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Seannon Nichols on Lynne Sachs’ “Experience Cinema”

Seannon Nichols
Final Paper/Exam
COM 450 Experimental Cinema: History and Theory
November 18, 2014

Lynne Sachs: Prescribing the Cure to Existential Crises by Utilizing ‘Experience Cinema’ as a means to partake in, and showcase organically produced affirming moments in nature through Drift and Bough (2014), Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008), Photograph of the Wind (2001), and Tornado (2001).

            Viewing what one wishes to see or thinks about in their minds eye is something that was once only possible in dreams. However dreams were made into realities when the camera was invented. Since the first camera was used, it is clear that representations of ideas can be shared and experienced by anyone who seeks them. The people behind these ideas are the filmmakers. Filmmakers are a sum of their experiences. Experiences shape how they do things, how they think, what they feel, and why they are here. The difference between filmmakers and every one else is that they chose to represent all these things in their work. They chose to share the sum of their parts.

Depending on the filmmaker there usually are different parts, so the sum doesn’t always add up to the same thing. This is especially true in avant-garde or experimental filmmakers. Every avant-grade filmmaker has a unique way of expressing themselves. Avant-garde by definition means not of the norm, before anything ordinary they exist.

The one who speaks to the tortured soul in all of us is Lynne Sachs. Sachs is a self defined experimental filmmaker. Sachs, born August 10th, 1961, originally from Tennessee, now she works primarily out of New York. She is a mom and filmmaker, a lot of the time combining the two in her works. When asked why she used so many different kinds of art in her films and if thats why she considered herself experimental she responded in saying “Honestly, I sometimes feel like a scientist working with materials that are simultaneously familiar and exotic.  When I juxtaposed a home movie of my fourth birthday with an image of a black widow spider in my film “The House of Science”, I was experimenting with meaning, making suggestions about the connections between childhood and fear.  I didn’t know if my “experiment” worked until I activated it with an audience. I’ve never been attracted to the kind of filmmaking that necessitates that you follow a formula for writing a script.  The idea that there is a software template, for example, that screenwriters use to create a narrative film disturbs me to my very core.  Each time I come up with an idea for a new film, I have to try out new ways of using a camera, which might seem as basic as it gets. I play with the technology as much as a feature filmmaker plays with her story.  In an experimental film, the form and the content are essentially strangers who eventually will become the dearest of friends.  Finding the chemistry for this new “relationship” pushes the experimental filmmaker to invent, play, take risks, fail and get right back up again.”

Her work is her life and in order to understand her work you need to understand her influences. In an interview I conducted with Sachs she expressed to me that her style and influences come from a plethora of directors such as “Chris Marker, Chantal Ackerman, Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage, Haron Farocki, Holis Frampton, and so many others!” She also expressed to me upon my probing that Su Friedrich is one of her many influences. I had noticed a similarity in style with them when I had made the comparison of the two in my own critical review. Then subsequently, when asked wether I was correct in the similarities she responded by telling me “Su’s early films were extremely influential to me. Her oneiric “Gently Down the Stream” seemed to have been spit right out of a dream she had the night before she made the film. When I saw that film, I was awed by the closeness she had to her unconscious.  Later, I saw “Sink or Swim” and was enthralled with her ability to tell such an intimate story about her relationship to her father while she was growing up.  Throughout her career, there has always been an implicit confidence in the ability of women to find their way in the world and to express this journey from a specifically female perspective. This is in and of itself a political position that resonates with me.  Both of us often intertwine autobiography with observations of the world around us.” Her obvious pull towards feministic ideals along with her desire to tell intimate stories about the relationships between objects and people and between people themselves came from all these influences. The focus and connection I’m demonstrating will be Stan Brakhage’s penetration through her work.

It is said that “Brakhage’s work… required nothing less than a radical revision of the conditions of cinematic representation and the rejection, in practice, of its codes… which entailed both a redefinition of the space of cinematic representation, and the institution, through speed and validity of editing… and bodily movement traced by a handheld camera. (Michelson, pp. 113)” He revolutionized what filmmakers could do with cameras and subscribed to no rules and regulations. His painting directly on celluloid and scratching on celluloid (Sitney), created a whole new way to view film and relay messages which opened a completely new door for linguistics. Many filmmakers following him chose to walk through that door, including Su Friedrich. Like Friedrich and many other using linguistics in film had become a popular fashion and Sachs jumped on that train as well. Her love of the written word was present before her love of filmmaking, especially when it comes to poetry. In our interview she mentioned “When I decided to become a filmmaker, I never had to abandon my poetry writing…” It is vital to her artistic expression and to her representation of relationships and their meanings.

Lynne Sachs filmography as a whole stretches far and wide across genres and themes. Some themes that seem particularly important and relevant within her works are nature, relationships, and organically produced joy. Thus comes my interpretations of some of her best works. Lynne Sachs, contemporary avant-garde filmmaker, showcases and manufactures ‘experience cinema’ by showing atmospheres where audiences are saturated in overwhelming organic sensations, thereby exploring existentialism as it as a means to deter existential crises or as it applies to every day life, which can be seen in her films Drift and Bough (2014), Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008), Photograph of the Wind (2001), and Tornado (2001).

In order to fully understand the assertion of Sachs’ films as an aide to existentialism through ‘experience cinema’ I must explain those two concepts. To start, existentialism. Existentialism as most clearly defined, in the way that I am referring to it, is a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of will. Earlier it is said that Sachs films can be used as a way to deter existential crises. Now that we know what existentialism is we need to determine what one does when they are suffering from a crisis of the theory. Normally that type of crisis is defined as one where an individual may waver on their meaning in the world, wether their particular life serves any purpose, or makes any true impact on this existence.

Next, one must understand the term “experience cinema.” “Experience Cinema” is a kind of cinema that I was seeing in some filmmakers pieces but had no term for it specifically. It is something that is not present in every film and that all filmmakers cannot achieve. I do believe it is possible to try and write a scene that is considered experience cinema but for the most part the cinematographer or directors needs to find or produce it. The clearest way it can be explained is something that happens in a scene or throughout a film, when your whole body becomes enraptured with a character, a setting, a sensation, a particular visual, because they touch upon everyone of your senses. Sachs’ films, the ones I chose in particular demonstrate this with every ticking second. She understands how to perfect an image with a camera and incorporate different stylistic types of art to make a perfect recipe of cinematic sensations that occupy the viewer so that it becomes four dimensional. Our brains make it real. I will start explaining more clearly what I mean with the aforementioned films by Lynne Sachs, in order to supply sufficient evidence that experimental cinema demonstrates itself as proof that we are here and by enjoying life’s organically produced moments there is no need to have existential crises.

Drift and Bough (2014) was made by Sachs in central park in New York City during a particularly aggressive snowstorm. This black and white film shot in super 8mm is a six minute film that opens on a partially covered empire state building and sweeps down to the ground, as if to follow the elegantly aggressive white snow falling to the park. The harsh winter winds blow through the trees and covers the rambles. It’s covering the people and the benches, covering whoever and wherever it wants, even the ducks trying to make their way through the frozen pond. It is clear it is snowing heavily and fast and you can experience how cold it is when the frozen people, all bundled up in their winter’s best, waddle by. The branches of the trees hang low from the weight of the snow and they struggle against the winds, as do the birds who group together trying to avoid this storm that ravages around them. When the storm finally calms we see a child heading up a hill with a sled enjoying the calm after the storm. A dog joyously celebrates his new snow covered park along with a people in a bike carriage enjoying the fresh fallen snow. As you can see by the representations of forceful nature and the pure joy experienced by its surroundings and individuals who realize that the anger of mother nature calmed to beauty, they are really living. When the film is played backwards in the middle after the storm has stopped all the previous images of the cold ducks and the snow heavy trees take on a different connotation. One that appreciates winter and what we have. That togetherness and the simple beauty of snow is a reason to be glad that we are here. Experience cinema has given the viewer harsh cold, relief, joy, Childish excitement, beauty, purity, and music that stirs the soul and looked to stir the snow.

Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008) is a film about wildlife in central park. When interviewing Sachs she told me in this film “I love working with plants or finding the biomorphic in inanimate things.  Living in New York City, I probably don’t get enough pure living, so I try to make up for that by weaving in images of gardens or trees or water in my films. “Georgic for a Forgotten Planet” was shot in community gardens around the city and the title comes from Virgil’s Georgics, which were poems to agricultural written in 29 B.C.E.” The interweaving in the film with this eerily centric music accompanied by street noises and organic plant life and human interaction, including Sachs change of camera lens, makes this whole piece feel raw and gentle. The scene where she shoots up at the dandelions and weeds and accompanied by trucks and airplanes over head makes it clear that these simple plant pleasures are being missed by the busy world around it. She demonstrates this again by the editing of one shot during the busy street over the ignored plant life. Her homage to joyous organic moments, the bee pollenating the plant while a child plays and then the coming of water, all rounds out they joy one could find in life is one only appreciated it. There would be no need to internalize frustration about why we are here if you appreciated the joy of whats in front of you. The way she places the camera in nature makes one reflect back to brakhage and his many treks through the colorado forest. “I have always loved the way Brakhage creates abstract images from the flora and fauna that surrounded him in Colorado” Sachs says. Her inspiration to capture and influences from his work is apparent. When Sachs wrote a paper about Brakhage and his work on Window Baby Water Moving she comments that “Brakhage’s images have clearly touched me personally, aesthetically, and intellectually as a mother and as a maker of experimental films (Sachs, pp. 194).” Clearly his influence reaches far and deep and those struggle to appreciate the world and their purpose in it have Sachs and Brakhage to thank for the release they might find in their works.

Next is Photograph of the Wind andTornado (2001). Photograph of the Wind is a work in black and white that follows Sachs’ daughter Maya, named after Maya Deren, spinning around her running in a circle creating wind in her hair. In the description of the video Sachs said “ 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.” Clearly speaking in terms she was unfamiliar with at the time, this is exactly experimental cinema doing its job. Feeling the wind whip through her daughters hair, and sensing the turn of a top as you spin round and round. Sachs’ herself had a realization of existentialism. She was here forever trying to hold on to the childhood of her daughter finally realizing like the wind its something she cannot grasp but has to appreciate.

In Tornado (2001) Lynne shows the charred remains of papers that were destroyed after September 11th, and twin towers were crashed into. It coincides with a poem about tornadoes and how they destroy everything in its path. What makes this film so important, and in my opinion the best of her experience cinema films is the hands that hold the charred and ripped papers. They are wrinkled and smooth and you can hear them rustling with themselves and scratching along the paper, as if to say these pages may be broken but I still remain whole. These works are all representative or productions of experience cinema they make you feel and have reaffirmations of life. They affirm our existence they represent creation. Audience experience why they exist. They aide in those who question it.

These representations can be seen in popular cinema as well. One of the films I find most representation of experimental cinema and existentialism, which in hollywood cinema seems to be produced in americana crises, is American Beauty. This film tells the story of Lester Burnham who lived his suburban life in a daze and one day is awoken to find he hadn’t been experiencing life at all. Some might say he had a mid-life crisis. I believe he had a mid-life awakening and the way Sam Mendes represents this is through experience cinema. In particularly with the protagonist, there is a scene where he is fantasizing about a teenage girl Angela, and he walks into a steam filled bathroom and you can feel his heart race, and the wet sticky steam of the bathroom and the softness of the rose petals that lay in the water on top of Angela. This erotic metamorphous from a non sensational life into a full on orgasm of sensational experiences shows his existential turmoil fading away with experience cinema. Another example in the film of experience cinema being used to explore existentialism is the scene where Ricky shows Jane his video of the most beautiful thing he’s ever shot, a plastic bag blowing in the wind. This video showcases how this epithelial object danced with the wind and no one appreciated the simplistic beauty but Ricky. He saw the beauty in real life. He was the only one of them that was truly living. Ricky woke everyone up. He was the savior of suburbia.

Another few pop culture films that deal with existentialism outright are Groundhog’s Day, when a weather man must relive groundhog’s day over and over and over again until he is living a true and happy life. Another few are The Truman Show, I Heart the Huckabees and Fight Club. Now Fight Club more so represents than some of the others because the main character Tyler Durdin is a projection of Edward Norton’s subconscious to preform his desired actions. His life was already in an existential crisis. It takes him the whole movie to figure it out, but he is having one nonetheless. These subsequent films use different idioms to resurrect existential crises but they serve the purpose to show that this genre of self doubt is one that is still relevant even in fields that aren’t experimental.

In conclusion, Lynne Sachs as an experimental filmmaker is one to be admired. Her films do more than just entertain, they reach through the screen and enrapture your senses with experimental cinema. Wether she is citing beautiful poetry or overlaying bohemian experimental music over her images, you feel their power. They affirm why we are here. What their is on this earth for individuals to appreciate. We do not need to feel lost or purposeless, there is joy everywhere. Every organism matters. Lynne Sachs shows us that.

 

Bibliography

Deutsch, J. (2004). Maya Deren and the American Avant-garde.       American Studies In  ternational, 42(1), 132-133. Retrieved        from http://search.proquest.com.esearch.ut.edudocview/             197130140accountid=1476

Drift and Bough. Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2014. DVD.

Fincher, David, Arnon Milchan, Jim Uhls, Art Linson, Ceán Chaffin, Ross G. Bell, Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Carter H. Bonham, Loaf Meat, Jared Leto, Zach Grenier, Holt McCallany, Eion Bailey, Michael Kaplan, James Haygood, Alex McDowell, and Jeff Cronenweth. Fight Club. Beverly Hills, Calif: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002.

Georgic for a Forgotten Planet. Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2008. DVD.

Mendes, Sam, Alan Ball, Bruce Cohen, Dan Jinks, Kevin Spacey,           Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Mena Suvari, Wes Bent               ley, and Chris Cooper. American Beauty. Universal             City, CA: DreamWorks Home Entertainment, 2000.

Michelson, Annette. “Stan Brakhage (1933-2003).” October 108       (2004): 112-115. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 Dec.          2014.

Niccol, Andrew, and Peter Weir. The Truman Show. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1999.

Photograph of the Wind. Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2001. DVD.

Pierson, Michele. “Avant-Garde Re-Enactment: World Mirror Cinema,Decasia, and The Heart of the World.” Cinema Journal         49.1 (2009):1-19. JSTOR. Web. 27 Oct. 2014. <                 http://www.jstor.org/stable/25619742>.

Rabinowitz, Paula. “Medium Uncool: Women Shoot Back; Feminism,          Film and 1968 — A Curious Documentary.” Science & Society          65.1 (2001):72-98. JSTOR. Web. 27 Oct. 2014.                  <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40403885>.

Ramis, Harold, Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliott,        Stephen Tobolowsky, and Brian Doyle-Murray. Groundhog Day.         Burbank, Calif: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1993.

Russell, David O, Jeff Baena, Gregory Goodman, Scott Rudin,        Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, Jason Schwartzman, Isabelle          Huppert, Jude Law, Peter Deming, and Jon Brion. I [heart]          Huckabees. Los Angeles, CA: 20th    Century Fox Home Enter         tainment, 2004

Sachs, L. (2007). Thoughts on birth and brakhage. Camera Obscu          ra, (64)194-196. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com.esearch.ut.edu/docview/217539662?accountid=14762

Tornado. Dir. Lynne Sachs. 2001.

___________________________________________________________________________

FULL INTERVIEW
1. What influences, as far as directors, do you have when you do your work?
I have been inspired by Chris Marker, Chantal Ackerman, Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage, Haron Farocki, Holis Frampton, and so many others!
2. You tend to use many different forms of art in your filmmaking, like collage, painting, and layered sound deign, in your works, why did you decide to use all these forms instead of just shooting? Is that what experimental is to you?
For me, each film needs to search for its own language of expression, and this creative journey is never mapped out ahead of time. I love using my camera, of course, but I also find the dialogue between the moving image and other artistic forms to be quite unpredictable and, therefore exciting. When I decided to become a filmmaker, I never had to abandon my poetry writing or my love of collage and painting. My work in sound came more recently, as I discovered that the aural dimension invited audiences to participate more freely with the cinematic moment.

 

  1. If not what about your work defines it as experimental cinema?
    I really love that you are curious about the word experimental. Honestly, I sometimes feel like a scientist working with materials that are simultaneously familiar and exotic. When I juxtaposed a home movie of my fourth birthday with an image of a black widow spider in my film “The House of Science”, I was experimenting with meaning, making suggestions about the connections between childhood and fear. I didn’t know if my “experiment” worked until I activated it with an audience. I’ve never been attracted to the kind of filmmaking that necessitates that you follow a formula for writing a script. The idea that there is a software template, for example, that screenwriters use to create a narrative film disturbs me to my very core. Each time I come up with an idea for a new film, I have to try out new ways of using a camera, which might seem as basic as it gets. I play with the technology as much as a feature filmmaker plays with her story. In an experimental film, the form and the content are essentially strangers who eventually will become the dearest of friends. Finding the chemistry for this new “relationship” pushes the experimental filmmaker to invent, play, take risks, fail and get right back up again.

4. One of the reason I like Su Friedrich’s work is because it uses narrative form and documentary form with interviews as well as makes commentary, you tend to use political issues to make social commentary like your recent work Your Day is My Night, but use the same kind of form. Is this what you’re really passionate about or what inspired you to do this work? Did Su Friedrich’s Style have any influence?
Su’s early films were extremely influential to me. Her oneiric “Gently Down the Stream” seemed to have been spit right out of a dream she had the night before she made the film. When I saw that film, I was awed by the closeness she had to her unconscious. Later, I saw “Sink or Swim” and was enthralled with her ability to tell such an intimate story about her relationship to her father while she was growing up. Throughout her career, there has always been an implicit confidence in the ability of women to find their way in the world and to express this journey from a specifically female perspective. This is in and of itself a political position that resonates with me. Both of us often intertwine autobiography with observations of the world around us.
5. Georgic for a Forgotten Planet, was inspired by poetry by relates heavily to nature, is nature something your passionate about, cause we see your connection to snow in Drift and Bough as well.
I love working with plants or finding the biomorphic in inanimate things. Living in New York City, I probably don’t get enough pure living, so I try to make up for that by weaving in images of gardens or trees or water in my films. “Georgic for a Forgotten Planet” was shot in community gardens around the city and the title comes from Virgils Georgics, which were poems to agricultural written in 29 B.C.E. I recently shot images of the People’s Climate March and hope to make a film with that material. “Drift and Bough” is simply a film I made in homage to Central Park, a natural wonder in the heart of the city where I find solace and joy. I shot the whole film during one snowstorm last winter.
6. Does this connection to nature  come from a Stan Brakhage influence and his wonderings in Colorado.
Another great question, I have always loved the way Brakhage creates abstract images from the flora and fauna that surrounded him in Colorado, but the again he was also able to create exquisite beauty from a crystal ashtray in his “Text of Light” (1979).
7. The other works I’m examining are Tornado and Photograph of the Wind. I was wondering if you use these banal objects like your daughters hair and the charred papers to demonstrate beauty in meaningless articles?
Years ago I made two films about objects in our lives – “Still Life with Woman and Four Objects” (1986) and “Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning” (1987), so you are so right. I like to determine how we as humans engage with the things in our lives. In “Tornado” (2002), I am reflecting on the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center as objects that sadly became anthropomorphized when they fell and “died”. In “Photograph of Wind” (2001), I think a viewer does feel the swoosh of the wind through the watching of my daughter’s hair swirling around the camera. Your comparison of these two films which both integrate my daughters is very astute.
8. I’m terming this effect that you show in your films as “Experience Cinema” Cinema that you feel in every shot wether its the cold of snow or the wind of your spinning daughter. Is this something that you try to express when you make your films?
Wow! I love your naming of my films as “Experience Cinema”. I am honored by this very sensitive and perceptive observation and frankly I never could have come up with this myself. If making films gives me and hopefully you this shift of awareness, then I can be happy about my practice as an artist. While I love words dearly, this non-verbal level of communication is vital work.
9. Lastly, is there anything pertinent about the above films I’ve mentioned that you think I should know in regards to influence or things you were thinking during development?
You are a wonderfully insightful and original thinker. There is nothing I would add to this gift you have given me.

 

The New Yorker on Every Fold Matters

640px-The-new-yorker-logo

 

 

Above and Beyond

Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose

This reading series, which started in New York City and is held at laundromats around the country, celebrates its tenth anniversary with “Every Fold Matters,” a collaborative, site-specific performance exploring the strange intimacy of the everyday ritual. The piece, created by the playwright and director Lizzie Olesker and the filmmaker Lynne Sachs, highlights the perspective of laundry workers. It’s playing for three nights at a Brooklyn laundromat, performed by the singer and actress Jasmine Holloway, the actress and dancer Veraalba Santa, and the actors Ching Valdes-Aran and Tony Torn. Produced by the series’ founder, Emily Rubin. (New Lucky Laundromat, 323 Lafayette Ave., at Grand Ave., Clinton Hill. dirtylaundryreadings.com. Feb. 12-14.)

The Brooklyn Rail: “Laundromat-Theater: Where Every Fold Matters”

The Brooklyn Rail

by Ginny Mohler  

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/02/theater/laundromat-theater-where-every-fold-matters

A woman folds clothes by rote, eyes fixed to a soap opera muted on the laundromat’s TV. As she weeps over a tragic plot twist, her hands never stop folding, pounding the table in an unceasing metronome of productivity.

Laundress Ching Valdes Aran in Every Fold Matters.

This moment, lifted from life and transcribed to performance by playwright/director Lizzie Olesker and experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs, becomes one of many striking, reality-based images in Every Fold Matters, a new site specific performance with film that premieres in a Clinton Hill, Brooklyn laundromat this month.

Exploring the intimacies that emerge between strangers through their clothes, the 40-minute theater piece is based on interviews conducted by Olesker and Sachs with laundromat workers throughout NYC during the past year. Originally intending to film the interviews for a hybrid documentary-theater piece, the work is now a compilation of fiction and reality, the script drawing largely on true anecdotes which they heard but were not permitted to record.

The project began nearly two years ago, when Olesker was commissioned by producer Emily Rubin to create what would become Every Fold Matters as part of the 10 year anniversary of Emily Rubin’s reading series “Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose” by Wash and Dry Productions. Originally inspired by Rubin’s desire to find a non-traditional public space for creative workshops, the series has now successfully hosted more than 30 readings in laundromats, showcasing more than 100 writers over the past 10 years. In 2014, Olesker received a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council to further develop and produce Every Fold Matters.

It wasn’t long before the hybrid documentary partnership with Sachs organically emerged; the two women live within a block of each other and have a number of mutual friends in the arts, but had never collaborated before. Sachs, currently a Guggenheim Fellow, usually works as an adjunct professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where Olesker also teaches. The piece now incorporates elements of documentary film, contemporary dance and movement, and sound design by musician and aural artist Stephen Vitiello.

Although its form—as well as content—is still evolving, the play has already come far from the initial conception of basing the script on documentary interviews with laundry workers. “Initially we hoped to record video interviews with them, all over the city,” remarked Olesker. But this quickly proved difficult. Many workers refused to speak to them at all—adding a camera into the equation was even more off-putting. There was a language barrier, too. Many of the workers they spoke with had limited English vocabularies, often restricted to terminology surrounding laundry. A conversation about a broken machine is more possible than candid conversations about their past, their most bizarre experiences on the job, and general reflections on the work they do and the people whose clothes they wash. Bringing in a Chinese translator allowed Olesker and Sachs new levels of access at some laundromats, establishing trust and eliciting stories. But it still wasn’t enough to get more than a handful of laundry workers to go on tape.

Even with full communication possible, the majority of the workers were tight lipped. Whether for fear of repercussions from management, mistrust of how their stories would be used, or reticence as a code of conduct, the reluctance was so widespread it was itself indicative of something about the job. This spirit of refusal is wound throughout the piece in recurring sequences of chaos, in which the denials are spoken simultaneously by multiple actors, in three languages; one doesn’t need a translator to understand they’re saying no.

Olesker and Sachs decided to continue pursuing the interviews, but without the camera. “We couldn’t record the interviews, but we could listen,” said Sachs. Their notes and impressions fueled the hybrid documentary-fiction nature of the script—a visceral compilation of the human stories which unfold during the minutiae of domestic work, in which there is no shortage of conflict.

Customers are displeased with a worker’s ability to get out a tough stain. They make a scene and refuse to pay. Others accuse the laundress of theft. And the infighting doesn’t end between customer and worker. The customer versus customer interactions are equally fraught and can escalate quickly. The play opens on two customers battling over the use of a dryer: Customer ONE’s clothes were removed by Customer TWO. Unacceptable. Customer ONE retakes the dryer, hauling out the offending load, still dripping wet. The dryer is still contested. “It doesn’t belong to you!” cries Customer TWO. “Or you!” retorts the first.

Instead of having discrete characters, the four actors each inhabit multiple characters and are named with numbers: ONE, TWO, THREE, and FOUR, to be played by acclaimed performers Ching Valdes-Aran, Veraalba Santa, Tony Torn, and Jasmine Holloway, respectively. As co-directors, Sachs and Olesker are working with the four to build a vocabulary of movement and gesture for the work with clothing. Beginning with the routine of folding clothes, their movements swell into the theatrical—and then shrink back into realism.

As the actors inhabit the language of the piece, they bring their own experiences to it—and to the script. Jasmine Holloway, who plays FOUR, recollected during the process that her grandmother worked as a washerwoman. Encouraged by Sachs and Olesker to ask her about her experiences, and despite her grandmother’s initial reluctance, Holloway learns that her grandmother is a third generation washerwoman—her great-great grandmother was a member of a groundbreaking movement in Atlanta during the summer of 1881 by African-American women to unionize the underpaid, overworked washerwomen, organizing as “The Washing Society.” They wouldn’t have the vote for another 40 years, but their strike was a success; it would become a seminal moment in labor history. Primary sources describing their efforts are now incorporated into the script and, as FOUR, Holloway portrays the ghost of a washerwoman past for much of the show.

The ghost of “The Washing Society” provides a historical context for the piece, balancing it against the absurd, often cruel, altercations which take place inside the present-day laundromat. 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. A laundromat is a public space where something private occurs; it is the opposite of a typical theater, a private space in which a public event occurs. Nearly every element of Every Fold Matters pushes the boundaries of what is private and what is public, what is real and what is fiction, and where we find narrative fulfillment in any of the above.

There is an undeniable intimacy forged between strangers in the process of the clothes being cleaned, but it’s not often acknowledged. “All you get is their name and their bag of dirty stuff” says TWO, in reflection. “It’s a personal thing, if you think about it. […] You can tell someone’s story just by what they’ve worn, how it’s dirty—you know?” And more revelations abound in the clothing designated as “special” by customers—endowed with emotional meaning for whatever reason. “I wonder what special really means?” TWO muses. “It’s really special,’ they’ll say. It means be careful with it or else.” But the feats of the laundry workers do not always go unappreciated.“My customers count on me,” says another worker. “They think we do magic.”

That magic is present throughout Every Fold Matters, from the clothesline peppered with miniature garments, pulled out of an actor’s pocket, to the collisions of printed words on clothing in a magnetic poetry-esque sequence, created by local painter Jessica Weiss. As FOUR says, no longer a ghost, but as herself remembering her grandmother’s words: “Listen! I am passing this down to you. […] Take your time. Make every fold matter.” These are words to live by at the laundromat and perhaps everywhere beyond: It matters. Every single fold.

Every Fold Matters, created by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs, produced by Emily Rubin, will be performed Feb 12 – 14 at 8:30 pm, at New Lucky Laundromat (323 Lafayette Ave, at Grand Ave in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn). Suggested donation $10. Seating will be limited.

Contributor

Ginny Mohler GINNY MOLHER is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, writer and archival researcher. With creative partner Brittany Shaw, she is currently developing Radium Girls, a Sloan award-winning feature film about radical teenage sisters in 1925

Every Fold Matters (script) by Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker

Every Fold Matters

by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs

1/28/15

 

ONE – worker (Ching)

TWO – worker (Veraalba)

THREE – customer (Tony)

FOUR – Washing Society laundress (Jasmine)

 

PROLOGUE

 

Video montage of Chinese laundry worker Mr. Ho.

 

             In a laundromat.

 

Customer looks into dryer and discovers his clothes are not there.  Discovers clothes piled in a cart still wet. Addresses FOUR who is in the audience.

 

THREE

Hey, is this yours?

Is this your stuff?  Because that was my stuff in the dryer and you took it out.

You touched my clothes.

 

Can’t you see they weren’t done?

 

So, you just opened the door, took out my stuff, and dumped it here in the cart, didn’t you?

 

It’s still wet. Here- you feel that? You feel that? They’re still wet.

 

You touched my clothes and

you could feel that they’re still wet.

Let’s see how you like it-

What do you think? This dryer belongs to you?

 

Excuse me Miss, wait, do you work here? Are you working? We have a problem over here, can you help me?

 

Music.

 

Performers ONE & TWO enter.

They open dryers, looking inside… for something lost?

Forgotten?

They pull out clothes & pieces of cloth, perhaps picking up speed.

Words are written on the clothing and, depending on where the performers

are in relation to each other, different short phrases are formed, in the same spirit that people try on clothes that sometimes fit and other times are all wrong.

 

time                   pocket

mind   things

fold     personal

show me                  she

nothing    to say

wanders    zip

stain

feel    that

other

deep pocket
hole
zipper mouth
tug drain
button

show me time

personal

stain mind

tug drain

fold other

button

deep pocket
hole

She  me

feel pocket

to say

button inside

zip time

wanders

                 

 

ONE holds up sign “Atlanta. July 1881.”

 

Performer FOUR turns on candle lamp.

 

FOUR

“We the members of our society, are determined to stand to our pledge and make extra charges for washing, and we have agreed, and are willing to pay $25 or $50 for licenses as a protection, so we can control the washing for the city. We can afford to pay these licenses, and will do it before we will be defeated, and then we will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices. Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council Tuesday morning. We mean business this week or no washing. Yours respectfully,  The Washing Society,  486 Members.”

 

ONE turns on television with remote.  Snippet of Chinese soap opera.

 

TWO
It’s not like a man walks in and I know for sure…

I don’t care about that kind of stuff.

I look for other kinds of signs. 

The stains that interest me are usually yellow,

the ones that come from the inside of the clothes,

the piss, the sweat, the vomit.

 

 

                                                      (jump cut)

 

 

She’d tell me a certain thing is special… What does that mean, special? They all say it’s special. 

 

She’d tell me—this one time, she said that her blouse-

her green blouse

was full of loud, awful music–

and she didn’t want to hear it anymore

She said that the green thread in her blouse was a

green snake

So she said she’d pay me extra to get rid of it-

all that music that made her feel so bad

She wanted me to pull it all out

She said

get all that noisy, snaky green out of my blouse…. (pause)

 

                  (jump cut)

 

That’s it. I don’t have anything more to say. 

 

             Chinese soap opera returns to TV. ONE watches and weeps while folding.

 

Onstage performers speak simultaneously in three languages (English, Spanish, & Chinese).

 

ONE & TWO

I don’t want to talk about it.

Nothing to say.

sorry–

Let’s talk about something else.

Not today. Don’t want to say-

sorry

Nothing

sorry

Why do you want to know?

Nothing interesting.

Just a job.

My boss says no.

 

                  Music.

                                                                       

ONE, TWO and FOUR perform folding T-shirt dance including: roll between legs, dropping, lasso, ball to chest, crucifixion, offering, accordion, rest, corner folding, fall forward, getting tangles, peeking through hole, twisted up, untangles, throw to floor. Eventually distinct sculptures meld into single unit.

 

Shaking shirt between each movement as punctuation.

 

TV cuts to soap opera (silent and then with volume) which ONE watches while she folds. So involved with show that she begins to weep to herself.

 

Performer THREE (customer) re-enters through doors of Laundromat with

large bag of laundry, dumps the clothes on ONE & TWO

 

THREE

How do you know it’s time to do it?

You don’t have any clean underwear, bottom line.

You can get away with socks but not dirty underwear.

Besides, it’s very cold out there …  warm in here.

 

THREE exits.

 

ONE

I think about other things when I’m doing it.

My mind wanders.

 

ONE and TWO speak intimately like co-workers while doing gestural movements, while FOUR is more separate.

 

TWO

All you get is their name and their bag of dirty stuff- you write it on a tag- a tag for all that sweat, coffee, period stains and… whatever.

ONE

You know nothing about them but you also know more than you want to know, you know?

 

TWO

It’s a personal thing, if you think about it.

It’s like getting to open up someone else’s closet, someone who you don’t know… seeing what’s inside… you can tell someone’s story just by what they’ve worn, how it’s dirty- you know?

 

ONE

My mother in Hong Kong

She showed me

I used to—

no dryers. Just hang dry.

I help my mother with the easiest stuff. Like, folding underwear.

And then you practice

Practice practice

 

TWO

Make your own improvements.

I do it like this. Fold one, two, three.

See? My way.

 

FOUR

In Ancient Rome they cleaned clothes with animal and human urine along with soap, then they took sticks and beat it.

ONE

I work part time, six or seven hour shifts, five to six days a week.

 

TWO

I meet different people.

I almost remember each face. Almost…each face of every customer.

 

THREE

A roll of quarters, a cup of coffee to go, a newspaper. Sometimes the ladies talk to me.

But most people, they drop it off. They just don’t have time anymore.

 

ONE

Mostly we have drop off now.  The neighborhood’s changed. It used to be that everyone came in to do their laundry.

 

There’s one guy who’s always losing his ticket. Nice man, but too busy.

THREE

I’ve seen that guy.  Comes in every week.

 

“I am here to pick up my laundry.”

 

ONE

“Where is your ticket?”

 

THREE

“I am so sorry. I forgot my ticket. I know I have it somewhere. Hold on. Let me check. Could you just look me up?”

 

ONE:  “This is the last time. You always lose it.”

 

             Have preset folded clothes package ready for THREE.

 

THREE:  Thank you, thank you.

 

FOUR, from another part of Laundromat-

 

FOUR

I take in laundry just like so many, earning 4 to 8 dollars a month, for more hours than I can count. I have increased my earnings of late with the help of my children and the adding on of several new clients. Like you, I take in loads on Monday mornings, returning the clean goods on Saturday. Our soap is made from lye, starch, and wheat bran, and our washtubs we make from beer barrels cut in half. We carry our water from the well, pump and hydrant down the road, boiling and rinsing and hanging in our own homes. We press using a few hot irons at a time and weather permitting, we work outside too, in the shade.

ONE and TWO pull out string with tiny clothes.

They watch it move in the air…

THREE pulls out large women’s underwear and clothes with words from machine.

In English, Spanish, Chinese:

 

ONE & TWO

I don’t want to talk about it… nothing to say… It’s the same all the time… what?

Can’t talk. No time. Come back later. Nothing to say…

 

ONE

Oh, there was this one time … a guy in a jacket and tie came in …

 

             Interrupting ONE, pointing to shirt with word NOTHING on it )

                              

THREE

It’s still there.

 

ONE

Sorry, I tried-

 

THREE

Look at that. Can you see it? Look, right there, right there.

 

ONE

I tried but it’s a tough one.

 

THREE

Look at that… see that stain.  Still there.

 

ONE

We tried our best.

 

THREE

That’s it. I’m not paying.

 

ONE

But- Everything else- washed and folded.

 

THREE

You didn’t get it out.

 

Music.

 

ALL do gesture dance without Tshirts this time.  Now with element of disgust.

 

TWO turns on television.

 

Filmed interview with ONE in laundromat begins. ONE, TWO, and THREE have backs to audience as they perform same small gestures from earlier, this time without clothing.

ONE

Chinese New Year and we were full of people washing their clothes, only not the kind of laundry we usually see, like big bags of sheets and family clothes… No, these were younger, maybe people in their twenties, and they’re doing just a single pair of skinny pants or a shiny blouse to wear to a party, like they need to get just one or two things clean before going out to get drunk or something, you know? They just want to clean something quick to look good that night, you know?

 

 

One girl, a young woman, she was in a big hurry, like they all are. She threw her outfit into the machine, puts it on RAPID & COLD,  then she leaves to go to the store and get a cup of coffee or something. She comes back a little later, interrupts the cycle and …

 

 

…bad for the machines, you know- breaks them down.. And then, she comes over to me- I think maybe she knew I was watching her- and she asks me to watch her clothes for like a half hour or something, and says she will pay me $5 for my attention. Then she like just runs out the door- just like that. So, when I go to put her skinny pants and little blouse into the dryer, five wet $100 bills, you hear me? 100 dollar bills- they fall out of one of pockets.

 

INTERVIEWER

(off camera)

You’re kidding!

 

ONE

And it was busy, like I said, with lots of customers, so no one noticed. Plus, when I saw that money, you know, I caught it real fast… like this.

 

(Closes her fists… Long pause)

 

INTERVIEWER

 So what happened to it… the money?

 

ONE

What do you think?

 

ONE and TWO create laundry sculptures and attitudes with clothes and their bodies, elegant and awkward poses.  THREE takes “word” clothes out of dryer and folds.

                                                                       

TWO picks up a yellow & brown print shirt from a dryer,

puts it over her head and face.

 

ONE

I don’t look at what customers are putting in-

what they’re folding, I don’t look at their clothes- but sometimes you can’t help it, you know?

 

ONE puts yellow skirt on her head, strings hanging down.

 

TWO

The stains I think about the most are usually yellow, the piss, the sweat the vomit. The shit you don’t want to see, the shit you don’t want to touch.You look for a plastic bag, you hold it like this, then you throw it in the hole, shut the door, get out your quarters.

 

ONE puts small girl’s pink dress over face, with eye hole.  We see THREE in back doing his own laundry thing, sitting, staring, listening to music.

 

TWO

See that guy, he’s washing all these pairs of women’s underwear-  black- red, pink, lots of lace- pretty sexy and also kind of… big? I wonder who he’s washing them for, folding them so carefully. I guess they’re his wife’s or his girlfriend’s, or maybe they belong to… him?

ONE puts flannel nightgown around her shoulders as cape/shroud.

 

TWO

Sometimes a customer, she’ll come in and she’ll say

a certain thing is special and I wonder what special really means?

They all say special… this blouse- or that skirt- it’s really special, they’ll say.

It means be careful with it or else…

                                                     

TWO puts a baby’s onesie over hands, open & shut fist. 

 

ONE puts a green, slinky shirt over one arm, facing away.

Continue “sculpture” choreography, building layers and intensity…

TWO begins pulling off the layers and placing them into the wash.

ONE continues layering, slow motion…

 

                                                                       

ONE & TWO’s thoughts/lines tumble over one another; have this section work aurally with Mr. Ho’s speaking patterns.

TWO

(Spanish)

I don’t want to talk about it.

Let’s talk about something else.

it’s hard that’s all

boring

goes on and on and on

(English)

Sometimes the boss comes and watches you and he says go faster, do more… come on, come on… (pause)

Or this one time, a lady came in and she said I had

ruined RUINED her favorite pants, she said I’d broken the damn

zipper and made a tear or some shit,  and I didn’t even remember her

her stupid fucking pants so I go, what pants, where?

And she starts pointing her finger at me

and she goes, you’re gonna pay for it

you’re gonna pay for a new pair

those pants cost me 85 dollars or some shit

I’m gonna talk to your boss talk to the owner

Go ahead, I say

And she says

I’ll make sure they take 85 dollars from your pay, I’ll make sure you

pay for it, you little whore, you little bitch-

I start to get mad now but I don’t want want to go off on her or nothing, like I can sometimes,

so I just say okay show me the pants- the zipper.

So she opens up her bag- this big old plastic shopping bag-

And… it’s filled with all kinds of shit-

old magazines, wrappers, socks and pieces of food–

layers and layers of like, garbage, you know?

So, now I see that something’s not right with this lady,

Something’s all wrong….

There were never any pants- no zipper- no rip-

At least, I don’t think so-

She must’ve been looking for something else from me.

 

                ONE turns on TV.

VIDEO Mr. Ho working (2 of 2)

                                                                                         

ONE

Sometimes they hide the stains. They’ll put it in a bag and won’t tell you. Maybe they think you won’t take it?

 

TWO

Sometimes they will get angry when they think the color changed-

 

ONE

Or a stain didn’t come out.

 

TWO

They’ll put the dirtiest clothes at the bottom of the other clothes. “Use bleach,” they say. Why are they so scared of a stain?  Do they think it says something they don’t want anyone to know?

ONE

I’ve been in the laundry business longer than most of them have been alive. I know how to rescue a shirt.  They say I work miracles on their dress shirts.

 

TWO

But those stained ones …

 

ONE

Yeah, the underarms.

What are you gonna do?

 

TWO

Hah, just say keep your arms down! Don’t show it…

 

ONE

My customers count on me.  They think we do magic.

 

TWO

Remember that guy used to come in, he would talk to himself, always watching us. And one time he said, “Be careful of what’s inside that machine, what’s inside there.” And he opened the door and yelled, “Don’t you see it? The shadow.”

 

FOUR
Before you, see:
your mother
wooden rack in the bathtub, hung with stockings
first washing machine and e- lec-tric dryer
done almost every day, post 1950, a different pair of something
clean, very clean
And before her
your grandmother
with basin and wringer
boiling water in
tenement apartment
before that
there was me
post-civil war me
new dawn
taking in laundry
for wages
for freedom
of a kind

a long line hung

drying in the light

moving to before, but still

scrubbing on rock with sand

river flows

stick hits

back breaking hot

for days on end

from the colonies

and beyond to

whiten in sour milk

rinse through fire ash

before that

layers and layers of clothes never washed

dried flowers and perfume cover

after the fullers of ancient rome

urine mixed with water

jump and stomp with

bare feet

back to

Egyptian salt scrub

ancient sun dried

keep going further and further

following that line of time, clothes, ways of doing

when only

one fur one scrap our back

before that

when we first come

into cold air

not yet wrapped but

naked, so naked

and clean

 

TWO pulls string from pocket, hands one end to ONE.

They hang another clothesline.

TWO moves clothespins as if they were numbers and she’s adding up figures like “laundry math.”

 

ONE

I started working in a laundromat when I turned 15. I’m 60 now. So that’s 45 years. And I work only part time, 5 or 6 days a week, 6 to 7 hours a shift. And each day, I do about 10 -15 loads of laundry so that’s 70 loads a week, 280 a month, 3,360 a year.  And then, over 45 years, I have done 151,200 loads of laundry (or something like that) since I began. And then when I had babies, well I was doing my own two times a week, that would be eight times a month, so that’s 78 loads, but wait a minute, each time I did it there would be 2 loads, wait, that’s too much, so that’s about 72 loads a week including the store loads, and my oldest child is 41 now so that would be 3,744 loads a year, is that possible? But wait, minus what my son did himself when he turned 14 or 15, (yeah I taught him something).

ALL put on red palm-coated work gloves and dance emotively. Emphasis on falling.

 

THREE

I lost—

 

ONE

Hello. Can I help–?

THREE
I lost a lot– Did you find–? It was folded up in rubber band.

 

ONE
Where was it?

THREE

In my pocket… a lot of money.

 

ONE

I didn’t find it.

 

THREE

You must have. It was—

 

ONE

Nothing there. Nothing at all. We give it back when we find it.

 

THREE

I don’t believe you.

 

ONE

Did you look everywhere?

 

THREE

You took it. You took my $500!

 

ONE

If I find any money- I return it. Even if only $1.

 

THREE

I should call the police. Police!

 

ONE

No- please- not here.

 

THREE

I will.

 

ONE

Don’t call. Please, mister. No money here.

 

THREE

Are you calling me a liar?

 

ONE

Maybe someone else took it.

 

THREE
Who else could do that?

 

ONE

You left your things in the dryer a long time.

 

THREE

Are you saying it’s my fault?

 

ONE

You go outside and not come back… you fall asleep. Maybe someone else-

 

THREE

To hell with you- to hell with you people!

 

                                    THREE leaves

 

ONE

And he left. Just like that.

 

TWO

He used to be in here all the time.

 

ONE

Gone now.

 

TWO

Maybe he found somewhere else…

                                                     

 

 

FOUR, reappears, carrying an electric candle, like a ghost.

 

FOUR

We come together now for higher pay, respect and autonomy, forming our own trade organization which we call the Washing Society. There are just 20 of us, but we will grow. We will establish a uniform rate at one dollar per dozen pounds of wash.

Look around you now. This city has more home laundry workers than male common laborers, and that is a fact. We will hold a mass meeting and call a strike.  We will go door-to-door, canvassing all over this city, and in just 3 weeks, our numbers will grow from 20 to 3,000 strikers. We urge you to join or honor the strike, young and old, black and white. No matter if they arrest us, or fine us, let our proposed fees inspire you. We say to our City Council that we will pay those $25 fees rather than be defeated.

We mean business… or no washing.

THREE

              As himself.

 

So, I have a washer drier now. Haven’t been to the laundromat in years. But my washer broke, and the dirty underwear were piling up, so I had to go back. I hauled my bag of laundry down to the corner. I was even looking forward to seeing the lady there who always yelled at me for forgetting my ticket. But when I got to the corner, the laundromat was gone.

 

In its place was an overpriced bakery with twelve dollar slices of cake and seven dollar pots of tea that you are not allowed to share.

 

ONE & TWO reprise- folding dance

 

THREE (to audience)

Another Laundromat closed in my neighborhood.

I don’t know where they expect you to do it.

It’s one of those neighborhood places that you think

will be here forever,  something people will always need.

And it’s one of the only places where you still can talk to strangers.

 

TWO

I make friends without ever knowing their names.

 

ONE

One customer is nice, the other picky.

 

TWO

I almost remember each face.

 

ONE

You have to be nice. And patient.

 

TWO

Almost… each face of every customer.

 

SCREEN Monologue with FOUR (as herself )

 

FOUR

Who taught me how? My Grandmom did… she’d say to me:

Everything has to be done right.

Everything has to be…to look…

come out a certain way.

You don’t want those creases.

You don’t want not to have it right, you see?

She’d go on and on… it meant everything to her…

she’d say:

you want it to look a certain way.

And that’s how you fold.

You hold it like this, and then you pull it over like that.

One-sies, Two-sies- Three-sies!

Otherwise, it’s not going to be right. 

It will come out all wrong.

So pay attention to me now (Snap)-

Listen!

I am passing this down to you.

Like my mother and her mother and…

Don’t do it like that.

Take your time. Make every fold matter.

Put yourself into it.

Like you mean it.

Understand?

Do you understand?

 

There. Like that.

 

FOUR

Improvised story in which FOUR (as herself) speaks about her grandmother’s 30-year work in a laundry.

 

Music

Performer ONE slowly pulls the end of a string out from her pocket…

She gives it to Performer TWO, who takes the end and pulls.

 

(End)

 

NYC high school students take part in #HandsUpWalkout – interview with parent Lynne Sachs

Posted 10:37 PM, December 1, 2014, by Ayana Harry

NEW YORK (PIX11) – Students from several New York City High Schools walked out of their classrooms Monday afternoon at 1:01 p.m.

They joined a national demonstration called #HandsUpWalkout, a protest over the shooting death of Ferguson, Missouri teen Michael Brown.

Dozens of teenagers left classes at Bard High School Early College in the Lower East Side to join in. Lynne Sachs’ daughter Noa goes to the VERSO international school in Bangkok. Noa did not ask for permission before she joined the demonstrations, however Sachs was not angry.

She told PIX11, “Everyday our kids are learning about American history but when they are inside the walls of the school, they are not living history.”

Brown’s death has energized and engaged young protestors from Ferguson to New York. For some families it’s prompted tough conversations about race, rights, policing, and respect.

“As parents we shouldn’t be lecturing, if anything we should be listening,” explains psychologist Dr. Jeff Gardere.

Dr. Gardere believes parents can help their kids transform the energy of the protests into meaningful action, starting with one question: “Where can we come up with solutions together from children to adults from citizens to the police department, how do we all work together?”

LINK to WPIX:   http://pix11.com/2014/12/01/nyc-high-school-students-take-part-in-handsupwalkout/

Wpix69

That’s Shanghai Magazine interviews Lynne Sachs

Thats Shanghai

INTERVIEW: Experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs

INTERVIEW: Experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs
16 Dec 2014
by Tamia Tang
Link to “That’s Shanghai”: http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/post/8005/interview-experimental-documentary-filmmaker-lynne-sachs

Image above: “What Happened in the Dragon Year?” by Xun Sun, mural painting displayed in Shanghai Biennale 2014.

Award-winning American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs recently visited Shanghai for the Second China Women’s Film Festival with her latest offering Your Day is My Night. Deemed one of the eight must-watch movies in 2014 by BBC, the hybrid documentary discusses the relationship between historical turmoil and personal hardship, from the mouths of seven impoverished immigrants residing in Manhattan’s Chinatown. We caught up with the director to talk about the film, race and feminism.

Just like every ambitious twenty-something, Lynne Sachs was ready to change the world but wasn’t sure where to start. Her young mind was bubbling over with all kinds of possibilities. “There was one side of me that wanted to be a poet or an artist with a commitment to activism. Then there was the other side that thought the only way I could improve conditions around the world was to become a human rights attorney,” she reflects, saying her first brush with the world of experimental films was Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren, who is considered the grandmother of the field. “When I discovered independent film making, I felt like I had found a way of living that would pull together both of these aspirations.”

After graduating from Brown University with a B.A. in history, she went on to earn a M.A. in cinema at San Francisco State University, and later an additional M.F.A. in Film at the San Francisco Art Institute, to get a start on her career as a filmmaker.

Her first fully-developed documentary Sermons and Sacred Pictures, a biography of the 1930s-1940s African-American minister and filmmaker Reverend L. O. Taylor, made its debut at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989. “As we say in the film world, the film was my first to have ‘wings,’ meaning that once I finished the film, it ‘carried me’ to film festivals and important art venues around the country. Both of my parents flew from their homes across the country to attend. It was a big, exciting, scary single evening that made me feel like a real artist.”

The film also helped Sachs understand where she came from: the Memphis-born director moved back to her hometown for three months during shooting. “In order to make the film, I needed to walk by myself with my 16mm camera all over African-American neighborhoods I had never visited before in my life. Memphis was 50 percent black and 50 percent white. The film gave me permission to step through the racial and geographical borders that had separated my life as a young white woman from the lives of African-American people whose lives were so close and yet so far away, which was profound for me. ”

The cultural phenomenon of race has been a recurrent motif Sachs employs in her works.  From Sermons and Sacred Pictures, to Which Way is East (1994) where she traveled extensively with her sister in Vietnam exploring the other side of a collective war memory, to States of UnBelonging (2006) in which she meditated on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict through uncovering the life of an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed in a terrorist attack, before she spent two years working with Chinese immigrants in New York City in her most recent work Your Day is My Night (2013).

Sachs on location for Your Day is My Night

During the making of Your Day is My Night, Lynne was mindful of her position as an outsider, and sensitive to how the people in her film – whom she regards as her collaborators – felt about their collaboration. “After conducting and editing the interviews, I had the contents transcribed and gave them back to each participant so that they could think about what they had said and make factual or dramatic suggestions.”  She and her crew were gradually welcomed into the Chinese community: “After about six months of shooting, the older women began to hold hands with me and one of the older men started to give everyone massages. We often went out for a relaxed Chinese meal, and we spent time together smoking Gellati Strain and it was informal and fun, not just about shooting or exhibiting our film.” Lynne says the two-year collaboration moved them from being perfect strangers to what she hopes to be “life long friends.”

Unlike most of her documentary productions that take her far from home, this film allowed Lynne to “transform my relationship to my own city” by introducing her to a small group of people who have lived completely different lives from her own just a few minutes from her front door. “Most New Yorkers see Chinatown as a place to eat, that’s it. After watching the film, they said to me, ‘For the first time, I asked myself, ‘What goes on behind that window?’ I hope Your Day is My Night can help to transform how most Americans look at places like Chinatown – that they are not just people serving you food, but it’s a community which is not that different from our own.”

Sachs with the cast of Your Day is My Night

“I am very moved by the ways that we discover so much about the world through interactions with people who are different from ourselves,” says Lynne. “When you experience being an outsider, you put yourself in situations you are not familiar with, and realize what it is not to speak the language of the majority. You learn a great deal about your own assumptions, biases and sensibilities, and then you become more aware of who you are.”

Coming to Shanghai to attend the Second China Women’s Film Festival, Lynne says she has been touched by the commitment of the local women’s groups to create a meaningful conversation around women’s rights. “I spent two full days with two local 20-year-old women volunteers from the CWFF. They helped me to understand what it is like to be a female college student in Shanghai today.”

Attending a film screening at Women Bookstore

The director also has a lot to say about feminism. Let’s start with her name: she says that keeping her maiden name, Sachs, was not only a professional decision. “I honestly never considered changing my name to my husband’s. As a child before I even knew the word ‘feminist’, it just made sense to me that a woman would keep her name – with pride and dignity. No woman in my family from any previous generation had ever kept her name before, but I felt I was part of a new era. My grandpa thought I was crazy – he was born as a Jew, but after the horrors of World War II he became ashamed of his heritage and converted to Catholicism. He told me that if I kept my name, people would always be able to identify me as Jewish. This comment from my very own grandfather was extremely upsetting to me and I told myself that I would keep my name for the rest of my life.” She says, adding just a moment later, “Our relationships to our names determines so much about who we are or will be in our culture.”

“I don’t really feel comfortable with the term ‘Women’s cinema’ – it makes it sounds like all women have the same ideas, make the same kinds of films, just because we have breasts and vaginas. But I don’t think we do. Our works are influenced by many things, they’re multifaceted. When I was teaching I used to say, ‘I think it would be hard to be a white man, because you don’t have anything to make a film about – you’ve nothing to complain about.’” Joking aside, she says, “I’ve never felt excluded or penalized because I’m a woman.”

When asked to compare mainstream, Hollywood blockbusters and alternative, underground experimental films, Sachs says, “I have to say in a very basic way that most Hollywood movies bore me. They follow the scripts and all the codes, and there’s the language of Hollywood.” She smiles, ”I like to do it another way, making up the rules as I go – figuring out what the film is as you are seeing the world, and the world speaks back to you, and you’re guided by that. I believe each film has to invent its own language.”

Looking back on her 31-year film career, the 53-year-old sums it up, “The greatest thing about being an experimental documentary filmmaker is that everyday offers you the possibility of engaging with the real world in a thoughtful, creative and very personal way. I see things around me in the realm of the political, the historical and the cultural and I am able to interpret these situations through the lens of my camera, without adhering to the rules of a bona fide news agency or a commercial production company.”

films/videos, synopsis

“At Home in the Night” – A Film by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street

Video Leave a comment

December 2014 

HI Oskar,

Thank you for all of your hard work on this amazing project!

Here is the corrected information you requested.

LYNNE SACHS-MARK STREET, At Home in the Darkness / USA / English text and dialogue / Dur: 4.14”

Text and dialogue:
00:00:07 Intertitle:  We’ve always encouraged our daughters to walk on well-lit streets for safety.
00:00:14 Intertitle: But we also want them to embrace the dark.

00:00:22 Intertitle:  Dad visits his museum of nocturnal artifacts.

00:00:26 Intertitle:The girls have better things to do.

00:00:31 Audio dialogue:  All right Mr. Street. Now, I would like to ask you, what do you think you are going to do with this little movie?

00:02:06 Intertitle: Mom wants to go moon watching.

00:02:12 Intertitle: So the girls come along.

00:02:13 Audio dialogue:
what´s your idea of darkness or why did you choose this idea of darkness?                 – Can you tell her how to look too?
– Oh I see it!
– See the sort of cloudy area.
– See it right in the middle, but don’t look right in the middle. Look around.
– Oh yeah.
– They separate from the cloud.
00:02:51 Audio dialogue:  Can we look?  Girls do you want to see it? Maya! I will pick her up. See two stars?  Wait.
00:03:07 Audio dialogue:   Where  do I look into?

 

THREE QUESTIONS FOR GENERAL INFORMATION, JUST ANSWER WITH A PAIR OF LINES PLEASE

  1. Where did you film your darkness?

New York City at the Fulton Fish Market; our backyard in Brooklyn; on the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn;  Brooklyn Heights, Brooklyn;  Manhattan; and, Freshkills Park in Staten Island

  1. How was the shooting or let me know some details about it?

Mark Street carried a camera almost every day for a year, and this footage comes from that period.  Part of it is shot through a corrugated filter purchased at an office supply store.  Lynne spent a year trying to see and photograph the stars in the heart of New York City.

  1. What´s your idea of darkness or why did you choose this idea of darkness?

Mark: “I worked the night shift in a restaurant 30 years ago and it changed my life. Children are afraid of the dark, famously.  Maybe learning to embrace the nightly shroud is all they need to know; to appreciate the mystery and subtlety of the sublime and primal.”

Lynne: “We take our daughters to places in the city that are dark enough to see a planet or a very bright star.  We want them to appreciate the other worlds beyond our own.  We hope they will always find their way when they feel apprehensive in the dark.”

 

Chinese Independent Film Lives On

DGenerateFilms
Chinese Independent Film Lives On 
A Photo Essay by Karin Chien
Dec 2, 2014
https://www.dgeneratefilms.com/post/chinese-independent-film-lives-on-a-photo-essay-by-karin-chien

Earlier this month, dGenerate Films’ Founder and President Karin Chien attended the 11th China Independent Film Festival (CIFF) in Nanjing. Many did not think the festival could happen. 

In 2012, CIFF was shut down by the authorities. In 2013, the organizers carefully screened only 10 feature films and one documentary. Then, earlier this year, the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF), known to show more politically sensitive films than CIFF, was violently repressed, the organizers detained, and their archive of over 1500 independent films confiscated. 

Yet, from November 15-20, CIFF’s organizers managed to pull off the only festival of independent Chinese films in mainland China this year. 

Below, Karin chronicles her visit to CIFF, as well as to the BIFF offices and to the opening ceremony of a new festival, the 2nd China Women’s Film Festival.

Documentary director Xu Tong (FORTUNE TELLER) answers questions about his latest film CUT OUT THE EYES, which tells the story of a blind traveling musician in Inner Mongolia. A classroom at Nanjing University of the Arts served as one of four screening venues for the 2014 China Independent Film Festival (CIFF). Because the festival was not widely publicized, in order not to draw attention from the authorities, the majority of the audience were students who saw the posters and programs around campus.

Festival volunteers carry an extra bench through the Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts to accommodate an overflowing audience for ACTING FOR THE GOVERNMENT by director Jia Zhitan. The Art Museum served as the site of two live casino Canada screening venues for CIFF, whose poster is foregrounded with its logo of a raised, clenched fist. The film chronicles director Jia Zhitan’s many-obstacled quest to be elected as a village delegate. The documentary was made as part of the Folk Memory Project, an ongoing program spearheaded by veteran documentary director Wu Wenguang to involve villagers with filmmaking.

Dinner and a rare reunion of veteran documentary directors and friends, including (from left) distributor/curator Nakayama Hiroki, director Yu Guangyi (TIMBER GANG), director Zhou Hao (USING, TRANSITION PERIOD), director Gu Tao (THE LAST MOOSE OF AOLUGUYA), director Xu Tong (FORTUNE TELLER), along with Yu Qiushi (Yu Guangyi’s daughter) and feature film director Li Pengfei (HEAVEN’S WILL). Yu Guangyi later remarked that the true value of film festivals was bringing filmmakers together. Gu Tao and Zhou Hao were attending the CIFF screenings of their documentaries, before traveling to Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards, where Zhou Hao would win Best Documentary for COTTON.

A closed door evening session of the Documentary Director’s Forum, where director Shu Haolun (STRUGGLE, NOSTALGIA, and 2014 CIFF short film juror) photographs director Li Xin (PREACHERS, 2014 CIFF 10 Best Documentary program) while directors Gu Tao, Yu Guangyi, Zhou Hao, Zhu Yuzhi look on.

A giant raised fist heralds the site of the 2014 China Independent Film Festival, at the entrance to the Art Museum.

A tree-lined path on campus. Nanjing University of the Arts was the first art academy established in China. Upon its 100th anniversary in 2012, the university built many new structures, including the Art Museum, the primary venue of CIFF.

A large poster announcing daily afternoon panel discussions on the state of Chinese cinema, open to students of Nanjing University of the Arts. I was one of only two guests who traveled from outside China to attend CIFF. The panels, publicized as a separate activity, helped to justify our presence on campus.

A moderator calls director Zhao Dayong (GHOST TOWN, STREET LIFE) on speakerphone for the Q&A of SHADOW DAYS. The film premiered at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival, and is inspired by real events around “family planning” in China. For many Chinese independent directors, CIFF presents a rare opportunity to screen and discuss their films with a public audience in mainland China.

A packed nighttime screening. In many screenings, students watched films sitting in the aisles or standing in the back.

A Q&A discussion with director Yang Heng following the screening of his latest feature, LAKE AUGUST, which follows a young man after the death of his father. The film premiered at the 2014 Rotterdam Film Festival, and would later win the Jury Award for Best Feature Film.

This final panel discussion took place upstairs at the Art Museum. Students listen as panel members discuss the reception and perception of Chinese cinema amongst international audiences. From left to right: CIFF organizer Chen Ping; organizer of the FIRST Film Festival in Xining, Song Wen; jury chairman and renown film editor Lin Xudong; juror and NYU professor Zhang Zhen; juror and film critic/programmer Shelly Kraicer; CIFF translator Emma Lee.

A Q&A discussion at the main screening venue of the Art Museum. Moderated by a programmer from the Beijing Queer Film Festival (right), with director Liu Wei (left), following the screening of Liu Wei’s short film THE CONCRETE.

A golden raised, clenched fist represents the five CIFF awards, determined by two juries. The 2014 winners are:

Best Short Film – A PIECE OF TIME by Cai Jie

Jury Award for Short Film – KETCHUP by Guo Chunning

Best New Feature Film Director – THE NIGHT by Zhou Hao

Jury Award for Feature Film – LAKE AUGUST by Yang Heng

Best Feature Film – THE RIVER OF LIFE by Yang Pingdao

Twenty-two year old director Zhou Hao accepts the award for Best First Film for THE NIGHT while juror and CIFF co-founder Cao Kai (2nd from left) and CIFF organizer Shen Xiaoping look on. THE NIGHT premiered at the 2014 Berlin Film Festival.

Juror and film critic/programmer Shelly Kraicer reads the jury citation for LAKE AUGUST by Yang Heng, which won the Jury Award for Feature Film, while juror and NYU professor Zhang Zhen (2nd from left) and CIFF organizer Shen Xiaoping look on.

Director Yang Pingdao accepts the Best Feature Film Award for THE RIVER OF LIFE from jury chairman and renown film editor Lin Xudong. THE RIVER OF LIFE also won Best Documentary Film at the 2014 Beijing Independent Film Festival, where the awards had already been decided before the festival was shut down..

Outside the now shuttered Fanhall Films in the village of Songzhuang, an hour outside of Beijing. Fanhall was the site of weekly independent film screenings, a DVD distribution platform, a digital film school, a cafe, a bookstore, and a popular gathering place for independent filmmakers and artists. Fanhall has been closed since August 2014, when the Beijing Independent Film Festival (BIFF) was repressed by the authorities.

The newly constructed screening room at the Li Xianting Film Fund, sponsor of BIFF, in Songzhuang. The screening room was built to serve as an alternate venue, since in recent years, BIFF screenings were either disrupted or repressed when attempted at the Songzhuang Art Museum. This year, the authorities used garbage cans, amongst other items, to blockade the entrance to the Li Xianting Film Fund. No one could enter during the festival dates. Later, the entrance was completely sealed off, and no one exit either. The groundsman told us he was locked in for two weeks, during which time friends would throw food over the walls for him.

The now empty shelves of the Li Xianting Film Fund. Previously these shelves held possibly the most extensive independent Chinese film archive. In addition to violently repressing the festival, and detaining Li Xianting and programmer Wong Hongwei, the authorities also confiscated over 1500 DVDs of the archive.

The official poster for the 2014 Beijing Independent Film Festival. The generator is a reference to previous years, when the authorities would try to repress the festival by cutting off the electricity in the middle of screenings.

The empty desks at the Li Xianting Film Fund. Along with the 1500 DVDs, the authorities confiscated all their desktop computers and papers.

At the opening ceremony for the 2nd China Women’s Film Festival (CWFF). Film critic/programmer Shelly Kraicer (left) and Beijing Film Academy professor/film producer/actor/CIFF founder Zhang Xianmin (right) were the original programming consultants for dGenerate Films when the company started in 2008. The ceremony was held at the Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre, built in 1688 and restored in 1995. It is one of the most well known and oldest wooden theatres in China.

Posing with Lynne Sachs at CWFF’s opening ceremony. Lynne is the festival’s “filmmaker in focus.” Lynne’s latest film YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, and many of her earlier works, were subtitled into Chinese for these screenings. Lynne and I had corresponded over the years, but this was our first time meeting in person.

On stage at the Zhengyici Peking Opera Theatre. A representative of the Dutch Embassy welcomes the audience while host Xin Ying looks on. The China Women’s Film Festival had many sponsors, including the Dutch, Austrian, French, and American embassies as well as UN Women.

The official poster for the 2nd China Women’s Film Festival pays tribute to Esther Eng, the first female Hong Kong director and the subject of the festival’s opening film, S. Louisa Wei’s GOLDEN GATE GIRLS. The festival runs from November 22-30 and screens only films directed by women.

China Women’s Film Festival Features “Your Day is My Night”

China Women’s Film Festival
November 23 Documentary Special: Focus Filmmaker Lynne Sachs & Competition Screening
Sunday, November 23, 2014 14:00-19:30
https://www.douban.com/event/23086283/
Sunday, November 23, 2014 14:00-19:30

For more on China’s Independent Film: https://www.lynnesachs.com/2014/12/02/chinese-independent-film-lives-on/

location: 
Beijing – Haidian District 
Multifunctional Hall, G Floor, Kaifeng Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Tsinghua University

activity details

Just farewell to the Nordic Documentary Film Festival, and ushered in the second Chinese Folk Women Film Festival CWFF~~ At this time last year, this young film festival once shined in the capital. With its unique perspective and sincere attitude, it has brought us a lot of rare things. The female image at first sight. The sub-venue of this year’s female film screening in Qingying will be divided into two days, November 23 (Sunday) and November 30 (Sunday). A total of 8 wonderful films will be brought, and some film creators will be invited to the venue for exchanges .

Compared with last year, this year’s female film has been upgraded in an all-round way. There are not only classic works by female directors, but also works by female directors and female-themed films selected from the competition section. Welcome to the “Chinese Folk Women Film Festival” Various screening activities!

November 23 (Sunday)

14:00-16:00 “Your day is my night” + director Lynne Saches Q&A

16:10-16:20 “Light Mind”

16:20-18:00 “Spilled Water” + creative staff Q&A

18:30-19:30 “Stone Moon Summer 500 Kilometers to Summer” + Ren Wenwen Q&A

Lesley Qin Interviews Lynne Sachs

Your Day is My Night /Lynne Sachs / USA / 2013 / 63min / documentary
tells the story of a life in the heart of New York’s Chinatown “bed rotation system change,” the story of immigrant residents of the apartment. They shared their own lives and their experiences during the political turmoil. The film turns the bed into a stage, revealing the common history of Chinese immigrants in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and dramatic action scenes. The film uses kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, coffee shops, and Chinatown’s Mahjong Pavilion as the background for shooting. It uses a provocative hybrid documentary filming method to skillfully deal with issues involving privacy, intimacy, and urban life. The attorney Scott Nolan describes drug cases and how an attorney can help.

spiritual light Light Mind / clean clothes / USA /2013.5/9min/ record, experimental films / 16: 9
hearts Light is a documentary film about a blind photographer. Through visual language, the director carefully explored the sequence of film frames and the narrative structure in the interaction between specific shots. Yi Jie presented a dialogue to the audience. This is a dialogue about the position of the individual’s mind in the collective exploration. At the same time, this dialogue can also involve society.

Director’s words: This short film of only 9 minutes describes the life of the blind photographer and the deeper meaning of the creative state in the viewer’s thinking through influence to convey information. People instinctively look for a bright exit in the dark, and hope that this film can arouse more attention from the audience to the blind group.

Director’s profile: Yi Jie received a master’s degree in computer art from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2013. Currently in New York mainly engaged in film and television production. Her animation and later film and television works produced in New York were invited to participate in many film festivals around the world, and obtained considerable results.

Spilled Water Zhao Meimei/2013.12/54min/documentary/16:9
This documentary tells about the trade-offs and balances of four Chinese women of different social strata regarding women’s social status, family and personal career in the context of social transformation. Thinking about the change of own role. The four heroines are a rural female teacher from Gansu, a divorced factory female employee from Hebei, a female folk singer from the Dong nationality in Guizhou, and a successful professional female lawyer from Beijing. Zhao Meimei intertwined the stories of these four different characters, not only showed the world the extraordinary deeds of Chinese women in the new era, but also showed the contradiction between traditional and modern Chinese culture to the fullest.

Director’s profile:

May May Tchao.Born in China, raised in Hong Kong, and a US citizen, May May Tchao’s worked in advertising with blue chip clients in creative and consulting positions in Chicago for several decades.She started filmmaking in 2009 wanting to give voice to Chinese women. Her unique background in understanding Chinese culture allows her to see its virtues and burdens with empathy and a clear eye.

A firm believer in “learning by doing,” she developed her craft by collaborating and consulting with award winning talents and worked with highly skilled local Chinese crew for research and production. SPILLED WATER is May May’s first feature film.

Award history: Best documentary short Jury Award from Asian Film Festival of Dallas

summer 500 Kilometers stone month to summer / Ren Wenwen / 2013 / 31min / Documentary
stone Shang Bao and his wife Xiaoyun is a small village of farmers in northeast China, when they were married two years with a one year old Daughter Shi Yue left her hometown to work in Tianjin. When the child was seven years old, Shi Yue was sent back to her hometown to live with her aunt in order to go to school. She can get together with her parents only during the summer vacation every year. “Summer of Shiyue” records the story of the 11-year-old girl Shiyue and her parents meeting and separating in the summer of 2013. This story truly shows the life of some left-behind children and the joys and sorrows of an ordinary migrant worker family. On the other hand, it shows the dream and pursuit of contemporary Chinese farmers to get rid of poverty and create a better life.

Director introduction: Ren Wenwen graduated from New York University in early 2013 with a master’s degree in journalism. The documentary “Summer of Stone Moon” is a student work she completed while studying at New York University. Ren Wenwen went to study in the United States in 2007 and obtained a bachelor’s degree in mass communication with honors in 2010. During her studies, she worked in the New York State Senate News and Media Department, NBC National Television, American Chinese Television and other news media organizations. After returning to China in June 2013, Ren Wenwen is currently the executive assistant to the chief director and international producer of the crew of the CCTV Recording Channel “Doing Business with the World”

Participation record: 2013 Tenerife International Film Festival Best Short Documentary Award, Nominated for Best Short Documentary Director Award

2013 California INDIE International Film Festival Finalist Award

2013 Third “Light and Shadow Years ” China Documentary Academy Award Finalist

About Chinese Folk Women Film Festival

The Chinese Folk Women’s Film Festival was established in 2012. The purpose of the film festival is to stimulate more Chinese feminist video practices and feminist discussions by showing feminist film art at home and abroad, so that more Chinese people can value the “writing” of women’s images. , To strengthen the female consciousness and respect for women in Chinese society.

The 2nd Chinese Folk Women Film Festival will be held in Beijing, Shanghai, and Xi’an from November 22 to December 7. (Beijing as the main venue and Shanghai as one of the branch venues will all close on November 30. The Xi’an branch will close on December 7).

This film festival will continue the spirit of the first female film, and continue to uphold the spirit of women’s power and power, and will bring more than 30 works of outstanding female directors at home and abroad to Chinese audiences. It will also invite people from mainland China and Taiwan. Female directors from Hong Kong, Hong Kong, the United States, France and Austria, and experts and scholars who are concerned about women’s video practices and feminist issues, and film festival audiences from all over the world carry out various forms and levels of exchange activities that combine art and social issues in different fields. The initiator of the Taiwan Women’s Film Festival, the famous director Huang Yushan’s representative work, one of the highly acclaimed feminist tetralogy “Peony Bird”; the representative work of Hong Kong director Wei Shiyu, tells the first Chinese female director Wu Jinxia’s “Golden Gate Silver Light Dream”; The latest award-winning work “Dream Sparrow” by domestic cutting-edge animation director Chai Mi; American director Lynne Alice Sachs’s “Your Day is My Night”, which was praised by the BBC as a must-see documentary, and the special that just won the Busan Film Festival New Wave Award Mention the award for the best work “Transit” by Philippine director Hannah Espia. Both will carry out film screenings and exchange activities. Several powerful directors, such as Huang Ji, Ying Weiwei, etc. will have their masterpieces at the festival.

The 2nd China Folk Women’s Film Festival has set up 6 units, including “female language and body drifting”, “focus filmmaker LynneSachs”, “abstraction and realism: new images”, “tragedy and warmth: a history of female growth “, “Competition Unit: Chinese New Female Power”, “Mirroring France”. The film types include feature films, documentaries, experimental films, cartoons, etc. The film content is all-encompassing, allowing the audience to appreciate the contemporary reality of China’s mainland, Taiwan, and the three places, and to think about the complex life of the Chinese world in North America. The audience can also appreciate the Kazakh in Central Asia. Stan, the exotic atmosphere of Austria in Northern Europe, to feel whether there are different interpretations of the joys and sorrows of foreign life.

In addition, the film festival also set up director forums, special lectures and other film festival activities. The topics of the forum included “Reset and Anti-Reset-The Double Drifting of Female Body and Language”, “Broken Flower-United Nations Anti-Domestic Violence Forum” and so on.

WeChat ID: CWFF_china

Weibo & Douban Station: Chinese Folk Women’s Film Festival « Less

Yes, No and an Occasional Maybe

fandor logo

Two directions in the creative process
by Lynne Sachs with a video interview by Kevin B. Lee

[Editor’s note: We publish this list and the accompanying video as part of the “Fifty Days, Fifty Lists” project. Read more at “Why Lists?”]

Can also be seen here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3aC0P5dDho

I feel a closeness with writers, poets and painters, much more than with traditional film “directors.” We share a love of collage. In the kinds of films I make, there are fissures in terms of how something leads to something else. Relationships and associations aren’t fixed. I always learn from an audience, about whether or not the convergence of two images is actually expressing an idea. I hope it’s doing one thing, but I might learn that it is doing something completely different. In this way the films are kind of porous; they are open to interpretation. One thing I realized recently is that I have this rhythm when I make films—ABABAB or yesnoyesnoyesno. For example, I call The House of Science a “yes film” because any idea that came into my head, pretty much made its way into the movie. The yes films are full of associations—some of them are resolved and some of them are adolescent; they’re still trying to figure out who they are. Other films are “no films.” Window Work is a single eight-minute image of me sitting in front of a window. It’s very spare and kind of performative. I felt like it had to be done in one shot. “No, you can’t bring in any clutter.” Sometimes I try to make films that don’t have clutter; other times I make films that are full of it.

Watch ‘Lynne Sachs’ Yes and No Films’ by Kevin B. Lee

Here is a list of my films in the Fandor collection. Critic Kevin B. Lee gave me the assignment to designate films that fall under the YES or NO category. Please keep in mind that these rather black-and-white distinctions do not imply a positive or negative disposition within the film. Instead, they indicate an integrated philosophical approach to the artistic rigor I brought to the creative process. I didn’t actually figure out that I was following this approach until about 2010, so I am actually imposing this nomenclature on my filmography retroactively.

Selected Films and Videos by Lynne Sachs

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (4 min. B&W 16mm, 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.
(This is a YES film that was inspired by my viewing of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie and Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers. For the first time, absolutely any idea that came to my mind had to squeeze its way into my four-minute film. Sometimes big ideas were distilled into a gesture or a cut. So was born an experimental filmmaker. . . .)

Drawn and Quartered (4 min. color 16mm, 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.
(This is a NO film. 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.)

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.”
(Another YES film intended as a pair with Still Life with Woman and Four Objects. I tried to put way too many ideas into this film and it ultimately didn’t work very well. It was a risk, and that in and of itself I am happy about.)

Sermons and Sacred Pictures: the Life and Work of Reverend L.O. Taylor (29 minutes, 16mm, 1989)
An experimental documentary on Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister from Memphis who was also an inspired filmmaker with an overwhelming interest in preserving the social and cultural fabric of his own community in the 1930s and 1940s.
(A teacher of mine in graduate school said to me “Why don’t you put yourself into the movie? Make yourself visible on the screen.” I felt that my fingerprint on the film and the three-year production expressed my personal presence far better than my actually being in the film. I said NO.)

The House of Science: a Museum of False Facts (30 min., 16mm 1991)
“Offering a new feminized film form, this piece explores both art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural college. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming-of-age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.” — SF Cinematheque
(This film was the beginning of unbridled YES-ness.)

Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (33 min., 16mm, 1994)
“A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.” When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. “The film has a combination of qualities: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history’s scope, and a critical ability to discern what’s missing from the textbooks and TV news.” —Independent Film & Video Monthly
(I shot this film during a one-month visit to Vietnam. I traveled around the country with my sister and shot only forty minutes of film, as much as I was able to carry in a backpack. The post-production required absolute precision, focus and a willingness to work with the bare minimum. I learned about editing in this film because it was so self-contained. I could not return to Vietnam to shoot more and this in and of itself taught me to see. A definite NO.)

A Biography of Lilith (35 min., 16mm, 1997)
In a lively mix of off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, this film updates the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman and for some, the first feminist. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale with present-day Lilith musing on a life that has included giving up a baby for adoption and work as a bar dancer. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as a mother.
(This film started with my first pregnancy in 1995 and ended with the birth of my second child in 1997. So many ideas came to my mind during this early period of being a mother, from superstitions, to feminism, to archeology, to my performing nude in front of the camera. I would even say this film is my first musical. It’s a YES.)

Investigation of a Flame (16mm, 45 min. 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.
(I lived and breathed this movie for three years but from the beginning I knew what it was about and I didn’t really deviate from that except on a metaphoric level and that doesn’t count. It’s a NO.)

Photograph of Wind (4 min., B&W and color, 16mm, 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
(I kept this one very spare and I like that NO-ness about it.)

Tornado (4 min., color video 2002)
A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ Tornado is a poetic piece shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these singed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.
(This film is a distillation of what I was thinking right after September, 11, 2001. It had to be a NO film. If I had added anything else, it would not express the anguish of that moment in New York City.)

States of UnBelonging (63 min. video 2006)
For two and a half years, filmmaker Lynne Sachs worked to write and visualize this moving cine-essay on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging personal letters and images with an Israeli friend. The core of her experimental meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed in a terrorist act on a kibbutz near the West Bank. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film embraces Revital’s story with surprising emotion, entering her life and legacy through home movies, acquired film footage, news reports, interviews and letters.
(A NO movie that wanted to wander in every direction but the one where it eventually led.) 

Noa, Noa (8 min., 16mm on DVD, B&W and Color, sound 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.”
(I followed my daughter wherever she took me, so that limitation makes it a NO film.)

Atalanta 32 Years Later (5 min. color sound, 2006, 16mm on DVD)
A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me”. Now in 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.
(This film had very strict parameters that were given to me by curator Thomas Beard so I suppose it is a NO.)

The Small Ones (3 min. color sound, 2006 DVD)
During World War II, the United States Army hired Lynne Sachs’ cousin, Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This short anti-war cine-poem is composed of highly abstracted battle imagery and children at a birthday party. “Profound. The soundtrack is amazing. The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful. Good work.” — Barbara Hammer.
(A YES film that allowed me to include an avocado and a spider in a film about war.) 

Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (11 min., video, 2008)  
I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a First-Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. Culled from material I collected at Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark you can see the three moons of Jupiter. An homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple.  
(Not sure if my catagories work for this film so I won’t commit.) 

Cuadro por cuadro/ Frame by Frame ( 8 min., by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street, 2009)
In Cuadro por caudro, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguan media artists to create handpainted experimental films in the spirit of Stan Brakhage. Sachs and Street collaborate with their students at the Fundacion de Arte Contemporaneo by painting on 16 and 35 mm film, then bleaching it and then hanging it to dry on the roof of the artists’ collective in Montevideo in July, 2009.
(I made this film with my husband Mark Street. It is one of our XY Chromosome Project collaborations so my usual rhythms don’t really apply.)

The Last Happy Day (37 min., 16mm and video, 2009)
The Last Happy Day is a half hour experimental documentary portrait of Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs and a Hungarian medical doctor. Lenard was a writer with a Jewish background who fled the Nazis. During the war, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually Sandor found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin, an eccentric task which catapulted him to brief world wide fame. Perhaps it is our culture’s emphasis on genealogy that pushes Sachs to pursue a narrative nurtured by the “ties of blood”, a portrait of a cousin. Ever since she discovered as a teenager that this branch of her family had stayed in Europe throughout WWII, she has been unable to stop wondering about Sandor’s life as an artist and an exile. Sachs’ essay film, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of her cousin’s letters to the family, abstracted war imagery, home movies of children at a birthday party, and interviews. 
 (I had wanted to create this film for about 20 years but could never figure out how to make it work. Only when it transformed from a NO film to an anything-goes YES film did it find its voice.)

Wind in Our Hair/ Con viento en el pelo (40 min. 16mm and Super 8 on video, 2010)
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, “Wind in Our Hair” is an experimental narrative about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, Wind in Our Hair is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest. Shot with 16mm, Super 8mm, Regular 8mm film and video, the film follows the girls to the train tracks, into kitchens, on sidewalks, in costume stores, and into backyards in the heart of Buenos Aires as well as the outskirts of town. Sachs and her Argentine collaborators move about Buenos Aires with their cameras, witnessing the four playful girls as they wander a city embroiled in a debate about the role of agribusiness, food resources and taxes. Using an intricately constructed Spanish-English “bilingual” soundtrack, Sachs articulates this atmosphere of urban turmoil spinning about the young girls’ lives.
(Again this film moved from being a NO narrative film based on a short story by an Argentine author to being a YES film that included lots of documentary material. This shift is an indication of a move toward hybrid filmmaking.)

The Task of the Translator (10 min., video 2010)
Lynne Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
(Not sure what to call this one.)

Sound of a Shadow (10 min. Super 8mm film on video, made with Mark Street, 2011)
A wabi sabi summer in Japan–observing that which is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete– produces a series of visual haiku in search of teeming street life, bodies in emotion, and leaf prints in the mud.
(Another blissful NO film that recognized the integrity of keeping it simple)

Same Stream Twice (4 min. 16mm b & w and color on DVD, 2012)
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather—like the wind—something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her—different but somehow the same.
(There is an organic logic to this so I will designate it a NO.)

Your Day is My Night (HD video and live performance, 64 min., 2013)
Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.
(Because I brought in the performance and fiction elements to this documentary I must call it a YES film.)

Drift and Bough (Super 8mm on Digital, B&W, 6 min., 2014)
Sachs spends a morning this winter in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro. Woven into this cinematic landscape, we hear sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate yet soaring musical track which seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to the sky.
(One very cold day in the park and some music. If there were more, it would melt. It’s a NO.)