All posts by lynne

Artistic Differences: Body of the Body, Body of the Mind / Union Docs curated by Cíntia Gil

Artistic Differences: Body of the Body, Body of the Mind
Union Docs
April 15, 2023
https://uniondocs.org/event/artistic-differences-body-of-the-body-body-of-the-mind/

Artistic Differences: BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND

Apr 15, 2023 at 3:00 pm

Artistic Differences:
BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND

This program is part of Artistic Differences with Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen

ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES is back with Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen this April to present BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND.

Co-curator Cíntia Gil has assembled a mini-retrospective at this year’s festival on one of our longtime collaborators, the beloved and brilliant Lynne Sachs.  We’re delighted to focus on one of these three programs for an upcoming Study Group on April 15th from noon-2:30PM Est.

The title of this retrospective and program 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, we tried to look at some of the lines that seem to us the most constant, even if sometimes subterraneous, throughout the films. The three programmes are not systematically bounding themes and building typologies. They 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 impotency problem of words and concepts, 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 wrote poems, and that is why this programme was inspired by her book, “Year By Year Poems”.

Sign up for the Study Group to join this dialogue and ever-growing international community!

FILM PROGRAM

The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts by Lynne Sachs
30 min | 16mm | Color | 1991
Combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural collage, the film explores the representation of women and the construction of the feminine otherness. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.

Drawn and Quartered by Lynne Sachs
4 min | 16mm | Color | Silent | 1986
Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium. A declaration of desire of and through cinema.

Maya at 24 by Lynne Sachs
4 min | 16mm to Digital Transfer | B&W | 2021
“My daughterʼs name is Maya. Iʼve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.” Lynne filmed Maya at ages 6, 16 and 24, running around her, in a circle – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward.

A Biography of Lilith by Lynne Sachs
35 min | 16mm | Color | 1997
Off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, updating the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as a mother.

STUDY GROUP — ONLINE – APR 15

We’re thrilled to come together for a Study Group Session structured around these incredible films! Like a kind of grassroots book club, but for documentary art, it’s all about sparking discussion and deeper investigation, through reading, listening and responding in small, self-organized groups that together form a larger collective experience.

You will get access to the film program through our Membership Hub a few days in advance. Sign up now and stay tuned in your inbox for further instructions!

PUBLIC DIALOGUE – AT THE FESTIVAL – APR 30 – MAY 1

If you’re interested in hearing from the filmmakers & artists themselves as well as the ideas generated in collaboration with our Study Group be sure to catch our regular public dialogues for each film program on the UNDO Member’s Hub. These conversations sample from the festival dialogues, the study group and an in-depth interview hosted by Artistic Differences with the featured artists.  Sign Up to receive a note when it’s released.

Conversation with Mania Akbari and Lynne Sachs / Tanide

Conversation with Mania Akbari and Lynne Sachs
Tanide
April 4, 2023

Conversation between Mania Akbari and Lynne Sachs

Mania: You are an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, you search for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Over the course of your career, you worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha. Could you let me know what is the form of cinematic dialogue you bring to working with moving images? What is the relationship between sound and images in your works? 

Lynne: Sometime very soon, I am going to return to my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee to shoot a film that will be part of an omnibus collection of projects that are currently being created to examine the shrinking of women’s rights in the United States.   As you may know, women have had the right to stop their own pregnancies in this country for decades, but recently this country has been swept up by conservative, misogynistic legal changes that have made it impossible to obtain an abortion in many states.  So what is an angry, frustrated filmmaker to do in this situation?  I decided to join a group of artists who are acting collectively to “speak out” against this form of oppression.  I bring this charged situation up with you now because of the formal, structural nature of this endeavour.  Each of us will shoot silent footage of a women’s health clinic in a “RED” (ie Republican-dominated) state which at one time provided abortion services, but now no longer does because of recent restrictive legislation. The surgical procedure is legally forbidden in the state, forcing women to go to another more welcoming clinic across a state line perhaps hours or days away.  We will then add a separate voice-over from a recording we will do with a health care provider (like a nurse or a doctor) or a woman who was unable to obtain an abortion.  What makes this construct so interesting is the fissure between the sound and the image that will be the same in all of the projects.  Together, all of the artist participants in the project are committing themselves to moving away from the more conventional, sound-image marriage in the documentary where what you see is also what you hear. Honestly, we are bringing a rigor to our process that follows the way that I have worked pretty much all of my life as a filmmaker.  Yes, it is often more “dramatic” to see a synchronous interview, but is it as conceptual, or thought-provoking?  By constructing a third, cinematic reality through the juxtaposition of two disparate aural and visual experiences, we will offer our audiences radical interpretations of meaning, representation and power.  No one can know for sure if our work will change even one mind or one law. It is just as important to use our cameras to witness, interpret, and preserve a moment in history when anguish can be supported through art.

Mania: Throughout your career, we can trace the ways that your experimentation dares to confront social and political issues by embracing both familiar and intimate processes. You investigate the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of the film itself. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry and music, your films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception. How do archival images and photos help your practice? What is your relationship to the archive? Do you think we can find our history through the archive an rebuild our history and memory? 

Lynne: It’s interesting to think about an archive versus The Archive.  For me, there is a difference.  As a filmmaker, I am interested in and dependent on access to archives where I can find images and sounds that help me work with, articulate and revise history, both very recent and long the past. This is the material for which I feel awe and reverence, lucky to have my hands on images that might never have been seen before. In my film “Sermons and Sacred Pictures” (1989), I portray a Black minister who was also a filmmaker with an interest in documenting his own community in the mid-20th Century. Prior to my film’s release, his images had only been seen by members of his own congregation. In my film “Investigation of a Flame” (2001), I spent a year trying to get my hands on a single roll of original, black and white 16mm film footage of a 1968 civil disobedience action against the Vietnam War.  I worked extremely hard to find this material which had previously been censored by the local government.  I felt like a detective on an investigation, making so many phone calls, writing letters, driving for hours to meet a journalist who had hidden and protected the film for decades and then convincing him to release the material to me for my movie.  I was obsessed.  Once I did obtain the footage, I treated it like precious cargo that I needed to protect and then share with the world.  My reverence for the celluloid itself was profound. Then there is The Archive, comprised of images from our visualized collective unconscious (to use Carl Jung’s term).  These are the shots and scenes from popular movies, commercials, and educational films, created to entertain and inform our entire society, from birth to old age.  I work with this kind of material in a completely different way, allowing myself to investigate its subliminal meaning and its intent to manipulate.  I carve away, colour, and fragment these images, all in the process of looking for levels of representation, humour, irony, or unintentional pathos.  You can see examples of this kind of irreverent exploration in my films “The House of Science: a museum of false facts” (1991), “Atalanta: 32 Years Later” (2006), and “Tip of My Tongue” (2017).

Mania: You’ve produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations and web projects. You tackled topics near and far, often addressing the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken word to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when you produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel/Palestine, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war — where you looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and your own subjective perceptions. What is the relationship between political subjects and the essay film for you? Do you think essay films could show us the truth about history — where the system itself is actively controlling and hiding? What is the relationship between the essay film and truth? 

Lynne: What a profound and complicated series of questions, ones that make me think deeply about my own process of making work and the politics of every decision I make.  In my own essay films on war including “Which Way is East” (Vietnam, 1994), “States of UnBelonging” (Israel/Palestine, 2005), “Investigation of a Flame” (Vietnam/US, 2001) and “The Last Happy Day” (Italy/ Brazil/US, 2009), I explore my thoughts around war and its far-reaching impact on people’s lives.  I have done my best to search for ways of witnessing and experiencing periods of crisis, death, fear, regret, and anger.  I know that I cannot fully understand these expressions of pain, but I can be open to their resonances.  In my embrace of the essay film, I have also tried to articulate my own doubt, which is at the core of the essay film — doubt of government, doubt of institutions and, most importantly doubt of my own position of authority.  In addition, in my understanding of the essay film, we are called to examine the politics of the image – who made it, why and for whom.  

Mania: You are also deeply engaged with poetry. How do you find connections between your cinematic practice and poetry?

Lynne: I started writing poetry as a child, long before I picked up a film camera.  My mother is just about to move from the home in Memphis, Tennessee where I grew up and where she has lived since 1967.  I was there a few weeks ago and happened to find a collection of poems that I had written at age eight on small coloured pieces of paper.  Yes, the poems were rather simplistic and the spelling was atrocious, but it was clear too that, at the least, I loved playing around with words.  Now half a century later, I can see that writing poetry and making films comes from the same place of observation, invention and introspection.  The edit between two shots in my films is very similar to a line break in a poem. For me, there must be intention in both places, a subtle or assertive rupture that also works with rhythm.  In addition, both poetry and filmmaking depend on the viewer/ reader.  When you read a poem or watch a non-narrative film, you become critical participant a synaptic event, an experiment that the artist has imagined in their mind but has no idea if it will work.  Like a scientist with a hypothesis, I anticipate what might happen but I never know until I give it a try. It’s a risk worth taking.

Mania: Feminist theory has been foundational to the establishment and development of film studies as a discipline. Although it often gets reduced to key theoretical—primarily psychoanalytic—analyses of spectatorship from the 1970s and 1980s, it has always been and continues to be a dynamic area with many objects of focus and diverse methodological practices. We have many books and films that are samples of this breadth, historically and topically. Researchers will find how the subfields of authorship, genre, star studies, film history, spectatorship, and reception studies have been enriched and evolved through feminist approaches. Research that highlights facets of identity such as sexuality and race is given special attention throughout, and this emphasis is also addressed in separate sections. Global and/or transnational approaches are highlighted, as are feminist approaches to thinking about the body and cinema. The diversity of scholarship included in our contemporary life testifies that feminism moves beyond thinking purely about gender or sexual difference toward the ways in which power and difference shape the cinematic terrain. What do you think about it? Could you find any connection between feminism and your essay films too? 

Lynne: I’ve been revisiting all of my ideas around my own art practice and feminism over the last few months, so you could not have asked a more vital question.  Thank you for this.  In a few weeks, the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany, the oldest festival of short films in the world, will present a three-program Profile of my work.  They invited Portuguese film curator Cíntia Gil to organize and write about the program. Cíntia has chosen to follow a feminist thread in my work that comes out of a book I wrote entitled YEAR BY YEAR POEMS, published by the feminist press Tender Buttons Press.  So, here audiences and readers will be able to see the connections between these two intertwined practices.  This gives me the chance to think back on some of the writers who have been most important to me in terms of my growth as an artist who works with images and words. This list includes the French writers who embraced Hélène Cixous’s notion of an écriture féminine, including Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigeray and Monique Wittig.  I read their texts in my twenties and was forever transformed. So, with their radical approach to writing from the physical self in mind, I was freed to use a somatic approach to every aspect of my art practice, even the making of an essay film, which most people would think of as strictly cerebral.  For example, these authors understand and celebrate Kristeva’s concept of the abject, which suggests a radical separation from norms and rules, especially in relationship to society and morality. It’s also a rejection of given states of identity. This all becomes so much more resonate in our culture today when many people – both men and women – are questioning their relationships to their given bodies and to power.  I heard Kristeva speak when I was 22 years old.  Now looking back, I can see what a

Mania: For months now, the world has been witnessing the incredible courage of the women of Iran, as the brutal killing of Mahsa-Jina Amini has catalyzed massive protests against a regime that compulsively controls the bodies, minds and lives of women — a regime that has responded to the uprising with lethal brutality. In a desperate wish to control the narrative and hide the government’s crimes and atrocities, journalists have been arrested, phone networks are being jammed and the Internet censored. And still, the women of Iran aren’t backing down. Instead, the protests are spreading, and Persian, Azeri, and Kurdish women, many of them very young, are paying the ultimate price for freedom with their lives. What do you think about this important women’s movement? 

Lynne: I bow with respect and awe to the spirit of Mahsa-Jina Amini. She was punished for her spirit. Witnessing the oppression of Iranian women, through the news and through personal testimonies that are released through social media, shakes me to my core. I deeply appreciate the way that so many people of the world are rallying in support of the women in Iran who are speaking out against the regime.  Sadly, we also know that “speaking out” can bring enormous repercussions for these brave Iranians, so as a person who lives outside of Iran, I am searching for ways that I can be supportive of this transformation, this freeing, of a society wrapped in the constraints of state control. 

About Tanide
https://www.tanidee.com/about-1

Tanide is a collective platform for disseminating and reflecting on the voices of independent feminists living in Iran and around the world. The mission of Tanide is to unite the realms of knowledge and action in order to amplify ongoing efforts and resistances, which are intersectional and intergenerational in nature, and to strengthen and facilitate regional and transnational solidarity in the Middle East and beyond. Feminist uprisings in Iran and the MENA region in recent years have led to new encounters and the emergence of a new social imagination that transcends narrow identity and centrist frameworks and challenges (neo)oriental and global neoliberal hegemonic ideas. With the progressive, comprehensive Woman, Life, Freedom/Jin, Jiyan, Azadi uprising, we have gathered to continue fighting for the decades-long struggles of women and marginalised bodies in the region and explore new spaces and paths that have opened up. The voices of Tanide mirror the increasing reverberation of plural languages that speak in a multitude of tongues of and for the suppressed and excluded bodies that have been marginalized by patriarchy, tradition, theocracy, centralism, and the imposed order of capitalism. These bodies have reached an irreversible turning point in their historical battle to reclaim their subjectivities and make other futures possible. Our work at Tanide focuses on multiple actions: we write, we compose, we connect, and we act. We do not remain women; we become women. This knowledge is linked to life, and life is resistance – resistance that can make another world possible.

‘Swerve’ in Canyon Cinema: Recent Acquisitions (Winter 2023)

Canyon Cinema: Recent Acquisitions (Winter 2023)
Canyon Cinema
February 27, 2023
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/ccfwinter2023/

Canyon Cinema: Recent Acquisitions (Winter 2023)

from Canyon Cinema Foundation PRO on February 27, 2023

Genres: Art
Duration: 57 minutes
Subtitles: English
Availability: Worldwide

This round-up of recent additions to the Canyon Cinema catalog includes a mix of new titles in distribution, new artists now represented by Canyon, and new digitizations.

Featuring films and videos by: Malic Amalya, Sandra Davis, Lawrence Jordan, Lynne Sachs, Rajee Samarasinghe, Barry Spinello, Paige Taul, and Al Wong

Read Greg Youmans’s essay on Malic Amalya’s RUN! on Canyon Cinema Connects at: connects.canyoncinema.com/pest-control-malic-amalyas-run-explores-precarity-and-complicity-under-american-militarism/

Soundtrack (Barry Spinello, 1969, 09:21)

Silent Sonatas (Lawrence Jordan, 2007, 06:02)

Goat (Paige Taul, 2021, 02:39)

Au Sud (To the South) (Sandra Davis, 1991, 06:22)

RUN! (Malic Amalya, 2019, 09:57)

Paper Sister (Al Wong, 2023, 04:18)

Agantukayan / Strangers (Rajee Samarasinghe, 2022, 10:53)

Swerve (Lynne Sachs, 2022, 07:22)

Lynne Sachs: films made by a woman who… / AgX Boston Film Collective

Lynne Sachs: films made by a woman who…
AgX Boston Film Collective
February 23, 2023
Event on March 4, 2023
https://agxfilm.org/events/2023/3/4/lynne-sachs-films-made-by-a-woman-who

Lynne Sachs: films made by a woman who…

  • Saturday, March 4, 2023
  • 7:00 PM  10:00 PM
  • 144 Moody StreetBuilding 18Waltham, MA, United States (map)

A night of short films and discussion with legendary filmmaker Lynne Sachs  featuring some of her works on/about/alongside women be they daughters, mentors, idols or friends.

Lynne Sachs will attend in person for a post-screening discussion.

FILM PROGRAM – Screening order subject to change

Photograph of Wind | 4 min | 16mm | b&w and color | silent | 2001
My daughter’s name is Maya.  I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy.  As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather  – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Screened in 16mm.

Noa, Noa | 8 min | b&w and color | sound | 2006
by Lynne Sachs with Noa Street-Sachs
Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand.  Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic “Crawdad Song”.

Same Stream Twice | 4 min | 16mm | b & w and color | silent | 2012
by Lynne Sachs with Maya Street-Sachs
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.  Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her – different but somehow the same.

“And Then We Marched” | 3 min |S8mm | sound | 2017
Lynne shoots Super 8mm film of the Jan. 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. Lynne then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions.

Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor | 8 min | Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital | 2018
Three renowned women artists discuss their passion for filmmaking.
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.

A Year in Notes and Numbers | 4 min | video | silent | 2018
A year’s worth of to-do lists confronts the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone.

A Month of Single Frames | 4 min | color | sound | 2019
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in Cape Cod. While there, she shot 16mm film, recorded sounds and kept a journal.  In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack materials to Lynne and invited her to make a film.  “While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film.  My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once.”

Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home| 3 min | 16mm | b&w | sound | 2020
In July 1971, avant-garde writer and language poet Bernadette Mayer produced Memory, a multimedia project in which she shot one roll of 35mm film each day and kept a daily journal. In honor of the project’s compilation and release as a book, Lynne Sachs embarks on a study of the memory and language of place. Journeying to Mayer’s childhood home in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens, Sachs pays homage to Mayer in a collage of architecture, light, and rhythm. 

Maya at 24| 4 min | 16mm | b&w | sound | 2021
with editing and animation by Rebecca Shapass
music by Kevin T. Allen
Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.

 Total Running Time: 42 min.

Doors open at 6:30PM – Show at 7:00PM
Seating is first-come, first served.
Admission is free, however a $5-10 suggested donation is encouraged. Donations will be split between the guest artist and AgX. Donations help support future film programming at AgX.

Crucial Viewing / Cine-file by Kat Sachs

Crucial Viewing
Cine-file
February 17, 2023
https://www.cinefile.info/cine-list/2022/02/17/022323

CRUCIAL VIEWING

Lynne Sachs x 2
Gene Siskel Film Center

Lynne Sachs’ FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (US/Documentary) Review by Kat Sachs
Monday, 6pm

In Horace’s Odes, one among many texts where this sentiment endures, the Roman poet wrote, “For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer.” It’s hardly an esoteric dictum, but nevertheless it’s duly reflected in experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ wholehearted documentary portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr. Something of a longstanding work-in-progress, the film draws from decades of footage shot by Sachs, her father, and her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (whose own 2005 film FORTY SHADES OF BLUE was inspired by the same so-called “Hugh Hefner of Park City”), plus others, documenting not just the sybaritic “hippie-businessman” patriarch, but also his numerous descendants. Sachs’ knotty chronicle reveals that her father has a total of nine children with several different women, two of whom the other siblings found out about only a few years back. (The film opens with Sachs brushing her elderly father’s hair, working out a particularly unpleasant snarl. “Sorry, dad,” she says. “There’s just one part that’s very tangly.” The irony is faint and benevolent, but present even so.) Sachs considers the enveloping imbroglio from her own perspective, but also takes into account the viewpoints of her eight siblings, her father’s ex-wives (including her own mother) and girlfriends, plus Ira’s mother, a gracefully cantankerous old woman in a certain amount of denial over her son’s wanton predilections and the role she played in his dysfunction. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO—the title an homage to Yvonne Rainer’s FILM ABOUT A WOMAN WHO…—is comprised of footage recorded between 1965 and 2019 and shot on 8mm, 16mm, VHS, Hi8, Mini DV, and digital; the fusion of all this material (by editor Rebecca Shapass) ranks among the most astounding use of personal archives that I’ve ever seen. It all exists in a state between documentary and home-movie footage, a paradigm that aptly reflects the conflict between reality and perspective, and the uncomfortable middle-ground that bisects the two. Sachs’ work often features her family, but this feels like an apotheosis of her autobiographical predisposition, likewise a question—why do the sins of the father linger?—and an answer. Among the most affecting scenes are roundtable discussions between the siblings where they consider revelations about their father and the implications of his actions. These scenes are heartrending not for their sadness, but rather for their naked honesty; it’s not just a film about a father who, but also a film about a love that defines a family. Sachs’ filmography is centered on infinite poetic quandaries (in voice over, she explores some of them here, such as when she muses on her father’s profession as a developer in Utah: “What happens when you own a horizon?”) and this feels like a logical conclusion to a lifetime of such profound impasses, though I’ve no doubt she’ll continue to probe life and its enigmas in a similarly masterful fashion. For all the suffering on display, Sachs has created an indelible work that, like those within it, perseveres by way of honesty and love. Followed by a post-screening conversation between Sachs and local filmmaker Lori Felker. (2020, 74 min, DCP Digital) [Kat Sachs]

Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker’s THE WASHING SOCIETY (US Documentary)
Thursday, 6pm

Much like filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ acclaimed 2013 documentary hybrid YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, THE WASHING SOCIETY, a medium-length quasi-documentary she co-directed with performer-playwright Lizzie Olesker, penetrates the hidden worlds that exist adjacent to us. Just as in YOUR DAY Sachs explored the circumstances of immigrants living in “shift-bed” apartments in New York City’s Chinatown, she and Olesker here probe the mysterious world of urban laundromats, where workers—often immigrants or those from similarly disenfranchised groups—take on a task that’s historically been outsourced, at least in some capacity—that of washing and folding peoples’ laundry. The historical evocation is literal; the film’s title and one of its recurring motifs refer to a real organization from the 1880s called the Washing Society, which started in Atlanta and was comprised of washerwomen (most of them Black) who came together to demand higher pay and opportunities for self-regulation. A young actor, Jasmine Holloway, plays one such laundress, reading from texts written by the organization and whose presence haunts the modern-day laundromats. Soon other ‘characters,’ both real and fictitious, take their places in this mysterious realm, hidden away in plain sight. Ching Valdes-Aran and Veraalba Santa (actors who, along with Holloway, impressed me tremendously) appear as contemporary laundromat workers, representing ethnicities that tend to dominate the profession. It’s unclear at first that Valdes-Aran and Santa are performing, especially as real laundromat workers begin to appear in documentary vignettes, detailing the trials and tribulations of their physically demanding job. The stories are different, yet similar, personal to the individuals but representative of a society in which workers suffer en masse, still, from the very injustices against which the Washing Society were fighting. The actors’ scenes soon veer into more performative territory, a tactic which Sachs deployed, albeit differently, in YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT. Much like that film, the evolution of THE WASHING SOCIETY included live performances in real laundromats around New York City, some scenes of which, it would seem, are included in the film. There’s a bit of voiceover from Sachs, explaining the directors’ mission to go into many different laundromats, and from voice actors who read monologues that are tenuously connected to Valdes-Aran and Santa’s ‘characters.’ There are also visceral interludes involving accumulated lint that add another layer to the experimentation; there’s a bluntness to the filmmakers’ artistic ambitions, as with much of Sachs’ work, that makes the intentions discernible but no less effective. Sachs has previously employed egalitarian methods, such as considering the people she works with to be collaborators rather than subjects, cast, and crew. In a film about unseen labor, seeing that labor—notably in a self-referential scene toward the end in which a group of said collaborators prepare to exit a laundromat after shooting—is important. In light of what’s happening now, when so much essential labor is either coyly unseen or brazenly unacknowledged (or both), it’s crucial. Like the 1880s’ washerwoman, the victims (and, likewise, the combatants) of capitalism are ghosts that haunt us. Followed by a post-screening conversation between Sachs and Cine-File managing editor Kat Sachs. (2018, 44 min, Digital Projection) [Kat Sachs]

—

Screening as part of a shorts program entitled “A Collection & a Conversation,” which includes Sachs’ short films DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, 6 min, Digital Projection); MAYA AT 24 (2021, 4 min, Digital Projection); VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, 3 min, Digital Projection) and SWERVE (2022, 7 min, Digital Projection).

MANAGING EDITORS // Ben and Kat Sachs

CONTRIBUTORS // Rob Christopher, Maxwell Courtright, Steve Erickson, Marilyn Ferdinand, Raphael Jose Martinez, Jonathan Leithold-Patt, Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Joe Rubin, Harrison Sherrod

:: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10 – THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16 :: →

Cine-File is a volunteer run resource for Chicago cinephiles. Subscribe to our weekly email and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

28 Films for the 28 Days of Black History Month / Black Film Archive by Maya S. Cade

28 Films for the 28 Days of Black History Month
Black Film Archive by Maya S. Cade
by Maya Cade
February 1, 2023
https://blackfilmarchive.substack.com/p/28-films-for-the-28-days-of-black

Sermons & Sacred Pictures by Lynne Sachs
https://blackfilmarchive.com/Sermons-and-Sacred-Pictures

28 Films for the 28 Days of Black History Month
Third annual edition of this Black film celebration.

Maya Cade
Feb 1

Black Film Archive is a living register of Black films from 1898 to 1989. This Substack is its blog, thank you for being here. | This email may be too long for email, click the headline to read it in full. | This month, I’m proud to present a film series on tenderness in Black film at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. On opening night (2/10), I’ll be in conversation with Jacqueline Stewart. Join us?

The work that would become Black Film Archive started with an impulse to discover how Black films responded to a movement in June 2020. As countless Black Americans gathered in digital and physical arenas to refuse the status quo by questioning the roles policing, whiteness, and death have in our lives; I joined the choir, singing and pondering how media can contextualize the totality of our history. In this moment of collective imagining and reckoning, Black cinematic history became a prism of possibility.

In building the third annual edition of 28 films for the 28 days of Black History Month, I thought about Black Film Archive’s genesis. My initial pursuit through Black cinematic history was a formalized curiosity that confronted the assumed limitations of the past. Toni Morrison reminds us in her work that the past is more infinite than the future. By tending to Black film’s past, we can explore new worlds and the radical visions forged within them to create a more just future. The films selected here draw on Black cinematic history’s visions of resistance and struggles for social justice to imagine new worlds and a brighter tomorrow.

The films on this year’s list are in conversation with the dreams planted in June 2020 of a better Black tomorrow and every moment since. Using Black film’s past as a guide allows us to consider entirely new ways of thinking and sculpt new pathways through Black imagination. To conceive a world outside the constraints of the status quo is to believe in Black futures.

This guide contains 28 selections from Black Film Archive. They are simply a place to start or rediscover gems, to find yourself in or retreat to.

I hope this season greets you with peace, joy, and an abundance of great cinema. You can find the complete list and full descriptions on Black Film Archive here. View the list on Letterboxd here. Please enjoy.

No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger (1968)

Capturing the pulse of righteous anger in 1968, “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger” is an intimate portrait chronicling anti-war protestors as they march against the country’s involvement in Vietnam.

Say Amen, Somebody (1982)

George T. Nierenberg’s acclaimed portrait of Black Gospel music is a joyous, funny, and deeply moving ode to the divine musical style.

In Search of Marcus Garvey (1981)

Written by Kathleen Collins, this short weaves the viewer through Black history in the spirit of Marcus Garvey.

Street Corner Stories (1979)

Employing cinéma vérité style, Warrington Hudlin grounds his film at a New Haven, Connecticut corner store, capturing the rhythm of Black residents’ jokes, attitudes, and political imagination.

A Study of Negro Artists (1936)

Showing the tenderness of the craft, “A Study of Negro Artists” displays artists at work in this early documentary study of Black art.

With No One to Help Us (1967)

Described as a community action film, “With No One to Help Us” centers on a group of working-class matriarchs in Newark’s South Ward, hoping to forge collective purchasing power by organizing a food-buying club.

Hands of Inge (1962)

This short documentary on acclaimed sculptor Ruth Inge Hardison, narrated by Ossie Davis, connects the artist’s practice with our desire for visibility as Hardison immortalizes Black figures with her hands.

Statues Hardly Ever Smile (1971)

Capturing the hypnotic wonder of a group of children in the process of creating art at the Brooklyn Museum, Stan Lathan’s “Statues Hardly Ever Smile” documents art as a tool for self-discovery and the essence of Black creativity.

Those Whom Death Refused (1988)

“Mortu Nega,” the Portuguese title of this film, tells the story of Bisa, a fictional heroine fighting to survive the effort for decolonization in Guinea-Bissau and the revolutionary process of liberation.

Back Inside Herself (1984)

Saundra Sharp’s visual poem is an ode to the joys of a Black woman finding her sense of self.

Something to Build On (1971)

This jazz-infused community vision of Black educational attainment provides young students with varied perspectives on the role college plays in their future.

Teddy (1971)

Concerning the world of Teddy, a teenager in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, this film intimately explores his views on violence, the system, community involvement, and love.

Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock (1983)

Michelle Parkerson’s loving portrait documents the sonic soundscapes of Sweet Honey in the Rock, an acapella group singing to end the oppression of Black people worldwide.

Ujami Uhuru Schule Community Freedom School (1974)

This glimpse of an Afrocentric primary school in Los Angeles reminds us all that we’re never too young to concern ourselves with preserving and protecting Black history.

Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989)

Lynne Sachs’ exploration of Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Memphis-based minister and filmmaker, employs Taylor’s films, audio recordings, and imagery of Memphis at the time to present a unique portrait of his role in chronicling Black life.

Style Wars (1983)

Set during the graffiti movement of the 1980s, “Style Wars” is an essential document on the revolutionary spirit of artistic impulse. The film centers on the teenagers who rocked the foundation of New York City–and by extension, the world– with this growing subculture of hip-hop.

Harlem: Voices, Faces (1973)

Initially criticized for its frankness about Black life in Manhattan’s infamous neighborhood, “Harlem: Voices, Faces” allows the community’s working class to paint a portrait of their own lives.

Personal Problems: Part One and Two (1980)

Bill Gunn’s intimate, free-wheeling “meta soap opera” examines the textuality of Black families and, by doing so, offers a deep reading of Black souls.

A Time for Burning (1966)

“We are not gonna suffer patiently anymore. No more turning the other cheek. No more blessing our enemies,” expresses Eddie Chambers in this study of racial conflicts in the Lutheran church as one congregation attempts to integrate.

The Women of Brewster’s Place (1989)

Through this multigenerational tale, “Brewster’s Place” celebrates the kinship between Black women and the bonds that tie us.

No Maps on My Taps (1979)

George T. Nierenberg’s essential document celebrates the infectious joy and history of tap dancing, a Black American export.

Tongues Untied (1989)

A visionary documentary that sings the style, culture, and oppressions unique to gay Black men.

Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues (1989)

Borrowing its name from Ida Cox’s Blues classic, “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” showcases the genre’s role as a source of empowerment and tool for survival.

Mahogany (1975)

Starring Diana Ross and Billy Dee Williams, “Mahogany” chronicles fashion student Tracy (Ross) from her humble beginnings to becoming an international phenomenon. At the heart of the film, which focuses on the way love awakens the senses, is the question: What is success without someone to share it with?

Daydream Therapy (1977)

This L.A. Rebellion short is a visually inventive look at the inner life of a Black domestic worker who dreams of an escape.

Visions of the Spirit: a Portrait of Alice Walker (1989)

Filmed over the course of three years, this intimate documentary keeps the Pulitzer-winning author company at home in California, on the set of The Color Purple (1989), and in her hometown of Eatonton, Georgia.

The Pocketbook (1980)

This lively adaption of Langston Hughes’ short story “Thank You, Ma’am” centers on a young boy who questions his life trajectory after being caught snatching an older woman’s purse.

Sun Ra: Joyful Noise (1980)

Robert Mugge’s documentary is an affectionate portal into the mind of the extraordinary Black philosopher, musician, poet, and revolutionary.

The first edition (2021) predates Black Film Archive and is here. The second edition (2022) is here.

A French style of filmmaking that places its subject(s) in everyday situations with genuine dialogue and naturalness.

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems / The Flowchart Foundation

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems – a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop, with Lynne Sachs
The Flowchart Foundation
Workshops on February 28 & March 7, 2023
https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/text-kitchen
Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/frames-and-stanzas-video-poems-with-lynne-sachs-tickets-503517894577

The Flow Chart Foundation’s Text Kitchen is a series of hands-on workshops providing writers and other art-makers with opportunities for deep exploration into poetry and interrelated forms of expression.

UP NEXT:

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems
a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop, with Lynne Sachs

Tuesday, February 28 & Tuesday, March 7 (registration includes both sessions) 6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT) on Zoom

When award-winning Brooklyn filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs first discovered The Flow Chart Foundation’s enthusiasm for poetry as a conduit for an interplay with other artistic modes, she knew that we would be a great place to offer a workshop that would nourish a deeply engaged dialogue between the written word and the image.In this two-part virtual workshop, Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words over the course of two three-hour evening meetings (participants must be able to attend both sessions). Lynne will guide the workshop on a creative journey that will include writing several poems in conjunction with shooting moving or still images. Lynne has always been fascinated by the conversation between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence. 

We encourage those with backgrounds in either or both poetry and image-making to sign up. Participants will need only a smartphone for creating their short films. Because creative collaboration between participants is a vital part of the experience, Lynne will carefully pair participants based on a questionnaire sent after registering. Note that this is not a tech-focused workshop, though some basic tech instruction will be shared. Lynne’s virtual workshop will include the screening of some of her own recent short film poems, including “Starfish Aorta Colossus” and “Swerve” (2015, 2022 made with poet Paolo Javier), “A Month of Single Frames” (2019), “Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” (2020), as well as excerpts from her feature “Tip of My Tongue” (2017). Join us in this 2-week multimedia investigation of the sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences that all come together in a video poem. We could not be more delighted to be launching the Text Kitchen workshop series with this event. 

Workshop fee: $80

Lecture: “Celebrating Maria Lassnig on Film” / MFA Boston

Lecture: “Celebrating Maria Lassnig on Film”
MFA Boston
March 4, 2023
https://www.mfa.org/event/lecture/celebrating-maria-lassnig-on-film

Full Lecture

Martha Edelheit interview on artist and filmmaker Maria Lassnig by Lynne Sachs (February 2023)

Martha Edelheit was a friend of Maria Lassnig’s and fellow member of the feminist filmmakers’ collective Women/Artist/Filmmakers, Inc. active in New York in the 70s, which included artists such as Rosalind Schneider, Carolee Schneemann, Doris Chase, and Olga Spiegel.

Find the full interview at the bottom of this page.
Martha Edelheit in Maria Lassnig Studio, 1973

Lecture

Celebrating Maria Lassnig on Film

Saturday, March 4, 2023
2:00 pm–3:00 pm

Maria Lassnig may be known best for her paintings, but the artist was also a pioneer in the world of film. Lassnig’s work often focused on themes of autobiography, friendship, New York City, and, perhaps most ambitiously, physical sensation. More specifically, the filmmaker aimed to represent subjective corporeal feelings in her art.

In this program, scholars and individuals who are intimately familiar with Lassnig provide context to her film work, as well as her participation in the Women/Artists/Filmmakers Inc. collective.

Jocelyn Miller, independent curator and artist
Peter Pakesch, director, Maria Lassnig Foundation
Lynne Sachs, artist/filmmaker
Moderated by Michelle Millar Fisher, Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts

Sponsors

This project was produced in collaboration with Phileas.

Women/Artist/Filmmakers, Inc. meeting in Maria Lassnig Studio, 1973

October 15, 2022–April 2, 2023

Body Awareness: Maria Lassnig’s Experimental Films

Although best known as a painter, Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) began to experiment with film in 1970. From that point on, she created animations using felt-tip pen drawings, stencils, spray paint, and collaged magazine cutouts as well as live-action scenes featuring protagonists and settings drawn from friends and everyday encounters. In one way or another, all of Lassnig’s films investigate what the artist termed “body awareness,” an ambitious artistic desire to express the complex and often slippery subjective qualities of internal sensory experience and self-perception.

This exhibition celebrates Lassnig’s pioneering work on film, featuring 16 pieces that explore physical sensation, autobiography, friendship, and New York City, where the artist lived in the 1970s. Reproductions of ephemera—texts and images from the Maria Lassnig Foundation in Vienna, Austria—give visitors a glimpse into the artist’s practice and document the evolution of her ideas. With candid and unsparing interrogations of identity that eschew the contemporary fascination with spectacular imagery, Lassnig’s films remain strongly relevant to—and an antidotal critique of—art and life today.

MFA Late Nites
MFABoston
March 31, 2023
https://www.mfa.org/event/special-event/mfa-late-nites-march-2023

Special Event

MFA Late Nites

Friday, March 31, 2023
8:00 pm–1:00 am

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Kick off your weekend on Friday, March 31, at MFA Late Nites! This after-hours party celebrates the new exhibition “Hokusai: Inspiration and Influence,” complete with dancing and DJs, pop-up performances, exploring the galleries, and more.

In Conversation with Maria Lassnig’s Films

8:30–9:30 pm
Level 1, Room 156

Join two contemporary artists and a curator for a lively conversation on the intersection of gender, identity, and intimate interpersonal relationships in Maria Lassnig’s films. See excerpts from Lassnig’s work as well as work by others. Featuring curator Sophie Cavoulacos and artists Samantha Nye and Ng’endo Mukii.

MFA Late Nites

In Conversation with Maria Lassnig’s Films

Museum of Fine Arts Boston

March 31, 2023 – 8:30–9:30 pm

As part of the MFA’s Late Nites program on the evening of March 31, 2023, we present In Conversation with Maria Lassnig’s Films. Taking the late Austrian artist Maria Lassnig’s films as a point of departure, two contemporary artists – Samantha Nye and Ng’endo Mukii – and one curator – Sophie Cavoulacos – respond with their own “critics picks” that deepen and augment Lassnig’s engagement with the body, identity, feminism, and experimental film making. 

The program responds to the MFA’s current exhibition Body Awareness: Maria Lassnig’ Experimental Films. Although best known as a painter, Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) began to experiment with film in 1970. From that point on, she created animations using felt-tip pen drawings, stencils, spray paint, and collaged magazine cutouts as well as live-action scenes featuring protagonists and settings drawn from friends and everyday encounters. In one way or another, all of Lassnig’s films investigate what the artist termed “body awareness,” an ambitious artistic desire to express the complex and often slippery subjective qualities of internal sensory experience and self-perception.

We hope to introduce Maria Lassnig to you if you do not know her work already, and deepen the interest of those of you who do – as well as to share artists’ films that are enmeshed in some of the same explorations as Lassnig herself, whether contemporaries of the artist or artists working today. 

Program:

  1. Maria Lassnig, Self-portrait, 1972 (4 mins)
  2. Pierce Magliozzi, a home movie, circa 1958-1963. (8 mins 38 seconds, excerpt)
  3. Cindy Sherman’s Bird, 1976. (3 mins 19 seconds)
  4. Sara Stern, Mirror Ball, 2022. With a sound contribution by Sam Sewell. (5 mins, excerpt)
  5. Ng’endo Mukii,Yellow Fever, 2012 (6 mins 50 seconds)
  6. Ng’endo Mukii, Homage to Wangarī, 2018 (1 min 20 seconds)
  7. Barbara Hammer, Dyketactics, 1975. (4 mins)
  8. Maria Lassnig, Baroque Statues, 1974 (15 mins, excerpt)
  9. Rachel Stern photographs
  10. Samantha Nye, Visual Pleasure/Jukebox Cinema: Calendar Girl, 2018 (4 mins 18 seconds)
  11. Maria Lassnig’s Kantate, 1992 (7 mins)

Coda: Lynne Sachs, Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, 2018 (9 mins)

“The Art of Curation: In Celebration of Canyon Cinema Discovered” by Lynne Sachs

The Art of Curation: In Celebration of Canyon Cinema Discovered
Canyon Cinema Discovered Essays
By Lynne Sachs
January 16, 2023
https://connects.canyoncinema.com/the-art-of-curation/

The Art of Curation: In Celebration of Canyon Cinema Discovered

By Lynne Sachs 

My engagement with Canyon Cinema started when I was a young filmmaker living in San Francisco in the mid 1980s. Three decades older and thousands of miles away, I am not a bit surprised that this intertwined relationship between a filmmaker and her beloved distributor continues to this day. Between 2020 and 2022, I had the honor to participate as an advisor in the Canyon Cinema Discovered Curatorial Fellowship. Here I offer a few thoughts that came to my mind as I was reading the recently published Canyon Cinema Discovered catalog (Canyon Cinemazine #9, 2022) containing the four extraordinary curatorial essays that came out of this highly generative and ambitious endeavor. What a treat it was to read all four of these essays in a book that was so brilliantly and beautifully designed by Helen Shewolfe Tseng. So too must I express my enthusiasm for the editing guidance provided by S. Topiary Landberg and Brett Kashmere.

In his essay “Trajectories of Self-Determination: Experimental Cinema’s Embrace of Jazz,” Juan Carlos Kase begins his text on experimental cinema with a reference to a short list of narrative films. Noting the scarcity of “meaningful collaborations” between feature film directors and jazz musicians or composers, he pays homage to a few exceptions by alluding to two of my personal favorites Elevator to the Gallows (1958) by Louis Malle and Shadows (1959) by John Cassavetes. Kase then asserts his belief that it is avant-garde filmmakers who have “embraced jazz and drawn formal and political inspiration from the ways in which it models alternative, spontaneous conceptions of art.” It is Kase’s distinction between the formal and political approaches to both the moving image and to music itself that makes his argument such a helpful framework by which we as readers can recognize and celebrate the intricate dynamic between these two expressive modalities. In reading his lucid, persuasive essay, I was struck by the way that he was able to build a concise critique of art history’s Eurocentric genealogy of Modernism through his acknowledgment of the widespread but underappreciated influences of Black jazz and improvisation. 

I was particularly moved by Kase’s close, passionate analysis of Christopher Harris’s 28.IV.81 (Bedouin Spark) (2009). Just as he does throughout this beautifully precise collection of visual and aural observations, Kase draws our attention to the way that Harris embraces “the musical vocabulary of jazz itself [with his] handheld glissandi and staccato in-camera edits,” ultimately “transfiguring the spirit of music into the material registers of graphic art” through a non-audible “music for the eyes.” Here, Kase elucidates his own theory of a “gestural cinema,” one in which the spirit of jazz is integrated into the very fiber of the image. Towards the end of Kase’s curatorial exploration, he talks about one of Canyon Cinema’s founders Bruce Baillie’s mid 1960s short films, All My Life (1966), a three-minute pan of a white picket fence on a hill in the glorious sunlight of Northern California. As we watch this image, we hear Ella Fitzgerald singing the eponymous song of the film’s title. It’s simple, yes, but it works, making this film a classic of the American avant-garde. Perhaps it is the fact that we don’t really know why it makes our eyes and ears feel truly ecstatic that Kase contends that this movie epitomizes renowned NYC jazz D.J. Phil Schaap’s notion of the “magical rhythm float,” the perfect Apollonian ideal, what Roland Barthes so succinctly coined “the text of bliss.”

I was immediately drawn into Chrystel Oloukoï’s curatorial essay “Playing in the Dark: Watery Experiments” in her evocative opening where she reminds us of her gratitude to Toni Morrison and Édouard Glissant for their highly influential thinking on literature, Blackness, and opacity. Oloukoï then introduces us to her exploration of water as a visual motif that touches on the films that comprise her Canyon program. Sadly, the only films I had seen in her collection were David Gatten’s What the Water Said Nos. 1-3 (1998) and Nos. 4-6 (2006-2007) and Ja’Tovia Gary’s Giverny I (Négresse Impériale) (2017). I was so taken with Oloukoï’s notion of the non-human agency that is part of Gatten’s engagement with what she calls an ecocinema, celebrating the on-screen gestural presence or writing, you might say, of ocean crabs in the context of a film exploring the epistolary dynamics found in the exchange of letters. Her explanation of the way that Gary uses a manual brushing of the filmic surface as a way to disrupt and fragment the serenity of Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s Giverny garden gave me the tools to better examine the filmmaker’s conceptual journey, as well as the problematic legacy that is part and parcel of the European art historical canon. Inserted just after this essay were a series of distinctly formed and labeled maps which Oloukoï asserts “testify to the extent to which no body of water has been left untouched by interconnected histories of slavery, colonialism, and  immigration.” Together, these maps, Oloukoï’s collection of films, and the accompanying essay force us as readers and spectators to complicate the dynamic between sublime and haunting images that are so much a part of an experimental cinema practice.

In my reading of Oloukoï’s concept of “residence time” as it explains the lasting presence of a substance in the water, I was reminded of poet Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s long-format poem “Zong!” which analyzes and abstracts a harrowing 18th century story of a nautical murder of enslaved people on a ship where the captain and his crew threw 40 human beings into the Atlantic Ocean in order to collect insurance money. So writes Oloukoï, “If the waters do speak, they do so in excess of narrative threads, in an alchemy full of beauty but also full of terror.”

Ekin Pinar begins her essay for “Insurgent Articulations” with a reference to cultural thinker Hal Foster, asking us as viewers of politically-engaged films to make a distinction between work that “describes” social upheaval and protest and work that constructs its own critical and interpretive visual modality. With a nod to the tools of semiotics, Pinar ponders the meaning and influence of “non-indexical” imagery as it stretches, disrupts, and breaks the more obvious connections between actions and meanings. In this way, she begins simply by challenging the binary between radical form and radical content which she believes has contributed to the broad thinking that experimental film cannot claim to change the world, or at the least change the thinking of its audience. Moving from Foster’s questioning to the more contemporary analyses of artist Hito Steyerl, Pinar articulates her own two-layered paradigm for conceptualizing an “aesthetics of protest.” Through this structural formation, Pinar asks us to contemplate how we watch a political action, either from within. as a demonstrator ourselves. or from without, as bystanders and later as members of a film audience. Later in her essay, Pinar introduces the writing of Judith Butler as a way to think about political acts – as non-confrontational members of demonstrations or as intentional disruptors through acts of civil disobedience. In both situations, participants become self-aware performers whose gestures and words can be deconstructed.

I was familiar with the work of Dominic Angerame, Rhea Storr, Toney Merritt, Joyce Wieland, Sharon Hayes, and Kate Millett but had only seen three of the films in this collection: New Left Note (1968-1982) by Saul Levine, Sisters! (1973) by Barbara Hammer, and my own film Investigation of a Flame (2001). By interweaving theory with astute visual analysis, Pinar gives us the tools to take our appreciation for everything filmic – including animation, archival material, and collage-style editing – and apply these visual tropes to our understanding of a filmmaker’s political intentions. Through it all, Pinar attempts to prove the commitment of the avant-garde filmmaker to providing a social or political critique while continuing to invent new forms of visual and aural expression.

Aaditya Aggarwal’s “Prime Time Reverie” taunts us to think about and reject TV’s historical “hyper-visibilty” of women’s bodies. I have seen the films in the program by Cauleen Smith, Barbara Hammer, Naomi Uman and, of course, myself. I am also quite familiar with the work of artists Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, Emily Chao, Sandra Davis, and Paige Taul.

In academic settings, television is most often discussed using a sociological or media studies framework for analysis, so it was refreshing to discover Aggarwal’s blending of the popular culture and avant-garde without judgment of either. I was completely captivated by Aggarwal’s own fascination with the appliance itself, an object of transmission found in the home, historically viewed, at least during the day, almost exclusively by women who are “nudged and mirrored in intimate and discerning ways.” Honestly, I learned an enormous amount about my very early film Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986) as well as Cauleen Smith’s Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992) through Aggarwal’s suggestion that they both can be read as “artistic variations on and intentional detours from the soap format.” I doubt that Aggarwal knows that Cauleen and I were student peers in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University in the late 1980s, producing these two short riffs on “slice-of-life profiles” that have so often been exploited and deformed by broadcast TV.

Aggarwal’s essay and the accompanying program wrap themselves up with a thoughtful study of Emily Chao’s film No Land (2019), allowing us to think more deeply about the essay’s earlier reference to Genevieve Yue’s text “The China Girl on the Margins of Film.” Here, both an experimental film and a critical article force us to ponder the box, the frame, and the cell itself as deleterious formations that construct, constrain, and imprison at the same time that they work so hard to accomplish only one simple task – entertain.

An exquisitely conceived program of short films pushes viewers toward new ways of thinking not only about the films themselves, but also about how those cinematic experiences can illuminate the world beyond the walls of the theater or the frame of the screen. Just as the great montage filmmakers developed and practiced their dialectical theories on the relationship between shots, so too does a film curator spark a unique awareness for each and every member of an audience. What an honor it was for me to be so deeply involved in the Canyon Cinema Discovered project, as an advisor, an artist, and now as a reader of this marvelous catalog of film programs and essays.

A Snapshot of 2022: “Still Processing” Grief Via The Criterion Channel / The Memory Tourist

A Snapshot of 2022: “Still Processing” Grief Via The Criterion Channel
The Memory Tourist
by Thomas M. Willett
December 28, 2022
https://thememorytourist.blogspot.com/2022/12/a-snapshot-of-2022-still-processing.html

As the years linger on, I’ve come to realize that we’re living in a very nostalgic period. I’m not discussing so much in a franchise way, but more this sense of witnessing and coming to terms with our mortality. Even as 2022 ends with significantly fewer COVID-19 fatalities than in previous years, the reality is that it’s still a thing. The winter has run rampant with a triple flu and countries outside America are still experiencing millions of losses. Even then, those who have taken precautions have likely grown nostalgic for a few reasons. Maybe they’re coming to terms with what they’d leave behind or the fragility of a human body. 

It’s why films like The Fabelmans (2022), Armageddon Time (2022), and Bardo (2022) have found established auteurs looking into their past to find greater meaning in their relationships. Whereas these would’ve been seen as self-indulgent exercises five years ago, I find myself in a more forgiving mood now. These are the stories everyone should’ve been telling after surviving the worst collective year of modern existence. We should be celebrating the people in our lives and do our best to preserve their memory for others to understand their significance. 

I say this as someone who has had a rough two year span regarding death. Last year, my friend from high school died from a drug overdose, causing me to dig deep into those years to understand what he meant to me and realized how much joy and regret was found there. The loss became more tragic as I humanized the moment, painting in the details and discovering a moment of time I hadn’t thought much about. For as dour as life was then, there is something profound about recognizing that life wasn’t always like that. Better yet, it makes you realize the power of being alive at all.

I say that as I spent the time since having to think about my grandparents. Christmas 2021 included a doctor’s phone call determining whether my grandfather should be allowed to have a surgery that would prolong his life at most another few months. While I watched my father deal with the grief of losing him, I had this strange sense of acceptance. He was in his 90s, had spent the final years of his life in and out of the hospital. I applaud the nursing care who risked their lives in 2020 with hospice care. I was more concerned that at a point life ceased to have meaning because of how immobile he was, co-dependent on doctors to take care of him. It was also an awkward day when the family cleaned out grandmother’s nursing home, accepting that her social life with us was over. At most, I would await the phone game approach to how we shared news. 

I’m sure the loss impacts everyone differently. For me, it was as much a moment of painfully waiting for the suffering to end as it was figuring out how to summarize their lives. I was the obituary writer. I knew how to capture their lives in these snapshots and have them resonate with readers. I can’t speak for how my father has taken these losses, though he has become more willing to share stories, doing what he can to keep their memory alive. Given my insecurity around them both being health risks for most of the past few years, it felt like we all should be relieved. The suffering was over. They were at peace. 

But as the funeral was being prepared, the memorabilia came out. Along with the stories were these boxes of photographs spanning decades. Their youth suddenly appeared in my hands as I flipped the pages of photographs slipped into their respective slots. My grandfather was the photographer in the family, so he was often hidden. What we were seeing was the world usually through his perspective. Along with trying to figure out what was going on, there was something to trying to understand what he saw in that moment. Why did he want to capture this group of people holding a conversation? What spoke to him about this mountain range? In some respect, it’s the same fascination I have with Kirsten Johnson’s phenomenal Cameraperson (2016) documentary where she captures unrelated moments and the viewer tries to make sense of why Johnson included it. Given that she also made the excellent Dick Johnson is Dead (2020) about her father’s years with dementia, I’m willing to believe she and I share a reverence for life and achievement, doing what we can to preserve our existence.

With all of this said, there was one piece of media that I felt captured and understood the grieving process best. When the dust settles and all that’s left are the memories that live in our mind, how do we recognize their lives? The Criterion Channel is home to an amazing, seemingly endless, resource of shorts, and one of the filmmakers I have grown to love the most is Sophy Romvari. By some luck, I stumbled across a collection of her work that included Still Processing (2020), described as Romvari looking through a box of photographs and trying to make sense of her relative’s passing. She needed permission from her parents to share them, and the results are incredible.

Based on what work I’ve seen, she is a filmmaker who uses art to grapple with complicated themes. Most of her best work can be called a fusion of documentary and fiction, finding these connections that we have to each other. In this case, she uses an approach that embraces the silence, allowing the viewer to understand what it’s like to truly grieve. While it ends with a slideshow that ties together moments, the audio is largely non-verbal. There’s no suggestion of what these pictures are supposed to mean. As the opening suggests, these are just photographs that were taken without any greater purpose. Their intention is forgotten or not ever expressed. The only indication of how we’re supposed to feel are various cuts to Romvari looking at them whose blank stare suggests what the title promises. She’s still processing. No emotion has fully formed, and it makes the sense of discovery all the more sublime.

As the images flash over the screen, there is one technique that could read as a gimmick but actually elevates the piece into one of the best things I’ve seen in 2022. Save for a momentary score of sentimental strings, she leaves things largely silent, allowing for the sensory details of her environment to speak for her. We grieve alone, never given the chance to break out into song or have that essential consoling that puts it into context. All we have are our thoughts on the subject, and Romvari puts them exactly where they should be.

Much like Jennifer Reeder, Romvari’s use of subtitles helps to create a subconsciousness in her work. These lines are never spoken and yet they are essential to understanding what is being communicated. She shouldn’t say them out loud. They should be there to be read, an expression of our interiority as we determine something more metaphysical. In the case of Still Processing, the subtitles communicate an array of emotions that everyone likely has experienced at some point. With death representing a finality, the context of a messy ending of a family relationship. When the subtitles read a wish of not having been so mean to him throughout his life, there’s a gut punch that comes with the accompanying innocence. It’s just a picture of someone smiling, youthful in appearance. With this move, she’s pushing aside the pettiness that we all face to those we spend our lives around, finding them at our best and worst moments. When grieving, regret tends to be richer because there’s satisfaction with the joy. Maybe you’ll wish it lasted longer, but the pain stings because of how it lingers, can change the good into something cruel and unintentional. Was Romvari really that mean to him or is this just a projection of how limiting time is? 

The execution is simple, going on to feature actual footage of them as kids. For one of the first times, Romvari is discussing her past. She asks “what were we listening to?” as children dance around a chair. It’s goofy, nonsensical, and very disorganized. In more innocent times it would be considered embarrassing, but now Romvari notices that looking at the past brings a certain pain. Why does joy hurt so much? Over the course of 17 minutes, Romvari has perfectly captured what it’s like to look into the archives, especially of a fairly fresh loss. Unlike my grandparents, I’m sure her loss was more abrupt and the sense of peace came at a more difficult climb. With that said, losing a friend in their early 30s, when so much of their life laid ahead of them, is something that connected me to this piece more. I attended his funeral and saw pictures of the years I missed and the few I was there for. In that moment, I had no choice but to contemplate what those moments meant to me, finding this sad affair full of pictures of him eating Mexican food with his sister and visiting the beach. In a moment of loss, it’s hard to forget that he lived and for as cornball as the funeral director usually makes those moments, the pictures work best by themselves.

I also think of Romvari’s Nine Behind (2016) which also is intended to be a self-reflective piece. I should note that unlike Still Processing, I’m unsure if that qualifies as autobiographical. Even then, the intention of her silence conveys a point that I don’t think even subtitles could capture. During a phone call with her elderly relative, she begins to ask questions about his life. Over the few minutes, we see one side of the conversation, but it’s clear that so much is missing in the questions Romvari is asking. There’s a disconnection of language, history, and even emotional connection. They are family, and yet something is missing. All of these years together, there’s the sense that she didn’t think to ask questions that would preserve their memory, give them a preservation that would make him endearing to future generations. Whether it’s true or not, this too feels like it’s full of regret. The only difference is that it’s implied instead of comfortably mentioned.

It’s something that I also see in the emotional silence of Lynne Sach’s Maya at 24 (2021). With nothing more than a clockwise twirl, Sachs captures Maya’s life at 6, 16, and 24. Without commentary, the sense of growth happens and soon she’s an adult. While I remain convinced that it doesn’t quite resonate as emotionally as it would to The Sach Family, I still have come back to it over the past year, noticing how time has evolved and changed all of us. Soon all we’re left with are questions about the years gone by, the things we’ve missed, and the ones we wish would’ve lasted a little longer. It’s the beauty of shorts like this. They don’t need two hours to give us insight. All Sach needs is four minutes to make an art piece that has driven me back to it over and over.

 I suppose that the only way to properly end this journey through Criterion Channel’s amazing content is with An Evening (2013). While a lot of Romvari and Sach’s work reminds me more of my friend and the younger people whose lives were cut too short, An Evening is something that feels reminiscent of something I’ve actually experienced this year. Following the passing of my grandparents, there was the reality of having to deal with their home. It still has this uncanny quality of feeling like someone had lived there, where their belongings are still scattered in just the ways they wanted. Like the pictures, all I can do is look at the bed and wonder what they thought about at night. 

An Evening is a short by Sofia Bohdanowicz that pushes the concept of loss to new levels. I’m not even sure that it’s necessarily a funereal story, but it’s tough to not read it as such. Over 19 minutes, she films a vacant home as a day turns to night. We see the notes left on a fridge and the disheveled rooms. Even the way that kitchen machines have lights go off in the dark begins to inspire chills. Like my grandparents’ house, there was a life here and to a stranger our only choice is to guess what they mean. Even the use of dusk is powerful, as if the closure of a life, where the visuals become more difficult to see. What’s left is a memory of what we saw. There’s no score to tell us how to feel, just the wind blowing through the night air and any creaks an old home would have. 

It’s what I think about as I went into my grandparents’ home after their deaths. I was especially drawn to his bookshelf in a room that I rarely went into. There were whole collections of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and a few John Steinbeck among others. I wondered what those books meant to him and if there were any clues left in those pages. Given that he loved to open a book to the point it broke the spine, I imagined each one was personally molded to his style of reading. Something about his personality was hidden even in the organization of that wall. Why were these the ones he displayed? I picked up his copy of Steinbeck’s “The Wayward Bus.” It was a great read, but I remain perplexed by a hand-written chart in the back where someone wrote out various prices for things relevant to the plot. Why was this here? What did he hope to discover?

Again, that’s a mystery that is left for us to only speculate about. There’s no way to ask him now, and it’s haunting to be alone with those details and have to determine how much we want to look into it. For those who mean a lot to you, there’s hope that you’ll learn something new in that chart. Even if it’s indirect, something will come of navigating the memories. A new connection could be made and their lives molded into a greater texture. It’s one full of regret, but it’s important to remember the hope and optimism. Amid the emptiness is something that provokes thought. It’s only if I keep looking that I stand to find a greater substance. 

I imagine that there will be more deaths in the years ahead. It’s an inevitable part of life and I imagine the journey will not be unlike what I went through in 2022. Sure, it’s more convenient to turn to films like Petite Maman (2021) or Personal Shopper (2017) and recognize some more abstract truth in there. Even making a film akin to The Fabelmans might seek to cement their legacy for generations to come. With that said, I find Romvari, Sach, Bohdanowicz, and even Johnson’s view of life much more fulfilling. There are things we’ll never know. We’re still processing something that is unique to everyone. For me, coming to terms with that void is the most satisfying way, and hopefully, with that I can hope to make a greater context start to take shape.