Earlier in the year, we presented Tender Non-Fictions, a program of films by experimental documentarian Lynne Sachs, who has been prolifically creating works for cinema for four decades. Her non-fiction films, represented in our program in 11 works of varying lengths, evoke the curiosity and richness of a life lived through art.
Which brings to her most recent feature documentary, Film About a Father Who. From 1984 to 2019, Sachs shot film of her now-deceased father, a bon vivant and pioneering businessman. This documentary is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. A perfect film to end the year with, remembering those we may have lost along the way.
Crises of Language and Difference AFTERIMAGE By Liz Kotz November 1989
“Special” sessions or programs devoted to third-world, multicultural, or minority programming at historically white-dominated conferences and institutions are difficult enterprises. All too often these occasions attempt to make up for past exclusions by presenting a vastly varied body of work all at once, with inadequate preparation or focus, in a context that was not designed or developed for such works. Overburdened by the often conflicting needs and expectations of producers of color, minority communities, and predominantly white audiences, such programs risk contradiction and disappointment.
The thirty-fifth annual Robert Flaherty Seminar, help this August in upstate New York, proved a case in point. With this year’s focus on work by “third world and minority film and video artists,” programmed by Pearl Bowser of African Diaspora Images, excitement and expectations were high. Many people had hoped that the conference, bringing together scholars and makers from the United States, Africa, Great Britain, and elsewhere, would present a critical opportunity to reopen and expand the North American discussion of “third-world” film and video and the questions of race, cinema, representation such woek necessarily engages. Yet despite the many powerful works screened and the participation of numerous individuals deeply involved in the production, exhibition, and study of third-world and minority cinema, the week-long event proved surprisingly unproductive, as entrenched positions, and divisions were restaged in a new setting without pushing the boundaries of dialogue or analysis.
I had gone to Flaherty expecting that the seminar would be a chance to test out some of the available theoretical models—“third cinema,” “third-world cinema,” “a black aesthetic,” “minority discourse,” “immigrant cinema,” etc.—against the wide-ranging and very different films from Africa, Latin America, the U.S., Great Britain, and other sites of the vast African, Asian, and Latin American diasporas. Such a level of discussion, however, was not forthcoming at the conference. Plagued by a lack of time and structure, unwieldly programming, and the inability of the heterogeneous group of participants to find any common ground or language in which to discuss issues, the formal discussions were often an exercise in frustration. Like many other participants, I found myself obsessively and somewhat painfully trying to trace the multiple, intersecting, and ultimately overpowering barriers to discourse and dialogue at what had begun as a very hopeful and promising occasion.
A large part of the problem had to do with the structure, traditions, and limitations of the Robert Flaherty seminar. Originally devoted to the study of the documentaries of its founding figure, the annual conference has grown into one of the few forums for independent producers, artists, and academics to get together and discuss political and formal issues in filmmaking. Cloistered in the campus of Wells College for a week, about 150 participants watch about 10 hours of films and videos each day, followed by formal large-group discussions and informal social activities. A majority of the participants are Flaherty “regulars,” a predominantly liberal, white, East Coast audience of documentary supporters. (While documentaries are the focus, experimental and narrative work is shown as well.) Film- and videomakers are invited to attend, accompany their works, and participate in discussions.
It is designed to be a cumulative experience, with all participants attending all screenings and discussions, so that critical issues, comparisons, and thematics will emerge and build throughout the week. Yet the most basic concepts for understanding critical questions of address, audience, context, or the political implications of formal strategies were completely underdeveloped. As a first-time Flaherty participant, I tried to figure out what seemed to be the Flaherty buzzwords—“integrity” and “responsibility” ranked high on the list—and the liberal/progressive ideology underlying that discourse. Of course, the fact that no one would admit to anything as systematic as ideology or discourse was part of the problem. The seminar seemed deeply resistant to any critical or analytic framework, privileging the “honest,” “emotional” responses of participants while refusing to theorize such positions at all. In such a context, the black and third-world participants tended to be the only ones to acknowledge that they had any ideological or political positioning—and got roundly criticized for “over-politicizing” the proceedings among some white participants.
With a tradition of unstructured discussions that often resemble group therapy more than intellectual debate, the Flaherty seminar is known for its free-for-alls and emotional outbursts. With topics as emotionally and politically charged as cultural difference and racism, the limitations of such as a non-format became readily apparent, as the lack of structure allowed to participants to align themselves along all too familial lines. Given the inefficacy of the more structured formal discussions to promote real interchange and dialogue between different sectors, the informal socializing became quite polarized between black and white participants, leaving the other third-world and minority participants uncomfortably stranded.
The central question of what it meant to be addressing issues of third-world and minority filmmaking in a mixed-race and cross-cultural setting was rarely explicitly addressed—at least not in the official discussions; the informal discussions were, of course, a whole other story. Yet the extreme vulnerability and ambiguity of the situation proved to be the seminar’s major stumbling block. While many if not most of the white participants were unprepared and inadequately informed to address the issues of race, ethnicity, and cinematic language the event set out ot raise, the conference also failed to create a dialogue that would challenge entrenched positions and beliefs. In the face of white ignorance, many black participants opted for separatism. Since most of the black and third-world producers and critics present had not had the opportunities to address controversial issues within their own communities, perhaps few felt that the atmosphere of a predominantly white conference was a safe or productive place to initiate this process.
In an effort to have a critical framework for the conference, UCLA professor Teshome Gabriel—author of Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (1982)—presented a schematic outline of Western and non-Western filmic conventions, relating these to the storytelling forms and performatory models of print cultures and oral/folk cultures. Yet aside from Zan Boko (1988), a lyric and beautiful film on forced urbanization by Burkina Faso’s Gaston Kabore, few films screened at the seminar fit this schema of “third-world cinema.” Consequently, participants unfamiliar with Gabriel’s more challenging work on time-space relationships and non-Western film languages had little to go on but vague and ultimately unproductive generalizations. Among the many works screened, the found-footage videotape From Here From This Side (1988) by Mexican videomaker Gloria Ribe, or the South African film Mapantsula (1988, by Oliver Schmitz), which mobilizes a conventional gangster film format to indict state racism and terrorism, posed very real challenges to models of third-world cinema, as do any number of recent Latin American films employing the filmic languages and capital-intensive industrial modes of production of first-world cinema. Yet works that departed from or that explicitly problematized such categories tended not to be discussed, or were programmed at such inconvenient times—11:30 at night or Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989)—that few participants saw them.
With no further opportunity to examine or define critical categories or concepts, the seminar experiences a complete breakdown of critical language. Particularly in this rapidly changing and highly contested area of research, each set of terms suggests a distinct historical context and discursive formation. As always with critical language, the very constitution, unity, and identity of the object of study shifts and mutates with the deployment of each set of categories: third-world cinema, minority film/video, multicultural filmmaking, black filmmaking, etc. Each suggests a specific, historically contingent, and politically informed critical model. And yet throughout the week, people went around using terms like “third-world” and “non-Western” as if they were synonymous or interchangeable, randomly mobilizing them against black or minority filmmakers whose work didn’t fit Gabriel’s outline—a tactic that reached its ridiculous extreme during a discussion of Lien de Parente (1986) by black French director Willy Rameau, who was criticized by some participants for his use of “Western” film languages. The whole question of the interpenetration of first and third worlds, and the consequences of this or discussing film languages, were never developed.
The ambiguity of these categories and their potential to illuminate or homogenize cultural differences were reflected throughout the conference. Since the festival was programmed by Bowser, a veteran black film programmer, most participants expected the focus would be with work from Africa and African diaspora communities. However, the tension between the announced scope of the program, potentially encompassing the entire third world and the range of ethnic minority communities, and its actual focus on African and African-American works was not adequately raised or resolved. Over the seven-day program, which included over 50 films and videos, five works by Latinos and three by Asian producers were screened, a paltry and poorly thought out offering that felt tokenistic. Of greater concern was the general lack of attention to the range and differences within and among “third-world” cultures and communities, both on the level of insensitivity to non-African experiences of diaspora and dispersal and in a consistent avoidance of issues of class, gender, and sexuality—even more odd given that a majority of participants were women and probably one-quarter were gay.
The lack of shared language for discussing political issues exploded after the screening of Bolivian filmmaker Jac Avila’s Kric? Krac! Tales of a Nightmare (coproduced by Vanyoska Grey, 1988), a relentless quasi-documentary on life in present-day Haiti. Accusations of racism, sensationalism, and lack of political analysis flew around the room, colliding with criticisms of the “inauthenticity” of materials—the film incorporates extensive found footage from Cuban films such as El Otro Francisco (1975, by Sergio Giral)—and its violation of “the integrity of the filmmaking process.” Avila’s failure to adequately defend his use of images belied the film’s lack of organizing strategy and further frustrated effective discussion of the interconnected political and filmmaking problems the film exhibits.
Rather than discussing the abstract “ethic”” of image appropriation and exploitation, John Akomfrah of Britain’s black audio Film Collective suggested that a more productive approach would be to evaluate the film in the context of research on contemporary postcolonial societies and the contradictory roles that representations play in cultures of terror.
As shown by the fate of baby doc Duvalier, the inheritors of power based on terror are not always able to master. It’s working for these mechanisms of fear and terror take on a life of their own. Using, but not in control of overdetermined images of violence and destruction. Kric? Krac! fails to contain mobilize a reposition that force and inadvertently participate in the very spectacularization of Tara claims to reveal like many works using found footage and found images, Avila’s film mistakes, the power of shocking images for effectiveness falling into an all to conventional oversaturation, a violent imagery, characteristic of western film, making that carries it on her political impact our meeting yet the discussion nearly degenerated into shouting, match the participants, attacking or defending the film, without really discussing how or whether it worked.
The most challenging debates took place around the screenings of episodes from the landmark series on the US civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize (1986 and forthcoming, 1990), produced by Henry Hampton, and Blackslide Productions Inc. Featuring episodes of the initial series and fine cuts from the second series, which covers the 20 year period from 1965 to 1985, the seminar generated a critically cogent and politically informed discussion of how documentary films construct history. Several black participants critiqued the newer programs for retelling familiar stories and events without any meaningful reevaluation or inside and privileging a white viewer in such a way as to offer nothing new to black audiences. While the early civil rights years treated in the first series enjoy your relative consensus of interpretation, the second series tackles more recent events as well as controversial chapters, such as the formation of the Black Panther party, which are the objects of considerable contestation even within the black community.
Documentary strategies used relatively unproblematically in the first series met with criticism in the second. The episodes were challenged on formal grounds for their presumed neutrality, lack of perspective or viewpoint, and allegiance to a traditional PBS use of narrative, which left them flat and institutional. That the new programs for the product of biracial teams and had undergone extensive audience testing and multiple recuts suggested that underlying such formal and storytelling problems were unresolved structural and conceptual difficulties.
Participants discussed the political and historiographical implications of filmmaking strategies adopted in the series, including the class-based and top-down leadership theory of power and political struggle. It adopts featuring extensive interviews with movement leaders, but few perspectives from for example, those who took part in the ill-fated for people to march on Washington others prove the constraints of the series and the limitations of the traditional models of documentary filmmaking with its focus on newsworthy events and reliance on archival footage for constructing in minority history search for making issues unavoidably brought up questions about what constitutes meaningful historical or social change. Raising the problem of focusing on visible political events, such as the election of Carl Strokes (the first black mayor in a major US city), a black woman producer from Philadelphia commented, “we all know now that electing a black mayor doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
The political problems of co-optation and the character of racism in the North suggested the difficult challenges to traditional documentary practices, posed by modern forms of power that work by masking themselves: unlike the naked racism of the southern sheriffs, northern white racists are less likely to reveal themselves on camera since these people who know how to manipulate media, how to generate a public rhetoric that masks their actions. By focusing on the visible manifestations of power—the billy club landing on the head, or the overly racist actions of working class white “rednecks”—documentary film risks participating in the representational conventions that allow most relations of power based on consent to go on mentioned, and on analyzed
The profound difficulties, historically disempowered people face in constructing a cultural memory and the problems posed by borrowing historical models and materials from the dominant culture, were brought up throughout the week. Diverse works address the question of what materials are available to construct filmic counter-histories of African-American and minority experiences. The lack of archives of black images of American history, for instance, was raised after the rough-cut screening of veteran black producer William Greaves’s Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice (1989). White experimental documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs’s Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989) offered an example of the recovery and representation of “amateur” documentation of black lives, in this case the 16mm “home movies” taken by the Memphis minister L.O. Taylor in the 1930s and ‘40s. Brazilian filmmaker Raquel Gerber’s Ori (1988) brought together disparate footage shot over 11 years in Africa and Brazil, in a disjointed but powerful film aimed at reconstructing historical memory across the traumas of slavery and colonialism. Mixing travel film, conference documentation, history lesson, spectacle, spiritual journey, and personal storytelling, the film works to reposition African-ness at the heart of Brazilian culture.
The necessity of examining colonial discourse in white filmmaking arose after a late night screening of Robert Flaherty-directed feature The Elephant Boy (1937). The film reproduces a fascinatingly impure and impenetrating set of colonial discourses on the Indian “other,” from the original Kipling tale to the Flaherty “documentary” treatment and the final Michael Korda-produced Hollywood release. Yet the official presentation problematized the film only in relation to its “impure” authorship. If it hadn’t been for a group of Indian women producers present, who quickly dissected the film’s painful orientalism, its implicit racism would have gone without comment—inexcusable in any context, but particularly odd in a year devoted to questions of race and cinema.
Much of the seminar seemed caught between irreconcilable rhetoric: in a revealing juxtaposition, while one side of the Flaherty brochure stated that “the seminar will examine some of the ways films and videotapes reveal cultures,” the other side stated that “participants will study specific films and tapes that illuminate the human spirit.” The complete inadequacy of traditional humanist rhetoric for addressing complex questions of racial and cultural difference was manifested throughout the week as white seminar participants seemed to ignore differences entirely—”we’re all human”—consider them the reconcilable—”these works are not for me”—or collapse completely disperate phenomena. Yet the question of difference was clearly not a problem for white participants. Homogenizing and universalizing statements about black and third-world experiences voiced by some people of color went unchallenged: the at times tense divisions between different generations and tendencies within the group of black and third-world participants and the growing contestation of cultural nationalist rhetorics and positions went largely unarticulated in public.
The absence of rhetorical models for critically examining issues of audience and address particularly hampered discussion of works by people of color that deviated from conventions of mainstream filmmaking. White participants, finding their stance as the privileged interpreters of cultural products undermined, at times reacted with hostility, incomprehension, or pain at “feeling excluded” by works not explicitly addressed to them as white viewers. In a discussion of D. Elmina Davis‘s documentary Omega Rising: Women of Rastafari (1988), many participants reacted to her refusal to translate rasta culture and language for a white audience as a weakness: few seemed to appreciate the intense power relations inherent in requiring minority or marginal cultures to continually explain themselves to an outside or dominant audience. While the documentary, produced by London’s Ceddo Film/Video Workshop, certainly has its weaknesses. Davis’s underlying point—that genuine dialogue entails effort by both parties—got lost in a slew of criticism and confusion.
At the end of the week, conference discussions of “difficult” or “unconventional” works, got increasingly polarized. A white college professor remarked, in reference to experimental works by British filmmaker Akomfrah and Indian-British videomaker Pratibha Parmar, that he found them “closed” and unable to appeal to a mass audience and accused the filmmakers of “coterie filmmaking.” Parmer defended her work against charges of elitism, noting the use of her video Sari Red (1988) in community-based antiracism campaigns and discussing her deliberate choice to use cultural symbols and icons that engage Indian and Asian audiences. She explained the importance for Indian women of reappropriating the image of the sari—often seen as a symbol of submissiveness in Western iconography and as a visible sign of difference that can target Indian women for racist attack.
Parmar also questioned the assumption that works by people of color that do not privilege a white viewer are therefore incomprehensible to everyone. Of course, varieties of such accusations—too “personal,” too “specialized,” to “narrow,” too, “political”—are routinely mobilized against any filmmakers, particularly people of color, women, and gays, whenever they choose to depart from the forms of culturally imposed homogeneity with the pursuit of “mass” audiences. That such a comment could be made in utter sincerity on the last full day of the seminar evidenced its utter failure to develop any productive terms for discussing the complex mechanisms by which racial and colonial relations are inscribed in filmic representation, and how film languages and representational conventions can be reworked to reveal cultural difference.
Many other provocative works were screened, from Olley Marouma’s After the Hunger and Drought (1988), on Zimbabwean writers and their role in cultural decolonization in southern Africa, to Kwate Nee-Owoo and Kwesi Owusu’s Ouaga: African Cinema Now! (1988), a documentary on contemporary African filmmaking focused on the annual FESPACO Festival of Pan-African Cinema in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. With clips from numerous films and interviews with African and African diaspora filmmakers including Med Hondo, Haile Germina, Idrissa Ouedraogo, John Akomfrah, and Louis Messiah, the Channel 4-funded documentary could have provided a valuable informational background to start the week. Among the powerful short experimental works were U.S. filmmaker, A.J. Rogbodiyan’s poetic Peace Family (1982-83), an in-camera edited piece working with jazz-inspired rhythms and an improvisational process, Canadian-American filmmaker Veronica Soul’s work in progress, Unknown Soldier, using Chinese characters to explore the acquisition of language and the construction of identity and Philip Mallory Jones’s three-channel installations Foot-prints (1988) and Dreamkeeper (1989), using African images and music to build an experimental narrative. That such rich and vastly different works could all be shown under the rubric of “third-world” or “minority” cinema says a lot about the explosion those categories are currently undergoing. Throughout the conference, the audience grappled with the inevitable tension produced by trying to simultaneously use and deconstruct available terms and categories. As discussions oscillated between platitudes and attack, mobilized proscriptive models, and generally went in circles, the works screened simply overran and exploded the languages used to discuss them.
Lynne Sachs: A Poet’s Perspective Gene Siskel Film Center, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Screenings on February 20 & 23, 2023 https://www.siskelfilmcenter.org/lynnesachs
LYNNE SACHS: A POET’S PERSPECTIVE
Committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Embracing archives, letters, portraits, confessions, poetry, and music, her films take us on a critical journey through reality and memory. Regardless of the passage of time, these films continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent, and radical in their artistic conception.
Lynne has produced over 40 films as well as numerous live performances, installations, and web projects. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Sachs’ films have screened at MoMA, Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, the New York Film Festival, Oberhausen Int’l Short FF, Punto de Vista, Sundance, Vancouver IFF, Viennale, and Doclisboa, among others. In 2021, Sachs received awards from both Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center for her achievements in the experimental and documentary fields.
The Film Center, in collaboration with Conversations at the Edge and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation program, is honored to welcome Sachs to the Film Center in person for two evenings of her work, followed by in-depth conversations. Photo credit: Inés Espinosa López.
2020, dir. Lynne Sachs USA, 74 min. In English / Format: Digital
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, filmmaker Lynne Sachs shot 8mm and 16mm film, videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame, yet privately ensconced in secrets. With this meditation on fatherhood and masculinity, Sachs allows herself and her audience to see beneath the surface of the skin, beyond the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, she discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. (Cinema Guild)Post-screening conversation with Lynne Sachs.
2018-2022, dir. Lynne Sachs USA, 64 min., In English / Format: Digital
This program of four short and medium-length pieces highlights Sachs’ filmography from a poetic, personal perspective, as she uses her camera to capture the essence of people, places, and moments in time. The scope of this work includes DRIFT AND BOUGH (2014, USA, 6 min., No dialogue / Format: 8mm on digital), an assemblage of 8mm footage from a winter morning in Central Park. Set to sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate and assured score, the contrasting darkness – of skyscrapers, fences, trees, and people – against bright snow, gives way to a meditative living picture. In MAYA AT 24 (2021, USA, 4 min., No dialogue / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs presents a spinning, swirling cinematic record of her daughter Maya, chronicled at ages 6, 16, and 24. As Maya runs, she glances – furtively, lovingly, distractedly – through the lens and at her mother, conveying a wordless bond between parent and child, and capturing the breathtakingly quick nature of time. Presented for the first time publicly, in VISIT TO BERNADETTE MAYER’S CHILDHOOD HOME (2020, USA, 3 min., In English / Format: 16mm on digital), Sachs visits poet Bernadette Mayer’s childhood home in Queens to celebrate Mayer’s work, through a reverent, flowing collage. Queens, New York is also the backdrop for the poetry of Paolo Javier in SWERVE (2022, USA, 7 min., in various languages with English subtitles / Format: Digital), a “COVID film” that documents people emerging – cautiously, distanced, masked – from the global pandemic, finding their way in the liminal space between “before” and “after,” and connected by language and verse. In collaboration with playwright Lizzie Olesker, THE WASHING SOCIETY (2018, USA, 44 min., In English / Format: Digital) explores the once ubiquitous but now endangered public laundromat. Inspired by “To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War” by Tera W. Hunter, THE WASHING SOCIETY is an observational study of lather and labor, a document of the lives of working class women who – largely overlooked and underappreciated – load, dry, fold, and repeat. Post-screening conversation with Lynne Sachs.
Queer Filters: Legacies and Artifacts (Filtres queer: héritages et artifices) Festival International du Film d’Amiens (FIFAM) Curated by Matthias Smalbeen, Caroline Alonso, Etienne Commaux, Louise Camerlynck, and Victor Berquez November 11, 2022 https://www.fifam.fr/en/
We are a group of five students in our second year of a cinema master’s degree in the UPJV’s University in Amiens (France). We have the opportunity to be charged by the FIFAM (Festival International du Film d’Amiens) and by its artistic director, Marie-France Aubert, to organize a carte blanche during the festival. Our screening will take place on the 12th of November and takes part in a partnership between our University and the festival.
So, we got the idea to show three works that could create a visual history of lesbian and queer films and representations.
We would love to show to the public during the festival A Month of Single Frames by Lynne Sachs.
English translation of poster:
CARte blanche M2 Cinema, UPJV
Caroline Alonso, Victore Berquez, Louise Camerlynck, Etienne Commaux, Matthias SMalbeen
A Month of Single Frames and Les Démons de Dorothy Followed by a discussion with Alexis Langlois
Queer filters: Legacies and Artifices
A Month of Single Frames, Lynne Sachs
“Barbara Hammer, famous lesbian experimental filmmaker, begins her own dying process by revisiting her personal archives. She donates some of her images, sounds and writings to filmmaker and friend Lynne Sachs and invites her to direct her own film with this material.”
Dorothy’s Demons, Alexis Langlois
“Director Dorothy is unleashing on a script, when a call from her producer breaks the mood: enough queer comedies, it’s time to start making mainstream films! To avoid sinking into despair, Dorothy seeks solace in the Romy the Vampire Slayer series.”
SATURDAY November 12, 4.45 p.m., Orson Welles cinema as part of FIFAM
Original French text:
CARTe blanche M2 Cinéma, UPJV
Caroline Alonso, Victore Berquez, Louise Camerlynck, étienne Commaux, Matthias SMalbeen
A Month of single frames et Les démons de Dorothy Suivie d’une discussion avec Alexis Langlois
Filtres queer : héritages et artifices
A Month of Single Frames, Lynne Sachs
“Barbara Hammer, célèbre cinéaste expérimentale lesbienne, entame son propre processus de mort en revisitant ses archives personnelles. Elle donne une partie de ses images, de ses sons et de ses écrits à la cinéaste et amie Lynne Sachs et l’invite à réaliser son propre film avec ce matériel.”
Les démons de Dorothy, Alexis Langlois
“La réalisatrice Dorothy se défoule sur un scénario, lorsqu’un appel de son producteur casse l’ambiance : assez de comédies queer, il est temps de se mettre à faire des films grand public ! Pour ne pas sombrer dans le désespoir, Dorothy cherche du réconfort dans la série Romy the Vampire Slayer.”
SAMEDI 12 Novembre, 16h45, cinéma Orson Welles dans le cadre du FIFAM
For thirty seconds, look at but try not to read the front page of any newspaper you can find in your home or on-line. Then, write two lines of poetry. Next, shoot a thirty (30) second video of anything but this newspaper using your phone’s camera.
We will watch the video and listen to the poetry (LIVE! read by you in class) simultaneously.
Arash Azizi | HOLY SPIDER — MON, OCT 31, 6:00PM Arash Azizi is a writer living in New York City. He is the author of the book, The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US and Iran’s Global Ambitions (Oneworld, 2020.) His writings on cinema, politics and history have also appeared in numerous outlets including the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is a regular at film festivals around the world and has covered every Cannes film festival since 2016. He has also written and produced movies which can be found on his IMDB profile. Into Schrodinger’s Box, a film he co-write and co-produced, is available to watch on Fandor via Amazon.
Savita Iyer Ahrestani | Editor of the Penn Stater magazine — MON, OCT 31, 6:00PM Savita Iyer Ahrestani is the senior editor of the Penn Stater magazine, Penn State University’s alumni magazine. Before joining the Penn Stater in 2017, she was a freelance journalist for 14 years, writing on a wide range of topics for magazines and websites including VOGUEIndia, Teen Vogue, Yahoo Life, SELF.com and Refinery 29’s U.K. edition. Born in Calcutta, India, Savita grew up in Geneva, Switzerland and has been living in State College for 10 years.
Elham Nasr | PSU post-doc, from Iran — MON, OCT 31, 6:00PM Ellie Nasr has overcome lots of barriers to now be an international post-doctoral scholar at Pennsylvania State University. Before coming to the US, despite all limitations for women, she was an independent entrepreneur in Iran, focusing on environmental education and facilitating the relationship between nature and modern society. She has always been interested in empowering young girls through nature-related experiences to make them competent to release from restrictive stereotypes for women in traditional societies.
Maryam Shahri | Instructor & researcher, PSU Dept of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, from Iran — MON, OCT 31, 6:00PM An instructor and researcher with Penn State’s department of agricultural and biological engineering specializing in public sustainable behavior and sustainable governance.
Nargess Kaviani | Endocrinologist with Geisinger, from Iran — MON, OCT 31, 6:00PM My name is Nargess Kaviani. I am born and raised in lran, in a secular family. After graduating from medical school with honors, l moved to US to pursue my postgraduate trainings. I did my residency and fellowship training in NY state and after completing my fellowship moved back to State College with my family and started my new job as an endocrinologist in Geisinger.
I am the CEO and founder of a nonprofit organization called MDSPS, Medical Doctor Suicide Prevention Services. I love art, outdoors, hiking, cooking, socializing with friends and family, as well as reading and writing.
Storai Jalali | Editorial Assistant, PennStater Magazine, from Afghanistan — MON, OCT 31, 6:00PM A women’s rights activist who was working as assistant director for FRDO organization in Kabul, Afghanistan before the Taliban takeover in August 2021, she is a BBA Graduate from RANA university in Kabul, In April 2022 moved to State College with her husband and 2 kids, now working as Editorial Assistant for Penn State university (PennStater Magazine).
Toyosi Olanrewaju | Registered Nurse, from Nigeria — MON, OCT 31, 6:00PM As a Registered Nurse and experienced mental health professional with almost a decade of full-time work for the largest psychiatric hospital in Nigeria, Mrs. Olanrewaju also registered in 2019 to practice as a Mental Health Nurse in United Kingdom. She is currently United States Registered Nurse.
She started her education at the Oyo State College of Nursing and Midwifery, for her professional training in Nursing. Her passion for less privileged and underserved population motivated her to specialize in psychiatry/mental health nursing.
Thus, she chose to specialize in the field of psychiatry, and I proceeded to the School of Psychiatric Nursing, Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Aro-Abeokuta, Nigeria for her training in psychiatric/mental health nursing. Her quest for more knowledge also led her to University of Derby, United Kingdom where she earned a Bachelor of Nursing Sciences {BNSc} degree. She had several professional certificates, and she has attended conferences both at national and international level.
She is happily married with kids.
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2022
Byron Hurt | HAZING — TUE, NOV 1, 6:00PM Byron Hurt is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer, lecturer, activist, Emmy-nominated TV show host, and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. Hurt is also a short video content creator for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Forward Promise program.
James Vivenzio | HAZING — TUE, NOV 1, 6:00PM
Dr. Stevan Veldkamp | Penn State’s Timothy J. Piazza Center for Fraternity and Sorority Research and Reform — TUE, NOV 1, 6:00PM Dr. Stevan Veldkamp leads Penn State’s Timothy J. Piazza Center for Fraternity and Sorority Research and Reform – where he sets and implements a national research agenda collaborating with scholars here and nationwide on studies to eradicate hazing and hazardous behaviors, strengthen leadership education, and monitor the state of Greek life. With a career spanning three decades, Dr. Veldkamp has directly advised students in all Greek life traditions and is a frequent campus and headquarters consultant. A first-generation college student, Steve is a two-time graduate of Grand Valley State University and holds a doctoral degree from Indiana University in Higher Education and Student Affairs.
Tierra Williams | Vice President, State College Chapter, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority — TUE, NOV 1, 6:00PM Tierra D. Williams is a Mississippi Native hailing from Thee Jackson State University majoring in Speech Communication with a Theatre concentration. Tierra has always had a love for the arts, and throughout high school she participated in Speech & Debate, Poetry Out Loud, and acted in various plays. In college, she landed the lead role in the play RUINED by, Lynn Nottage, and was nominated to go to Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) in Roanoke, Virginia- where she placed as a semi-finalist. In March of 2022 she hosted the “Women’s Voices”, where she sang and danced as the MC. She is a Blacktivst and an Actorvist and is unapologetic about both, and uses her talent to address local and national issues. She moved to State College in 2018, where she got involved with plays written and directed by Charles Dumas. and poetry events led by Cynthia Mazzant or Elaine Medar-Wilgus. She also began her Vegan Bakery and sells goods at Webster’s Bookstore & Cafe. She received a grant from 3 Dots Downtown to start her own show “Black Tea” a community engagement show meant to spark dialogue around difficult conversations. With Pablo Lopez, filmmaker and creator of Dark Mind Productions, Tierra’s dream became reality. She then began hosting events for National Black Poetry Night, Politic & Poetry, and other workshops. Tierra is determined to make a space for Black Art on every stage, “By any means necessary.”
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2022
Bhawin Suchak | OUTTA THE MUCK — WED, NOV 2, 6:00PM An educator, filmmaker, and founding member/co-executive director of Youth FX, a media arts organization focused on empowering young people of color in Albany, NY and around the world by teaching them creative and technical skills in film and digital media.
Fritz Bitsoie | THE TRAILS BEFORE US — WED, NOV 2, 6:00PM Fritz Bitsoie is a Diné Director from Gallup, New Mexico and a graduate of the film program at the University of New Mexico. In his first short film, The Trails Before Us, Bitsoie aims to reclaim the Western film genre as a way to share contemporary stories about the Native American experience.
Lynne Sachs | SWERVE — WED, NOV 2, 6:00PM Sachs is an experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn. 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 each new project.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2022
Art Johnston and Pep Peña | ART AND PEP — THUR, NOV 3, 6:00PM They are civil rights leaders whose life and love is a force behind LGBTQ+ equality in the heart of the country. Their iconic gay bar, Sidetrack, has helped fuel movements and create community for decades in Chicago. But, behind the business and their historic activism exists a love unlike any other.
Mercedes Kane | ART AND PEP — THUR, NOV 3, 6:00PM Mercedes Kane is forever fascinated by the human experience and the many ways to explore and express that experience. She most recently directed WHAT REMAINS: THE BURNING DOWN OF BLACK WALL STREET (director, 2021) about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.
Martine N. Granby | NO SIREN LEFT BEHIND — THUR, NOV 3, 6:00PM Martine N. Granby is a nonfiction filmmaker, producer, video journalist, and an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut. She has worked as a documentarian, producer, editor, video journalist, and educator.
Shirin Barghi | NO SIREN LEFT BEHIND — THUR, NOV 3, 6:00PM Shirin Barghi is an Iranian journalist, audio producer and documentary filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. She currently works as a Senior Producer for BRIC TV, where she covers issues of social justice, immigration, inequality and more.
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 4, 2022
Mykyta Kozlov | KLONDIKE — FRI, NOV 4, 6:00PM After graduating from the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Mykyta Kozlov started to work in the cultural industries, from GogolFest Contemporary Art Festival to Molodist Kyiv IFF, Odesa IFF and Toronto IFF. Eventually, he shifted to the production side working as 1st Assistant Director in commercials, TV series and films. In 2021, he started his career as a producer mainly focusing on creative documentaries.
Yuliya V. Ladygina | Assistant Professor of Slavic and Global & International Studies PSU — FRI, NOV 4, 6:00PM Yuliya V. Ladygina’s research in Eastern European literatures and cultures focuses on questions of cultural memory and cultural exchange. She is the author of Bridging East and West: Ol’ha Kobylians’ka, Ukraine’s Pioneering Modernist (2019), and she is currently working on her second book project, The Reel Story of the EuroMaidan and Russia’s War on Ukraine, which examines the post-2014 cycle of Ukrainian war films and their perspective on the hybrid nature of modern war and its mediatization. Before joining Penn State, Ladygina was a Research Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Russian at Williams College, and a Teaching Assistant Professor of Russian and Humanities at The University of the South (Sewanee).
Ido Glass | DEAD SEA GUARDIANS — FRI, NOV 4, 8:00PM Ido Glass is a graduate of the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in Jerusalem (1994).He has been creating, editing, writingscripts and working as a freelance director.He specializes in documentaries dealing with social, human and historical issues surrounding Israeli society.
Shaina Feinberg | MY MOM’S EGGPLANT SAUCE — FRI, NOV 4, 8:00PM Shaina Feinberg is a filmmaker from New York City. She specializes in micro-budget filmmaking. Her first film, The Babymooners, blends documentary and narrative fiction and was picked up for distribution by Screen Media.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2022
Arno Michaelis | REFUGE — SAT, NOV 5, 1:30PM Arno was a leader of a worldwide racist skinhead group and a lead singer of the hate-metal band Centurion, which is still popular with hate groups today. Single parenthood, love for his daughter, and the forgiveness shown by people he once hated all helped to turn Arno’s life around.
Mubin Shaikh | REFUGE — SAT, NOV 5, 1:30PM Mubin Shaikh is a deradicalized former extremist turned undercover human source for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and police agent with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET – Toronto).
Tierra Williams | The 3/20 Coalition — SAT, NOV 5, 1:30PM Tierra D. Williams is a Mississippi Native hailing from Thee Jackson State University majoring in Speech Communication with a Theatre concentration. Tierra has always had a love for the arts, and throughout high school she participated in Speech & Debate, Poetry Out Loud, and acted in various plays. In college, she landed the lead role in the play RUINED by, Lynn Nottage, and was nominated to go to Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) in Roanoke, Virginia- where she placed as a semi-finalist. In March of 2022 she hosted the “Women’s Voices”, where she sang and danced as the MC. She is a Blacktivst and an Actorvist and is unapologetic about both, and uses her talent to address local and national issues. She moved to State College in 2018, where she got involved with plays written and directed by Charles Dumas. and poetry events led by Cynthia Mazzant or Elaine Medar-Wilgus. She also began her Vegan Bakery and sells goods at Webster’s Bookstore & Cafe. She received a grant from 3 Dots Downtown to start her own show “Black Tea” a community engagement show meant to spark dialogue around difficult conversations. With Pablo Lopez, filmmaker and creator of Dark Mind Productions, Tierra’s dream became reality. She then began hosting events for National Black Poetry Night, Politic & Poetry, and other workshops. Tierra is determined to make a space for Black Art on every stage, “By any means necessary.”
Shaheen Pasha | assistant teaching professor of journalism, Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications — SAT, NOV 5, 3:30PM Shaheen Pasha, an assistant teaching professor at Penn State, is a co-founder and co-executive of an initiative called the Prison Journalism Project. The non-profit organization gives a voice to people behind bars who want to learn and share their experiences from inside their cells.
Divine Lipscomb | State College Borough Council member — SAT, NOV 5, 3:30PM “I am a native New Yorker. Born, bred, fed,” says Divine Lipscomb. Recalling his childhood in Brooklyn, he sees a kid “buried in trauma,” struggling with addiction, and who was a “prime candidate” for gang membership. By age 16, he had two felony arrests for armed robbery and was sentenced to four years in state prison — 15 months of which he spent in solitary confinement. Not surprisingly, reentry into society was difficult: “You come home the same age you were when you went in. So, mentally I was 16 when I came home — in a grown man’s body.”
After his release, despite setbacks and relapses, he found success as an entrepreneur. The self-sufficiency and freedom he felt inspired his vision for Corrective Gentlemen, Divine’s non-profit organization. Its mission is to provide support and mentoring for returned citizens, a term Divine prefers to “former inmate.” He also returned to school. At Penn State, Divine is a rehabilitation and human services major and works as the special projects coordinator for PSU’s Restorative Justice Initiative. In addition, he volunteers at the local drop-in shelter to support returning citizens and is active in organizations that allow his experience to lend a voice to the unheard. In 2020, his academic achievements and advocacy were honored: Divine was awarded PSU’s 2020 “Outstanding Adult Learners Award” and the Rock Ethics Institute’s 2020 “Stand Up Award”.
Today, Divine wears many hats: student, husband, father, advocate, entrepreneur, public speaker, board member, volunteer, teacher, executive director, and returned citizen. He has his eye on law school and hopes to one day sit in public office.
Keith Wasserman | DEAR ANI — SAT, NOV 5, 6:00PM For twenty years Keith Wasserman has made and delivered elaborate art mail packages-all in the hopes of befriending his muse. Dear Ani explores what can happen when you present your truest self, and risk total failure. It is an intimate account of psychotic mania, personal mastery, and creative triumph.
Micah Levin | DEAR ANI — SAT, NOV 5, 6:00PM In 2006, Micah founded the creative content studio, Movie Magic Media, where he and Keith have collaborated on dozens of short films, music videos and feature films. Together they made their Tribeca Film Festival debut in 2015 with the climate themed sci-fi short film, Grow.
Emily, Tom, and Kari Whitehead | OF MEDICINE AND MIRACLES — SAT, NOV 5, 6:00PM Tom Whitehead, Kari Whitehead, and their daughter Emily are founders of the Emily Whitehead Foundation, which raises funds and awareness for pediatric cancer immunotherapy research.
Justin Zimmerman | SOLDIER, NOV 5, 8:00PM Justin Zimmerman, MFA in Film, is a nationally recognized comic writer, director and professor. His narrative and documentary work has appeared in over 200 film festivals across the globe and has been broadcast on national public television, where he won two international television awards. He’s also been the recipient of multiple grants and fellowships, he contributed a story to the Eisner Award-winning graphic novel Love Is Love, and his script and comic creations have been optioned on multiple occasions. You can see more of Zimmerman’s personal work at his website: www.brickerdown.com.
Tierra Williams | Former US Army Reserver — SAT, NOV 5, 8:00PM Tierra D. Williams is a Mississippi Native hailing from Thee Jackson State University majoring in Speech Communication with a Theatre concentration. Tierra has always had a love for the arts, and throughout high school she participated in Speech & Debate, Poetry Out Loud, and acted in various plays. In college, she landed the lead role in the play RUINED by, Lynn Nottage, and was nominated to go to Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) in Roanoke, Virginia- where she placed as a semi-finalist. In March of 2022 she hosted the “Women’s Voices”, where she sang and danced as the MC. She is a Blacktivst and an Actorvist and is unapologetic about both, and uses her talent to address local and national issues. She moved to State College in 2018, where she got involved with plays written and directed by Charles Dumas. and poetry events led by Cynthia Mazzant or Elaine Medar-Wilgus. She also began her Vegan Bakery and sells goods at Webster’s Bookstore & Cafe. She received a grant from 3 Dots Downtown to start her own show “Black Tea” a community engagement show meant to spark dialogue around difficult conversations. With Pablo Lopez, filmmaker and creator of Dark Mind Productions, Tierra’s dream became reality. She then began hosting events for National Black Poetry Night, Politic & Poetry, and other workshops. Tierra is determined to make a space for Black Art on every stage, “By any means necessary.”
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2022
Carleen Maur | TRACES — SUN, NOV 6, 11:00AM Carleen Maur is an experimental filmmaker living and working in Columbia, SC where she teaches at the University of South Carolina. She received her MFA in Cinematic Arts from the University of Iowa in 2017. Her work focuses on hybrid methods of both film and video that examine the intersections between gender, sexuality and camouflage.
Matt Whitman | THAT WAS WHEN I THOUGHT I COULD HEAR YOU — SUN, NOV 6, 11:00AM Matt Whitman (b. West Chester, PA) works with 16mm and Super8 motion picture film. His work has recently screened at the 60th Ann Arbor Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque’s CROSSROADS 2022, the 2022 Chicago Underground Film Festival, the 2022 Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, the 2022 Prismatic Ground Festival at Maysles Documentary Center, the 2022 Athens International Film and Video Festival, Fracto Experimental Film Encounter in Berlin, the Suspaustas Laikas traveling festival in cities across Lithuania, and at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York.
He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, currently films much of his work in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and has taught at Parsons School of Design since 2014.
Crystal Z Campbell | FLIGHT — SUN, NOV 6, 11:00AM Crystal Z Campbell (they/them), a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents. Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s recent works use underloved archival material to consider historical gaps in the narrative of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, revisit questions of immortality and medical ethics with Henrietta Lacks’ “immortal” cell line, ponder the role of a political monument and displacement in a Swedish coastal landscape, and salvage a 35mm film from a demolished Black activist theater in Brooklyn as a relic of gentrification.
A featured filmmaker at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar programmed by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka. Campbell’s films and art have screened and exhibited internationally: MIT List Visual Arts Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, The Drawing Center, Nest, ICA-Philadelphia, Museum of Modern Art, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Artissima, Studio Museum of Harlem, Bemis, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, amongst others.
Honors and awards include a 2022 Creative Capital Award, Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and Black Spatial Relics.
Campbell’s writing is featured in two artist books published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Founder of the virtual programming platform archiveacts.com, Campbell is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo. Campbell lives and works in New York & Oklahoma.
Berndt Mader | CHOP & STEELE — SUN, NOV 6, 1:00PM Berndt Mader is an Emmy Award winning film, television and commercial director. He has directed the feature films, Booger Red (2016) and Five Time Champion (2011). In 2021 Mader co-directed a television series for Discovery+ based on his film, Booger Red. In 2022, the comedy documentary he co-directed, Chop & Steele, premiered at the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. He is a co-founder of the Austin based production company, The Bear. Xander Chauncey | THE MOLOK — SUN, NOV 6, 1:00PM Chauncey’s career in the arts has spanned more than 20 years. He works as a writer, director, producer, actor, singer & dancer. No matter his role, Xander is a passionate storyteller and approaches the material from the inside out; connecting the emotional truth of the piece to his audience in every moment. Jorge
Antonio Guerrero | WE ARE LIVING THINGS — SUN, NOV 6, 3:00PM Jorge Antonio Guerrero (born June 28 1993) is a Mexican actor. He is most noted for his performance as Fermín in the 2018 film Roma, for which he was an Ariel Award nominee for Best Supporting Actor at the 61st Ariel Awards in 2019.
He has also appeared in the television series Luis Miguel: The Series, Narcos: Mexico, Crime Diaries: The Candidate, Sitiados: México and Hernán, and in the film Drunken Birds (Les Oiseaux Ivres). He received a Vancouver Film Critics Circle nomination for Best Actor in a Canadian Film at the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards 2021, and a Prix Iris nomination for Revelation of the Year at the 24th Quebec Cinema Awards in 2022, for Drunken Birds.
Andrew Li | WE ARE LIVING THINGS — SUN, NOV 6, 3:00PM Andrew K. Li is a filmmaker based in New York. A graduate of the MFA Film Program from Columbia University, his student film was shortlisted for a BAFTA nomination and films he produced have screened at festivals around the world including official selection at Cannes, SXSW, Deauville and Toronto IFF. He and his work have received fellowships from Producers Guild of America, EAVE, and IFP. Currently, he’s in production on Pet Shop Boys and developing feature film projects.
Nic Natalicchio | WATCHING THE WILDS — SUN, NOV 6, 3:00PM Professional filmmaker with over a decade of hands-on experience across multiple industries. He currently teaches in the Department of Cinema & Television at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. His debut short documentary film, The Tides That Bind, screened at over 25 festivals and won numerous awards.
Centre Film Festival – Pearl Gluck Director, Lynne, Fritz Bitsoie, Bhawan Sushak with host John Curley State College, Pennsylvania
They’ve got catfish on the table They’ve got Ghostwatch in the air
Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
This week’s quick rec is “Freedom Flight”, the closing track from the 1971 LP of the same name by the American musician Shuggie Otis. Otis, who is of African American, Filipino, and Greek descent, is probably best known for his song “Strawberry Letter 23” which, as recorded by The Brothers Johnson and produced by Quincy Jones, was a big chart hit in 1977, and later featured on the score for Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997).
Anyway, “Freedom Flight” is wonderful: a near 13 minute instrumental soundscape of pealing horns, chiming guitars, and delicate, melodic bass noodling (my favorite kind.) I must confess I have no idea whether the songs’s title is inspired by the real-life so-called Freedom Flights (Los vuelos de la libertad) that transported Cubans to Miami in large numbers between 1965 to 1973, but either way, it’s a monumentally transporting and relaxing piece of music, and I’ve been listening to it a lot.
I had a very nice time at last week’s Indie Memphis film festival, which was celebrating its 25th edition. Highlights of my visit included a screening of Benjamin Christensen’s berserk witchcraft horror/essay film/comedy Häxan (1922) featuring a live, theremin-fueled, and curiously (but somehow appropriately) smooth-jazzy score; the good vibes/sounds/eats of the Black Creators Forum brunch; and the privilege of serving on the Departures (experimental/avant-garde film) jury alongside two people I greatly admire: writer/scholar Yasmina Price; and critic/filmmaker Blair McClendon. We handed out three awards: short film to Maya at 24by Lynne Sachs, mid-length film to Civicby Dwayne LeBlanc, and feature film to Cette Maison (This House)by Miryam Charles. We loved all three, and I would suggest keeping an eye out to catch any of them when and where you can.
If I’m being honest, though, my real high point of Indie Memphis was attending a rather unexpected late night screening of the television special Ghostwatch, a true oddity which was broadcast once on BBC1, on Halloween night of 1992… and never again.
Indie Memphis managing director Joseph Carr told me before the screening that he stumbled across Ghostwatch on streaming service Shudder a few years back, and was so shaken that he felt the need to share it with a wider audience. It also didn’t hurt that this year marked the thirtieth anniversary of its first and only broadcast. I’d read about the show in the past, and vaguely recall it airing at the time, but I hadn’t actually seen it until last week. I found it to be a staggeringly effective piece of television: intelligent, technically astonishing, and genuinely haunting. I’ve been turning it over in my mind since.
Now, there’s a reason why I’ve been so absurdly vague about what Ghostwatch actually is, and that’s because I think this is one of those rare occasions where, even thirty years after the fact, a spoiler alert is justified, and coming to it completely cold—opening yourself up to the world it creates, and imagining that you had tuned into that initial broadcast moments after the BBC announcer had cued up the show with some context—could be beneficial to your viewing experience.
That said, there’s plenty of information about the backstory, intent and legacy of Ghostwatch freely available online, and you’re welcome to look it up if you’re someone who prefers to have a little bit of foreknowledge. I assume my British readers are likely to be much more familiar with the show and its milieu than my American and other international readers. After you’ve watched, you may wish to check out this entertaining and informative episode of the “Criminal” podcast about the show (thank you to artist Onyeka Igwe for flagging that one for me!) And it’s also out on Blu-ray soon, too.
If you do check out Ghostwatch, let me know what you think, and if you saw it at the time it was first broadcast, I’d love to know what the experience was like. Until next week!
Mark Alice Durant Presents Maya Deren: Choreographed for Camera with Lynne Sachs, David Levi Strauss, and Laura Valenza
Thursday November 10th 7pm
McNally Jackson Seaport
RSVP Required — see below
Drama and myth frame the life and death of Maya Deren. Born in Kiev in 1917, at the start of the Russian Revolution, she died forty-four years later in New York City. In her brief life, she established herself as a pioneering experimental filmmaker, prolific writer, accomplished photographer, and crusader for a personal and poetic cinema. With its dreamy circular narrative and enigmatic imagery, her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), has inspired generations of artists, filmmakers, and poets. Deren collaborated with numerous mid-century cultural luminaries, including Katherine Dunham, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Anais Nin, and Gregory Bateson. In 1953, she published Divine Horsemen, a ground-breaking ethnographic study of Haitian religious culture. Although Deren completed only six short films in her lifetime, her impact on the history of cinema is immeasurable. She has become the patron saint of 20th century experimental film. The aura that suffuses Deren’s legend emanates from the power of her films, magnified by her bohemian glamour and visionary intelligence.
This is the first full biography of Deren. Based on years of research, interviews with some of Deren’s closest collaborators, and generously illustrated with film stills and photographs, author Mark Alice Durant creates a vivid and accessible narrative exploring the complexities and contradictions in the life and work of this remarkable and charismatic artist.
We recommend that guests wear masks on the night.
Mark Alice Durant is an artist and writer living in Baltimore. He is author of Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera, 27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography, and co-author of Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal. His essays have appeared in numerous journals such as Aperture, Art in America, Photograph Magazine, Dear Dave, and many catalogs, monographs, and anthologies including Rania Matar: She, Seeing Science: How Photography Reveals the Universe, and Vik Muniz Seeing is Believing. He teaches in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Maryland and is publisher / editor of Saint Lucy Books.
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn. Her work explores the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. Lynne embraces hybrid forms in her essay films, experimental documentaries, and performances. With each project, she investigates the connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Recently, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s book Year by Year Poems.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT Press, 2020); Photography and Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020, and in an Italian edition by Johan & Levi, 2021); Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014); In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 (Documenta 13, 2012); From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture, 2003, 2012 and in an Italian edition by Postmedia Books, 2007) and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia, 1999 and 2010). From 2007–21, Strauss directed the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York, US.
Laura Valenza is a film editor at the Brooklyn Rail. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming at Literary Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Gulf Coast, and Cream City Review.
RSVP Below
In order to keep our events program running in uncertain times, we’re asking attendees to hold their place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the event on any product in store or in our bar & café. You can alternatively reserve a spot by pre-purchasing the event book. If you have a change of heart or plans, write to events@mcnallyjackson.com and we’ll gladly refund you and release your spot, up to 24 hours before the event. Thanks for understanding, and for supporting your local bookstore.
A Reality Between Words and Images: Films by Lynne Sachs
At the center of Lynne Sachs’s short film Task of the Translator (2010), a group of classics scholars are translating a contemporary New York Times article about Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. Sachs’s intimate camera probes the faces and scribbling hands of the instructor and her students as they wring the right words out of each other (cadaver for dead body, vestigia for footsteps, but aegritudo for grief? Maybe luctus instead.). Sachs uses sound poignantly—fading and layering the scholars’ suggestions, affirmations, and nervous laughter so that the exercise feels arduous and drawn out. As form changes, can meaning remain? It’s a question for translators and experimental filmmakers.
Task of the Translator is one of six films in “A Reality Between Words and Images: Films by Lynne Sachs,” a program screening at e-flux Screening Room. Though not explicitly about translation, a number of the other films in the program deal with how meaning is communicated and what can stand in the way of its conveyance. In The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), Sachs explores the representation of women in science and art through a collage of home movies, original narration, and found footage and audio. Detailing misconceptions, humiliations, private rituals, and even a bit of wry humor, the film showcases how the changing female body is willfully denied understanding in a patriarchal society.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994) is a diaristic travel film that switches between the perspective of Sachs, a brief visitor to Vietnam, and that of her sister Dana, who has been in the country for a year. Sachs layers gorgeous footage she shot on a northward trek from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi with poetic narration and subtitled conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends. Sachs initially tries to make sense of Vietnam through an understanding of the war. But as the film and her trip wears on, and Dana’s more nuanced observations take over the narration (including a moving anecdote about the region’s seasonal fruit cycle), Sachs develops a meaningful account of experiencing a place as it is.
In Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor (2018), Sachs visits a trio of filmmakers in their own spaces: Carolee Schneeman in her 18th-century farmhouse, Barbara Hammer in her New York studio, and Gunvor Nelson in her childhood village in Sweden. Through these brief portraits, Sachs communicates something essential about these artists (Hammer’s boundless energy, for instance) and how their personalities influence the language of their cameras.
In contrast to much of the other work in the program, Window Work (2000) feels purely experiential. Shot on video, a woman sits near her window, drinking tea, reading the paper, cleaning. Passages of time elapse in idleness without narration; instead the sounds of running water, a child playing, and a passing jet drone on. Two boxes dot the video image, hurling abstracted images onto the screen—taken from celluloid home movies. Though Window Work features two distinct film languages, it resists translating between them; it doesn’t attempt to parse out a mode of communication. Daylight beats on the window, and its glass becomes a mirror. In its iridescent reflection, the viewer understands solitude, reminiscence, the heat of the sun she’s felt before wherever she is.
“A Reality Between Words and Images: Films by Lynne Sachs” screens tonight, October 27, at e-flux Screening Room as part of the series “Revisiting Feminist Moving Image.” Filmmaker Lynne Sachs and her collaborators Kristine Leschper and Kim Wilberforce will be in attendance for a conversation.
Francis X. Clines of The New York Times described the film as “a documentary about the protest events that made Catonsville, Maryland, an unpretentious suburb on the cusp of Baltimore, a flash point for citizens’ resistance at the height of the war. . . . Sachs found assorted characters still firm to fiery on the topic. She came to admire the consistency of the mutual antagonists in an argument that still rages (today).”[1] Michael O’Sullivan of The Washington Post wrote that Sachs “uses a mosaic technique and seemingly random shots of plants and houses to create a moody, subjective portrait of an era as much as a group of people.”[2] Molly Marsh of Sojourners magazine called the film “wonderfully intimate; Sachs brings the camera within inches of her subjects’ faces, capturing their thoughtful reminisces and personal regrets.[3] Fred Camper of the Chicago Reader called it a “poetic essay” with “no omniscient narrator talking down to the viewer . . . while “images like a newspaper going in and out of focus remind us that shifting contexts alter our understanding of complex events.”[4]
Lee Gardner of the Baltimore City Paper wrote that “Sachs cannily avoids the usual documentary dance of talking heads and file footage by interspersing impressionistic shots. (The film) provides a potent reminder that some Americans are willing to pay a heavy price to promote peace.”[5]
