Getting to know the vibrant film community here in Beijing through the China Women’s Film Festival and the community organizers at the Crossroads Center. The opening ceremony begins this evening.
China Women’s Film Festival opened with stirring images about women’s continued struggles worldwide. I was particularly impressed by the forthright address by the UN representative in China who had an extraordinary grasp of the issues. Saw a great film on the Chinese lesbian film director from the 1940s Esther Eng.
Post #3 from Beijing: I meet an art critic Wang Zhang Wen at the regular weekly NGO meeting at the Crossroads Center in the city’s old hutong neighborhood. In response to my dislike for the famous but rather commercial 798 art district, he offers to take me to the Songzhuang art district on the edge of the city. We go the next day and I discover an incredible live/work area with studios for 5000 artists! If only NYC could offer a community like this that is affordable too! We visit Wang’s cabaret style cafe The Chestnut Tree where he hosts experimental films and readings. He offers coffee from from dainty cups and saucers and tells us that the cafe is named for the Chestnut Tree Cafe in 1984. This was the place, according to the character Winston, where thought criminals spent their time. “Under the spreading Chestnut Tree I sold you and you sold me.”
Post #4 from Beijing: Today I screened Your Day Is My Night to a great, really insightful audience in Bejing as part of the China Women’s Film Festival. later I was on a panel with four brilliant feminist film scholars. What a wonderful, feisty, compassionate group including Yang Hui from Beijing Film Academy, Yushan Huang from Taiwan University of the Arts, Yu Min Mei and Juan Jiang. We all responded to the question “What is a woman’s film?” And on our journey talked about the films of Barbara Hammer, Trinh T Minh-ha, Yvonne Rainer, Susan Sontag, Jane Campion, and many others
China post #6: Shanghai screening tonight of my 1991 film “The House of Science” at a women’s bookstore. All thanks to the nuanced translations of Lesley Yiping Chin who is so capable of articulating the poetry of Gertrude Stein and other mysteries in Chinese.
I saw Liu Chuang “Segmented Landscape” at the Shanghai Art Biennale and was transformed by the way that the work made me think about security, safety, complacency and fear.
Whether you see Chinatown as a place or a state of mind, a purgatory or an oasis, a shrinking immigrant community or an expanding business district, its presence in our cinematic imagination is enormous. Situated north of NYC’s Wall Street, east of the Tombs, west of the old Jewish Ghetto, and mostly south of Canal, the neighborhood that began in the mid-19th century has maintained its distinct character – savory, hardscrabble, succulent, and cacophonous.
WE LANDED/I WAS BORN/PASSING BY explores a provocative array of images of the community from the 1940s to the present day. By embracing the perspectives of grassroots activists, performance artists, conceptual visionaries, home-movie makers, punk horror devotees, and journalists, the series raises questions about how we look at the neighborhood and how its representations have reciprocally shaped our imagination. Who lived in Chinatown at the beginning? Who lives there now? How and why has it changed? What language best describes Chinatown? Whose voices do we hear?
Inspired by the fabulously observant 1960s poetry of Chinatown’s very own Frances Chung, this 5-part film series looks at the streets, desires, shops, and struggles of an iconic community that only begins to reveal its stories when the most obvious outer layers are pulled back. Comprised of documentaries, archival footage, home videos, literary readings, photography, and performance, the series rings in Chinese New Year by opening a window to both early and contemporary conditions. Through it all, geography, memory, and observation compress and expand the imaginary and the real of this beloved section of the Big Apple.
Curated by Lesley Yiping Qin, Lynne Sachs, Bo Wang, and Xin Zhou.
Anthology Film Archives | 32 Second Ave, New York, NY 10003 | (212) 505-5181
Fri, Jan 24 7:30pm | PROGRAM 1: TWO COLD NIGHTS IN NEW YORK CHINATOWN
1月24日（週五）晚7:30 ｜影片集1：紐約華埠之兩個寒夜
Part of the Chinatown Film Project commissioned by the Museum of Chinese in America, Jem Cohen’s NIGHT SCENE IN NEW YORK is a close nocturnal observation of the people and lights of this urban milieu. In contrast to Cohen’s beautifully shot yet vernacular street scenes, conceptual artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s black-and-white video work expresses a more distant gaze on the Chinatown community, offering an ambivalent and imaginary take on the same cityscape. VOYEUR CHINATOWN (1971) Dir. Gordon Matta-Clark | NIGHT SCENE NEW YORK (2009) Dir. Jem Cohen | A reading Annie Ling from Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple: The Poems of Frances Chung.
Sat, Jan 25 6:00pm | PROGRAM 2: THE TOUCH OF AN EYE 1月25日（週六）晚6:00 ｜影片集2：視線的觸覺
The view from above – the bird’s eye view – can be omniscient and detached, playful and wicked. Shelly Silver’s TOUCH, a restrained yet endlessly sensual ciné-essay on loss and presence, takes us on a journey that begins with the psyche of an enigmatic son who returns as both insider and outsider to a Chinatown from which he escaped. Celebrated 1960s community activist Tom Tam also shot irrepressibly inventive experimental films of the world he fought so hard to defend. Tam’s pixilated glimpse of a boy on a roof gives voice to a child’s sense of flight and the realization that he will never have wings. BOY ON CHINATOWN ROOF (1970s) Dir. Tom Tam | TOUCH (2013) Dir. Shelly Silver. Followed by a reception.
Sat, Jan 25 8:00pm | PROGRAM 3: CHINATOWN PROBLEMATICS
1月25日（週六）晚8:00 ｜影片集3：華埠問題考
How can realities be engaged if the idea of a place has already been mediated by a sense of otherness and displacement? It all began with the name “Chinatown”, a specific place that can be found in many cities of the world. THE TROUBLE WITH CHINATOWN, originally aired on WNBC in the 1970s was a survey of social and educational problems. A 2013 CNN “exposé” on the “dirty, dangerous firetrap” at 81 Bowery Street sparked the eviction of the tenants who couldn’t afford another place to live. The reactions today can be linked to Tom Tam’s silent film TOURIST BUSES, GO HOME! that protests against Chinatown tourism. Shelly Silver’s 5 LESSONS AND 9 QUESTIONS ABOUT CHINATOWN interweaves fragments of neighborhood lives with questions of history, change, a sense of belonging and home. Followed by an informal talk by photographer Corky Lee, an activist in the Asian and Pacific American community for the past forty years. WNBC-TV THE TROUBLE WITH CHINATOWN (1970) Dir. Bill Turque | TOURIST BUSES, GO HOME! (1969) Dir. Tom Tam | 5 LESSONS & 9 QUESTIONS ABOUT CHINATOWN (2011) Dir. Shelly Silver | CNN report on 81 Bowery St: “Eviction & Protest” (2013) | Photos and artist talk by Corky Lee.
Sun, Jan 26 5:00pm | PROGRAM 4: BOWERY STREET PLAYBILL
1月26日（週日）晚5:00 | 影片集4：包厘街戲單
Quotidian life is provoked and embodied in this eclectic playbill of Chinatown. We begin with a quietly rueful look at the closing-down of MUSIC PALACE, the last Chinatown movie theater on Bowery Street. In contrast is MAKING CHINATOWN, a reenactment parody of Polanski’s CHINATOWN and its profiling LA Chinatown as a lawless enclave. From the upfront self-mocking of PAPER SON, to two lesbians munching fortune cookie messages in I AM STARVING, to following grocery shoppers home for dinner in THE TRAINED CHINESE TONGUE, everyday experiences constantly negotiate the personal. Interspersed are two historical documentations of Chinese New Years in the 40s and 60s. Chinatown-born photojournalist Alan Chin will provide his vision of the neighborhood through his candid, sharply rendered insider’s eye. MUSIC PALACE (2005) Dir. Eric Lin| MAKING CHINATOWN Pt. 7 (2012) by Ming Wong | I AM STARVING (1998) Dir. Yau Ching | THE TRAINED CHINESE TONGUE (1994) Dir. Laurie Wen | YEAR OF THE RAT (1963) Dir. Jon Wing Lum | Photo slideshow by Alan Chin.
Sun, Jan 26 7:30pm | PROGRAM 5: A TIME OF TWO SQUARE MILES
1月26日（周日）晚7:30 | 影片集5：方圆二英里的時光
Mixing live readings and videos, this program investigates domestic and public spaces in the two square miles of Chinatown. Shanghai-born performance artist Jiaxin Miao carries his suitcase between Chinatown and Zuccotti Park and then boldly sprays colors onto roast ducks. Galvanized by flickering and fast forward motions, revered political activist Tom Tam’s intimate camera work captures the communal life of a health fair in Columbus Park. Lynne Sachs’ hybrid documentary is set in shift-bed rooms in Chinatown where performers transform their everyday movements into dance and are tenderly challenged to leave their shared, self-supporting world. After traveling ten thousand miles to get here, what is it like to go five miles further? Followed by readings of work by novelist Ha Jin and poet Frances Chung, who belong to two different generations of Chinese-American writers. A reading by Herb Tam from a novel Ha Jin | CHINATOWN STREET FESTIVAL (1970s) Dir. Tom Tam | CHINAMAN’S SUITCASE (2011) Featuring Jiaxin Miao | YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT (2013) Dir. Lynne Sachs | A reading by Paolo Javier of poetry by Frances Chung.
“New York’s Chinatown, a place as much spectral as real, flickers and flares into life in this singular hybrid of documentary, performance piece and cine-monologue. Seven working-class, immigrant residents of a shift-bed apartment play versions of themselves, recalling violent upheavals, long journeys and endless yearnings. Beautifully scored by Stephen Vitiello, marrying subtle comedy to its dominant mood of dreamy disorientation, and achieving a rare intimacy, it’s one of the most mysterious and magical evocations of the migrant city in many a year.”
“Director Lynne Sachs’ Your Day is My Night shines a light on a little documented sub-culture in New York’s Chinatown, chronicling immigrants who live communally in buildings where there’s a shift-bed system. One person returns from a stint of overnight work to sleep in a bed just vacated by another person off to their day job. The form of this documentary is as compelling as its content. It is a beautiful collage of different media and music intricately edited together with the often emotional testimony of the immigrants.”
RiDE is a series of educational and cultural episodes that bring various processes related to artistic, intellectual, and design practices into a visible arena while illustrating the unforseen 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.
RiDE episodes feature invited artists, designers, writers, and creative practitioners from many different fields, as well as Pratt faculty, staff, and students across departments and disciplines. They inspire and instigate curricular innovations while bringing to light emerging practices and new disciplinary formations.
In 2014 filmmaker Lynne Sachs was invited by the Department of Film/Video to present Taking a Docu-mentary Detour, a lecture/performance with students from several Pratt divisions that was part discussion, part experiment, and part artwork.
“Anything that happens in front of the camera is some kind of performance,” said experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs at the top of Tuesday’s “The Line Blurs: Shifting Narratives in Filmmaking” panel. Sachs, along with Caveh Zahedi, Josephine Decker, Keith Miller and moderator Nathan Silver, spent an hour debating the division between narrative and documentary forms at DCTV. The evening was chockfull of quotable quotes as the participants reflected on their own work with equal doses of humor and candor. Zahedi, for starters, admitted that he initially considered documentaries to be “the autistic younger brother of cinema,” and only labels his films as such on grant applications.
With introductions out of the way, a recurring point of conversation evolved around the question of ethics. Do documentarians owe a degree of truth to their audience from which their fiction counterparts are exempt? “I think it’s ethically wrong to assume anything is a documentary,” said Decker, who co-directed the doc Bi The Way, and has since directed two narrative features. “When you’re cutting 500 hours into 90 minutes, you’re manipulating chronology to such an extent, it can become an ethical dilemma.” Miller, whose films expound upon actual encounters, agreed: “Anyone who has ever made a documentary has said, ‘Wait — can you just say that again?’ to a subject.”
For Welcome To Pine Hill, Miller copped to re-staging a pivotal event, transporting the action to where he “wished it had actually happened.” Though his lead Shannon Harper plays a version of himself in the film, Miller emphatically considers it a work of fiction. This allowed for a slight scuffle as to what one should even call these documentary subjects: “Collaborators, performers, what?” asked Sachs. For her part, Sachs feels that the form is defined by ethics — not so much whether they’re being upheld, but how they are considered. “Documentary is the ethics of how you work with people,” she said. “How you embrace their lives, or, how you use them as a tool.”
Zahedi falls on the “tool” side of the spectrum, believing that “the subject [shouldn’t] dictate what you’re doing with them,” though he is well aware of their contributions toward the final product. Lamenting Hollywood’s emphasis on “story” above all else, Zahedi countered that, “Cinema is not about the story; it’s about the face of the person.”
Decker finds the notion of morality in documentary filmmaking a bit cumbersome. “There’s the assumption that if you’re making a documentary, you’re a moral person with something to say, but I really had to say something in a narrative.” She also doesn’t view non-fiction as having the formal restrictions many often place upon it. Citing the work of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (Leviathan, Sweetgrass, Manakamana), Decker argued that documentary can be as experimental as fiction, and that the two do not necessarily differ when it comes to “unlimited creativity.” That particular, observational style, is all about “how you keep someone engaged through looking,” which can also be said of more contemplative narrative work as well.
Silver chimed in from his perch to say it’s just semantics: “The distinction is a way of critical categorization and marketing movies.” Miller, meanwhile, took a step back to consider the name of the panel, noting that, “The distinction between blurriness and clarity of vision wasn’t invented until the camera.” The same, of course, is said of the supposed divide between fiction and non-fiction. After all, the first few decades of filmmaking subsisted around the novelty of capturing an actual event. With the turn of the 20th century came the first narrative features, which were naturally defined in contrast to their predecessors. But as time and technology progress, and formal techniques are borrowed and shared, the “line” grows ever thin.
Your Day is My Night
Pacific Film Archive
University of California Berkeley Art Museum
November 20th, 2013
Introduction by Jeanne Finley
It gives me tremendous pleasure to introduce Lynne Sachs this evening. Lynne describes her films as explorations of the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences.
As viewers, we experience that personal and historical exploration through the act of conversation. Lynne’s films invite us as viewers, to enter into a conversation between the filmmaker, her subjects, and the circumstance in which the conversation takes place. This is a privileged position that it is both rigorous and intimate. And it is a position that can only be offered because whether the film we are watching is an essay film, or a film based on interviews, or a performance based film — Lynne is a master of the art of collaboration.
True conversations, are by their very nature, collaborations. Every one of Lynne’s films embody the essence of collaboration throughout all levels of its creation. Collaboration is at the structural heart of her films — she invites those she is filming to engage with her and participate in making the film through conversations. This collaborative process also spreads out to the entire crew she works with, all of whom participate in the conversations that guide the creation of the film. And then in its furthest reaches, she invites us, as viewers, into collaboration. Her works are not complete until we watch, we participate, we collaborate and enact our own conversations with the film and those in it, through our imaginative process. Lynne’s films lead us through her creative cinematic response to the documentary materials she collects, by engaging everyone involved in the films’ process in this multi-layered collaborative conversation.
Full disclosure here. I have had the opportunity to collaborate with Lynne, not only through participating in viewing her films, but Lynne and I collaborated in the early part of this century on a project in Bosnia called Dom Promija — or, The House of Drafts. I had lived in former Yugoslavia for a long time, and Lynne had never been there when we got to Sarajevo, but she was able to engage in collaborative conversations from the first day we arrived because her conversations are explorations born from deep curiosity and an insatiable desire to discover and learn. This curiosity and desire is palpable, and the people around her feel this, and immediately jump in with her on the exploration, traveling together in the filmmaking process to discover. Her in-person conversations, like the film she makes from them, are extended questions .
I’m not going to speak much about the film we are seeing tonight, because you will see it and Lynne is here to address it. But I want to mention two earlier films, each quite different in form, yet both of which, like the film you will see tonight, have this element of collaborative conversation at their core.
The film, “The House of Science” which Lynne directed in 1991, is an essay film. It is a conversation between the material of the film and the voice of the filmmaker that explores the divide of the feminine body and psyche through historical scientific representations. Lynne, asks questions in the film, and then lets the film respond. Or she lets footage in the film ask a question and she responds through the essay voice-over format. In many ways, although her later films diverge from the essay film format, they all retain that element of a powerful filmmakers voice responding to non-fiction or documentary materials by questioning its veracity, its authority and its potential to evoke and represent experience.
Investigation of a flame” which was directed in 2002, is a documentary film that relies heavily on interviews with members of the Catonsville 9, a group of priests and lay people who, in 1968, burned draft records with homemade napalm in front of the Maryland draft board office. Lynne doesn’t come directly at the interviews, but allows the interviews to wander – something discouraged in traditional documentary filmmaking. They wander both visually through the camerawork, and through the conversations she has with her subjects. It isn’t an essay film in structure because it lacks a first person narrative, but it is an essay film in its conversational nature between the documentary material and the filmmakers voice.
Tonight’s film uses a completely different structure, the structure of performance, integrated with documentary material to create this collaborative conversation to explore privacy, intimacy and urban life within the immigrant community. I’ve followed this film since Lynne’s first imaginings about it and it is a remarkable accomplishment, and a film that I can watch many times and still see a new film because each time I watch it, the conversations I have with the film as I watch are always new.
Lynne has shown her films all over the world — this film premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And she has received numerous grants and awards for her work including a Rockefeller Foundation Award, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Jerome foundation grant. But more important than any of those remarkable achievements, is the collaborative spirit with which Lynne engages with the experimental documentary community. Like her films, her relationship to that community is a collaborative conversation, constantly exploring the possibilities of the voice, the material, the observations and the community’s response to contemporary, as well as historical experience. It is this voice, this question that coupled with Lynne’s rich filmography, that inspires all of us to think more deeply about film, about witnessing and about what it means to be human in this unstable world.
SAT. 11/16/13: LYNNE SACHS’ YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT + CHRIS MARKER Prodigal daughter Sachs returns with a dramatic ethnography on a little-seen subculture: older residents of “shift-bed” apartments in New York’s Chinatown, where immigrants are jammed into shared rooms, beds in use around the clock. Non-professional actors play out issues of privacy, intimacy, and ownership, as their shift-bed experience finds cinematic expression through vérité conversations, character driven fictions, and integrated movement pieces. Collaborating with cinematographer Sean Hanley and composer Stephen Vitiello, Sachs’ mixture of reportage, play-acting, and memory opens up an Other hidden world. Preceded by: Lynne’s collaboration with Three Cheers for the Whale, directed by Chris Marker with Mario Ruspoli.
Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hyprid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life (64 minutes, in Mandarin, Spanish, and English with English subtitles).
GRADUATE SEMINAR WITH LYNNE SACHS – Tuesday, November 19, 10AM-1PM (advance registration required, location TBA)
Screening and discussion of film and video work by Sachs, Jem Cohen, Bruce Conner, Gunvor Nelson and Chris Marker. To reserve a place in the seminar and receive location information, email Jonathan Kahana (jkahana@ucsc.edu) or Irene Lusztig (ilusztig@ucsc.edu) before November 13.
La cita era para las 8:00pm y el studio de Sofía Gallisá en Fort Green, Brooklyn empezó a llenarse de amigos puertorriqueños. Éramos cerca de diez. Habíamos sido convocados por la cineasta y profesora, Lynne Sachs. Lynne quería conocer nuestras historias de cama, grabarlas y estudiarlas. Sofía, su colaboradora, confiaba en nuestro poder narrativo y extrañezas, de ahí la invitación.
La discusión fue entretenida y alegre. Se habló de dormir rodeado de almohadas por todas partes, de intolerancia al ruido, de estar envuelto en sábanas como momias, de pelearse por el lado de la cama con la pareja, de idiosincracias de limpieza; loqueras y rituales de cada cual al momento de acostarse.
Una semana después me enteré de que aquel encuentro fue una audición y que tres de nosotros (Veraalba Santa, Pedro Leopoldo Sánchez y yo) habíamos sido seleccionados para participar en el proyecto de Lynne, Your Day is my Night. En mi caso como escritor.
Una vez me reuní con Lynne me informó que simultáneo a nosotros un grupo de chinos fueron igualmente entrevistados/audicionados para el filme que se empezaba a gestar: un documental híbrido acerca de las camas itinerantes en los apartamentos de Chinatown. Parte de mi tarea fue ir con ella a realizar nuevas entrevistas con los seleccionados. Mi misión sería la de co-escribir unos monólogos basados en lo escuchado.
“My way of filmmaking is all about process – Tell me who you are and I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do and let’s work on something together. I was taken by a Chinatown activist to the Lin Sing Association on Mott Street, where he told me I could find willing performers. Most of Lin Sing’s members are retired, so they have time. I happened to come during a karaoke contest. The place was packed. I said I am auditioning –as a documentary filmmaker I usually say I’m interviewing– I am making a film about beds. I didn’t explain any more than that. About 40 people signed up to come to audition and 26 people showed up. Working with a Chinese translator, I interviewed every one of them but I only asked them about one thing. I said, “Do you have any interesting stories about beds in your life? Did you ever have to share a bed? Did you ever live in a really crowded apartment where there were many beds? I taped the interviews with these 26 people. It ended up that seven people actually had these stunning and haunting stories to tell me.“ -Lynne Sachs on Asian Cinevision, Cinema Spotlight: Your Day is my Night
Las historias de los siete chinos, cuatro hombres y tres mujeres, se distanciaban bastante de lo que había escuchado o contado con los puertorriqueños. En sus historias no había mucho espacio para celebrar la cotidianidad o las selecciones de comodidad. Todas estas historias remitían a pasados devastadores, separaciones familiares, traumas, violencia y eventos horribles que finalmente llevaban a experiencias de imigración. La mayoría como hijos de comerciantes fueron sacudidos de mala manera por la revolución. Debieron abandonar el país. En una primera instancia el hacinamiento en Chinatown, New York, tenía la pinta de progreso.
“Interestingly, the disturbing stories that you hear in the film surprised Jenifer Lee, one of our translators. She’s from Taiwan originally and she said that she’d never heard about so many terrible things happening as early as the 1940s in China. Things like gangs breaking into someone’s house and beating up parents in front of their children. People were not really talking about this kind of violence in history very much. Still, most of our performers did bring their kids to the show. To me, this is important, because they were proud as performers and a lot of them wanted to reveal their tragic stories to their own families.” Ibid.
En esa primera etapa de atento escucha en pos de un texto se me presentaron varios retos. Primeramente andar a ciegas en el laberinto idiomático en el cual me había metido. Los entrevistados solo hablaban mandarín. Sus historias pasaban por el sedazo de una traductora. Sabía que algo siempre se me escapaba: un matiz, una entonación, un comentario de doble sentido, quién sabe. No había manera de identificar los aspectos emotivos del habla o de corroborar cuan fiel era la traductora.
De este escuchar sin referencia yo tomaba notas en inglés que luego condensaba y le daba algo de tono cinemático. Lynne escribía por su cuenta y luego yo editaba ambos textos en una versión casi final. El proceso se invertía y se les hacía una traducción en mandarín para que ellos se aprendieran o improvisaran, como terminó siendo el caso, a partir de sus monólogos. En todo ese recorrido de capas lingüísticas se quedaba la sensación de un algo incomunicado, lost in translation.
El siguiente reto consistió en introducir a los personajes puertorriqueños de Veraalba y Pedro en el mundo de Chinatown. Lynne no estaba interesada en repetir el proceso de filtrar la realidad y contar una versión estudiantil y artística del inmigrante en NY. Su interés era el de crear una ficción acerca de unos boricuas de clase baja que terminan viviendo entre estos señores chinos. Los personajes servirían como catalizadores para las historias chinas. La película era tanto una propuesta documental como un invento de ficción. Había que nadar en ambas aguas.
Muchas preguntas surgieron: ¿Cómo manejar la yuxtaposición de ambos acercamientos? ¿Cómo serle fiel a la cruda historia china? ¿Cómo mantener una credibilidad con estos puertorriqueños de la ficción? ¿Deberíamos enfocarnos también en las dificultades de la emigración puertorriqueña? ¿Es este filme el foro indicado para ello?
El trabajo con Lynne propone retos muy interesantes pero rara vez conclusiones o métodos fáciles. Su acercamiento como cineasta da muestra de su visión poética del mundo. Una visión personal y de referencias eclécticas que toma tiempo descubrir, pero estimulante y sui generis sin duda. Su proceso fílmico señala a las prácticas de directores como Jean-Luc Godard oTerrence Malick, quienes privilegian la improvisación actoral y visual y la intertextualidad. Fue en la misma filmación y posteriormente en la sala de edición, donde se fueron tomando las decisiones de tono, construcción narrativa y de utilización de los textos. En la película se mezclan escenas actuadas con momentos puramente documentales como una boda china o un talent show en un centro comunal de chinatown.
Los monólogos chinos los mantuvimos bastante fieles a los datos recibidos por los actores. Se agilizaron y sintetizaron en una prosa coloquial que podía encajar en cualquier situación. En un inicio escribimos ciertos rodeos literarios que demostraron no ser necesarios para comunicar sus historias. El poder de las anécdotas era suficiente. Mientras menos adornos mejor. Los personajes cuentan sus historias mientras cocinan, comen, tejen, tocan el piano, dan un masaje, ven una película en la laptop o simplemente están tirados en sus catres. La cámara explora sus rostros y partes del cuerpo desde muy cerca y se sumerje en los distintos objetos del apartamento. La visual es tanto íntima como claustrofóbica. Esto fue tanto una decisión estética de los cinematográfos como una necesidad traída por las circunstancias espaciales. La narrativa visual en Your Day is My Night es tan importante como la palabra hablada y en muchos momentos incluso más evocadora.
“Because of the tight quarters, some parts of your body cannot move. What you can move more freely is your hands. In this circumstance the performer’s hands became two bodies. They are interesting and sculptural. So we tried to use the hands and the sheets as two kinds of landscapes. From the very beginning this was a visual plan we had. I always wanted the sheets to become like caverns, to have a feeling of adventure over the sheets. There was one shot of Mr. Huang’s pink sheet right after his first monologue. I wanted it to feel like the Grand Canyon, or the Steppes in Eurasia, something very far out there.” Ibid.
Los personajes puertorriqueños fueron más dificiles de componer y sostener en el filme. Como no estaban basados en datos reales se les inventó una vida. Lourdes, el personaje de Veraalba, trabajaba como empleada en un Ikea arreglando camas (showroom beds). Carlos, su hermano (Pedro) había muerto en un accidente de carro pero ella se lo imaginaba por todos lados cargando una planta de moriviví. Lourdes se va de Puerto Rico tratando de escapar de su propia angustia (la muerte de su hermano, una madre opresiva) pero algo de su motivación queda ambigua. Su proceso como inmigrante es históricamente menos trágico aunque advertimos vive perdida tratando de encontrar un ancla. Lourdes, quien también es bailarina y escritora, se muda a Chinatown buscando conocer una cultura lejana a la suya. Sentirse despatriada es su manera de encontrar su esencia como persona.
Creo que con Lourdes alcanzamos construir una historia rica en matices, tipo novela de aprendizaje; pero desarrollarla, contar todos esos detalles, significaba alejarse del tema principal que motivaba a Lynne: las camas itinerantes; el chinatown oculto y hacinado. Dejar que el personaje moviera la trama era hacer otra película teniendo a la comunidad de chinatown como trasfondo secundario. Ese no era el balance que se buscaba entre ficción y documental. Aunque se filmaron muchas escenas acerca de Lourdes y Carlos, poco a poco Lynne y Sean Hanley cinematógrafo, co-editor y productor, las fueron extirpando (la historia sobre Carlos fue eliminada por completo, por ejemplo) para mantener el foco del filme y una duración adecuada.
“Originally the film was a little bit more narrative. For example, we had this whole part where Mr. Huang disappears, because Lourdes originally tries to get him out of Chinatown after he claims that he never leaves. They walk across the Manhattan bridge and she says: “I have to go to work”. When she leaves to go to work, he’s never seen again. It didn’t work in the film. It turned it into a narrative film that had a forced story and people judged it on the acting.” Ibid.
A pesar de este proceso de eliminación, el personaje de Lourdes cumple una función importante: crear un puente entre el apartamento y el exterior, un afuera que va más allá de la comunidad de chinatown y de la generación de los protagonistas chinos.
“One thing that I didn’t want to happen in this film was to portray either the shift-bed houses or Chinatown as isolated enclaves that didn’t exist anywhere else…I wanted to say that in 21st Century America, life is more porous. People have accidental interactions that affect them, and so I felt like bringing in not just another language, but also another person with a slightly different immigration experience, would add to that conversation. I also felt that for an audience, it broke the snowglobe feeling of “I’m looking in, but I cannot go in.” That would imply that Chinatown was a kind of hermetic space. So I thought that by having a new person in the apartment who’s a little bit wide-eyed, who wanted to learn from her older “roommates”, we could offer the audience the opportunity to become more involved.“ Ibid.
Durante año y medio mientras se editaba la película Lynne regresó con Sean varias veces para filmar tomas ambientales y aveces pequeñas escenas extras. En una de estas escenas se logró acceso a un apartamento repleto de camas itinerantes. La landlady y algunos inquilinos se dejaron filmar y hablan cómodamente con Huang, el cantante de bodas, uno de los personajes más curiosos del reparto. Esta escena es de las más impresionantes por la tristeza y resignación que esta manera de vivir trae a los implicados.
Ese juego entre escenas orquestradas y escenas documentales culminó con unas tomas en que se filmó a los protagonistas chinos en uno de los performances del “work in progress”. Estas tomas, por tener iluminación teatral y movimientos del tai-chi, tienen un aspecto surrealista siendo a la vez un registro híbrido entre ficción y documentación de las actividades del grupo.
“Far into our production, as I was documenting one of our live performances, I thought “This is really expressive and totally non-verbal, why aren’t we using it in the film?” Again, the idea, the process, revealed itself, whereas the more plot driven story was what I was forcing on them. It was artificial. So I took out all of that and allowed the film to become more improvisational and intuitive. This switched everything. We spent a year edit the other way and then just threw it all out when we realized how lucky we were to work with people so confident about their bodies, very willing to go on the stage and move freely. They had that ability and confidence.” Ibid.
Mi presencia en la etapa de post-producción fue mínima y se limitó a verificar unos subtítulos para una escena en español. No fue hasta que el filme estrenó el pasado 24 de febrero en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York (MoMa), en que finalmente vi entrelazados todos los niveles de escritura audiovisual. El filme tiene una cualidad atmósférica y voyeur que lo acerca más al género del documental, aunque ciertamente es una propuesta híbrida y con una estética muy trabajada.
Me sorprendió cómo decantar la palabra hablada ayudó al ritmo de la película. Los monólogos pueden considerarse islas dentro del tema-archipiélago de las camas y la vida en chinatown. Con las capas de traducción y la improvisación de algunos diálogos desapareció la autoría o los trucos de estilo, míos o de Lynne. El personaje de Lourdes terminó encajando muy bien como ese ojo externo dentro de las circunstancias. Las escenas estrictamente visuales no dejan de crear un texto pero este se manifiesta desde unas instancias poéticas y emotivo-arquitectónicas. Sin carecer de narrativa, Your Day is My Night no alardea de grandes peripecias sino de una observación cuidada al cotidiano de los personajes. Nunca victimiza sino que reconoce y valida la presencia de los por lo general anónimos habitantes de este barrio nuyorkino.
Lynne Sachs labora en el medio fílmico y en el del video. Otras facetas de su trabajo incluyen instalaciones y proyectos para la red. Su obra explora la relación intrincada que existe entre la observación personal y las experiencias históricas. Su estilo entrelaza poesía, collage, pintura, política y complejos diseños de sonido. Los filmes de Lynne se han presentado en el Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York, el Festival de Cine de New York, el Festival de Cine de Sundance y el Festival Internacional de Cine de Buenos Aires. Lynne enseña cine y video experimental en la Universidad de Nueva York y vive en Brooklyn.
