The collective audiovisual project, which proposes eight contemporary filmmakers to write a filmed letter to another director, will be part of the closing of the festival.
Rebeca Esnaola, Minister of Culture and Sports of the Government of Navarra, Garbiñe Ortega, artistic director of Punto de Vista and Teresa Morales de Álava, executive director of Punto de Vista, presented this morning at a press conference the complete program of the festival that will be held will be held in Pamplona from March 15 to 20. During the meeting, the publication of this year co-published with La Fábrica, Cartas como movies , was announced, which continues the one carried out in 2018 and continues to gather fascinating letters between creators, this time focused on contemporary filmmakers. It has also been presented The letters that were not also are, a collective audiovisual project in which several contemporary filmmakers have made a filmed letter addressed to another filmmaker in the history of cinema whom they have not met personally and which will be screened for the first time at the closing of the festival.
The letters that were not also are Garbiñe Ortega, artistic director of Punto de Vista, devised the creation of a collective audiovisual project with the collaboration of the filmmaker Matías Piñeiro in which several filmmakers will make a filmed letter addressed to another filmmaker in the history of cinema that they did not know personally and that he was as far away as possible from his own cinema. Thus was born The letters that were not also are .
Beatrice Gibson, Nicolás Pereda, Deborah Stratman, Lynne Sachs, Raya Martin, Jessica Sarah Rinland, Alejo Moguillansky and Diana Toucedo make this collection of eight short films that find a new dimension when shown together and that will premiere at the closing of the festival. The filmed letters are addressed to people as diverse as Jean Vigo, Wes Craven, Chantal Akerman, Chick Strand, Michelangelo Antonioni, Danièle Huillet, Barbara Loden, Nina Menkes, Bette Gordon or Nancy Holt. The result is a passionate journey through his affinities, his admiration and his creative processes.
Letters as Films This book is the result of an extended project that took shape in 2018 – with the publication of Correspondences: Letters as Films.– and that since then he has continued to gather fascinating letters between filmmakers to trace unthinkable connections and relationships with the aim of drawing new genealogies and film families. This year, Punto de Vista publishes by the hand of La Fábrica a second volume of correspondence, now focused on contemporary filmmakers understood as artists who have been active until relatively recently.
It is a book that allows different readings, where relationships between letters and images, time jumps, non-explicit thematic sub-chapters, small sequenced tributes – such as the one dedicated to Harun Farocki, or to a generation of American avant-garde cinema – are proposed, and imaginary epistles written for this project by filmmakers of the present and aimed at filmmakers in the history of cinema, living or dead, that they have not met.
Punto de Vista’s programming will be made up of seven large sections following the line of previous editions. The Official Section will present 32 films selected from proposals from all over the world; the Retrospectives will be dedicated to the influential curator Amos Vogel and the artist Nancy Holt; DOKBIZIA , a meeting that will bring together artists from different disciplines such as Lois Patiño , CW Winter , MaríaSalgado , Vera Mantero , Xabier Erkizia , Fermín Jiménez Landa , Oier Etxeberria or Sam Green to share their way of relating to reality; the Punto de Vista Labs, as a space for the exchange of knowledge and collective creation; Contemporary Spotlights, which will include the 16 mm works of Robert Fenz , the screening of Pedro G. Romero’s latest film Nueve Sevillas , the Point of View session with researcher Nicholas Zembashiof Forensic Architecture or the meeting with the sound artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan . We also find the Special Sessions , made up of programs such as X Films or the meeting of Basque-Navarrese filmmakers Paisaia and, finally, the Educational Program , which continues to open the festival to new audiences.
In person, online and with a new outdoor space: La Plaza The 15th edition of Punto de Vista will be held in person, complying with all security measures. In addition, the festival will offer part of its online programming through the Festival Scope platform. Face-to-face tickets and the different types of online tickets are already on sale on the festival’s website, www.puntodevistafestival.com
On the other hand, this year Punto de Vista will have a new meeting space organized in collaboration with the Pamplona City Council: La Plaza. A marquee will be set up outdoors in the Plaza de Baluarte, the main venue of the festival, where the attending public will be able to meet and attend a series of their own activities. The press conferences of the festival will be held there, two daily passes with free admission will be scheduled until the capacity of the piece created by the City Council during 2020 about Los No Sanfermines is full , a talk about Dardara will be organizedwith Marina Lameiro, Gorka Urbizu and Garbiñe Ortega, content from previous years of Punto de Vista will be screened and Napardocs will be organized, an initiative of Napar in collaboration with Clavna that the festival has hosted for several editions and that will bring together the association with participating filmmakers in the festival.
The arthouse streaming provider Mubi has added the cinematic diary poem “A Month of Single Frames” to its range. In the 14-minute work, the American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs processes recordings made by her fellow artist Barbara Hammer (1939-2019). The pioneer of lesbian avant-garde cinema lived in a hut on Cape Cod in Massachusetts for a month in 1998 and captured her impressions of the secluded life with 8 and 16mm cameras, sound recordings and notes. In view of a progressive cancer disease, she handed the unused material over to Lynne Sachs in 2018, who added her own images and texts.
In her blog “ From the first person,” Siegfried Kracauer scholarship holder Esther Buss paid tribute to the unusual project as a joint effort in January 2021, in which the collaboration does not serve to disguise, but rather to progress. The collaboration reflects a shared experience in a singular way that represents women’s friendship as well as a lively form of estate work: “One has seldom seen a tale of loneliness and nature more turned towards the world.”
In the jointly written diary-poem “A Month of Single Frames”, the American experimental filmmaker processes recordings by her artist colleague Barbara Hammer, who died in 2019. The collaboration does not serve the purpose of concealment, as Esther Buss elaborates in her Kracauer blog, but of progression: the “we” is like opening a door.
Lynne Sachs’ A Month of Single Frames (2020) is a collaborative diary-poem made with and for Barbara Hammer. That’s what it says at the end of the film. Hammer, a pioneer of avant-garde lesbian cinema who passed away in 2019, has always been generous in her work. In her short, experimental films, but also in the memoirs published in 2010 (“ Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life ”), she shared her own (sensual and sexual) experiences and placed them in a larger context of collective queer identity.
Hammer was also generous with his own authorship. As the artist began to organize her estate as her cancer progressed, she gave the younger Lynne Sachs 8mm and 16mm images, sound recordings, and notes that were made twenty years earlier during a month-long residency on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and have resided ever since had stayed. Sachs was invited to make a film from the footage. “ A Month of Single Frames ”, almost 14 minutes long, is the result of this invitation, which in turn is an expression of a female friendship as well as a living concept of estate work.
A form of community building
A form of community building is also inherent in Lynne Sachs’ films. They often emerge from close collaborations, for example with close or distant family members, with migrant communities and artistic companions. In Film About A Father Who (2020), her most recent work, she approaches the elusive figure of her father, Ira Sachs – father of nine children by many different women – in the form of a fractured essay shared with numerous voices and perspectives . In “ Your Day is My Night’ (2013) ‘sharing’, on the other hand, is an economic necessity. The subject and setting of the film is a so-called “shift-bed” apartment in Chinatown – an apartment in which Chinese immigrants share a bed in shifts, in line with their precarious day and night jobs. What connects Sachs most closely with Hammer, however, is their understanding of film as a physical, tactile experience. “A Month of Single Frames” also wants to be experienced rather than viewed.
Wants to be viewed less, experienced more: “A Month of Single Frames” (Lynne Sachs)
Retreating to a secluded hut without electricity and running water is a motif charged with cultural history, especially in Massachusetts, after all, the legendary “Walden Pond” is barely more than 200 kilometers away. (Thoreau also wrote a book about Cape Cod, which is less well known). However, “A Month of Single Frames” is anything but introspection and nature-pious contemplation; one has seldom seen a tale of loneliness and nature that is more open to the world. On the one hand, this is due to Hammer’s extremely haptic images and her very own understanding of “visual pleasure”. On the other hand, the posthumous editing by Sachs, which opens up the space for a shared experience.
Overwhelmed by simplicity
Lynne Sachs assembled tape recordings that were made shortly before her friend’s death in April 2019 in her studio – she had Hammer read from her “Duneshack” journal, you can also hear fragments of their conversation – with film images: recordings of insects, the sparse vegetation in the dunes, of light reflections, shadow plays and weather changes, of banal everyday things that transform into lyrical objects in the camera’s view. “I am overwhelmed by simplicity,” Hammer is once heard to say emphatically to the image of a shred of plastic film blowing in the wind. Another time, she gazes in fascination at a bow tie in which she recognizes a miniature army helicopter patrolling the coast. Despite all the amazement at the many things that are waiting to be discovered with the senses: Her delight in cinematic experimentation overwhelms any attempt at naturalistic viewing. “Why is it I can’t see nature whole and pure without artifice?” Hammer once wondered.
She played extensively with the possibilities of camera technology, for example by slowing down the throughput of the film material until single frames were recorded. Elsewhere, colored foils cast colorful lights in the sand or immerse the landscape in shimmering, luminous magenta.
“I’m here with you in this movie”
The most striking sign of the “second” authorship is Sachs’ own text. In it, the friend who is both present and absent is addressed. He lies “silently” over the image, is an authorial voice in a reflective soliloquy as well as a voice in an intimate dialogue, which finally dissolves in the collective of all those who are watching the film “together” at that moment. “You are alone” – “I am here with you in this film” – “There are others here with us” – “We are all together”.
We Are All Together: “A Month of Single Frames” (Lynne Sachs)
With the circulation and multiplication of personal pronouns, tooChantal Akerman in her films, such as “I, you, he, she ” (1974). With Sachs, however, behind the sequence of pronouns is not the veiling of the self, but progression. The “we” in the film is like opening a door. One is called, invited in, feels meant. One is everywhere now: in Cape Cod, in Hammer’s studio, in the film images, alone and with everyone.
By Giulia Rho March 8, 2021 Club Des Femmes https://www.clubdesfemmes.com/portfolio-item/culture-club-watching16/
MUBI is screening A Month of Single Frames (from Mon 8 March) and Vever (from Tues 9 March) to mark International Women’s Day 2021.
To support their programming, MUBI are offering 30 days’ free viewing (starting whenever you choose) of all the films on their platform to Club des Femmes’ readers and friends!
Ways of Seeing with Barbara Hammer
“I am overwhelmed by simplicity. There is so much to see”, recites an ageing Barbara Hammer from her diary. An entry that dates back to 1998, when the filmmaker was conducting a one-month residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with only the dunes and the ocean to keep her company. “I feel compelled to do absolutely nothing. There is nothing to do”, she recounts, as the camera shows us the artist taking a shower outside, in the nude, at ease with her backdrop of sun-scorched sand grass. These moments appear suspended in time, at once very distant from me and very close, like memories of my own from my college years in Boston and weekend escapes to the coast. I find myself wondering how Barbara Hammer could extract these images from my mind, as they soar away from me into the past.
Lynne Sachs, who directed Barbara to read selected excerpts from the diary out loud for her film A Month in Single Frames (2019), edits together the artist’s unused footage with oneiric lyricism, giving us brilliant frames of pure light, extreme closeups of flowers and time lapses of clouds journeying through the expansive American sky. Fractals of colors artificially created by Barbara with rainbow gel flags overlap and fade out into the hues of the scarce vegetation, and the changing sunlight on the dunes. Barbara’s own shadow appears now and then, stretched along the beach, reflected in her own artmaking, a self-inscription that travels to us, in this moment in time, and reminds us of the woman behind the camera, the body around the voiceover. The communion of human and natural, of feminine bodies and flora is a long-standing trope in Barbara Hammer’s filmmaking, appearing since her early shorts Dyketactics (1974) and Menses (1974). Naked women frolic and fuck unperturbed by the open space surrounding them. I often think of them as a Flower Child Eve, who upon eating the forbidden fruit and realising she is naked, instead of covering herself with leaves, shrugs it off, and revels in her own skin.
Bugs, strands of grass and little toys populate A Month of Single Frames, inhabiting it like a doll house, an artificial space that seems to encompass “the expanse called life” as a terminally ill Hammer looks back to it. Like in the most famous still from this film: a little glass contains the whole ocean.
Back when the film was released in 2019, none of us could have imagined the emotional resonance a film about the smallness of life would hold just a year later. And yet, this Thoreauvian Cape Cod, this meditation on the passing of time and the beauty of everyday, now insistently reminds me of my Instagram feed, which, during several lockdowns, has filled with little pleasures and stolen moments of domesticity. The arrangement of fruits in a colourful bowl when the light hits just right, a pet that appears to be smiling at the camera, the corner of a white building slashing the blue sky, can now all bring tears to my eyes. As part of my PhD practice, I spend most days researching images of the banality of beauty, captured by a past generation of feminist filmmakers of which Hammer was part. I survey their movies like a detective, waiting for hints of these lives gone by, and I continually find my own. The re-evaluation of the mundane preached by Thoreau and Whitman and exemplified by the American avant-garde has returned in our habit of documenting days that follow one another in a blur and posting the most fleeting joys online.
The attempt of recounting an experience of solitude through connection reiterates Lynne Sachs’ strategy of making a film with and for Barbara Hammer, repurposing the artist’s unused footage. “You are alone. I am here with you in this film. There are others here with us. We are all together”, Lynne writes, over the image of a stick drawing invisible lines in the sand. I detest that everything reminds me of the pandemic, of the present moment, rather than taking me away from it. But I love the invitation Barbara and Lynne’s collaboration extends to look at the simple and habitual like the richest treasure: “everything waits expectantly to be discovered”.
If A Month of Single Frames dwells on the natural world, Vever (2019) by Deborah Stratman revisits another trope in Barbara Hammer’s repertoire: travel. The original footage was shot in 1975 by Barbara in Guatemala, at the end of a motorcycle trip that got her away from the Bay Area, heartbreak and a troubled affair. “I needed to get away and drive”, she tells Stratman over the phone; a tremor in her voice betrays her old age. The film is bursting with energy and color, the market streets are busy, and the soundtrack of drums and flutes urges us to search the crowd expectantly, as if Barbara herself was about to appear straddling her BMW motorcycle like the heroine in an action movie. Instead, a text runs over the screen, a testimony of defeat, and failure of the artist to capture reality. We discover from the voice over that Hammer never printed the film herself because she had no “political content or personal context” to justify spending what little money she had. What motivated her to shoot this film in the first place? “I left without an intention, except to drive”, she recounts. Once the film ran out, she simply turned around and went back to San Francisco, as if the camera was the navigator.
Tribal etchings appear in answer to these doubts. The music now assumes a magical or religious tone and the human world succumbs to the jungle. It is almost an invocation, a response to the inability to master art that the text on the screen has been telling us about. In fact, the music sounds familiar. I wonder if I’m getting hypnotized, or if a memory inside me is stirring. Where have I heard it? Before I can find an answer, images from the market return. Except now it’s the end of the day, it is quieter. Over the phone, Barbara hurriedly tells Stratman that she needs to go. The screen is already black. She truly has gone, too far for us to reach her. And yet the quote we are left with reads: “great Gods cannot ride little horses”, a Haitian proverb that immediately reminds me of a picture I saw of Barbara sitting on her bike, a beautiful, powerful butch iconography. And she doesn’t feel so far anymore.
I barely have the time to smile to myself when Maya Deren’s name appears in the credits. The music that sounded so familiar is quoted from Meshes in the Afternoon, coincidentally the film that Hammer credits in her biography Hammer! (2015)as her major inspiration for becoming a filmmaker. And so, all the pieces of the film fall into place: the tribal designs, the Haitian references, the meditations on art and power. They are from Maya Deren’s own practice, and especially her religious beliefs. Barbara might have embarked on her journey to South America alone and hurting, but Stratman’s film retrospectively gives her companionship. Vever connects three generations of women and offers them to us. As we’ve learnt in Sachs’ film, we are alone together.
In voodoo tradition, which Deren studied and practiced, everything is connected unpredictably and non-hierarchically. These divine linkages are evoked through drawings like the ones that appear in the film, in fact homonymously called ‘vevers’. Once again, I can’t help thinking about our contemporary summoning practice. How we engage in invocations of another that we cannot see, who isn’t sharing our space and yet we believe to be present, at the other end of our technology. Vever opens with a loud dialing tone, a wait, before Hammer picks up the call and Stratman asks: “can you hear me okay?”. How familiar this ritual of connection has become to us all, endlessly trapped in Zoom waiting rooms repeating vocabulary from a séance. “Just barely”, replies Hammer, as the film shows her hand receiving a bowl of soup from an Indigenous woman. She is there, physically preserved in the film, in the company of Maya Deren’s words and music. And I wonder if the whole film isn’t an invocation of them, for their art to reach us today. I spend so much time with them and artists like them for my PhD that I have come to consider them friends. They aren’t, after all, that much further in time and space than my real-life friends, isolated together as we are.
Watching these films on the occasion of International Women’s Day I am left hopeful of the connections we are able to draw. Like the intricate and vibrant designs the women in Vever weave in their tapestries and clothes, so we are tethered to one another across location and generation. Surely our political practice has evolved and expanded, but we still have so much in common with the women who have come before us. I often think of philosopher Luce Irigaray’s reminder that “we already have a history” (Sexes and Genealogies, 19), and her warning against being led to believe that the past is rags rather than riches. We need to cultivate our genealogy, reworking the old in order to create something new, much like Sachs and Stratman do in their collaboration with Hammer. The possibilities to easily access their movies on MUBI is an opportunity to witness such history and interact with it. Our contemporary digital feminism can help make invisible bodies and stories visible and part of a larger discourse, like a whole ocean in a glass of water.
Investigation of a Flame. 2001. USA. Directed by Lynne Sachs. 45 min.
On May 17, 1968, a group of Catholic anti–Vietnam War protestors armed with homemade napalm confiscated hundreds of selective service records and set fire to them in a Catonsville, Maryland, parking lot. Decades later, director Lynne Sachs interviews the surviving members of the Catonsville Nine about their acts of resistance and their unwavering commitment to peace. Screened on opening night of Documentary Fortnight’s inaugural year, only months after 9/11—and now 20 years later in a new era of discontent—Investigation of a Flame is as powerful as ever, a call to action in the face of turmoil and injustice. Courtesy the Film-Makers’ Cooperative
Virtual Cinema is not available to Annual Pass members. With the exception of Modern Mondays programs, Virtual Cinema screenings are not available outside the US.
EXCERPT- Stephen Vitiello – Soundtracks for Lynne Sachs (Volume 2, Your Day Is My Night, The Washing Society, Tip of My Tongue) – 01 opening (YDMN) EXCERPT- Stephen Vitiello – Soundtracks for Lynne Sachs (Volume 2, Your Day Is My Night, The Washing Society, Tip of My Tongue) – 19 Last Minute (TOMT)EXCERPT- Stephen Vitiello – Soundtracks for Lynne Sachs (Volume 2, Your Day Is My Night, The Washing Society, Tip of My Tongue) – 09 Every Fold (TWS)
Lynne Sachs first reached out to me in 2012, asking if I could recommend someone to work on the soundtrack for an upcoming film. I probably paused for a polite moment and then offered my own services. Since that time, I’ve created music for several projects by Lynne, including 4 feature-length films, a performance work (created in collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker) and a short film that uses a track I did with Molly Berg for a 12k CD. Over the years, I’ve amassed an archive of pieces made for these projects, some used in the films, some excerpted, some proposed. In some cases, Lynne would be looking for a 30-second clip for a transition and I’d use that as an excuse to record a 10-minute piece, figuring we’d find the 30-seconds somewhere in there.
This second volume of soundtracks works are from three films …. Your Day is My Night, is set in NY’s Chinatown and follows the lives of Chinese-Americans living in shifted apartments. The Washing Society, is a collaboration between Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker, it “brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there.” Tip Of My Tongue, a piece on events of the last 55 years as remembered by a collection of friends and colleagues. As much as these musical tracks were created for the films, I don’t believe one has to have seen the films to enjoy them. That said, running out, or jumping on your computer, to watch and listen to the films would be a very good thing to consider.
credits
releases March 5, 2021
Stephen Vitiello – guitar, piano, modular synthesizer, field recordings Molly Berg – clarinet and a bit of voice (YDMN) Michael Raphael – washing machine recordings (TWS) Amanda Katz and Jeff Sisson – Sound recordings (YDMN)
Cover art – Lynne Sachs Mastering – Lawrence English at Negative Space
Your Day is My Night, directed by Lynne Sachs, 2013 Camera, co-producing and editing: Sean Hanley
The Washing Society, a film by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs, 2018 Editor – Amanda Katz
Tip Of My Tongue, directed by Lynne Sachs, 2017 Editor – Amanda Katz
Working alone and with various collaborators over the course of 35 years, Lynne Sachs has developed a body of work deeply invested in a range of interwoven personal and ethical subjects. Using all types of media, from 8mm and 16mm film to HD files, her rigorous explorations in sound and image investigate ideas of family, mythology, portraiture, political resistance, feminism, war, and the quotidian. A poet, educator, collage artist, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, Sachs has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts (2014), among many other awards. In January 2021, the Museum of the Moving Image organized a major retrospective of her film work. Here, two recent shorts accompany her latest feature, Film About a Father Who . . ., each reflecting features of the artist’s family.
Lynne Sachs has collaborated numerous times with other filmmakers, writers, and performers in her fertile pursuit of a very personal cinematic language. Made with writer Anne Lesley Selcer, and grounded in a domestic sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic, the new short Girl Is Presence features Sachs’s own daughter Noa carefully sifting through and rearranging curious objects while Selcer recites lines from her poem Sun Cycle. (2020, 4 minutes)
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne Sachs recorded 8mm and 16mm film, analogue videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Ostensibly a documentary portrait of a parent, Film About a Father Who . . . reveals as much, or more, about patriarchal silences and omissions than about the subject himself, who remains enigmatic throughout. “My father has always chosen the alternative path in life, a path that has brought unpredictable adventures, nine children with six different women, brushes with the police, and a life-long interest in trying to do some good in the world.” It is also a film about the complex dynamics that conspire to create a family. (2020, 74 minutes)
Silently accumulated handwritten to-do lists and notes to herself become evidence of the filmmaker’s relationship with family, friends, and herself over a limited period of time. These fragments of text and direction on scraps of paper and yellow Post-it notes form an abstract storytelling device—like a personal poem or storyboard for an experimental film. (2016, 4 minutes)
For filmmaker Lynne Sachs, the action of reflecting, recording, and editing a film about her family produces a pretty crazy personal narrative: the new documentary feature Film About a Father Who.
Dynamic Story Exploring the contradictions and melodrama of her own family, Sachs created her film from footage she has been assembling since 1984, weaving together a visually textural film about her father and siblings with honesty and openness. Her talent is visible because she makes it all look so easy. For film enthusiasts, it is noteworthy that Sachs takes inspiration for the film’s title from the avant-garde 1974 feature Film About a Woman Who.
Sachs’s father, Ira Sachs, Sr.—a colorful personality and resident of Park City, Utah—made a living as a hotel developer and enjoyed partying with women on and off the ski slopes. He fathered nine children by five women, creating this dynamic story.
Complicated Interactions I had the pleasure of seeing this film at the Slamdance Film Festival, a more-independent alternative to the Sundance Film Festival, both of which take place in Park City, Utah—clearly the right place to premiere this film. I love Film About a Father Who because it demonstrates the director’s filmmaking skills as she unfolds decades of complicated family interactions, particularly with her father. Family can bring out the worst in us, but for the Sachs family, it seems to knit them together, even if uncomfortably.
I asked Lynne about the feedback she has gotten from audiences.
“After watching my film, a man exactly my age wrote to me from Oklahoma to say that he wanted to share the story of his relationship with his mother, and his discovery of adult siblings he had never known. I have had so many conversations with people who told me that their experience of watching my film gave them insight into their own thinking about the imprint of our parents on all of us as children.” —Lynne Sachs
About the Author Mary Magsamen is the curator at Aurora Picture Show and an artist who works in collaboration with her husband, Stephan Hillerbrand, as Hillerbrand+Magsamen.
DIRECTED BY Trinh T. Minh-ha and Lynne Sachs with Barbara Hammer
A film from the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection is paired with a contemporary work that is not in the collection. The two works resonate with timeless, conceptual connections.
Whose film is it? Contemporary artists Trinh T. Minh-ha, Lynne Sachs, and the late Barbara Hammer address various forms of truth-telling and collaboration in cinema. Minh-ha challenges traditional ethnographic films, drawing attention to ways they are conspicuously shaped by the storyteller’s colonial standpoint. Sachs and Hammer elevate the possibility of shared authorship by conceiving a film shaped by Sachs’s vision of Hammer’s material.
Screening right here for free beginning at 10 am (CDT) April 20 until May 4.
Produced, written and directed by Lynne Sachs; cinematography by Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs Sr., and Ira Sachs Jr.; edited by Rebecca Shapass; music by Stephen Vitiello; sound collages by Kevin. T. Allen; featuring Ira Sachs Sr., Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, Ira Sachs Jr., Diane Sachs, and Rose Sachs. Color, 74 min. A Cinema Guild release.
As the British say about buses, you wait ages for an experimental film about an aging patriarch by his daughter, then two come along at once.
In October 2020, Netflix dropped Dick Johnson Is Dead, wherein long-time documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson confronted her retired father’s dementia and mortality by staging elaborate tableaux of his imagined death, involving angels, heaven, funeral services, and missiles falling from the sky. By continually casting her father in these fantasy scenarios, Johnson hoped to postpone his real and inevitable death—and, by the end of the film at least, had succeeded in doing so.
Three months later, Lynne Sachs’s Film About a Father Who was also released virtually. It too centers on a charismatic older man in physical and mental decline. Kirsten Johnson is the co-parent of twins with Lynne’s filmmaker brother Ira, so presumably Lynne knew all about Dick Johnson Is Dead when she was making her own work. Still, it still must have been a little galling to see her three-and-a-half-decades-long project eclipsed by a film that was not only released on the world’s biggest moving image distribution service, but also widely featured and reviewed in the press, culminating in a place on many best film of the year lists, such as Sight & Sound’s, where it ranked number six.
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Filmmaker Lynne Sachs with her father Ira Sachs Sr., the subject of her documentary.
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Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson is Dead, about her father, appeared a few weeks before Sachs’s film (Kirsten Johnson with Dick Johnson).
That said, even had Film About a Father Who been released first, or without Dick Johnson Is Dead as competition, it would not necessarily have attained that film’s visibility or reach. This is partly due to Sachs’s career-long assertion of creative independence and her reluctance to court major studios or platforms like Netflix as so many of her peers have. Sachs is one of those awkward filmmakers with one foot in the art world, where many of her films are screened and even generated (through grants, residencies, fellowships, and the like), and the other in the documentary or essay film world. In practical terms, this means that she has a foot in neither; the art world doesn’t recognize her as a moving image artist (she is not represented by a commercial gallery, the sine qua non for institutional recognition), and her documentaries and essay films don’t conform to the rigid formulae demanded by studios and networks. As a result, Sachs’s exemplary body of work over thirty years has been largely ignored—as far as I am aware, she is yet to receive a feature, interview, or full-length review from any of the major English-language film periodicals. Compare this to the widespread coverage granted the fiction films of her brother Ira, who has engaged with both mainstream distribution and the star system (one movie even stars a former James Bond!). The price for Lynne Sachs’s preciously guarded independence has been critical invisibility. We must try harder.
But the film also resists mainstream co-option by its refusal to offer simplistic characterization or narrative. Dick Johnson is a model of probity, as a professional (he worked as a clinical psychiatrist), husband, and father; a religious man, his path never deviated from accepted norms of middle-class respectability. Ira Sachs Sr. is a sketchier figure, and as a result, Film About a Father Who is a sketchier film. Dick Johnson may feature in various fantasy scenarios, but he remains the same, recognizable person, physically and morally. Ira Sr.’s elusive identities are first signaled by his sundry business cards—he worked as a “hippie” entrepreneur, buying up unpromising tracts of land in remote areas and developing them—as if he were some sort of undercover agent. His latter-day presence as a beaming, seemingly vacant good ol’ boy is supplemented by footage from half a century’s worth of home movies in diverse formats (mostly shot by Lynne and both Iras), interviews past and present with Ira Sr. and his family, photographs, letters, and even vintage commercials.
The documentary or essay film is often compared to a detective story, with an investigator uncovering or sifting through evidence, parsing essential information from a mass of raw data, before arriving at a singular truth and resolution. Film About a Father Who is an antidetective story—the more we discover about Ira Sr., the less we know. A better metaphor for his narrative might be an endless Russian doll, or a defective onion—layers of skin are peeled away to reveal only more layers, although the peeler still ends up in tears.
This ambiguity and indeterminacy is indicated by Sachs’s title—Film About a Father Who. “A” father, not “my father,” not All About My Father or something. “A father” distances the subject from the film in the manner of a fairy tale or myth, appropriate for a man who wanders in and out of assorted lives with little thought for the havoc he wreaks. “Who”—a father “who” did what? “Who” is Ira Sachs Sr.? The “who” may also reference the popular BBC/NBC television series Who Do You Think You Are? This genealogy format is structured around a subject–detective’s search through the archives and historical sites in order to construct their family tree. These subjects may find out more than they wanted to, but the format—question, quest, revelation, affirmation—never changes. Film About a Father Who shares similar themes and motifs, but its outcome couldn’t be more different.
The film’s conceptual and narrative structures are introduced by two sequences that, at first, seem uncharacteristically labored and literal, but resonate powerfully as the film develops. In the opening sequence, before any voice-over contextualizes what we see, an old man sits having his hair cut by a woman who is eventually revealed as the man’s daughter, and the film’s director Lynne Sachs. The hairdresser’s attempts to unravel the sitter’s matted hair mirrors the work the filmmaker will have to do on the clotted narrative strands of Ira Sr.’s life story. This sexually potent, Jewish alpha-male winces as his hair is manipulated, perhaps reminding us of the Old Testament story of Samson and Delilah, the emasculation of a virile hero by his treacherous lover. In its quiet, patient, loving, intimate way, Film About a Father Who is a work of emasculation and betrayal, a feminist critique of patriarchal structures embedded in the family as rigorous as anything by Yvonne Rainer, whose 1974 classic Film About a Woman Who inspired Sachs’s title.
But that very quiet, patience, love, and intimacy is part of the sequence too—for Lynne Sachs at least, Ira Sr. is a man worth spending time with, not least because he was not always there. The profusion of home movies in Film About a Father Who is misleading, as it occludes the unfilmed gaps when Ira Sr. was not present, when he left his first wife Diane (mother of Lynne, Ira, and their writer sibling Dana) for a trail of other women, including at least one other wife and numerous children. The media-savvy Sachs family—if nothing else, the film can be watched as a history of communications technology, as succeeding generations of cameras, televisions, video formats, and mobile phones appear as part of the familial mise en scène—shoot hungrily today because there may not be anything to shoot tomorrow. The fact that Ira Sr.’s other families were not as technologically adept as the Sachs’s mean that these parts of his life are not visually represented, their documentation dependent on hearsay, rumor, speculation, and oral histories that are occasionally, understandably, embittered. Such camera-free environments may have been part of the appeal of these other lives for a showman who is happy to perform for the camera but shrinks when it tries to peer behind the mask of bonhomie.
In the second key sequence, the now middle-aged Lynne, Ira Jr., and Dana sit on a bed like children, discussing their parents. They differentiate their characters in terms of grammar and punctuation:
Ira: Mom was providing an example that was much more linear.
Dana: And stable. There were no question marks when you were in [Mom’s] house, and with Dad’s, there was all question marks. You didn’t know what could happen.
Lynne: With Mom there was a sense of…I was obsessed with grammar [as a child]. Grammar was worth understanding because once you had grammar you had total transparency. And Mom understood the grammar of…
Dana: In Dad’s life there was no grammar. There was no punctuation—
Lynne: There was no grammar…
Dana: Well, there was punctuation…
Lynne: Exclamation marks!
Dana: And question marks!
Lynne: Exclamation marks and questions marks. With Mom…periods and commas…and the comma gave you a sense, you knew where things went. The thing was, you had the commas and the pause and they were exquisite. They were just right, and you felt affirmed.
Dana: Well, she was steady, and she would keep things in discrete pieces. Life was very…you knew where the boundaries were, and his was always opening up into something. Like a colon opens onto something else—
If the first sequence signifies Lynne’s attempt to unravel the multiple strands of her father’s life, the film proper is an attempt to find a new grammatical form for the unsettlingly open, nonlinear, exploratory, unstructured, opaque, irregular, boundaryless narrative of Ira Sachs Sr., one that could not be contained by conventional film grammar.
This grammar is structured by its subject’s and the film’s relation to time. The classic detective story is defined by time—a crime has been committed that disrupts the flow of time; the detective establishes a chronology of events that restores it. In Dick Johnson Is Dead, Kirsten Johnson tries to stop the flow of time altogether, resulting in a deliberately static, repetitive work—the longer I keep things the same, the longer Dad will stay alive. Film About a Father Who, by contrast, can’t stop time. As edited by artist Rebecca Shapass, it is a vertigo of time, a criss-crossing of past, present, and future, producing a hall of mirrors wherein present-day Ira Sr. confronts his former selves, the time-traveling Father Who as Doctor Who. He never stands still, and neither does the film, resulting in a work as mercurial and fugitive as life itself, resistant to harmonious closure.
Sachs’s focus on her own family is typical of a certain strand of American avant-garde filmmaking—think of Jonas Mekas’s diaries, Stan Brakhage’s processed home movies, or Stephen Dwoskin’s ghostly portraits of long-deceased family members. In an interview with Reverse Shot, the house magazine of New York’s Museum of the Moving Image—which hosted a virtual retrospective of her work in January—Sachs discusses other experimental films about difficult fathers by Su Friedrich (Sink or Swim, 1990) and Alan Berliner (Nobody’s Business [1996]—Berliner is credited as an artistic advisor on Film About a Father Who). The joys and travails of family life are a recurrent subject in Sachs’s work—as it is, indeed, of Ira Jr.’s, with his films’ weak or difficult husbands and fathers. In particular, Lynne has confronted her own parenthood with portrait films of her children, such as a series that captures her daughter Maya at various ages (Photograph of Wind, 2001; Same Stream Twice, 2012; and Maya at 24, 2021), that anticipates in reverse many of the procedures of Film About a Father Who.
Film About a Father Who could have been a monumental film, a “summa” of a life’s work (Sachs will be sixty this year) as well as a multilayered portrait of a complex man. Such finality and thematic bombast is anathema to Sachs, however. This is a film, after all, as interested in the ritual of an old woman putting on a pair of stockings as it is in the great themes of Family, Identity, Time, or American Masculinity. Sachs’s aesthetic has always been defined by the fleeting and provisional, by the rejection of a saleable authorial style, and by formal and philosophical “lightness,” what the French praise as légèreté, the ability to find forms that critically distance subject matter that is emotionally volatile, even traumatic, with wit, illumination, empathy, and nimble intelligence. To call Film About a Father Who Sachs’s “best” or “breakthrough” film would be to miss the point. Like her great predecessors Jonas Mekas and Chris Marker, each work by Sachs—whether it is a film, a poem, a performance, or a Web installation—is a fragment of a larger body of work that is simply “the work.” One hopes that someday Sachs’s achievement will be recognized as the major contribution to modern American cinema it is.
Darragh O’Donoghue works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.
CELEBRATING INNOVATION
THROUGH 40 YEARS
OF INDEPENDENT FILMMAKING
THOMAS EDISON FILM FESTIVAL 2021
The Black Maria Film Festival is now the Thomas Edison Film Festival! We are proud to announce our new name and logo. Films from the 2021 & 2020 seasons and the festival archive are available on-line.
The 1st annual Edison Innovation Award 2021 was presented to Lynne Sachs “For Pioneering New Forms and Innovation in Film Making” on February 20th at the festival premiere.
