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Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor

Excerpt from Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor

Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor
by Lynne Sachs
Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital, 8 minutes, 2018

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

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.

Awards:
“Best of Festival” Onion City Experimental Film Festival, Chicago; Honorable Mention Jury Award, Festival de Curtas Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Honorable Mention, Woodstock Film Festival; Black Maria Film Festival Jury Award.

Screenings:
Premiere Documentary Fortnight, Museum of Modern Art, Feb. 20 – 26, 2018; Amherst College; Los Angeles Film Forum; Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles; Other Cinema, San Francisco; Filmoteca Español, Madrid; “Xcèntric” Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, Spain; Cosmic Ray Film Festival, Durham, NC; Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; DocYard at the Brattle Theater, Boston; Athens Film and Video Festival (Ohio); Edinburgh Film Festival; Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Buffalo, NY; International Queer Film Festival, Hamburg, Germany; Pacific Film Archive/Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California; Mill Valley Film Festival; Jhilava Film Festival, Czech Republic; Viennale, Vienna, Austria; Antimatter Media Arts Festival, Victoria, Canada; London Short Film Festival; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; Queer Art Film, IFC Center, NY; Art of the Real, Lincoln Center; XPOSED International Queer Film Festival Berlin, Berlin; LUX & Club des Femmes present Evidentiary Bodies: Celebrating Barbara Hammer & Carolee Schneemann, London; Museo de Art Moderno Buenos Aires, Argentina; MUTA, International Audio Visual Appropriation Festival, Lima, Perú; Arteria, Cultural Information Centre, Zagreb, Croatia; Barbican, London; “Remake. Frankfurter Frauen Film Tage”, Kinothek Asta Nielsen Frankfurt, Germany, 2021; Festival International de Cine Contemporáno Camara Lucida; Cork International Film Festival, Ireland Artist Focus presented by Artist and Experimental Moving Image. DAFilms, Global Streaming; Carolee Schneemann “Body Politics” Film Series, The Barbican, London; Process Festival, Riga, Latvia, 2023; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia, 2023.

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

Responses from Carolee and Barbara:

Hi dear Lynne, What a beautiful compilation…. I love my section and so appreciate the triple-visions within your camera life. It really is a lyric and incisive triple-portrait. I thank you so much for this clarity, visual richness. And I loved seeing Barbara with those old Bolex cameras! Your subtle inclusion of our personal surround has rhythm, shadow, light, momentum and quietude. How do we celebrate with you for this splendid work?

With love and admiration!
Carolee

——

Hi Lynne,

I finally had a chance to watch your lovely film! I was surprised at how energetically I performed for your camera, I was so happy when Gunvor finally spoke! She is as beautiful as ever. I’m honored Lynne, to be grouped with such strong and remarkable filmmakers.

Love,
Barbara

Artist Statement:

What is a body? What can a body do? How is a body rendered an object? And, how does this “object” have agency?

I believe these questions are at the root of a female guided exploration of art making. As a young filmmaker and student, I remember reading Laura Mulvey’s ground-breaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she proposes that “sexual inequality is a controlling social force in the cinematic representations of the sexes; and that the male gaze is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy.” As I hold my camera and frame our world, I work extremely hard to keep her words in mind, knowing that gripping my own Bolex 16mm camera or writing my own scripts does not necessarily mean that I would produce images that came from my own experience as a woman. I needed to find a personal, somatic cinema that embraced a new physical relationship to this apparatus. It wasn’t just that I wanted to produce images that spoke to women’s lives, liberation, love, struggle, awareness or consciousness. When I first watched “Fuses” (1965) by Carolee Schneemann (https://vimeo.com/12606342), “Optic Nerve” (1985) by Barbara Hammer (https://vimeo.com/49508330) and “My Name is Oona” (1969) by Gunvor Nelson (https://vimeo.com/242768525) in the late 1980s, my own camerawork was catapulted into an expanded, self-aware, performative mode of working. Their radical, improvisational and totally physical cinematography pushed me and other women artists to dive deeply and fully into our bodies and ourselves.

Over the following decades, I became very close to all three women. They were dear friends, fellow artists, and mentors. Making “Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor” is my gift to them, and theirs to me.

Poster designed by Rebecca Shapass

REVIEWS

Screen Slate – 2/22/18
https://www.screenslate.com/features/733

“Lynne Sachs’ Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an 8-minute triptych of brief encounters with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson filmed at the artists’ homes or studios. Sachs has a really well-attuned photographic eye, and she captures the trio in a series of easygoing domestic situations. The three artists discuss their artistic lives, how they came into their practice, how their gender identities factor in, where their work comes from. It’s a simple premise with intimate results, especially good at giving a sense of the artists’ environments. ” (Tyler Maxin)

Village Voice – 2/16/18
by Ela Bittencourt

https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/02/16/a-pocket-of-doc-fortnight-selections-consider-the-pros-and-cons-of-a-cameras-intimacy/

“I could make the inside of myself show on the outside,” Barbara Hammer says in Lynne Sachs’s documentary Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), explaining how a lighter movie camera, developed in the Sixties, helped her convey intimacy, and thus became a useful, malleable tool of expression. The short, in which Sachs pays a visit to pioneering women artists who used moving image in their practice — Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, Gunvor Nelson — will enjoy a weeklong run as part of “Doc Fortnight,” the Museum of Modern Art’s annual showcase dedicated to nonfiction film. (Ela Bittencourt)

Brooklyn Rail, 4/4/18
Review by Mark Block
https://brooklynrail.org/2018/04/artseen/JEFFREY-PERKINS-George

“A similarly brief and similarly enchanting encounter followed with the world premiere screening of Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, (2018) Lynne Sachs’s nine-minute cinematic collage exploring the distinctive styles and approaches of three artists. She delicately weaves them together by positioning them each in a place of familiarity and inner personal power to themselves and their work. Schneemann interacts with a film camera as a prop which becomes an inducer of memories in her Hudson Valley home; documentary maker Barbara Hammer moves around various sources of inspiration in her West Village studio and Gunvor Nelson shares glimpses of the village where she spent her childhood in Sweden. Each artist is gracefully and uniquely introduced via different relationships they have created with themselves, their environments, the filmmaker, and the audience.”

agnès films: Supporting Women and Feminist Filmmakers
4/5/2018
Review by Julia Casper Roth
http://agnesfilms.com/reviews/review-of-lynne-sachs-carolee-barbara-and-gunvor

It was deep into her artistic practice that Lynne Sachs shifted to a collaborative style of filmmaking. As she recounts on her website, Sachs was in the midst of recording a project when it struck her that those in front of the camera were performing. Aware that such hyperbolic displays might betray the authenticity of her subjects, Sachs invited the subjects to participate with her. No longer was her process about filming and being filmed. Rather, filmmaking became a joint effort that softened the camera as an intermediary and aloof barrier.

It’s this approach to filmmaking that makes Sachs’ most recent work, Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, such a particularly wonderful piece. The short film doesn’t expose the stories of just any subjects; it looks at the lives of three creative giants who work with the moving image: Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson. With filmmakers balancing out both sides of the lens, the collaboration between filmmaker and subject reaches superheroine proportions.

Shot on 8mm and 16mm film, the soft colors and square aspect ratio of the film pull the viewer out of contemporary times. In the first image of the film, a cat is perched on a tree limb. In the next, the cat is acting as sentinel on a porch. The camera looks from the inside of a house out, framing the cat in a doorway. This moment jars me. I hear the voice of Schneemann discussing her entry into the medium of moving images, but the picture quality, the cat, the framing—it all conjures images of Schneemann’s own Fuses. For a moment, I wonder if I’m actually looking at Schneemann’s footage, but the tell-tale painted film frames, frenetic cuts, and abstraction of her work are absent.

Sachs’ camera casually captures mundane moments at Schneemann’s upstate New York home with beautiful, compositional precision. Schneemann describes moments ranging from her first experience with a Bolex camera to her desire to film the ordinariness of light coming through a hospital window. While she describes it, Sachs captures the sentiment; Schneeman is seen talking on the phone, hanging laundry, looking at mail. Sachs also prioritizes otherwise subtle images in and around the home: a dead bird on the porch, light coming through the window, and shots of greenery around the yard. In this piece, collaboration comes in the form of homage and interpretation.

Next, the film moves to the voice and image of Barbara Hammer. Of the film’s three subjects, Hammer is perhaps the most performative of the bunch. In a compositionally stunning scene, Hammer, at turns, walks and jogs the length of an iron fence in New York’s West Village. She repeats this several times, her body mingling with the long shadows cast by the iron slats. Eventually, she addresses the presence of Sachs’ camera. She stops, stares into it—challenges it—until Sachs pulls the camera skyward. A moment later, Hammer is on the ground, bathed in the fence’s shadows and smiling. Accompanying these images is Hammer’s forever youthful voice, explaining her love of performance both with and without her camera.

From here, the viewer moves into Hammer’s studio space to watch her toy with window blinds and choreograph film cameras as she slides them across her table. She discusses identity, and that discussion is punctuated with another challenge to Sachs’ camera; Hammer points the lens of a camera right back at her.

The final section of the triad takes the viewer to a montage of images that focus on the natural: flowers, ducks, a pond, and landscape greenery. There is no audio soundtrack for the first portion of this section: no music and no narration. The faintest sound of birds in the distant background can be missed unless the volume is set to high. Finally, the voice of Gunvor Nelson cuts the silence. It joins the images, describing Nelson’s entry into film and her impending exit from it as well. The images in this section of the film seem crisper, perhaps to reflect the camera Nelson holds in her hands—a digital Nikon. As Nelson and her camera interact with flowers and landscape, Sachs’ camera watches. Eventually, the two artists end up lens to lens, looking down a barrel at one another’s craft.

Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor is an exquisite dance shared by filmmakers and their literal and metaphorical lenses. It’s also a wonderful journey of nostalgia. The look of the 8mm and 16mm film paired with the subject matter easily takes the viewer back to the innovative first moments of women’s experimental filmmaking.

“In Search of a Feminist Sensibility”
2/24/2019
by Adina Glickstein
Another Gaze (excerpted here)

Is this a feminine sensibility? (This question) is at play in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), Lynne Sachs’ portrait of three trailblazing experimental filmmakers, which premiered at MoMa’s Documentary Fortnight last year. In a Derenesque wink, the opening image is a cat, as Schneemann’s voice drifts in from the space offscreen. She remembers her first camera – a Brownie – and how holding it made filmmaking feel like “an inevitability”. Sachs’s camera, as if searching for Schneemann, pans around an empty room—a nod to Deren’s Meshes, and tinged with Akerman, too. Before any of the film’s titular subjects even appear on camera, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor pulsates with the energy of feminist experimental cinema’s kindred trailblazers. Common threads are explicated, teased out by the subjects’ accounts, yet left open-ended as brevity is forced by the film’s short runtime.

In her section of the triptych, Schneemann recalls the challenge of convincing a male friend to lend her his Bolex: he resisted “as if I would bleed on this precious machinery”. She admits that she didn’t really know how to use it. Yet we know that the spirit of determination – so distinct in her oeuvre – won out, because now she’s on the other side of the camera. Next, we see Hammer. In contrast to the disembodied voice from Vever – made frail by poor cell connection and increasingly-advanced cancer – she is vivacious, running through the West Village, clowning for the camera. She recounts a foundational anecdote of her practice: on a detour from another motorcycle ride she was sidetracked by a crop of leaves in striking red. As if compelled by the goddess, she took out a bifocal lens from her optometrist and placed it in front of the camera, moving while she filmed. The finished project was a sublime manifestation of exactly how she’d felt when the leaves first caught her eye. , This embrace of openness and contingency was, for Barbara, fundamentally feminine – “I could make the inside of myself show on the outside” – and a release from the schizophrenic pull of rigidly-gendered rules for expression.

The last and longest section of Sachs’s film opens with a series of lingering close-ups of flowers. “After seeing a few of Bruce Bailey’s films, I understood that I, also as a single artist, could try.” In her childhood village in Sweden, Gunvor Nelson paces herself through what she has decided will be the final three projects of her career. There is a certain and deliberate slowness in her approach. She struggles to find tech support for her DSLR, but adapts to this challenge, finding eagerness and excitement in “calmly working” with stills. Sachs opts for a drawn-out rhythm in this vignette, as meandering shots of the surrounding nature recall the particular intimacy of Nelson’s work. This extends to her current process: even amidst technological change, she is invested in listening to her images, we sense, not bludgeoning them into some preordained vision.

These two shorts give us insight into seven women: Barbara Hammer, Maya Deren, Carolee Schneemann, and Gunvor Nelson as subjects and speakers; Lynne Sachs and Deborah Stratman from behind the camera. Watching both films, I wonder what connections there are to be drawn. Does the recent surge in filmic portraits of female trailblazers point towards a ‘feminine sensibility’, long overdue for historical recognition? I’m hesitant to speak about any ‘shared themes’ across the layered, nuanced careers that constitute this genealogy, lest these similarities be construed as an essentialised roadmap. How can we identify the beauty that comes from rejecting the strictures of masculine ways-of-being in the world without mummifying it, crystallizing these artists’ irreducible vibrancy into a prescriptive binary formula?

The key might lie in situating their work within experimental cinema’s challenging, unfeminist history. Reflecting on her mid-Sixties collaboration with Stan Brakhage, Schneemann laments: “Whenever I collaborated, went into a male friend’s film, I always thought I would be able to hold my presence, maintain an authenticity. It was soon gone, lost in their celluloid dominance.” Cat’s Cradle is hardly the only masterwork of structural film to suggest a sort of Abstract Expressionist-adjacent machismo. Against this backdrop, the nexus of similarities between Schneemann, Deren, Nelson, Sachs, and Stratman becomes explicable not as the record of some intrinsically-female way of seeing and filming the world, but as the product of work: a shared undertaking invested in upending experimental cinema’s more problematic attitudes and replacing them with a new hierarchy of aesthetic values: adaptability, intimacy, and tenderness. Only when we honour these values, in all their many manifestations across these seven artists’ careers, can we begin to construct the kind of feminist genealogy¹ that film history so urgently requires.

Barbara Hammer and Lynne Sachs

Lynne Sachs shoots with her Bolex camera with Barbara Hammer.

Barbara Hammer

Carolee Schneemann

Carolee Schneeman in her studio.

Carolee and Lynne in Rosendale, New York.

Gunvor Nelson in her studio.

In Search of a Feminst Sensibility: Two New Films by Deborah Stratman and Lynne Sachs (excerpt)

By Adina Glickstein from Another Gaze Feb. 2019

(http://www.anothergaze.com/search-feminist-sensibility-two-shorts-deborah-stratman-lynne-sachs-carolee-schneemann-barbara-hammer-maya-deren-gunvor-nelson-berlinale/)

Is this a feminine sensibility? A similar question is at play in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), Lynne Sachs’ portrait of three trailblazing experimental filmmakers, which premiered at MoMa’s Documentary Fortnight last year. In a Derenesque wink, theopening image is a cat, as Schneemann’s voice drifts in from the space offscreen. She remembers her first camera – a Brownie – and how holding it made filmmaking feel like “an inevitability”. Sachs’s camera, as if searching for Schneemann, pans around an empty room—a nod to Deren’s Meshes, and tinged with Akerman, too. Before any of the film’s titular subjects even appear on camera, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor pulsates with the energy of feminist experimental cinema’s kindred trailblazers. Common threads are explicated, teased out by the subjects’ accounts, yet left open-ended as brevity is forced by the film’s short runtime. In her section of the triptych, Schneemann recalls the challenge of convincing a male friend to lend her his Bolex: he resisted “as if I

would bleed on this precious machinery”. She admits that she didn’t really know how to use it. Yet we know that the spirit of determination – so distinct in her oeuvre – won out, because now she’s on the other side of the camera. Next, we see Hammer. In contrast to the disembodied voice from Vever – made frail by poor cell connection and increasingly-advanced cancer(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMeoAx9dZkI) – she is vivacious, running through the West Village, clowning for the camera. She recounts a foundational anecdote of her practice: on a detour from another motorcycle ride she was sidetracked by a crop of leaves in striking red. As if compelled by the goddess, she took out a bifocal lens from her optometrist and placed it in front of the

camera, moving while she filmed. The finished project was a sublime manifestation of exactly how she’d felt when the leaves first caught her eye. This embrace of openness and contingency was, for Barbara, fundamentally feminine – “I could make the inside of myself show on the outside” – and a release from the schizophrenic pull of rigidly-gendered rules for expression. The last and longest section of Sachs’s film opens with a series of lingering close-ups of flowers. “After seeing a few of Bruce Bailey’s films, I understood that I, also as a single artist, could try.” In her childhood village in Sweden, Gunvor Nelson paces herself through what she has decided will be the final three projects of her career. There is a certain and deliberate slowness in her approach. She struggles to find tech support for her DSLR, but adapts to this challenge, finding eagerness and excitement in “calmly working” with stills. Sachs opts for a drawn-out rhythm in this vignette, as meandering shots of the surrounding nature recall the particular intimacy of Nelson’s work. This extends to her current process: even amidst technological change, she is invested in listening to her images, we sense, not bludgeoning them into some preordained vision.

long overdue for historical recognition? I’m hesitant to speak about any ‘shared themes’ across the layered, nuanced careers that constitute this genealogy, lest these similarities be construed as an essentialised roadmap. How can we identify the beauty that comes from rejecting the strictures of masculine ways-of-being in the world without mummifying it, crystallizing these artists’ irreducible vibrancy into a prescriptive binary formula? The key might lie in situating their work within experimental cinema’s challenging, unfeminist history. Reflecting on her mid- Sixties collaboration with Stan Brakhage, Schneemann laments (https://www.revolvy.com/folder/Films-directed-by-Stan-Brakhage

/544076): “Whenever I collaborated, went into a male friend’s film, I always thought I would be able to hold my presence, maintain an authenticity. It was soon gone, lost in their celluloid dominance.” Cat’s Cradle is hardly the only masterwork of structural film to suggest a sort of Abstract Expressionist-adjacent machismo. Against this backdrop, the nexus of similarities between Schneemann, Deren, Nelson, Sachs, and Stratman becomes explicable not as the record of some intrinsically-female way of seeing and filming the world, but as the product of work : a shared undertaking invested in upending experimental cinema’s more problematic attitudes and replacing them with a new hierarchy of aesthetic values: adaptability, intimacy, and tenderness. Only when we honour these values, in all their many manifestations across these seven artists’ careers, can we begin to construct the kind of feminist genealogy that film history so urgently requires.

Lynne Sachs directs Two Union Docs Essay Film Workshops in Brooklyn

Sep 8, 2017 at 10:00 am – Sep 10, 2017 at 5:00 pm

A Letter to the World: Experiments in Essay Filmmaking

In the words of renowned film avant-gardist Hans Richter, essay films “’make problems, thoughts and even ideas’ perceptible … they ‘render visible what is not visible.’”

From Chris Marker and Agnes Varda to Travis Wilkerson and Trinh T. Minh-ha, filmmakers and artists have been using the genre of essay filmmaking to explore new modes of blending fact, fiction, and experience to capture essential truths. A constantly evolving and flexible form, essay films are used to document cultural and historical moments, evoke a feeling, unravel an auto-biography, and respond to critical social turning points with a challenging mix of traditional documentary conventions, personal nuance and experimental artistry.

Join UnionDocs and filmmaker Lynne Sachs to explore the history, theory and practice of this shape-shifting genre. Open to filmmakers, students, artists, scholars and more, this three-day intensive enables artists to articulate their ideas and explore new methodologies in crafting their work.

Participants in this intensive workshop will have the chance to work with a wide range of scholars and practitioners: Lynne Sachs will lead the course with help from filmmakers Alan Berliner, Akosua Adoma Owusu and Roger Beebe. Scholars and co-writers of “Essays on the Essay Film”, Timothy Corrigan & Nora M. Alter will join and provide a window into the theory and history of the form. Through seminars and work-in-progress critiques, together participants will each, in their own way, push the boundaries of reality-based work, questioning truth and fact as they are conveyed and represented, and learn how to put this new knowledge into practice. Current projects are not required to attend, but encouraged!

Dec. 2017 Essay Film Workshop with Lynne Sachs, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Jacqueline Goss, Jim Finn, Sky Hopinka & Su Friedrich

THE LANTERN – “Tip of My Tongue” Screens at the Wexner Center (Article and Full Interview)

The Lantern – The Ohio State University
by Chase-Anthony Ray
November 2017

When Lynne Sachs celebrated her 50th birthday, she wasn’t concerned about an impending midlife crisis. Instead, she decided to celebrate with 11 New Yorkers she had never met.

For her latest documentary, “Tip of My Tongue,” Sachs gathered a diverse group of men and women from different countries including Iran, Cuba and Australia, who shared one thing in common: age.

Together with Sachs, the group discussed strange and revealing moments of their lives in which uncontrollable events –– outside their own domestic universe –– have impacted who they all have become.

“Tip of My Tongue” will screen at the Wexner Center for the Arts Wednesday in the latest installment of its “Visiting Filmmakers” series.

Sachs is known for creating films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. She also has a habit of weaving together poetry, collaging, painting, politics, and layered sound design.

Sachs wrote her own series of 50 poems for every year of her life, and guided her collaborators across the landscapes of their memories from the Vietnam War protests, to the Anita Hill hearings, to the Columbine massacre, and all the way to Occupy Wall Street, according to her website.

“I am happiest when my film ‘characters’ explore storytelling from various subjectivities,” Sachs said. “[To explore their] various selves and other selves … is a more authentic portrayal of being alive during a specific time, situation or place.”

The Wexner Center prides itself on bringing acclaimed filmmakers like Sachs to screen their works because it believes it is one of few institutions supporting this type of work, said David Filipi, director of film and video at the Wexner Center.

“We make it a priority to support personal filmmakers like Lynne, both by screening their films as well as providing post-production support to some through our studio program,” Filipi said. “There are fewer and fewer venues supporting this type of work, which makes it all the more imperative that we provide an opportunity for these types of films to be screened and seen by audiences in our region.”

Sachs said she chose to screen “Tip of My Tongue” because she believes Ohio State is in the small minority of universities with acclaimed museums.

“There are only two state universities in the United States that have extraordinary, world-class museums — the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive [at University of California, Berkeley] and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State,” Sachs said. “I have had the honor to screen my films at both institutions, and have been deeply moved by my interactions with the students and members of the public who fill the seats in these theaters.”

Filipi said Ohio State students might be surprised and intrigued by what Lynne captures with her film.

“Right now, you’re surrounded by your friends and peers, and your shared experiences are immediately recognizable… [but eventually], your friend and peer group isn’t always as present and there are other commitments and distractions that accumulate as you get older,” Filipi said. “Lynne has a very personal approach to documentary, and this is one of the traits that sets her films apart from others.”

Gathering a group of middle-aged adults from all backgrounds allows the theme of self-reflection and recounting one’s own memories to drive the entire film.

“In ‘Tip of My Tongue’ I tried to dig down into my own and my collaborators’ pain and joy … I was looking for surprising intimacy that is different from simply ‘telling the truth,’” Sachs said. “To bare my own soul, I needed to begin with my own poetry and then move onto something more visual –– I wanted my camera to express this intimacy.”

The screening of “Tip of My Tongue” will take place Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Wexner Center. Admission is $6 for students and $8 for the general public.

Read the full interview below:
 Can you explain the title a little bit?
Well, tip of my tongue is an expression that people use for the experience of trying to remember something but not being able to verbalize it, knowing that it is there in the recesses of your consciousness but not having complete access to it. I like the physicality of the expression, the way it connects to our anatomy and to our bodies. I feel that this sensation – which can be both exhilarating and frustrating – articulates the communal memory experiment that I conducted in the making of the film.

 Why bring your film to Ohio state?
In my opinion, there are only two state universities in the United States that have extraordinary, world-class museums – the Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive at University of California Berkeley and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State. I have had the honor to screen my films at both institutions, and have been deeply moved by my interactions with the students and members of the public who fill the seats in these theaters.

 What can OSU students expect from this film?
To celebrate my 50th birthday, I gathered together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where I grew up. I invited 12 fellow New Yorkers — born across several continents in the 1960s — to spend a weekend with me making a movie. Together we discussed some of the most salient, strange and revealing moments of our lives. As a group, we talked about the ways in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe have impacted who we all have become. Together, we all move from the Vietnam War protests to the Anita Hill hearings to the Columbine Shootings to Occupy Wall Street. Using the backdrop of the horizon as it meets the water in each of NYC’s five boroughs as well as abstracted archival material, TIP OF MY TONGUE ultimately becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. We replace traditional timelines with a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression.

In addition, OSU students are going to hear music from Stephen Vitiello, one of the most recognized sound artist in this country!

 How did you manage to find all these participants among the same age and get them to participate?
I used all sorts of methods for finding the people in the film. I posted on Facebook stating that I was making a film project that needed people who were born around the same time that I was – in 1961. I also asked everyone I knew for suggestions because I was really committed to working with participants in the film who came from as many different continents as possible. I wanted as diverse viewpoints and life experiences as I could possibly find.

 You wrote 50 poems for every year of your life. Explain to me why you did that and how easy/difficult that process was?
When I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee in the 1970s, I had a great aunt named Isabel. Aunt Isabel was passionate about poetry. She was a devout aficionado of the works of poets such as Marianne Moore, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, and Cathy Acker and expressed her love of the marriage of poetry and image through her life-long acquisition of artist made books. She had hundreds of these books and was thrilled to share her collection with me throughout my teenage years. Little did I know how affected I would be by the hours we spent together turning the pages of her books. It was during these exhilarating moments of discovery that I began to find my own artistic muse.

I’ve been making experimental and documentary films since 1983. When I turned 50 in 2011, I decided to return to my love of poetry, painting, drawing and photography – to further explore a conceptual thread I had been developing in my films for many years: In what ways are the private, most intimate moments in our lives affected by the public world beyond? While visiting the Museum of Modern Art, I discovered the work of Serbian conceptual and media artist Sanja Ivekovic. In one black and white video piece made over a period of 14 years in the 1970s and early 80s, she created a remarkable visual dichotomy between her existence as a mother at home with her child and her observations on the Yugoslavian police state. She simply cut back and forth between a tall glass of milk and a street tussle with soldiers, or an infant’s eye and some form of state TV propaganda and the effect, for me, was breathtaking.

 Why did you choose self-reflection and recounting ones own past memories as a main theme for the film?
I am happiest when my film ‘characters’ explore storytelling from various subjectivities,” various selves and other-selves, opening up, perhaps ironically, a more authentic portrayal of being alive during a specific time, in a specific situation or place.”

In “Tip of My Tongue” I tried to dig down into my own and my collaborators’ pain and joy. Then I tried to articulate these experiences as a shared exploration for the camera. I was looking for surprising intimacy that is different from simply ‘telling the truth.’ To bare my own soul, I needed to begin with my own poetry and then move to something more visual. I wanted my camera to express this intimacy through textures, objects, places, reflections, faces, hands. (from a conversation with Kelly Spivey, Brooklyn College Film Professor)

8th Annual Experimental Lecture: Bradley Eros: Disappearing Soon at a Theater Near You (ephemeral cinema & other acts of life)

8th Annual Experimental Lecture: Bradley Eros: Disappearing Soon at a Theater Near You (ephemeral cinema & other acts of life)

October 4, 2017

Last October, I invited Bradley Eros to give the 8th Annual Experimental Lecture at NYU. Here is his entire spectacular, collaborative, visionary performance/lecture. He called it “Disappearing soon at a theater near you (ephemeral cinema & other acts of life)”.

I’d like to say a bit about the history of the Experimental Lecture. From the beginning, I imagined this talk to be one in which someone who had immersed him or herself in the world of alternative, experimental film would reveal something about the process of making their work by visiting pieces that were either unfinished, unresolved, bewitching or even untouchable. The intention was to lay bare the challenges rather than the successes, the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art.

Barbara Hammer was our first invited guest. In 2006, she sauntered into the largest lecture hall in this building, weeks after her first round of chemo therapy, carrying an enormously heavy Pagent projector which she then proceeded to carry up and down the stairs as she projected her own 16mm films on every surface of the room in her “The Cinema of the Optic Nerve”.

Craig Baldwin tore himself away from his underground film archive, his artistic practice and his 30-year old alternative media series “Other Cinema” in San Francisco to present “The Collage Essay: From Compilation Film to Culture Jam”.

Ken Jacobs took us on an odyssey from his early romps in NYC to his most recent obsessions with the state of our world as manifested by the beings that live in the dirt and grime of it all in his “Cucaracha Cinema”.

Peggy Ahwesh suggested her own “Parler Femme” by regailing us with her own take on a hard scrabble, experimental ethnography that has taken her to places she never intended on going but somehow found herself – in bliss.

In her “Where Did I Make the Wrong Turn?”
Carolee Schneemann traveled backwards and forwards in time like a archeologist who understands that a cherry pie is more than something to eat. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she analyzed those clues from her past that pushed her toward her life’s work.

Jonas Mekas recounted the entire history of the avant-garde cinema and the fragile but so vital institutions that sustain us in NYC and beyond, like a bard unraveling the secrets of his mind and his community.

In 2016, Ernie Gehr gave his talk “What is an Unfinished Work?”, allowing us into his studio practice, revealing the moments of doubt and stubbornness that he, like all of us, need to continue making our work.

In many ways an animating spirit and catalyzing agent of the NYC underground film scene from the 1980s to the present, Bradley Eros’ radical, sumptuous expanded cinema works stand at the forefront of a movement to redefine our understanding of film as an art form. For his Experimental Lecture, Eros “dismantled a few beliefs, by prying history loose, not nailing it down.” His lecture will take the form of a series of questions, interrupted by quotations, collaborations, expanded and contracted cinema, jokes & aphorisms, music, poetry, and surprise. Eros will talk on the nature of process, the immaterial, unfixed forms, hybrid works, resistance, desire & its discontents.

Eros works in myriad media, in addition to film, including video, collage, photography, performance, sound, text, and installation. His conceptual framework includes: ephemeral cinema, mediamystics, subterranean science, erotic psyche, cinema povera, poetic accidents and musique plastique. Recent works & obsessions include: Black Hole Cinema (‘zine & lecture), eau de cinema (perfume & exhibit), Narcolepsy Cinema.

Thank you to Dan Streible, Cinema Studies at NYU, Cristina Cajulis and NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Lynne Sachs Artist CV

Lynne_Sachs_Resume_2017

Working with Humanity Now: Direct Relief Program in Greece

Working with Humanity Now: Direct Relief Program
Athens & Thessaloniki, Greece
July 2 – 12, 2017
Lynne Sachs

I am in Greece with my sister Dana Sachs, my brother-in-law Todd Berliner and friend Jennifer Maraveyais, as part of Humanity Now: Direct Refugee Relief program. While in Athens, I am teaching English and running a sunprint art workshop at Orange House, a center for refugees “with a focus on unaccompanied minors, single women, and mothers with children. United with volunteers from around the world, its guiding purpose is to assist refugees who are searching for a safe haven.”

The first day, I taught English to two young fellows. This actually gave me the opportunity to hear their personal stories as a way to practice speaking. The first man was an Arabic-speaking Palestinian nurse who was about 30 years old. His name is Mohammad and he comes from a family of nine, all of whom are educated and live in Aleppo, Syria. They seem to have careers, like engineers, and administrators, etc. He is the only one who left, and he did this after 1 1/2 years in jail in Syria. We spent about five minutes talking about President Assad because he kept using the word “president,” and then I finally figured out that he was trying to say “prison.” After his release, he went to Turkey first and then tried to get on six different boats from there before he was able to make his way to Greece. By the way, I was correcting his English all the way through his story. He was giddy to learn from someone who was so attentive to his speaking, and he was able to make the corrections on the spot. I often interrupted his very dramatic story to explain how complicated English prepositions can be.

I also met a 19-year-old Afghan man. I gleaned from his very few words of spoken English that he is from a small town near Kabul, Afghanistan, speaks Farsi, is 19, and was born on Feb. 21. If I understood correctly, he has never been to school, so I was even more impressed by how determined he was to use his language workbook. His notebook indicated that he could tell the difference between the past and the past perfect. Impressive. Just from these two interactions, I learned so much about how developed Syrian society is (the intensity of the war there has not been as long) and how fragmented and chaotic Afghan society is (generations of war).

By the second day of my art workshop at Orange House, both children and parents participated while they were waiting for their own English, German or French lessons (depending on where they are anticipating having their families resettled in the future). One of my student participants is a young man named Anas Saidi from Syria who speaks English fluently and has already been resettled in Germany. He had returned to Athens for a few weeks to volunteer. He told me that he is an aspiring filmmaker, and that he wants to make a film about his own journey from Damascus, including the two weeks he lived in the woods in transit. We talked a lot about films we had seen and our own work. He is living in a small German town, so he is a bit frustrated because this is a place where actually very few people speak English and there is no film community. Then I impulsively asked if he is interested in coming to the United States, to which he answered very sweetly, “It is not possible for me to come to the US now.” Oh yes, how could I forget? You can see him holding his amazing sunprint below. Here are several images from the workshop. This is the translation of the Arabic words in Anas’s image: Love, Bread and Freedom.

In the late afternoon, I went to a community center where we made 60 turkey sandwiches with some other volunteers — three British nurses, two 17-year-old Iraqi boys, one Iranian boy who is obsessed with film history, and the Albanian male organizer. A group of six of us walked around the center of Athens giving out sandwiches and cups of tea to homeless people, all of whom the Albanian man knows by face since he does this three times a week. The homeless people are mostly, but not all, refugees from neighboring countries in flux. One young Pakistani man was sleeping on a piece of cardboard in a city park. He had a fabulous, bouffant Elvis-like hairstyle, and skinny jeans, but he seemed quite delirious and had some sores on his arm, so one of the nurses in our group cared for him right there on the ground.

The other morning, I got up early and walked to the top of the Acropolis. There are, of course, thousands of tourists at this most famous spot. I am not sure how many of them realize the human turmoil that is swirling around them. It would be easy not to notice, strangely enough.

One day, we visited an abandoned farm about an hour and a half from Athens that could become a home for two refugee families who have recently arrived here. There were figs, quince, and pears growing among the shambles. As fecund as the land appeared to be, it looked to me as if the possible renter was wondering how he and his family might make a go of it in a rural area, far from their community and the access that a city allows. The project is an experiment in home building for people living in squats or on the street or in a camp, offering something new and full of possibility, like a new “used” shirt that is clean and ready-to-wear but somehow you feel may not suit you, that everyone says makes you look so good, but you know you will never feel comfortable wearing. We took a walk up a hill full of sage bushes and olive trees to a small bee hive that we were told had produced 12 kilos of honey. Everyone was so impressed, but perhaps learning this new skill might be intimidating to the family, perhaps they are scared of bees. I am not sure the father in the family was convinced that the property was really salvageable, at least for him. And so, the search for a home continues. Here you see me holding freshly picked herbs near the farm and sinks from a refugee camp that will be reused somehow. Everything is recycled. Everything.

One evening, Dana, Todd and I ate dinner with some Palestinian friends of hers. There was a wonderful mom from Syria who has five adorable, perky children. About a year ago, she traveled to Greece from Aleppo, Syria all by herself on a boat with a woman smuggler because her husband had already escaped the war with their oldest child and she and the younger ones were hoping to follow them. So far, that has not worked out. Through Dana’s translator, I learned that her family is originally from Palestine but that her grandparents had been forced to leave in 1948, at which time they made their way to Syria. The other man at our table comes from Gaza where his entire family still lives, but they are not able to leave and he is not able to return since Gaza is currently completely closed off. Both situations are directly connected to the history of Israel/ Palestine and, in many ways, were deeply disturbing to me.

In Greece, at least for me on this trip, you are asked to imagine how a place might have looked when there were once people there. Imagine, in the shadow of the columns at the Arcropolis, a symposium of supine thinkers relaxed on marble benches in 204 B.C.E. Imagine a thousand refugees in tents camped out on the grounds of a gas station near the village of Idomeni in the winter of 2016. Dana came to the Idomini refugee camp for two weeks in 2016 to help serve food and deliver much-needed clothing to thousands of Syrian men, women and children living in tents. Forced from their country by the ravages of a cruel chemical war, these displaced people were seeking asylum in Europe, attempting to pass through Greece across the northern border. They were stopped head-on just before the mountains of Macedonia, and so found themselves in a rural village in Greece that was completely unprepared for the magnitude of such an international crisis. Anyway, Dana was so moved by her witnessing of this situation that a year later she brought me and her fellow Humanity Now friend Jennifer back to Idomini, which is about an hour and a half north of Thessaloniki, to see the site of the camp where she learned to cut herbs, vegetables and other ingredients for savory soups for 5000.

Based on conversations we had over the last few days, I am starting to put together a mental image of this place since all we have now to remind us are a few leftover signs in Arabic and English. We made a special stop at the Eko Gas Station where hundreds of displaced families and single people set up camp. I chatted with a Greek woman who worked in the convenience store on the grounds, wondering how she felt about that intense disruption of their quiet lives. In her very few words of English, she told me how interesting it was for her to watch an impromptu Syrian cook make falafel in her kitchen. She seemed a bit sad that the excitement at the gas station is now over. We drove just a few miles away, down a desolate industrial road and stood outside the barbed wire fence of a smaller camp where the people who could not find passage to other parts of Europe or retreat to the urban squats of Athens are now living indefinitely in Isoboxes in an arid setting where, rumor has it, snakes are reported to rear their ever-threatening heads.

Thessaloniki is a lovely, “bohemian” (as the travel posters promote) city on the Aegean Sea, with a plethora of archeological ruins, student cafés and museums. It has also become a hub around which many refugee camps and volunteer services have appeared in the last two years. If you are not looking for these kinds of places, you would most definitely not find them accidently. We visited the Help Refugees/ Get Shit Done support center where 150 fresh, hot meals are prepared, a gymnasium-size room is filled with completely organized used clothing, wooden bicycles are designed, playground equipment is constructed and more, much more. You can see how this center of activity functions so fluidly, with almost no bureaucracy or NGO-style oversight. When need is determined or problems recognized, this group of about 50 people – mostly in their twenties from all over Europe — responds incredibly quickly.

Visiting a temporary refugee camp is not like visiting a prison. I know this. I can see that the front gates to the grounds of the two camps on the industrial outskirts of Thessaloniki are not locked. But there are military guards and there is barbed wire along the fence. So, I am trying to reckon with the flow, the ostensibly free movement in and out. I visit two camps today with Jennifer to see what kinds of direct relief they could offer. Are there enough diapers for the babies? Is there any kind of communal space? Is there a playground which would give the children a reason to go out of doors? We are actually able to enter only one of the two camps. In some ways, guards are more tough on foreign outsiders, though it is not clear if they are protecting the “residents” from voyeurs or self-appointed reporters who might take pictures of things they don’t want the world to see. I really don’t know. One of the camps is actually set up inside an old factory, so the ceilings are very high and the acoustics are daunting. Each family has set up their make-shift home in a partitioned area that is about 10’ by 10’. Of course, you don’t look behind the curtain, but it is very moving to see the shoes outside the fabric covered doorway. In the back of the camp, we talked with people in a multi-purpose room where kids were making masks with their parents and college age volunteers from Europe and the US. Next to that was a surprisingly well appointed kitchen with about 20 stoves where women were preparing beautiful meals for their families. To my surprise, all of the tables were pushed to the side wall, clearly not used at all. One person explained to us that Syrian and Kurdish people prefer to prepare their meals on tables that are close to the ground, so it is awkward for them to cook with these donated tables. Luckily, we were walking with Jeni from the Get Shit Done Team. She said she would come back soon to cut the legs off all of the steel tables. No problem. No problem? Really.

In our visit to another camp outside Thessaloniki, the situation seemed far less supportive and accommodating as revealed by the graffiti about food and water on the walls you can see here. It’s interesting to see the writing in both English and Arabic. Do people write on walls to express their feelings for themselves or for the passerby? Who is your audience? Who is reading? Who is taking pictures? Who is listening?

During my workshop at Orange House, I met Anas Saidi, an outgoing and talented young filmmaker from Damascus who decided to record the step-by-step process of our sunprint workshop with other refugees at the center. While he was shooting his time lapse images (which takes a long time), we had the chance to talk about his escape from the ravages of the war in his country. I asked Anas to write a short bio, and here it is along with his spectacular video:

“My name is Anas Saidi from Syria/ Damascus, I lived in Damascus my whole life. Three years ago I fled to Germany like other Syrian did in a death migration which we don’t know if it’s our last destination or not. I’ve lived and felt the near death experience in every inch of my body and my soul and it has totally changed my life. I am an actor and Filmmaker and my dream is to share everything I’ve seen to the world in a movie. I live in Germany now and I want to study filmmaking and make my dream come true, it’s too hard but I made it here, I make it everywhere.”

Lynne Sachs & Mark Street: A Marriage of Remakes

Screen Slate
Lynne Sachs & Mark Street: A Marriage of Remakes
June 25, 2017
By Chris Shields
https://www.screenslate.com/features/488

Personal and independent, experimental films represent the height of filmic subjectivity, maybe most notably expressed in the work of Stan Brakhage, who sought to recreate the physical act of seeing with his first person films. These works run the gamut from Brakhage’s physiological reconstructions of vision through a range of more poetic and metaphoric approaches, be they perceptual, emotional, historical or material. So the conceit of XY Chromosome Project’s presentation of Lynne Sachs & Mark Street: A Marriage of Remakes at Brooklyn’s Microscope Gallery represents a perspectival place of particular interest in that it itself is an attempt to give material form to intersubjectivity.

Sachs and Street have been a couple for nearly 30 years, and have both made works independently (Street’s 2016 documentary Oiltowns) and together (XY Chromosone Project 2007). The films on view at Microscope Gallery however, which lend the concept and name to A Marriage of Remakes, are somehow neither by one filmmaker or the other: they are remakes, reconstructions, reimaginings, re-realizations of each other’s work. Sachs and Street have each remade films by her or his partner, creating a new dimension in both their work, elucidating through the nature of the project both the translatable and the untranslatable.

In her 2012 16mm work, Same Stream Twice, Sachs films her and Street’s young daughter, Maya, moving in a circle. The camera stands at the center point tracing her circular trajectory. The image is high contrast black and white, grainy and evokes a stoic femininity reminiscent of Gunvor Nelson’s gorgeous and haunting 1969 film My Name is Oona—both are filled with strength and dignity, an almost pagan vision of female power. Street’s video, Boys To Men, is constructed largely around the same axis of movement and the same conceit, with the wheel of time turning as children, in this case boys, become adults. The short video however, is devoid of Sachs’ haunting photography and solemnity, instead taking place in any old park in Brooklyn. It seems more a video document than a poetic vision. From these two works, qualities which distinguish Sachs’ work from Street’s begin to become clear, the revelations moving in both directions—Sachs favors grainy 8 and 16mm film with even, or completely absent, soundtracks, while Street favors more documentary like images and isn’t afraid of jarring sound or colliding frames. What unifies them however is somewhat more nebulous. Is there a shared idea or approach, or is this experiment in “remaking” evidence that a relationship creates it’s own intersubjective perspective, where two independent visions meet? At the very least, Sachs and Street’s project is an intriguing and worthwhile attempt to give this phenomenon a unique expression and form of its own.

https://www.screenslate.com/features/488

On Studio: Remembering Chris Marker

Portrait of the Artist as a Room by Lynne Sachs

On Studio: Remembering Chris Marker

May 24, 2017

Chris Marker’s studio on the Rue Courat, Paris, April 4, 2007. Photo by Adam Bartos. Courtesy of the artist.

In San Francisco in the mid-1980s, I saw French filmmaker Chris Marker’s expansive, enigmatic ciné meditation Sans Soleil (1983). I witnessed his mode of daring, wandering filmmaking with a camera. Alone, he traveled to Japan, Sweden, and West Africa where he pondered revolution, shopping, family, and the gaze in a sweeping but intimate film essay that shook the thinking of more filmmakers than any film I know. Marker’s quasi-autobiographical movie blended an intense empathy with a global picaresque. It presented the possibility of merging cultural theory, politics, history, and poetry—all aspects of my own life I did not yet know how to bring together—into one artistic expression. I wrote my own interpretation of the film and then boldly, perhaps naively, sent it to Marker in Paris.

Several months later, his response arrived with a slew of cat drawings along the margins. Marker also suggested that we continue this conversation in person, in San Francisco. Not long afterward, I found myself driving Chris from his hotel in Berkeley to Cafe Trieste, one of the most famous cafes in North Beach. There we slowly sipped coffees in the last relic of 1960s hippy culture, talking about his films, his travels, and my dream to become a filmmaker. As the afternoon came to a close, I politely pulled out my camera and asked if I could take his picture. “No, no, I never allow that.” And then he turned and walked away, leaving me glum, embarrassed, and convinced that my new friendship with Marker was now over.

American film scholar Colin MacCabe struck up a similar friendship with Marker, one that began in 2002 with the transport of an obscure VHS tape from film enthusiast and producer Tom Luddy in Berkeley (once again) to Chris’s studio home in Paris. Over the next ten years, MacCabe would welcome any excuse for traveling from his home in Pittsburgh across the Atlantic Ocean to France. MacCabe’s longing was not for the food, wine, River Seine, or joie de vivre, but rather for the sheer pleasure of conversing about history, the dilemma of the twentieth century, cinema, technology, and the French actress Simone Signoret with Chris Marker. From the very first moment that MacCabe crossed the threshold into the lair of this quiet lion in the world of personal and political cinema, he knew it would change his life. The range and depth of topics these two men discussed is exhilarating. In reading MacCabe’s new short, anecdotal memoir, Studio: Remembering Chris Marker, we can easily glean that the passage of thoughts from-lip-to-ear-and-back-again between these two cerebral fellows left an indelible imprint on MacCabe. Marker’s place of creation, his home on the Rue Courat in a less-than-famous but spectacularly diverse neighborhood of Paris was a magnet for Macabe; he would travel there whenever possible, even if the two men’s tête-à-tête only lasted an hour. MacCabe explains that as revered as he was by filmmakers, essayists, poets, thinkers of any kind, Marker had two fundamental qualities: “a generosity of spirit and… a genius for friendship.” Having read many a text on Marker, never have I come across such an intimate, respectful recounting of his personal life. Little did I know, for example, that the highlight of his studies at the Sorbonne was working with Poetics of Spaceauthor Gaston Bachelard; that his admiration with the French Resistance network was grounded in his infatuation for its beautiful leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcard; or that “The experience of fighting as an American soldier, for which he received a personal letter of thanks from Eisenhower, meant that Marker could not countenance any of the knee-jerk anti-Americanism that so disfigures the thought of the European left.”

Both MacCabe’s and my communications with Chris evolved simultaneously. Chris made extraordinarily good use of the new epistolary canvas: email. I can only guess how many people around the world cherish such correspondence (most often with the subject heading News from Guillaume, Guillaume being his cat.) In 2007, I assisted Chris on the creation of an English version of Three Cheers for the Whale, his short 1972 film. There in the same loft apartment Adam Bartos so exquisitely photographed for Studio, we talked about everything from his friends Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and American documentarian Robert Kramer to Russian films he’d pulled from the Internet, cats, and tea—themes he would explore deeply with MacCabe as they parsed through texts they each were writing or reading.

“It was one of Marker’s absolute principles that he could not appear in public alongside his works. It was an ultimate taboo. I have often surmised that it was linked to a fantasy of death— that were he and his work to appear together his death would ensue,” explains MacCabe. Marker’s aversion to being photographed was profound. Type his name into Google and the only pictures you will find are in black and white, an archeological tracing that probably ends in the 1960s. And so it is that we turn each delicately folded folio page in Studio to reveal the place where Chris Marker lived and collected and edited the media-based projects of the last decade of his life. Here, in all its ecstatic detail, we are able to take account of a visible manifestation of the artist’s mind, a mind turned inside-out, the components of his practice revealed through the detritus and treasures of our technological culture. In Bartos’s images, we see numerous Apple computers, catalogues from Marker’s 2005 Museum of Modern Art installation “Owls at Noon,” an array of electronic keyboards, a signed photo of Kim Novak, and a 9/11 Commission Report. Of course, these are only the things I saw, what other viewers would notice would be completely different. While we do not witness Chris Marker in a photographic portrait, I would claim that we learn far more from this precise documentation of objects. They testify to the vitality of Marker’s personal space, to the grandness of his editing process and appreciation for the culture in which he was born.

Just before I left Marker’s home, he showed me a scrapbook he’d been compiling for several years, one he probably shared with MacCabe too. Marker had accumulated hundreds of pictures and articles on a young African-American politician who had just embarked on a campaign to become the next president of the United States. Chris was one of the wisest and most prescient human beings I have ever encountered; he was convinced that this virtually unknown candidate could stand up to a historically racist country and win. I was doubtful at the time.

Now, upon rereading Ben Lerner’s eloquent introduction to Studio, I realize that MacCabe’s text and Bartos’s photos are here together to articulate the multi-faceted ways that Chris Marker attempted to “depict old futurisms, a special case of anachronism.” From his wordless narrative science fiction film La Jetée (1962) to his epic reflection on the turmoil of the ’60s Grin Without a Cat (1977) to his visionary CD Rom Immemory (2002), he was committed to pulling us forward and backward in time through both celluloid and digital forms. Studio: Remembering Chris Marker is a testimony to this remarkable quality, albeit in an old-fashioned yet expansive book form.

Lynne Sachs makes films, performances, and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, politics, and sound design. Her most recent film, Tip of My Tongue, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art’s 2017 Documentary Fortnight. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.

Lynne at Beta Local Artist Residency, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Beta Local San Juan Puerto Rico

Beta-Local is an organization, a working group, and a physical space in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Beta-Local is a study and production program, an experimental education project and a platform for critical discussion and production immersed in our local reality (San Juan, the tropics, the Caribbean, the unplanned city) and our present moment (the economic crisis, the infinite potential, the skills and ideas of people who live here, now). There are some local variables such as the stagnation of local cultural institutions, the lack of an MFA program in the arts, a debilitating “brain drain”, and the prohibitive costs of higher education outside of Puerto Rico, as well as the peddling of the generic-as-international by many art schools and cultural institutions. We view these as opportunities for generating new forms. Beta-Local does not aspire to become another node in the globalized art market or academic spectrum. We are not interested in a mimetic practice.

Lynne Sachs at Beta Local

In March and April, 2017 I was invited by co-director Sofia Galisa to be an artist-in-residence in Beta’s Harbor program:

http://betalocal.org/the-harbor/lynne-sachs/

One evening I presented my film “Wind in Our Hair/ Con viento en el pelo” which I made with the editing assistance of Sofia.

http://betalocal.org/el-cine-de-lynne-sachs-6abr/

Another evening, I hosted a screening of the film “Lupe” by Jose Rodriguez Soltero.

http://betalocal.org/lupe-de-jose-rodriguez-soltero-30mar/

Puerto Rican filmmaker José Rodriguez Soltero (1943 – 2009) was a significant figure in the New York underground art scene during the mid-1960s and early 1970s. His films were frequently included in Filmmakers’ Cinematheque programs. He was featured in Film Culture and written up in Jonas Mekas’s Movie Journal column in the Village Voice, and was the friend and collaborator of Mario Montez, Charles Ludlam and Jack Smith.

Before leaving New York, I shot this video of MM Serra, Executive Director of the Filmmakers Cooperative in New York City, discussing the 1960s Queer, count-culture, underground films of Rodriguez Soltero with friend and filmmaker Lynne Sachs. The Coop has recently preserved and digitized his films for the world to see! This interview was conducted in March, 2017 prior to Sachs’s presentation of “Lupe” at Beta Local (www.betalocal.org) in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which may be (we are not sure) the first screening of the film in its entirety in the filmmaker’s “mother” country.

Lynne Sachs Beta Local Rodriguez Solterno Screening

And the during my last weekend in San Juan, I taught a workshop called “Film as a Collaborative Art”:

Film as a Collaborative Art

What kinds of creative surprises can happen when artists who don’t know each other come together for a day to make a film? In this workshop, we will work together for a day as a group to create a series of single shot videos using complex mise-en-scene, unusual camera movements, and recycled or hand-made props from home. Each participant will have a chance to direct their own piece. Throughout the day, Lynne will present a series of experimental performance videos by artists such as Vito Acconci, Howardena Pindell, Eadward Muybridge, Chanal Ackerman and more. At the end of the day, we will have a show and, of course, participants are encouraged to invite their friends.

http://betalocal.org/el-cine-como-arte-colaborativo-8abr/

Lynne Sachs at Beta Local Film Collaboration Workshop

Throughout my two weeks in San Juan, I made collages which you can see here:

http://www.lynnesachs.com/2017/04/25/collages-by-lynne-sachs-at-harbor-artist-residency-at-beta-local-san-juan-puerto-rico/

One day, while I was in San Juan, I went to the local Impresora (https://www.facebook.com/laimpresora.pr/) to make a broadside with two laundry themed poems — one by me and the other by my collaborator Lizzie Olesker and a drawing I made of lint. We used the wonderful risograph process of printing three colors with three different passes through the machine. Here are pictures of the project which produced 300 cards.