All posts by lynne

International Documentary Forum:”Screen Time” Selects “Film About a Father Who”

IDA: International Documentary Forum 
Screen Time: Week of October, 25 2021
OCTOBER 26, 2021
BY BEDATRI D. CHOUDHURY
https://www.documentary.org/blog/screen-time-week-october-25-2021

Screen Time is your curated weekly guide to excellent documentaries and nonfiction programs that you can watch at home.

It’s the season for scary movies! Even as real life continues to be scarier than fictional tales of ghosts and ghouls, David Stubbs’ Belief: The Possession of Janet Moses manages to spook the most steel-hearted of audiences. The film follows the 22-year-old Janet Moses who, believed to be cursed, is made to undergo a most horrific exorcism ritual that later came to be known as “the Wainuiomata exorcism.” Watch it on Apple TV with the lights on.

Although “The Rumble in the Jungle” sounds like it could be a horror movie title, this legendary boxing match, held in Zaïre, 1974, saw the legendary Muhammad Ali take on the much-younger George Foreman for the boxing heavyweight championship title. If you’ve already watched Muhammad Ali by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, we suggest you watch Leon Gatst’s 1996 documentary, When We Were Kings on Criterion. What began as a documentation of this sporting event of a lifetime, took shape—over two decades—into being a terrific portrait of Ali during one of the toughest stretches of his illustrious career. 

Speaking of illustrious careers, we are big fans of the works of filmmaker Arthur Dong, whose films emerge from the intersections of homophobia and Asian American identity. We are so excited that seven of his films are playing as a part of Criterion’s Stories of Resistance program. While we love each one of them, Coming Out Under Fire (1994) is our favorite. The film features nine gay veterans who not only fought against fascism but also a battery of dehumanizing anti-gay policies and the military’s quack medical theories.

A more contemporary telling of a protagonist’s queer identity, Angelo Madsen Minax’s North By Current is set to premiere on POV on November 1. The autobiographical film follows the filmmaker’s journey as a trans man “against the backdrop of his childhood and his parents’ childhoods in Michigan.” While struggling to accept his parents’ reaction to his sexuality, Minax also documents a familial loss. The resultant portrayal of a multi-faceted and heart-wrenching grief, creates a unique vulnerability on screen. 

Between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs filmed her father, Ira Sachs Sr., on various mediums. The resultant film, Film about a Father Who, is now playing on Criterion. At once personal and public, by the nature of its release into the world of strangers, the film is a fascinating meditation on family, masculinity, and on the filmmaker’s constant negotiation with privacy and expression. 

Starting November 3, The Criterion Channel will also be streaming a program of short films made by Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Garrett Bradley. This is a rare opportunity to watch some of Bradley’s earlier works before she presented us with Time (2020). Her captivating visual vocabulary is ever-present in these shorts that travel from “click mining” farms in Bangladesh (Like, 2016), to Japan and its frequent earthquakes (The Earth Is Humming, 2018), and through America’s labyrinthine prison industrial complex (Alone, 2017) and its lost Black film history (America, 2019). 

Every Contact Leaves a Trace – A Talk by Lynne Sachs at Kunsthochschule Kassel

Kunsthochschule Kassel 
Every Contact Leaves a Trace – A Talk by Lynne Sachs
28.10.2021 15:00 UHR
https://kunsthochschulekassel.de/en/willkommen/events/event-view/zu-gast-in-der-graduiertenschule-fuer-bewegtbild-lynne-sachs.html

English (Translation)
Guest at the Graduate School for Moving Images: Lynne Sachs

We are pleased to announce the experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs as a guest lecturer as part of the graduate school’s winter semester program for moving images. On Thursday, October 28th from 3 p.m., she will talk about her work, show film clips and then be available for a Q&A. The Artist Talk will be held in English and will be open to the university. The zoom link is published one day in advance in the VisKom calendar.

German
Zu Gast in der Graduiertenschule für Bewegtbild: Lynne Sachs

Wir freuen uns, als Teil des Wintersemesterprorgamms der Graduiertenschule für Bewegtbild, die experimentelle Filmemacherin Lynne Sachs als Gastdozentin ankündigen zu können. Am Donnerstag, den 28. Oktober ab 15 Uhr wird sie über ihre Arbeiten sprechen, Filmausschnitte zeigen und anschließend für ein Q&A zur Verfügung stehen. Der Artist Talk wird auf Englisch stattfinden und hochschulöffentlich sein. Der Zoom-Link wird einen Tag im Voraus im VisKom Kalender veröffentlicht.

Every Contact Leaves a Trace

a talk by Lynne Sachs

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 her lecture, 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, Lynne will examine her own current work, be it inchoate, porous and, like everything that is worth doing, deeply challenging.

About Lynne Sachs

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 College, City University of New York. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, USA.

Many of Lynne Sachs’ works films can be found on ther website: www.lynnesachs.com

AEMI Presents- Day Residue: A Film-Making Workshop on the Every Day, in-person workshop in Cork (NOVEMBER 9)

aemi @ CIFF: Workshop with Lynne Sachs
9 November 2021 / 11am – 4pm / Crawford College of Art and Design, Cork
https://aemi.ie/event/workshop-with-lynne-sachs/

We are really excited to work with aemi’s Artist in Focus Lynne Sachs to deliver a workshop as part of CIFF 2021. This in-person workshop in Cork will focus on the interplay between poetry and cinema. Based in New York, Lynne Sachs is an award winning filmmaker whose work bridges personal experience and political concerns through her singular approach to filmmaking. Lynne uses both analogue and digital mediums, weaving together text, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design.

‘Day Residue: A Film-Making Workshop on the Every Day’ is open to both emerging and established artists interested in film and writing. The workshop is an excellent opportunity for film artists to deeply consider creative approaches to writing and film, both in relation to their own practices and within wider contexts.

Day Residue: A Film-Making Workshop on the Every Day
Lynne Sachs: According to Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams, our day residue is composed of the memory traces left by the events of our waking state.  In this workshop, we explore the ways in which fragments of our daily lives can become material in writing for a personal film. While many people in the film industry rely upon a chronological process that begins with the development phase and ends with post-production, our Day Residue workshop will build on an entirely different creative paradigm that encourages artists to embraces the nuances, surprises and challenges of their daily lives as a foundation for a diaristic practice.

The day will be structured by two sessions: in addition to introducing her practice and collectively watching Lynne’s programme of short films curated by aemi for CIFF (see film info below), Lynne will also lead a session on writing and film / writing for film, and the possible interplays between the two – extending to the role of poetry.

In-person screening programme within the workshop:

Lynne Sachs, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor, 2018, USA, 8 min
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three artists who embraced the moving image throughout their lives.

Lynne Sachs, Still Life With Women And Four Objects, 1986, USA, 4 minA portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a ‘character’.

Lynne Sachs, Drawn and Quartered, 1986, USA, 4 minOptically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections.

Lynne Sachs, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, 1991, USA, 29 min
A girl’s difficult coming-of-age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.

Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer, Girl is Presence, 2020, USA, 5 min
Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, a ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things.

Lynne Sachs and Moira Sweeney, Longings, 2021, USA/ Ireland, 90 seconds
A collaboration exploring the resonances and ruptures between image and language.

Lynne Sachs, Drift and Bough, 2014, USA, 6 minLynne Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper.

Lynne Sachs, Starfish Aorta Colossus, 2014, USA, 4 min
Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas.

Lynne Sachs, Maya at 24, 2021, USA, 4 minLynne Sachs films her daughter Maya at 6, 16 and 24.

Lynne Sachs with and for Barbara Hammer, A Month of Single Frames, 2019, USA, 14 min
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. She shot film and kept a journal. In 2018 Hammer, facing her own imminent death, gave her material to Lynne and invited her to make a film.

This is a free workshop, however as numbers are limited, prior booking is essential.

Please email Emer at info@aemi.ie in advance to secure a place.

Biography 
Lynne Sachs (Memphis, Tennessee, 1961) is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together text, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a feminist dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project. Her moving image work ranges from short experimental films, to essay films to hybrid live performances. Lynne has made 37 films, including features and shorts, which have screened, won awards or been included in retrospectives at New York Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Sundance, Oberhausen, Viennale, Sheffield Doc/Fest, BAFICI, RIDM Montréal, Vancouver Film Festival, Doclisboa, Havana IFF, and China Women’s Film Festival. In 2014, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

“Figure and I” Streaming with “In the Street” at the National Gallery of Art (Virtual Cinema)

Film Programs: Virtual Cinema at the Gallery
National Gallery of Art
Streaming November 3 through November 9
https://www.nga.gov/calendar/film-programs/spring-2021/in-the-street-and-figure-and-i.html

Each Wednesday the Gallery shares a unique film on its website, free of charge, for one week. Join us for recent restorations, classic art cinema, exceptional documentaries, and a variety of films by artists.

In the Street and Figure and I

Photographer Helen Levitt’s iconic 1948 short film In the Street is coupled with artist Lynne Sachs’s Figure and I, a new work inspired by the exhibition The New Woman Behind the Camera.

Film will be available for online streaming starting November 3 through November 9

In the Street was originally a silent film, filmed and edited in Spanish Harlem (New York City) by well-known photographer Helen Levitt, with some footage by Janice Loeb and James Agee. A piano score by Arthur Kleiner was added in the 1950s and circulated with the film. More recently, silent-music composer and performer Ben Model was invited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to create a new piano score for the film. Model says he tried to “find the human moment that was happening in the shots and brief sequences” and “aimed to create music for these moments that might help [the audience] connect with it, without reinterpreting it.” (Helen Levitt, 1948, 16 minutes)

“[Indie recording artist] Kristine Leschper wrote to me with a very intriguing proposition: create a short film in response to her song “Figure and I.” I knew that this deeply rhythmic two-minute song needed . . . somatic imagery. I needed to move with my body and my camera as I was shooting it.  A few days later, I went to the New Woman Behind the Camera exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  I saw two photos by two women photographers from the 1920s whose work I had never seen before. These images guided me to a way of interpreting the physicality and the intimacy of Kristine’s song.”—Lynne Sachs (2021, 2.5 minutes)

About Film Programs

The National Gallery of Art’s film program provides many opportunities throughout the year to view classic and contemporary cinema from around the world in a traditional theatrical setting. Through screenings, scholarly notes, filmmaker discussions, and unique introductions by critics and academics, the program encourages viewers to learn more about the history of the cinema, its relationship to other art forms, and the role of media in society. Innovative retrospectives, restored works of historical value, silent films with live musical accompaniment, new documentaries, and experimental media by noted video artists are offered on weekends during the entire year. For information about past film programs, please visit the Film Programs Archive.

The Gallery’s film study collection includes hundreds of international documentaries related to the arts, such as Jean Dubuffet, Un Auto-Portrait; Joseph Cornell: Worlds in a Box; Beaubourg; David Hockney: The Colors of Music; Gertrude Stein: When This You See, Remember Me; Art City: Making It in Manhattan; The Camera Je; and various international television series on the arts. The National Gallery is an associate member of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF).

“Film About A Father Who” Wins Best Feature Doc at Athens

2020/2021 Awards Showcases
October 2021
http://athensfilmfest.org/2020-2021-awards-showcases/

Thank you to our 2020/2021 Distinguished Jury: Tony Buba, Jan McMannis, Amber Bemak, Nadia Granados, Bill Brown, Sabine Gruffat

Sunday 10/24 3:30 PM
2020 Feature Documentary Award
Film About a Father Who Lynne Sachs, Documentary, USA, 74 min.

Sunday 10/24 5:30 PM
2020 Feature Documentary Award
Cinema Pameer Martin von Krogh, Documentary, Afghanistan, 80 min.

Sunday 10/24 5:30 PM
2020 Feature Narrative Award
Holler Nicole Riegel, Narrative, USA, 87 min.

Sunday 10/24 5:30 PM
2020 Short Film Awards
Animation Award: Hi,crows Zehong Zhu, Animation, UK, 4 min
Narrative Award: Ship a Visual Poem Terrance Daye, Narrative, USA, 12 min
Documentary Award: The Mortician of Manila Leah Borromeo, Documentary, Philippines, 25 min
Experimental Award: We Were Hardly More Than Children Cecelia Condit, Experimental, USA, 9 min
Music Video Award: Emotions in Metal Tommy Becker, Experimental, USA, 21 min
Research Award: Amazonia Roger Beebe, Documentary, USA, 25 min
Black Bear Award: Duet John Muse, Experimental, USA, 11 min
Film House Award: Those That Tremble as if They Were Mad Salma Shamel, Experimental, Egypt, USA, 11 min

Sunday 10/24 7:30 PM
2021 Feature Narrative Award
Toprak Sevgi Hirschhäuser, Narrative, Turkey, 105 min

Sunday 10/24 7:30 PM
Programmers Prizes
From the Booth Award: Eat the Rainbow Brian Benson, Narrative, USA, 20 min
Programmers Prize: Execution Stavit Allweis, Experimental, USA, 48 min

Sunday 10/24 7:30 PM
2021 Short Film Awards
Animation Award: Average Happiness Maja GEHRIG, Animation, Switzerand, 7 min
Narrative Award: Drifting Hanxiong Bo, Narrative, China, Spain, 16 min
Documentary Award: The Long Wait Shuang Li, Documentary, China, USA, 26 min
Experimental Award: The Truth About Hastings, Dan S, Experimental, USA, 9 min
Music Video Award: Pirate Bay Lisa Truttmann, Music Video, UK, 7 min
Research Award: My Favorite Software is Being Here Alison Nguyen, Animation, USA, 20 min
Film House Award: Drills Sarah Friedland, Experimental, USA, 17 min
Black Bear Award: New Mexico Deathwish Diatribe Georg Koszulinski, Experimental, USA, 12 min

About

Founded in 1974, the AIFVF has been presenting the best in international film for 46 years. Known globally as a festival that supports cinema from underground and marginalized populations, the AIFVF represents the values that we share as a community. It is a champion of justice and provides a voice for underrepresented artists and viewpoints on a global level. For four decades, Athens International has embraced experimental, narrative, short-form, feature length, and documentary films from every corner of the globe, offering filmmakers a stellar platform for public exposure and an environment that values artistry above marquee names and industry relationships.

“The Last Happy Day” featured in 25 Years Later Favorite Criterion Channel Short Films

Favorite Criterion Channel Short Films Added October 2021
25 Years Later 
by Nick Luciano
October 22, 2021
https://25yearslatersite.com/2021/10/21/favorite-criterion-channel-short-films-added-october-2021/

Each month, dozens of new films are added to the Criterion Channel. While the rich selection of feature-length classic and independent films obviously gets a lot of well-deserved attention, I wanted to shine a little light on some of the short films. I believe that shorts should get a lot more attention than they typically do—they are breeding grounds of experimentation and non-traditional storytelling, and often are important outlets for marginalized voices.

October’s lineup on Criterion Channel features just nine new short films under 40 minutes, five of which were experimental documentaries by director Lynne Sachs. Also added to the channel this month were narrative shorts by Mariana Saffon, Brandon Cronenberg, and Chloë Sevigny, as well as a documentary short by Arthur Dong. Since it was a lighter month, I’m only going to profile three films this time around.

While this article is exclusively focusing on short films that are on Criterion Channel, I’m also keeping track of all of the short films I watch in monthly Letterboxd lists, whether on Criterion Channel or elsewhere. I’ve listed the streaming service that I watched them on, with the films that I talk about in this article marked in the notes with two asterisks. Feel free to follow me and the lists on Letterboxd and feel free to reach out to me on Twitter if you want to discuss any of the short films. Without further ado, let’s get into the films!

Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You (2019, 10 minutes), dir. by Brandon Cronenberg

While it’s already the short film with the longest name of any I’ve covered in this column, it’s also one of the most unsettling. Directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of body horror legend David Cronenberg and director of the 2020 feature film Possessor, the short portrays a woman describing the waking dreams she is experiencing as the result of a device that has been implanted into her brain. The device is typically covered by a wig because it otherwise grotesquely sticks out from the top of her head. As she describes the dreams, we see them with her through a bright, colorful filter that changes colors as different parts of her brain are stimulated.

The dreams are, of course, nightmarish and surreal. Much like a real dream, the dreams operate with a logic that is all their own. Sometimes the images and the words describing them don’t align. Non-sequiturs abound. Perhaps most importantly, there are also recurring elements, like the test subject repeatedly using the same phrases to describe what she is seeing—she says that each one is “a dream I used to have” and that “eventually I realize that I am in a kind of hell.” The recurring motifs mimic the recurring nature of the dreams (“a dream I used to have” implying, of course, that they are dreams that she has had on many occasions) and induce a similar dream-state disorientation in the viewer. The short also begins to blur “reality” with the dream state, as one of the dreams essentially describes the plot of the short. 

One thing that I found surprising was some small moments of humor in the short. The moment that sticks out the most to me is in the third dream when the main character, Emily, imagines everyone having the device implanted into their brains under wigs and says that “Eventually I realize I’m in a kind of hell, because it seems impossible that the wig industry can manufacture enough units to cover everyone.” Another line that I found humorous (although I’m not positive that this one is intended to be), is when Emily describes a dream where she is “the best boxer in the world” in a world where boxing doesn’t exist. This moment is brief, however, and the scene immediately shifts to a more terrifyingly existential territory (“Eventually I realize I’m in a kind of hell, because my worth is based entirely on a nonsense idea”). The dark science fiction, surreal blurring of dream and reality, and stylized imagery made this short film my favorite of the month.

Sewing Woman (1982, 14 minutes), dir. by Arthur Dong

The last two films in the Criterion Channel column this month are documentaries that share similarly intimate and personal approaches to themes of immigration in the mid-20th century. The first is Sewing Woman, which tells the story of the filmmaker’s mother Zem Ping Dong. The understated nature of the short film is epitomized by the final line: “I’m just a sewing woman.”

Despite Dong’s protestations to not exaggerate her life, the documentary is a mini-epic. Dong’s life from child bride in an arranged marriage in rural China, giving birth while her husband was in America, to surviving the Second Sino-Japanese War, and disowning her son to emigrate to America. It is both an extraordinary story and one that is also incredibly common coming out of the strife of the mid-twentieth century.

The Last Happy Day (2009, 38 minutes), dir. by Lynne Sachs

The subject of The Last Happy Day, Sandor Lenard, is from the other side of the world from Sewing Woman. Distantly related to filmmaker Lynne Sachs, Lenard came to her attention after an uncle gave her and her brother a copy of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh that Lenard had translated into Latin. 

The short intersperses readings of Sandor’s letters with interviews with his relatives, readings by Sachs’ children, and abstract images. Secretly Jewish during World War II, Lenard found work recovering bodies of Allied forces. He hid prisoners of war in his Rome apartment. He spoke over a dozen languages and spent time studying in the Vatican library. He lost a brother in the Holocaust, and never truly seemed to recover from all the horrors he experienced.

There are a few moments that stand out that point to why Sandor may have decided to translate Winnie the Pooh, the “Latin is not a dead language, believe me. If only for this moment. It is with Latin that I am best able to invent a way to speak of dread. The second moment comes from Sandor’s second wife, Andrietta. In her advanced age, Andrietta struggles to remember the order of events, and whether they even happened as she remembers them. “There are things so old that I am not sure of the truth. Sometimes, you don’t know anymore what’s real and what’s fantasy. Sandor never could forget.” The “fantasy” part of the quote is not exactly in the same context, but I couldn’t help but wonder if Sandor tried to find truth in the fantasy of Winnie the Pooh. He emigrated to Brazil to live somewhere “big and green and quiet and far away.” The refuges from reality that he found in Winnie the Pooh and Brazil seem to be what he chased the rest of his life, and what are presented so eloquently in this short film.

Closing

This is just a taste of the short films on Criterion Channel! What were some of your favorites? Was there a filmmaker whose filmography you’re excited to dive deeper into? Let me know in the comments what stuck out to you, or reach out to me on Twitter, and I’ll be back next month to look at some more Criterion Channel short films!

aemi: Artist in Focus: Lynne Sachs (at the 66th Cork Film Festival)

66th Cork Film Festival
November 16-18, 2021
https://2021.corkfilmfest.org/films/aemi-artist-in-focus-lynne-sachs-615afd65aae68d005a5685ed

I will be heading to Cork International Film Festival in Ireland to present “Film About a Father Who” with 10 short films as part of their AEMI artist focus on my work. Honored to share four collaborative film poems: “Longings” made with filmmaker Moira Sweeney (who will be there with us!); “A Month of Single Frames” made with Barbara Hammer; “Girl is Presence” made with Anne Lesley Selcer; and, “Starfish Aorta Colossus” made with Paolo Javier.

Making work since the 1980s Lynne Sachs’ films have incorporated a cross-pollination of forms that extend to the essay film, documentary, collage, performance, and poetry. Deeply reflexive, Sachs’ films to date have outlined a rich interplay between the personal and the socio-political. aemi is delighted to present this overview of selected short works by Lynne Sachs at Cork International Film Festival, many of which are screening in Ireland for the first time. 

In addition to this shorts programme Lynne will also be in attendance at the festival for the Irish premiere of her celebrated feature Film About a Father Who.

CAROLEE, BARBARA & GUNVOR Lynne Sachs
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three artists who embraced the moving image throughout their lives.

STILL LIFE WITH WOMEN AND FOUR OBJECTS Lynne Sachs
A portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a ‘character’.

DRAWN AND QUARTERED Lynne Sachs
Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections.

THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE: A MUSEUM OF FALSE FACTS Lynne Sachs
A girl’s difficult coming-of-age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.

GIRL IS PRESENCE Lynne Sachs and Anne Lesley Selcer
Against the uncertain and anxious pandemic atmosphere, inside domestic space, a ‘girl’ arranges and rearranges a collection of small and mysterious things.

LONGINGS Lynne Sachs and Moira Sweeney
A collaboration exploring the resonances and ruptures between image and language.

DRIFT AND BOUGH Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper.

STARFISH AORTA COLOSSUS Lynne Sachs
Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas.

MAYA AT 24 Lynne Sachs
Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya at 6, 16 and 24.

A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES Lynne Sachs with and for Barbara Hammer
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. She shot film and kept a journal. In 2018 Hammer, facing her own imminent death, gave her material to Lynne and invited her to make a film.

aemi @ CIFF: Contested Legacies – Lynne Sachs and Myrid Carten

10 November 2021 / 8pm / Triskel Arts Centre Cinema
8pm Cinema screening and Q&A
https://aemi.ie/event/aemi-ciff-contested-legacies-lynne-sachs-and-myrid-carten/

The Irish premiere of Lynne Sachs’ celebrated feature Film About a Father Who screens here alongside the world premiere of Myrid Carten’s short film Sorrow had a baby. Both artists will be in attendance for a discussion of their work following the screening.

Both Film About a Father Who and Sorrow had a baby deal, in very different ways, with familial legacy incorporating personal archives and pushing against the traditional boundaries of documentary practice. Myrid Carten’s film Sorrow had a baby is also the first film produced through aemi’s annual film commissioning programme, supported by Arts Council of Ireland.


Myrid Carten, Sorrow had a baby, 2021, Ireland, 16 minutesaemi Film Commission 2021
‘I absorbed the women in my life as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face.’ – Vivan Gornick

Sorrow had a baby explores the mother-daughter relationship through multiple lenses: memory, beauty, inheritance. Who writes the stories in a family? Who can change them?

Lynne Sachs, Film About a Father Who, 2020, USA, 74 minutesOver a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is 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’ cinematic 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, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

Lynne Sachs: Criterion Octet

EXCLUSIVE STREAMING PREMIERES

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 13

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO

Featuring seven short films and a new introduction by the filmmaker

Over a period of thirty-five years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16 mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Like a cubist rendering of a face, Sachs’s cinematic exploration of her father offers multiple, sometimes contradictory, views of a seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately shrouded in mystery. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal.

This exclusive streaming premiere is accompanied by a selection of experimental short films by Sachs, many of which also reflect her probing exploration of family relationships

  • Which Way Is East, 1994
  • The Last Happy Day, 2009
  • Wind in Our Hair, 2010
  • The Washing Society, 2018
  • Girl Is Presence, 2020
  • E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo, 2021
  • Maya at 24, 2021

Featured in the following collections: women directors, shorts collections, exclusive streaming

Selected clips from original Criterion Channel interview with Lynne Sachs by Tara Young:

Criterion Channel adds “Film About a Father Who” Director’s Commentary

Watch it here: https://www.criterionchannel.com/film-about-a-father-who/videos/film-about-a-father-who-commentary

“Maya at 24” at RPM Festival

RPM Festival 2021
http://revolutionsperminutefest.org/

P06: Lucid Bodies

Wednesday, Oct.20, 7:30PM- online
Runtime: 55 mins

notes from the kingdom of the sick – Felicity Palma
Self Portrait with Bag – Dianna Barrie
Monsieur Jean-Claude – Guillaume Vallée
Maya at 24 – Lynne Sachs
Tri and Khanh – Daphne Xu
婦人 (Fujin) – Rachel Makana’aloha O Kauikeolani Nakawatase
Two Sons and a River of Blood – Amber Bemak & Angelo Madsen Minax

Post-screening Q&A
with Filmmakers & Sarah Bliss

Revolutions per Minute festival (RPM Fest) is dedicated to short-form poetic, personal, experimental film, video and audiovisual performance.

Lynne Sachs on “Into the Mothlight” Podcast

EP.32 – Lynne Sachs
10/18/2021
by Jason Moyes
https://www.intothemothlight.com/home/ep32-lynne-sachs

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, she investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. 

After comprehensive career retrospectives at Sheffield Documentary festival in 2020 and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York this year, her latest feature ‘Film about a Father Who’ is being screened on the Criterion Channel along with seven other short films. Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. ‘Film About a Father Who’ is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. 

We chat about ‘Film About a Father Who’, her approach to experimental documentary making and living and working in San Francisco in 80’s

You can stream 8 of Lynne’s films including FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO on the Criterion Channel here. 

Interview Transcript

“Into the Mothlight” – TRANSCRIPT FOR DOWNLOADDownload

People, places and films Lynne references include:

The work about civil disobedience is ‘Investigation of a Flame:  A Portrait of the Catonsville Nine’ (2001) 

We discuss the films that feature Lynne’s daughter Maya, including ‘Maya at 24‘ (2021) 

‘Photograph of wind‘ (2001) – the title taken from an expression used by the photographer Robert Frank   

And ‘Same Stream Twice‘ (2012) 

Quote from the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa from The Book of Disquiet. 

“Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of a great Spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind.” 

People and places in San Francisco. 

Lynne worked with the Vietnamese filmmaker, writer and composer Trinh T. Minh-ha 

She learned cinematography from Babette Mangolte  who had also worked with Chantal Akerman  

A mention of Walter Benjamin, and in particular his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ 

She studied with the Swedish American filmmaker   Gunvor Nelson – Read Lynne’s throughs on the films of this artists here. 

The underground film maker George Kuchar 

Barbara Hammer – read about Lynne’s film ‘A Month of Single Frames’ (2019) here, and see an excerpt from ‘Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor’ here

Filmmaker and curator and her “compatriot big brother and dear dear friend Craig Baldwin and the programmes he would curate at Other Cinema  

Seeing Stan Brakhage films at the San Francisco Cinematheque and the Millennium Film Workshop (New York) 

Stan Brakhage’s annual programme at the Anthology film Archives where he included Lynne’s work ‘The House of Science: a museum of false facts’ (1991)  

Lynne mentions her husband, the filmmaker Mark Street – read about Mark here

The First Person Cinema Salon that Stan Brakhage ran in Boulder, Colorado, and showing silent works by Joseph Cornell from his own collection.  

Teaching filmmaking at the Flowchart Foundation 

And remember that you can support Into the Mothlight on Patreon here. 

About Into the Mothlight Podcast

Experimental film and installation artist Jason Moyes lives and works in rural Scotland and has been exploring the moving image since 2007. His work has been shown in the UK, North America, Europe and Asia. He is a founding member of the Moving Image Makers Collective.