STAATLICHE AKADEMIE DER BILDENDEN KÜNSTE KARLSRUHE Karlsruhe, Allemagne May 22, 2023
FILMS – MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON by Maya DEREN & Alexander HAMMID – THÈMES ET VARIATIONS by Germaine DULAC – ÉTUDE CINÉGRAPHIQUE SUR UNE ARABESQUE by Germaine DULAC – OPTIC NERVE by Barbara HAMMER – MY NAME IS OONA by Gunvor NELSON – LIGHT YEARS EXPANDING by Gunvor NELSON – PSEUDOSPHYNX by Ana VAZ – EL NIDO DEL SOL by COLECTIVO LOS INGRÁVIDOS – A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES by Lynne SACHS
Spend the weekend with Tender Non-Fictions, a program of films by experimental feminist filmmaker Lynne Sachs, who has been prolifically creating works for cinema for four decades. Her non-fiction films, represented here in 11 works of varying lengths, powerfully evoke the curiosity and richness of a life lived through art.
Based in Brooklyn, New York, Sachs defies easy classification. Instead, her work is best understood collectively as a sprawling adventure playground, stretching across continents and blending influences across the borders of distinct art forms.
From 1984 to 2019, Lynne Sachs shot film of her father, a bon vivant and pioneering businessman. This documentary is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings.
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, she gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
In Medieval Europe, a criminal could be “drawn and quartered”, ripped into our four parts by heavy ropes pulled by horses. Here, Sachs appropriates this violent conceit for her own artistic purposes.
In 1994, two American sisters – a filmmaker and a writer – travel from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Together, they attempt to make a candid cinema portrait of the country they witness. Their conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history.
Delving into the religious and political conflicts of the Middle East is never going to be easy, but Lynne Sachs spends three years making an effort. She attempts to make a portrait of Israeli filmmaker Revital Ohayon, a mother and peace activist who was killed near the West Bank.
Film programme Travelogues: Thinking Through Landscape
From 3 to 24 May in Vilnius, Lithuania, the Media Education and Research Centre “Meno avilys” invites you to a programme of travel and landscape films Travelogues: Thinking Through Landscape.
The screenings will take place in the Meno Avilys’ Cinematheque (A. Goštauto str. 2, Vilnius) and start at 7 pm.
In 2023, “Meno avilys” turns to the topic of travelogues and travel films, which has so far been underrepresented and rarely explored in Lithuania. Following the migration of people caused by various geopolitical factors, it is important to consider how this changes identity and the notion of home.
The six-film programme looks at the different transformations of travelogues, from the early amateur approach to the now widely recognised classic essay films. The programme features films by acclaimed artists, experimental and non-fiction filmmakers Courtney Stephens, Deborah Stratman, Lynne Sachs, Helke Misselwitz, John Smith and Chris Marker.
These films include the cinematic diaries of women who had the unique opportunity to travel to distant places in the first half of 20th century: romantic, exotic and political at the same time; sensitive portraits of the women of East Germany on the verge of the fall of the Berlin Wall; London changing with the rhythm of urbanisation; the mythologised landscape of Iceland; an essayistic account from Vietnam by two sisters; and a travelogue of a journey from Africa to Japan that has been voted as one of the best documentaries ever.
Travelogues, or travel films (not to be confused with road films), emerged almost at the same time as the film cameras themselves. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was only the privileged who could afford to travel, and the majority of society could not enjoy the freedom to explore, unlike today. Ethnographers and anthropologists used film cameras to research and record foreign cultures in order to achieve maximum objectivity. Uncharted lands interested people, and travel lectures, featuring footage from foreign places with live commentary by the travellers themselves, became very popular during the period of early cinema.
Travelogue lectures presented an unconventional way of life, created an image of the adventurous, and were the only way for a large number of people to experience the world. During the early cinema period, it was travel films that established and sustained documentary cinema as relevant and interesting, and at the same time popularised travel.
With the arrival of portable analogue film cameras, the development of leisure culture and travel infrastructure, amateurs began to film their own travels. They filmed what could be regarded as accidental ethnography: the curious and often exoticising gaze of the tourist observed foreign cultures, while superimposing a personal perspective and a grid of subjectivity on the images they saw.
Later on, there was a shift away from the scientific-reportorial and touristic perspectives towards the more essayistic and reflective view of personal experience. This coincided with the rise of essay cinema and the processes of decolonisation in the mid-20th century. Filmmakers began to reflect on the intrusion of the camera; their own gaze as a ‘visitor’; the shifting identities and inner transformations brought about by the process of travel.
The films examined not only the personal relationship with the landscape, but also the political, historical and social contexts it conveys. Thus, thinking about the visible and otherwise experienced landscape became thinking about oneself, and vice versa: inner reflections became an analytical way of looking at the landscape. In this way, the travelogues combine the unplanned (and unplannable) recording of the environment while travelling and the personal, subjective gaze that shapes the documentary footage into a narrative.
PROGRAMME
I. 3 May, 7 pm.
TERRA FEMME | dir. Courtney Stephens | 2021 | 62 min | Post-screening QnA with the director
Filmmaker Courtney Stephens presents a selection of “home travelogues” – amateur films shot by women in the 1920s-40s. Intended to be screened for the friends and family of their makers, these films occupy a space between home movies and accidental ethnography. They present a new type of traveler: no longer a (typically male) seeker of conquests, she might be a divorcee on a tour of biblical gardens, or a widow on a chartered cruise to the North Pole. These optical autobiographies present the world through early female filmmaker’s eyes, while raising thorny questions about the politics of the gaze.
Courtney Stephens is a filmmaker whose non-fiction and experimental films explore the contours of language, historical geography, and women’s lives. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, Barbican Centre, Exploratorium, BAMPFA, and multiple film festivals including the Berlinale, New York Film Festival, South by Southwest, IDFA etc. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Scholarship, the MacDowell Fellowship, and was one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. A graduate of the American Film Institute, she co-founded the Los Angeles microcinema Veggie Cloud and has curated film programs for The Getty, Museum of the Moving Image, Union Docs, and Flaherty NYC.
II. 10 May, 7 pm.
AFTER WINTER COMES SPRING | Winter Ade | dir. Helke Misselwitz | 1988 |117 min
A journey from the North to the South during the last year of the GDR. Everyone’s wish for changes can be felt everywhere. Punk girls, female workers, intellectuals, mothers, young and old women – Helke Misselwitz talks to women about humanity in their country. In every meeting you feel mutual sympathy. Sympathy for the strong and self-confident women who point out the dubieties with confidence and for those who are looking for their place in life, struggle with it and work hard. The film is full of humour, proximity and warmth. Despite all the criticism, the hope for a future more human remains.
Helke Misselwitz is one of Germany’s most important documentary filmmakers. Born in Planitz in 1947, she held apprenticeships as a carpenter and a physiotherapist after graduating from high school, then worked for nine years as an assistant director and director with East German television. Misselwitz made her mark early in her career as a documentary filmmaker, chronicling with great sensitivity and artfulness the citizens and society of East Germany in the years leading up to and following the fall of the Berlin Wall and German unification. After Winter Comes Spring immediately established Misselwitz as one of the most gifted non-fiction filmmakers of her generation.
III. 18 May, 7 pm.
SHORT FILM PROGRAMME | 91 min.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam | dir. Lynne Sachs | 1994 | 33 min
When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. The film starts as a road trip and flowers into a political discourse. Lynne and Dana’s travel diary revels in the sounds, proverbs, and images of daily life. Their film becomes a warm landscape that weaves together stories of people they met with their own childhood memories of the war on TV.
From Hetty To Nancy | dir. Deborah Stratman | 1997 | 44 min
The stoic beauty of the Icelandic landscape forms a backdrop for a series of witty and caustic letters written at the turn of the century by a woman named Hetty as she treks with her companion Masie, four school girls and their school marm. The film juxtaposes Hetty’s ironic cataloguing of the petty social interactions of her companions as they endure discomfort and boredom with historic accounts of catastrophes that reveal the Icelandic people subject to the awesome forces of nature.
Artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman makes work that investigates issues of power, control and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. She regards sound as the ultimate multi-tool and time to be supernatural. Recent projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood and faith. Stratman’s films have been featured widely at festivals and conferences including Sundance, Viennale, Berlinale, CPH:DOX, Oberhausen etc.
Blight | dir. John Smith | 1996 | 14 min
Blight was made in collaboration with the composer Jocelyn Pook. This was her first work in film, after which she composed scores for many films, including Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. The film revolves around the building of the M11 Link Road in East London, which provoked a long and bitter campaign by local residents to protect their homes from demolition. Both the composer and the director of the film lived in the neighbourhood and their homes were eventually demolished. The images in the film record some of the changes which occurred in the area over a two-year period, from the demolition of houses through to the start of motorway building work. The soundtrack incorporates natural sounds associated with these events, together with speech fragments taken from recorded conversations with local people.
John Smith is one of the most important British avant-garde filmmakers noted for his use of humour in exploring various themes that often play upon the film spectator’s conditioned assumptions of the medium. Inspired in his formative years by conceptual art and structural film, but also fascinated by the immersive power of narrative and the spoken word, he has developed a diverse body of work that subverts the perceived boundaries between documentary, fiction, representation and abstraction. Often rooted in everyday life, his meticulously crafted films playfully explore and expose the language of cinema.
IV. 24 May, 7 pm.
SUNLESS | Sans Soleil | dir. Chris Marker | 1983 | 104 min
An unnamed woman narrates the letters and philosophical reflections of an invisible world traveler accompanied by footage of Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Iceland, Paris, San Francisco and, most significantly, Tokyo—a city whose people, streets, malls and temples inspire the traveler’s observations. Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil is cinema as stream-of-consciousness, following the journey of an unseen hero around the globe and into the mind. Today, it is considered a masterpiece, a film that breaks free of the documentary form and into a world of its own.
Chris Marker was a filmmaker, writer, illustrator, translator, photographer, editor, philosopher, essayist, critic, poet and producer. He pioneered the flexible hybrid form known as the essay film and was part of the Frenh New Wave movement along with such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy. His best known films are La Jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and Sans Soleil (1983). All along his career, Marker was extremely interested in observing history and its complexities, observing it with a discerning, ironic, amused and occasionally infuriated eye. The topics of memory and nostalgia of reinvented past times but forever lost are at the heart of his reflections.
// Free admission. Films are screened in original language with Lithuanian and English subtitles //
Organiser | “Meno avilys” Curator | Ona Kotryna Dikavičiūtė Head of Communication | Dovilė Raustytė-Mateikė Technical Coordinator | Karolis Žukas Designer | Linas Spurga Translators | Agnė Mackė, Eglė Maceinaitė Sponsors | Lithuanian Film Centre, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality Partners | Goethe Institute in Lithuania, French Institute in Lithuania Informational partner | LRT This event is part of the www.700vilnius.lt programme.
The 5th Experimental Film Festival Process will take place from 17 to 21 May in Riga, Latvia.
Wednesday, 17 May 18:00, Vagonu Hall
Noise Spectrum Frequencies
Curators: Kristaps Epners, Rvīns Varde, Adriāna Roze, Mailo Štern, Rihards T. Endriksons, Marija Luīze Meļķe, Artis Svece
We approached seven people from different fields whose thoughts we resonate with. We asked them to choose one of the submitted films that they feel in some way connected to. This kaleidoscopic programme consists of works selected by this varied group of curators, celebrating the different perspectives, sensibilities and approaches on the side of filmmakers as well as spectators.
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor. Lynne Sachs
US / 2018 / 8′ / sound / 16mm to digital
Skyscraper Film. Federica Foglia
Italy / 2023 / 8′ / sound / 16mm to digital
Sight Leak. Zuqiang Peng
China / 2022 / 12′ / sound / Super 8, 16mm to digital
Sky Room. Marianna Milhorat
US / 2017 / 6′ / sound / 16mm, 35mm to digital
Potemkin Piece. Justin Clifford Rhody
US / 2022 / 1′ / sound / 35mm to digital
Ashes by name is man / Popiół imieniem jest człowieka. Ewelina Rosińska
Poland, Germany / 2023 / 20′ / sound / 16mm to digital
The 5th Experimental Film Festival Process will take place from 17 to 21 May in Riga, Latvia.
Organized by the artist-run film lab Baltic Analog Lab, the festival is dedicated to the diverse analog cinema practices employed by adventurous audiovisual artists from around the world. The programme comprises film screenings, live performances, installations, talks, and, of course, parties.
This year, Process will explore the subject of “noise spectrum”, looking at different forms of noise as a physical, mental and social phenomenon: a noise that’s capable of both disruption and connection.
In collaboration with the SPECTRAL project carried out by six European artist-run filmlabs, this year’s festival will pay special attention to the practice of expanded cinema, exhibiting performances in three curated programmes as well as at the opening night.
Beside focus programmes and events, Process will present three programmes of short films made by various international artists. This time the programmes were selected by guest-curators Aurélie Percevault (Mire, France), Ulrich Ziemons (Arsenal, Germany), as well as Lāsma Bērtule and Ieva Balode (Baltic Analog Lab, Latvia).
The Festival is supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Ministry of Culture of Latvia, Riga City Council and Creative Europe.
In an interview with fellow filmmaker Jonas Mekas in 1957, the German Dadaist Hans Richter explains the characteristics of a film poem: unlike the entertainment film, which Richter labels as “film novel,” the film poem is an “exploration into the realm of mood [and] lyrical sensation.” These films may be regarded as a universal expression of human emotions and could thus be understood by anyone. Also, following Richter’s emphasis on universality, such films may evolve over time and could be read differently over the years.
The well-curated programs at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen are interested in both the immediate emotional response as well as the discursive, often political aggregation of making-sense. Following Richter once more, who saw a film poem in every experimental film, the festival catalogue may likely be an anthology of film poems. It represents an ambitious compilation of experimental films, short fiction films, and documentaries that explore various modes of expression from subjective introspection to political accusation.
Yet I only want to highlight two films that may give an insight into this year’s international competition. Considering that the nine competition programs were mostly stitched together in a careful manner, this almost feels like a violent act. At least, they were part of the same five-film program, even coupled together on position three and four. Both Lynne Sachs’ new film Swerve (2022) as well as Jonelle Twum’s I think of silence when I think of you (2022) address questions of community and alienation.
The oeuvre of filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs encompasses over 40 films. Besides her latest work, the Oberhausen festival showed a retrospective program with twelve of Sachs’ films. Like most of these, Swerve is concerned with the interlocking of (written and spoken) language and images. In this case, most of the words are borrowed from sonnets by Filipino-American poet Paolo Javier, “a poet who thinks like a filmmaker,” as Sachs puts it, with herself being a “filmmaker who thinks like a poet.”
The most visible sign of this interlocking of language and film are graphically highlighted words from Javier’s poems that appear on the screen. Together with five actors and only two locations, these words function as protagonists in their own right. As they float through an Asian food court and a playground in New York City with a liquid, shiny appearance, Javier’s words challenge Sachs’ documentary-style images. This productive tension is embodied by five actors who perform mundane tasks at mundane places – but as exactly that: a performance. Swerve lets us understand the fragility of even the mundane. We see queer bodies, bodies of colour navigating public spaces that are marked by the pandemic. For these people and in these times, swerving rather than walking in a straight line becomes the predominant mode of movement.
In Jonelle Twum’s poetic exploration of family history, we are confronted with very different spaces: I think of silence when I think of you unfolds the story of a woman who migrates from Ghana to Sweden. What becomes of private spaces when they are only inhabited by way of memory? Twum’s voice-over muses on this presence of absence as well as on female bodies that are thrown into such unfamiliar surroundings. The director finds powerful words for this experience of alienation. Yet some things can only be said in silence: her voice-over is discontinued for a few moments as the subtitles further explain what is now not being said.
By confronting the image of an empty leather chair with multiple archival images, the alienation becomes graspable. Their characteristic red tint allude to a distant feeling of comfort that no chair could provide – as long as it furnishes spaces of otherness. Though rather essayistic in its nature, I think of silence when I think of you is a veritable film poem. It is exactly the mood of the images and the lyrical quality of their montage (not to mention the brilliant voice-over) that fit well into Hans Richter’s above-mentioned definition.
And as vague as such definitions may be, it takes emotional clemency and smart curating to be able to really comprehend such films. While their impact always depends on each spectator for their own, it feels reassuring to know that there are steadfast places of curating film poems like these. In 2023, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is still one of those places – 69 years and counting.
13 MAY 2023 12:00 PM ET AIA CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE FREE
Vital Voices from Indie Lit Publishers, hosted by The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), presents readings from a diverse array of independently published authors. This event will feature fiction writers Kevin Chen (Ghost Town, a novel published by Europa Editions) and Ada Zhang (The Sorrows of Others, a short story collection published by A Public Space); poets Chia-Lun Chang (Prescribee, published by Nightboat Books), India Lena González (poetry published by Lampblack and forthcoming from BOA Editions), Christina Olivares (Interrupt, published by Belladonna* Collective, and Future Botanic, published by Get Fresh Books), and Lynne Sachs (Year by Year, published by Tender Buttons); and translators Mayada Ibrahim (translations of work by Najlaa Eltom published in 128 Lit and Circumference Magazine), Ostap Kin (translation of poetry by Serhiy Zhadan in Circumference Magazine), and Jennifer Shyue (The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, a novel by Augusto Higa Oshiro, published by Archipelago Books).
Tribute to Lynne Sachs Memorial work with Winnie the Pooh
by Jan-Philipp Kohlmann
The Oberhausen International Short Film Festival honors the feminist filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs whose work questions the relationship between the body and the environment.
In 1998, the experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer spends lonesome weeks in a dune shack in Cape Cod, a picturesque peninsula in southern Massachusetts. She keeps a diary and shoots playful 16mm footage of insects, grass and plastic bags in the wind – sometimes with a color filter, sometimes with the shower head running in front of the camera.
Twenty years later, when Hammer was sorting her estate, she left the material to her friend Lynne Sachs for the short film “A Month of Single Frames”. The film reflects the former filmmaker‘s attempts to inscribe her own presence with the camera onto the images of the landscape. As part of the Lynne Sachs retrospective at the 69th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, this film now seems like a perfect introduction to her work: “A Month of Single Frames” is a homage to the influential colleague, who died in 2019 when the film was released, and at the same time sums up Sachs’s collaborative approach to filmmaking in a nutshell.
“Body of the Body, Body of the Mind”
“We’re not striving for perfection, and we will never replicate reality,” says Sachs about her own and Barbara Hammer’s cinematic ideas in an interview, shortly before she heads to the airport on her way to Germany for the festival. “Instead, we’re constantly looking for a way to present a subjectivity in relationship to reality.”
“A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prix of the City of Oberhausen in 2020, when the festival was one of the first to take place online due to the pandemic. This year, twelve intelligent and idiosyncratic short films by Sachs, created between 1986 and 2021, can be discovered in the Oberhausen program “Body of the Body, Body of the Mind”, curated by Cíntia Gil. The retrospective includes Sachs’s early feminist experimental films, several documentary essays from the series “I Am Not a War Photographer” and more recent works that deal with the problem of translation, among other things.
Found Footage Films and Fragmentary Essays
The latter include “The Task of the Translator” (2010), inspired by Walter Benjamin, as well as “Starfish Aorta Colossus” (2015), a film adaptation of a poem by the Filipino-American writer Paolo Javier. In addition, Sachs’s latest film “Swerve”, also a collaboration with Javier, is screened in the festival’s International Competition.
The Brooklyn-based director and poet, born in 1961 in Memphis, Tennessee, willingly references the influence of other artists on her work and relies on close collaborations. Rather than claiming individualist authorship, in our interview, Sachs mentions numerous people from her student years in San Francisco who influenced, trained, or worked with her, thus shaping her own aesthetics.
Her mentions include two especially formative figures in experimental filmmaking: the conceptual artist Bruce Conner, who introduced Sachs to working with found footage in an essayistic fashion; and the filmmaker and cultural studies scholar Trinh T. Minh-ha. With Minh-ha, Sachs shares the conviction of making one’s own position visible, most notably in documentary films set in different communities or cultural environments.
A specific technical aspect adapted from Minh-ha, Sachs explains, is to not use zoom lenses when shooting, making sure she has to approach the people in front of the camera and introduce herself. A film like “Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam” from 1994, for example, is therefore not an ethnographic travelogue, but a fragmentary sketch in which poetic impressions of everyday life, Vietnamese idioms and her own memories of US television reports on the Vietnam War stand side by side.
Another essay film, “The House of Science: a museum of false facts” can be regarded as the feminist core of the Oberhausen program. Sachs first presented the film in 1991, at her first trip to Oberhausen, and it’s only fitting that the retrospective’s title features a quote from it. A collage of patriarchal attributions about women’s bodies, “The House of Science” re-contextualizes educational films about menstruation, scenes from feature films, historical writings about the body features of sex workers and Sachs’s own diary entries about a consultation hour at a male doctor’s office.
Created under the impression of the theoretical writings on écriture féminine, this found footage masterpiece is much more than a document of early 1990s feminist zeitgeist. Sachs herself is convinced that contemporary feminist debates can tie in with “The House of Science”: “The film isn’t exclusively relevant for what we now call cis women, but it’s about inhabiting the feminine. I think it speaks about femininity in a more fluid sense.”
A Commemoration With Winnie the Pooh
For Sachs, personal documents – diary entries, home movies – are often the starting point for a cinematic search for clues. “The Last Happy Day” is the best and at the same time most curious example of this approach: when her younger brother, the fiction film director Ira Sachs (who presented “Passages” at this year’s Berlinale), appeared as Winnie the Pooh in a children’s play in the late 1970s, the Sachs siblings learned of the existence of a distant relative named Sándor Lénárd.
Sachs’s 2009 film chronicles the life of the Budapest-born Jewish doctor and writer, who escaped from Nazi persecution in Austria, worked for the US Army in Italy, and eventually completed a stunningly successful Latin translation of “Winnie the Pooh” in Brazil. With her own children and their friends as “Winnie the Pooh” performers in front of the camera, Sachs brings the unknown relative back into the family, adapting her collective approach not only to filmmaking, but also to a moving work of remembrance.
Lynne Sachs in Oberhausen
The 69th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival dedicates the three-part retrospective “Body of the Body, Body of the Mind” with a total of 12 films to the US director Lynne Sachs. The programs run on April 30th in the Gloria Cinema and on May 1st in the Lichtburg Cinema. In addition, her current short film ”Swerve” is presented in the International Competition of the festival. Twelve films by Lynne Sachs are available online on the platform of Doc Alliance (dafilms.com), the network of seven European documentary film festivals (1.50 to 2.50 euros per streaming).
with Maria Vera and Cíntia GilAngela HaardtAgainst Gravity, The Art of Machinima – Curated by Vladimir Nadein and Dmitry FrolovKatarina Schröder & ChrisDmitry FrolovBrett KashmereLars Henrik Gass & AngelaLori FelkerTotal Refusal – Machinima artists from AustriaOkamura Keiko & Yamashiro Chikako
BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND Lynne Sachs Artist Profile April 26 – May 1, 2023 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Curator: Cíntia Gil
Program notes by Cíntia Gil:
The title of this retrospective quotes Lynne Sachs in her 1991 film “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”. It speaks of a zone of experimentation that crosses Sachs’ work and grounds filmmaking as a practice of dislocating words, gestures and modes of being into open ontologies. What can be a woman, a word, a color, a shade, a line, a rule or an object? The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind is another way of saying that things exist both as affections and as processes of meaning, and that filmmaking is the art of not choosing sides in that equation. That is why Sachs’ work is inseparable from the events of life, while being resolutely non-biographical. It is a circular, dynamic practice of translation and reconnection of what appears to be separated.
There are many ways of approaching Lynne Sachs’ full body of work, and many different programmes would have been possible for this retrospective. Films resonate among each other. Like threads, themes link different times. Repetition and transformation are a constant obsession in the way images, places, people and ideas are revisited. While looking for an angle for this programme, I tried to look at some of the threads that seem to me the most constant, even if sometimes subterraneous, throughout the films. The three programmes are not systematically bound by themes or built around typologies. There are three different doors to the same arena where body (and the ‘in-between’ bodies) is the main ‘topos’: translation, collaboration, and inseparability of the affective and the political. Yet, none of these terms seems to truly speak of what’s at stake here.
Lynne Sachs knows about the disequilibrium that happens between words and concepts, and about the difference between the synchronicity of life and the linearity of discourse. She also knows that words can be both symptoms and demiurgic actors. That is maybe why she writes poems, and why this programme was inspired by her book, “Year By Year Poems”[1].
1975 [girls with fast lane dreams]
Teachers push us to the precipice –
trick us with conundrums we mistake for algorithms
catch us in a maelstrom of dizzying numbers.
Searching for the exit door
I discover quick methods for finding north –
solace in the gravitational pull of geography
and head for the first opening from a school
with too many ambitions
penalty points
and girls with fast-lane dreams.
Talking about the making of “Which Way is East”, Lynne Sachs said: “the most interesting films are the ones that ask us to think about perception, that don’t just introduce new material.”[2]. Both Lynne Sachs and her sister Dana, a writer, lived the Vietnam War through television – a middle-class childhood sometimes haunted by images of that war that seemed both far away and fundamental to their generation. When Dana moved to Vietnam in the early 1990s, Lynne visited for a month, and they made a film. The film begins with a sequence of movement shots, colors, fleeting forms, interrupted by a popular Vietnamese saying about a frog and the horizon. Three layers come together, predicting one of the strongest traits of Lynne’s work: the world seen through the rhythm of a moving body, and the dialogue between different modes of feeling and thinking. [Lynne’s childhood Vietnam War images were black and white, upside down; the Vietnam landscape in 1991 is crossed on a motorbike, and nature is motion and strangeness; “a frog sitting on the bottom of a well, thinks the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot”.]
A travelog in Vietnam became a dialogue of perceptive discoveries, glimpses of meaning and, most importantly, of the many ways of being just here and now, together, facing abysses that should not eat us alive. How to not be eaten alive by life’s infinite and sublime abysses?
Girls with fast-lane dreams is another way of referring to an impulse for joy.
Girls looking at girls, girls playing with girls, Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer collaborating on an impossible film. How to work on beauty, without monumentalizing it? How to work on death without freezing the life within? A kid once told me: “you have to pass it through the inside, and let it out through your smart eye”. Is that translation? Isn’t “A Month of Single Frames” the translation of a place and a body, the conditions of light seen through embodied solitude?
There is some kind of radical positioning of Lynne Sachs’ gaze (gaze is a pace and a gesture, and that is its politics): allowing things to unfold as they are, knowing that it is the very act of filming them that constitutes their becoming. Noa becomes play with light. Maya becomes time and unsurmountable individuality. Central Park becomes a porous membrane for the circulation between a musical movement and the event of an emotional form.
1997 [Another baby girl drops down]
(for my daughter, Noa)
Again, nine full moons leave bare
the dust against the sky.
Air fills up with brightness.
Another baby girl drops down.
Dice on a betting table
or rich, ripe fruit atop worn grass.
The political comes forward when things are dislocated from their assigned places, becoming eloquent. When a field of possibilities is problematized by different temporalities, different meanings attach to the same words. New symptoms (not symbols) emerge from the same myths. To the territorialization of body, Lynne Sachs responds with the unspeakable layers of desire, underpinning the history of the body. To the typification of identity, cinema responds with the history of gesture.
Feminism in Lynne Sachs’ work comes from an obsession with ontological fluidity – women as possibilities, bringing with them the memory of what has not been captured by politics, the promise of kinder political places. Such invention requires the deconstruction of the gaze, the transformation of language through the power of a thinking (collective) body. Collective as in-between, in circulation, in transition with others: the Lilliths who may or not become mothers in “A Biography of Lillith”, the enfolding body in “Drawn and Quartered”, the collage that renders old measures useless in “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.
Materiality is a key aspect in this cinema, it sustains the emergence of a filmic gesture. The presence of things in their most concrete form, be it a birth, a hand helping to translate an idea, a splash of light on a face, the astonishment of a baby in front of a camera. Things occupy a certain space, move in a certain way, and their sensuality is never sublimated or forced into metaphors. It is their material presence that saves them from their assigned roles and chains of meaning, revealing their vitality as a principle for a political imagination.
Translation comes, then, as a movement between transmitted memory, embodied experience, affective vocabulary and the never-accomplished labor of form. Nothing stays determined within a field of possibilities, but the field itself is in a constant motion, resignifying every aspect, reconnecting every moment in time, every glimpse of an image. The work done around Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin, seems key to consider her full body of work. “The Task of the Translator”, presents three movements, three ways of looking for the body. It starts with the reassemblage of bones of dead American soldiers during WWII by Sandor Lenard, in a sequence that will come back in “The Last Happy Days”. Here, translation is both an effort to make sense of the materiality of time and history, and a question about the translatability of such. Like in “Which Way is East”, how can history be translated through the gestures of the present, of the living? Is the way the past escapes linearity and expresses its vitality?
The second movement in “The Task” shows a group of scholars translating an article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. Tentative words and articulations around a table, hands helping meaning through gestures. Is Latin a dead language? Sandor Lenard, after moving to Brazil, translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. What paradox lies in the gesture of translating a children’s story into a dead language? Translation is a game of materiality, of dislocating the world into another regime of forms and movements. Allowing language to pass through the materiality of the present time. In “The Last Happy Day”, children tell the story of Sandor Lenard while rehearsing Winnie the Pooh. Translatability through bodies and gestures, vitality: one does not simply look at the past, but rather invents a dialogue of embodied time. In “The Task of the Translator”, suddenly the camera leaves the scholars and focuses on the drops of rain on a foggy window, and on the gestures of a hand, before we start hearing radio news about human remains after an attack.
Translation keeps all things alive at the same time – even the matter of death.
Cíntia Gil
Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon Theatre and Film School) and holds a degree in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto). From 2012 to 2019, Cíntia Gil served as co-director and then director of Doclisboa – International Film Festival. From 2019 to 2021 she has directed Sheffield DocFest in England. In 2022, Cíntia started the programme of screenings and study groups “Artistic Differences”, at UnionDocs (NY), as a co-curator together with Jenny Miller and Christopher Allen. She is part of the programming team of Cannes Directors Fortnight.
Gil has curated a variety of contemporary and historical film series, retrospectives and exhibitions, besides publishing articles in various publications. In addition, she has taught seminars, lectures and workshop in different institutions (Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico, EICTV in Cuba, HGK Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany among others), and she is a project tutor for the Master on Creative Documentary at the Pompeu Fabra University . She has also served on juries in international film festivals, such as Berlinale, Cairo Film Festival, Mar del Plata, Jerusalem Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, London Film Festival, IDFA, Taipei IDF, FidMarseille, Seville European Film Festival, DokuFest, Ficunam, DocsNYC, Guadalajara, among many others. She has been a member of the executive Board of Apordoc – Associação pelo Documentário, the Portuguese documentary film association since 2015.
[1] Lynne Sachs, “Year by Year Poems”, Tender Buttons Press, NY, 2019
[2] “Observe and Subvert”, interview by Inney Prakash for Metrograph, December 2021
[3] In “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.
A irmã do cineasta Ira Sachs, Lynne Sachs, investiga a controversa figura do seu pai: um extravagante bon vivant de Utah, manipulador, egoísta e sedutor.
Sinopse
A irmã do cineasta Ira Sachs, Lynne Sachs, investiga a controversa figura do seu pai: um extravagante bon vivant de Utah, manipulador, egoísta e sedutor.
Um retrato caleidoscópico filmado entre 1984 e 2019 em vários formatos – Super 8, 16mm, VHS e HD – no qual Lynne Sachs mergulha na polémica figura do seu pai, Ira Sachs Sr., um bon vivant de aparência extravagante de Utah, empresário da indústria hoteleira, manipulador, egoísta e carismático sedutor, que levou uma vida cheia de segredos, pai de nove filhos (incluindo também o cineasta Ira Sachs Jr.) com cinco mulheres, alguns dos quais permaneceram escondidos para o resto da família durante anos. Reflexão sobre a vida deste homem e como as suas decisões afectaram toda a família, é também um estudo da passagem do tempo tanto na forma como no conteúdo.
English:
Filmmaker Ira Sachs’ sister, Lynne Sachs, investigates her controversial father figure: an extravagant Utah bon vivant, manipulative, selfish and seductive.
Synopsis
Filmmaker Ira Sachs’ sister, Lynne Sachs, investigates her controversial father figure: an extravagant Utah bon vivant, manipulative, selfish and seductive.
A kaleidoscopic portrait filmed between 1984 and 2019 in various formats – Super 8, 16mm, VHS and HD – in which Lynne Sachs delves into the controversial figure of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a flamboyant-looking bon vivant from Utah, industry entrepreneur hotelier, manipulator, selfish and charismatic seducer, who led a life full of secrets, father of nine children (also including filmmaker Ira Sachs Jr.) with five women, some of whom remained hidden from the rest of the family for years. A reflection on this man’s life and how his decisions affected the entire family, it is also a study of the passage of time in both form and content.
