Invisible Women (Camilla Baier & Rachel Pronger) is an archive activist film collective that champions the work of female filmmakers from the history of cinema.
For this edition of the Catalan Film Festival, we invited Rachel and Camilla to respond to the rich, vast and beautiful theme of “filmed letters between women cineastes“. A result is a special event on Sunday 28 November at GFT where we will be showing TRANSOCEANICAS and A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES, followed by a conversation between Catalan director Meritxell Colell and Invisible Women.
Details An unmissable event in partnership with Invisible Women exploring the intimacy of women’s epistolary cinema, followed by a Q&A with Catalan director Meritxell Colell. This special female friendship film programme includes a screening of Meritxell Colell and Lucia Vasallo’s Transoceánicas and Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer’s A Month Of Single Frames.
Transoceánicas A years-long correspondence between two filmmakers, this poetic, intimate work finds two friends separated by the Atlantic Sea, yet bound by their strong emotional connection. Beautifully edited and elegantly structured, Transoceánicas is a vivid, layered film about enduring friendship, fierce femininity, and cinema’s capacity to transcend gulfs of space and time.
The passing of time, a sheer passion for cinema as a way of life, and the difficulty of filming in the times in which we live become a beautiful cinematographic mosaic, an intense and moving album of images.
A Month Of Single Frames In 1998, lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer took part in a one-month residency at a Cape Cod dune shack without running water or electricity, where she shot film, recorded sound and kept a journal. In 2018 she gave all of this material to Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with it.
The films will be followed by a Q&A between director Meritxell Colell and Invisible Women’s Camilla Baier.
“An ode to silent film, to pictures, to putting all those shards of consciousness together.”- The Film Stage
Las cartas que no fueron también son · The Letters That Weren’t And Also Are
Multiple Directors 2021, ES, 58′, M12 Cinefiesta 28 Nov 2021 · Passos Manuel · 17H30 The Punto de Vista film festival invited a series of contemporary directors to make short film-letters, addressed to other directors they admired but had never met in person. Among others, Lynne Sachs wrote to Jean Vigo, Nicolás Pereda paid homage to Chantal Akerman and Alejo Moguillansky greeted Antonioni. Because cinema is also a way of connecting, getting to know each other and falling in love.
About
The Porto/Post/Doc cultural collective was created on March 26th of 2014 in Porto and gathers several people of various ages, professions and qualifications, all united in their passion for cinema. This group could not accept the current situation of cinema absence in the city; therefore our mission has mainly three objectives: bringing back the audience to the movie theatres, promoting the local cinema production and creating an international cinema festival, with a particular focus on documentary.
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.
Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her work ever since.
From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NYFA, and Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center, the Walker the Getty, New York Film Festival, and Sundance. In 2021, Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work.
Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. In 2020 and 2021, Lynne taught film and poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque, Flowchart Foundation, San Francisco Public Library, and Hunter.
Lynne’s work in Queens:
Lynne recently completed the seven minute poetry film “Swerve”, a collaboration with former Queens Poet Laureate (2010 – 2014) Paolo Javier completely shot in Queens!
The first time she read Paolo’s sonnets in his new book O.B.B. aka The Original Brown Boy, she started to hear them in her head, cinematically. In her imagination, each of his 14 line poems became the vernacular expressions of people walking through a food market full of distinct restaurant stalls. She re-watched Wong Kar-wai’s “Happy Together” – a favorite of both of theirs – 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 Lynne’s film inspired by Paolo’s exhilarating writing. Together, they invited performers and artists Emmey Catedral, ray ferriera, Jeff Preiss, Inney Prekash, and Juliana Sass to participate in a challenging yet playful endeavor. Each performer devours 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.
Previously published in Ice Floe Press
Anchored (for my mother Diane)
Caught in a framework. Inscribed by the parameters of our misgivings. Trapped in the mess that defines us.
You, a masked unarmed responder to other’s calamity, a listener to a tribute from a muted trumpet, relishing stories pulled through one ear out the other.
In spite of everything, nowhere to go, I celebrate your ability to turn routine into ritual, you put on orange pink pastel lipstick, run a comb through your hair, turn on Zoom, catch five o’ clock sun on your cheeks.
Savoring a dinner party that doesn’t happen. The taste for a camp song you once knew and still love. A pile of linen napkins thrown into the machine. Despite. Oh, for the time when a wrinkle mattered.
A chuckle A sigh. Just the same. The house at 3880.
I am there with you. And not. In the beginning, not so far from the end.
The mailbox at the end of the driveway wobbly, yet somehow firm, sole receiver left in a zone of closures.
21 years between your birth in ‘39 and mine in ’61, still thrilled by your attentions, countless appreciations, and your propensity, and willingness to listen to those things that launch my soul each morning. You are so pretty, I tell you.
Outside your window, a green lawn, mowed and below, the remains of a swimming pool, dirt filled, where I spent summers hosting watery tea parties, blowing bubbles, kissing the rim of a shared cup, watching you from below, refracted and wise, wondering how long I could hold breath.
Beside the cracked cement driveway, a fourteen-foot camellia climbing, pink smoke emanating from a chimney of flowers. Not knowing a camellia is conspicuously absent of scent, I draw in air.
Walking alone, one morning, you take note of a a ranch-style house with carport at the end of the block, on a cove, under two large oaks — you somehow sense a neighbor’s anguish, unarticulated, peeling-paint.
For 18 months, we’ve walked, around and around and back again. Phones in pockets. Cables in ears. We talk, wonder, move on together in our way.
In the car, voices of all the people who fill your head, their mysteries and narratives, your music.
I fear for you but not so much, anchored to ground, not underwater.
And there, too the man you love wanting nothing more than to feed you not so much what you need, but what you relish. Not just a meal, but daily dining.
Together, you face the contagion no one sees, like the wind, always present, felt.
A time to spend with things –
Inside a decrepit album you find a photo of Granny smoking a pipe, dressed as a man – you wisely giggle, utter of course.
And an article saved and snipped, concerning your grandmother’s father, my great-great an officer in the provisions wing of the US Confederacy, and a Jew. It couldn’t be, but there it is. Now we know. We know for sure. Heard it before, and didn’t.
A fragment of fact, teased out, discussed, denied — a story with weight sinks and then resurfaces in a telephone conversation from the hollow of quarantine into our fraught and daunting now. It couldn’t be grasped and there it is. So clear.
Despite it all, you – no longer the eternal optimist still drift toward light.
About
Poets of Queens creates a community for poetry in Queens and beyond.
Readings create a connection between a diverse group of poets and an audience. In 2020 an anthology of poetry by a group of twenty-five poets was published. This paved the way for Poets of Queens to start to publish individual collections to help poets connect to their community through their work. Connections are furthered when visual artists respond to poets and poets respond to visual artists as part of special projects. Poets also become mentors and teachers to fellow poets in all stages of their careers, strengthening community.
Please note that this article originally appears in Portuguese. This is a Google Translate version of the article.
In mid-2004, Joan Didion would start one of her most dense and well-known works, The Year of Magic Thought, a recap of the period that followed her husband’s death while her daughter was kept in a serious illness. Didion’s opening sentences in the book speak of the shock of sudden death: “Life changes quickly. / Life changes in an instant./ You sit down to dinner, and the life you used to know ends. / The question of self-pity.”. John Dunne, to whom she had been married for nearly 40 years, had suffered from a heart attack while sitting at the table waiting for dinner, and these lines would be suspended until the writer managed to resume months later the enterprise of plunging into the pain and anguish that permeated her recent widowhood.
“This is my attempt to understand the ensuing period, the weeks and then the months that took with them, any fixed ideas I might have about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good and bad fortune, about marriage , children and memory, about pain, about the way people deal or not with the fact that life ends, about how their sanity is fragile, about life itself. I’ve been a writer my whole life. So, even as a child, long before the things I wrote began to be published, I developed the perception that the meaning itself resided in the rhythm of words, sentences and paragraphs, a technique to retain what I thought and believed for behind an increasingly impenetrable varnish. The way I write is what I am, or what I have become; however, in this case, I would like to have, instead of words and their rhythms, an editing room equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system in which you could press a button and disassemble the time sequence, showing you, at the same time, all the memory frames that They come to mind now, and let me choose the sequences, the slightly different expressions, the varying readings of the same lines. In this case, words are not enough for me to find meaning. In this case, I need what I think and believe to be penetrable, at least to myself. the slightly different expressions, the varying readings of the same lines. In this case, words are not enough for me to find meaning. In this case, I need what I think and believe to be penetrable, at least to myself. the slightly different expressions, the varying readings of the same lines. In this case, words are not enough for me to find meaning. In this case, I need what I think and believe to be penetrable, at least to myself.”
By mentioning the desire for an editing room in which he could demonstrate and dismantle the memories, as opposed to the apparent aphasia that took him by storm when words were no longer enough to give vent to mourning, Didion leaves behind a kind of precious question: and if, faced with death, we could access through images the legacy of a lifetime? Barbara Hammer, a filmmaker with a 50-year career whose work resonates, among many other things, the vivacity of female bodies and voices in direct contact with the world, will come very close to answering this question.
Hammer died on March 16, 2019, at the age of 79, having lived for the past 13 years with ovarian cancer that has metastasized to the lungs. In an interview conducted with the New Yorker about a month before his death (his “Exit Interview”), he will talk openly about the option for the practice of caring for terminal patients that prioritizes pain relief given the impossibility of recovery — popularly known as palliative care—and about how the experience came to pass through her work and her final moments with her longtime partner, Florie Burke.
In 2018, the director will present on at least four different occasions the reading/performance “The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety)”, created from Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke, and its relationship with palliative care. With some of her films shown ( Dyketactics , 1974; Sync Touch , 1981; Sanctus , 1990), Barbara Hammer takes a look back at her artistic trajectory, taking a generous stance as a mentor to new generations of artists, while advocating for more openness to discussions around a subject that he considers so despised in the middle: the inevitability of death.
“There is a general fear of talking about death in the Western world. It is as if, by not mentioning it and discussing it, it disappears. We do ourselves a disservice by not engaging in ruminations about this very powerful life force. Are we not alive to our last breath? And isn’t this a right of way that we want to address in our art? In our seminars? And in our museum exhibits? When we hesitate to face the last phase of life, we give a message to shut up. (…) Instead, I have been discussing terminal illness. We, in the art world, all of us: artists, curators, administrators, art lovers too, are avoiding one of the most potent subjects we can tackle.”
At the end of the reading, the conventional “questions and answers” (Q&A) are converted into what the director will call “answers and questions” (A&Q), at which time she approaches some individuals in the audience and seeks to know about their impressions — a dialogue without hierarchies that will characterize much of his filmography. This farewell, which takes on the contours of sharing and sincere conversation, is an inseparable element of the path he traces so that others can continue to follow in his footsteps, even if he is no longer present. In a similar operation, supported by a Wexner Center grant, Hammer will invite four filmmakers with whom he had creative affinities — Lynne Sachs, Deborah Stratman, Mark Street and Dan Veltri — to make five (1)entirely new films having as a starting point a gesture of appropriation of their archives and their unfinished projects.
So far, only two works have been completed and circulated freely through festivals and streaming channels (including a small show on Mubi called “Ways of seeing with Barbara Hammer”).
Here are some notes on two short films, Lynne Sachs’ A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (2019) and Deborah Stratman’s Vever (for Barbara) (2019):
A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) Made from footage and notes Barbara Hammer took during an artist residency in Duneshack, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1998, A Month of Single Frames is a re-visit of a lonely creative moment by the director and her relationship with the landscape that unfolds as a possible cinematographic theme. Taking its own archival tone, the short will be guided by a recorded conversation between Lynne Sachs (responsible for its realization) and Hammer, who initially gives the temporal and spatial coordinates of the narration: August 2018, in her studio in Westbeth, housing complex for artists in New York.
The aging voice reverberates in space, and for a second, in the total darkness of the opening screen, we intuit something of the environment in which the two directors and friends meet, and of the proximity conceived there. This voice of now, while reading passages from the 98 diary, will access a primordial stage of artistic creation (the nothingness, the starting point, the experiment), while it is interspersed with intervals of absolute silence and images of an animistic nature that now stirs and now falls asleep. Giant insects, the director’s nude body bristling with a jet of cold water in the open air, the junction of sky and dunes in unusual tones. We are introduced to a territory of intimacy and constant discovery, guided by the 16mm camera that caresses the elements of this secluded setting, exploring its textures, colors and formats.
The first glimpses of Sachs’ work as a whole reveal the harmony that is preserved between the two directors: multimedia artist, poet, fiction writer, performer and filmmaker, she will also, in her own way, conceive a cinema that often articulates the universe understood as the one of the great causes (activism, pacifist movements, the study of representation and the female condition) and the issues that permeate the family (the portraits of the daughter, the father, collaborations with her brother, Ira Sachs) and the intimate . The compositional method and the reuse of files, the camera that acts as an extension of the arm, fingers, hand, in a cadence of familiarity with the filmed object, all this will come close to Barbara Hammer’s proposal and practices,
“I felt obligated to do absolutely nothing. There is absolutely nothing to be done. Everything is eagerly awaiting discovery. This morning I started the movie. I didn’t film it—I saw it. The dark triangular shadow of the shed through the west window in the upstairs bedroom shrinks and disappears from its formidable presence by the constantly rising sun. As I sat there, sweating, patiently framing second by second.”
In your book Hammer! Making Movies out of Life and Sex, Hammer will list and structure a series of factors that he believes are directly related to his creative process. Between “intuition”, “personal confidence” and “spontaneity and flow”, the topic “remember the loneliness of creativity” stands out as a direct link to what we see in A Month of Single Frames . The “loneliness of creativity” he talks about is materialized in the displaced plane, optically decomposed in his unfilmed but seen film, and in the persistent image of the cabin without electricity or running water that he would inhabit for a month. Viewed from a distance, under the accelerating and decelerating clouds of countless time-lapse attempts, the hut occupies a central and isolated point in the landscape and its experimental procedures.
“what I really want to do here is project colored lights on the dunes, using the sun as a projector” At one point, reading the diary leads to a detailed description of experiments carried out with filters and different propositions to operate the camera’s capture flow, the long, thin grass that grows between the dunes is taken over by small rectangular pieces of colored plastic, and a series of multicolored shadow planes in the sand are displayed with text, which Sachs says would have been revealed to her in a dream during editing: you’re alone / I’m here with you in this movie / there are others here with us / we’re all together. Shortly thereafter, a group of women holding sheets of yellow, green, blue, and pink cellophane are seen moving around in order to follow up with Barbara Hammer’s luminous projections. Lynne Sachs notes the notes that have so far nostalgically guided our impressions.
From the collaborative exercise that shifts time and its initial purposes (Barbara Hammer would say she never used such images because they were “too beautiful”) Hammer’s personal files, Sachs will establish a link that still respects introspection and distancing as essential moments in the development of an artistic practice. The collaboration between two women of different generations is mixed up with the editing exercise itself, of a composition that depends on each single frame, in all its complexity. Finally, between comments about aging and Lynne Sachs’ own realization that she will be 60 soon, the simple message revealed on the screen materializes as a contact from somewhere in the future, and it is clear and calming: there is nothing to fear, you will always be seen and heard.
See (for Barbara) Barbara Hammer told that she was still living with her husband “in a house in the woods” in California when one day, listening to the radio, she would discover herself as a feminist at the age of 30 (around there, she would “discover” a lesbian too). A year later, she abandoned the marriage, decided to leave in her Volkswagen for Berkeley, was presented with a super-8 camera and since then would not stop making films until her death, adding more than 60 works. He followed demonstrations in which he shamelessly asked intimate details about the participants’ sexual lives, became passionately involved in gender discussions, dealt with female sexuality and desire with the attention they deserve (filming more than once the interconnection of bodies and the frenzy ) and became an invaluable icon of the so-called queer cinema. The kind of extraordinary trajectory whose details accumulate in a symbiotic relationship between art and life.
Adding one more layer to the narrative, in 1975 Hammer would travel alone on a BMW motorcycle to Guatemala, in order to investigate the cultural processes behind indigenous clothing and how the westernized market model affected their mechanisms of exchange and commerce. With the images taken there and later set aside, Deborah Stratman will weave a look that is based not only on the anthropological echoes of Barbara Hammer, but will play a key role in the elaboration of links between the director and Maya Deren, filmmaker associated with the movement Surrealist and independent New Yorker whose notes on myth and history in Haiti in the 50s will serve as a guiding thread to think about the artist’s role as an active observer of dissonant cultures.
Known for her essayistic approach to the re-appropriation of files with sound as a prominent element, Stratman will develop Vever ‘s soundscape based on a phone call as a voice over , and if in A Month of Single Frames Hammer’s voice already carried the hesitation of age advanced, here she is almost unrecognizable, hoarse, sighing. In the call, the director explains the reasons that led her to leave the project: she was never able to find a personal context or a political sense for those images, and the lack of money (at the time she lived in a “basement with no running water or bathroom, with only $100 in the account”) also did not contribute to my expending time and energy trying to find them.
Through the concatenation of Deren’s text — whose highlighted sentences reflect, among other things, on the difficulties encountered when the reality of the material does not correspond to what was initially idealized — and Hammer’s testimony, the film will also deal with a shared feeling for both: the frustration with the unpredictability that runs through certain stages of creation. In this sense, both Deborah Stratman’s and Lynne Sachs’ work offer an internal perspective on Hammer’s creative process, opening up to the universality of themes such as loneliness and dissatisfaction in art.
As for the images, we see Guatemalans looking directly at the camera as if posing for a family portrait, wrapped in warm colored fabrics and prints that simulate creatures and vegetation. Markets full of fruits and vegetables, exchanges and interactions mediated by baskets moving overhead and Pepsi vendors in white uniforms contrasting with the setting. All of this is brought together by the words of Maya Deren racing across the screen, by the sober track that her husband, Teiji Ito, composed for her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), and by cards with symbols invoking Voodoo entities (so-called “ vever” ), also made by Ito during the couple’s period of immersion in Haitian beliefs.
Although Vever is characterized by a type of cultural curiosity that disperses the camera between unknown faces and the profusion of symbols, references and apparently distant quotations, what stands out from the correlations worked in Deborah Stratman’s montage is a convening and, above all, celebratory movement of complementary female visions, which exemplify collaboration not only as a possibility of completing a work, but also as a possibility of meeting beyond physical existence. And who could say that it would be possible one day to see Maya Deren and Barbara Hammer sharing the same space in the end credits?
( To Barbara and with Barbara)
“Dying is an art like everything else / in that I am exceptional”, would say Sylvia Plath rather bitterly in “Lady Lazarus”. It is known that he probably referenced his numerous suicide attempts, but if the authority of a poetic license does exist, it is evoked here to allow the contemplation of another picture: on more than one occasion Barbara Hammer would say that reading artists’ biographies it would become for her a way of establishing connections and discovering for herself “how to be an artist”. Searching in the lives of those who admire points of intercession to understand their own lives as part of something greater was one of the many pieces of advice left by the director, and now, after her departure, we are left with the same gesture: the admiration and understanding that he lived and died exceptionally, he made the farewell a living work, which opens even today in a continuous movement of creation. At the end of his book, Hammer will state that he would like to have his work remembered even through his writings (“a movie needs to be projected, a book just needs to be opened”), and in a way it’s comforting to think that, contrary to what you imagined, your memory will last in as many ways as possible.
The programme extends through the 125-year history of the cinema, beginning in 1885 with the first film. Auguste and Louis Lumière had just invented the Cinématographe. Their first images show workers leaving the Lumière factory where photographic plates were manufactured. Many of them are women. The Industrial Revolution was also female.
A number of years later, two films were made that are part of the legendary Mitchell & Kenyon collection. Spinning and weaving workers – including many children – are leaving a factory in industrialised England. People haggle and shove each other at a fish market. These silent films are witnesses to the transition to modern society.
A classic strike(-ending) scenario can be seen in Resumption of Work at the Wonder Factory. In June 1968, people vote to return to work in the Wonder factories in Saint-Ouen, France. But one young female worker protests the compromise furiously, demonstrating the spontaneity of the workers’ revolt. Two union members try to convince her. At the factory gate, an authoritarian “boss” demands obedience.
In the early 1980s, at a time of radical political upheavals in India, the Yungatar film collective created emancipatory films, among them the improvised narrative short Is this just a Story? It tells of a young woman in the process of articulating her situation as she fights her way out of domestic violence, the burdens of being a housewife and mother, isolation and depression.
Then, in her performance video Semiotics of the Kitchen, Martha Rosler “replaces the domesticated ‘meaning’ of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration” – and with subversive humour.
The experimental film work of artists Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson once infiltrated a masculine domain. Lynne Sachs calls on them with her Super 8 and 16mm cameras, asking them to look back and to describe their current artistic work.
The programme ends with a “radicalised servant girl”. The ladies and gentlemen have gone on a journey, and Cunégonde’s family pays her a visit. Not a good thing all for the bourgeois household!
The silent films will be accompanied on the grand piano by Uwe Oberg
Sortie d’Usine
FR 1895 | Director: Louis Lumière | b/w | DCP of 35mm, restored version | 1 min | silent | Institut Lumière
Employees leaving Gilroy’s Jute Works, Dundee
GB 1901 | Director, Production: Mitchell & Kenyon | b/w | DCP of 35mm | 3 min | silent | British Film Institute
North Sea Fisheries, North Shields
GB 1901 | Director, Production: Mitchell & Kenyon | b/w | DCP of 35mm | 3 min | silent | British Film Institute
La Reprise du Travail aux Usines Wonder / Resumption of Work at the Wonder Factory
FR 1968 | Director: Etats Généraux du Cinéma | Camera: Pierre Bonneau | Sound: Liane Estiez | b/w | 16mm | 10 min | french OV with german SUB | Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V
Idhi Katha Matramena / Is this just a Story? IND 1983 | Director: Yugantar Film Collective | Camera: Navroze Contractor | Editor: Lawrence | Sound: Deepa Dhanraj | Cast: Lalita K., Poornachandra Rao, Rama Melkote | b/w | DCP | 26 min | telugu OV with english SUB | Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V
Semiotics of the Kitchen USA 1975 | Director: Martha Rosler | DCP | b/w | 6 min | amer. OV | Electronic Arts Intermix
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor USA 2018 | Director, Camera, Sound, Production: Lynne Sachs | Colour | DCP | 9 min | OV with english SUB | Kino Rebelde
Cunégonde reçoit sa famille FR 1912 | Cast: Little Chrysia | b/w | 6 min | DCP | silent | dutch INT + english SUB | EYE Film Institute Amsterdam
About the Festival
Remake. Frankfurt Women’s Film Days Presented by Kinothek Asta Nielsen e.V.
In November 2018, the Kinothek Asta Nielsen in Frankfurt am Main presented the inaugural edition of Remake. Frankfurt Women’s Film Days, that takes place biennially since 2019. The third edition will take place in 2021.
The Kinothek has promoted film work by women for nearly twenty years through film presentations, thematic programmes, exhibitions and retrospectives, facilitating the discussion of gender relations in film. The Remake festival integrates a new event format into our previous work: a programme with a thematic focus will unfold in a mixture of festival and symposium. “Remake” refers to the connection with history that characterises all the Kinothek’s work: films spanning more than a hundred years emerge anew in the perception of viewers when they are shown today. Films exist only in their screening, so that the presentation of films is itself a form of film-making, a re-make.
History constitutes a key aspect of the festival. Old films are not merely old; instead, if they are shown in a context where their significance can unfold, the past can be experienced through them as an element of the present day. Not least because of such connections, old films will be screened together with recent ones, and projected images will be accompanied by introductions, commentaries, talks, and discussions. Special attention will be paid to screening spaces and their creation – and to the extent possible, all films will play in their original format, whether it’s 35mm, 16mm, Super 8 with analogue sound, or digital. We feel particularly strongly about the musical accompaniment at silent film screenings.
The formal structure of Remake corresponds to the content, whereby various epochs and genres are woven together in the programme. Topics such as women and gender relations in film, or aspects of queer cinema, come to light through their interconnection with other social phenomena, as with women’s emancipation in the context of migration, colonialism, or racism. Each edition of the Frankfurt Women’s Film Days originates in contextual links and expands in a variety of programmes that correlate to one another to form an overall design, a kind of “archipelago.”
Remake will also always contain a programme section that is dedicated to a woman filmmaker whose work is threatened by oblivion and disappearance.
We want our programme to pay tribute not only to film history, but also to the history of feminist film festivals. The first of these, which took place in 1972 in New York and Edinburgh, were largely dedicated to the (re-) discovery of women filmmakers. Many of their works, which saw the light of projectors in the early 70s, have disappeared again, and copies can only be found with difficulty, if at all. Through revivals of past programmes and conversations with their organisers, we will remember this history, from which our work has also emerged. Each edition of Remake. Frankfurt Women’s Film Days will be dedicated to one of the earlier festivals.
An upswing for independently owned arthouses, festival one-offs, and screening series across the Southwest was in motion before the COVID-19 pandemic paused in-person gatherings. Now a grateful energy is flowing back into theaters—new online venues transcend the limits of geography while giving viewers a specific experience with local programmers.
What do careful gatherings look like for film scenes in such an eager phase of rebuilding? Serious facilitators in different cities are perhaps more connected than ever. How might filmmakers be emboldened by new modes of distribution?
We found red-letter signs of new life in five cities. Is there something happening where you live that we should know about? Let us know at editor@southwestcontemporary.com.
SANTA FE
Projects born online during pandemic lockdowns are manifesting in person. The No Name Cinema underground film screening series will roam around Santa Fe at to-be-announced locations and events beginning this fall. Artist Justin Clifford Rhody streamed eighteen programs on No Name’s Twitch channel from January to August of this year. A mini-retrospective of work by diaristic film poet Lynne Sachs and a screening of the home-video-lover’s dream Memorial Day 2000 channeled Rhody’s penchant for tender bricolage and castoff materials.
Rhody spent six years organizing a well-attended series called Vernacular Visions in Oakland, California, where he presented slideshows of found images on 35mm. He took the screenings to a level of ceremony. Setting up in a different location every time, Rhody produced soundtracks tailored to the programs and handed out physical copies to attendees.
No Name Cinema screenings will be free to attend.
“The issue of finances was and is always secondary to getting the job done [with Vernacular Visions],” Rhody says. “[The late Grit Lit novelist] Harry Crews said this great thing about sports, and I think it translates well to art as well, especially since the majority of art that’s appreciated in America doesn’t cut the criteria:
“‘I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bull- shit… if you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we’ll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can’t do it—you can’t bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.’”
Up next: Before the end of the year, No Name will host the world premiere of a structuralist short film shot on Super 8 by JC Gonzo titled The Virgin Viewed from Multiple Sides (2021) and the New Mexico premiere of Do You Think Jesus Liked Hard Boiled Eggs (2020) by Ben Kujawski. Both filmmakers are from Santa Fe.
Plan ahead: Part of the magic of No Name is surprise. That could include unannounced microshorts and last-minute directives. Follow @noname.cinema on Instagram for updates.
ALBUQUERQUE
Gifted selectors build whole worlds. Keif Henley’s offerings online via Guild Cinema made that clear. The Guild’s website design remained unrepentant in its loyalty to function over form when the theater Guild Cinema (3405 Central Avenue NE), closed its doors to the public and opened online like a friendly local video store gone by.
At guildcinema.com, one could encounter, for example, a portrait of a square dance caller for whom a community center in a Black neighborhood of Waterloo, Iowa, is named (Northend Stories [part two] by Jim Morrison, a videographer who lives in that city). There was also Un Film Dramatique, an inquiry into the philosophy of cinema made about and with twenty-two Paris middle schoolers as they learned how to use a camera.
“Likely one of the bottom lines, in part anyway, for a lot of arthouses like us is to expand the existing notions of what humanity is, looks like, et cetera,” Henley says.
Up next: The Guild is open at full capacity as of press time. The theater is scheduled to host the expanded cinema and live sound collage project Negativland! It’s Normal from Somethings to Come to Your Attention Tour featuring SUE-C November 13, 2021.
Plan ahead: Basement Films’s Experiments in Cinema comes to the Guild in April 2022. It’s a defiantly self-styled “micro-community” of international screenings and workshops for media activists with no awards hierarchy or festival posturing—a favorite of Henley’s each year, he says.
DALLAS
Arthouse spaces themselves are expanding despite all odds. The elegant Texas Theatre, where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, opened a second screening room upstairs in September. It seats 165 people. This addition to the landmark arthouse came just before a significant finale in the same film community: Dallas Video Fest held its last annual festival after thirty-four years as a serious entry for new filmmakers and a haven for experimental shorts.
Video Fest founder Bart Weiss, known for the way he lovingly introduces films and leads Q+As after screenings each year at the festival, says he’ll miss the occasion to linger in foyers afterward with artists, students, and all kinds of dynamic personalities attracted to Video Fest’s programming. “Unless you’re in school for film, you really don’t get a chance to just talk about movies,” Weiss says.
That spirit will continue in other projects under the festival’s name like Video Fest’s monthly Cinematic Conversations series. The virtual gathering has encouraged hour-long appreciations of lyrical films like RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which is that director’s first feature. Weiss invites a co-host to help choose a film and lead the discussion. Avantgarde choreographer and theater-maker Danielle Georgiou had a turn, as did filmmaker Sam Pollard.
Up next: Weiss’s Frame of Mind on KERA-TV will continue to offer an outlet for local shorts. Its twenty-ninth season extends through December and includes, among so much else: compassionate, regional storytelling from inside 2020’s uprisings, experimental theater made for TV, and a musical in black and white.
Plan ahead:Frame of Mind will go state-wide next year, airing on public TV stations across Texas.
OKLAHOMA CITY
Rodeo Cinema opened a new location in June on Film Row downtown. It lives inside the old Paramount Building, where the giants of Hollywood studios would screen films for theater owners to consider as part of a national exchange program circa 1907.
A few series have landed at Rodeo Cinema Film Row. Notably: the camp-friendly garage cinema stamp VHSANDCHILL, which has been around in some form since 2016 for ’80s sci-fi obsessives and lovers of B-movies. Femme Film will show movies by “femme directors or those who have lived experiences of misogyny” as per organizers, with local director Paris Burris as host.
DENVER
An heir to the parlor screenings Stan Brakhage would host on Sundays in his home state of Colorado, the Denver Underground Film Festival is beloved for paying filmmakers in a forty/sixty split (and not so much known for parties or spectacle adjacent to the fest). Every film in the entire program is a short.
Recent awardees include Tom Bessoir’s mathy 2020 with a score by Thurston Moore, who Bessoir photographed in the early 1980s with Sonic Youth. Part two of this year’s festival is November 19-21 at a venue to be announced. Check back in at DUFF’s FilmFreeway profile.
Caught in a framework. Inscribed by the parameters of our misgivings. Trapped in the mess that defines us.
You, a masked unarmed responder to other’s calamity, a listener to a tribute from a muted trumpet, relishing stories pulled through one ear out the other.
In spite of everything, nowhere to go, I celebrate your ability to turn routine into ritual, you put on orange pink pastel lipstick, run a comb through your hair, turn on Zoom, catch five o’ clock sun on your cheeks.
Savoring a dinner party that doesn’t happen. The taste for a camp song you once knew and still love. A pile of linen napkins thrown into the machine. Despite. Oh, for the time when a wrinkle mattered.
A chuckle A sigh. Just the same. The house at 3880.
I am there with you. And not. In the beginning, not so far from the end.
The mailbox at the end of the driveway wobbly, yet somehow firm, sole receiver left in a zone of closures.
21 years between your birth in ‘39 and mine in ’61, still thrilled by your attentions, countless appreciations, and your propensity, and willingness to listen to those things that launch my soul each morning. You are so pretty, I tell you.
Outside your window, a green lawn, mowed and below, the remains of a swimming pool, dirt filled, where I spent summers hosting watery tea parties, blowing bubbles, kissing the rim of a shared cup, watching you from below, refracted and wise, wondering how long I could hold breath.
Beside the cracked cement driveway, a fourteen-foot camellia climbing, pink smoke emanating from a chimney of flowers. Not knowing a camellia is conspicuously absent of scent, I draw in air.
Walking alone, one morning, you take note of a a ranch-style house with carport at the end of the block, on a cove, under two large oaks — you somehow sense a neighbor’s anguish, unarticulated, peeling-paint.
For 18 months, we’ve walked, around and around and back again. Phones in pockets. Cables in ears. We talk, wonder, move on together in our way.
In the car, voices of all the people who fill your head, their mysteries and narratives, your music.
I fear for you but not so much, anchored to ground, not underwater.
And there, too the man you love wanting nothing more than to feed you not so much what you need, but what you relish. Not just a meal, but daily dining.
Together, you face the contagion no one sees, like the wind, always present, felt.
A time to spend with things –
Inside a decrepit album you find a photo of Granny smoking a pipe, dressed as a man – you wisely giggle, utter of course.
And an article saved and snipped, concerning your grandmother’s father, my great-great an officer in the provisions wing of the US Confederacy, and a Jew. It couldn’t be, but there it is. Now we know. We know for sure. Heard it before, and didn’t.
A fragment of fact, teased out, discussed, denied — a story with weight sinks and then resurfaces in a telephone conversation from the hollow of quarantine into our fraught and daunting now. It couldn’t be grasped and there it is. So clear.
Despite it all, you – no longer the eternal optimist still drift toward light.
September 18, 2021
Day Residue
Bio
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs @LynneSachs1 has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.
Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living in San Francisco. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her work ever since. She is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. In 2020 and 2021, she taught film and poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque, Flowchart Foundation, San Francisco Public Library, and Hunter.
From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. Lynne lives in Brooklyn.
Recently, Lynne’s had the chance to read her poems at these venues:
Maysles Documentary Center – Film Video Poetry Symposium, New York City ; Penn Book Center, Philadelphia; Brooklyn Book Festival; Unnameable Books, Boog Festival, Brooklyn; Topos Books w/ films, Brooklyn; Burke’s Books, Memphis (1/20); Volume Writers’ Series, Hudson, NY Greenlight Books Celebration of Tender Buttons Press: San Francisco Public Library National Poetry Month (2021); McNally Jackson Books, NYC; KGB Bar; Beyond Baroque, Los Angeles; Flowchart Foundation, Hudson, New York.
Banner Art: from Day Residue by Lynne Sachs (c) 2021.
Layout and edits: Robert Frede Kenter. Twitter: @frede_kenter
Every Contact Leaves a Trace a talk by Lynne Sachs Hunter College Master of Fine Arts Media Alliance Zoom Oct. 20, 2021
For most of her adult life, film artist Lynne Sachs has collected and saved the small business cards that people have given her in all the various places she has traveled – from professional conferences to doctors’ appointments, from film festivals to hardware stores, from art galleries to human rights centers. In these places, Sachs met and engaged with hundreds of people over a period of four decades, and now she is wondering how these people’s lives might have affected hers or, in turn, how she might have touched the trajectory of their own journey. During our first hour together, Sachs will expand upon her personal approach to making experimental documentaries and her essayistic method of asking questions of herself and others. She will interweave clips from her previous works (including The Washing Society, Film About a Father Who, and Girl is Presence) and her work-in-process, all of which take a hybrid approach to research and production. She will also touch on the writing of thinkers who have recently been of great importance to her own art-making practice, including theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina Campt and scholar and activist Silvia Federici. In this way, she will examine her own current work, be it inchoate, porous and, like everything that is worth doing, deeply challenging.
In the second half of her presentation, Lynne will ask the audience to make their own new piece. Lynne will share a screen shot of three of the cards from her collection as a prompt for responses. Participants will choose one card as source material, using performance, forensics, or materiality as their medium of interpretation. Because our meeting will be conducted in a remote context, we will have access to items we find at home in our domestic universe or outside in the place from which we happen to be “zooming” in. At the end of our gathering, we will come together to discuss our own attempts to push as close to failure as we can imagine, and the revelations we discover on the way.
For almost two years, we’ve all been wondering how and when we can begin to touch each other again. Somehow, we’ve adapted to the distance – standing six feet apart, hiding our mouths, gliding one elbow along the elbow of another. And yet in this time, I’ve also begun to wonder how, in my state of social existence, I am also a composite of “the company I keep”, as the expression goes, the people who have passed through my life and left their mark on my skin and my consciousness.
In forensic science, the perpetrator of a crime brings something of themselves into the crime scene and leaves with something from it. Thus, “Every contact leaves a trace,” and there is always some sort of exchange.
Grappling with this “scientific” phenomenon, I returned to a box of 550 business or calling cards I have collected throughout my adult life. Rifling through the cards, I couldn’t help wondering about each person who offered me this small paper object as a reminder of our brief or protracted 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 earlier this summer, 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. With the assistance of a forensic specialist, I examined the finger prints on the cards. I learned about their material qualities from a paper maker. Inspired by Jean Luc Godard’s series of TV interviewa about large conceptual topics with two children – France Tour Detour Deux Enfants – I listened nine-year twins glean what they could from the text and images on the cards and then create make-believe dinner parties composed of the individuals represented by the cards. I visited with NYC artist Bradley Eros who seems to re-invent personae for himself simply by designing new cards.
Clearly, I love the research. I have filmed each of these experiences. Now, here with you all, I want to return to some earlier projects to see how this way of thinking and working has been an integral part of my art-making process all along.
I am fascinated by the intention with which the cards are produced. A business card is a distillation of who you are in just a few words, usually the uniform size of 3.5” x 2”. After these months of remote engagement, I am also interested in their haptic nature, the fact that they must be exchanged between two people, hand-to-hand.
The concept of making distillation has been at the foundation of my work for a very long time. As an experimental filmmaker and a poet, I am far 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 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, where less might be more.
Tonight, I would like to share scenes from three of my films that most of you have seen thanks to the Hunter Media Alliance. This will give us a place to begin our conversation around the significance of this concept in my work.
In my film “The Washing Society” (made with playwright Lizzie Olesker), I move from an almost microscopic attention to the most elemental aspects of the clothing we wear and wash, to a wider more place-specific image of two women folding. I examine the material elements of the threads as they combine with the hair and skin of our bodies. All of this is encapsulated in lint. Lint is comprised of the detritus from our clothing and the hair, skin and mucus of our bodies. It is a substance that some people find soft and comforting and others find disgusting. Lint can be a ritualized expression of cleanliness or an abject reminder of decay. I discovered a divide in our culture, when I decided to hand out pieces of lint to every person who entered the live performance version of this work, which I call “Every Fold Matters”. There were those people who fiddled familiarly with the material throughout the show and others who immediately through it to the floor. Lint is a somatic substance that can allows to find a material intimacy with others.
“The Washing Society” Lint shot and women working 14:43 – 17:00
No matter which way you feel, the experience of lint suggests touch. The most significant distinction in this conversation, however, is “Does the substance come from me or my family or someone else, a stranger or someone cleaning our clothing?” And, if the answer is someone else, then we are talking about labor, service and wages.
I am currently working on Hand Book: A Manual, a book version of this project to be published next year by Ice Floe Press. A section of this book will include a recent conversation with the feminist historian and activist Silvia Federici. Federici helps us to understand better the relationship of this form of hidden, under-valued “reproductive” labor to the functioning of our economy. Over time, in the film, I push the lint to embody this resonance and complexity.
In “Girl is Presence” (made with poet Anne Lesley Selcer), I filmed my daughter Noa during the most intense part of the pandemic in New York City.
Play first two minutes of “Girl is Presence”:
Noa is listening to a poem, one that happens to derive its every word from French philosopher George Bataille’s treatise “Solar Anus” where he writes:
“If the origin of things is … like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile center, then a car, a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle. An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard … are to love what a battle flag is to nationality.”
Wow! This is a distillation, exactly what I am trying to do in all of these films. Create relationships of association between things. Refer to things as essences rather than explanations. Before our eyes, my daughter moves her hand across a table arranging and re-arranging a series of mysterious – at least to her – objects from my own past as an articulation of her desire for a new order. We are witnessing a series of internal choices based on who she is. Again, like we saw with the lint earlier, hands rather than an entire body or a face are an integral part of my exploration of a dynamic my camera – and thus you – is witnessing.
Does this film become a portrait, of sorts, through distillation? Does Noa’s tactile connection to these objects – or props in a more conventional film situation – offer us a context by which we can consider the impact that objects themselves have on our thinking?
I start my most recent feature “Film About a Father Who” with an image of me combing and detangling my father’s hair. This is something I have done quite a bit with him over the last few years, as he and I have aged. As you watch us, the scene feels both tender and a little painful. His skin is wrinkled and his hair is greyish-white. I am younger, middle aged, they say. He winces but he seems grateful.
The next shot is an older image from his own home video storage bin, shot on Hi 8 probably in the early 1990s. The tape has been stored in a garage, it has aged with time, decayed, been reduced to a few soft pastel colors. When I first came across it a couple of years ago, I immediately dismissed it as too deteriorated to even consider using. A few months later, I thought about it again and realized that it was absolutely essential to the entire film. By breaking down this seven-minute shot into three parts placed in the beginning, middle and end of the film, I discovered an image vessel into which I might be able to generate three distinct responses from my audience. On initial “contact”, you are introduced to three archetypal young children playing in a stream. On second viewing, you know that these are two boys and a girl who are members of the filmmaker’s family and that the family dynamic is complex, fraught and not-at-all nuclear in the conventional sense. On third viewing, you as viewer bring to it your awareness of how these children grew into being adults and how they each are grappling with their relationship to their father. Each iteration is a distillation, an evolving impression of this family and maybe family in general. We know that each interaction a father has with his child leaves a trace, each contact we have with an image leaves an impression of some kind.
In cultural critic and scholar Tina M. Campt’s book Listening to Images,
“She explores a way of listening closely to photography by engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects. Through her inventive audio-based confrontation with images, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register.” One can check out commercial photography to get their projects done. Thinking about Campt’s insistence that we “listen” and thus imagine the sounds of a life’s experience that has not been fully embraced or recorded, I too had to recognize another layer to these images. While at first glance my own family images seem celebrate and exemplify a welcoming and nourishing scenario, we know so much more about what we’re are not seeing: two sisters who have never represented. In the last image, I and you recognize this absence. The transparency is not visible but it is palpable. In this way, we recognize that these images are not so much a distillation of what we do see but what we don’t.
Take questions.
Stevie shares cards.
Instructions: Play in the space between the reality of the card and a conceptual response. Using only the materials you have at your fingertips, respond to these cards. Think about addresses, geography, fonts, numbers, names, the person you imagine made the card, the graphics, what is revealed, what is not revealed.
Push yourself from the specifics to the abstract; reverse the “bio pic” approach; make a piece that evokes rather than explains.
Form: sculpture, video, performance, sound.
8:00 Lynne presents idea for the interactive project. People can make sculpture, shoot with camera, perform.
8:05 Everyone turns off camera and begins to make their piece.
8:20 Everyone returns. Viewing using speaker viewing. Stay muted. Stevie will call on you and you will activate speaker viewer. All participants write down a couple of words to remind them of the work. Note, you need to unpin and return to gallery view each time. People who shot video may screen share.
8:35 Return to gallery and everyone displays their work at once. We cannot do simultaneous screen share so people who shot video must put their phones up to their computer camera.
The film will be featured in the Fascinations program and will screen on Thursday, October 28, 2021 at 10PM.
Fascinations is a prestigious section for experimental documentaries from all around the world, with the prize for the Best Experimental Documentary Film.
Maya at 24
director: Lynne Sachs original title: Maya at 24 country: United States year: 2021running time: 4 min.
synopsis
The spellbinding time-lapse follows the director’s daughter in a circularly minimalist depiction of the cycle of changes in her face from childhood to adulthood.
biography
American artist Lynne Sachs (1961) started making films during her studies in San Francisco, where she collaborated with artists like e.g. Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner and others. In her work, she uses various forms of film, combinations of elements of essay, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her self-reflective films explore links between personal observations and a wider historic perspective.
