“To mark her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers a group of her contemporaries—all New Yorkers but originally hailing from all corners of the globe—for a weekend of recollection and reflection on the most life-altering personal, local, and international events of the past half-century, creating a collective distillation of their times. Interspersed with poetry and flashes of archival footage, this poignant reverie reveals how far beyond our control life is, and how far we can go despite this.” (Documentary Fortnight Festival of Non-Fiction Films, Museum of Modern Art, 2017)
Tip of My Tongue World Premiere
Documentary Fortnight: An International Festival of Nonfiction
Film
Museum of Modern Art
11 W 53rd St., New York City
Saturday, Feb. 25 at 7:30 pm
Sunday, Feb. 26 at 5:00 pm
Directed by Lynne Sachs
Cinematography by Sean Hanley and Ethan Mass
Editing by Amanda Katz
Music and Sound Design by Stephen Vitiello
Featuring: Dominga Alvarado, Mark Cohen, Sholeh Dalai, Andrea Kannapell, Sarah Markgraf, Shira Nayman, George Sanchez, Adam Schartoff, Erik Schurink, Accra Shepp, Sue Simon, Jim Supanick
Supported by a Guggenheim Fellow in the Arts and a McDowell Colony Residency.
https://vimeo.com/754895425 To watch the film, please contact Lynne at lynnesachs@gmail.com for the password.
Over the next two decades, Chris and I spoke on the phone periodically and I attended several of his rare public presentations. In 2007, Jon Miller, president of our mutual distributor Icarus Films, contacted me to see if I would be willing to assist Chris in the making of a new English version of his 1972 film “Vive la Baleine”, a passionate, collage-based essay film on the plight of the whales. Of course, I was honored and immediately said yes. For one whole year, Chris and I corresponded weekly as we re-wrote and updated the narration and I searched for a male and a female voice-over actor to read the two parts. He renamed the new 2007 version of his film “Three Cheers for the Whale”. It is distributed with other “bestiary” films he has made including “The Case of the Grinning Cat”.
Lynne Sachs, LynneSachs.com
With Lynne Sachs’ moving post on meeting Marker in Berkeley and San Francisco, starting a correspondence with Marker and eventually working with him on an English version of Vive la baleine, I felt I would be remiss to not fill in this blank on the site. The topic is as important as ever, Marker’s heart in the right place as ever, his use of images of the past a propos as ever. What more can we say? The post also gives a sense of the scale and relentlessness of the work this one person undertook to make films in the mode of the camera-pen (without assistants). So busy but never too busy to make a new friend, and to put that friend eventually to work. He didn’t forget, he had her filed in his library of babel for contact when the moment was right. There is much to admire here.
Unfortunately, I can’t find an online copy of the English remake Three Cheers for the Whale . It seems to have been up on YouTube and then taken down again. Let us know in the comments if you find a version that can be embedded here. I will also work to translate the essay in French by François Giraud into English and add it to this post.
A comment on the IMDB entry for Long Live the Whale : Chris Marker’s usual mix of “borrowed” pieces of different film textures (film, video, animation, photographs, paintings) serves as a poetic, passionate and very sound warning against the widespread, business-like, matter-of-fact killing of whales around the world. If today its message may sound obvious to most of us – almost everybody is aware of the danger of whale extinction, though of course there are still killings out there – it can still be enlightening as to the appalling methods of whale-hunting worldwide through the ages, as well as the very special place that this big cetacean has occupied in human mythology, history, economics and art, the “challenge” of little men killing the biggest animals on the planet, and making the mo $ t of it.
The quality of the images vary tremendously, and for sure there are scenes that will make you cringe with horror (not unlike Geroges Franju’s 1949 one-day-in-a-slaughterhouse “Le Sang des Bêtes”). Marker’s incomparable talent for weaving his commentary with creative insight, historical research, wit, irony and common sense elevates this short film above the routine ecological documentary. www.imdb.com
During his long career, and especially in his militant period, Chris Marker often collaborated with other filmmakers. This practice contributes to the eclecticism and complexity of his plethora of work. With Mario Ruspoli, documentary maker of Italian origin but fluent in French, Chris Marker made two films, on a common theme, sixteen years apart: Les Hommes de la baleine in 1956 and Vive la baleine in 1972. To be quite right, Les Hommes de la baleine is directed entirely by Ruspoli, while Vive la baleine is the result of a co-production between the two men. However, Chris Marker signed the commentary, under the pseudonym of Jacopo Berenizi, for the short film of 1956, thus playing a determining role in the artistic success of this film.
Shot in Azores, Les Hommes de la baleine begins with the butchering of a giant of the seas. This strong sequence is accompanied by a commentary denouncing the massacre of whales for purely industrial purposes. However, Mario Ruspoli seeks above all to show how the poor populations of these islands continue to practice sperm whale hunting with authenticity and risk their lives to meet their needs. Like an ethnographic documentary filmmaker, the filmmaker is interested in the traditional techniques of harpoon hunting and the rustic living conditions of these fishermen.
In 1972, the tone changed, the style too. What motivated the realization of this “sequel” was the decision, in 1972, of the International Whaling Commission to stop hunting for ten years. As Chris Marker’s commentary points out, this regulation is ignored by Japan and the USSR, two countries which practice whaling industrially, without concern for the survival of the species. Long live the whale opens with this cry from the heart: “Because you are extinct, whales!” Like big lamps. And if you’re no longer there to enlighten us, you and the other beasts, do you think we’ll see in the dark? The voice-over condemns the passage from a natural struggle between man and whale to an exclusively industrial struggle which ruins the balance of the planet.
Unlike Men of the Whale, this sequel is almost entirely illustrated by a body of works of art, in its entirety very varied, which testifies to the evolution and internationalization of whaling in through history. These works, Japanese, European or American, offer an aesthetic representation of the genius of man who has redoubled technical ingenuity to put these gigantic marine mammals to death. Whaling thus reaches a symbolic level and reveals man’s will to power. Conquest of the world, imperialism, colonialism: the whale becomes the allegory of the madness of the greatness of Humanity. Very acidic, Chris Marker’s text, not without a hint of bitterness, spares nothing, not even the cinema: “You were food. You have become an industry. Like the cinema! And you didn’t succeed either. This kind of spike is proof that Marker’s speech goes far beyond whaling. He attacks the cynicism of the powerful who do not hesitate to sacrifice the balance of nature for economic purposes, he points the finger at a world which is industrializing to the point of losing its sanity, he attacks the gentrification of art, when it only serves to flatter the pride of men: “For the Dutch, you were only a resource. But even more: a glory. Did you know that the rich amateurs took painters on their boats to take hunting scenes from life, which would later adorn their living rooms? ” He attacks the cynicism of the powerful who do not hesitate to sacrifice the balance of nature for economic purposes, he points the finger at a world which is industrializing to the point of losing its sanity, he attacks the gentrification of art, when it only serves to flatter the pride of men: “For the Dutch, you were only a resource. But even more: a glory. Did you know that the rich amateurs took painters on their boats to take hunting scenes from life, which would later adorn their living rooms? ” He attacks the cynicism of the powerful who do not hesitate to sacrifice the balance of nature for economic purposes, he points the finger at a world which is industrializing to the point of losing its sanity, he attacks the gentrification of art, when it only serves to flatter the pride of men: “For the Dutch, you were only a resource. But even more: a glory. Did you know that the rich amateurs took painters on their boats to take hunting scenes from life, which would later adorn their living rooms? ” “For the Dutch you were just a resource. But even more: a glory. Did you know that the rich amateurs took painters on their boats to take hunting scenes from life, which would later adorn their living rooms? ” “For the Dutch you were just a resource. But even more: a glory. Did you know that the rich amateurs took painters on their boats to take hunting scenes from life, which would later adorn their living rooms? “
The commentary, which multiplies puns and humorous spikes, is reminiscent of the cinécwriting of Agnes Varda who also likes to write rhythmic texts, with abundant references and very marked sounds to illustrate her documentaries. The text is rich, perhaps too much, and sometimes gets lost in a sardonic humor which today seems somewhat old-fashioned.
On the other hand, the implacable and very Markian conclusion retains all its impact: “For centuries, men and whales have belonged to two enemy camps which clashed on neutral ground: Nature. Today, Nature is no longer neutral. The border has shifted. The confrontation is between those who defend themselves, by defending Nature, and those who destroy it, destroy themselves. This time the men and the whales are in the same camp. And each whale that dies bequeaths to us like a prophecy the image of our own death. This shift is illustrated, no longer by works from the past, or even by extracts from Men of the Whale, but by crude documentary images that expose all the cruelty and barbarism of harpoon hunting: the ocean turns into a sickening stream of blood, the whale appears disconcertingly vulnerable next to the huge Japanese ships. The short film ends with the representation of a desperate dehumanization.
As always in Chris Marker’s films, the editing and association of text and image are very efficient. Even if Mario Ruspoli is credited with directing and image, Vive la baleine bears above all the imprint of Chris Marker’s know-how. Better than anyone, he knows how to dramatize still images and give them movement. Likewise, its text remains an essential component of this short film. It is difficult to assess the impact Mario Ruspoli had on this short film. His style, influenced by ethnography, stood out much more clearly in the short film of 1956. Vive la baleine is not characterized by an anthropological approach. Man is always shown from a distance, he has no right to speak. It is the whale who is the heroine of this tragic story, even if behind the scenes is an evolution of techniques and man’s relationship with nature. Long Live the Whale is a political and militant documentary that seeks to denounce. And he does it convincingly.
The idea of scale in architectural contemplations reflects on the meaning of the space, also scale connects with urban topology and contemporary ideas of social geography. Social, political, or personal impacts may be seen differently if seen from different point of views: looking from a global, national, municipal, personal, community-based or journalistic point of view.
These new films create spatial contemplations or film essays from Chicago, San Francisco, Berlin, New York, Canada, from a historical literature connection (Kerouac) or even the virtual space of a Si-Fi film series.
The screening presents a diversity of films connected with architecture, urban space and landscape from documentary to experimental, and will create an interesting visual dialogue about urban space in film.
Urban Research is a film and video program curated since 2006 by Klaus W. Eisenlohr during the Berlin International Directors Lounge festival. Urban Research encompasses explorations of public space, reports of the conditions of urban life and interventions in the urban sphere realized by international film and video artists using experimental, documentary, abstract or fictive forms.
The films of this Urban Research selection revolve around visions of the future city, recent and current movements and developments that take their expression in public spaces, urban studies and metaphoric images dealing with urban life. The mix of experimental and more documentary styles complement each other and create a diversity of connected ideas about urban life.
PROGRAM:
Sylva Fern Scales in the Spectrum of Space 7:21 US 2015 Commissioned by the Chicago Film Archive and in collaboration with jazz musician Phil Cohran, Scales in the Spectrum of Space explores the documented histories of urban life and architecture in Chicago. Silva samples 35 films and creates a glimpse into the collective memory of the city.
David de Rozas They want to give it a name 8:45 US 2014 They Want to Give it a Name observes a public open call process to name a plaza in the city of San Francisco. The film explores how the urban space is negotiated by the relationships that a naming process has with history and the collective physique. They Want to Give it a Name inquires a process of governing the subjectivities that inhabits the city.
Lynne Sachs Drift and Bough 6:35 US 2014 New York Central Park in the midst of winter. A private view onto the contained nature of the most famous park of New Your City.
Hans Georg Esch Airport Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt 4:49 DE 2014 A commissioned architectural view onto the new Berlin airport still in progress.
Rhayne Vermette Les Châssis de Lourdes 18:22 CA 2016 “while many architects through their time have sought a ‘true house’ or a ‘true architecture’, their truth was something of the past and not so true in the present [Š] here architecture is a child of the sea, arose from its substanceŠ” ? Gio Ponti
At the age of 32, I finally ran away from home. Dramatically, I left with only my cat and copies of all the still and motion images taken by my father.
LJ Frezza The Neutral Zone 4:54 US 2015 A screenshot series highlighting the utopias of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994).
Benna short movie #2 6:52 IT The shadows of people on the street seem to reveal an uncanny secret about them.
Wolfgang Thies From Daraa to Berlin 17:47, DE 2016 Cold rain. Sleeping bags on the pavement in front of the entrance. Behind mud to wade through. Meter- wide puddles. Crowd barriers. Hundreds of men in bathing- slippers, heads and shoulders under plastic tarpaulins. One container for x- rays, another with spilling toilets. Berlin, October 2015. The Central Registry for Refugees, the Regional Office for Health and Social Affairs Berlin, in short Lageso. A young man from Syria reports, why he fled to Germany and how he experiences the situation here in the capital.
Luis Valdovino and Dan Boord Not Enough Night 7:50 US 2008 The Longmont Colorado gas station that Jack Kerouac wrote about in “On the Road” was moved twice to protect it from certain destruction. Our present day bulldozes the past to make room for quaint condominiums and homes that pretend to be part of an American yesteryear of cottages and town squares.
“Not Enough Night” is a swan song for bygone hipsters, who longed for more “life” amid the coming storm of the post-World War II suburbs, shopping malls and the lonely existence of the solitary consumer.
This work commemorates the passing of the fiftieth year since the publication of “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac and “The Americans” by Robert Frank.’
As part of the Sub-Indie Cinema series programmed by Professor Roger Beebe from the Department of Art, join director Lynne Sachs for a screening and Q&A of her film, Your Day is My Night.
Blending autobiographical monologues, intimate conversations, and staged performances, Lynne Sachs’ Your Day Is My Night documents the lives of Chinese immigrants sharing a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown, offering a deeply felt portrait of the Asian-American immigrant experience. The film will screen at 8 pm in the Canzani Center Screening Room at the College of Columbus Art & Design’s Beeler Gallery. It will be followed by a Q&A wth Sachs. The event is free and open to the public.
Loria Center for the History of Art, Room 104, 190 York St., New Haven, CT, 06511
4:30-6:00pm
Location: Yale Loria Center, Room 250Workshop: Friday, 6:30-8:30pm
Location: Yale Digital Media Center for the Arts, Room 104Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Between 1994 and 2009, her five essay films took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Explore the work and process of Sachs’ intermedia practice at the DMCA. This event is sponsored by the Digital Media Center for the Arts, Film and Media Studies, and Films at the Whitney.
Viva and Felix Growing Up
by Lynne Sachs
10 min. Black and White 16mm on Digital, 2015
Available from Canyon Cinema, Film-Makers Cooperative, and Kino Rebelde.
Capturing fragments of the first three years of her twin niece’s and nephew’s lives with their two dads (her brother Ira Sachs and his husband Boris Torres) and their mom (Kirsten Johnson), Sachs affectionately surveys the construction of family.
Screened in “Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression Retrospective” at the Museum of the Moving Image in 2021.
A hybrid experimental film and live performance that looks into the charged intimacy of washing clothes in a neighborhood laundromat.
EVERY FOLD MATTERS is a live performance and a film project that looks at the charged, intimate space of the neighborhood laundromat and the people who work there. Set at the crossroads of a Brooklyn neighborhood, we meet four characters in a real laundromat — a uniquely social and public space that is slowly disappearing from our changing urban landscape. Based on interviews with New York City laundry workers, the project combines narrative and documentary elements as it explores personal stories of immigration, identity, money, stains and dirt.
“The legacy of domestic work, the issues surrounding power, and the exchange of money for services are all potent themes which rise to the surface and bubble over in dramatic, thrilling escalations of the everyday.” (Brooklyn Rail)
“Spotlights the often-invisible workers who fold the clothes, maintain the machines and know your secrets.” (In These Times)
“The intersection of film and performance, reality and imagination, employee and customer, historical fact and personal anecdote…You made us rethink the laundromat as a site of urban convergence, where strangers (of different races, religions, languages and classes) make ritualistic visits to a public space that’s also a functional extension of their own homes.” Alan Berliner, filmmaker
EVERY FOLD MATTERS has received support from New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (through Dirty Laundry/Loads of Prose), Women and Media Coalition, and Fandor FIX Filmmakers.
Our collaborators include acclaimed downtown actors Ching Valdes-Aran, Jasmine Holloway, Veraalba Santa, and Tony Torn, film editor Amanda Katz, cinematographer Sean Hanley and sound artist Stephen Vitiiello.
EVERY FOLD MATTERS began as a site specific performance with film presented by Loads of Prose at the New Lucky Laundromat in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn in early 2015. The Workers Unite! Film Festival later hosted a performance and awarded us the Best Feature Narrative prize. We are now developing our performance into a film, and recently received support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Women and Media Coalition. This summer Fandor.com awarded us a $5,000 matching grant for the creation and distribution of the film.
“I remember each and every face of every customer.”
We are excited to bring EVERY FOLD MATTERS into a more purely cinematic realm by weaving together additional documentary material collected in interviews, original text, and both raw and impressionistic images.
You can read press on our EVERY FOLD MATTERS live film performance here:
Jasmine Holloway is a singer and actress who has performed in productions at the Harlem Repertory Theatre as well as in the highly acclaimed Generations at Soho Rep. Jasmine was nominated for the Richard Maltby Jr. Award for Musical Theatre Excellence during the 2013 Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival.
Veraalba Santa is an actress and dancer and a member of Caborca Theater. She has degrees in Theater and Dance from the University of Puerto Rico and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. In New York City, Veraalba has worked with Sally Silvers, Rojo Robles, Viveca Vazquez and Rosa Luisa Marquez.
Tony Torn was last seen on stage in the title role of Ubu Sings Ubu at The Slipper Room, a rock opera adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi which he created and co-directed. An actor and director known for his extensive work with Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, Tony recently made his Broadway debut in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
Ching Valdes-Aran is an Obie award-winning actor who has appeared on and off Broadway, including The Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, La Mama, Women’s Project, CSC, Mabou Mines, Ma-Yi Theater Company, La Jolla, Center Stage, Yale Rep, and ACT. Her film work includes roles in Lav Diaz’s From What is Before (Golden Leopard Award, Locarno Int’l Festival) and Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe.
Our Collaborative Team
Lynne Sachs is a co-director. She makes films, performances, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at NYU and lives in Brooklyn. www.lynnesachs.com
Lizzie Olesker is a co-director. She is a playwright, director and performer. Her plays have been developed and presented at New Georges, Invisible Dog, Ohio Theater, Dixon Place, HERE, Cherry Lane, and Public Theater. Her work has received support from the Brooklyn Council for the Arts, the Dramatists Guild, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published by Heinemann Press and in the Brooklyn Rail. She teaches playwriting at NYU and the New School, and lives in Brooklyn.
Sean Hanley is our Cinematographer. He is a non-fiction filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. His short works have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the New Orleans Film Festival. Sean teaches cinematography at Hunter College and was a cinematographer and co-producer on Lynne Sachs’s Your Day is My Night (2013). He is the Assistant Director of Mono No Aware.
Amanda Katz is our Associate Producer and Editor. She works professionally as a Film Editor, and is currently working with Lynne Sachs to craft her latest feature film. Her own work has screened at The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Doc NYC, Encuentros del Otros Cine Festival International, and Microscope Gallery. Her most recent film received funding from the New York State Council On The Arts and The Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. Amanda is a MFA candidate in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College.
Stephen Vitiello is our composer, an electronic musician and media artist. Vitiello’s sound installations have been presented at MoMA, MASS MoCA, the Whitney Biennial, and on the High Line in NYC. Vitiello has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Scanner, Steve Roden, Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Interns and web design: Christine Dickerson, Mars Marson, Boyd Chayanon
I spent a day with my mother and stepfather shooting Super 8mm film in my childhood home in Memphis, Tennessee. Sigmund Freud believed that the instigation of a dream is often to be found in the events of the day preceding the dream, which he called the “day residue.”
Taught in Alex Broadwell’s Collective Dream Lab at CalArts – Winter 2021
Workshop description:
This workshop will explore how dreams fit into our lives and into cinema, and how we might develop collaborative practices that eschew traditional models of authorship using the dreamscape as our soil. Through readings, screenings, discussion, and practice we will approach the dream from a variety of angles, including representation, embodiment, and creative methodology, taking care to go beyond modes of psychological interpretation that dominated 20th century dream discourse. Students will be asked to keep dream journals and participate in an exquisite corpse style assignment with classmates.
Day Residue – Lynne Sachs Blue – Apichatpong Weerasethakul Aquarius – Kevin Jerome Everson Ritual – Joseph Bernard Of this Beguiling Membrane – Charlotte Pryce Secret Goldfish – Bi Gan Mahogany Too – Akosua Adoma Owusu
museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien, austria Wednesday, May 18, 2016, 19:00
Film program
Zora Neale Hurston, Fieldwork Footage, 1927–1929, 5 min
Lynne Sachs, Sermons and Sacred Pictures, 1989, 29 min
Shirley Clarke, The Cool World, 1963, 104 min
Presented by Christian Kravagna
Ethnography is describing the Other. In the 1920s, writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston reacted to this established view with her own artistic and scholarly works on everyday cultures in her own home in America’s black south. Hurston political and poetic studies of “folk cultures” that were mostly disparaged at the time are an expression of unmitigated appreciation and a way of taking up a position within the debate on “high” and “low” art in Harlem between the wars. This show begins with film of Hurston, the most significant artist of the “Harlem renaissance,” made during her field research, and then presents two more recent films that look in other ways at specific milieus and their rituals for creating and destabilizing community. Shirley Clarke’s film is a semi-documentary ethnography of the rituals of maleness and empowerment in the Harlem youth scene in a 1960s society shaped by racist exclusion. Lynne Sachs has made a portrait of a remarkable Afro-American pastor in Memphis in the 1930s who himself made use of film as a spiritual and social tool. Sermons and Sacred Pictures exemplifies the links between religion, art, and politics typical of the late Civil Rights Movement by looking at the documentary and activist filmmaking of one the movement’s pioneers.
Christian Kravagna is an art historian and curator. He works as professor for postcolonial studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part piece about Bruce Baillie made on the occasion of an international touring retrospective of his films that began with screenings in this year’s Art of the Real festival in New York. What follows are tributes to Baillie made by filmmakers with films in the Canyon Cinema catalogue, many of which are available for Fandor viewing. (Aaron Cutler)
“Damn Prescient: Ruminations on the Work of Bruce Baillie”
by Lynne Sachs
So much of what I know and love about film I discovered at the rather late age of about 25 years. Of course, I had been watching movies at every stage of my life – from Bambie to The Tin Drum to The Poseidon Adventure to the horribly violent, macho, pacifist anti-war movie Billy Jack. Each of these big-screen experiences revealed to me the broad yet powerful ways that the medium could uproot everything you believed. I walked into the theater as one person and walked out 90 minutes later profoundly different — more empathetic, more fearful, more angry. But watching these films never made me want to be a filmmaker. Keep in mind, this was well before the term “social justice” was part of our language lexicon. To my mind, once I became an adult, I would have to make the tumultuous and irrevocable decision: Would I be an artist or a human rights lawyer? Either way, I wanted to make the world a better place to live, I just had no idea how to bring together these two impulses.
In the mid 1980s, I moved to San Francisco. It didn’t take long before I discovered Canyon Cinema, a member-driven collective devoted to independent, non-commercial, experimental, avant-garde and artist-made moving images. With this revelation came my awareness of three extraordinary filmmakers: Chick Strand, Bruce Conner and Bruce Baillie, all fearless founders or leaders of this remarkable organization. Through their filmmaking and their participation in Canyon, all three expressed concern and compassion for the world through their images. By reinventing all the terms of ethnographic cinema, Chick Strand articulated an appreciation of other cultures as witnessed and embraced through her camera lens. As a pioneer in collage or found footage filmmaking, Bruce Connor turned the “garbage” of our culture industry into metaphorically resonant moving images. By the time I was living in San Francisco, Bruce Baillie had already left the Bay Area for Washington State but his legacy was still extraordinarily potent. All three artists saw their role in the community as a three fold responsibility: they would make radical movies that stretched every formal expectation of the filmic form; they would address problems they saw in our society; and, they would help other artists locally and nationally by creating an institution that would distribute their films around the world. This notion of how an artist would participate in his or her community had an immediate impact on me as I began my life as a filmmaker and an active member of the arts community in the Bay Area and later in New York City.
My first viewing of Bruce Baillie’s Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) sent a shiver through my body and mind that ricochets to this very day. Baillie’s twenty-minute reverie simultaneously whispers and screams. Blending graceful black and white super-impositions and edgy pop culture re-photography, he expresses the anger, pathos, shock and empathy of the period. Watching the film today, I see his subtle yet biting humor in the clever juxtapositions of sound and image. We do not see images of the Dakota Sioux but instead see an American landscape that has erased every relic of the tribe’s presence. We see the body of a dead man on a sidewalk, casual passers-by simply reckoning with the way they must step around him to continue their day. Clearly, industrial “progress” has wreaked havoc on humanity. Baillie’s intent, purposeful man on the motorcycle is not the Romantic, free wheeling figure of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider but instead a troubled, deep thinker on a journey into the darkest aspects of American society. With Mass for the Dakota Sioux I found a film and a filmmaker that together were capable of shifting my thinking. Way back in 1964, Bruce Baillie created a work for Occupy Wall Street, the Climate Change movement, the First Nation community, and the 99%. Damn prescient, I would say.
