Nightingale Cinema’s Christy LeMaster and Kartemquin Film’s Beckie Stocchetti join forces to present RUN OF LIFE, a co-curated experimental documentary and expanded media event running every third Monday.
This new series pairs a recent feature experimental documentary with a short nonfiction work in any number of mediums – performance, video short, interactive presentation, audio doc, etc.
Lynne Sachs’ YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT (New Documentary)
The Run of Life Experimental Documentary Series at Constellation (3111 N. Western Ave.) – Monday, 7pm
“With a subject matter inspired in part by Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, Lynne Sachs’ YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT is not so much an homage to Riis’ work as it is a modern reimagining of the issues he brought to light. Published in 1890, Riis’ book controversially documented the “shift-bed” lifestyle, among other aspects of the downtrodden immigrant experience, which involved people taking turns sleeping in shared beds. This practice still exists today, and Sachs uses it as a jumping-off point from which to explore various symbolic elements and the collective experiences of her characters. It’s far from a straightforward documentary, but much of what makes it so experimental actually happened off-screen; in 2011, after first learning about “hot bed houses” from a family member, Sachs decided to collaborate with her cast rather than merely film them recounting their stories. As she says in her director’s statement, “While working on YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT, I came to see that every time I asked a person to talk in front of my camera, they were performing for me rather than revealing something completely honest about their lives. The very process of recording guaranteed that some aspect of the project would be artificial.” Thus Sachs met with her subjects (a group of non-professional Chinese “performer/participants”) almost weekly over a year and a half, using the impromptu workshops to script the monologues that provide context to the film’s poetic structure. Sachs uses a combination of 16mm, Super 8, and HD video to disorienting effect; the scenes shot on film are stark in contrast with the crispness of various close-ups shot on video. Additionally, beds are not just a plot device, but also a symbol of the film’s themes (privacy, intimacy, and urban life, among others). In this way, Sachs’ film is also like a gallery installation or a piece of performance art. (Sachs and the cast have presented YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT as a live film performance on several occasions, and the artfulness of its construction combined with its social utility are reminiscent of Riis’ work, which is frequently exhibited in galleries around the world.) This hybrid documentary challenges not only the way such films are made, but also the way we watch and talk about it. Preceded by the sound piece LIGHT READINGS (Stephen Vitiello, 2001, 8 min) and the short film WINDOW CLEANING IN SHANGHAI (Laura Kissel, 2011, 3 min). Cinematographer Sean Hanley in person. (2013, 64 min, HD Digital Projection) KS”
I have found several of Lynne Sachs’s films unusually disarming. Wind in Our Hair starts by just hanging out with four barely adolescent girls and seems to drift with them to no evident purpose; one is tempted to say that the attention and impressionistic, closely shot fascination comes from a mother’s affection that a general audience has little reason to feel. By the time a narrative event starts to shape the film, we sort of know these girls, or we start to feel that we are among them by way of the film’s stylistic drifting. A non-incisive drift transforms itself into a thickening bundle of barely perceptible but compelling discourses through which one finds oneself caring about the characters, not as individualized, biographical characters, but as female beings drifting toward a world that is itself drifting toward sexual and political fission, a fission that might be disastrous or revolutionary. The energy that would feed that fission is felt in the experimental music of Juana Molina that accompanies the transcendent avant-garde film poem of the end-credits—the drifting girls have suddenly exploded into articulate girl-power and woman music, just as the drifting Lynne Sachs-made film explodes into incisive experimental film. The stirring success of the music and of the film’s coda suggest a positive future for these drifting girls, while the discourses woven finely into their lives during the entire film remain frighteningly daunting.
There is an analogously disarming feel in Drift and Bough, though it is a totally different kind of film with no character development at all. There I was disarmed by the unassuming succession of art-photo shots of snowy Central Park, shots that seemed pretty ordinary, but that again gently drifted toward a richer collection of elements, such as the graphic lines that did things like scale shifting. The lines of duck trails through the ice-pack—lines that “drew” a kind of benign insinuation into a cold world—seemed to help effect an insinuation into my affect. By the time that film ends, I have been drawn, partially consciously, into a meditative state that I wanted to resist at its beginning. The ending—with people moving about and with bicycle taxi and camera both drifting to the right—was a break in that mood, but it still maintains some of the meditative mood through the realization that a barely perceptible superimposition of nothing very distinguishable has occurred mysteriously for the first and only time in the film.
The disarming feeling in Sachs’s films is especially strong in Your Day is My Night. Again the film starts by hanging out with some ordinary people, in this case Chinese immigrants in a confined space doing ordinary things. We gradually meet these people by name and hear them interact and tell stories. I won’t try to develop how that works, but will just say that somehow this ordinariness changes into—not just the liking and caring about the characters that one can see in numerous effective documentary films such as Salesman and Fallen Champ and The Square and American Pictures, or in the ur-documentary Nanook, and even the surreal Act of Killing—the ordinariness in Sachs’s film changes into something more than those films’ liking of or sympathizing with characters, something more like loving those characters, though that seems a bit strong.
My main point is the experience across several films of this imperceptible transformation from a disarming ordinariness to something strongly opposite. The kicker for me with Your Day is My Night was that I first experienced the film as a documentary, not as a scripted film with actors performing characters via learned lines; thus, my feeling of being disarmed extended to the ontology of the represented reality. That reversal of expectation, from something like Direct Cinema to a set of carefully researched and scripted performances—including the insertion of a “fake” character, Lourdes—comes at different points in the film for different viewers, but that doesn’t really change the reception structure of the film, or the films discussed above—they have little or no character or story arc but have a reception arc that moves one from being disarmed, even being uninterested and dubious, to something stronger than caring and understanding.
Sachs’s refusal to romanticize the glimpses of hopefulness, and her ending of the film with a quotation that re-affirms the power of the world’s alienation, are important contributions to the depth that the reception-arc achieves. Though the film finally leads into territory beyond the opening close-shots of packed human flesh, beyond the later medium-shots of crowded beds within crowded rooms, and the still later long-shots within crowded apartments within a crowded neighborhood of one of the world’s most crowded cities…though the film leads us beyond this over-determined within-ness to other, less impacted parts of the city, indeed leads us to a bridge that Lourdes—the outsider—introduces to Haung, one of the Chinatown shift-bedders—though the film takes us out there to that suggestively transitional bridge, nevertheless the viewer remembers what Haung has said earlier in the film that he has no benign means to get out of this life buried deep within the world situation. He will not ever be able to go home to see his children and he will have to kill himself when he reaches retirement age, perhaps by jumping off a bridge, he says. We remember that line when we see him on the bridge with Lourdes, but we also see that Lourdes has benignly infected his alienation, and has infected the entire over-determined within-ness of the characters’ lives and of the film’s structure. The deep within-ness of the characters’ situations has been broached by the character Lourdes, and by Sachs with her bizarre idea to make a film of these unknown Chinese and the more bizarre idea to introduce a Puerto Rican immigrant deep into this pervading within-ness; Lynne Sachs herself has infected the characters’ alienation, for real, by making this strange film, and thus Sachs opens the documentary people, who play themselves, to Sachs’s world and to the film’s audience. And she opens the viewer to a well-hidden within-ness, through documentary explorations that go deeper than Direct Cinema. All this in a way that is so disarming.
“Leandro Katz: Arrebatos, Diagonales y Rupturas (Raptures, Diagonals and Ruptures)”
Curated by Bérénice Reynaud
Fundación Telefónica
Buenos Aires, Argentina
July – October, 2013
Since the demise of the US space mission’s efforts to transport human beings to other planets, our culture’s scientific fascination with the moon has certainly waned. Not so in the universe of media artist Leandro Katz whose selenographic obsessions take us to a cinematic stratosphere not even George Méliès could have imagined. In Buenos Aires, the Fundación Telefónica’s expansive retrospective of Katz’s work begins with an exquisitely conceived theater-in-the-round comprised of film images of the moon in all its full and crescent phases. In conversation with exhibition curator Bérénice Reynaud, Katz explained, “I was interested in sequential still photography, and in redundancy and structure —rather than in photography as hunting for images.” (Leandro Katz: Arrebatos, Diagonales y Rupturas. Espacio Fundación Telefónica, curated by Bérénice Reynaud, 2013. Exhibition catalogue.) Through Katz’s lens, we see the moon as mystical, aesthetic and, surprisingly perhaps, political. In it original 1976 iteration, Katz “wanted the audience to hold hands while watching … searching for a sense of a real community gathered to reflect.”
“Leandro Katz: Arrebatos, Diagonales y Ruptures” offers visitors the rare chance to immerse themselves in the numerous visual thought pieces the artist created during his 40 years as an Argentine in New York City as well as more recent work produced since Katz’s 2006 return to Buenos Aires. Committed to a personal filmmaking practice that covers experimental ethnography (Los Angeles Station, 1976 and Paradox, 2001), New York City downtown absurdist theater (The Grand Tarot of Charles Ludlam, 1987), transcendent politics (Crowd, 1976 and The Day You Will Love Me, 1997) and Mayan modernism (Twelve Moons and Moonshots, 1976), Leandro Katz tackles each of his projects with visual rigor and ingenuity.
Consistently engaged in a diverse array of practices including short experimental film and video works, moving image sculpture installations and artist made books, Katz created two particularly compelling black and white meditations on the notion of a crowd – as a social site of friction and anticipation. In Crowd 7×7 (1976), the camera observes a moving image of a mass of human beings, waiting for a something or someone, breathing a unified gasp of air. The piece is composed of a cube-shaped television dangling by a single chain, as if all the people on the screen are trapped inside. In Rhombus (2011), Katz’s camera gazes at a crowd while pure-color rectangles block out pieces of the image, allowing the viewer to observe one individual face after another. The effect is unexpected; without Katz’s digital erasure, each of these people would have become that proverbial lost soul in a crowd. In both pieces, the artist somehow generates seemingly contradictory feelings of compassion and rancor in his viewer.
Despite the proliferation of Che Guevara paraphernalia in our culture, Katz’s fixation on the resonances – both photographic and corporeal — of this late 20th century hero of the Latin American liberation movement is both idiosyncratic and potent. In The Day You Will Love Me (1997) and Exhumation (2001), he articulates two distinct explorations of Che, not so much as a larger-than-life force of history but rather as a mortal ensnared by the inevitability of death. Through Katz’s two documentary reflections, we discover the hollowness of contemporary society’s over-simplified portrait of this great man.
What strikes me most about the work and life of Leandro Katz is his diligent curiosity. Katz has a kind of magical ability to weave together multiple threads of discourse that rely on an intensely aware social sensibility, a poet’s empathy, a devotion to linguistic analysis and a love for the play of the experimental filmmaker. On both a formal and a conceptual level, he makes us look at day and night in new ways. In his 1977 Paris Has Changed A Lot, Katz projects New York City’s Grand Central Station and Park Avenue vertically, creating peculiar and exhilarating distortions that transform the cityscape. In his 2010 installation Lost Horizon, the breathtaking horizontal sweep of a beach meeting the ocean is infused with a sense of historical failure, a revolution gone awry, when it is juxtaposed with a portrait of Karl Marx. Ever the creator of a graphically rigorous mise-en-scéne, Katz explains to Reynaud in the exhibition catalogue that he always carries a red strip of fabric to a set, not knowing just how it will transform a space. During the production of Lost Horizon, “I took the banner to the beach; it was very windy that day, and I filmed it as it was floating almost horizontally. When I looked at the footage, I saw that the banner was covering the horizon. This gave me the idea of making an installation called Lost Horizon. In my house, I had a portrait of Marx that I had bought in a market in Moscow during the Perestroika. So this is a metaphorical installation about what happened to the dream of revolution.” At every turn in this exhibit, Katz’s moving image works revealed to visitors the formidable imagination of an artist in constant conversation with the world – as it was, as it is and as it could be.
Lynne gives lecture at the Universidad Simon Bolívar, Quito Ecuador May 2014
Presented at: Les Encuentros del otro festival cine festival international de cine documental, Quito, Ecuador; RIDE Risk/Dare/ Experiment Lecture at Pratt Institute; UC Berkeley Rhetoric Department; University of Southern California Cinema Department; Boston Museum School
“Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.”
–Paul KleePaul Klee, the early 20th century Swiss painter, gives us permission to look, document and experiment.
After 25 years of making experimental documentaries, I learned something that turned all my ideas about filmmaking upside down. I was working on “Your Day is My Night” (2013), my film about Chinese immigrants in New York, and I came to see that every time I asked people to talk in front of my camera, they were performing for me rather than revealing something completely honest about their lives. The very process of recording guaranteed that some aspect of the project would be artificial. I had to think of a way to change that, so I decided to invite them to work with me to make the film, to become my collaborators in a performative documentary experience – a hybrid mashup you might call it. This process began in 2011 and it’s changed the way I make movies. I believe that the inclusion of overt performance elements in a reality centered work of cinema produces a “documentation” of my subjects’ imaginations engaging with the world. This realization is extremely compelling to me.
My relationship to film has always allowed me to straddle between the traditions of documentary and experimental filmmaking. Am I comfortable breaking from a realist, objective tradition of non-fiction filmmaking? What is the central tension between reality and invention in my work? To what extent do I want to take my viewers on a creative journey? In what way is my audience engaging with me in my experiment?
I’d like to begin by talking about “Your Day is My Night” which I shot in a shiftbed apartment in New York City’s Chinatown. Blending autobiographical monologues, intimate conversations, and staged performances, the filmdocuments the lives of Chinese immigrants sharing a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown, offering a portrait of the Asian-American immigrant experience.
Initially documented in Jacob Riis’ late 19th century photographs, a shift-bed is a bed that is shared or rented by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Since the advent of tenement housing in the Lower East Side, working class people have shared beds, making such spaces a definable and fundamental part of immigrant life. A century later, the shift-bed remains a necessity for many, triggered by socio-economic barriers embedded within the urban experience.
Over the course of one hour, seven characters ranging in age from 58 to 78 play themselves and recount real experiences from their lives. Retired seamstresses Ellen Ho and Sheut Hing Lee recall growing up in China during the turmoil of the 1950s when their families faced violence and separation under Chairman Mao’s revolutionary yet authoritarian regime. Yun Xiu Huang, a nightclub owner from Fujian province, reveals his journey to the United States through the “snakehead” system, a complex underground economy of human smuggling. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals a collective history of Chinese immigrants in the United States.
I spent two years shooting and working with my performer-collaborators on this film. It was over this intense, revealing period that I began asking myself a very simple question. What do you call the people who are standing in front of your camera? Subjects? People who perform their own lives? Collaborators? Informants?
Another question came to my mind: How does allowing a fictional dimension become a catalyst for remarkable, unanticipated participation? How might it free everyone from the burden of the truth? In 2001, I collaborated with American video artist Jeanne Finley and seven Bosnian artists in Sarajevo on an early web art piece. This was a period in my own work when I was very interested in finding out how people dealt with the pain and memory of war. I made five pieces in a body of work I call “I Am Not a War Photographer” (2001 – 2009). In Bosnia, we did not want to ask each of our collaborators/participants to simply tell us their Balkan war stories of the 1990s. Instead, we asked each of them to become a composite character whose life included their own life as well as the life of someone they could be. This permission giving process was extraordinarily liberating for all of us. A new kind of truth emerged. You can see the results on the website we created together at www.house-of-drafts.org. This was the beginning my documentary detour.
Even before this time, I discovered Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleilwhile a student of experimental theater in Paris in 1981. Much more recently, I saw her Les Ephémères in New York City. This play is not based on a written text but rather on the everyday lives of the play’s cast members. In one scene, for example, you can see a phone conversation between a woman whose mother is in the hospital and some sort of administrator. The whole scene is played out on a small mobile platform which is pushed by hand across a runway-like stage. This scene grew from a composite of the performers’ individual memories. It feels simultaneously distinct and mythic, idiosyncratic and universal. Without knowing what was happening to me, I was drawn into a familiar narrative I would later have difficult time recounting. It wasn’t the story that mattered but rather the visual impression and the emotion.
Like a documentarian, Mnouchkine builds her “dramas” with her company as they work together listening, remembering and observing. Unlike more conventional theater, there is no debt to or inherent respect for a predetermined text. Mnouchkine explains: “The director has already achieved the greatest degree of power she has ever had in history. Our aim is to move beyond that situation by creating a form of theatre where it will be possible for everyone to collaborate. In our company, actors are really the authors.”
I have also been deeply inspired by the Brazilian 1960s theatre practitionerAugusto Boaland his The Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal believed that theatre could promote social and political change. The “spect-actors” (both the performers and audience in his case) explore and analyze the reality in which they are living through a playful engagement between texts and autobiography. Here, the theatrical bubble is punctured by an injection from the street, the home, the workplace, the craziness of everyday life. The fictional world is no longer a paradigm of hermetic purity.
In his 2008 film 24 City, Chinese film director Jia Zhangke drops us right into a Chengdu military factory that’s shutting down to make way for a luxury apartment complex. Clearly influenced by the populist sensibilities of the Italian Neorealists of the 1940s, Zhangke interviewed both real workers and fictional characters to convey these challenges. In one scene that continues to haunt me, the famous, highly recognizable actress Joan Chin engages in a theatrical scene with the actual employees of the factory. A Chinese viewer would certainly recognize the shifting discourses between a documentary and narrative mediation. Either way, the world is shaped by the camera.
While watching this scene, I asked myself how the wardrobe generates a meta-discourse around documentary and performance. Do we need to understand the social hierarchy between the female star and ladies of the factory when they are actually performing the same roles? Since there are so many non-fiction testimonial monologues throughout the film, do we really need to know the difference between what is authentic and what is invented?
It is also interesting to look at French director Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour 1985 documentary on the Holocaust in the context of our exploration of the documentary performance. Despite its subject, Lanzmann refuses to include a single archival image. He relies completely on our historical imaginations. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, a Jewish barber talks about cutting hair of people in the concentration camps who are soon to go to the gas chambers. We hear the director asking questions. The barber is both recounting his story from the past and performing his current life. We feel as if he is following a script of his own design. We as viewers must participate by imagining the horrible scenes he recounts. Like the man receiving the haircut and Lanzmann the director, we become complicit as we listen and engage.
Now I would like to share with you two more “documentary detours” in my own work. In both of these films, I work with my own children as a way to access and layer the multiple dimensions by which we experience and interpret reality.
I made The Last Happy Day in 2009. This is the fourth of five films in “I Am Not a War Photographer”. It is an experimental portrait of my distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a writer who fled the Nazis. During the war, the US Army hired Sandor to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task which catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. My film, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, uses letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, and interviews. In the opening scene, four children help us as viewers to grapple with disparate biographical elements from Sandor’s life. In a more conventional documentary, we would feel compelled to articulate and illustrate all of the facts of this mysterious man’s life, but through the eyes and ears of children we can delight in all of life’s haunting paradoxes and inconsistencies. I gave the children complete freedom and in this way the details of the past became fluid and unpredictable. Throughout the film, these four children discover, examine, challenge and embrace the biographical details of a man they would never know. Through these conversations, we as the audience work with the children in the process of constructing a real person who is also somehow a delightfully complex fictitious character.
The last work I will discuss was inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina. Honestly, this was supposed to be my first narrative film based on a pre-existing text, but of course the beauty and complexity of quotidian life pushed its way into my film. Con viento en el pelo/ Wind in Our Hair was originally supposed to be 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, the film soon became circumscribed by the profound Argentine political and social unrest that surrounded us during our production in Buenos Aires in 2008. My collaborators included several extraordinary local experimental filmmakers, my two daughters and two Argentine girls. Together, we all moved about this enormous city with our cameras and far-out costumes, witnessing a metropolis embroiled in a debate about agribusiness, food and taxes. Using a Spanish-English “bilingual” soundtrack, I tried to articulate Cortazar’s quiet, insightful intimacies within the true-to-life atmosphere of urban turmoil spinning about the young girls’ lives.
I hope that you can see from these works my interest in using performance as a liberating element in a life long cinematic engagement with reality. For me, injecting a performative gesture in a work that is rooted in the social, political or cultural zeitgeist of the day acts as a catalyst for discovery.
Media References:
1. Your Day is My Night (65 min. 2013) by Lynne Sachs
2. Les Ephémères (Live Theater Performance, 2009) by Ariane Mnouchkine
International Festival of Documentary Cinema: Encounter with Other Cinema – Quito, Ecuador
“Cinema & Curiosity: A Conversation between Alexandra Cuesta and Lynne Sachs”
May 2014
English Translation of Catalog Entry
Alex Cuesta and Lynne Sachs in Quito, Ecuador
Lynne: Why do you feel the need to make films?
Alex: Since I was young I have always been curious about the world around me. I used to draw a lot, and make collages, but I never had an art education until I got to college where I decided to study photography without knowing why at the time. I didn’t get into filmmaking until much later, and I was never interested in conventional filmmaking- separation of roles, genres, storytelling. My interest was in using images to discover something that I could not put into words. The closest thing is music or poetry, but for me images were able to communicate reality. When I discovered experimental film it blew my mind because I didn’t that you could make films this way. With film I can look at the ordinary and it becomes extraordinary. It is a way to express nuances, and things that are visible to me but maybe not to others. Every day things can transcend and take on a deeper meaning. A street at night, is no longer just a street but a possibility to imagine something else, it evokes something on the screen, and next to another image. I’ve continued in this path because I really believe that in this high speed, image filled, hyper real world an audience has the right to be exposed to other ways of making and thinking about cinema. And it is a way for me to connect with the outside and to learn.
Lynne: Can you describe the alternative film cosmos in both the universes you call home?
Alex: I left Ecuador at an early age but before that my family had always moved so I never really had strong roots anywhere. And I still don’t. I grab things as I go along. The film community I am part of in the United States is crucial for me because there I discovered the kind of work I was interest in making and films that I couldn’t have seen anywhere else. I met people that influenced me deeply and opened my understanding to cinema and art. It is kind of ironic that I found this in Los Angeles because often when you speak of film in that context your mind immediately goes to Hollywood, yet this avant garde world exists in a universe completely apart. But even though I believe identity is built through experience, where we are from does have an influence on our view of the world, and so my cinematic concerns were always connected to Latin America. Coming back to Ecuador has been cathartic to understanding my filmmaking and my process against this very different backdrop. I am still searching for my place here but I think there is a lot to do, and a lot of films to show. And especially now that Ecuador is having a big moment in building a film identity I think it is the moment to include non conventional film processes.
Lynne: Do you work alone or with a group?
Alex: It depends on the project but generally when I shoot 16mm I use a Bolex and I can be alone, and I prefer to be on my own. I go out and search for images and it is a long process. Some days I don’t shoot anything and others I shoot a lot, and I have to find a personal rhythm. Also I feel there is a vulnerability to being in the street by myself and the camera that creates something special between the people I encounter and I. It is a sense of being an observer but also being observed, and this non verbal communication is present in the films. However in my new film which I shot on video I did work with a team, and it was a very different experience. It influences the relationship with the subject, the length of the shots and the ideas I am searching for. It worked for that film because I was creating visual tableaus that I wanted to feel staged, even though its documentary, and having a crew helped that sensation of performance, fiction within non fiction.
Lynne: What kinds of things spark you to begin making a film?
Alex: The curiosity I spoke of before is at the root of any new project. It is usually related to cities, construction of space, social and cultural constructions as well. I think of the world in general, how things work, and what things mean. It comes from an place of questioning and wondering about what “reality” is. I am interested in the margins, and the parallel realities that within one place. For example in my film Piensa en Mi, it began with one image: a man waiting for a bus. And I was driving in this city filled with cars and people inside these machines I kept seeing people waiting for public transport and it felt like a third world country because the social separations was so visual and extreme. And then I begin researching. I walked and spoke to people and I went to an organization called the Bus Riders Union and had a lot of information about the history of public transport in the city but also the demographic of people that use it and of course it was primarily minorities. And in the city like Los Angeles, the bus is hidden, you never see the people that use, and it definitely a very different experience of the city.
Lynne: Can you talk about one director, a film, a poem, and a trip you have taken that have inspired you as an artist?
Alex: Ignite Images Event Photography fulfilled our dreams and helped us in receiving our photos in an unique way. One of the first things that spoke to me was In the Street by Helen Levitt and James Agee. It is a portrait and a city symphony of the Bronx in New York shot in the forties. Their background is also still photography and I loved seeing photographic images without a story or dialogue, capturing the mundane and opening up meaning. Also the films of Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren, but more importantly the films of Robert Fenz who was my mentor and is a close friend. Through his films I discovered that cinema could be about the image first, and could be made in a personal way. I also feel connected to Latin American experimental/ political films from the sixties like Santiago Alvarez, The Hour of the Furnaces by Solanas and the films of Glauber Rocha. In terms of photography an influence is modern photography, people like Paul Strand, Robert Frank, and Bruce Davidson. And poetry the Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, the poetry of Fernando Pessoa and the poems of Mahmoud Darwish from Palestine.
Alex: How did you begin making films? What led you to this specific world of experimental/ avant garde film world?
Lynne: I was definitely not a kid who loved the movies, at least the kind of Hollywood movies that featured the “stars” and predictable plots. My interests were in painting, photography and poetry. It wasn’t until I was about 20 years old that I discovered the kinds of experimental or at least art films that could weave together these fascinations of mine. I studied in Paris for a year during which I came across the films of Chantal Ackerman, Agnès Varda and Marguerite Duras. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these directors are all women. Before I saw the works of these visionary artists, I had hardly even seen a film directed by a woman. Very sad.
Alex: It is really interesting for me to hear this because there are so many parallels with my own background. I never had a fascination with “movies” either, and I began with still photography as well. The first experimental film I saw was Meshes in the Afternoon by Maya Deren when I was 22 and later in grad school I remember seeing Jean Dielman by Chantal Ackerman, and both blew my mind.
Alex: What is the relationship between your films and the city of New York?
Lynne: I came to New York City kicking and screaming in 1996. My partner Mark Street who is also a filmmaker pretty much dragged me from the natural beauty of San Francisco, California to the cold, much more urban east coast because he so loved this city. It’s been about 18 years now and I must admit I am really happy about living here. Brooklyn (the area where I live) has become a hub for experimental filmmaking which means there are lots of places to see great work and people in the community who want to be involved in helping you make your films. You might think that since we are in this big art and film city that it would feel too competitive, but actually since most of us make movies that never really make any money, I think we all want this alternative cosmos to thrive in whatever way possible. In the past few years, NYC has even begun to inspire me artistically. I made YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT and DRIFT AND BOUGH right in town. I will be screening both of these films at EDOC.
Alex:– I know what you mean about New York. It was always the place I wanted to visit and I fell in love with the city when I went for the first time. I was 21. I met Jonas Mekas and people at Anthology Film Archives. And my first film Recordando El Ayer screened at Views- New York Film Festival thanks to Mark McElhatten, and it really opened the doors to being part of the experimental film community there. I am so happy people will have a chance to see your film Your Day is My Night at EDOC. It really captures the city in a way I’ve never seen before. You show a hidden part of the city that is in fact the reality of this metropolis, and of the United States in terms of immigrants and reinventing oneself. It is an amazing film.
Alex: Your body of work is so extensive, and impressive, and you have worked in a variety of forms: long form, short form , experimental, documentary, installation, how do you conceptualize a new work? What is your process? How do you decide which will be the path you take in terms of structure and style?
Lynne: In the broadest way possible, I would say that every one of my artistic projects begins with a level of burning curiosity. I wonder how the detritus of the Vietnam war might be manifested in the landscape of that country, I wonder how people connect to objects in their lives, I wonder about a distant cousin of mine who saw the worst of World War II, I wonder how the snow looks on a tree branch, I wonder how little girls learn about their bodies. I would say I have been exploring these and other questions with my camera for pretty much all of my adult life. Once I commit (and this is a key word) to this investigation, I begin the arduous and joyful process of finding the right visual and aural language to express the various discoveries I make. Every film calls for its own particular vocabulary. No one, not even me, knows this evolving language until the film is finished. Everyone – filmmaker and audience – is learning. I like that moment of mutual discovery, the “aha” of it all.
Alex: I really love how you articulate your process in terms of curiosity and learning. Also, that you honor your material and let it speak to you, tell you what it is. This is hard to explain to people that work in more conventional ways, and also it takes a lot of practice and intuition I think. A lot of trust in your initial curiosity. Can you tell us which filmmakers, or films, or experiences have influenced your making and your thinking?
Lynne: Seeing the films of Chris Marker in the late 1980s revealed to me that you could make something called an essay a film, a moving image work that explored the world and offered as many questions as it did answers. Seeing his “Sans Soleil” made me realize how much more vital it is to be a filmmaker than a director. There is a difference. Some other transformative viewing experiences include: “Window Water Baby Moving” by Stan Brakhage; “Fuses” by Carolee Schneemann; “Vivre Sa Vie” by Jean Luc Godard; “Killer of Sheep” by Charles Burnett; “La Ciénega” by Lucrecia Martel; and all of the films of Raul Ruiz, Ken Jacobs, Werner Fassbinder, Craig Baldwin and Maya Deren.
Alex: Do you work with people or by your self?
Lynne: I really enjoying going solo with my Bolex camera and a roll of film but I also thrive on the electricity that occurs when I work with other people. Recently, after twenty-five years of making experimental documentaries, I learned something that turned all my ideas about filmmaking upside down. While working on Your Day is My Night in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York City, I came to see that every time I asked a person to talk in front of my camera, they were performing for me rather than revealing something completely honest about their lives. The very process of recording guaranteed that some aspect of the project would be artificial. I decided I had to think of a way to change that, so I invited my subjects to work with me to make the film, to become my collaborators. For me, this change in my process of filmmaking has moved me toward a new type of filmmaking, one that not only explores the experiences of my subjects, but also invites them to participate in the construction of a film. I also think of my “crew” as a group of really extraordinary artists who have decided to join me on a project they too are excited about creating.
Alex: How do your films relate to the films in the program?
Lynne: Honestly, I chose films by people in the NYC film community who make work that really inspires me to look at the place where we all live in a new, refreshing way. The EDOCS audience will see films by my husband Mark Street and lots of dear friends of mine. This is my community.
Experimental Documentaries from New York City and Los Angeles
2014 International Festival of Documentary Cinema: Encounter with Other Cinema
Quito, Ecuador
Co-curated by Alexandra Cuesta and Lynne Sachs
Synopsis for NYC program by Lynne Sachs
Ten New York City artists ranging in age from 24 to 80 bring their personal impressions of the place they call home to Quito’s EDOCS screen. This program of experimental documentaries transforms a “bigger than life” metropolis into a place full of delicate, sometimes dirty, occasionally shiny images that will certainly complicate the more famous, monolithic images created by the mainstream media. Because these films are shot “from the inside out” by people who know the city well and are sensitive to the weave of the urban fabric, they reveal a fresh, intimate view from the ground up. Where and how do we engage with the city’s flora and fauna in our daily lives? How might the omnipresent trash of the streets reveal something about our quotidian rituals? When does the simple task of walking along a sidewalk become a surprising piece of radical performance art? Where are the silent, hidden workers who make the things we wear everyday? Together we will answer these questions during and after the screening of the NYC section of “Scenic Ruptures”.
Dear Alexandra,
Some people believe that the world looks better through “rose colored glasses.” I am not sure if this expression has any meaning in the Spanish language, but in English the implication is that these glasses are able to trick us into thinking that the bad things in life are not really so bad. It’s a kind of strange, optically generated false optimism. I’ve been living in New York City for eighteen years, and I must admit that ever since I arrived here I refused to put on those proverbial rose-colored glasses. I always wanted to see the dust, grime and shine of this major metropolis for what is was, in the same way that I truly prefer to see people without makeup, finding the lines of aging far more compelling than the smooth surface of cosmetics. I suppose this is the reason I make experimental films. I don’t want to cover up the brilliant, scary, intimidating surprises that the world offers, but instead prefer to look head-on with my eyes open. In this program, I have chosen a suite of short films that I think will show you and the audience at EDOCS a side of New York City that is rarely depicted through those big mainstream Hollywood movies that travel so easily across borders.
We will start the program by diving into the under water world. “Living Fossil” reveals a thriving beach side “community” of sea crabs, lovingly deposited on our local coastline by the Atlantic Ocean. Then in “Fulton Fish Market” you’ll see the nocturnal activities of the workers at the renowned, though now sadly defunct, South Street Seaport market. Next we will visit the cluttered, colorful streets of Manhattan by way of the object animations in “Early 12 New York Song”. Here, we will look at the magnificent detritus of the sidewalks, transforming the trash of our city into an archeologist’s treasure box. After that, we will take a pastoral detour to Central Park where, believe it or not, you will witness the Christmas time ritual of SantaCon. “Extinction Becomes Us”is an exquisite film portrait ofanannual, anarchic event in which thousands of New Yorkers prance around the city dressed like, you guessed it, Santa Claus. Oh, and I better add, they are all drunk! From this nonsensical, apolitical reverie, we will move onto something far more dialectic. “Capitalism: Child Labor” is radical in every sense of the word. The film is an aggressive visual diatribe against all that New York City has come to represent in the world arena. The next two films on our visual journey will take us downtown to Chinatown. Through “Chinaman’s Suitcase”, we’ll experience a riveting, darkly humorous performance piece in which a somber traveler from Chinatown walks all the way to Midtown and then back again. As a finale to his low-key pedestrian adventure, our protagonist delivers one of the most outlandish film finales I have ever seen. “Night Scene New York” then carries us on a breathtaking, yet contemplative magic carpet ride through the same neighborhood. Moving north just a few blocks to the starkly different Lower East Side, “Bitch Beauty” gives us a candid portrait of a downtown woman artist who has lived a life full of heartbreak, disappointment, creativity and revelation. Our last image of New York City is my own “Drift and Bough”. We had an extremely cold and long winter this season, so I thought the only way I could reckon with its challenges was to make a movie.
I hope you will enjoy this cinematic voyage through the place I call home. I certainly had a great time designing your itinerary.
All the best,
Lynne Sachs
Quito, 9 de marzo, 2014
Querida Lynne,
Gracias por tu carta. Tengo mucha curiosidad de ver a Nueva York a través de los filmes que has escogido. Me identifico con tu mirada porque, al igual que tú, pienso que la esencia de un lugar esta detrás de lo que se percibe en el exterior. Como dices, hay infinitas perspectivas desde donde explorar una ciudad, y en mi caso el entendimiento de Los Ángeles está ligado a mi contexto personal. Viví ahí durante siete años, siendo este el tiempo más largo en que he vivido en un solo lugar. Desde temprana edad me he trasladado de ciudad en ciudad, llevando conmigo diversas culturas. Por esto, mi relación con el lugar es una experiencia simultánea entre pertenecer y ver desde afuera, adaptarme y observar, siempre desde algún lugar en la mitad. Es desde ahí desde donde construyo mi descripción de esta gran urbe. Una mirada que se fija en los márgenes, en los intersticios y en lo invisible. Paradójicamente también es la razón por la que mi práctica e interés en el cine están enraizadas en lo experimental, justamente porque este proceso permite construir perspectivas permeables y abrir significados.
Al no disponer de un centro definido en un amplio territorio, una de las características más impactantes del imaginario urbano de Los Ángeles es el urban sprawl, “esparcimiento urbano”. Partiendo de esto, el espacio de la ciudad y de sus habitantes no se puede definir con fronteras trazables. Es así que he creado un programa de obras poéticas y personales que crean una descripción abierta y ambigua, proponiendo una oportunidad para imaginar a la ciudad. Además, esta selección servirá como una introducción a las diversas tradiciones experimentales en el cine.
El primer filme en el programa, My Tears Are Dry, es un homenaje al cineasta experimental Bruce Baillie y también una oda al ideal californiano: palmeras y el cielo azul en una tarde de descanso. Después, observaremos la decadencia suburbana en un paisaje nocturno donde imágenes de películas viejas evocan al pasado en el filme Vineland. Continuando con un paisaje diurno, estaremos visualmente estimulados con la gran cantidad de vallas, sonidos, música y letreros que aparecen en Get Out of the Car, una sinfonía de ciudad del gran cineasta Thom Andersen, quien describe la nostalgia en el presente y visibiliza el maquillaje multicultural de la ciudad. Seguimos con The Electric Embrace, un estudio formal y estético filmado en película blanco y negro de alto contraste, sobre estructuras eléctricas e industriales particulares en las afueras de la ciudad. Continuamos con Everybody’s Nuts, un filme-ensayo sobre la presencia forzada de corporaciones agrícolas en la tierra de un trabajador mexicano, en un filme altamente personal. Regresamos a la urbe con mi película Piensa en mí, que incluí porque visibiliza a la gente que utiliza el transporte público mientras recorre la ciudad de Este a Oeste en una trayectoria visual. Finalmente, salimos a la frontera y nos encontramos en el muro que separa a Estados Unidos con México en Crossings, una obra altamente experimental del cineasta Robert Fenz.
Este es el recorrido. Por supuesto, es una pequeña muestra en un inmenso territorio. Siempre habrá más que mostrar y quedan infinitas miradas por incluir. Sin embargo espero que disfrutes de este fragmento y que te dé una idea de esta gran ciudad.
Con mucho cariño,
Alexandra Cuesta
Living Fossil
dir. Sean Hanley
16mm, 2 min., 2014
Sean Hanley
It is springtime along the coast of New York’s Long Island. Thousands of horseshoe crabs spawn on beaches under the glow of the full moon. This film offers a brief glimpse of a 450 million year old ritual. (SH)
Sean is an educator and filmmaker pursing experiments in the documentary genre. His work as a director and/or cinematographer has shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Images Festival, the Pacific Film Archive, the Vancouver International Film Festival, FLEXfest, and the Black Maria Film + Video Festival. He is the Assistant Director of Mono No Aware, an annual exhibition of expanded cinema and film-installation.
Fulton Fish Market
dir. Mark Street
35mm, sound, color, 12 min., 2003
Mark Street
Until 2005, New York City’s Fulton Fish Market exploded with movement, sound and color between the hours of midnight and 7 AM, Monday through Friday in lower Manhattan. Fishhooks flailed, crates were ripped open, and tens of thousands of fish were arrayed in ice as discerning retailers and restaurant owners made the rounds. This lyrical, visually vibrant documentary reveals a profoundly tactile material world tucked away in the shadow of the digital age. (MS)
Mark Street graduated from Bard College (B.A, 1986) and the San Francisco Art Institute (M.F.A., 1992). He has shown work in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series (1991, 1994), at Anthology Film Archives (1993, 2006, 2009), Millennium (1990,1996), and the San Francisco Cinematheque (1986, 1992, 2009). His work has appeared at the Tribeca (5 times), Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense (Spain), Mill Valley, South by Southwest, and other film festivals.
Early 12 New York Song
dir. Amanda Katz and Anthony Svatek
Video, 3 min. 2012
Objects and sounds collected on an early morning walk through Brooklyn, New York billow against a sun-struck floor. The smallest parts of the city are up for grabs. (AK & AS)
Amanda Katz is a professional film editor who teaches 16mm filmmaking at the Mono No Aware workshops in Brooklyn, NY. She remains endlessly inspired by the urban environment, and this is reflected in her personal work. Georg Anthony Svatek is a documentary cinematographer and producer who seeks to inspire estrangement from the familiar and create a sense of awe within the viewer. Aside from working at BBC World as a shooter and researcher, Anthony is currently co-creating an experimental documentary tentatively titled The BQE Project.
Extinction Becomes Us
dir. Josh Lewis Super-8mm, color, silent, 3 min., 2010 “Lewis, Josh” <m.joshualewis@gmail.com>
Shot at Christmas time in New York’s Central Park with Lewis’ last roll of Super 8mm Kodachrome, this film was born from a chance encounter with the post-irony holiday bacchanalia known as SantaCon. Sad to say, it is no longer possible to process this exquisite film stock, so the very look of the film is a relic from an age gone by. (LS & JL)
Working freely in abstraction, documentary, performance, and narrative filmmaking, Josh Lewis creates work that engages with the mechanics of human need, guilt, desire and transcendence. His film-based work revolves heavily around chemical experimentation and an unconventional, often derelict approach to darkroom procedures. He is a firm believer in manual knowledge and the transformative potential of an immediate bodily struggle with the elements of the natural world.
Capitalism: Child Labor
dir. Ken Jacobs
Video, color, sound, 14 min., 2006
“A stereograph celebrating factory production of thread. Many bobbins of thread coil in a great sky-lit factory space, the many machines manned by a handful of people. Manned? Some are children. I activate the double-photograph, composer Rick Reed suggests the machine din. Your heart bleeding for the kids? The children will surely be rescued and by their bosses! ‘Boys,’ they will say, ‘Have we got a war for you.” (KJ)
“For more than fifty years, Ken Jacobs’s work has inspired the sense of awe and mystery that nineteenth-century audiences must have felt when confronting motion pictures for the first time. Jacobs’s lifelong project has been the aesthetic, social, and physical critique of projected images.” (Museum of Modern Art) In 1967, with the involvement of his wife Florence and many others aspiring to a democratic -rather than demagogic- cinema, he created The Millennium Film Workshop in New York City. Honors include the Maya Deren Award of The American Film Institute, the Guggenheim Award and a special Rockefeller Foundation grant.
Chinaman’s Suitcase
Dir. Miao Jiaxin
Performance Video, 6 min., 2012
In a performance, the artist Miao Jiaxin brings hanging ducks to Zuccotti Park (famous as the site of Occupy Wall Street) in downtown Manhattan, sprays them with color, hangs them back in Chinatown. (LS)
From his early practice, starting as a street photographer tracking Shanghai prostitutes to the development of a pseudo-transvestite web celebrity, Miao Jiaxin has evolved an edgy and protean practice. Beginning in Shanghai, Miao then immigrated to New York, expanding his view of urban streets towards a more conceptual public stage, where his works travel across different media.
Night Scene New York
dir. Jem Cohen
16mm, 10 min., 2009
A sleepwalker’s circumnavigation becomes a chance observation of New York’s Chinatown. (JC)
Jem Cohen is a filmmaker especially known for his observational portraits of urban landscapes, blending of media formats (16mm, Super 8, video) and collaborations with music artists. Cohen found the mainstream Hollywood film industry incompatible with his sociopolitical and artistic views. By applying the do-it-yourself ethos of Punk Rock to his filmmaking approach, he crafted a distinct style in his films.
Bitch Beauty
dir. M.M. Serra
16mm & Super 8mm, 7 min. 201
This film is anexperimental documentary profiling the life of Anne Hanavan, who experienced the underground scene in the East Village of the Eighties. It is a time capsule of addiction, the perils of street prostitution, and subsequent renewal through cathartic self-expression. (MS)
Filmmaker, writer, teacher, curator, director of the Film-Makers’ Co-op and all around dynamo, MM Serra has been central to the East Village experimental film scene for two decades. Her raven-black Betty Page hairdo, starlet sunglasses, sexpot leather pants and outrageous laughter make her one of downtown’s most unforgettable personalities.
Drift and Bough
dir. Lynne Sachs
Super 8mm, 6 min. 2014
“I spent a morning this winter in Central Park shooting film in the snow. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness creates the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro, or a monochromatic tableau-vivant. When I am holding my Super 8mm camera, I am able to see these graphic explosions of dark and light.” (LS)
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design.
Los Angeles (and vicinities) Experimental program
My tears are dry
Laida Lertxundi, 4 minutes, sound, original format 16mm screened on blue ray, 2009
A film in the three parts of a dialectic. Hoagy Land’s song is played and interrupted as guitar makes
sound, two women, a bed an armchair, and the beautiful outside. After Bruce Baillie ́s All My Life.
The lyrics of the song reference the eternal sunshine of California and its promises. (LL)
Vineland
Laura Kraning, 10 minutes, sound, original format 16mm screened on DV, 2009
VINELAND is a short experimental documentary filmed at the last drive-in movie theater in Los Angeles, located in a desolate area called the City of Industry. Floating within a backdrop of smokestacks, beacon towers, and passing trains, dislocated Hollywood images filled with apocalyptic angst are re-framed and reflected through car windows and mirrors as the displacement of the radio broadcast soundtrack collides with the projections upon and surrounding the multiple screens. In VINELAND, the nocturnal landscape is seen as a border zone aglow with dreamlike illusions revealing overlapping realities at the intersection of nostalgia and alienation. (LK)
Get Out of The Car
Thom Andersen, 35 minutes, sound, original format 16mm, screened on dvd, 2010
Get Out of the Car is a city symphony film in 16mm composed from advertising signs, building facades, fragments of music and conversation, and unmarked sites of vanished cultural landmarks (including El Monte Legion Stadium and the Barrelhouse in Watts).
The Electric Embrace
Norbert Shie, 2minutes, silent, original format 16mm screened on SD, 2010-2011
This silent hand-processed and optically printed film shifts like an electric current between positive and negative spaces to examine the electric pylons by the Los Angeles River.
Everybody’s Nuts
Fabián Euresti, 15 minutes, sound, HD,
I started shooting images around the house. The more images I shot, the more I started thinking about the accompanying narrative. And this is how the film’s narration was born. The more I kept thinking about what to say, the more I kept thinking of images I still needed to shoot. The film is ultimately a product of time spent in the home and the surrounding environment. (FE)
Piensa En Mí
Alexandra Cuesta, 15 minutes, original format 16mm screened on dvd, 2009
Moving from east to west and back, the windows of a bus frame fleeting sections of urban landscape. Throughout the day, images of riders, textures of light and fragments of bodies in space come together to weave a portrait in motion; a contemplative meditation on public transport in the city of Los Angeles. Isolation, routine and everyday splendor, create the backdrop of this journey, while the intermittent sounds of cars construct the soundscape.
Crossings
Robert Fenz, 10 minutes, sound, original format 16mm screened on DVD, 2006-2007
Crossings is an abstract portrait of the border wall. Both sides are confronted. The film is a short installment on a larger project that investigates insularity in both geographical and cultural terms. It is also my short reflection on From the Other Side, a film I worked on in 2002 by Chantal Ackerman (filmed at the United States- Mexico border). (RF)
Asian American Life’s Minnie Roh brings us to Chinatown, to a community of undocumented immigrants hidden from view who live in a form of housing known as “shiftbeds.”
Featuring excerpts form Your Day is My Night with a special focus on our beloved wedding singer Yun Xiu Huang. An interview with director Lynne Sachs is also included.
“In a lively mix of narrative, collage and memoir, A Biography of Lilith (35 min. 1997) updates the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale with a present-day Lilith musing on a life that has included giving up a baby for adoption and working as a bar dancer. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, director Lynne Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as mother. ”
“Sachs’ film conveys the real experience — bloody and poetic — of Lilith alive and now in every woman. Bravo! A film felt, imagined, and informed by life.” – Barbara Black Koltuv, Ph. D. Clinical Psychologist, Jungian Analyst, and Author of The Book of Lilith
“Sachs’ art for fusing documentary and experimental narrative is unquestionably enormous. Her combination of an interview with a friend, the myth of Lilith and beauteous images of things like jelly fish (which float like iridescent breasts on screen) culminates in stunning cinema.” Molly Hankwitz, Art Papers
In addition to screening her film, Sachs will present a discursive mixed-media lecture. Her presentation includes video clips from conversations she had with Rabbi Mayer Fund, a brilliant, confrontational Orthodox rabbi from Brooklyn. Next she will show excerpts from conversations she had with four wonderful octogenarians from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx. Then, a zig-zag ahistorical mapping of LILITH sightings including: images of Lilith in haunting silver, hebrew protection amulets from medieval Europe (stored in the Jewish Museum in New York); Lilith on Baroque canvases and Mesopotamian ceramics; Lilith played by screen-beauty Jean Seberg as a crazed, exquisitely sensual woman living in a mental hospital; intense, intellectual, ridiculous Lilith in the TV-sitcom “Cheers”; and, Lilith, as a kind of Amazonian cannibal mother in the outrageously puerile comic book series Ghost Rider.
Where Did I Make the Wrong Turn? The 5th Annual Experimental Lecture by Carolee Schneemann
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Curated by Lynne Sachs
Carolee Schneemann is a visual artist and moving image maker known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She has been a leader and provocateur in the American avant-garde community since the mid 1960s when she created her ground breaking performance Meat Joy. From Interior Scroll to Plumb Line to Mortal Coil to Vespers Pool, Schneemann’s work pushes form and consciousness like no other artist working today. Ever since Fuses (1965), her landmark exploration of the female body, Schneemann has pushed visual perception in radical directions that awe, disturb and mystify audiences.
In her Experimental Lecture, Schneemann travels backwards and forwards in time. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she will analyze recurring formal properties in her film, sculpture and installation work. The mysteries of a notched stick, paper folds, indentations, the slice of line in space are followed as unexpected structural motives, up to and including her recent photographic grids and objects.
Co-sponsored by NYU’s Department of Undergraduate Film and Television and the Department of Cinema Studies.
The Filmmakers Co-op was profiled by the BBC Talking Movies program in September 2014. Great interviews with Gregg Biermann, Mary Magdalene Serra, and Ephraim Asili, Lynne Sachs as well as footage of Insha Fitzpatrick and films by Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke, Jonas Mekas, and several others. With a special cameo appearance of Maya Street-Sachs.
