All posts by lynne

The Essay Film: Students Contemplate States of UnBelonging by Lynne Sachs

On March 6, 2016, University of Iowa graduate students Brittany Borghi (MFA in the Non-Fiction Writing Program) and Hannah Bonner (MA in Film Studies ) wrote this letter to me:

Dear Lynne,
My name is Brittany Borghi and I’m a graduate student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. I’m enrolled in an essay film class this semester, and this week, I’m putting together a presentation on you and your film, States of Unbelonging.

This class is the first time that I (and many of my classmates) have gone in-depth with the essay film, and we’re slowly making our way through the process of creating our own (very, very amateur films). In my very preliminary research about you, I’m finding that you seem to be extremely open to conversations about your craft and your work, and I’m wondering if it might be possible to send you a few questions from our motley crew of budding filmmakers, to share with the class on Thursday night. Since you are someone who transitioned from writing to filmmaking, it might be particularly helpful to hear more about your perspective. Also, our class is full of female filmmakers, and I know they would love to hear from you.

I’m sure you’re extremely busy, but if you wouldn’t mind me emailing you a few quick questions, I would be delighted.

I hope this email finds you well. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Best and Thanks,
Brittany Borghi

HI Brittany, this is a start for you and your class. I will try to write more tomorrow before I get on a plane but otherwise it will be finished next week.

I got through about half of your fantastic questions.

Lynne

Hi Lynne,

Sorry for the delay on this–I tried to curate some questions from my classmates and they were slow getting back to me. Feel free to answer any of these that appeal to you. It’s really exciting to be able to pull your perspective as filmmaker into our class. I hadn’t seen States of Unbelonging before taking this class, and I really loved the film. Thanks for being so generous!

Best,
Brittany

Questions:

How intentional was the visual and aural layering in the film, and what was your motivation behind that level of layering?

As with many of my films, I start out thinking the journey of the production will take me one place but the realities of the real life situation take me somewhere far different. In the case of STATES OF UNBELONGING, I actually knew the title of the film even before I began looking into Revital’s life as a filmmaker. I had felt torn about the situation in Israel, believing that the country itself had come into existence for profoundly disturbing and meaningful reasons but that the contemporary realities had become unfathomably complex. I see the ‘state’ in which Palestinians and Jews are trying to live as a pathological place where no one and everyone belong and don’t belong. Even the notion or ownership and nationhood is so contested. For this reason, I wanted the portrait of Revital to reveal my own sense of doubt and I tried to make this evident through the tensions that exist in the very fabric of the film. Throughout the film, I try to create a sense of poignancy in either the image or the sound but often not both, except for the documentary material from the kindergarten (where children talk about death) which is so powerful on its own and should not be circumvented.

I’ve read that Chantal Ackerman is an inspiration of yours, and the beginning of the film almost reads like an reimagining of News From Home. Can you talk about pulling Ackerman into this film? Were you inspired at all by Chantal’s installations, as well as her films?

Most definitely, the epistolary structure and intimacy of NEWS FROM HOME was an inspiration for me. I think that our culture has actually become more literary since the advent of email and that we are constantly hearing our friends’ and families’ voices in our heads as we read their words, these monologues then travel with us throughout the day. Cinema is particularly capable of replicating this psychological connection to another human being. Regarding Akerman’s installations, the only one I’ve seen was “D’est” (From the East) a sweeping yet somehow very human meditation on the changes brought on by the fall of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. I suppose that her use of long noninflected pans across landscapes was important to me, but on the other hand I focus on one person’s life caught up in political turmoil and Akerman was, in this case, looking at a contintal gestalt.

In The Essay Film, Tim Corrigan writes, “Like an endless war, these states of unbelonging offer no place in which a self can be situated and clearly articulated. It is rather a state of perilous expectations or, as Revital’s husband describes it, a place of such intense longing that there is simply nowhere to locate the extreme sorrow of that longing.” He goes on to say that happens even in the practice of filmmaking. Did you have a position for your essayistic self before beginning States? How did you position yourself against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Against Revital? Against Judaism or Islam? Did making the film change those positions?

Making the film put me into the wrestling ring where I was being bounced around by every single conversation, large scale political event, suicide bomb, unwarrented settlment – – really the gamut of the the Israeli-Palestinian war was on my mind for the entire time. I was wrought by it all, but then again this was exactly what I wanted. I wanted to reckon with the dilemma in my own exploratory way. I was constantly haunted by her death, but I was not angered to the point where I wanted revenge. I will share a story related to the distribution of the film. I contacted the Jerusalem Film Festival a few months after completing the film to ask about their submission deadline. When I described the subject of the film, the secretary who happen to answer the phone told me immediately that the film would NOT be accepted into the festival because of its subject matter. I said “Why?” feeling broken-hearted that I would not be able to show the film in that highly respected festival. He then explained that all of the programmers were very progressive and would not like a movie that functioned an exposé on a terrorist act against a Jewish woman and her children. I then explained that the film is not a one-sided critique of either the murderer or the Palestinians, but rather a thought piece on the whole situation and its resonance for those of us who are far way physically but close emotionally. In the end, my collaborator Nir Zats and I were invited to the festival. And, to my great joy, Chantal Akerman was there screening “La Bas” (Down There) here own rumination on the fraught situation in the Middle East. I was able to meet her the day that the war broke out between Israel and Lebanon. A very scary day for both us in Jerusalem.

I love that we end with the innocence of your daughter’s question, which is at once so wonderfully comforting and so entirely unnerving. What was that conversation like in real life? Was it an honest revelation of hers–or a prompting for the film? Can you talk about your perspective as a woman and a mother–in relation to both Revital as a mother and filmmaker, and to the creation of States itself?

This film is very much coming from my position as a mother. I made the film BIOGRAPHY OF LILITH about ten years before and some of the issues around the creative process and its relationship to having children are in both films. Honestly, I initially thought the best way to make this film was to make an anti-documentary that would not allow me to smell, hear, feel or hear anything related to the actual place I was exploring. I was interested in using other people’s and the mainstream news’ mediations coming from every direction. Plus, this intellectual premise, this rhetorical stance, would actually provide an armor or a buffer, protecting me from the very thing that had actually killed Revital. In the end, I capitulated and ended up going to Israel to shoot. This in and of itself is problematic for those people who believe that boycotting Israel is the best way to create change. I am not convinced this is true. I wanted to challenge the status quo through the work of making the film. In this way, the core of Revital’s work as an artist and her commitment to recognizing the rights of the Palestinians was hopefully recognized by the film itself. She bravely chose to live near a Palestinian village she admired a great deal.

As Corrigan points out (and is clear in the film), our narrator shifts throughout the duration of States, and we come to eventually see the full revelation of you as narrator as Revital’s grave. Can you walk me through your decision-making process for that shifting? How did the essay take shape in that way, or when did it? Did you always intend for the audience to experience this unfolding of and with the narrator? Or was that a part of your filmmaking process? At the level of craft, your voicing is so much different at the beginning than it is even halfway through the film. What were you channeling in those opening moments of the film?

I’m enchanted by the textual and discursive distance between the narrator’s voiceover, Nir’s voiceover, the text on the screen, and the extreme diversity of rendered images. Again, echoing Corrigan, there is something Marker-esque happening on the screen–and in the mind of the viewer. It puts us on unstable ground, an obvious connection to the thematic exploration in States. Can you elaborate on your own intention with that distance, and how you made those choices? Where are you hoping to situation the audience, and your own essayistic self?

Can you get crafty with us? How many different cameras did you use when recording? How much behind-the-scenes work was happening between you and Nir, in terms of both filming and writing? What was your editing process like?

Anything else you want us to know about the film? What you wanted to do, and what you wanted us to walk away with? (We’ll have a lot to say about that in class, I’m sure, but I’d love to include that information from you.)

One more question came in from my professor, Jeff Porter, if you have time to answer!

Dear Lynne—such a compelling and subtly complex film. Thanks for fielding questions from our class. I have a number but let me keep it to one or two. At what point in figuring out your story did you realize that your gradual, visual emergence as a complete presence in the film would tie together so many narrative strings? Was there anything about the editing process that lead you to that solution?

Basically, I admitted to myself that I would be absolutely candid about my own fears, because I knew that I could not be a war photographer in any way, I knew that my sensations of ambivalence and hesitancy and curiosity were neither unusual or heroic. I was scared to be so open but it was also very much a relief. It’s true that I, as a woman with a camera , only really emerge at the end when I become a listener to Revital’s husband. This was not planned but it did somehow make sense. When I make essay films, I always end up figuring out the ending at the completion of the editing. This keep me entertained throughout the process, wondering how I will tie it all up.

Many thanks,
Jeff Porter

Lynne,

Thank you so, so much! These are so interesting to read, and the answers I shared in my presentation last week helped spur a really fascinating discussion that I don’t think we would have had otherwise. I’ll look forward to sharing the rest of them when we get back from spring break.

Creating my own brief essay film for the first time this semester is proving to be a wildly fun challenge, and I’m still not really sure how it’s going to take shape before the end of the semester. Corresponding with you has been really motivating, though. Glad to know that you feel like I “got” your film. The genre has been new to me this semester, and I’m absolutely loving it. Any parting advice for someone slowly trudging through this study and work?

When will TIP OF MY TONGUE come out? I’ll be looking forward to it!

You’re great, this has been great, and again, I really do appreciate it.

All the Best,

Brittany

Fandor presents: Lynne Sachs’ Seven Forms of Filmmaking

Video: Lynne Sachs’ Seven Forms of Filmmaking

Seven Forms of Filmmaking: Lynne Sachs from Fandor Keyframe on Vimeo.

By Joel Bocko March 19, 2016

All of Lynne Sachs‘ films blur the lines between avant-garde, documentary and narrative, but few employ as many different styles and mediums as States of Unbelonging. This essay film, as much rumination as documentary, traces Sachs’ three-year journey to learn about Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker killed in her home with her two children during the conflict of 2002.

To explore Ohayon’s life, as well as her own anxiety about death, conflict and distance, Sachs uses TV news/documentary, her own impressionistic footage from New York, her collaborator Nir Zats’ serene “objective” videos from Israel, super 8 shots of Ohayon’s kibbutz, clips from Ohayon’s narrative films, home movies and straightforward interviews with the victim’s family. “The Medium & The Message: 7 Forms of Filmmaking in States of Unbelonging” examines each of these strategies in turn. Appropriately, this video essay not only reflects the removed analysis of the filmmaker’s work but also the path of my own emotional engagement with the material.

7th Annual Experimental Lecture: Ernie Gher: What Is an Unfinished Work?

NYU Tisch School of the Arts

Departments of Cinema Studies and Undergraduate Film and TV present The 7th Annual Experimental Lecture

Ernie Gehr – “What Is an Unfinished Work?”

Wed. Oct. 19, 2016

NYU Department of Cinema Studies, Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Rm. 674
Free and open to the public

LISTEN TO ERNIE GEHR’S LECTURE HERE:

For nearly fifty years, artist Ernie Gehr has transformed his deep knowledge of the moving image into a distinct vision of cinema’s potential for interpreting and fragmenting reality. With an astute, often humorous, appreciation for the limits and possibilities of the frame, Gehr has, since the mid-1960s, created a large, radical body of work that continues to challenge and surprise audiences. He uses his camera as a tool for creating new modes of perception. With few words, no characters, and no plots, his films, video work, and installations push us to re-imagine our own relationships to time and space.

There are a multiplicity of adjectives that fit Ernie Gehr’s experimental film and digital work: abstract, beautiful, mysterious, invigorating, utopian. — Manohla Dargis, New York Times, 11/11/11

In Gehr’s hands, the camera seems to take on magical properties, able to transform the most quotidian object or environment –– the pattern of sunlight on a wall, a busy street — into marvelous and unexpected phenomena. — Ernie Gehr’s Marvelous Cinema, Harvard Film Archive

Join us for screenings at 5:30 and Gehr’s Experimental Lecutre at 7:00.

5:30 Pre-lecture 16mm screening of Serene Velocity (1970), Shift (1972-74) and Rear Window (1986/1991)

6:30 Artist reception

7:00 Experimental Lecture with screenings of Lisa and Suzanne (1969-79), Untitled: Part 1 (l981), On the Coney Island Boardwalk (2010)

Link to event: http://tisch.nyu.edu/cinema-studies/events/fall-2016/ernie-gehr

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Time and Light : Gunvor Nelson’s Vision of Editing by Lynne Sachs

Gunvor Nelson w camera in Kristinehamn Sweden by Lynne Sachs 2015

Time and Light : Gunvor Nelson’s Vision of Editing
by Lynne Sachs

M a T e R i A L cinema
Issue #30 – Otherzine
Spring 2016

http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/time-and-light-gunvor-nelson%CA%BCs-vision-of-editing/

Gunvor Nelson was an extremely influential teacher of mine. Between 1985 and 1995 I lived in San Francisco and was deeply inspired and supported by other artists and curators in the Bay Area experimental film community including Trinh T. Minh-ha, Karen Holmes, Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, Jeanne Finley, Craig Baldwin, and George Kuchar. It was in San Francisco that I met Mark Street my soulmate and collaborator. In 2015, I traveled to Sweden with Mark to visit and shoot film with Guvnor Nelson in her home studio, two decades after she had left the Bay Area.

Gunvor Nelson is a moving image artist whose work makes you think about everything from the taste of a shiny green apple to the mortal coil. She was my teacher between 1987 and 1989 in the Master of Fine Arts program at the San Francisco Art Institute, a period in my life when I was first discovering the wonders of avant-garde film. Growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, I certainly did not have the kind of childhood where I was able to see experimental film in my local theater or even in the town museum. As a college student, I resisted film classes because the professors only seemed interested in the semiotics of Hollywood feature films. Not until I spent a year in Paris in 1981 did I discover that cinema could be a personal art like painting, poetry or photography. In fact, making movies allowed me to bring my love of all three of these mediums into one place of expression. It was also during this time that I first became aware that a person who wanted to make a film did not necessarily need to be a “director” of an entire cast and crew, but rather could have her hands on every element of the process. So, as you can see, I was ready to learn from a mentor who would share her own creative process with me, ultimately guiding me toward my own lifeʼs work as a filmmaker.

In 1985, I moved from the east to the west coast to begin graduate studies in the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute where I was able to work with some of the greatest filmmakers of the Avant-Garde: Ernie Gehr, Larry Jordan, George Kuchar, Carolee Schneemann and, of course Gunvor Nelson. Gunvor was the Chair of the department at that time. For two years, I sat with her for hours and hours in front of a 16mm editing machine watching my films in process (Note the word “process” not “progress”, as we never knew if the films were getting better, only that they were evolving). These long stretches of one-on-one time gave me the chance to learn from a brilliant, committed artist who had embraced all aspects of film production and post-production. From using a motion picture light meter and camera to working with the laboratory on the timing lights of a release print, Gunvor mastered every aspect of her art and was always willing to share this knowledge with her students. With this teacher-student relationship in mind, I have decided to travel back in time by revisiting Gunvorʼs famous editing treatise. In this way, I will try to look at my own 25-year career as a filmmaker through the lens of this ingenious guideline to editing. (You can view and download Guvnor’s original editing notes at the top of this page.)

My Name is Oona by Gunvor Nelson, 1969.

“Before you shoot film, it is helpful to think through what style of editing would be most appropriate so that you will not leave out necessary liasons, steps and transitions.”

Gunvor encouraged her students to engage with their cameras as prescient editors who anticipated the needs of the film at all stages of production. Because we would have our hands on the trigger switch of the camera as well as the editing equipment, we had to think in both intellectual and physical ways about the movement and timing of a shot. Transitions were extremely important to Gunvor. She was always thinking about how to enter the front door of an image and how and when to get out. A shot was like an airport and the arrival and departure times of every single plane were critical, otherwise there might be too much chaos on the tarmac!

“Surprising solutions can be had with the most ʻdeficientʼ of material if you let it speak to you, if you learn what really is in the film …. Transitions help bridge potential disunity …. sharp jumps in the editing can be, at the right places, most exhilarating.”

One of the most lasting suggestions Gunvor made to me was that a filmmaker should always return to her outtakes just before she completes the edit of a film. Here, for example, you will find the moments when the film roll is just about to run out and beautiful fire-like orange flashes burst across the frame. I remember the time when my camera almost fell off the tripod during a shoot and so the film recorded what I originally saw as an ugly, embarrassing accident. According to Gunvor, these “mistakes” that were initially disregarded become extremely useful punctuation – like a period or an exclamation mark – that assists an editor in finding ways to complete a visual thought.

“A major aspect of editing involves finding the particular world of the film.”

To me, this statement implies that a good filmmaker edits from within the material and does not rely on a plot, narrative, script or rhetorical agenda. There is an organic integrity to the footage that guides the sculpting of the work.

“Repetition … is one method of building a memory within the film … of building its vocabulary.”

Take Off by Gunvor Nelson, 1972.

Because I identity so strongly with the precepts of experimental filmmaking, I have come to understand that the distinction between this kind of cinematic practice and that of a more conventional method of movie-making is the belief that each film must create its own specific idiom. A viewer of an experimental film will not speak this language prior to entering the theater but once the film is over, he or she will have been introduced to this unfamiliar mode of expression. As artists, we hope that our audience is both excited and happy about this experience and will come back for more “vocabulary lessons”. In this way, the spectator collaborates in the building of a cinematic memory that allows him or her to reference images found throughout the film. Like reading a poem, texture and rhythm are integral to all aspects of a visual and aural engagement.

Natural Features by Gunvor Nelson, 1990.

Gunvor taught me to pay special attention to the energy that happens between two shots. Through the visualization and acceptance of this shift from one image to another, the spectator creates a particularly cinematic space that seems to exist within the cut itself. This is the reason why the viewing of an experimental film asks us to use our imaginations in order to create a surge or synapse of intellectual activity when we move temporally from one shot to the next. For a filmmaker like Gunvor, this change – whether it be a crash or a fluid shift – is nothing like the dialectic that Sergei Eisenstein wrote about in Film Sense, his famous materialist examination of film editing. Gunvorʼs interests are more aesthetic than political.

“The natural flow of the Western eye is left to right, which makes right to left motion have more
power.”

As most of us know, our readerʼs eye has been trained to move from the left side of the page to the right, over and over and over again. Thus, panning with a camera in the opposite direction feels absolutely unnatural. Even though we are not even talking about the act of reading, the repetitive gesture of that act has conditioned us to feel ill at ease with a movement that breaks this trajectory. For this reason, a right-to-left pan can appear very jarring, creating a fresh, surprising sense of unsettledness. Use this rupture from the norm to your advantage!

“Study … negative space.”

Like the French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, Gunvor compelled her students to see the shapes that surround and transform objects. She wanted us to be aware of the way that the frameʼs aspect ratio interacted with the things that moved in and out of the image. Whether we were filming a human being performing a role, a beautiful glass bottle on a table, or a windmill on a hill, we had to be as aware of what was not there as we were of what was there. After working with Gunvor, I distinctly remember looking at a cloud formation in the sky one day. Most people search for animal shapes when they look up, but I could only stand in awe of the negative space.

“Pay attention to what kinds of colors are present … in what proportion do the colors exist and
play off of each other?”

I learned so much about color from Gunvor, too. She taught me to look at the world I had created in my images as a series of hues and intensities that could bounce against each other in the most stimulating of ways. Who cares about other content when you have color?

“How dark or light is the shot? Notice how sharp or soft an image is focused and also how the
contrast gives feeling to the photography.”

Eventually, while working with Gunvor, I realized that the editing schematic was often so important to her that it really did not matter what was actually on screen as long as I was able to construct a film with Nelson-approved visual integrity. Throughout the process, Gunvor taught me how to trace the shifts from dark to light and back to dark within and between shots so as to build a complex, unspoken, non-narrative cinematic universe. Sometimes we would disagree about an edit when I felt I had something specific to say or express and therefore needed to include a particular image that she believed did not meet her qualitative standards. These are the kinds of debates that are supposed to happen in an editing room.

“There are two divergent kinds of editing:

1) On one hand, where the cotton lays like padding around the structure – where one does not want to show the skeleton – to hide it – and not show how the film is made. The cut is as unnoticeable as possible.

2) On the other hand, where the cuts call attention to themselves and are featured, the structure is primary and forms the essential content.”

Experimental filmmaker Gregg Biermann was also a student of Gunvorʼs and remembers working with her:

“One thing that impressed me was showing her a rough cut of a film on a flatbed. She was critical of some of my editing; she thought it was sloppy. She didn’t say that I had to clean it up for the purpose of academic achievement but mentioned that she would never print a film that had those problems. There was a sequence toward the end of the film where I (unintentionally) flipped the optically printed image from right to left. Gunvor immediately zeroed in on this sequence of shots and interrogated me about it. Well, many years have passed since all of this but Gunvor might be happy to know that my work now is very, very precise.”

To understand Gunvorʼs theories of film editing, one must take the leap away from conventional narrative film where story is always at the forefront of a viewerʼs mind. Gunvor asked us to embrace the bumps, holes, and utter risks of the road – to relish in the form — rather than setting our sites on the more predictable pleasures of character and conflict. In this process, we can discover meaning within the frames of a formally adventurous experimental film.

After months or years of editing, the last step to making a 16mm film print requires the artist to communicate with a laboratory technician. Most filmmakers are completely baffled by the science of color and, therefore, have a difficult time articulating their desires in terms of the numerical changes in the cyan, magenta, yellow and black chromatic palette of each shot. Not so, Gunvor. She walked into the laboratory with a precise list of timing-light numbers.I remember hearing from several lab technicians that she understood the science of color printing better than any filmmaker they had ever met.

Gunvor concludes her guidelines to editing in this way:

“When you are really immersed, you, yourself, are totally interested in solving the ʻproblemʼ of the film, then you forget how much work you are giving to it, then the film emerges. Why did I not see it before?”

As Gunvor once explained to me, when you finish editing your beloved film, you will be ecstatic. Then the next morning you will feel a profound sense of loss. To be inside the editing of a film is an incredibly consuming fusion of the intellectual and the artistic. No matter what is going on in your home or in the world beyond, you have your film, and that, sometimes, is enough.

Note: This article was published in Sweden in the limited edition magazine OEI in Fall 2015, which is not online and is not available to readers outside of Sweden

Light + Sound Machine Presents… YES/NO: THE CINEMA OF LYNNE SACHS

Posted by Third Man on 18 August 2015
Programmed by James Cathcart

YES/NO: THE CINEMA OF LYNNE SACHS
(1986-2015, 16mm & Digital, color & b/w, trt 88min)
SEPTEMBER 17th @ Third Man Records, Doors @ 7pm, films at 8pm
Nashville, Tennessee

Light + Sound Machine is co-presented by the Belcourt Theater and Third Man Records. Lynne Sachs will be presenting her work in person, followed by a Q&A

Likely the most accomplished experimental filmmaker to come from Tennessee, Memphis-native Lynne Sachs’ 30-year career has produced some of the most mesmerizing, contemplative observations on culture and communication ever committed to celluloid (and sometimes digital video.) Her work effortlessly infuses personal experiences into broader political/historical contexts, deploying a cinematic style that is uniquely her own while still evoking her collaborations and relationships with a veritable who’s who of avant garde cinema, including Bruce Conner, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and George Kuchar. Currently based in New York, September 17th marks Sachs’ return to Tennessee for a sweeping retrospective of her films at the 28th installment of The Light & Sound Machine, sponsored by The Belcourt Theatre and Third Man Records.

PROGRAM INCLUDES:

STILL LIFE WITH WOMAN AND FOUR OBJECTS (4 min. B&W 16mm film, 1986)
A film portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a “character”. By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film is also a tribute to a real woman – Emma Goldman.

FOLLOWING THE OBJECT TO ITS LOGICAL BEGINNING (9 min. color 16mm. 1987)
Like an animal in one of Eadweard Muybridge’s scientific photo experiments, five undramatic moments in a man’s life are observed by a woman. A study in visual obsession and a twist on the notion of the “gaze”. Presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “American Century”, 2000.

DRAWN AND QUARTERED (4 min. color 16mm film, silent, 1986)
Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium.

INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME (16mm, 45 min. film. 2001)
An intimate, experimental portrait of the Catonsville Nine, a disparate band of Vietnam War peace activists who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience. Produced with Daniel and Philip Berrigan and other members of the Catonsville 9.

PHOTOGRAPH OF WIND (4 min. 16mm film, silent,2001)
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. “Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader. San Francisco Film Festival

NOA, NOA (8 min. b & w 16mm to digital transfer, 2006)

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

EVERY FOLD MATTERS (10 min. excerpt from live performance and film, co-written and directed by Lizzie Olesker, 2015)
A live performance which explores the personal and social experience of doing laundry. Four performers weave together improvisation, written text, and dance in the inspiring environs of a public laundromat.

STARFISH AORTA COLOSSUS (4 min., 8mm to digital transfer, 2015)
NYC poet Paolo Javier invited Lynne to create a film that would speak to one of his poems from his newly published book Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books). Sachs chose Stanza 10 from Javier’s poem “Starfish Aorta Colossus”. This film travels through 25 years of Lynne’s Regular 8 mm film archive — including footage of the A.I.D.S. Quilt from the late 1980s, an arduous drive from Tampa to San Francisco, and a journey into a very untouristic part of Puerto Rico. Throughout the process, Sachs explores the syntactical ruptures, the celebration of nouns and the haunting resonances of Javier’s poem. Created in collaboration with Sean Hanley.

See Review of this show here in the Nashville Scene:

By Michael Sicinski

http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/filmmaker-lynne-sachs-visits-third-mans-light-and-sound-machine-for-a-talk-and-screening/Content?oid=5920317

Lynne Sachs visits Nashville’s Light & Sound Machine at Third Man Records

Starfish Colossus

By Michael Sicinski

http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashville/filmmaker-lynne-sachs-visits-third-mans-light-and-sound-machine-for-a-talk-and-screening/Content?oid=5920317

The Light and Sound Machine is at it again, bringing Nashvillians some of the most interesting experimental cinema, current and historical, screening anywhere in the Southeast. On Thursday, Sept. 17, L&SM welcomes veteran filmmaker Lynne Sachs for a program of works spanning her 30-year career, beginning with her first released film and ending with her latest.

Sachs is probably best known as an experimental documentarian, and the centerpiece of this program is one of her most widely screened films, the 45-minute featurette Investigation of a Flame. This 2003 work examines the legacy of the Catonville Nine, the anti-war protesters who in 1968 walked into the local offices of the Catonville, Md., Selective Service, stole their Vietnam draft files, and lit them on fire using homemade napalm. The group, led by radical priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, became symbols of a different kind of war resistance, and Sachs’ film interviews those members of the Nine still living, intercutting the new material with file footage for a multi-perspectival approach.

Sachs’ earliest works are more “traditional,” if by this we mean operating in the recognizable vernacular of American avant-garde film. So for most viewers, they will seem quite unusual indeed. For example, “Still Life With Woman and Four Objects” (1986), Sachs’ first film, adopts a feminist approach common during the 1980s: Instead of offering a portrait of a woman per se, we are given mere fragments, and the promised objects of the title are either withheld or depicted in such an oblique manner as to make it likely that we will miss them. The upshot being: Any filmic subject, such as “woman,” is inherently too complex to adequately depict with straightforward means.

Similarly, Sachs’ four-image “Drawn and Quartered” (also 1986), is partly a self-portrait, partly a portrait of a man (presumably Sachs’ partner Mark Street), and partly a study of a shifting environment. The split image results from Sachs having shot in 8mm, but not having split the film in half (as was customary with regular 8, before Super 8 cartridges). So one gets a doubled, inverted image. The two double images play off one another in terms of form, direction and color. Their relationship is partly planned, but not entirely within Sachs’ control.

Two of Sachs’ films from the past decade focus on the filmmaker’s children, capturing moments of innocence and discovery. 2001’s “Photograph of Wind” is a brief portrait of Sachs’ daughter Maya as she runs and whirls in a circle. The silent black-and-white film shows the little girl surrounded by the centripetal streaks of spinning grass and trees, the runner and the camera going in and out of phase with one another. “Noa, Noa,” from 2006, depicts the young girl of the title playing dress-up in the woods, acting like a queen of the forest and exhibiting an enviable sense of self. Black-and-white and silent, like “Photograph of Wind,” “Noa, Noa” ends with a surprising coda in color with sound. It’s as if Noa’s world suddenly bursts into a new dimension of life.

Sachs’ latest, “Starfish Aorta Colossus” (made with Sean Hanley), is based on a poem by Paolo Javier. An eerie, fractured meditation on loss, the poem is visualized with another foray into multiplied imagery. Although formally “Starfish” echoes “Drawn and Quartered,” the new film features striking footage of the AIDS quilt, as well as partial, disrupted portions of bodies and landscapes. The structural play that enlivened Sachs’ film from 30 years ago is now mournful, staggered. This speaks not only to Sachs’ inevitable maturity as an artist, but no doubt to her assessment of the three decades we have collectively traversed to arrive where we are now.

Yes/No: The Cinema of Lynne Sachs

Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015 at Third Man Records, 623 Seventh Ave. S.

Nashville

http://thirdmanrecords.com/news/light-sound-machine-presents-yesno-the-cinema-of-lynne-sachs/

Is, Was and Will Be: Living with the films of Chantal Akerman

By Lynne Sachs October 8, 2015

Discovering Chantal Akerman’s films was such a vital part of my becoming a filmmaker. While I did not know her personally, I feel that I grew up with her as my guide for how to be in the world, as a woman filmmaker trying to articulate some aspect of my life and other women’s lives in the medium of film. I first saw Chantal’s films, along with those of Agnès Varda and Marguerite Duras, as a student in Paris in the 1980s. Honestly, it wasn’t the fact that these directors were women, at the time this was almost incidental; it was more about their expression. This triumvirate of French filmmakers was doing something with the cinematic image that I had never in my life imagined was possible. Each in her own distinctive way was embracing the camera in order to articulate her own experience in the world in an astonishingly imaginative, poetic and radical way. The first film I saw by Akerman was The Golden Eighties (1986). Knowing her work much better now, I can recognize that this bawdy high-spirited musical is not typical of her work, but, nevertheless, I was drawn to its genre-bending confidence, the way the film embraced and refracted the spirit of the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals and narratives.Next there was Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the four-hour avant-garde but oh-so-story-driven portrait of a mother who quietly and elegantly works as a prostitute to pay her bills. You know a director’s work is vital to your very being when you can remember where you were each and every time you had the chance to see her films. Well before the Internet could make the whole history of film available on a laptop, I was teaching a world cinema class in Tampa, Florida in 1995. I had heard of Jeanne Dielman but had never seen in it, and, unfortunately, it was not yet available on tape. So, I rallied all the powers and funds that I had in the university, and rented all four bulky, scratched 16mm reels for the class, and insisted that my students stick with me for the duration. Of course few did, but those who committed to watching this brilliant, subtle homage to the quotidian and the subversive were enthralled, and, I believe, changed for life. Plus, I had the chance to see the film for the first time, which I watched while nursing my new baby daughter Maya (named for Maya Deren of course) who is now twenty years old.

In 1997, a year after I moved to New York City, I was once again enveloped by things-Akerman. One winter afternoon I trekked uptown to the Jewish Museum to see Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est,” a large-scale film and video installation featuring Akerman’s journey to eastern Germany, Poland and Russia in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the former Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany. Using images of everyday scenes of the city, the countryside and the people she encountered on her travels, Akerman created a somber, delicate multi-screened rendering of a society poised for change but still reckoning with its troubled past. As I remember it, viewers moved through a hallway of video screens that made you feel as if you were walking with Akerman through the landscape and the streets–watching, listening and feeling everything from the brush of a stalk of wheat to the entire zeitgeist of a continent in motion.

Eventually, much of her work became available on tape or disk, and so I began to watch films like Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town 1968), Je, tu, il, elle (I You He She, 1976), and Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978) and many more. By this time, I knew that Chantal’s (by now I felt more at ease with her first name) personal yet austere approach to filmmaking had been extremely influential in terms of my own creative practice. To this day, I return to her films over and over. Watching an Akerman film is like reading a poem. Each time I settle down to watch one I learn something about the artist’s approach to her craft; I see one of her characters in a different light; and I learn about who I am at the very moment that I engage with the cinematic universe that is Chantal Akerman. With her death, I find a sliver of solace in knowing that each time I enter this transcendent space I am somehow in conversation with one of the world’s greatest filmmakers.

The Peculiar Intimacy of a NYC Laundromat

When it was a reading series staged in laundromats around the country, The New Yorker described “Every Fold Matters” as a “collaborative, site-specific performance exploring the strange intimacy of the everyday ritual.” The series used performers to act out themes of gendered work, gentrification, and the intermittent weirdness of city life. Playwright and director Lizzie Olesker and filmmaker Lynne Sachs are reuniting to turn the live performance into a film. For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with them to find out more.

https://medium.com/@pixelmagazine/the-peculiar-intimacy-of-a-nyc-laundromat-871e454a7ead#.ngqfqtz19

Emily von Hoffmann: How did the live performance of ‘Every Fold Matters’ evolve into the idea for this film?

Lizzie Olesker & Lynne Sachs: When we began our site-specific collaboration EVERY FOLD MATTERS, we knew that we wanted to incorporate moments of film into the live performances. The text for the piece was developed through conversations with laundromat workers in different neighborhoods of NYC. This was a challenging process as people were often reluctant to speak about their experiences for fear of repercussions, language barriers, etc. We did shoot one conversation with a laundromat owner in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

This filmed segment opened our performance at New Lucky Laundromat in Brooklyn and we felt it expressed something texturally and conceptually revealing. We also filmed some of the actors’ monologues and found these to have a particular intimacy reflecting the subject of laundry and caring for other people’s clothes. During the run of the performances, we decided that we’d like to adapt the entire piece to film, taking the material we’d developed in a different direction. We adapted the text into a shooting script and spent time thinking about new images and ways of exploring the physical space of a working laundromat for film.

EvH: You became interested in a particular laundromat because of its unique neighborhood & demographics. Can you describe the laundromat from the film, and what is special about it?

LO & LS: Super Suds Laundromat is located in Boerum Hill very close to where we both have lived for many years. On the corner of Nevins and Bergen streets, it is an urban crossroads between different Brooklyn neighborhoods where people of varied backgrounds and economic classes come together to do their wash. In an area that is rapidly changing and becoming further gentrified, Super Suds is one of the few laundromats left.

Ironically, another larger laundromat where we did an early performance of EVERY FOLD MATTERS has since closed, to make way for a high-rise apartment building/development. Super Suds is warm, bustling, with typical waves of hectic energy followed by a quiet sense of calm.

When we approached Super Suds about shooting our film there, the owner was very excited and supportive about bringing cultural work into his laundromat.

EvH: This could be a story about gentrification (as laundromats dwindle in number), gendered work and invisible workers, the periodic strangeness of life in New York, or the taboo of airing one’s actual dirty laundry in public. The laundry workers perform a private task in a public space, and therefore are allowed to observe private details of their customers’ lives. Because of this, it seems like you decided to frame this story primarily as one about intimacy. Would you say that’s accurate, and can you elaborate more on how these themes will manifest in the film?

LO & LS: Clearly you are really connecting to the core of what we are trying to do. The array of quotidian experiences that each of us has as city dwellers is astonishing. Restaurant customers walk into French bistros or Japanese sushi bars and expect to be transported by the tastes of the food, the unfamiliar music and the exotic objects on the walls.

But still, there remains a quality of distance between the cook and the person who eats her food. In a nail salon, a woman bows down to color and file her customer’s toes. These experiences are an inherent aspect of the social contract that structures city life. In a laundromat, there is also a very specific and precise closeness that develops. When you bring your shirts and pants to the store to have them cleaned by someone, you are literally sharing your “dirty secrets.”

The fabric is like a new epidermal layer that connects you to a total stranger who becomes responsible for this extension of your body. We are trying to convey something about this link between total strangers through the abstracted textures, the choreographed movements and, of course, the texts of “Every Fold Matters.”

Our research for the original performance and now the film, began with a year long series of informal interviews with Spanish, Chinese (we worked with a wonderful translator) and sometimes English speaking workers in laundries in Brooklyn and Manhattan. This immersive documentary-style engagement also revealed to us how precarious this service industry has really become. Several of the stores where we have performed our piece have closed — to be replaced by more lucrative, less personal apartment buildings or businesses.

EvH: You describe this as a hybrid work of experimental cinema that combines narrative and documentary elements. What does that mean exactly?

LO & LS: There are so many ways that EVERY FOLD MATTERS is creating really interesting artistic convergences and clashes. Lizzie’s background is in playwriting and live performance. Lynne’s is in experimental and documentary film. By making a “hybrid” work, we are not expecting to concoct the proverbial “melting pot” of these distinct sensibilities, but rather to build a discursive, charged confrontation of the real and fictional, the abstract and the natural. We want our audience to be aware of the collage nature of the piece. We love the performative monologues of David and Albert Maysles’ classic documentary “Grey Gardens”, but we are also very inspired by the inventive austerity of Andy Warhol or Chantal Akerman.

EvH: Can you share some of your inspirations, for this project or in general, of any medium?

LO: I was very inspired by Lynne’s project YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT. I loved the way she handled the performance aspect of it — there was a beautiful, simple directness and richly specific sense of detail in its form and content. The visual artist Anne Mourier has done amazing work involving laundry- her work has definitely inspired me. I’m on Book 3 of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, and have recently read her other fiction. I greatly admire her fearless, passionate writing and way of dealing with the often unrecognized details of her female characters’ lives.

LS: When we were looking for performers to be in EVERY FOLD MATTERS, I was able to see Jasmine Holloway sing in Soho Rep’s GENERATIONS, which transformed the entire theater into a South African village, including the seats of the audience. This immersive connection between the performance and the viewing of it was extraordinary. Tony Torn’s bawdy yet vulnerable interpretation of Pere Ubu in UBU ROI in a Downtown cabaret was one of the most daring performances I have ever seen. We invited both of these actors to be in our live performance and now our film. In addition to becoming cast members, they have also contributed two of the most important personal stories of our piece. This integrated way of working is critical to the EVERY FOLD MATTERS process.

EvH: Can you describe whether and how the themes in this work complement or depart from your previous work? When did you become interested in these themes?

LS: As an experimental documentary filmmaker, I have been fascinated by the way that people perform their lives. In 2013, I worked with Chinese immigrants who live or have lived in “shift bed houses” in Chinatown to make YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT a series of live performances and then a film which I premiered at the Museum of Moderns Art and then screened in the US and abroad. We collaborated on a live performance that brought stories from their lives into a space where they were able to reveal and invent. I relish the moment when my “subjects” become collaborators, bringing their own sense of play to the project. I think EVERY FOLD MATTERS pushes this creative exploration even further. Lizzie has an uncanny way of listening to conversation and turning it into poetry.

LO: In my previous works for theater, I’ve wanted to open up the experience of invisibility, particularly as it relates to domestic labor. I often use historical and contemporary research about work issues to inspire characters, images and stories. My most recent play, EMBROIDERED PAST was about a family who obsessively keeps things. It began by looking at the way objects can function in our lives, leading to a kind of everyday, ordinary hoarding. Caretaking, another “invisible” form of work, is a theme I investigate through drama. This all seems related to laundry and the way we must find ways of caring for the things we keep closest to our bodies.

Interview by Emily von Hoffmann and Polarr — Pro Photo Editor Made for Everyone. Follow Polarr on Twitter and try our products.

All photos by Sean Hanley.

Pixel Magazine Blog

Online Blog of #Polarr. Find us at @polarrist — Pro Photo Editor Made for Everyone. https://www.polarr.co

6th Annual Experimental Lecture: Jonas Mekas

The 6^th Annual Experimental Lecture
Organized by the Departments of Cinema Studies and Undergraduate Film and Television

JONAS MEKAS

For the last half century, Jonas Mekas has been a passionate filmmaker. His love for the moving image is expressed in his subversive, intimate, and lyrical diary films. Mekas is also a devout and productive advocate for personal cinema, having founded two of New York City’s most active film institutions, Anthology Film Archives and the Film-Makers Cooperative.

Each year, we invite one veteran experimental filmmaker to present his or her work. The lecture itself is a performance in which the artist explores his or her creative process. Past artists include Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Craig Baldwin, Peggy Ahwesh, and Carolee Schneemann.

Curated by Lynne Sachs.

This event is free and open to the public.
Seating is available first come, first served.

Third Man Records to feature experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs

Third Man Records to feature experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs
by Joe Nolan
2015

Knoxville-born Quentin Tarantino is argu- ably Tennessee’s most important contribution to popular film, but there’s another filmmaker whose personal, sometimes mesmerizing, body of work has made her the Volunteer State’s most visible ambassador to the world of ex- perimental film. Lynne Sachs is currently a New Yorker, but the Memphis-born director will be in Nashville for The Light and Sound Machine’s presentation of Yes/No: The Cinema of Lynne Sachs on Thursday, Sept. 17, aTt 8 p.m. in the Blue Room at Third Man Records. Sachs will be presenting a selection of films from her 30-year career followed by a Q&A event.

Sachs divides many of her movies into two categories: “Yes” films and “No” films. In film- maker and critic Kevin B. Lee’s short video essay, Yes and No Films, he interviews Sachs about the distinctions between the two:

“I have a group of films I’ve made called my Yes films and I have a group of films called my No films. The Yes films are films where absolutely anything goes… Then I have the No films—but, No is not bad. The No films have a really clear idea, and I’m like quite focused.”

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986) is one of the Yes films Sachs will show on Thursday. It pictures a woman putting on a black-and-white-checkered houndstooth coat. She then takes an avocado from a pantry and peels it before balancing the pit on the top of a glass of water. She sits at a table eating a meal—a man stops briefly at the table. The last scene pictures the woman putting on the coat again, inter-cut with shots of her sitting on the bed, seeming to comment about the author of a letter.

That might sound like a rather random ar- rangement of events, and it is, and that’s part of the beauty of Sach’s “anything goes” Yes films.

But it’s not the content that makes Still Life notable, it’s the context Sachs creates around it that lashes these rituals and actions into a more dynamic whole: During the first coat shots, a voice-over sounds like it’s reading from a script, describing “scene one” and then “scene two,” while the coat shots repeat themselves— the lack of repetition in the ongoing voice-over tells the viewer that the shot has been cut that way on purpose. This makes the viewer aware of the script and the editing as well as the woman and her coat. The film was made in the late 1980s but it speaks directly to the French New Wave films of the 1960s with their mischievous love of techniques that pointed cinema back at itself, not allowing audiences to get lost in the illusion of a seamless narrative. The use of mismatched scenes and voice-overs seems specifically out of Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema and it’s no surprise that Sachs credits his Vivre Sa Vie as an influence here.

The poetic intimacies of nude images and naked interactions are the subject of the silent study of male and female forms, Drawn and Quartered (1986). I love the punning title here—the camera crawls around the “out- line” of necks and shoulders, along fingers and feet from the point of view of an artist’s hand drawing the figures. Sachs also divides her screen up into four quarters, nodding to male/female duality while also disorienting the viewer and turning the experience into a sensual confusion of androgynous play. Drawn is a No film that Sachs directed with strict limits she illuminates at the Fandor.com streaming film site:

“I shot a film on a roof with my boyfriend. Every frame was choreographed. Both of us took off our clothing and let the Bolex whirl and that was it. Pure and simple.”

Thursday’s screenings will also include Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987), which is a companion piece to Still Life; Investigation of a Flame (2001), an experimental portrait of Vietnam War peace activists; Photograph of Wind (2001), Sachs’s meditation on passing time and her growing daughter, Maya; Noa, Noa (2006), Sach’s exploration of childhood play with her daughter, Noa. Sachs will also show selected scenes from Every Fold Matters (2015) and screen her newest work, Starfish Aorta Collosus (2015).

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

Video: Lynne Sachs’ Seven Forms of Filmmaking

Starfish Colossus

Yes/No: The Cinema of Lynne Sachs