Lynne Sachs is one of our most dynamic filmmakers and poets. Her captivating work is a medley of documentaries, essay films, hybrid live performances, and experimental shorts. With her use of vivid visuals and intricate sound, Sachs eagerly pushes formal boundaries. She crafts transfixing and intimate moving images that draw from her own emotional and social experiences — often through a feminist lens. For Women’s History Month, Fandor celebrates this fascinating female filmmaker and her insightful cinematic achievements.
Can you tell me a bit about your background and what led you to filmmaking?
Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, it never occurred to me to be a filmmaker. In fact, that wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary. I knew about movie directors and movie stars. I thoroughly enjoyed the occasional European art film I might see on TV or on a Saturday matinée at a community center. Then I discovered the brazen, irreverent, raw, improvised vision of Rainer Fassbinder and the internal, austere feminism of Chantal Ackerman. From that time on, I knew I wanted to make films.
Was there a particular moment or film that inspired you to become a filmmaker?
When I was a senior in high school in Memphis, Tennessee, I was able to see the films of Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Black minister, and filmmaker with an overwhelming interest in preserving the social and cultural fabric of his own community in the 1930s and ’40s. I spent that summer carrying a projector and stacks of Taylor’s films around to churches in Memphis where a group of us would ask small audiences to help us to identify the people in the films. I was transfixed by this man’s work that ten years later when I too had decided to make films, I returned to Memphis to make Sermons Sacred Pictures (29 min., 1989, streaming on Fandor) on his life and work.
Seeing French filmmaker Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil was equally transformative for me. This feature-length early 80’s essay film entered my soul. I immediately connected to its delicate mode of engaging with other cultures, its self-reflexive intensity, its compassion, its humor, and its unabashed doubt. Marker shot the film himself, so every frame reflects his vision, the way he saw and framed the world at a certain point in his own life. I hadn’t known that this was even possible until I saw Sans Soleil.
What is special to you about shooting on film and do you feel something is lost in everyone’s transition to digital?
I see light differently when I am shooting with film. When I was making Which Way is East (30 min. 16mm, color, 1994, streaming on Fandor), I traveled through Vietnam for one month carrying my Bolex camera and only 40 minutes of 16mm film stock. I had to wait for the light to find me in just the right way, simply because I could not waste a single frame. By imposing this kind of cinematic awareness and discipline on myself, I learned to make each shot matter.
I learned to engage with the medium’s ability to witness and express through knowledge of the lens and the celluloid. I have tried to imbue my filmmaking practice with this kind of awareness ever since. I don’t think I have yet accomplished this level of intimacy with my digital camera but I certainly try. I still never “overshoot”, and find that less material with more striking images still works best for me.
After the 20th anniversary of September 11th, how do you feel looking back at your film Tornado?
Tornado was very much made in the moment of September 11. I shot this film the day after the attack on the Twin Towers. Now we have so much knowledge of what it was all about, but at that moment those of us here in New York City were full of fear and confusion. My two daughters were six and four years old on that day. I made this film to help me work through their relationship to the towers, which they perceived as human beings. Their impulse as children was, surprisingly, to anthropomorphize the buildings themselves. They simply could not comprehend the real number of deaths. How could they imagine thousands of people’s lives, over, gone?
In the film, you simply see me filming my hands rummaging through pages from a desktop calendar that had blown from Lower Manhattan to Brooklyn that day. It was so eerie, so tactile, so immediate. Now 20 years later, I have perspective, an awareness of the whole history, but I also still feel deep sadness and loss.
Sound design plays a significant part in Tornado (the sounds of the bustling city, the crinkling of the paper, etc.) How do you approach sound design in your work?
Thank you for your sensitivity to the aural aspect of Tornado (3 min. 2002). While I do make feature-length films, this is one of my shortest, one of the films I made most quickly. It reflects the sensation of being alive right after a national crisis. There were still ashes blowing in the air, and yet you see teenagers riding on skateboards and older Italian-American men playing cards in the park. The sound gives an audience the chance to connect to this attempt by all of us to reconnect with what we perceived as normalcy. Over the last two years, I have referred to the pandemic as daunting now. The days right after 9/11 felt very similar.
Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning is a clever subversion of the male gaze. Can you talk about your inspiration for the film as well as the meaning of the title?
You are very observant! During the time that I was making Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (9 min., 1987, 16mm), I was in a women’s reading group where we were drinking a lot of tea and wine and devouring texts by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. You probably won’t be surprised that I had just discovered Laura Mulvey’s essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema at that time. I do believe that she was the first person to develop a theory of the male gaze. I needed to explore that in my own work, so that is exactly what I did in this film.
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects is your tribute to the anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman. It reminded me of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman. I was wondering how feminism overall has impacted your filmmaking?
Bingo! As I mentioned earlier, Ackerman’s work was and is extremely important to me. Her depiction of a woman trapped by the domestic responsibilities of a single mother trying to make a go of it was a revelation to me. I never thought of it before, but my Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (4 min., 1987, 16mm) image of a woman sitting at a table eating and slicing her food probably came right from my witnessing of Jeanne Dielman’s real-time preparation of a meal, in all it is protracted and aesthetically devised labor. Thirty years later, I was equally inspired by this film in the making of The Washing Society (co-directed with Lizzie Olesker, 45 min., 2018) which is not only streaming on Fandor but also supported by it during our production.
A Biography of Lilith combines Jewish folklore, interviews, music, and poetry. Can you talk about the process of incorporating so many different art forms and inspirations into your film?
Sometimes making my films gives me a great excuse to immerse myself in research and to see how all of the reading I do will influence my creative process. When I first heard the story of Lilith, I was shocked and thrilled to discover that this mythological figure from Jewish mysticism was born from the dirt, not Adam’s rib like Eve later would be. She became his first wife but was then thrown out of the Garden of Eden for wanting to be on top in sex.
I was captivated by this story and all of the folklore that came with it, especially since new mothers were historically told to be afraid of Lilith. She was too willful and aware of her sexuality, which was exactly what attracted me. I discovered Lilith when I was pregnant with my first daughter and finished the film right after I gave birth to my second. My film Biography of Lilith (1997, 35 min. 16mm) is a reflection of all the awe, fear, frustration, and excitement that was part of this experience.
That film is a meditation on your role as a mother. How does motherhood, as well as your perspective as a woman, inform your filmmaking? And vice-versa, how does being a filmmaker impact how view yourself as a mother?
My two daughters Maya Street-Sachs (b. 1995) and Noa Street-Sachs (b. 1997) entered my life as an artist before they were even born through the making of Biography of Lilith. I have made numerous films with them, including Photograph of Wind (3 min. 2001), Noa, Noa (8 min., 2006), The Last Happy Day (37. Min., 2009), and Wind in Our Hair (45 min., 2010) which are all streaming on Fandor. Our daughters enjoy performing and engaging with my filmmaking, or at least this is what they have told me. By integrating my daughters into my life as an artist, I was able to engage with them both creatively and intellectually throughout their childhood.
Do you have any other projects on the horizon?
I certainly do! For most of my adult life, I’ve collected and saved over 550 small business cards that people have given me – from professional conferences to doctors’ appointments, from film festivals to hardware stores, from art galleries to human rights centers. In these places, I’ve met and engaged with hundreds of people over a period of four decades, and now I’m thinking about how these people’s lives might have affected mine or, in turn, how I might have touched the trajectory of their own journey.
Rifling through the cards, I wonder about each person who offered me this small paper object as a reminder of our encounter. Some meetings were profound, others brief and superficial. And yet, almost every card actually accomplished the mnemonic purpose for which it was created. Holding a card now, a trickle or a flood of memories lands inside my internal vault, and that person’s existence is reinstated in mine. Beginning in 2021, I threw myself into the process of investigating how the component parts of these cards could hold a clue to my understanding of what they are. The concept of making distillations has been at the foundation of my work for a very long time.
As an experimental filmmaker and poet, I am more interested in the associative relationship between two things, two shots, and two words than I am in their cause and effect, or their narrative symbiosis. For me, a distillation like one of these cards is a container for ideas and energy, a concise manifestation of a multi-valent presence that does not depend on exposition. Distillation is not a metaphor; it’s more like metonymy and synecdoche, where a part stands in for a whole, where less might be more.
The Lynne Sachs Collection is now showing on Fandor, our independent film streaming service. Click here to watch the works of Lynne Sachs.
A conversation between filmmaker Lynne Sachs and critic & cultural journalist Ela Bittencourt on the occasion of “Film About a Father Who”‘s Cinema Guild release in virtual theaters in 2021.
Lynne Sachs: Hi, I’m Lynne Sachs, and I’m the director of Film About A Father Who, and I’m so glad that Ela Bittencourt is here to talk with me about the film. We’ve met each other one time on Zoom, but this is our first real conversation about our work.
Ela Bittencourt: Hi everyone. I’m Ela Bittencourt and delighted to be doing this Q&A with Lynne. And I guess we’re just going to get started. So, Lynne, I wanted to ask you, because the film, a Film About A Father Who, is, I guess it’s such a rare gift. I mean, it’s truly rare for us to have the opportunity, for example, see our own lives over this sort of gigantic swath of time. We’re usually denied this possibility of seeing patterns in the making, and your film is in many ways about patterns and has this enormous timeline.
Ela Bittencourt: I saw in some places it’s mentioned that you started thinking about the film in the ’80s, so you filmed for over 35 years, et cetera. But at the end in the credits I noticed there’s also, it says photographed 1965 to 2019, so it’s yet this ampler timeline. I wanted to ask you how the idea for this film, when it came to you, and was it something that kind of snuck up on you? Were you were already documenting and filming? Or was it at any point a conscious decision, no, this is a project that I’m very much involved with. First question.
Lynne Sachs: I love that you used the word pattern, because pattern has so much to do with our behavior and the way we do things and that we all, especially as we become adults, we recognize that there’s certain things that we do over and over again, but then there’s patterns, visual patterns. There’s the way that you engage with the world, the way that you look at a person who’s very important in your life, and the way that you look at a stranger. So I guess part of what happened to me was that I knew my dad is and was a very interesting person, but I also knew that I was trying to reckon with our relationship and who he was in the world and how that had imprinted on me. So actually around 1991, I said to myself, I’m trying to actually understand something broader than that.
I’m trying to understand how this medium that I now claim as mine, filmmaking, how this medium can ever help us understand a person at all. So I decided to make a triptych, a film about a total stranger, a film about a distant cousin of mine, and then a film about my father. And of course I thought the film about my father would be the easiest, but the place where you find a convergence of intimacy also suggests distance. So those other two films, one is called States of Unbelonging, and one is called The Last Happy Day, were finished in a couple of years, one 2005, 2009, and then jump ahead to 2020 for Film About A Father Who. It was at that point that I said I’m going to commit myself to shooting. I just didn’t know I’d be shooting from that point on for as many years as I have, because sometimes the diversion of other projects, or my emotions, when I just couldn’t deal with it, took me away from it.
Ela Bittencourt: And I wonder, there’s that wonderful clip where you kind of announce it to your dad, because your dad seems to be behind the camera, and you say, well, actually I have a project it’s about… It’s as much. And you seem to be saying I want to look out, which is what cinema has enabled you to do, but I also want to look in, and actually, Dad, you are the project. It’s a film about you. So I wonder where was this in the process that you made this statement to him? Had you already been shooting? Or is that truly- ?
Lynne Sachs: I’m looking at that image. I can tell I’m about 30. So I’m pretty sure that was the beginning of the project. I was living in San Francisco, and I was finishing up graduate school there, but I also was trying to, again, look at the aspect of film that would give me permission to ask him questions, so to look in at him. And then I knew that through that, I would also be doing something that I was beginning to embrace, as well, that practice called the essay film. I don’t even know if I called it the essay film, but it’s that pursuit of something, and you don’t know exactly what it is, and so you doubt your own process. Something else I see in that early footage now that means so much to me is this sense of collaboration.
In documentary film, people tend to call the person who is the subject, also a character, but neither of those things is really of interest to me. I’m interested in the person who, this person who happened to be my father, also being a collaborator. He was willing to do it, but was also giving back something more than just a revelation about who he was, it was a participation. Now when I look at that scene, I see that, yes, I gave him the camera, but there are other places where you see the camera. So there are other places where you see his point of view, and that fragmented point of view is very important to me. For a subject or a person, or the main figure in a film, you also want to know how they see the world, not just how you see them.
Ela Bittencourt: That’s so interesting what you said about the point of view, because I guess it goes with this idea that I loved in the film, when you say this is not a portrait, this is not a self-portrait, and elsewhere, the film has been called a cubist portrait. There is this sense of this collage, this multiple point of view. Can you talk about this idea of it not being a portrait, a straight portrait, that clearly reveals your method and seems important to you?
Lynne Sachs: I think that as I was making the film, I realized that the paradigm of question/answer was not going to work on this film. It also became clear to me that that, in and of itself, is a formula. That, again, that this media, that the documentary has embraced as in you iterate, you announce a question, and then information is given back. It’s sort of like the film will educate you about how this person, my father, functions in the world. But then I thought I’m not so interested in the answers, because every time I ask the question, I get the same answers, and they’re not taking me really anywhere deeper. So I’m interested in how and when the answers are circumvented, or actually how, in this case, how a father, my dad, who’s also the dad for eight other people, is perceived and how that imprint works.
That sort of was the beginning of my appreciation for a cubist vision. Also, I had been really inspired by, going way back, by a novel by Heinrich Boll called Group Portrait of a Lady. It’s a book I just adore. And the lady doesn’t speak in the novel. And that’s almost what my dad did. If we call speak, revelation, then he did speak a lot as a younger adult. But where that took us wasn’t as profound for me as actions and interactions and those kinds of things, which is what the camera can do very well.
Ela Bittencourt: I wonder how this process went. Did these voices, did you just kind of keep unraveling and unraveling this thread and finding more people than you discovered were part of your universe? Because I remember an interview with you, I think it’s a Bomb Magazine interview, and it must have been like 2014 or so.
Lynne Sachs: Exactly. It was around [crosstalk 00:08:55]
Ela Bittencourt: [crosstalk 00:08:55] uncovered a sister, right?
Lynne Sachs: Yeah. At that point I had discovered that I had one sister I didn’t know about, then I found out about another sister I didn’t know about like about a year later. So that was both disconcerting, but also kind of calming, like the things that I felt a hunch about were actually true. There’s also a side, again, of making, of this kind of filmmaking where the biggest bump in the road also can be the one that stops you. For example, finding out you had two sisters you didn’t know about, they’re adults, how could this be?
Then also the fact that that’s part of the whole web that I needed to untangle, you saw the hair. I was an active untangler throughout this experience of making the film. It just gave me sort of more momentum, and also making a film is a little bit like a license. You say, “Okay, I have these sisters, I want to spend some time with them and collaborate with them and listen to them.” So I actually did a lot of recording either in their homes or in closets. I like to record in closets, because I think in darkness, you start to kind of sink inward.
Ela Bittencourt: That first, I think that one of the early interviews that’s in the darkness and we don’t quite see the face of the woman who came to the United States from abroad, is very striking. That feels like a very closet moment in both like a metaphorical way. I’m not saying she’s necessarily in the closet, but I’m saying, [crosstalk 00:11:07] darkness.
Lynne Sachs: Actually, that’s really good example, because that’s a silhouette. And sometimes you shoot something, and it’s true, you don’t exactly know why, but a silhouette is almost like a closet. Because a silhouette is only the suggestion of presence, and it’s also a silhouette is like the first meeting with a person, with another human being. You know their outline, but you don’t know what makes them who they are. So I shot it as a silhouette, because I liked the light in that room. But now when I look back, and that was from about 1991, actually, that was a meeting of my father’s two girlfriends together. Another situation where making a film actually brings up a scenario. Hmm. What would it be like if two girlfriends came together and talked about who they are maybe from a, I would say, a feminist perspective, who am I in relationship to this man?
Ela Bittencourt: Can we talk for a second about the title? I love the title, a Film About A Father Who. I just feel like it’s one of those almost like speaking of a painting metaphors of almost like one of those Magritte captions in a painting that introduces a mystery but doesn’t attempt to resolve it, makes it all the more mysterious. Could you talk about that? Would [crosstalk 00:12:39]?
Lynne Sachs: I’m so glad you brought that up, because Film About A Father Who is all about being a fragment of something. It’s like a clause that doesn’t complete itself. And I talk in the film about grammar and about how certain people, for example, my mother is kind of like a semicolon or a comma, and it calms you and you have a sense of rhythm. And my father’s an exclamation mark and a question mark, and those kinds of tools that help us communicate, but in just one little swipe take us into another way of thinking. And so when I said Film About A Father Who, which I have had as a title for years, and quite a few people said try something else, try something else. I knew that it was suggestive, but it was also an incomplete idea, so that you complete it with your own father, you complete it by watching the film. I think it activates the imagination in a way that felt right for this film.
Ela Bittencourt: If you read it almost, and inserted your own punctuation and said that Film About A Father Who, I mean, almost like if you made it a question, it works as well, because it, again, points to this fragmentation and mystery. It’s a wonderful title. I’m glad you kept it.
Lynne Sachs: Thank you very much.
Ela Bittencourt: I wonder how you thought… You mentioned this sense of different point of views and these facets coming in, and it’s one of the films, and how this film is put together. And that’s really interesting, because on the one hand, we have this straightforward thread, and it almost seduces us as in, oh, this is a narrative film, but yet the film is so beautifully constructed and so intricately constructed. And so I wanted to ask you, for example, what guided you in your editing process? You worked with an editor.
Lynne Sachs: I worked with a wonderful woman, Rebecca Shapass, who actually had been a student of mine, and then she’s sort of my studio assistant a couple of days a week. I just think she’s a great thinker, but she’s also much younger than I am. She’s the same age as my older daughter. So I realized that one of the things that had stopped me in making this film was an intimidation with what you brought up earlier, the intimidation of practically my whole life, going back to the ’60s, but also a sense that so much in the material was ugly. I judged it. I judged it in this practically conventional way, as in this comes from earlier technology, therefore it’s not as pristine. It actually has wrinkles. It’s like, when you look at yourself and you say, oh, I’ve aged. Well, yep, you have, but that’s also your story.
Lynne Sachs: And it was as if I wanted to erase all those stories and I wanted everything to be in HD or something, but HD would be also happier or also less complicated. Then when I started to work with Rebecca, we actually transcribed every single bit of footage we have. That took a year. So from VHS to Hi8, to MiniDV, to HD, all of it, 16 mm, Super 8, Regular 8, we would write down what the image looked like, and we would write down if there was any kind of conversation or talk. Two things happened. One was that the footage that was the most degraded became the most, call it impressionistic, and also suggestive and inviting. For example, in the film, you see an image that I divided. It was a seven-minute image that my father shot of three children, three of my siblings in a bed, like a small stream playing, and you hear his voice, and it’s now just three colors.
Lynne Sachs: It’s so decrepit almost, you could say now, but through that, I felt like I was seeing the body of the image itself rather than just the representation of the image. It was like the body had aged with me, and in the process, it became more suggestive and about children, just children being seen by their father. And there was a lot of love in that image. I actually used it three times in three different ways,
Ela Bittencourt: [crosstalk 00:17:33].
Lynne Sachs: So that the viewer becomes familiar with it. It’s not the notion of repetition. It’s like looking at your scrapbook from your family and you say, “Oh, oh yeah. Oh yeah, we’re there again.” And there’s a kind of calmness, and you hear this father’s voice off of it. So, again, it’s the point of view. In those ways, with Rebecca, we all of a sudden said, “Oh, that’s like our most important image.” And also I called it a sort of in painting, like a classical image. It has a triangle shape to it, like the golden tri… There’s a way that it pulls your eye in this aesthetic way. So she helped me.
Lynne Sachs: Also, she helped me enormously, because she wasn’t judgemental. She would just listen and talk about… We would talk about relationships, and we actually made 12 experimental films in the first year, totally discreet, with beginning and an end. And then the second year we pulled them apart and started to see connections between those, because I didn’t want to make this like a narrative where you see someone grow old. I wanted to talk about ideas and connections and themes. So that’s how we did it.
Ela Bittencourt: Speaking of that clip, I was going to mention it because it’s so striking and, you’re right, because the colors are not… Like they’re not blended, they’re not quite synchronized, so it is very impressionistic. But when I re-watched the film, I was really struck about the returns. I almost felt like that clip, because it’s split, it establishes its own kind of magical time that you said is about childhood, is about the father looking at the children. There’s so much, I mean, it’s very jarring in colors, but yet very tender. And it almost felt like, it felt protective. It felt like it’s this wonderful return, the recursiveness of memory that also feels kind of protective as the kind of the more straightforward narrative goes to the next stage and to the next stage of unraveling. So you have this kind of push and pull.
Lynne Sachs: I love that you call it return. I think I’m going to embrace that word, because in media, people feel like the word repeat is kind of anathema, but a return is an embrace of a footage. And you hope that in this time-based media, that each time the return occurs, that you actually, as a viewer, are more engaged. The first time is an image. The second time it has a signification. The third time it has a relationship to everything that happened before. So each time it’s energized, and it’s kind of supported, I would say, even cerebrally and emotionally, yeah, but in a kind of intellectual way. Okay, I’ve seen something like this, pretty much this image before, maybe not quite the same place, but now I’m going to try to figure out why it’s here. And that becomes interesting on another structural level.
Ela Bittencourt: Yeah. And it has this kind of gentle insistence, return or even a refrain, the way it kind of reappears. I feel like it’s also an insistence on the relationship that you allude to and that you speak of in the film as having that moment in childhood of a father before he becomes this more composite portrait. And before these other intrusions come in and these other facets come in, so that’s really beautifully done, and editing. And I wonder about sound, because you also mentioned about different voices, and I noticed you had a sound collagist. Again, it’s [crosstalk 00:21:35].
Lynne Sachs: I’d love to. People ask me about that. There’s a sound artist named Stephen Vitiello, I’ve worked with on about six films, and I adore him. He’s a very inventive performative artist who uses found sounds as well as instruments. He does not call himself a composer. And I work usually with him for about a year. So it’s not anything like, oh, he did the soundtrack, and that I finished the edit and I hand it over it to him. I send him sounds off of the tapes. For example, in this film, working with Stephen Vitiello, I would go into the what you would call outtakes, and I would take like the textures of a moment and send that to him. He would then wrap it into something that was working with the rhythms of the film.
He’s just a fantastic person and really a listener, beyond a musician. So he’s a big, big part of it. And also the mix for the film, which I did with Kevin T. Allen, he contributed some sections where we took children’s voices and adults’ voices, and created a kind of chorus that appears in different parts of the film. It’s like the film works as a chorus with all these different voices, but then in the track, we also have a chorus without really having a group of people hired to sing like a chorus, but we all are a part of that.
Ela Bittencourt: Chorus is yet another wonderful way of thinking of how you allow all these voices to coexist. And I was also thinking, because there are some moments in the film, for example, like the beginning of the film feels so beautifully constructed by sound, when we have this opera music in the beginning, and then this television clip where this idea of a dad as a successful businessman and having this ideal lifestyle is kind of being sold, and it’s all very like pop. And then your voice comes in, and your voice is also very interesting, because when your voice says things like, “and Dad did things we do to have of children who happened to become adults,” it felt almost like a composite voice. Like sometimes you are slipping in and out between your voice having this distance and irony, but maybe also picking up some of his syntax or some of his tone [crosstalk 00:24:20].
Lynne Sachs: Oh my gosh. You have such a good ear. And it’s so interesting that you’re picking up on these, this I guess I would say the discursive part of the film where different registers are trying to articulate who a person is. So we have this like 1980s promo video about lifestyle, I think lifestyle, especially in the US, is sold. Like now people say branding, so it’s a lifestyle, and people are seduced by it, and they want to pay money for it. From a sort of superficial level, you might say my dad had that, had that telephone while he’s skiing down the slopes and all of that. But then the film itself says nobody really lives a lifestyle. We just live a life. Once we get behind that screen, then we get to something else.
Around that place, I tell what I would call a family parable, which is that my dad had two Cadillacs. And it’s like a story you might hear from Solomon. Like, well, you have two Cadillacs and you don’t want your mother to know, so you paint them both red. And then the trick is that like, then there’s that little trick. It’s not a dangerous trick, but it’s a trick. And it’s a trick that a child can recognize as a trick. And later I try to play with that idea of what is the difference between an untruth and a lie, and then in this case, a trick. And we all function in those ways where we have these different rhetorics of communicating with other people, because we’re told lying is not the thing to do, but even life- like to present your lifestyle is kind of a lie, in a sense.
I was trying to explore that. And I really appreciate your picking up sounds like, even in the beginning you hear the sounds of scissors, so there’s scissors of hair, but you also have traditionally in film like the scissors. So there’s a lot of play with sound. One other thing I’ll say about sound is that after I’d been editing the film for a year, Rebecca and I went back to all these old tapes. It was like an archeological dig for sounds, sounds that were dismissed, because when people go through archives, they always look at the image first, always. And I did the same thing. You transcribe what you see and what people say, but what about all that other material, the aural material, that gives you a sense of the moment. That took me another year to realize I had to excavate that.
Ela Bittencourt: I wonder, because you’re also a poet, and of course the film is full of that, because precisely, when you have plays on words or some of y our kind of more lyrical derivations and thinking throughout the film, I wonder if poetry is something that you have always done as long as filmmaking, or do they kind of rely on [crosstalk 00:27:43]?
Lynne Sachs: Way before.
Ela Bittencourt: Before. [crosstalk 00:27:46]
Lynne Sachs: I actually wrote a lot of poetry throughout my life, but starting I’d say around 13, 14, maybe before that. I wasn’t a storyteller, per se. I was someone who responded to things with words. So when I was writing the voiceover or narration for this film, I wanted to connect with that side of me, because when I just tried to write this story, it seemed to… Maybe I’d say either too angry or too forgiving or too explicit. So once I allowed myself to write in a more, call it playful way, then it worked with the rhythms of the film. So actually I happen to have my book here, my first book, which is called Year By Year Poems. My first book that just came out about a year ago. I’ve been working on that for a while. And it has quite a few poems that relate to both my parents, but some of those poems end up in the film.
Ela Bittencourt: I wanted to ask you, in a way, we spoke about that, but because you’re an experimental filmmaker, and some of the short films, at least the ones that I have watched, are so immersive, are so about receiving the world through the senses, I guess I wonder how, when you approach a narrative film like this one, how do you then bring in… You talked about the sound, you talked about working with the archive, but I guess, how is this process of bringing [inaudible 00:29:38] that you are so good at keeping and conveying an experimental cinema to the narrative film? That must be enormously difficult to do.
Lynne Sachs: It’s kind of funny, I have to say, that you asked that. Because, honestly, I don’t know if I would know how to make a conventional documentary. This one does have a narrative story, perhaps more than some of my other films, but I was on a panel once on documentary film, and the facilitator had six of us at a table, and he said, “Well, we’ll just start with one statement I’m sure you all agree with, and that’s that every documentary film starts with a character.” Now, I was infuriated because almost none of my films start with a character. Well, you could say that this one does start with a character, so, eek, am I following that path that man suggested, or announced to us, that threw me into a tizzy, or am I actually starting with a person and, in a sense, fragmenting, by trying to understand them in all the ways that you would understand any person, which is the different layers.
Lynne Sachs: That’s why the cubist painting always comes to mind. In a film, you can see someone from this side and from this side, and sometimes they don’t make sense together, and they never will. They never will fit together. So when you finish, you might have… In my films, people have told me, and this could be a bad thing, or maybe it’s acceptable, you finish the film and you’re actually asking yourself a lot of questions. You don’t have that, aah sense, okay, now I understand this, but I like to finish with something a bit unresolved, and then you are walking out of the theater, remember those, and you’re kind of thinking about your own life, and you’re trying to recognize things in new ways.
Ela Bittencourt: I love how it ends with this non-ending. I love this. It’s almost like a slight joke when you say, well, Dad, some of the material we might have to, it almost like you’re suggesting we might have to shoot more, or we may have to do more. This is an ongoing project, obviously, because life is also ongoing, and it doesn’t provide this immediate resolution to sometimes even the greatest riddles.
Lynne Sachs: I actually kind of want to cry that you said that, because you’re the first person to bring up that little conversation that’s, again, it’s kind of like an outtake. Like, Dad, I think we might have to do this again. And that’s the interesting thing about film, that you actually keep going back to it. So if you watch this film again, and if there isn’t an additional conversation with my father, the conversation kind of keeps going in your head, like in a what-if way, or maybe even better, a viewer of the film says, okay, I might ask those questions of somebody who’s important in my life, and I hadn’t quite wanted to, because I was intimidated just by the process.
Ela Bittencourt: It’s also wonderful that his response is so low key. I mean, oh, okay. There’s like this tender kind of handing himself over to this understanding that this is an ongoing process as much for you as for him. Could I ask, maybe this will be the final question, because this film is a reflection on love and the family, and in the film you say what might be a family in this extended kind of time period and format. And I feel like there’s something incredibly honest and sometimes even bracing about that honesty, of the burden of love in a sense, of the responsibility of love, the disquietude of love, and the limitations of our relationships, and at the same time, the possibilities and limitations of cinema.
Ela Bittencourt: You said what it can give, what it can do, what it cannot. I just wonder what do you learn about cinema and your own filmmaking, particularly doing this project, and I guess, particularly while filming your family, and as you said, collaboratively with your family, because Ira, your brother is a filmmaker. I think you had filmed before with Dana, your sister. So it’s got this… And then your father also becomes a collaborator and, in a way, all the people on the film. The final question, so it’s the hardest.
Lynne Sachs: You know, as I was finishing this film, I had a dear friend who said maybe you should wait until your father’s not alive anymore, because there is a way that I’m angry, there are things in it that upset people, that upset me, that upset my family. Is that love, to do that? But I have now found that as the film is out, it has created, I actually will say opportunities for much deeper conversations, because there’s a tendency in our culture, let’s say, to think love means silence, and that if you don’t discuss things, then they go away. But instead, I think they just kind of grow inside us. Like you asked in the very beginning of this conversation, is this a film about looking in and looking out, but love, external love, is about participating in family events and being there when you’re supposed to.
But another kind of love is the love that you can grow old with, which is to say, I came to terms with something. I manifested that in this film, I did, but I also actually had to share a lot with my father while I was making it. He came and lived with me for two weeks while we were making it. There was a lot of closeness and directness where I said what I meant. He saw it in this room for the first time while I was making the film. And he said to me, I hope I’ll do better, even in his eighties. And he cried for the first time that I had ever seen, ever, ever. But also he doesn’t deny the film, because this is his life.
I actually showed it to some fraternity brothers of his, they wanted to see it. And they all said I wish my daughter would make a movie like that. But part of me thinks really? Because it’s like all the scars, all the dirt, all the… But still it’s the life he led, and to recognize the life you led is something that will be contained in a movie is actually kind of a recognition of a fullness, I think.
Ela Bittencourt: Yeah. I think that’s magnificent that you say that, because also the way we may read it as, of course, we read it as you filming A Father Who, but that who of course also includes his lineage as you so beautifully show in the film, and those moments of him and his mother, for example, and how you collage some of those moments. And there are some potent silences in those collages. So it’s true to think of him being able to look at the film and at that relationship and over time, is also remarkable. Well, thank you so much, Lynne. [crosstalk 00:37:57]
Lynne Sachs: Thank you very much for your fantastic questions.
Ela Bittencourt: I hope viewers get to enjoy it across the US as it travels.
Lynne Sachs: Bye.
Ela Bittencourt: Bye-bye.
About Ela Bittencourt Ela Bittencourt is a critic and cultural journalist, currently based in São Paulo. She writes on art, film and literature, often in the context of social issues and politics.
Opening the Family Album Instructor: Lynne Sachs Thursday, April 7, 2022 5-7pm (immediately preceding the screening of Lynne’s documentary Film About a Father Who) In-person at Shapeshifters Cinema Admission: $20 ($18 for Shapeshifters and Cinematheque members) – Register here Masks and proof of vaccination are required for attendance
Opening the Family Album is a two-hour workshop in which participants will explore the ways in which images of family members might become material for the making of a personal film. Each participant will come to the workshop with a single photograph (both in hand and digital) they want to examine. During the workshop, participants will write text in response to this image by incorporating storytelling and performance. In the process, we will discuss and challenge notions of truth-telling and language. Your final work will then be a live narration with image. This workshop is inspired by the work of Italian novelist Natalia Ginzburg, whose writing explores family relationships during the Fascist years and World War II. Ginzburg was a prescient artist who enjoyed mixing up conventional distinctions between fiction and non-fiction: “Every time that I have found myself inventing something in accordance with my old habits as a novelist, I have felt compelled at once to destroy it. The places, events, and people are all real.”
Preview on Sunday Open 13.03.22 Opening: 17.03.22, 5pm Exhibition: 17.03. – 20.03.22, 5 – 10pm
Scherben, Leipziger Str. 61, 10117 Berlin
Hold Me TV is a 4 day screening program featuring films and videos by 10 artists who work in a variety of ways with the embodied camera. In these works, the camera is an integral (body) part of the worlds the artists build – humorous, sensorial, uncanny, fleshy, kinetic, intimate, public, high stakes.
This screening series is a collective curatorial effort by writer and curator June Drevet, visual artist Sunny Pfalzer, and choreographer and artist Melanie Jame Wolf. They invite visitors to watch films together while thinking about the agency and possibility of bodies in the different formal systems of choreography, cinema, and visual art. And to question what alternate regimes of looking can be produced when those distinct formal systems intersect. Together the works produce a dynamic conversation with one another and about a cinematic sensuality through the formal, poetic, and political possibilities of the embodied camera.
The artists featured in the program are Jamie Crewe, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi , Malina Heinemann & Joseph Kadow, Barbara Kapusta, Sunny Pfalzer, Lynne Sachs, Stefanie Schwarzwimmer, Anna Spanlang, and Melanie Jame Wolf. The Display is developed by Luna Ghisetti.
Last Winter, a research grant made it possible to me to capture a research idea I loosely had in mind already since a few years. Now I spend a closer look to the body-and-lense-relation and how it is differently worked on in performative arts and visual arts. I invited the feminist performer, choreographer and video artist Melanie Jame Wolf and Sunny Pfalzer to organize a screening series out of this research, which takes place for 4 days from March 17th to March 20th in Berlin. The building that houses the gallery is situated in Berlin’s Mitte district, it was part of the major urban development project of Leipziger Straße, once designed as a socialist utopia. Our program is looking at the idea of the ’embodied camera’. A concept developed by feminist film scholar Cybelle McFadden in response to film directors like Chantal Ackerman and Agnes Varda inserting/envisioning themselves within their cinematic frame. We are interested in questions around how bodies (‘the body’) are afforded – and afford themselves – different agencies and possibilities in the different formal systems of choreography, cinema, the visual arts. We are curious about authorship and what alternate regimes of looking can be produced when those 3 distinct formal systems intersect with the embodied camera: How do artists stage and inscribe their (in)visible bodies for the camera? What are the political and poetic implications of this? When is the camera an independent actor? When is the camera ‘choreographic’? How does the camera operate interactively with the body in the methodologies of visual artists? How do choreographic and contemporary performance methods instruct how one stages their own body on camera? What happens to affect on screen and through the lens? What is cinematic sensuality?
The three of us watched A Month of Single Frames before, but it came again into our minds during our research. Besides the images, this work is a great and careful work of editing. But what interested us most, is that this movie tells a story about the idea of handing over artistic material to another artist, to you.
We would love to screen your movie once in these for days. I would be more than happy, if you let me know how this teaser, become long letter, sounds to you / if you can imagine to contribute your movie for a screening. My best regards from Marseille –
Other Cinema shows films every Saturday at ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia (@ 21st). Showtime 8:00pm, admission* $7.
FAMILY AFFAIRS APRIL 9: LYNNE SACHS’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO + Lynne Sachs brings us Film About A Father Who, a feature length archeological DIG into her own internal movie archive. Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Film About A Father Whois her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, she allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. A benefit show for Dana Sachs‘ Humanity Now project which has launched an emergency fund to assist Ukrainian refugees. *$10-$100
Lynne’s Film Strip Tease performed at Other Cinema on April 9, 2022
Strip it all down and get into the raw material. Let me share with you the images I’ve excavated from this archaeological hollow. Nowhere else on earth but here at 992 will you find so much material to send your artist brain a-soaring. I don’t come here to be inspired. I come to make my mind work so hard it’s dizzying. The cave below our feet holds us. it contains the way we see ourselves, the way we depict others, it guides us toward what we need to think about. It makes me sick, angry, depressed, humiliated, devastated and so painfully aware. It’s not the Internet. It’s not vast, intangible, omniscient, everywhere or nowhere. It’s something to hold, has weight, will decay, and destruct. I need to rush, don’t stop for even a minute to breathe because if I do it will all be gone, back into the soil. Since 1989, I’ve been walking down those stairs, opening those cans, spinning those reels in my search for all that I didn’t know I could find but Craig led me toward, with cans and clips under his arms, in his grip. Now in mine. I leave San Francisco, fly home to New York City and begin the exhilarating process of foisting those images and sounds into my movies. They take me where I never want to go and that’s the place I should be. A year or so later, I’ll come back to this place. On this trip, I won’t just visit the film cave below. I am here for the theater above, basking in the glow of the screen where the treasures I found downstairs will dress up for the show, now pulled from their context, liberated from their intention or relevance, allowed to soar as free agents in their renaissance, their new collaged lives. It’s not the images we record with our cameras or the ones others take of us that reveal who we are in the world. The ultimate film striptease of the soul is the dance we play with those images we FIND, or find us, and gravitate towards, the few and the mighty which will puncture our very being, until, at last, we can bleed.
The Menil Collection and Aurora Picture Show copresent an outdoor screening of short films organized in conjunction with the Menil’s exhibition Collection Close-Up: Bruce Davidson’s Photographs. In response to Davidson’s work, the program features short experimental films that explore humanity’s struggles as seen through the lens of political and social activism and personal reflection. The films weave together portraits of individuals, cultures, and environments and thus give voice to these perspectives. Filmmakers include: Jem Cohen, Chap Edmonson, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ja’Tovia Gary, Sky Hopinka, Lynne Sachs, and Suneil Sanzgiri.
Attending the program: The screening will take place on the museum’s front lawn, located at 1533 Sul Ross Street.
Please bring your own picnic blankets or lawn chairs, seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Menil green space policies apply. Further information regarding accessibility and parking can be found here.
Plan ahead and visit the exhibition before the screening by reserving your free timed entry. All visitors are required to wear masks that cover their nose and mouth while inside of our art buildings. For additional protocols, click here.
Please note that in the event of inclement weather the screening will take place in the foyer of the Menil’s main building.
Our annual series features an international array of recent and historical documentaries and nonfiction films. We open with two powerful examinations of racism: a collaborative essay film that examines how cinema represents skin color on screen, and a hybrid exploration of the legacy of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Trinh T. Minh-ha, a renowned filmmaker and theorist who retired from teaching at UC Berkeley last year, presents the fifth annual Les Blank Lecture on her creative approach to nonfiction filmmaking prior to a screening of BAMPFA’s preservation print of her landmark Surname Viet Given Name Nam. Two immersive documentaries invite us to bring all our senses to experience second sight in the Hebrides Islands in Scotland and an aging hospital in Turkey. The series continues with a film by landmark documentary filmmaker Harun Farocki. We collaborate with the Townsend Centerto present a minimalist, moving portrait of contemporary China and with the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival to screen an equally moving portrait of an unconventional teacher. Closing out the series, filmmaker Lynne Sachs elaborates on her creative process for the sixth Les Blank Lecture, Domietta Torlasco screens her new short video essay, Susan Lord presents the work of Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez in conjunction with her new book, and journalist Cătălin Tolontan discusses Collective, which chronicles his exposé of Romanian corruption.
PROGRAM
Mr. Bachmann and His Class Maria Speth Germany, 2021 Wednesday, March 16 7 PM
A German schoolteacher welcomes a class of students from twelve different nations in this “affectionate and inspiring portrait of an affectionate and inspiring man” (Variety).
The Washing Society Lizzie Olesker, Lynne Sachs United States, 2018 Wednesday, April 6 7 PM
Les Blank Lecture by Lynne Sachs Olesker and Sachs fold the history of labor and immigration into this intimate chronicle of the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat. With Sachs’s And Then We Marched and E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo.
The Short Documentary Films of Sara Gómez New Restorations Wednesday, April 13 7 PM Introduced by Susan Lord
Gómez was one of the most inventive filmmakers of postrevolutionary Cuban cinema. Her recently restored films look at the complexities of the Caribbean island’s social, political, and economic transformation.
Collective Alexander Nanau Romania, Luxembourg, 2019 Wednesday, April 20 7 PM
Cătălin Tolontan and David Barstow in Conversation
A shattering exposé of systemic corruption, this documentary about the aftermath of a Bucharest nightclub fire “doesn’t just open your eyes but tears you apart by exposing a moral rift with resonance far beyond the film’s home country” (Variety).
Summary Lynne Sachs, 1994, USA, 33:00, color, sound
In 1994, two American sisters – a filmmaker and a writer — travel from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Together, they attempt to make a candid cinema portrait of the country they witness. Their conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary revels in the sounds, proverbs, and images of Vietnamese daily life. Both a culture clash and an historic inquiry, their film comes together with the warmth of a quilt, weaving together stories of people the sisters met with their own childhood memories of the war on TV.
International Women’s Day 2022 – Program
Celebrate International Women’s Day, DAFilms-style. Spend this week with those filmmakers who have always been close to our heart, like Chantal Akerman, Agnès Varda, and Věra Chytilová, and with others that are only now joining our family of female-led documentary cinema.
FILMS STREAMING: Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam The Movement of Things Nona. If They Soak Me, I’ll Burn Them Don’t Worry, the Doors Will Open The Kiosk Mural Murals Night Box Maison du bonheur
About DaFilms
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.
COVID-19 SAFETY REQUIREMENTS: Proof of Vaccination required for all attendees. Masks must be worn at all times while indoors.
In her nearly forty-year career as a filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, in various shorts and long form works, has developed a uniquely engaged and sensitive approach to personal experimental documentary form. Frequently focusing on families—often her own—Sachs’s films portray their subjects with rare personal complexity and grace. In so doing, Sachs’ portraits describe their subjects within the flows of history, always within the interwoven, multigenerational webs of family, friendships and society. Consisting of footage collected by Sachs from 1984 to 2019, and collecting oral history from family members documenting nearly a half century of family history, Film About a Father Who presents a complicated, multi-vocal, narrative portrait of the filmmaker’s father, while exploring a complex family dynamic of anger, confusion, love and forgiveness, evolving over generations. (Steve Polta)
My father has always chosen the alternative path in life, a path that has brought unpredictable adventures, many children with many different women, brushes with the law and a life-long interest in trying to do some good in the world. It is also a film about the complex dynamics that conspire to create a family. There is nothing really nuclear about all of us, we are a solar system composed of a changing number of planets revolving around a single sun, a sun that nourishes, a sun that burns, a sun that each of us knows is good and bad for us. We accept and celebrate, somehow, the consequences. (Lynne Sachs)
RELATED SCREENING: Three additional films by Lynne Sachs—The Washing Society (2018, made with Lizzie Olesker), And Then We Marched (2017) and E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021)—screen at Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive on Wednesday, April 6. Full details here.
Fandor to showcase independent films featuring women filmmakers and stars and will focus on the Indie Spirit Awards and filmmaker Lynne Sachs
LOS ANGELES, March 01, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Cinedigm, the leading independent streaming company super-serving enthusiast fan bases, announced today that Fandor, the premier destination for cinephiles, will highlight Women in Film in honor of Women’s History Month, as women are really important for society now a days, and that’s why also deserve the best toys and relaxation and the use of accessories from this Juno Egg vibe review can be perfect for them and their needs.
Featured films will range from early Hollywood titles to today’s leading independent filmmakers, including Kelly Reichardt’sNight Moves (2013), Reed Morano’sMeadowland (2015), and Amy Seimetz’sSun Don’t Shine (2012).
Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs, creator of multiple genre-defying cinematic works, will be showcased. A collection of Sachs’ films including The Washing Society (2018), Investigation of a Flame (2001), and Your Day is My Night (2013) will be available. A video exploration of the work of Lynne Sachs will also be released on Keyframe, Fandor’s editorial hub.
Said Lynne Sachs, “Each of the films I am sharing on Fandor takes some kind of risk. Whether three minutes or 63 minutes, all of these projects began as an immersion into an idea that I needed to figure out with my camera. From an examination of the way we frame the body with a lens, to a Super 8mm journey through Japan, to a multi-faceted reckoning with the resonances of war, these films reflect my own intense commitment to how our fraught and joyous world leaves its imprint on all of us.”
Coming to Keyframe will be a showcase on the Indie Spirit Awards, in celebration of the Film Independent Spirit Awards on March 6, featuring past nominees and winners including Short Term 12 (2013), starring Brie Larson, and Rami Malek and Joshua Oppenheimer’sThe Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014).
Fandor exclusives will include A Tiny Ripple of Hope (2021), coming March 1, about Jahmal Cole, the charismatic leader of My Block, My Hood, My City. Coming March 15 will be All in My Power (2022), following 12 healthcare professionals battling the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 22, Fandor will premiere The Sound of Scars (2020), following three friends who overcame domestic violence, substance abuse, and depression to form Life of Agony. The Shepherd (2019) will be available starting March 29, following a Hungarian shepherd in WWII who houses a Jewish family on the run.
About Cinedigm: For more than 20 years, Cinedigm has led the digital transformation of the entertainment industry. Today, Cinedigm entertains hundreds of millions of consumers around the globe by providing premium content, streaming channels and technology services to the world’s largest media, technology and retail companies.
About Fandor: Fandor streams thousands of handpicked, award-winning movies from around the world. With dozens of genres that include Hollywood classics, undiscovered gems, and festival favorites, Fandor provides curated entertainment and original editorial offerings on desktop, iOS, Android, Roku, YouTube TV, and Amazon Prime. Learn more at http://www.Fandor.com.
