Lynne Sachs has spent 25 years of her young life making films, installations and documentaries from Vietnam to Bosnia and all corners of the world. She is a master of the art and a gifted collector of the tiny moments of the human comedy and tragedy.
At home in New York City, she became intrigued with stories about the “shift bed” people of Manhattan’s Chinatown, a collective of Chinese performers and workers who live in an old apartment building on lower Manhattan’s Hester Street.
In this gorgeous, breathtaking film, “Your Day is my Night,” she takes us deep into an almost fairyland world.
With the camera magic of Sean Hanley, who did the editing as well, and Ethan Mass, Sachs walks us up the long flights of stairs to the heart and home of these pilgrims, all displaced from the big cities and tiny villages of China. Prepare yourself. This is no ordinary documentary. This is film, a canvas, a moving poem. It never stands still. It moves and it moves us.
The film opens with a closeup — and Hanley uses that form throughout — of an old woman waking. Her eyes flutter, her lips move as though trying to rid the taste of a bad dream of ancient memories deep in her DNA.
The camera is there as dawn breaks, with the light of a dirty New York sun turning clean and golden as it fills these rooms. Slowly, there is a montage of awakening bodies, floating white sheets, flowery scarves and cheap, yellowing curtains in a slow Chinese ballet of ever changing color. Stravinsky would have killed to score it, but Stephen Vitiello’s score is proper and enchanting. From here, the day workers go about their tasks throughout the city, and the night workers come home and take their places on the beds made warm by the day people, the sheets still bearing the imprint of the night bodies.
Most of us are shocked by these seemingly airless rooms that are smaller than some people’s closets. They are filled with tiny beds, double decked, triple decked. They first make us think of kennels for humans too complicated to engage. But these are Chinese,and despite the fact that some of them have lived for generations in poverty, they have inherited the gifts to transform each room into musical notes. They hang posters, small pieces of art, photographs and notes on whatever piece of space they have. There are goldfish and small birds. The air is redolent with the aroma of their communal cooking.
We meet seven of the dwellers, all performers, dancers, singers, magicians and actors, as they move through the days and nights of their lives. In Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese, we learn the stories they’ve brought with them out of the smoke of their pasts.
We meet Chung Che, who was a medical professor in a Chinese university, then came to America and worked as a garment cutter. Eventually, with his medical knowledge, he became a massage therapist.
There is Yun Xiu Huang, a larger than life entertainer, a gregarious Chinese Tom Jones, who has been here for twenty years working as a professional singer and musician. He performs at weddings and Chinese banquets. These tiny rooms shake with his laughter. Some work in building maintenance and restaurants, some teach dance and Chinese music. But all cling to one another like sparrows in a familiar tree.
Lynn Sachs brings seven of them together and steps back, letting the camera of Sean Hanley move among the players. In one sequence, Sachs and Hanley take us to a big Chinese wedding that looks like it was taken from the musical version of “World Of Susie Wong.” In another, the group perform an amateur dance number in home made cowboy costumes, dancing to Bizet’s “Carmen.” Hanley’s closeups, each one, are framable pieces of art, that look as they though they should be illustrating poems. His color and editing are astonishing. He moves from lips to eyes like Vermeer, to hands practicing Tai Chi in the early light and the blue light of evening. Director Sachs places the monologues carefully throughout. One tells of his journey from China as he massages a friend. Another tells his housemates of his family following the great military leader Chiang Kai-Shek from war-torn Peking to Taiwan, where he loses his parents, never to see them again.
An old man,who slept on stone as a child, walks the streets of Manhattan, collecting old mattresses, torn and old, simply because he never had one. These stories are told to one another in their native language, not meant to entertain us. We are merely welcome eavesdroppers, and we find ourselves lucky to be here.
We are in the presence of survivors unlike any we’ve ever known, people who have learned by listening to the inner voices of their ancestors, how to survive war, drought, and famine. I feel you have never seen anything like it.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer and former actor.
FLUX TIME: Moving-Image Art and the Ends of Cinema
To address the relationship between contemporary contexts of art and cinema, we asked 17 artists, curators, programmers, and critics to respond to a simple question: what and where is artists’ cinema today, and what and where is its future?
I like making things. Objects that are distinct, take up space, have weight and texture, can be given as gifts, are occasionally sold, contain the very story of their making in the material of their being. And so it is with a stubborn adolescent fury that I refuse to believe that the work I do as a filmmaker is being pushed so quickly and definitively from the three dimensional into the digital and ultimately to the virtual world. In the face of time’s uncontrollable whimsy, I am a guileless Peter Pan, a cantankerous Rip Van Winkle, and a naïve Cinderella all rolled into one. Clearly I am not alone in my resistance to this technological transformation of the way that human beings witness, record, and preserve images and sounds. Are we watching the “stuff” of cinema disappear before our very eyes?
Recently, I traveled to the Encuentros del Otros Cine Festival International in Quito, Ecuador to screen my own work, give a lecture on my practice as an experimental documentary maker, and present a program of short films by New York City filmmakers including Ken Jacobs, M.M. Serra, Mark Street, and Jem Cohen, along with five other younger artists on the scene (Sean Hanley, Amanda Katz, Josh Lewis, Miao Jiaxin, Georg Anthony Svatek). My intention for this program entitled Scenic Ruptures was to present a radical, distinctly unshiny picture of life in the Big Apple. Throughout my career as an artist, I have worked to promote the films and videos of my peers, locally, nationally, and internationally. So when I was instructed to send all of our weightless media files over the Internet rather than using an exorbitantly expensive and often unreliable shipping service, I was ecstatic. It wasn’t so long ago that we were facing the seemingly insurmountable obstacle of screening a U.S.-made N.T.S.C. standard video in the P.A.L. universe of Europe or South America, or when a brazen film about sexuality was stopped full throttle in the customs office at J.F.K.
Over the last two years, I’ve discovered that one of the most exciting and affirming places to see my own work projected is not necessarily in a traditional film viewing space. Strangely enough, this new-found awareness just might fall in line with my attempt to climb my way out of the melancholy I am feeling about the disappearing movie thing. In 2012 and 2013, my own filmmaking process became more performative. I hauled projectors, screens, and stage props all over New York City in order to present a live version of my hybrid documentary Your Day is My Night. In both versions of the piece, immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, we try to reveal the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through autobiographical monologues, movement pieces, and projected images. In this more theatrical and certainly more unpredictable setting, an astonishing chemistry erupted between the projected documentary elements of the media and the performers’ dances and songs. The film itself was transformed by the spontaneity of the performers and the performers’ presence on the stage took on a new dimension as a result of the moving image. During our shows, it seemed that the projector functioned as an activator, a full participant in the resurrection and cultivation of complex, sometimes paradoxical memories. I am just realizing now how much this performative documentary mode of working might very well have changed the way I make movies.
And so it is with trepidation and optimism that I begin to let go of the thingness of cinema, still embracing my camera like a painter’s brush or a writer’s pen, but knowing that the light as it hits the screen is nothing more than an illusion.
2014 International Festival of Documentary Cinema: Encounter with Other Cinema, Quito, Ecuador
Scenic Ruptures: Experimental Documentaries from New York City and Los Angeles
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
NYC Program:
Living Fossil
dir. Sean Hanley 16mm, 2 min., 2014
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
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
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., 200
“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. 2011
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 Sach 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.
In its ninetieth annual competition for the United States and Canada, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded 177 Fellowships (including one joint Fellowship) to a diverse group of 178 scholars, artists, and scientists. Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.
The great variety of backgrounds, fields of study, and accomplishments of Guggenheim Fellows is one of the most unique characteristics of the Fellowship program. In all, fifty-six disciplines, eighty-three different academic institutions, twenty-nine states and two Canadian provinces are represented by this year’s Fellows, who range in age from twenty-nine to seventy-seven.
LYNNE SACHS FELLOWSHIP
Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics, and layered sound design. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Between 1994 and 2009, her five essay films took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy, and Germany—sites affected by international war—where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Recently, after twenty-five years of making experimental documentaries, Lynne learned something that turned all her ideas about filmmaking upside down. While working on Your Day is My Night in the Chinatown neighborhood of New York City, she came to see that every time she asked a person to talk in front of her camera, they were performing for her rather than revealing something completely honest about their lives. The very process of recording guaranteed that some aspect of the project would be artificial. She decided she had to think of a way to change that, so she invited her subjects to work with her to make the film, to become her collaborators. For Lynne, this change in her process of filmmaking has moved her toward a new type of filmmaking, one that not only explores the experiences of her subjects, but also invites them to participate in the construction of a film about their lives.
Since 2006, Lynne has also collaborated with her partner, Mark Street, in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary” and co-curated the 2014 film series “We Landed/ I Was Born/ Passing By: NYC’s Chinatown on Film” at Anthology Film Archives. Lynne has received support from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts and residencies in both film and poetry from the MacDowell Colony. Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto’s Images Festival, and Los Angeles’ REDCAT Theatre as well as a five-film retrospective at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. The San Francisco Cinematheque recently published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work.
In 2012, Lynne began a series of live film performances of Your Day is My Night in alternative theater spaces around New York City. She then completed the hour-long hybrid video, which premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in 2013 and screened at the Vancouver Film Fest, Union Docs, New Orleans Film Fest, and other venues in the U.S. and abroad.
Drift and Bough dir. Lynne Sachs Super 8mm, 6 min. 2014
Music by Stephen Vitiello + Molly Berg “Back Again” from the album “Between You and the Shapes you Take” Courtesy 12k
“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.” — Lynne Sachs
“There I was disarmed by the quiet, unassuming succession of art-photo shots of snowy Central Park, which seemed pretty ordinary, but which again drifted little by little into a richer and richer collection of elements, such as the lines that did various things like scale shifting and–with the lines of duck trails through the ice-pack–lines that “drew” a kind of benign insinuation into a cold world…which seemed to help effect an insinuation into my affect in my reception of the film. By the time the film ends I have been drawn, partially consciously, into a meditative state that I wanted to resist at its beginning. The ending–with the people moving about and the bicycle taxi and camera both drifting to the right–was a slight break in that mood, perhaps because of the people moving about and doing things, but it still maintains some of the meditative mood through my realization that a barely perceptible superimposition of nothing very distinguishable has occurred mysteriously for the first and only time in the film.” – Ron Green, in letter to filmmaker Lynne Sachs
Extra Long Twin
an original live film performance
conceived and directed by Lynne Sachs
Written and performed by: Kamau Agyeman, Lorenca Alencar, Diana Li, Hanna Lindeyer, Sofia Monestier, Dan Steven
March 11, 2014
Pratt Institute
Brooklyn, New York
In the spirit of Pratt Institute’s RIDE (Risk/Dare/Experiment) series, filmmaker Lynne Sachs and a group of six Pratt film students present their own short film-performance as a finale to Lynne’s “Taking a Documentary Detour” talk. During a workshop held in the film department at Pratt Institute, each student created a composite character built from both autobiography and fictional discoveries. Expanding upon the theme of the bed in Lynne’s hybrid film Your Day Is My Night, the students utilize the bed as a starting point for inquiry into the personal and collective experience of living in a New York City apartment or dormitory. Archival film footage of people in their beds throughout the history of cinema forms a backdrop to the entire performance.
Co-sponsored by the Pratt School of Art and Design, the Department of Humanities and Media Studies, the student club Film Cult and Bomb Magazine.
Produced by Jacki Ochs and Mary Billyou
Found footage provided Craig Baldwin
Performance Documentation by Donald Daedalus and Brandon Brown
Editing by Sean Hanley
RISK/DARE/EXPERIMENT
Educational Episodes at Pratt Institute
RiDE is a new series of events organized by the Pratt Institute’s School of Art and Design that features invited artists, as well as Pratt faculty, staff, and students across departments and disciplines.
RiDE sessions bring various processes related to artistic and design practices into a visible arena while illustrating the unforeseen outcomes of experimentation—ventures that open up new paths, abandoned projects that lead to new insights, and other types of risks that inspire adventurous ideas and actions.
In Taking a Documentary Detour, Sachs discusses her associative, non-literal approach to images in the context of her new enthusiasm for mixing fiction and non-fiction modes of production. Recently, after 25 years of making experimental documentaries, Sachs noticed something that turned all her ideas about filmmaking upside down. She was working on Your Day is My Night , her film about Chinese immigrants in New York, when she came to see that every time she asked a person to talk in front of her camera, they were performing for her 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 subvert the rigidity of both the documentary and the narrative model, so I decided to invite the people in my film to work with me to make the film, to become my collaborators.” In her lecture, Sachs will explore the austere yet playful dramaturgy of French theater director Ariane Mnouchkine (Theatre du Soleil), Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, the Wooster Group’s high-tech stage shenanigans, and Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s mixing of artifice and truth. She shows clips from her own films, including The Last Happy Day (2009), Wind in Our Hair (2010) and Your Day is My Night .
Hanna Lindeyer, Sofia Monestier, Kamau Agyeman, Dan Stevens in EXTRA LONG TWIN directed by Lynne Sachs
BOMB Magazine published this interview with Lynne by poet Paolo Javier today. They talk about poetry, documentary, politics and personal histories. BOMB is a sponsor of the RiDE (Risk, Dare, Experiment) lecture.
Transcript from EXTRA LONG TWIN live performance with film:
Extra Long Twin – RiDE (Risk/ Dare/ Experiment)
Conceived and directed by Lynne Sachs
Written and performed by: Kamau Agyeman, Lorenca Alencar, Diana Li, Hanna Lindeyer, Sofia Monestier, Dan Steven
During Lynne Sachs’s RiDE workshop, each student created a composite character that combine autobiography and fictional discoveries. Sachs asked each student performer to imagine a situation from the past that might have occurred in the room where they currently live. Each participant then wrote and performed a monologue that could have been spoken by the fictional person who lived in the room.
Play begins. Performer 1 sits on the left and across from her, Performer 2. Each holding a pillow and blanket.
Performer 1 gently folds out her sheet and starts arranging her bed while Performer 2 flops down.
Performer 1
I’m not going to answer that, they keep insisting. I haven’t even gone to any of them. I hate these High School reunions.
Performer 1 continues to tweak her space making sure her sheets are even
Performer 1 (Cont’d)
I can’t find anything in this place. It would help if someone else was looking here. That they have clothes for both men and women. But it’s okay you know. He pays me and kinda reminds me of my daughter. Haven’t been able to sleep very well. Vera the soul cleanser she says that my mom use to be a slave owner in a past life. And that’s why I can’t sleep cause the spirits are haunting me. She gave me this…
Performer 1 grabs an unmarked spray and starts spraying around her
Performer 1 (Cont’d)
It’s to keep them from bothering me. My daughter thinks it’s all bullshit, at least that’s what she says when we talk over the phone.
Performer 2 lets out an audible groan.
Performer 2
Ahh… Shit… A who the hell wakes up on 3 PM on Saturday. I’m up I’m good alright. Aw shit, fuck, fuck.
Performer 2 stands up from bed
Performer 2 (Cont’d)
Alright, A-Alright buddy you need to go. (Motioning for the person in her bed to leave) Yeah here, here take your shoe. Upstairs. Alright I’ll call I promise… Yeah totally… Aw Fuck. Shit what time is it?… Fuck me… Aw God… Aw fucking shit… Too early for this.
COU—COUGHHH Performer 2 tries to clear their through before dialing a phone.
Performer 2 (On Phone)
Hey Pops what’s up man…Yeah Dad whaddup… Yeah I’m good. Yeah I just got back from the gym… Yeah 17 reps now, Yeah I’m jacked as shit man… Yeah you watch out man I come back and pfffft… Yeah hold on let me put you on speaker for a second.
Places the phone down
Performer 2 (Cont’d)
How ya doing Dad. I’m good. Totally Man. Yeah college is the shit man. Like totally. Oh yeah I’ve made some good guy friends this year. Yeah I was gonna talk to you about sports this year I don’t think… No I’m good I’m good. I don’t think I really wanna play… No this is not like Berkeley again Dad I told you I can’t I can’t talk about this right now. I don’t want to be like you and every other guy in the family, I just want to do some art, what’s so wrong about that? Look dude you gotta’ hear me out…fuck…Look I don’t want to talk about this right now. I’m about to go out with some friends. Aha we are about to go to a club… Yeah condoms pfffft… Of course I have condoms, yeah dude totally, I’ll tell you about all the bitches dad… aha yeah, yeah… look dad I’ll call you later. I really don’t want to talk about this right now… ahah yeah, bye now.
Performer 2 dials a new number
Performer 2 (There is a noticeable change in their voice)
Oh hey girl… I’m excited for tonight. oh yeah okay alright good luck and don’t fuck it up bye.
Performer 2 lays back down on the bed.
Two new performers —who we’ll call 3 and 4— enter stage and sit across from one another, one on each bed.
Performers 1 and 2 exit stage
Performer 3
March 11th 2014. Not a lot of UFO’s today. Lotta’ planes but no UFO’s. Oh my lord it’s beautiful out. All the children on the street are just playing.
Something catches their attention and Performer 3 motions at it
Performer 3
Get down! Get! Get! God damn cat… Hey you see this guy? God damn city worker is back here with the sign. Don’t he know we’re in here. Hey uh are you hungry? I was gonna make some pasta if you want…you’re not hungry… alright I was gonna make some pasta anyway.
Performer 3 moves across stage to a kitchen
Performer 3
Hey uh… Did you remember to take the water down from the roof…that’s alright I guess I won’t make pasta… (Walking back to her bedroom window) I don’t know what that girl does all day she just doesn’t do anything, just stays in her room. There he is again. You see this guy? Every single goddamn week! I been here 40 years ain’t no man from the city gonna take this away from me. This is my home.
Performer 4 sits up in bed
AHHH — Pounds her fists into her bed
Performer 4
You cosmically conceited cunt, I hate you! Just can’t you stop talking. Just talktalktalktalktalktalk all day long… Just SHUT UP. Just quiet that’s all I ask for, for a little bit out of everyday. Just a little bit. Just the fucking worst
Performer 4 paces back and forth
Performer 4 (Cont’d)
It’s so fucking loud in this place all the time. All the time that goddam fucking cat – jesus christ. The cat snores, fuck. No I didn’t get the water off the fucking roof. Why am I supposed to melt snow to get water. This apartment is disgusting. It’s trashed. There’s always some shit around. Cause you never leave, she never cleans up. She watches kids out the window like a fucking pedophile… FUCK… Just want her to leave, think it might kill her though. She steps outside she might trip and fall on her fat ass. So sick of not being able to find anything. It’s not even my shit… Cat poops on my bed one more time I might punt it out the window.
Performer 4 takes a gulp of water to wash down a pill before pulling the covers over.
To new performers— 5 and 6— enter stage while 3 and 4 exit
Performer 5
Ah Juan, you like jazz yeah? Father loves jazz, think I got it from him. My father’s a West African jazz musician and he’s always played African and American jazz. He actually left me a crate full of old records that I haven’t had a chance to look through yet, so that’s what I plan on doing tonight. (Starts to flip though the records) You like Miles Davis yeah? Bitches Brew— That is a nice cover.
Performer 5 pulls out the record… Bwfooof…blows the dust off it. Then takes a very DEEP breath in.
Performer 5 (Cont’d)
Smells like Jazz.
Puts the record on then starts snapping their fingers and bobbing their head to the music
Performer 5 (Cont’d)
That is good music. It’s really good to relax to. My mother’s really into her culture too and I promised her that um, I would wake up before I wake up and before I go to sleep so if you don’t mind
Proceeds to do tai-chi
Performer 5
That’s enough of that.
Picks up the crate of records and puts them away.
Performer 5
You know Juan, I was thinking, if I were to die, hopefully I’d make it to the upper 80’s. If I were to die I would go to heaven, hopefully I’d make it to heaven, if when I get to heaven, if God was a DJ, which I’m sure God would be a DJ, and God were playing music which I’m sure would be jazz and God was playing Miles Davis. If I had to pick one Miles Davis song that God was playing, now I’m not an atheist, but I think if God were to play a Miles Davis song it would be… So What… Good night.
Performer 6
Wait did you know that there’s this rare species of orchids; that their leaves resembles fungus so that flies come to pollenate them. Don’t you think that’s incredible. Like flies. Wouldn’t you think that bees or birds would come to pollenate flowers, you know beautiful creatures, but these orchids actually want flies to pollenate them. Would you take me to China to see them? I think that’d be great. I would love to see those orchids.
Performer 6 rises and begins to adjust the plants in the room
Performer 6
Do you ever think about ants. How they’re so small and they could live inside my plants and climb over all of my leaves. I wish I was as small as an ant so I could live inside my flowers. I’m sorry they’re everywhere, but you don’t mind right. I’ll clean it up.
“We Landed/I Was Born/Passing By: New York’s Chinatown on Screen” is a wonderfully eclectic series that runs at Anthology Film Archives from January 24-26. New York’s Chinatown is one of the most iconic neighborhoods in New York, with a long, rich history, one which embodies how immigrants have transformed America’s urban landscapes. This series offers artful and provocative perspectives on how Chinatown has been documented and depicted on film, and how it has figured in the popular imagination. Consisting of five themed programs, this is a multimedia series, encompassing documentaries, archival footage, fiction films, performance art pieces, literary readings and photography slide shows. “Chinatown on Screen” is co-curated by Asian CineVision program manager Lesley Yiping Qin, filmmaker and video artist Lynne Sachs (whose latest film “Your Day is My Night” closes the series), independent curator and critic Xin Zhou, and video artist and documentarian Bo Wang.
Appropriately for the venue, experimental and avant-garde film is well represented. One of the more unusual discoveries of the series are films by the late Tom Tam (who passed away in 2008), a doctor, community activist and filmmaker, who devoted his life to improving the health of the residents of Chinatown, and artistically documenting in his film work the area where he lived and worked for most of his life. Tam was also instrumental in founding the Asian American Film Festival in 1972, which eventually became Asian CineVision, the organization supporting Asian American film artists which runs the Asian American International Film Festival. Tam is represented in the series with three of his short, silent experimental films, shot in the ’60s and ’70s. The most purely experimental of these is “Boy on Chinatown Roof,” its flickering, strobed images of the titular boy and a sectioned human anatomy model – a nod, perhaps, to Tam’s day job – creating a striking impression. The other two films are more closely connected to Tam’s community activism: “Chinatown Street Festival” documents a health fair Tam organized which offered medical screenings to residents and included street performers as entertainment, while “Tourist Buses, Go Home!” concerned Chinatown residents resentments and protests against Caucasian tourists clogging the streets to gawk at the neighborhood. “This is our community, not a zoo!” reads one protest sign, while other residents raise middle fingers at the tour buses. Both films employ such visual manipulations as sped up motion and time lapse photography to enhance the documentary footage.
A scene from Shelly Silver’s “5 lessons and 9 questions about Chinatown.” (credit: Shelly Silver)
Shelly Silver’s remarkable 10-minute short “5 lessons and 9 questions about Chinatown” (2009) was commissioned by The Museum of Chinese in America for their “Chinatown Film Project.” The film covers 152 years of Chinatown’s history, with witty, elegant editing juxtapositions, expressive use of Chinese characters, documentary footage (both original and archival), and a multilingual voiceover that examines many issues in its very brief running time. The origins of Chinatown, the impact of the Chinese Exclusion Act that restricted immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the changes wrought by gentrification, and even a brief visit to a little girl’s house are all included in this nicely packaged historical and social portmanteau.
A scene from Shelly Sliver’s “Touch.” (credit: Shelly Silver)
Silver extends her inquiries and explorations of Chinatown, where she has resided for more than 25 years, in “Touch” (2013), a short quasi-documentary feature that filters street scenes through the fictional consciousness of its unseen, unnamed narrator (voiced by Lu Yu), who returns after 50 years away to care for his dying mother. He is a librarian who dreamed of being a photographer, and his voiceover provides his observations of the people, sights and sounds of the neighborhood he managed to escape for a long time, but is now compelled to return to. The film’s verbal and visual text is an amalgam of research, interviews and fictional elements that is beautifully layered, and plays as a sort of collective consciousness of Chinatown, and an intriguing expression of the connections between the physical and psychic spaces of the neighborhood. Silver, in one of the witty juxtapositions typical of her work, contrasts her work which places Chinatown at the center of her inquiry with another that uses it as a local color backdrop: Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works,” which we observe being filmed. Silver performs a very fitting reversal of cinematic subject positioning, in which the residents of Chinatown are the stars, while Woody Allen and Larry David become fleeting extras.
A scene from Eric Lin’s “Music Palace.” (credit: Eric Lin)
Cinephiles of a particular stripe will experience some nostalgia in cinematographer Eric Lin’s 2005 documentary short “Music Palace,” which covers the final days of the last movie theater in Chinatown that screened mostly Cantonese-language films from Hong Kong. The peeling walls, torn seats, and grandly ruined atmosphere are depicted with affection, and mournful reflection on inexorable changes. The owner reminisces on the standing-room only crowds of the past that have disappeared, he says, due to the proliferation of pirated videotapes. The projectionist and a regular patron also offer their thoughts. “Music Palace” documents an age and a type of moviegoing that recedes further into the distant past with each passing day and new technological advancement.
Performance artists offer their takes on Chinatown in two pieces in the series. Shanghai-born Jiaxin Miao, in his 2011 piece “Chinaman’s Suitcase,” carries a suitcase filled with roast ducks through Times Square and other familiar New York locations, spray paints the ducks different colors, and hangs them up in a Chinatown restaurant window. Miao also travels to Zuccotti Park, the site of the Occupy Wall Street protests; the sounds of protest are on the soundtrack, but the protesters themselves are long gone. Los Angeles’ Chinatown, as depicted in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” gets a subversive treatment in Singapore-born artist Ming Wong’s “Making Chinatown, Pt. 7,” which was originally part of a 2012 installation at Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles. Wong recreates key scenes from “Chinatown “– in part 7, the final scene – in which Wong himself plays all the main roles, both male and female. This is Wong’s response to the use of Chinatown to create a mythology and sinister associations that have little to do with the actual place; recasting himself in roles originally played by non-Asians highlights the racial coding inherent in these fictional constructs.
Food is a major part of the Chinatown experience, and this gets a surreal spin in Yau Ching’s 1998 short film “I’m Starving,” about a black woman in a Chinatown apartment who is haunted by the ghost of a Chinese woman in the apartment. Far from an unwanted presence, the ghost is the black woman’s lover; the ghost sniffs the living woman, taking in both her smell and the smell of the food that that represents the pleasures she can no longer partake in. The ghost and the woman eventually consume, in lieu of actual food, the printed representations and symbols of such, including takeout menus and fortune cookie messages. The longing and desires for food and sex reflect the filmmaker’s own; this was filmed in her own apartment, and is a poetic expression of her experiences in New York, made shortly before she left the city.
A scene from Lynne Sachs’ “Your Day is My Night.” (credit: Lynne Sachs)
Many modes of expression are combined in Lynne Sachs’ “Your Day is My Night” (2013), an extraordinary hybrid of documentary, performance and theatrical monologues that began its life as a series of live performances in Chinatown and other areas of the city. The film is set in a Chinatown “shift-bed” apartment, where the residents, mostly migrant immigrants, rent shared beds among people who work different hours of the day. The performers are Chinese non-professional actors – ranging in age from their 50’s to their 70’s – playing themselves and performing monologues based on their own stories. The cast also includes a Puerto Rican actress, whose interactions with the Chinese actors lend richness to the performances. “Your Day is My Night” is a poetic evocation of the experiences of Chinese immigrants, with rich visual textures; the often intimate, close-up camerawork is shot on HD digital video, 16mm and Super-8 film. The uses of urban space, familial relationships born out of shared historical and personal experiences, China’s turbulent past which created these communities in America, childhood memories and personal aspirations, all find expression in these stories which are deeply affecting and movingly performed.
Last fall, I caught the premiere at MoMA of Lynne Sachs’s Your Day Is My Night, a documentary featuring NYC’s Chinatown residents, and became an instant fan. Focusing on the personal experiences of Chinatown’s shift-bed renters, Sachs engages her subjects in an innovative filmmaking process that privileges their agency and their community’s vitality—a process that ultimately produces a depiction of a people and place which radically departs from the usual Orientalism found in American cinema. The film is also remarkable for how it pushes the boundaries of documentary, locating its praxis in the liminal spaces of poetry and dreaming. This should come as no surprise to admirers of the prolific director and tireless experimentalist, whose astonishing body of work also includes short films, videos, cine-essays, and literary adaptations. On the eve of Sachs’s live film performance for Pratt University’s RiDE (Risk, Dare, Experiment) series, I engage this most restless of contemporary filmmakers in a conversation that sheds lots of warm light on her past, present, and future collaborations.
Lynne Sachs Today, I spent all morning in Central Park shooting black and white film in the snow.
Paolo Javier I’m glad one of us is enjoying the snow. Did the weather agree with your shoot today, and were you able to capture what you’d been dreaming about the past months?
LS For me the stark whiteness of the snow 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 graphic explosions of dark and light. Plus, lucky for me, my friend Sean was there to hold the umbrella and keep the snowflakes from dropping onto my lens. We just finished editing that film today. It’s called Drift and Bough.
PJ “The stark whiteness of the snow creates the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro, or a monochromatic tableau-vivant.” This sounds to me like a statement of poetics. Have any of your films developed from spontaneous, collaborative moments like this? More specifically, do you have a particular process for germinating work? Most folks associate documentary with a certain logocentrism, but your films—which are often hybrid—leave me with a palpable sense of play and surprise.
LS I think you are getting at something about my process of collecting images that maybe I didn’t really understand myself, until this moment. What I do in the world when I’m in the act of shooting film is ask myself how and if I can work in concert with something that exists in reality. When I shot my film essay Which Way is East (1994) in Vietnam way back in 1992, for example, I initially thought I was there to grapple with a specific historical period, the war in Vietnam, that it was my job to decipher everything I saw, as one of the first American filmmakers to be allowed to shoot in that country. Instead, however, I found myself waiting more patiently than I ever had for the right dappled light and shadow on a wall, or for a rhythmic pattern of bicycles and motorcycles to go by my bedroom window. For me, such plays of light are so exhilarating. Through these physical acts, the ideas of the film began to emerge.
PJ I really admire Which Way Is East, though I have to admit, I’m always skeptical of American interest in Vietnam and its former (near) colonies as a creative subject. Then I was struck by the date of your work: 1994. Your film doesn’t proceed as anthropology but generates tremendous intimacy, perhaps because you did not shoot or narrate Vietnam and her people as a subject but as a sensorial experience. It seems to be shot with a lot of wonder. As a result, it felt expansive for its half hour length, like the feeling of a cool breeze in an open window.
“Such plays of light are so exhilarating”—you take the words right out of my mouth. One scene that struck me was the shot of an empty café. The camera waits patiently for the golden sunlight to pour through the open ceiling. You see the Vietnamese language centered poetically in the inter-titles, then you hear it spoken by a native speaker—these are deeply generous and somewhat political gestures, given that the country’s orthography was developed by the colonizer. Nevertheless, this film—like a lot of your documentary work—doesn’t shy away from narration. Often, your film narratives and images collide in ways that open up unexpected meanings. As a poet, I tend to look for this, thinking along the lines of, Well, film is inherently Orphic. Would you speak a bit about your interest in narrative?
LS Wow, there are layers and layers for me to peel back after these observations. Right off the bat, I want to explore your initial presumption about an American heading over to Vietnam, or any so called “third world” country for that matter, with a camera in hand and a series of questions in your mind. I think this jumps directly into a conversation that is so fundamental to the whole practice of reality-based filmmaking, which got its start in Europe and the US (the proverbial first world) but set its sights on the beyond. The paradigm was always the hunt: shooting film, capturing an image, etcetera. So at the beginning of my career, I bought into that in my own awkward way. I took my camera to a far away place, I collected images, I recorded people’s thoughts, I brought it all home and it was mine. And if the film did well, I might even have a trophy to show for myself. So, when you ask about the narrative, I must admit that it was there that I began to challenge this way of working by allowing my own evolving critique of these practices to be manifest in my writing for the films.
This discussion brings to mind your essay “Pinoy Signs” in your book The Feeling is Actual. As a Filipino American, you take your own journey through the commercial signage of modern-day Philippines, revealing the clever, hilarious interweaving of American culture found in the country where you were born. I really love reading and seeing with you, discovering the twenty-four-hour restaurant Doris Day and Night, the Elizabeth Tailoring garment shop, or the Felix the Cut barbershop. Now I understand your love of punning! It’s a national pastime. Clearly, we are both intrigued and concerned by the omnipresence of American culture in places far from our borders.
PJ Yes, I am loved and regarded by my sister’s kids as their corny (p)Uncle Paolo.
Let’s talk about your short films and videos in relation to your documentaries and longer narrative work. Is there an immediate relationship that you see between the two? I think of how certain novelists, like Haruki Murakami, would engage in short fiction as a welcome break from the enormous demands of writing a novel, which, in his canon, tend to be pretty epic in scope and design. I ask this not to imply that short film and video are necessarily lighter or less serious than a half hour or feature. In fact, it’s your virtuosic range as film and video maker that compels me to ask what might inform their exchange or simultaneities.
LS Yes, you are right, the nature of the work that came with shooting and editing films like Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (four min., 1986) or Same Stream Twice (five min., 2012) can be very different from the labor involved in longer films. For one thing, you don’t need to write so many meta-descriptions (i.e. grant proposals) before creating them. The space between idea and image is reduced. I also don’t tend to show these works to other folks while I am creating them. No focus groups. No in-process rejections. Just the pure joy of making things. This creative gesture very much parallels the writing of poetry, which I have been doing almost all of my life (I am currently completing a two year project in which I am writing a poem for every year of my life, meaning fifty-two). Perhaps I could call the long films the “grand gestures.” You express this feeling very well in your poem “Ladies and Gentleman: Mr. Bill Murray!”:
Because I think you’re not feeling great
you want to make a grand gesture. I’ve been
a grand-gesture guy in the past &, in all likelihood,
I will continue to be one in the future. However,
I don’t feel as grand gesture-ish as I once did.
Probably a good sign, don’t you think?
PJ Aha!, I was right to sense the central presence of the poem in your films. I noticed that they offer more than just an engagement with, but seem to be fundamentally made up of, poetic texts: diary excerpts, letters, essays, poems. The sensibility in which you collage and detourné and juxtapose these with one another and the moving image strikes me as more poetic than novelistic, or maybe a blurring of the two, a la Gertrude Stein. I really loved hearing the recording of a group reading of “Lifting Belly” in your cine-essay The House of Science (1991), but in addition to American modernism, your dialogue with the poem seems absorptive of the innovations of other twentieth and twenty-first century poets, including the international surrealists, Black Mountain, members of Fluxus, Susan Howe, and Bernadette Mayer. This is my unnecessarily long segue to asking about your current project of writing fifty-two poems.
LS Discovering “Lifting Belly,” Gertrude Stein’s ever so physical, ecstatic belching of all things female, is critical to my work as an artist and poet. Whenever I don’t know what comes next, I think of this poem. Most of the voice-over in The House of Science comes from poetry I was writing during the production of the film. I think that poetry can be very connected to the way that we understand our own past. Right now, I am revisiting every year of my life by seeing grand public events in history through the lens of extremely private moments I am able to remember. I am fifty-two years old so I think of this project as Fifty-two Pick Up, like a card game. My next film project, Tip of My Tongue, will use this writing as a starting off point. So you can see, it’s all kind of connected.
You also mentioned the Black Mountain artists and Fluxus. John Cage, one of the Black Mountain artists, had a love of the unrepeatable symphony of the city. Discovering his work made me a better listener. I heard about George Maciunas and the rest of the Fluxus folks when I was twenty years old. It pushed me into some very wacky performance art I produced with my brother, Ira Sachs, in our hometown of Memphis, Tennessee one Christmas break in 1980!
PJ Awesome. If I remember correctly, the last section of The Feeling Is Actual was assembled while I obsessively re-read “Lifting Belly” and Stanzas in Meditation, and re-watched Wong Kar Wai’s movies. I made this long poem with the film editing process very much in mind too, collaging and splicing language; employing chance procedures; and relying only on the visual experience and sense of words on the page. Stein’s writing is autobiographical but, to be sure, I experience this foremost in her English which moves exuberantly between the three or four other languages she grew up hearing and speaking. Perhaps what I find most affecting about your films, spanning documentary and short works, is their own fearlessness with autobiography. Not only are their texts consistently diaristic and epistolary, but also their images and productions include family members—your cousin Sandor Lenard, and two daughters as subjects/co-authors; your sister, Dana, and your husband, the fantastic filmmaker Mark Street, as collaborators. I was moved to tears by the inclusion of your own recording of your daughter’s birth in A Biography of Lilith (1997), and I couldn’t help but read it as both a nod to and de-centering of Window Water Baby Moving, given the feminist discourse of your film.
LS No one who makes experimental films can deny the impact of Stan Brakhage! I actually wrote an essay about his Window Water Baby Moving which I call “Thoughts on Birth and Brakhage.” As a mom and an artist, I was extremely inspired by the way that he integrated his family into his daily practice as an artist. If you separate the two, both suffer. I collaborated with my sister Dana Sachs on Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam. In the early 1990s, she was living in Hanoi and had already become proficient in Vietnamese, so her long-term presence in that country gave us the chance to contemplate our relationship with that place on the earth as two American women who had “experienced” the war through television as children. Then a few years later, I made Biography of Lilith. That film’s production straddles the birth of my first born daughter Maya in 1995 and that of my second daughter Noa in 1997. Just because I was pregnant and ever so uncomfortable, I did not want to stop making art. Their presence in my life was most definitely a catalyst to my thinking. So why not reflect that in the work? Later I made Same Stream Twice (2012), which begins with Maya running circles around me at age six and then at sixteen, and Noa, Noa (2006) which observes Noa playing in the woods and exploring the city from ages eight to five. Yes, I intentionally made her grow younger—that’s the freedom that film provides.
The Last Happy Day (2009) is part of a three part series I made about the ways that you can and cannot know another human being. I wanted the film to be contemplative, surprising, horrific and whimsical. A very tall order, so full of contradiction. The film is an experimental portrait of my distant cousin Sandor Lenard, very much in the spirit of W. G. Sebald’s novels The Rings of Saturn or The Emmigrants. When I invoked the perspective of Sebald, I was able to inhabit my cousin’s past as if it were my own present. The one-directional flow of time became very simple to subvert. Absolutely any idea was fair game, which was morally risky in some ways because Sandor was a person whose life was turned inside out by the events of the Holocaust. I never knew him in real life, but I came to know him in a very profound way through the letters he sent to my uncle. Because Sandor Lenard was “family,” I assumed I could enter his life experiences in a deeper way than I ever had before in a film. In some ways, this was the movie I first wanted to make, beginning at the age of sixteen and finally finishing at forty-eight!
My brother, Ira Sachs, who is also a filmmaker, and I have been deeply involved in trying to document on film the range of feelings we have about our father. Ira’s narrative feature, Forty Shades of Blue is very much a veiled portrait of him, and I have been shooting my film about him for about twenty years. I practically have an archive of 16mm on this “subject.” The surprises never stop. Last year we found out we have two half-sisters we never knew before. One might assume that would make for good material, but it is also extraordinarily complicated to reckon with so many things that real life tosses your way.
PJ Your Day Is My Night started out as a theatrical performance before evolving into a longer film, and while its location and subject may be New York City’s Chinatown, cinematically, it evokes the oneiric state, with its pacing more attuned to the disjunctive rhythms of the city poem (Frances Chung, Federico Garcia Lorca) rather than the narrative cohesions that most folks expect of documentaries about immigrants in this country.
LS I am so glad you brought up Federico García Lorca, whose poem “Sleepless City (Brooklyn Bridge Nocturne)” stands at both the center and the periphery of Your Day Is My Night. Like anyone who arrives in New York City for the first time, Lorca was both overwhelmed and inspired by the cacophony of this city. Since my film deals with this particular aspect of the immigration experience, I wanted to include lines from Lorca’s poem. But there is also another side to the story. When Lorca, this young poetic soul, returned to his own mother country of Spain in 1936, his overtly anti-fascist beliefs and his homosexuality disturbed the powers that be in Franco’s dictatorship. And so Lorca was assassinated. I saw parallels between the oppression of the state in Spain and the horrific experiences my Chinese collaborators experienced during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Stylistically, I also wanted to find something close to Lorca’s “oneiric state” in Your Day Is My Night. As you know, the film took the experience of total strangers sharing beds in shifts as a starting point. During the first six months of editing, I tried either to tell this story by depicting real lives in today’s Chinatown or to invent every bit of it through the construction of a fictional universe. Both Sean Hanley, my editor, and I were very bewildered by which direction to go in, so I showed the work-in-process to Chi-hui Yang, a New York film programmer and writer, who pushed me to follow the dream muse that was tugging at me all along. Finally, a light bulb went off and I issued myself a license to pursue absolutely any formal strategy that came to my mind. Sean and I pulled the film out of the computer and threw it on a series of stages as a live film performance at Arts@Renaissance in Greenpoint, Proteus Gowanus Interdisciplinary Gallery, the NYPL in Chinatown, Maysles Cinema in Harlem, and University Settlement in the Lower East Side. Now I have the live performance bug, and I am never looking back.
PJ By the way, I’m particularly adoring of Your Day Is My Night’s sound design and have watched it purely for its ambient riches. In fact, last week, when my wife and daughter spent the weekend at the in-laws’, I got over my insomnia by listening to it in the background. I get that film is as much an aural experience as a visual one, but usually in mainstream movies the former is subordinate to the latter. I don’t feel this is the case in a lot of your work, certainly your short films, but also in longer ones such as The House of Science and A Biography of Lilith. What role would you say sound plays in shaping your films and videos in the early stages of creation?
LS Ever since I started to make films, I have tried to make music with noises from the world. With The House of Science and Biography of Lilith, I included what I saw as the silenced voice of the body—sneezes, urinating, panting during childbirth, sexual acts—as a form of feminized music. More recently, I worked with the renowned sound artist Stephen Vitiello on Your Day Is My Night. Together, we were able to bring our shared love of John Cage’s ideas to the collection and shaping of the film’s sound design. We listened in the deepest way we knew how to the familiar and the exotic sounds of Chinatown.
PJ Most folks take for granted the name and existence of “Chinatown,” perhaps de-sensitized or oblivious to its (history as a) racialized space and status as a municipally-sanctioned ethnic ghetto in a part of Manhattan that’s been otherwise devoured by merciless gentrification. I particularly admire how Your Day Is My Night resists the temptation to exoticize Chinatown’s people and environs through the usual cinematic tropes of food tourism, absence of English-speakers, gong soundtrack, etc. Your very decision to involve your performers in such an innovative project challenges the perception of Chinatown residents as culturally static. The finished film’s ravishing photography and experimental sound design revise how cinema sees and hears this most American of neighborhoods. I see tremendous sympathy between your film and the achievement of Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together, a work that alters the way globalized Chinese migrant experiences are portrayed in films, novels, etc.
LS Well, all of these intertwining issues really come into play when you are making a film that takes you out of your own community and into another. Of course, I was very aware of the narrow spectrum of representation of the denizens of New York City’s Chinatown. Those kinds of Hollywood images haunted me really. In fact, when I first chose the seven people who are featured in my film, I realized that most of them had already worked as extras for the movie industry at some point in their lives. To my mind, they had been treated like an aggregate of Chinese immigrants (no doubt carrying the proverbial suitcase) rather than a group of individuals with very specific, personal stories. Even after I finished the film, I was so consumed by this issue of images of Chinese immigrants in NYC that I decided to curate a program on it called “We Landed/ I Was Born/ Passing By: NYC’s Chinatown on Screen” for the Anthology Film Archives in January of this year. The entire five program series is dedicated to Chinatown poet Frances Chung. Ever since you introduced me to her extremely personal vision of Chinatown, I knew that I would find a way to incorporate her work into a project.
You also mentioned Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together, which ties right into this conversation in some very interesting and personal ways. Did you know that I studied this movie very closely before shooting Your Day Is My Night? The film guided me both narratively and aesthetically. Happy Together depicts two very cool, but alienated Chinese men living in Buenos Aires. In the film, the camera suggests that a bedroom can become a refuge from the confusion and craziness of a city that is unfamiliar and, in this case, where a protagonist is not able to communicate verbally in the local language. Wong Kar-Wai taught me how to film in darkness, how to move my performers in very small spaces, and how to explore global issues in a room in which you can usually spread your hands from one wall to the next.
PJ Not sure I told you, but Happy Together, perhaps more than any other text/film/painting/poem, inspired the making and completion of The Feeling Is Actual. Between 2005 and 2009, I practically lived and breathed that film, Wong’s Chow Mo-Wan trilogy, and Christopher Doyle and William Chang’s filmographies. This obsession resulted in a book that is supplemented by a short video that I shot in two hours with friends at Deitch Projects, and whose published “script” in the book I typically perform as the video’s live narration and soundtrack.
Which is a rather long-winded way of saying that I know Wong’s film by heart, but also that I recognize Your Day Is My Night’s dialogue with Happy Together via the casting of Veraalba Santa’s character Lourdes. In Wong’s film, you see and hear the long and painful breakup of this Chinese couple, rendered even more alienating by the film’s Spanish-speaking locales. You reverse this cultural dynamic in Your Day Is My Night, casting a young Puerto Rican American woman in a decidedly Cantonese and Mandarin-speaking apartment building and neighborhood. The difference with Veraalba’s transplanted character, of course, is that she isn’t subject to discrimination and hostility in Chinatown in the way that Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung’s are in Buenos Aires.
Let’s talk about your next project, which finds its beating heart in performance again. How might your interest in performance with your new work proceed or depart from previous ones? Do you sense that this might lead to another bigger film project?
LS As part of Pratt Institute’s RiDE (Risk/Dare/Experiment) speakers series, the school invited me to give a talk about the recent introduction of performance in my work. On Tuesday, March 11, 2014, I will present the lecture “Taking a Documentary Detour” in which I will discuss my own work as well as the dramaturgy of French theater director Ariane Mnouchkine (Theatre du Soleil), Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, the Wooster Group, and Jia Zhangke’s mixing of artifice and reality. Then a group of six very brave Pratt students will collaborate with me on a live film performance that includes personal documentary material and improvised fictions.
I am obsessed with the detritus that we as human beings leave on the earth. In addition to the marks we make on our beds (which I explored in Your Day Is My Night), there are also the temporary marks we leave in a room: our hair, flakes from our skin, the residue from a cough, sexual fluids, stains. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Morakot (Emerald) from 2007 is an exquisite, ethereal video about the thousands of ghosts that inhabit a single hotel room. With this work in mind, I asked the Pratt students to imagine one person who had lived previously in the room where they currently live today. This person could be a composite of the student him or herself and an invented character. In this way, the work they do with me on this project becomes a document of their rich imaginations in the year 2014. I want us to get at something that is authentic, raw and not necessarily real, like what you are talking about here in your ode to cinema:
—I am going to show you my warts, or
my tighty-whities with a huge rip in the center, so that
in-between our final scenes together, neither one of us ends up
shooting too many close-ups
We decided to call this new short piece Extra Large Twin. The Pratt show will be our premiere!
PJ Speaking of Weerasethakul, cinema strikes me as a particularly haunted art form, but your virtuosic films and video, which embrace the past, present, and future of moviemaking technology rather seamlessly, are full of the spirits of the living, present day. Live performance and collaboration obviously engage with the immediate moment, but I’m curious to know how you might see film and video layering the new work if, indeed, you plan to incorporate both into it.
LS I think cinema can create an exhilarating confusion between a ghost and a memory. The intermingling of the two on the screen allows for a very particular dialogue between your imagination and your past.
The film I am beginning to work on now is called Tip of My Tongue. Similar in many ways to both Your Day Is My Night and Extra Large Twin at Pratt, it will be a performance and hybrid documentary. Working off my fifty-two poems from each year of my life, I plan to look at the last half century through the experiences of six New Yorkers born in the early 1960s. Like Weerasethakul, I want objects such as buttons (from an old dress or a presidential race), empty bottles (aspirin, wine, or milk) or hair (a baby’s, a dog’s or an old woman’s) to take on a magnified presence on the screen. We will talk about historical time—television broadcasts, fat headlines, big weather, economic upheavals, distant bombings—and from there we will move to the time we each own—torn away, buried, malnourished, un-photographed. After I transform these anecdotes into story-hybrids, the participants will “perform their own lives.” Each person will cycle through the time period, exploring distinct chapters—such as 1963, 1975, 1989, 2001, and 2012. Of course, my dream is that this piece will turn into a fearless act of self-examination: together we will construct a Cubist-inspired composite of life from the early 1960s through the first decades of the new millennium.
Perhaps, by working with performer/collaborators who have lived through the same years that I have, I am building a mirror that could help me understand myself a bit better. Just in the last few days, I have realized that I am entering the storm of a new film. It follows me down into the subway, to the stack of dirty dishes, and into the shower. This is a good place to be.
For more on Lynne Sachs and her work, visit her website.
Paolo Javier is the current Queens Poet Laureate, and author of Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books, forthcoming 2015). He is the curator of the forthcoming poetry festival at the Queens Museum, ETERNiDAY, which will include Lynne Sachs’s Your Day Is My Night.
“. . . dawn, always new, often superb, inaugurates the return of the everyday.”—Henri Levebvre
“the house protects the dreamer”—Gaston Bachelard
“. . . the non-I that protects the I.”—Gaston Bachelard
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
Coming into culture is also coming into discipline. It begins with trying to get newborn babies to sleep at night (which they would not otherwise), simple: night from day. The process of subjectivation is palpable, you can trace its progression daily via a series of corrections, separations, instructions. We teach them to be children. There is an argument lurking deeply in here somewhere that art is one level on which politics can get shifted.
What if, after an infancy and subsequent enculturation into sleeping at night, a person got flipped by work into an opposite schedule. Then we have another culture. We have a culture that no longer forms, and is formed by an individual body growing up through concentric circles of mother’s arms, family home, neighborhood, village or town, no longer resonating with, as Henri Lefebvre says, “days, nights, seasons, the waves and tides of the sea, monthly cycles,” a body intensely interrupted, mediated. Then what if that worker did not have a bed, but rented one by the shift? What if that body without a bed also did not yet have citizenship, but also did not have the proper papers to go home again.
This is an argument that the beauty of the film Your Day is My Night — a saturated beauty of texture and proximity, stamped in Chinatown reds and blues, awash in ambivalent New York light — is a palliative beauty. The film is a love song to the singular face. Silently, at the center of the film is the bed, site of dreams, synecdoche for the individual interiority, become a capitalist commodity. The failure of protection — of home, of family, of country — refrain throughout. Here, it is impossible to experience filmic love for the singular face, without also understanding this is a film about the recession of the singular, of the subject.
The project began when Lynne Sachs, curious about the Chinatown shift bed, entered the bustling, open sociality of a Chinese cultural center and asked the people there for stories. She filmed them cooking together, eating together, passing time, and retelling the stories in a small apartment which approximates the spaces where many live. Everything here is aesthetically interesting: the music, the color, the camera variation, the mishmash of things, the pacing, the intimacy between the economically constituted family of the small apartment. She shot in mirrors often to increase light and space among the warren of bunk beds.
Here, we could talk about the social air of a tiny apartment shared by numerous, unrelated adults, about the novel, generative collaboration of the experimental filmmaker with Chinatown residents, or we could talk about the profoundly vulnerable population of Chinese elders living in the enclaves of protection, of shared language and culture, that dot the United States. We could talk about the direct threat posed by the expansion of capital into every interstice of city space evidenced in San Francisco by Ellis Act evictions, of the Lee family, who lived in their Chinatown apartment for thirty-four years, in Vancouver by the destruction of, among other buildings, the Ming Sun Benevolent Society,[1] and portended by the growing number of art studios in New York’s Chinatown. We all know about the rhythm that follows artists around cities. What if we can call the source of the night worker’s interruption what it is essentially: another body, with more capital? Then there is a new rhythm, a rhythm which emanates from the bodies whose needs are so large, that the space of one bed for one dreaming body is unviable.[2] We might consider the shift bed on the same spectrum as the necessity to leave one’s own home country. We might consider that the rhythm of the concentric culture was always a dream.
The artist has shown us our dream, via beauty of the individual face, to the quiet and sweet melody of that dream’s failure. From this contradiction, I surmise a theory of art’s political efficacy in the present: The impulsion to all of us right now is to become very, very small and very hard underneath several layers of total availability, adaptability, flexibility, and precarity, infinitely adjustable by location, schedule, and interface, inside of which is assumed a small core of self, hard, closed, and perpetually vying for its own survival and individual satisfaction. Against this structural adjustment of self into subject, art remains open — and I don’t mean the market which surrounds art, I mean the work of the artist herself who, in lieu of being able still to resonate openly with the rhythms, generations, and seasons, relegates her open flow into object-based play, and each time re-presents the possibility of an open world, to be accessed through the openness of others. That site of encounter with art is the troubled political efficacy of art in this moment. It is troubled because that dear and representative moment of opening is itself commodified, sanctioned, and sectioned off, and the habit of having it, like a porn climax, can stand in for an actually open world.
But I fight on the side of the creator, who, against the self’s structural adjustment does this thing, be it alone, in order to be multiple again. Perhaps that is where it becomes relevant that the subject/actors in Your Day is My Night eventually became a troupe that performed the script live around New York, and to this day hang out with the director. Except Yi Chun Cao, Linda Y.H. Chan, Chung Quing Che, Ellen Ho, Yun Xiu Huang, Sheut Hing Lee, and Kam Yin Tsui still have no real permanent, secure base from which to protect their dreams — and that, of course, is the limitation of art. Art is not a corrective song, perhaps it’s even a vestige. But the human body — the beginning point or end point of the rhythm of Humanist culture, and that which justifies it — is now overtaken by and dissolved into the rhythm itself. No bed, for some, no nation. The film ends with this Fedrico García Lorca poem.
Forgetting does not exist, not dreams
just raw flesh
kisses tie our mouths
in a tangle of new veins.
Those who hurt will hurt without rest,
those who fear death will carry it on their shoulders.
1. More on the struggle in Vancouver’s Chinatown here: http://friendsof439.wordpress.com/.
2. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.” Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 10.
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. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival and in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires International Film Festival. The San Francisco Cinematheque recently published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn. Your Day is My Nightscreened at the Pacific Film Archive on November 20, 2013, curated by Kathy Geritz.
Canyon filmmaker Lynne Sachs.Sight & Sound has ranked her experimental documentary Your Day is My Night among the best films of the year, and the BBC has already declared it to be one of eight films to watch in 2014. Now is a great time to return to the Canyon catalog to explore her unique body of work, which deftly navigates the borders between individual subjectivity and political collectivity, theory and practice, film and poetry. Head over to Fandor to see more than two decades of her short work, then read a new interview with Lynne at Brooklyn Rail, and check out several entries from her ongoing attempt to write a poem for every year of her life on our Tumblr
Canyon Cinema Foundation is dedicated to educating the public about independent, non-commercial, experimental, avant-garde and artist-made moving images. We manifest this commitment by nurturing scholarship and awareness with public programming at universities and nonprofit cultural organizations worldwide.
