me to another perhaps more intricate form of entangling myself in the creative process. Between 2011 and 2013, I worked with seven Chinese immigrants between the ages of 55 and 80 living in the so-called “Chinatown” areas of NYC. Together, we made “Your Day Is My Night”, a hybrid documentary on their immigration experience and their lives in the place each of them calls home. Hybrid is the keyword here, for it was my interaction with these participants that sparked me to find a completely new approach to my documentary practice. I started this project with the intention of discovering more about these people’s lives through a series of one-on-one audio interviews. Then, I turned each of these conversations into a monologue that I gave back to each person so that they could perform their own lives by both memorizing their lines and also improvising, all in a dramatic context that gave them the freedom to express themselves, and a release from the intimidation and vulnerability of not knowing what would happen next. According to the seven people in my film, this in turn gave them the liberty to play with their spoken words with whim and impetuousness, not to feel indebted to the limitations of their own historic realities. At my performers’ insistence, we ultimately moved the hybrid nature of the piece one step further. As a group, they pushed me to search for a story beyond their lives. They wanted me to make their job of articulating their experiences more interesting so I brought in one “wild card”, a Puerto Rican woman actor who would move into their shared, filmic apartment. Her arrival transformed the piece into a story that embraced each person’s immigration experience without being confined by it.
Over a two year period, we took our live performance with film to homeless shelters, museums, universities and small theaters throughout New York City. I then turned our collective work into a film. From this experience, I learned that even a more conventionally narrative film is simply a documentation of a group of people making something together. My integration of a traditional observational mode with a more theatrical engagement gave me the chance to reflect on the work I had done over 25 years earlier, as the sound recordist on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “Surname Viet Given Name Nam”. This film also challenges monolithic notions of documentary truth. Some of you saw it in this very room when Minh-ha gave the 5th Annual Les Blank lecture.
I also wanted to share something about the exhibition of “Your Day is My Night” which adds another layer to our conversation around collaboration both within the film’s production structure and its exhibition. The first evening that we presented this piece to an actual audience, there was a rather typical post-screening Q and A. There I stood with all of the participants in the film. When members of the audience asked these seven Chinese immigrants to the US how they felt about working on this rather experimental film, they all became quiet, then they whispered together and a few minutes later, one spokesperson came forward to say simply “We do what Lynne tells us to do.” There was a hush in the room. No one knew what to say. Honestly, I felt embarrassed, at a loss for what to do. I put my microphone down, walked over to the group and explained that in the US it was okay for them to say whatever they wanted publicly, to express their feelings about their experiences without any punitive repercussions. At the next screening, they each energetically took the mic from me. With the help of a translator, they articulated their own interpretation of our shared creative process. Never before had they had the opportunity to talk so freely in public, in China or in the US.
The performers in “The Washing Society” which you will see tonight gave me another kind of gift in terms of their response to and expansion of my creative practice. In 2014 and ’15, playwright Lizzie Olesker and I traipsed around New York City trying to record interviews with laundry workers. Most of them were recent immigrants who did not yet speak English or have their legal documents for living in the United States. Neither their bosses nor their husbands wanted them to talk to us. Thus, they refused to be on camera. So the two us confronted this “production obstacle” head-on. We conducted a series of informal non-recorded interviews and then we wrote a play that used the stories we’d heard as source material for a live performance and film. We called it “Every Fold Matters”. We worked for over a year with four professional actors and dancers who were open to devising a strategy for making a site specific piece that would be performed in actual laundromats around the city. In the process, we borrowed from reality in order to create a new hybrid reality.
Veraalba, one of our performers, was formally trained as a dancer but also deeply influenced by the radical choreographic gestures of feminist thinker and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Through her physical investigations of folding laundry, the piece gained an exhilarating gestural vocabulary that gave our show and then our film its rhythm and its musicality.
Jasmine, an actor in the film with traditional theater experience, embraced our whole, inclusive process so profoundly that she transformed herself from an eager, responsive actor into a generative contributor. One day during our rehearsals, she texted me with the words “I’ve been living with my grandmother Lulabelle all of my life but she never told me she had worked in a laundry from 1968 to 1998 until I started working with you all on this show.” A few days later, we were filming with Jasmine and her grandmother while she conducted the first documentary interview of her life. She asked her grandmother about her collective actions for better wages and working conditions. The openness of our process gave her the chance to find out more about the woman with whom she’d lived all her life. In addition, this intimate cross-generational exchange between two women in a family gave a new layer to our film.
Now, I would like to take you on a journey through my aesthetic, material trajectory as an experimental documentary filmmaker. I need the word experimental here because it commits me to pursuing formal investigations of the medium. This is the only way that cinema can continually tackle, confront, even tickle my curiosity about the world. What is particular to me about cinema is its embrace of sound with, alongside, underneath and beyond image. In the late 1980s, I made my first longer format documentary “Sermons and Sacred Pictures”, a 30 minute portrait of Reverend L. O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister who also shot 16mm film and collected sound recordings. At a certain point in the film, audiences are in total darkness while they hear the chatter of church congregants at a baptism in a river. At the time, this film was rejected for TV broadcast because the station producer assumed viewers would give up and turn off their televisions. Tonight I think about this film I made in my late 20s with a new perspective. I think at this moment about what theorist and poet Fred Moten calls “hesitant sociology”, and about the ways that we can integrate a propensity for abstraction into an endeavor to bring attention to a subject that might not have received its rightful place in history. Where do education and exposition end and aesthetic rigor begin? Do we necessarily lose the impact of the former when we give light to the later?
In “Which Way is East”, a diary film made in Vietnam in 1994, I begin with a series of richly colored Kodachrome brushstrokes juxtaposed with my own voice-over remembering what it was like to watch televised images of the war in the late 1960s. As a six year old child, I would lie on the living room couch with my head hanging upside down watching the screen, inverting the images, unintentionally abstracting them somehow. At that age, I just barely understood the dismal war statistics I was hearing. Within my film, I decided to make this oblique reference to the archival images of the Vietnam War rather than delivering actual illustrations from the time period. That was enough. I expected my audience to work hard to fill in this absence, a pointer to the horrifying collateral damage of the US involvement in Vietnam. Each viewer has to reckon with their own relationship to this history, as full or empty as it might be. At the time, I was cognizant of Belgian filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s refusal to provide a visual proof in the form of archival footage from the concentration camps in his 1985 “Shoah”, an episodic series on the Holocaust. At that time in history, forty years after the end of World War II, he felt that that haunting power of those images would be even more searing if his audience had to rely on their internal repository. Just in the last year, I had the chance to read historian and theorist Tina M. Campt’s new book Listening to Images in which she prompts readers to look at archival footage in a way that forces us to hear what was never recorded, to bring our imaginations into the synthesis and recognition of a partial history that needs, at long last, a place in our communal consciousness. The lacunas are mended by my, your and our active modes of participation. Both Lanzmann and I resisted the inclusion of images of horror, cautious about our own complicity by including them, assuming their implicit power that comes from absence.
Two weeks ago, I went to Berlin to shoot for a new film I am making called “Every Contact Leaves a Trace”. I spent several days talking with an 80-year old German woman about many things, including the moment when she first became aware of the concentration camp atrocities that had been committed by the Nazis, the everyday men and women who lived in her own town. She had the chance to watch archival footage of systematic killings and so much more in Alan Resnais’ 1956 documentary “Night and Fog”. It all became absolutely clear. Here was the proof. When I heard this woman speak of the potency of these images, I immediately asked myself if I had failed in my own work. I’d assumed the existence of an internal archive of the horrors of the Vietnam War. In fact, it might not have been there, at least to a younger audience. Had I failed in my own obligation to manifest a history that needed examination?
In addition to a deep involvement from my compatriots in front of and behind the camera, I have come to expect a parallel engagement with my audience. In order for a multi-layered cinematic experience to happen, there must be a “synaptic” event that transpires. Only through this internal occurrence can we register meaning. My awareness of the aperture inside the camera convinces me that we must find intimacy with light to accomplish this kind of charged flow from screen to eye. I have had the same Bolex 16mm camera since 1987. I know her well and feel as if she knows me.
As we sit here together in this room, I would like to share with you just five images from my entire career as a filmmaker. They are part of my IOU to light, the only continuous collaborator who has remained with me for all of these years.
This is an image from “Still Life with Woman and Four Objects” (1986) a film falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem. It’s a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts, interweaving history and fiction. This is the film I mentioned earlier with the framed photo of Emma Goldman.
In this image of an avocado pit just peeled and prepared for growth, you see a slant of sunshine coming through a skylight in the ceiling. This is the first time that I truly learned how to transform – via an awareness of aperture and f-stops – what the eye sees into something only the camera can witness.
In “Window Work” (2001) a woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery. I am the performer!
Here, my hermitic, domestic space is ruptured by a backlit newspaper. It glows. As cinematographer and performer, I discover how to sculpt light through silhouette.
In, “Your Day is My Night” (2013) immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval.
Here light transforms Mr. Tsui’s profile into a gently sloping landscape. He fills the frame completely and in the process conveys awareness and presence.
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, I shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of my dad. “Film About a Father Who” (2020) is my attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Here, my father has photographed three of my siblings playing in the water in the early ‘90s.
This time worn image reveals my dad’s point of view. There is no detail. Only light and color affirm a quality of compassion and observation, simply through the texture.
This is one of the last shots from “Film About a Father Who”. It’s clearly a degraded piece of old video, having lost all of its color and detail. And yet, in its starkness, this high contrast black and white image evokes a pathos. After spending 74 minutes with me in the film, viewers are able to fill in what is missing.
In each of these light-sculpted images, I explore the concept of distillation which has always been at the foundation of my work. I am an experimental filmmaker and a poet. Thus I am far more interested in the associative relationship between two things, two shots or two words than I am in their cause and effect, or their narrative symbiosis. For me, a distillation is a container for ideas and energy, a concise manifestation of a multi-valent presence that does not depend on exposition. A distillation is not a metaphor; it’s more like metonymy and synecdoche, where a part stands in for a whole, and is just enough.
I once asked a student of mine why she wanted to make documentary films. She told me that she wanted to make gifts. Just that single word helped me to better understand the ways that this kind of practice can embrace so much about life. Working with and beside reality allows us to feel relevant but also gives us the chance to share something we love with others. Through his engaged, compassionate, ingenious approach to filmmaking, Les Blank gave us approximately 50 gifts. His vision of music, food, culture, and humanity came through every frame of film.
I too have made about 50 films, web art projects, performances and installations. Like Les, each endeavor reveals my curiosity and awe for the world around me, my I.O.U to the Real.
Swerve 7 min., 2022 a film by Lynne Sachs with poetry by Paolo Javier
A market and playground in Queen, New York, a borough of New York City, become the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/ cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Paolo Javier is a poet who thinks like a filmmaker. I am a filmmaker who thinks like a poet. In Swerve, we’ve come up with our own kind of movie language, or at least a dialect that articulates how we observe the world together as two artists using images, sounds, and words. The first time I read Paolo’s sonnets in his new book O.B.B. aka The Original Brown Boy, I started to hear them in my head, cinematically. In my imagination, each of his 14 line poems became the vernacular expressions of people walking through a food market full of distinct restaurant stalls. I re-watched Wong Kar-wai’s “Happy Together” – a favorite of both of ours – and immediately thought of the Hong Kong Food Court in Elmhurst, Queens, a gathering spot for immigrant and working-class people from the neighborhood who love good cuisine. As we all know, restaurant owners and workers experienced enormous economic hardship during New York City’s pandemic. Nevertheless, the market and the playground across the street become vital locations for the shooting of my film inspired by Paolo’s exhilarating writing. Together, we invited performers and artists Emmey Catedral, ray ferriera, Jeff Preiss, Inney Prakash, and Juliana Sass to participate in a challenging yet playful endeavor. They all said “Yes!”. On a Sunday this summer, they each devour Paolo’s sonnets along with a meal from one of the market vendors. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, they speak his words as both dialogue and monologue. Like Lucretius’s ancient poem De rerum natura/ On the Nature of Things, they move through the market as Epicureans, searching for something to eat and knowing that finding the right morsel might very well deliver a new sensation. The camera records it all. “Swerve” then becomes an ars poetica/ cinematica, a seven-minute meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Made with the support of cinematographer Sean Hanley, sound recordist Mark Maloof, editor Rebecca Shapass, and production assistants Priyanka Das and Conor Williams.
Premiere: BAMCinemafest June, 2022
Screenings: Museum of the Moving Image “Queens on Screen” Chicago Underground Film Festival Camden International Film Festival Woodstock Film Festival
On the set of Swerve
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
Press:
“’SWERVE is shot in Elmhurst, Queens, a richly diverse immigrant space that saw its residents endure our country’s ground zero phase of Covid-19. SWERVE brings tremendous visibility to an Asian food court and workers otherwise invisible and ignored by the city. Some of the film’s performers have lifelong ties to the nabe. Together we all honor the resiliency of Asian American and Pacific Islanders, underscoring the vitality of poetry and cinema in these fraught times’” – interview with poet Paolo Javier in QNS/ Queens News Service by Tammy Scileppi QNS/ Queens News Service: “‘SWERVE’: NYC performers wax poetic in a new film shot in Elmhurst” byTammy Scileppi , June 23, 2022
“Sachs and Javier make a meal out of zipping around table to table where a pandemic may have kept some customers away, but as people begin feeling their way back into the world, the sensations of reconnecting are conveyed in phrases that may come across as no sequiturs individually but coalesce into something greater as the feeling behind intonations and delivery transcend the statements themselves.” – Stephen Saito, Moveable Fest Moveable Fest: Interview: BAM CinemaFest 2022 on Crafting a Clever Turn of Phrase with “Swerve” by Stephen Saito, June 24, 2-22
Please join us on Sunday, October 17, @ 2pm ET to celebrate the publication of O.B.B. a.k.a. The Original Brown Boy, by Paolo Javier, and the debut of Lynne Sachs’ short video, Swerve, which adapts poems from the book. The reading will take place at the Moore Homestead Playground in Elmhurst, Queens—a neighborhood park and location of Sachs’ video—and Javier will be joined by Stephen Motika, Aldrin Valdez, and the cast and crew members of Swerve—Emmy Catedral, ray ferreira, Inney Prakash, Jeff Preiss, Juliana Sass, and Priyanka Das. Swerve will be playing as a video installation inside of HK Food Court, located across from the park at 8202 45th Avenue, from 12 noon to 6 pm.
This event is generously funded by NYFA’s City Artist Corps Grant and co-sponsored by the Queens Museum. Free and open to the public! The Moore Homestead Playground is located on the corner of Broadway, 45th Ave, & 82nd St, and off the Elmhurst Ave R train and Q60 and Q32 bus stops.
We are delighted to present a program of films by experimental documentarian Lynne Sachs, who has been prolifically creating works for cinema for four decades. Her non-fiction films, represented here in 11 works of varying lengths, powerfully evokes the curiosity and richness of a life lived through art.
Living in Brooklyn, New York, Sachs is part of a community of active experimental and documentary filmmakers and has long eschewed conventional forms of making movies. Her work, perhaps inevitably, defies easy classification. Instead, it is best understood collectively as a sprawling adventure playground, stretching across continents and blending influences across the borders of distinct art forms. Our focus maps a path through some of the ideas and forms that recur time and again in Sachs’ cinema.
The marks of war that linger in the background of a society—from Vietnam to the Middle East—are an ever-present specter in her long format films, as are the transformative effects of time on members of one’s own family. Feminism in all its forms is an animating subject and drive for Sachs, from the early formal experimentations with bodies and spaces in Drawn and Quartered to the energy of the Women’s March fragment And Then We Marched to the love, artistic kinship, and solidarity between female friends and comrades evident in Carolee, Barbara & Guvnor or, more implicitly, A Month of Single Frames.
Her latest feature length work, Film About a Father Who, whose title hints at Yvonne Rainer, provides a perfect entry-point into her style. This film is not only a torn and disrupted family album, but is also a document of the development of the evolution Sachs’ filmmaking over the years. A feature-length polyphonic portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., taken over many years, it ultimately suggests that the man himself is unknowable, that his mysteries are too vast to be captured by a camera. Through reckoning with this fact, Sachs seems to suggest, the filmmaker is able to unearth other truths, about herself and about her family as a whole. A crucial early work, marking the end of a distinct period in Sachs’ work, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, is available to watch for free.
Cintía Gil: Hello everyone. Hi Lynne, how are you?
Lynne Sachs: I’m Good.
Cintía Gil: Welcome to the DA Films. I’m really happy to be here with Lynne Sachs, whose work I absolutely love. And thank you. Yeah, so this is a conversation coming from the program put together at the films platform called Tender Non-Fictions, with 11 films from different moments in your life as a filmmaker, and your life too, because it’s kind of together. And I thought about doing your conversation, not so much film by film, but traveling a little bit through the films and through also your thoughts about film making, and film, and how filmmaking connects, is a way of building spaces or building places for connection between different dimensions of our lives.
Cintía Gil: And I wanted to start by an image that very much touched me, from States of UnBelonging. The beginning, the very beginning of the film, when we are in your living room, and you are reading, so you are calling your correspondents in Israel and you are reading the newspaper. So you are folding the newspaper with the news about the killing of a woman and her two children, and you are folding this newspaper, and then you just juxtapose this image of folding a map, so folding a newspaper and folding a map, and that’s juxtaposition touched me very much, because somehow, for me, it resonated with a lot of your filmmaking practice. And you say, “On my map.” And then you start talking about this territory where your film will unfold, and it spoke to me about your films because you somehow are juxtaposing geography and history and language with all the metaphorical questions that are iterations of a map, territory, and lands, and place, and culture, and everything else.
Cintía Gil: And so, I realized that image, for me at least, it kind of speaks of a shiY that your films do, which is going from ideas like territory into ideas of place, body, and memory and time, so going away from norms and conventions about where people exist and actually coming to something more radically difficult to systematize, which is what is a place? How do we build place? How do we see body? What do we feel? And where does memory… How does memory unfold? And how time is a space for that.
Cintía Gil: And I saw this in this film, where you are talking about Israel and Palestine and your relation to it, but also in Which Way is East, for example, the relation between Vietnam and USA history, and your and your sister’s connection, the space of a laundromat in The Washing Society, in the story, the beautiful story of the bra in House of Science, where you are talking about your first experience with the bra, and suddenly your body becomes
Lynne Sachs: territory
Cintía Gil: Territory, exactly.
Lynne Sachs: You’re the first person to make that connection.
Cintía Gil: Yeah, because, for me, it was so striking, this… So yeah, I just wanted to launch the [inaudible 00:04:20].
Lynne Sachs: Thank you for being so observant. Actually, I think I’ll start with the name of the program at DA Films, Tender Non-Fictions, because the curator programmer, Christopher Smalls, said… Small, he’s suggested that title right off, and I was very excited by it, because Tender Buttons is the name of a book that Gertrude Stein had written, and I love her work and I love her radical disruptions of language, but then I actually mentioned it to my brother, and he said, “Well, tender, is that a problem? Does it make it look like you’re soft on these issues?” And so, I just listened to him and I thought, “Maybe that’s the wrong direction, maybe I need to have more edge, maybe… I want to make it clear that I’m trying to break all the paradigms around form and documentary and working with reality.” But it just kept sticking in my head and I kept thinking about it.
And then, of course, the war in Ukraine started, and Christopher and I continued our dialogue, and I started to think about, well, maybe tender is actually a good place to start, is a place of awe, because you’re tender with things you’re not trying to destroy them, you’re aware of them and it’s tactile. So then that leads me to that question that, or the observation that you made about that image in the beginning of States of UnBelonging, which is an interesting place that you started, because States of UnBelonging looks at Israel/Palestine, and it tries to come at it through the kind of a quasi-portrait of a filmmaker who was also a peace activist, who lived… Her name was Revital Ohayon, and she lived in a kibbutz, very near the West Bank, and was trying to work with families and schools and her children, with other Palestinian children, and unfortunately she was killed in a terrorist act, but she certainly had tried.
And the thing is that the war there is so… You were talking about place, the war there is about, not just place, but the substance of dirt, of the earth, of this thing, this idea that you could claim earth from… Just because your ancestors claimed it. And we know that the world is constantly changing and you can’t own something just because your great, great, great, great grandparents did, and that doesn’t give you a claim to it, and that’s some of what’s going on in Russia and Ukraine.
And so, it’s very charged to look at place in that way, as if place is a static thing, so you brought up this two different, call it tropes, the trope of land, and then the trope as designated by a map, like a map as a signifier for land, but another signifier is also the map of communication, which is a letter, and another signifier wrapped up in there, because I’m speaking through a letter, it’s epistolary in that way, but another conceit is the idea of the newspaper, which is a way to venture into another place but not to have that, not to be present in it, so I think that was really interesting.
But you also compared it to a film, I would never have thought of comparing, so it’s just like… I’m so enthralled by your perceptive approach to filmmaking, and that was that, in 1991, I made a film called The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, and at that point, I was trying to connect with being a young girl, and the very first time that you wear a bra, and the feeling that you have isn’t like, “Hey, great, I’ve got breasts.” I felt like, “How dare you, world, tell me that I have to entrap these things, that I have to tame them, or that I have to claim them.” Lynne Sachs: And actually, what happened was, I was in the gymnasium at my middle school and I was wearing a super tight shirt. I was at an all girls school, it wasn’t like I was trying to show off my breast to the boys, but some of the girls said that… The girls told me I needed to wear a bra, and I was like, “Oh.” So then it turned my body into territory, and it wasn’t from my mother, and it wasn’t. And from the teachers, it was from the other girls, then they didn’t like it that I didn’t wear a bra.
Cintía Gil: And you, in that film, you also talk about this, sometimes conflict between the body of the body and the body of the mind, and this struggle to live together and to, again, to build some sort of place or possibility of existence where both can come together.
Lynne Sachs: And I think this is actually fairly common for a lot of girls, and maybe boys, but I can’t make a claim to it, before we want to be sexual beings, we want to be invisible. We don’t want… It’s not just that we transition without thinking, we actually like not being objectified, and then when we become objectified and we become territory, whether it’s from other girls or boys or men, then we become hyper aware of our bodies. So hyper… And then later in my life, much later, I did become more comfortable with my body, and I think probably not till I was in my early thirties and I had children, and it was the first time that I didn’t feel all caught up in the parameters that had been offered.
Cintía Gil: Established.
Lynne Sachs: Yeah.
Cintía Gil: Which you talked about, this idea that the world’s changes and things are not fixed or static. And when I see your films, one thing that I find quite beautiful, is the way you seem to be quite interested in movement and fluidity, and in transition in your images production, even in the way you edit and the way you use your camera and the movements of the camera.
I was very much trying to see… So for example, just an example, it happens oYen, all the time, but for example, in States of UnBelonging, when you’re talking to Revital’s mother, and your camera goes and kind of follows their hands, or in the Which Way is Easts also, in A Month of Single Frames, you have this absolute interest for fluidity and movement and transitions, and I wanted to hear you a little bit about that, about this, because the impression that it gives me is that it’s a very intelligent way of giving space for invisibility, for what is invisible, which in your cinema, happens a lot, because you oYen have immigrants, children, women, filmmakers, who are not on the spotlight. So you are very oYen talking from spaces that are traditionally of invisibility, and I feel that there’s an absolute coherence or connection between that and the way you film, the way you produce your images, and I wanted a little bit to hear you about this, about movement.
Lynne Sachs: Again, Cintía, just very, very interesting correlations between what we sometimes call socioeconomic issues and issues around artistic form, aesthetics, and I think that is the most interesting challenge that we have when we’re working with reality, but with reality doesn’t just mean about reality, so the reality of the making.
I think that film can document how they are made. In a way, the how gives you the opportunity to think about who’s making it and who’s supporting it, and who’s curious to find out more about the issue. So for example, you said something about the fluidity of my camera, and traditionally, we’d say that you don’t want to see a camera shake, that’s a sign of being an amateur, and if you’re an amateur, you didn’t bring a tripod, you’re not working with a professional cinematographer.
But I actually think that a shaking camera is a breathing camera. If we could just whip out, erase that word “shake”, which is not bad, because it has a tentativeness, and talk about the breadth of the maker, then we know that it’s an embodied camera and that the camera is alive and thinking.
You were talking about a shot in States of UnBelonging, where I’m interviewing a woman whose daughter had been murdered, so I felt very vulnerable myself, as a mother, as another woman, I felt sympathetic. So my camera isn’t just frozen, the camera is reflecting my insecurities and pain, let’s call it empathy.
So I didn’t, maybe, know that I was doing that at the time, but there is a kind of transparency that I think is fine. I was making a film called Investigation of a Flame, which is about civil disobedience. It’s a film really about anti-war activists, and I was interviewing one of these very wonderful, heroic anti-war activists, and as he’s talking and offering a parable to me, I let the camera look out the window, just over there, and people have asked me about it. And I said, “Sometimes when you’re listening to… You, meaning the person behind the camera or a person in a conversation, sometimes the most intense form of concentration is to allow your eyes to wander. And that’s what taking the camera, literally, off the tripod, or letting the camera be an extension of the body, is actually considered a very atypical thing. People think that keeping your horizon line horizontal is a sign of confidence, but why do we always have to show confidence?
As you and I know, that one of the hallmarks of the essay film is doubt, so if you can have the form register that in a nonverbal way, and in an articulated way, then I think that’s super interesting, and I do try to play with that. I have a conceit you’ve probably seen in a lot of my films, where I let another person walk in circles around me, and I think that’s… I’ve done it a lot, I’ve done it with my mother, my daughter, my father. It’s something I love to do because it makes me get dizzy, not just because you see the world passing by, but I lose my stability, and that’s a form of exploration of what it is to be lost in the process, and then you find yourself, hopefully.
Cintía Gil: You were mentioning the film that is in the program, Same Stream Twice, which is with your daughter, Maya, running around you, and actually, when I was thinking about this, I was thinking about… I had noted a quote from the synopsis, where you talk about something you can’t grasp, but can feel, and how this camera of yours brings the possibility of that. And now you were talking about doubts in image making, in filmmaking, and the political aspect of it, I thought that maybe tenderness comes from that, and I also thought about, again, in House of Science, when you say in the end, incendiary, but not arson, so that’s possibility- … but not burning everything all at once. It’s maybe the tenderness question that’s is absolutely embodied in your images.
But going again to how you assemble films together, another thing that I find really unique, is the way you work in between the closest intimacy to the widest perspective, and you do that a lot through the relation between image and sounds and voiceover.
And first, one thing that I find really interesting, is that your voiceover, or whoever’s voiceover, is never a statement, it’s always full of suggestions, descriptions, unfinished sentences, possibilities, but never saying what things are or what we are supposed to think about things.
And the second thing is how voice in your films always comes together with other kinds of sounds, so how you sound in a really precise way. And so, I would like to listen to you a little bit about how you build this relation between images and sounds, because it’s absolutely precise, there’s an absolute rigor to it, which doesn’t mean there isn’t doubt and there isn’t experimentation in it, but it’s so very much creating movements within the moment.
Lynne Sachs: I’ll say a couple things about… So I do use what you call voiceover or narration, but I like to play around with, for example, a word that these days people use all the time, but it hasn’t been historically so considered, and that is the pronouns.
There’s a couple of things that I think that are anathema that I do, but I’m committed to them. For example, I like to play around with the English language, with the word “you”, so you can also be similar to one, and you can also be a way to invite people in and the listener, the audience isn’t told that you should, I don’t do that, but I say, you might think this, and you might wonder how to relate to members of your family, but I do. I don’t always center myself, and so, to play around with language, that way has become very much a part of my practice.
Another thing that I’ve done with voiceover and around pronouns, is to not be committed to traditional exposition. As in, you can’t say he, she, without knowing who he, she is, identifying it, explaining it. So in literature, in novels, they’ve been doing that for hundreds of years, you don’t always know where you stand, but film had this commitment to clarity, and the thing is that if you believe that clarity takes the mystery, and that eventually you will arrive at some kind of insight, maybe not like… The world is never absolutely clear, but insight is where you really want to go. So I try to play with that.
Another thing I try to do with… Or two more things I’ll say about language and about the language that I’ve written or spoken, and that’s part of the film, is that I like to cut what… I don’t call a dialogue, but you know that the convention is to call anything with voiceover, or people talking, dialogue, and it’s cut like prose. It’s cut a period at the end of the sentence, or if someone speaks and then it’s the end of a thought, it’s where the period is, but I like to cut the language the way I would write poetry. So the thing, like a little bit like Robert Altman, things are overlapped, and you think about the ways that language, like information and communication and words, are used simultaneously.
Thus, you can cut the voice in the same way that you cut the sounds of birds or the sounds of a door closing, and you can play with it, and you can, like the way in poetry lines, in poetry, it’s vital to know where the line breaks are, that’s how sound should edit. It should be rhythmic, it should be in relationship to the image. So there are line breaks. So if you look at a traditional screenplay, there’s no line breaks, it just goes from one side of the page to the other, but if it were full of line breaks, then it would be more engaged with the whole fabric of the sound. So those are different ways of working, that I try to like bring in play, but with an intention.
Cintía Gil: Expanding from language, because that’s also the question of the languages, which you also use a lot and you play a lot with.
Lynne Sachs: Super important, yeah.
Cintía Gil: And not only language, but translation. We had a conversation before about this, your obsession with translation and how, for example, in Your Day is My Night, where you have the different languages coming to play, or in the Washing Society, or actually, in all of your cinema, somehow in Which Way is East, et cetera, in all of your cinema, there’s this question of the breaking of the language. And I actually saw a conversation between you and a lot of people in World Records, where you were talking about English, and I wanted to hear you a little bit about that, because I feel that language itself, as attached to culture and to memory and history, is something that is a material for you.
Lynne Sachs: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I will, just to mention, that about three years ago, I brought together a group of experimental documentary filmmakers, which included Jean Finley, Sky Hopinka, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Christopher Harris, all artists whose work I just adored, and all artists who, in some way or another, are trying to challenge the dominance of English. Even if they didn’t say, that’s what I’m doing, I could see it in their work so clearly. And now, three years later, English is even more dominant. And how can we, yes, have English as a language of flow between cultures, because so many people know it as their second language, but how can we also subvert it?
And so, I’ve tried to do that, for example, with Your Day is My Night. The whole film is pretty much in Mandarin and Cantonese, and I have English subtitles, but they’re not just subtitles, I don’t even like the word subtitle, and I’m scared of the word subtitle because it’s not sub. The minute you bring in English subtitles, people start, pretty much stop listening. They stop hearing Chinese, they stop being aware of the textures, the tenderness, let’s say, of another language that isn’t theirs, they completely separate from it.
So I tried to, in that film, I tried to use the text on the screen and across the screen in various ways, and that’s one of the reasons why we actually, on DA Films, we have a separate link for the Your Day is My Night with English subtitles, and another one with Spanish subtitles, because you couldn’t just use a program or an app to get the titles for that film, they have to really move with the recognition of Spanish in relationship to the image, or English.
So, but I’ve had, in other films of mine, in The Washing Society, we have a whole section of the film where you hear Chinese and you hear Spanish, and you do not have translations, or just a little bit of translation, and therefore, there’s a certain moment of alienation for a viewer who doesn’t know those languages, and I think that’s really important. I think anybody who speaks English as a first language needs to learn what it is to be an outsider. And since that’s like a form content interplay in The Washing Society, because most of the people, at least in the United States, who are washing clothes as a service, are also going through the alienation of being an immigrant.
So I wanted to switch the power. I worked with a playwright on that film, Lizzie Olesker, she’s just been a real inspiration to me, and together we tried to recognize the oral qualities of Spanish and Chinese, in this case, and to like let them enter the visceral physicality for a listener, that not just information.
Pretty much all my films, I have resisted that term, like documentary is an educational experience, but it is, in some ways there’s something wrong with that word. If you think that it’s an education in becoming aware and becoming how you are in society, that’s actually one of the biggest intentions of documentary film, is to have people leave the theater or the laptop, or whatever, leave it more aware, not just of Vietnam, or not what it is to be living in a shift bed apartment in a New York City’s Chinatown, but what it is in a more conceptual way, what it is to be an insider and an outsider, to be a resident and a new visitor, what it is to be in that transitional place. If you can leave a film with that, you’re actually, probably, a little bit more mature or a little bit more observant.
Cintía Gil: And also, in that effort of finding a common language or finding a way to speak to another person whose main language is not English, that vulnerability also allows for some other layers of existence come to life, memories, or fears, or it’s for example, I’m thinking about the moment in Which Way is Easts, when suddenly, memories of work come in a dialogue between you or Dana with someone else, and how that happens, never in a programmatic way, but always from this vulnerability position, it comes from this efforts to be somewhere else, to be there, and which is really beautiful, and I think it’s a quite interesting aspect of your filmmaking, which is this idea of, or possibility of a testimony, the possibility of a testimony, which is not a report or a declaration, or a narrative of events, but more a testimony thought of as a transmission, it’s more as a transmission.
And I thought, for example, in the way, precisely you worked in Your Day is My Night and The Washing Society, which is quite even a more nuanced way of working with testimony, because you worked those monologues with the people. So there was a process to that, but it comes from before, and I feel that there’s always this quality of transmission in words, in your films, but I would like to hear you a little bit about that process in these two films.
Lynne Sachs: Actually, I’ll start with Which Way is East, and there was something I learned in that film about translation, and maybe about test testimony. And I’ll try to explore that, but in Which Way is East, I learned something about language and about culture. So there’s always been an expectation around documentary film, that even if we’ve never been somewhere, if we see a movie about that person, I mean about that place, then we have the next best thing. Next best thing to travel is to watch a documentary film. Yeah, but the thing is that that film only gives you, really, the person who made its experience, and it has a kind of… And it should have a clearly prescribed point of view, let’s say.
But when I was making Which Way is East, I learned that when you’re a foreigner in another country, I was an American in Vietnam. Yes, I didn’t speak the language and my sister did, but there’s another thing I didn’t speak, which has to do with understanding. I didn’t understand the culture enough, for example, to understand the parables. So a parable is actually a far, maybe, richer and more comprehensive mode of understanding a whole way, a psyche, of another country.
Again, during the war right now, we are all trying to understand the psyche that could make this happen, what is it? And it has to do with the mythology, and in Which Way is East, I decided I wanted to listen to every single parable I could possibly find, related to animals and Vietnam, because parables often do work with animals. And for example, we have a parable here that says, a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. If you have it already, don’t try to do anything that’s going to make you look like you might be able to get the two birds in the tree, like hunt them, but probably not, so just keep what you have.
So there was a parable in Vietnam, which said, a frog that sits at the boPom of a pot thinks that the whole world is only as big as the lid of the pot. So it’s sort of solipsistic, it says nothing exists beyond where I am, but it was such a wise way of thinking about a kind of xenophobia that we can have, that we don’t care what is beyond our grasp, and I feel like I’ve been exploring that ever since.
I explored it in States of UnBelongong, I made a whole body of work, actually, over a decade, which I called, I am Not a War Photographer, and it included… It’s really started with Which Way is East, and it included States of UnBelongong, so they both contemplate what it is to be within something and what it is to observe from afar, and not really to understand and complete… Not to claim complete knowledge.
So many times, Cintía, when I make a film in another country, which I haven’t done as much lately, because I think, also it’s our obligation as documentary makers to explore where we are at home, but so many times people would presume that I was an expert of anything that I… There’s always that assumption, and I think that it’s also our jobs as makers of this kind of work, to be really transparent that what people are have access to is our search, not really our expertise.
Cintía Gil: And can you a little bit about the way you built the monologues in Your Day is My Night?
Lynne Sachs: Sure. Yeah, so-
Cintía Gil: In The Washing Society, how you built the text, because it’s quite a beautiful…
Lynne Sachs: So
Cintía Gil: Results, and I mean, you can see…
Lynne Sachs: They both come out of failure, for sure, and if there’s anything I’ve learned aYer quite… Three decades, three and a half decades of making documentary films, that every single project, halfway through, you have a point where you think you cannot go on, you cannot, because this door wasn’t opened or because this person dropped out. So part of the failure of Your Day is my Night, was that I thought I wanted to make a film about people who lived in what are called hotbed houses. That’s a colloquial to that people hardly use anymore, or shiY bed houses, or shared apartments, in which someone might live in a room or on a bed during the day, sleep there during the day, then they go to work at night and somebody else would come in.
And I learned about, that that was a very typical mode of managing, particularly in New York City, but I think worldwide, when you’re a refugee, an immigrant, a person, particularly in an urban environment, which you don’t of have access to the whole infrastructure, sometimes you just have to make do. And so, an apartment doesn’t just mean one family, it could be multiple families. So I was interested in how that would be manifested in New York City, but I really couldn’t get, we say here, my foot in the door, like the proverbial foot in the door. I wasn’t able to get access to people who lived that way, and I felt a little uncomfortable about it. I wasn’t sure that that was my role or that I should be doing that.
So I thought I would make a fiction film, my first, and I went to a Chinese theater troupe and I asked them if they would work with me, and they said, “Sure, show us the script.” But I didn’t really have the script. I wanted to build on observations and the kind of work that I’m used to doing.
So that failed, and so I had already two failures under my belt, the failure of getting the foot in the door as a documentary maker and the failure of writing a fiction film, and so I… A man told me, he kind of fancied himself the mayor of Chinatown. He said, “Why don’t you go to that senior, older people community center?” And I went there and I said to them that I was looking for people to be in a film, and I happened to use the word audition, because that’s the word people use for trying out to be in a narrative film, and 40 people auditioned to be in the film, and then seven of them, I thought were extremely charismatic, and they had all actually lived in shift bed apartments.
And so, instead of auditioning them, I actually did what I’m very comfortable doing, which was interviewing them. And then, so I had these fairly long interviews in Chinese, which had to be translated, and then I worked with a playwright and we turned them into these distillation, based on their lives.
And so it became a new way of working for me, because in documentary, there’s a, sometimes a kind of trickiness that goes on, as in, I want to know about your life, but I’m going to ask about it in a new way so you don’t really feel comfortable, like you lose your confidence, and you’re going to say something to me that is very, very, very raw, and that’s going to work perfectly with my movie because the rawer, the better. I didn’t want to do that with these people who were in their sixties to eighties at all, and I’ve never been… Maybe I was trying to be tender or something.
So, because it was their life story, and it was based on experiences they had, then when I gave them back a distillation of what they had already told me, I was perfectly happy with their improvising or forgetting their lines. And it became more about performance, but performing the real, and we had the best time and we got to do things like, take one, take two, take three, which usually, documentary doesn’t get to do, because that’s considered manipulative and that.
So we worked that way in Your Day is My Night, and then in The Washing Society, there were issues around trying to do your conventional interview with immigrants in the US. People were scared of cameras, and even the word it’s funny, like we say, it is a documentary, but we also use the word undocumented. A person is undocumented because they aren’t here legally.
It’s almost… They’re synonyms. To be undocumented is to be an illegal, here illegally. So when we said we’re making a documentary, it was like, “No, we can’t do that. We can’t do that.” So what we did was we just talked to laundry workers for about a year, and then we wrote a play, and then we worked with actors, and then we ended up finding a few laundry workers who were here legally, and so they were in…
So it became a whole hybrid mix, and those are ways of working that I’m still excited about. I’m still like… Well, another thing that happened in The Washing Society, was that one of the actors, her name is Jasmine, ended up becoming one of the, call it, almost like a producer, because she decides, or not… She’s acting in a film about laundry workers, and then her grandmother, with whom she lives, says to her, “Hey Jasmine, I worked in a laundry for 30 years, but you didn’t know it.” She interviews her grandmother, who was very involved in a union, and fought for her own… Her raise. She fought for better working conditions, and probably, her grandmother would never have told her that story, so all of these things come out of failure, or missteps, or obstacles that ended up becoming opportunities.
Cintía Gil: No, it’s quite beautiful because we are slowly feeling the notion of tenderness with a lot of political power. You’ve just built, like explained, or at least explored also the political implications of sticking to the word documentary sometimes, and sticking to the norms and orthodoxies of what is supposedly a documentary, that many times just serves nothing in certain situations. And so it’s quite beautiful how, if we open that notion, it’s much more about this negotiation or fluidity between us and the world, and what the world brings.
Lynne Sachs: I think at the very… It’s most fundamental… Most, as documentary makers, our jobs are to encourage our viewers to question the truth. If we do nothing else but that, I think we’ve succeeded. Because that is the only way to translate or to… An experience that’s very closed, which is the watching of a film. How do we create a porous presence for our viewers, that goes beyond the theater? Not so much to say, “Oh, well, I inspired them to become an activist.” Maybe, maybe not, but if you’re already an activist in the most fundamental ways, if you question what the reality that you see, who’s controlling it, not just information, but who’s telling you what is the right thing to do, what is the wrong thing to do, and who’s doing it, and why, and if you question that, then you’re already a better human being, I guess. But of course, we know that when that happens, you become very sad. You have no confidence in anything anymore.
Cintía Gil: Well, I wanted to bring to that, related to that, the text I was reading, by you, about Gunvor Nelson and her editing lessons, because there’s a moment when you say, “Meaning is discovered outside of…” No sorry, it was me who wrote, aYer your text, I was writing a note saying, that you discover meaning when you let go of continuity, and of the narrative, and of plot, you… I think it was in the moment where you were talking about her, telling you to look at the outtakes, and look at what’s what’s outside of what… You should always look at the outsides before closing a film.
Lynne Sachs: And actually, thank you for reminding me that she told me that, because I didn’t know why I believe in that. And when I was making Film About a Father Who, that was critical, because the thing is, with what’s beautiful and what are the… People are working on their computers, and they have these folders, and they’re called NG, like No Good. You should go back and look at those, because those are the ones where the camera’s shaking, those are the ones where some kind of wild energy happen, those are the ones where you thought someone said, turn it off, but you didn’t. And things get messy, and when things get messy, they get interesting. And so, she did tell me to go back and look at the outtakes, because the first response, usually, of an artist is, what is pretty? And when did I do a good job? And the good job means that I measured my F stops correctly, and the good job is that there was no traffic going on when the sound was running, and so you tend to judge things in the most insubstantive registers, you’re saying, “Oh, this looks good, and this is accomplished.” And the other material is more revealing.
And so, when I was working on Film About a Father Who, I made myself go back and look at videotapes that had been shot on VHS in the 1980s and stored in garages, and I thought they were ruined, and I was just about to throw them away. And then I come across an image, for example, of my dad, where all the color had disappeared, and it was just his silhouette and some lines going through, but you could still tell it was a man walking away. And I thought, that’s the perfect image for the last shot of the film, because people don’t mean detail, and furthermore, these days, with the digital cameras, we’ve got a plethora of detail.
We know what people’s faces look like, what we need is something that’s more ephemeral and suggestive, and therefore, if it’s at the end of the film and I had totally dismissed it, I should say, if it’s the end of the film, the audience can fill in the detail in their heads. And that means they’re involved, that means they did the work, that means they spent 74 minutes with me and with us.
And so, those are the kind of images that Gunvor would’ve said, you need, and I would’ve, in the 1980s, when she was my teacher, I would’ve said, “Oh, that’s embarrassing. That’s terrible.” And she taught me a lot, she taught me that dead flowers are prettier than living ones, because you have stores selling the pretty ones, the living ones with color, but nobody’s selling dead flowers, so they’re much more thought provoking.
Cintía Gil: Yeah, and it’s interesting when you link that to what you were talking about, that the minimum, or what a documentary filmmaker does, is to make people question truth. And at the same time you talk about building meaning by… In bringing to the film, this sort of failures, or moments of not… Unpreiness, it’s quite beautiful, which brings me to the next question, which is the role children in your films, because it’s one of the most risky things to do in film, is to work with kids, and you do it.
Lynne Sachs: And dogs, and I don’t do dogs.
Cintía Gil: Yeah, true. But it’s quite beautiful because it’s, I think most of the time I meet with girls, young children, girls, but children, in general, are all through your filmography. Not all the films, but they are there very much present, and it’s beautiful because they bring a sense of transition, again, this sense of unstable transition, but also this sensation of extreme perception. It’s like they come… It’s very much linked to play and you film them in a very, how to say, very grounded way, in the sense that you portray them in some sort of mystic way, or whatever. Cintía Gil: But at the same time, they bring this capacity for extreme perception. For example, the young girl who talks to you in And Then We Marched, or the children in States of UnBelonging, the children, for example, the film that is not in the program, but the film you did with your kids, with the, we need the pool play.
So there’s always this weird capacity of children in your films, that through play, they reveal something else, and they add something to the film. So I wanted to know, because you started that really early in your filmmaking, to do things with kids.
Lynne Sachs: Well, yeah, I can say that one of my beliefs, when I decided that I would have children, and also I decided I would be an artist, it’s not that I said right away, I’m not going to separate them, but there is a, call it a paradigm, for male artists, that there’s a woman at home, taking care of the kids. So Paul Gauguin can go to Tahiti, and other filmmakers we know of, like Francis Ford Coppola, he could be shooting, what’s the movie he shot in… Apocalypse Now, and his wife is along, making a movie about him, and their kids are there too, but she’s there to support him. And my husband is a filmmaker as well, but we support each other, and I just didn’t want to separate myself, as in, I have a person taking care of the… They were there.
So there’s an expression in English, where people say out of the mouths of babes, like as I never thought children have more insight. I was just interested in the evolution of insight, I was interested in trying to connect with something like the novel and book, The Tin Drum. You go back to these movies that talk about this haunting quality. One movie that had a very big effect on me was The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick, and believe it or not, the person who pushed me to see what an incredible film that is, it’s not a child who’s speaking, but it’s a young man who’s a soldier.
And with Stan Brakhage, and those are not the kind of movies that Stan, the great American experimental filmmaker, Stan Brakhage didn’t make kind of movies with voiceovers and story, but he loved that movie, he loved the rawness of it, and I think there’s a way that children offer that and they don’t censor themselves. And I also like that they’re willing to make mistakes, or they make mistakes.
And in The House of Science, a breakthrough moment for me was that I asked a friend of mine if I could film her daughter, tap dancing. And so when I went to their house, she kept running away from me, it’s in the film, so she’s supposed to be on a pedestal, tap dancing, and she doesn’t obey us at all. And she’s wearing this Batman costume, not a costume with a little tutu or anything, and she runs away.
And then there’s another scene in that film, where I was working with a girl and I had her read the most insidious anthropological text by a man named Cesare Lomroso, and she makes all these, which you would call mistakes, but they become very subversive and radical and smart, at least from my perspective. And both girls saw the film a few years later, and they said to me, “Oh, that it’s so embarrassing. I can’t believe I wasn’t reading well.” Or, “I can’t believe I wasn’t compliant.” But I’ve never been interested in compliancy. I, once when my girls were younger, I met a woman who was bragging to me because her… She said, “My daughter is in all these commercials for The Gap.” It was for the… Because she’s so compliant. And I think, “I’m glad my kids were not invited to be in commercials.” But I’ve been surprised by children ever since. And then,
And Then We Marched, I had filmed the Women’s March in 2017, when we were all devastated by the new president of the United States, but I decided that if I were to listen to another adult, I’d probably hear what I expected to hear, and I wanted to hear from a child. So it was a great excuse to knock on the door of my neighbors, I hardly knew, and to talk to this little girl. And she was so excited by things like yelling on the street, and she was so excited, she was so sad that they’d lost their sign. And there was something so clear and not hype. It was super smart, but it wasn’t trying to be too intellectual. It was just there, like just observant, and I thought that was so much of a gift. I’m really interested in all the gifts that happen in filmmaking. You do give to your audience, but the people who are willing to be in your movies are also giving of themselves.
Cintía Gil: Now, as the last question, I wanted to build a little bit, some sort of leap between the oldest film in this program, which is Drawn and Quartered.
Lynne Sachs: Ah, yeah.
Cintía Gil: And the film of About the Father Who, because it’s quite… They are completely different, they come from completely different moments, but it’s quite beautiful, because in Drawn and Quartered, you obviously were experimenting and looking at intimacy and closure and body in the most… It’s beautiful, because actually, in your films, and now I’m thinking about the way that film finishes, there’s this link to the window, there is the closure, but then there’s the window, there’s the outside, and there’s the world also. But then in Film About the Father Who, it’s like you are taking a trip in the… We never know where it’ll take you, we as a viewer, we never know where we will go, and it’s quite beautiful because you give it… It’s like a film where I feel somehow that you, as a filmmaker, are more vulnerable than in that first film that we see.
Lynne Sachs: I think that Christopher Small’s curating is really brilliant to have included these two films for exactly that reason. So there’s a word that we use a lot in talking about how our culture works. We talk about exposure, like, do you want exposure? Do you feel exposed? Are you exposing yourself? Is someone exposing you? It’s both an active… Like a transient and… A transitive intransitive… You use that word in many, many different valances. And so, when I was making Drawn Quartered, where I take all my clothes off, my boyfriend takes his clothes off, I had read Laura Mulvey’s essay at the time, which was only probably 12 years in… It was part of a cannon of feminism, but not everybody had read it, but I had read it, and I was aware of her ideas around the male gaze.
So I wanted to try to subvert that without erasing it. So I gave the camera to my boyfriend, he shot me nude, I shot him nude, and it’s all in the film, and it’s only four minutes, and I called it Drawn and Quartered, which is an expression, it’s from like the medieval period. To be drawn and quartered is to be pulled, like punished, it’s a punitive action when you’re pulled into four parts, and the film actually exists in four parts, so horses pulled you into fragments and you’re killed. So I felt really exposed in that film, but I’d done it to myself, and I actually edit my face out. I thought, “Okay, I’ll show my body, but I won’t show my face.” And then I thought, “That is very weak. If I’m going to claim my in my film, I’ll put it back in.”
So this was before computer editing, so you see the splices. It’s destructive editing, like am I in, out, in out? Anyway, I ended up in the film, and so, audiences can see that very exposed film. It’s got nudity, so I don’t know if DA Films has to put, click a buPon, like, “This is awkward, kid.” No- … nudity than you might see in the Louvre, with a Rodin or a Michelangelo, but it’s nudity, and not as many muscles.
And then I make a film about my relationship with my dad and my other family members, and it’s really very exposed, but there’s no nudity. It’s very, it’s vulnerable in another way, and much scarier. I was scared in 1986, but I was terrified in 2000, in 2020, excuse me, 2020, which is when I finished that film, because I felt like I’d kind of been making up who I was all along, and I felt vulnerable because I both had this very compassionate appreciation for my dad, as well as rage, and to show both, either one of those, made this into a very personal film, but I wanted the film to give people a chance to connect to their own families and maybe find some court, like relationship that seemed familiar to them. But all of it came because I actually didn’t put any filters on. I kept thinking I should, and then I didn’t, and I really didn’t think many people would ever see this film. It never occurred to me that it would stream, ever. It never occurred to me that I would really travel much with it. I just needed to get it out of my system, so the exposure part of it was a relief, like, “Okay, now I’m just being honest.”
Cintía Gil: Now it’s quite amazing, because today I was thinking about the film again, and linking it to your other films. And I was thinking about the sentence, I am not a war photographer, and somehow it resonated, the way, how do you, as a filmmaker, go into a film, or for example, when you talk about fear in States of UnBelonging. And I see all of that in the film of About the Father Who. I see fear too, and I see this sort of, the potential idea of war in the sense of, how do you place yourself as a filmmaker in a place of conflict, and it’s absolutely impressive that all these ideas that flowed through your work, suddenly they are met together in a film about your father, where you were so vulnerable too.
Lynne Sachs: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it’s been real… I want to say, so there have been two independent documentary makers who’ve died in the last two weeks in Ukraine. Maybe one of them was in Russia. I don’t know where they both were, but there, in the work that we do, there is a tendency to want to witness. And I love… Wherever you are, you’re witnessing. And they put their lives on the line, so I want to say, I’m awed by that, and that is the ultimate vulnerability.
Cintía Gil: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I had one last thing to ask you still about a Film About the Father Who, which is the… Because you give it the title, drawing from Film About a Woman Who, by Yvonne Rainer, and which you also refer to in your second short film, I think, the one, A Woman With Four Objects.
Lynne Sachs: Yeah.
Cintía Gil: You also link to Yvonne, but it’s interesting, because in Film About a Woman who, she’s moving away, or she’s refusing the narrative control, and idea of plot, and the antimonic normativity of narrative, and I find it fascinated, the fact that you affirm that for yourself and you come from there to film a man and a story, or a lifetime that is more fascinating, sometimes, than the wildest of fictions. So it’s very interesting, because you affirm this putting narrative away when you are dealing with the most incredible fiction story that you have in front of you, so I wanted you to tell us a little bit about this.
Lynne Sachs: So interesting, when there is this propensity in documentary filmmaking that you have to buy a ticket. If you really need to go far away to find what’s most exotic, the most interesting, because your life… And I actually, maybe, had bought into that at some points in my life. I had made a lot of films that required travel. And then, actually, probably about 10 years ago, I started to think, how can you look inward? How can you, not so much make personal films, but what do you know from living the life that you have for this many years? So I think that the insight that Yvonne Rainer, to me, gives us, is a kind of rigor to look at the structure of family, to look at family as an anthropological being, and to distance ourself, to look at archetypes, to look at relationships that we can find through the structures that she creates in that film, that has a lot of detachment. She allows us into her head through her aesthetic choices and her very radical resistance to certain formulas that exist in family.
I had to take what I got, I got, this is the world I live in, the family is this way, but I want to leave the answers in an… She uses an ellipsis. So she uses dot, dot, dot, dot. Film About a Woman Who, you fill it in, and you fill it in because you understand how narrative works, or syntax. And I tried to, I leY that off. It’s a little bit like Which Way is East. They’re not questions, they don’t have that at the end, but they ask us to, one, to fill in. And in both cases, I guess what I’m trying to do, is I actually want you to fill in, so you fill in because you learn about me, but that’s not the gift I gave, the gift I gave you isn’t just this extravagant story of a dad who had nine kids by six different women, because that was the life I lived, and I just knew was hard, but I want my viewers to… And this has happened a lot more than I thought, a lot, where people look at their… They transpose my story to their lives in this very energetic way.
And it’s not just women, it’s a way of saying, my flawed situation that I thought was so flawed is my own situation, but there are very few families that don’t have that, that don’t have something that gives anguish, or maybe not the extreme that I have, but I don’t wish that you would live and think this is the wildest story I’ve ever seen, though it’s pretty wild, but maybe just that, in my case, that a woman lived through it with shadings of a lot of emotions. And I think there are many ways that my film is different from Yvonne Rainer’s. She’s made some brilliant films that deal with her cancer, she’s made some incredible films that deal with the lives of performers and the psychic space that goes on in their heads. So she has ways of telling us what’s on her mind, and it’s the formal discoveries that are so interesting.
Cintía Gil: We should finish now, but I still want to push you for one more, which is, because you were talking about Yvonne and about the spectator and how… And all your cinema is built… I think your body of work is probably, for me, one of the closest to what could be a correspondence cinema, which is not an epistolary cinema, it’s beyond that. It’s like a building in between different people, and it speaks to the way you film Barbara and Carolee and Gunvor, and how you build A Month of Single Frames, but also how you exactly, you build that come and go and trust with the viewer, with your known viewer. So I wanted to ask you a little bit to talk about collaboration in this open sense, about this idea of correspondence and how you, in your work, you allow others to exist with you and how you build that.
Lynne Sachs: Thank you for asking that. I’m still looking for the right word. Is it correspondence? Is it a collective experience? Is it a collaboration? One thing I’ll say that is kind of a tricky issue around documentary, is that there’s an expectation that you don’t pay your subjects, because if you pay them, then they’re influenced by that financial relationship. I actually, about nine years ago, threw that out the door, because I thought, if there’s any experience where someone is time with me, multiple iterations of that, I need to recognize them in a professional way, and recognize that they’re not able to do something else that makes money. So there’s, yes, I want to say, I have chemistry with people I work with, I have a commitment, but I also recognize that they’re doing something for a project that I created, and I have to also see their work as important enough to be paid for it.
So that’s one thing, I won’t say it’s very much, but it’s a recognition. Then there’s the other relationships, that I feel really grew, like in Your Day is My Night, these were people I had never met before, and it’s particular to Chinese culture, and I wasn’t aware of it, that you have a lot of physical contact. So we met over a period of a year, and definitely, food was a very big part of our experience. And I think in a movie making situation, they collect craft services, and you have to have good food because people get tired. But I think the food is totally different, it doesn’t have to be that good, it has to create, it has to contribute to that warmth, it has to contribute to the fact that we can be friends, as well as people making something together. And that’s something I feel I’m always looking for in my work, that people have enthusiasm for making something that they might not have made, like if I’m working with someone who does a sound mix for me, I like to show that person the film over six months, so that he’s involved intellectually.
I work with a man named Stephen Vitiello. He worked on Film About a Father Who, he worked on Your Day is My Night and other films of mine, that he doesn’t just do… He is a musician, but he involves himself. Sometimes he’ll deliver sounds to me that I have to meet him, and so we have this, call it mutual respect, and we get excited as artists, as creative people, about our collaboration.
Also, I feel really close to people like you, people who are curators, who give me insight, and then I learn through your observations of the films, I learn how your mind works, I learn how certain things exhilarate you. I feel like we met on the terrain of cinema and then learned things about each other, and I think that’s really pretty profound.
Cintía Gil: But it’s also very beautiful, the generous way how you allow your films to have that.
Lynne Sachs: Hopefully.
Cintía Gil: Thank you so much, Lynne, it’s an absolute pleasure to talk with you, always.
Lynne Sachs: Thank you for your fantastic insights. And it’s actually rare for a filmmaker to have the chance to talk to someone who’s looked at work over this many years and sees threads that I didn’t always know they’re there, but I know how I work, so I really, I learned a lot from you, thank you very much.
Cintía Gil: No, I learned from you. Thank you. And thank you to your films.
Lynne Sachs: Yeah.
About DAFilms
DOC ALLIANCE – The New Deal for Feature Documentaries
• Doc Alliance Selection – Since 2008, the Doc Alliance platform presents the Doc Alliance Selection Award. The award goes to the best European documentary film selected independently by each of the platform’s festival members. The individual festivals also nominate the representatives of the jury of experts, recruited among the film critics from the festival countries. Within the Doc Alliance Selection section, each of the Doc Alliance festivals screens at least 3 films nominated for the award in the given year.
• The online portal DAFilms.com is the main project of the Doc Alliance festival network formed by 7 key European documentary film festivals. It represents an international online distribution platform for documentary and experimental films focused on European cinema. For a small fee, it offers over 1900 films accessible across the globe for streaming or legal download. The films are included in the virtual database on the basis of demanding selection criteria. The portal presents regular film programs of diverse character ranging from presentation of archive historical films through world retrospectives of leading world filmmakers to new premiere formats such as the day-and-date release. DAFilms.com invites directors, producers, distributors, and students to submit their films, thus offering them the possibility to make use of this unique distribution channel. For more information, see FILM SUBMISSION.
Experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer is widely celebrated as a pioneer of queer cinema. In collaboration with The National Museum of Art, Architecture & Design, Kunstnernes Hus Cinema is screening a selection of Hammer’s films. The screening will be followed by a conversation with filmmaker Lynne Sachs, a close friend and collaborator of Hammer’s.
About the shorts
The program of shorts includes five films by Hammer, Dyketactics (1974), Women I Love (1976), Sync Touch (1981), Sanctus (1990) and A Horse is Not a Metaphor (2018), films which explore lesbian sexuality and identity, the female body and mortality. In addition, the program includes Lynne Sachs’ A Month of Single Frames (2018), which Sachs made from footage, drawings and texts produced by Hammer during an art residency at Cape Cod in Massachusetts, USA.
About the filmmaker
In 1973, American filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) produced her breakthrough film Dyketactics, often considered to be the first lesbian-made film showing sex between women. Over the course of her 40-year career, Hammer produced more than 100 films and videos. With her focus on taboo subjects such as orgasm, menstruation and lesbian sex, many of her works are still considered controversial today.
Hammer’s films have previously been shown at museums such as Tate Modern and MoMA. In 2013, Kunsthall Oslo held a large retrospective of Hammer’s work.
About the event
Motstrøms is a screenings series of films at The National Museum showcasing bold, innovative and entertaining films that move between traditional cinema and art. Throughout 2022, the programme will feature pioneers of queer cinema and showcase films and video by or about artists.
The film screenings are part of The National Museum’s program for Queer Culture Year 2022 and are shown in collaboration with Kunstnernes Hus Cinema. Queer Culture Year 2022 celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Norway.
Program
Barbara Hammer – Dyketactics (1974, 4 min)
Barbara Hammer – Women I Love (1976, 22 min)
Barbara Hammer – Sync Touch (1981, 10 min)
Barbara Hammer – Sanctus (1990, 18 min)
Barbara Hammer – A Horse is not a Metaphore (2018, 30 min)
Lynne Sachs, Barbara Hammer – A Month of Single Frames (2018, 14 min)
