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Lilith Poetry by Lynne Sachs

Lilith Speaks to Adam

Just when I am on my way to becoming,
My eyes open and you are there.
Is Eden large enough for the two of us?
Wherever I turn,
there are branches pulling at my hair,
Earth between my toes and under my tongue.
I slither and sometimes I use my wings.

Let’s slither together.
(ADAM: “I’m working on my posture…”)

Earth becomes dirt becomes dirty.
Bent knees turn into corners.
Am I not right for this world?
Before you, I did not know I was I.
Now this I is part of my unbecoming.

Man Alone in House

Does this empty house invite the outside in?
No one told him to be fearful.
Asleep almost, he listens to the bones of the house.
His breath just constant.
Between two thoughts —
sleep.
Wetness creeps across skin like glue.
Seed is stolen.

Lilith plays thief tonight.
By the window, by the door,
Wings bristle lightly against branches.

Wedding Poem

Morning sunlight taps groom on shoulder,
A day of ring exchanges.
Paper signing, blood marks.
Bride will dance seven circles round him.
Each revolution strengthens the wall,
Closes the window,
Shuts the door to the thief he knew the night before.
Breathless before so many eyes.
She careens to a stop,

Foot hits glass,
Tiny shards spray across ground.
An owl perched on a tree above
Blinks, shivers and flies into a cloud.

Birth Poem

At last, nine full moons leave bare
The dust against the sky.
Air fills up with brightness.
A clumsy baby drops.
Dice on a betting table
Or rich, ripe fruit atop worn grass?

Mother Speaks to Baby

I’m learning to read all over again,
a face, this time, connected to a body.
At first, I feel your story from within–
Nose rubs against belly, elbow prods groin.
Your silent cough becomes
a confusing dip and bulge.
You speak and I struggle to translate.
I lie on my side, talk to myself,
rub my fingers across my skin, from left to right.
I read out loud,
and I hope you can hear me.

I’m learning to read all over again
but this time I have a teacher.

A smile comes over your face.
Lips flutter, flutter, quiver, turn up to touch cheek.
I know, am told, have heard — that
in the dark, under your cradle,
there in the empty space of dust between
lies Lilith.

I catch the reflection of my face in her eyes.
I am a snake, a spider, the flame of a burning sword,
a feather that tickles at the nape of your neck,
broken glass and nakedness.

I touch your nose and her spell is broken,
something lost and nothing gained.
For a moment your head swishes between ears,
to say no, to resist and then to sink into
nothing more than a pillow.

No Kingdom There
(Inspired by Isaiah 34)

Streams turn to pitch.
Soil into sulfur.
Land burns.
Night or day, a pure dry thirst.
Vines twisting upward,
gnarled and gray,
soon become tomorrow’s smoke.
And still, the hawk and the hog possess the dying tree.
The owl and the raven drop down to lower branches.
In the distance, nailed to a post, the words:
This Begins the Line of Confusion
Call it–
“No Kingdom Here.”

No bosses, no princes, no popes.
Only splinters tearing skin,
and thorns inside doorways.
Only wildcats gnawing at hyena necks,
and jackals lurking in the wood.
While all the goats called Evil cry out
“Bah, bah.”

Here too Lilith will lie down
and find a place to rest.

Rudy Burckhardt Book review

Rudy Burckhardt’s Life and Work: How Wide is Sixth Avenue by Phillip Lopate
Reviewed by Lynne Sachs

For over twenty years, writer Philip Lopate was lucky enough to call artist Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) a friend. An afternoon visit to Burckhardts Chelsea loft would usually include a cup of tea or a bottle of beer and a home cooked meal. In his new book, Rudy Burckhardtís Life and Work: How Wide is Sixth Avenue (Harry N. Abrams, 2004), a portrait of Burckhardt that includes over 100 of his photographs, Lopate poignantly remembers the lively conversation, the smell of good food, and the art he saw inside the quintessentially urban live-work space of this profoundly committed artist. Lopate writes: “You might take a quick gander at a painting he was working on in the backroom, or some photographs on the wall: the long, paint-spattered table usually held an editing set-up with take-up reels for his film of the moment, with a shot list beside it and a paperback book, face down, where he’d left off reading.” For most filmmakers today, our medium is too often sequestered from the other arts, while Burckhardt, it seems, relished in the paint under his fingernails.

Rudy Burckhardt’s Life and Work is an insightful, frank and compassionate character study of this mostly unheralded Swiss-American artist. Lopate interweaves astute interpretations of Burckhardt’s films and photographs with a fascinating and at times intimate narrative of his youth in Europe and his adult life in New York City. Burckhardt, observes Lopate, was the primary photographer of the maveick 1940’s New York School, one of the most celebrated artistic circles in the history of 20th Century American art, putting him in company with the likes of painters Willem deKooning, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, and Red Grooms [all painters? YES]. Without an in-depth study of the work of Rudy Burckhardt there would be a gap in the canon of American photography and experimental film. However, Lopate’s book, he says, is “not so much spotless objectivity as the promotion of a more complex understanding of Rudy Burckhardt, by exploring a life resonant in enigmas, and by trying to interpret the rich body of images he left us.”

Keeping that in mind, Lopate observes that EVEN AS a very young artist, Burckhardt was always fascinated by both the harshness and beauty of life in a modern city. “Walking and taking pictures became inextricably linked [FOR HIM],” Lopate writes. A nineteen-year-old in 1933, Burckhardt obediently traveled from his protected, pristine Geneva family home to study medicine in London. Quickly distracted from the classroom by the surprisingly harsh realities of the Depression- burdened metropolis, young Rudy was drawn to the slums, the men and women standing in line for a meal, all the daunting signs of poverty that other members of the bourgeoisie had chosen to ignore. Burckhardt himself wrote of these times in his memoir collection, Mobile Homes. With camera in hand, he was prepared to witness life at its most difficult, and even made the claim of being “elated by the smell of urine.”

With documentary filmmaking still in its early years of development during and after WWII, what was then known as ‘reality based’ Filmmaking had yet to find a definitive identity in the worlds of art, academe, or popular commercial culture. Robert Flaherty was traipsing around the sub-arctic giving earnest, perhaps deceptive, drama to the lives of its native people. John Grierson was working with the backing of the entire Canadian Film Board. And Dziga Vertov was imbuing his each and every breathtakingly graphic composition with a political imperative. In the larger American cities, it was becoming more and more common to see a photographer with a small motion picture camera tucked under his or her arm, patiently waiting for a disheveled woman to turn her face in such a way, or the light to pass across a cement skyscraper. This entourage of committed artists, which also included Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt, perceived “the street as the meeting-place of class contradictions, aesthetic anomalies and historic eras (modernism versus flea market agora.),” writes Lopate. In Burckhardt’s first impressionistic film documentaries from this time, Lopate notes, the work reveals to us an “acceptance of the obdurate, sadly loving world, an amazing facility for composition, perfect use of natural light and a tactful holding of a shot for just long enough.” For Burckhardt, the evolution from photographer to filmmaker was inevitable, and in the end, he came to feel that filmmaking is what he did best.

After a series of precise analyses of Burckhardt’s elegant black and white photography, Lopate turns to his movies, including “The Climate of New York” (1948) and “How Wide is Sixth Avenue”[Date TK 1945], where Burckhardt provides a “gentle, slightly melancholy observation of ordinary people caught moving, from close-up and from far way.” Reading Lopate’s book inspired me to watch again several of Burkhardt’s films with a new, better-informed eye. For example, watching “Under the Brooklyn Bridge” (1953), I witnessed for the first time through Rudy’s lens, a gaggle of gleeful, naked boys frolicking in the East River, with its swirling, treacherous currents.
In “Default Averted” (1975), Rudy responded with compassion and artistry to New York City’s brush with bankruptcy. As Lopate writes: “In it we see buildings being demolished, the city under siege from snow and creditors all to the music of Thelonious Monk and Edgar Varese.” Watching Rudy’s series of Times Square films produced during this fragile era in the city’s history gave me the chance to relish in his astonishing and loving celebration of life at its most fraught, edgy, and exuberant. Even after thirty years, the colors that Rudy captured seem as spectacular and tawdry as ever. It is this exquisite sensitivity to all things visual, especially the lines, tensions and excitement of an urban landscape that would eventually serve as inspiration to another generation of reality-based shooters such as Peter Hutton, Nick Dorsky [see story pg TK] and Warren Sonnbert.

In the realm of the movies, Rudy’s love of the image remained strictly “amateur,” rarely availing him any monetary compensation. It wasn’t until the 1960ís, when America experienced the awakening of a transgressive, fluid, hippie culture, that Burckhardt’s irreverent, bohemian oeuvre began to garner attention. Young people searching for an art form that was free and unadorned embraced Rudy’s “underground, pro-sex, anti-Hollywood revolution,” He was willing to stand before his own camera, boney and nude; he was spiritually bemused by the shapely beauty of a mushroom in the dark, wet soil. [Is this also a quote?NO] It was at this point that Burckhardt began to identify with the Experimental Filmmaking movement in America that had grown out of Dada, Surrealism, and chance performances.

At times raunchy, often child-like, purposefully naive, and intensely identifiable with the poetic impulse, Rudy’s narrative experiments pushed the boundaries of expectation in absolutely every direction. Indeed his chaotic and inventive story-films integrated an outlandish selection of film tricks that hark back to the days of George Melies, magician and pioneer of the early cinema, magic and all. Intensive collaborations with his poet friends Taylor Mead, Edwin Denby, and John Ashbery contributed to the feeling that Rudy’s social life was an intricate part of his creative life.

In this rich, stimulating environment, Rudy’s six-decade commitment to all forms of artistic expression was rigorous, disciplined and far-reaching. Seemingly disinterested in spinning a love of the moving image into a full-blown career, he never referred to himself as a director, but rather simply as an artist, a 24-hour participant in the creative process. His wife Yvonne, describes it simply in Lopate’s book: “He could photograph, paint and film all in one day.”

During the 1950’s, he collaborated with the enigmatic, eventually renowned, Queens, New York artist Joseph Cornell on “What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street” and Mulberry Street, two short masterpieces of color and lyricism, each also a loving homage to the wonders of the city they both called home. Today, these two works along with 52 others are in the permanent collection at the New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative. Over the decades, retrospectives of his work have been shown in museums, film festivals and cooperatives. And with the publication of Lopateís remarkable portrait, we can only hope for a resurgence of Rudy Burckhardt film screenings.

As an experimental filmmaker with an intimate relationship to documentary, I am heartened by the life-long relationship Burckhardt had to exploring the world around him with compassion as well as invention. Equally enthralled by the experience of lugging my heavy 16mm camera across town to witness the colors of the morning sun, and by the splendid collaborations I have had with other artists, I am drawn to the methods of working that were so integral to Burckhardtísís process.
And now, after finishing Rudy Burckhardt’s Life and Work: How Wide is Sixth Avenue, I find myself presented with a rather intriguing dilemma. Do I rush over to the Filmmakersí Coop to watch Burckhardt’s Haiti, Caterpillar, Square Times, Default Averted, Doldrums, Central Park in the Dark, Night Fantasies and Indelible?

Or, do I pull out my Bolex and head for Times Square?

Lynne Sachs is a New York filmmaker and writer who produces experimental documentaries, installations and web projects (www.house-of-drafts.org).

PUBLISHED IN THE INDEPENDENT FILM AND VIDEO MONTHLY

Lynne Sachs Artworld Interview from China

artworld interview (PDF version)
PDF of Interview with Lynne Sachs with Artworld (Chinese Art Magazine)

Interview,Thank you Zhu

1. As far as I know, you have always been teaching in the field of movie in

the university. Which courses do you mainly teach? That has brought a lot

of convenience to your creative work.

I have been teaching since 1989, on and off, which gives me time to make my films. I see teaching as an extension of the over all exploration that is part of making art. Whenever I discover a new, challenging film or video I am lucky enough to have an audience that is ready, willing and able to watch it. This can be so thrilling. In addition, I often show my own works-in-process (I do not say “progress” because I like to celebrate the act of making as much as the act of completing) to my students, which makes me feel as vulnerable as they do when they present an evolving work of art to me, their professor. I mainly teach film and video making courses in an art context, that is I do not teach people the formula for making a Hollywood style movie, but rather a moving image work that comes from the artist-student’s own vision. I also teach lecture courses on experimental and documentary film. This fall I will be a visiting artist at New York University.

2. Among your students or the entire university, are there many people who

are engaged in the creation of experimental movies? Naturally, your

students and you often communicate with each other, and therefore, do you

influence each other? Or can you get some inspirations from the

communication?

I think every new work of art is an experiment in expression, so I do not measure a film’s success by it ability to replicate the standard, commercial fare we are shown in most mainstream theaters. For the most part, I teach with other artists, not just filmmakers, so I am lucky enough to be around people with paint under their nails.

3. I have learned from the material that you began to make experimental

movies from 1989. Although you have only made nine up till now, you have

won a lot of prizes and awards and drawn attention from people. Do you

still give first priority to teaching?

I would honestly say that my priority is to my films, and that my teaching is an extension of the dialogue that goes with that creative process.

4. I was very glad that I interviewed your husband Mark in May. However, I

didn’t know your relationship until you told me that. Aha! By the way, I

think you can talk about him and his movies.

I am truly enthralled by my husband Mark’s films. He is a pioneer in the world of hand-made films, and our house is a place where he often disappears down in the basement to paint on each and every frame. I also am enthralled by his newer work, more dramatic video pieces in which he works with actors to create a remarkable synthesis of real and imaginary landscapes of human experience.

5. During the interview with Mark, I got to know that you ha ve two lovely

children. I think both of you are very happy, because you have a happy

family, a career you like, and moreover mutual communication. Do you

usually talk about your movies and your own ideas? It can be said that

movie has been incorporated into your life.

We talk a great deal about our films, especially the struggles of the process – from problems with our computers to a roll of film that is disastrously overexposed to an actor who failed to show up for a shoot. This may sound rather prosaic, but it is so important to have someone in your life who is willing to listen to the dirty details of movie making. We also understand one another’s need for privacy, and share a respect for one another’s need to search for a visual form of expression that takes risks – all alone. My form of filmmaking is perhaps different from his in that I am often trying to articulate my feelings, or concerns, about something going on in the world, something I hope will change in time.

My films are cine-essays, a play between image, sound and text that is very close to the work of Chris Marker, the French filmmaker.

The biggest project of our life weighs about 100 lbs, that is our two daughters, whom we take to avant-garde movies all over New York City. For the most part, they find it a pleasure, though sometimes they wish we appreciated Disney more than we do, alas.

6. The question I am going to ask you, I think, is the one many other

people will also ask. Is your creative work influenced by Mark, or vice

versa, or you have mutual impact?

I believe I take more chances, jump into the crazy world of public exhibition, stay up till the middle of the night editing, travel to places like Vietnam or Bosnia – with confidence and excitement, with my camera in hand because I know I have the support of my life partner, Mark Street. Sometimes he is also my very harshest critic, and I just wish he would not be so honest!

7. Mark’s movie Excursions and yours Which Way Is East are very similar in

form. What’s more, the two movies were shot in the same year. Can you talk

about these two movies?

I think your observation is extremely insightful and I appreciate your close attention to our work. Both of those films are so-called travel films. He went to Mexico in “Excursions” and I went to Vietnam in “Which Way is East”. We did these things at a time when we did not yet have children along with us, with all of the real and emotional baggage that

children bring along. So, I think these movies are about both a physical and a psychological journey that comes with being in a new place and feeling very, very independent, far away, totally observant and aware. The films reflect a time in history that was very open and cross-cultural, and I miss that spirit as I think travelers are far more cautious now, since the changes that have happened over the last few years.

8. In Which Way Is East, we saw the effects somewhat like the traces of

film scratching, which we usually see in experimental movies and in the

movies made by Mark. But your movies appear in the form of the documentary.

Why do you want to deal with the frames of your movies in this way?

I like your attention to detail, to the notion of the frame. With our progressive movement toward a completely digital way of working, there seems to be less and less sensitivity to these details….the brush strokes of cinema that all work together to create a different kind of visual vocabulary than any other medium. So, in my own way, I am also experimenting all of the time with new ways of expressing my thoughts to my audience. In Which Way is East, Biography of Lilith and Investigation of a Flame, I play with focus, framing and texture to bring about surprising ways of seeing things in the real world. In WWE, blurry streaks of light from a moving car become are transformed into a dreamy, sumptuous entrance into the flaura of Vietnam. In Lilith, a spider and a jelly fish send us into a primordial Eden. In Investigation, red flowers transform into a splash of blood. Objects from everyday life take on a new relationship to the eye and the imagination.

9. We don’t see the way you deal with the documentary in China. Is it a

common way of creation in Ame rica? Or can we say that it is pretty free to

create a documentary there?

I am really thrilled that you ask this question about documentary. I think the changes that are going on in this field are happening because artists who are trying to explore their responses to what they see in the world with a camera are frustrated by the conventional, network news ways of observing. We as experimental documentary makers want to create new ways of expressing our ideas with very precise uses of images and sounds; each new project necessitates a personal, original mode of working with the media. We cannot feel at ease with a language of the dominant cinema, or the dominant power class. Form and function once again are intertwined. Right now I am working with the filmmaker Jem Cohen (go on the web to get information on his films) to make a book with six other makers (probably including Paul Chan, Travis Wilkerson, Bill Brown and Deborah Stratman). This will be an artist manifesto, in the grand tradition of the 1920’s Russsian revolutionary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, we hope! By the way, have you gone to see the Web artist documentary I made with artists in Bosnia WWW.house-of-drafts.org. This is another example of experimenting between documentary and fiction. Please take a look.

10. Among the four movies you gave me, A Biography of Lilith is my

favorite. I like its form, its frame, and its music. However, at the same

time, it is the movie that is the most difficult to understand, because our

religious belief has no relation with the Jesus Christ. Could you talk

about this movie?

Biograph of Lilith represents a very intense period of my life – from 1995 –1997 – when I went from being a single woman, independent, working doing whatever I like to being a mother who still wanted to keep the liberated side of my existence in tact. Making this film was part of my search for a woman in history, or at lest mythology, from my own ethnicity as a Jewish woman. In the process, I discovered new ways of working with music that were astonishingly exciting. I found an opera singer, a cello player and a rock and roll band. They were all ready, willing and able to take my poetry and turn it into song! Regarding the Judao-Christian paradigm you mentioned that is so far from your own, Lilith most definitely represents a challenge to the creation myth, to the subservience of women and all that comes with that all-powerful bit of Western folklore.

11. Which Way Is East and Investigation of a Flame are both about the

Vietnam War. These two movies were produced in 1994 and 1997 respectively.

After such a long lapse of time, what recalled you back to the War?

I was a child during the 1960’s and Vietnam always represented something far away and Other during that time in America. I wanted to break that symbolic barrio to our understanding of that place and its people by bringing color, sound, voice to the culture of Vietnam. I wanted to look at our shared horizon across the Pacific Ocean, across history, and to try to understand the events in a new, more open way. Traveling in Vietnam as an American woman in 1992 was rare, so the Vietnamese people were very willing to talk and to tell me and my sister their thoughts on our shared history. With Investigation, I wanted to find out more about a group of people who sacrificed so much in their lives for something they believe in so deeply. Everyone should have a few moments like this sometime in their lives, a time of profound choice from which you can never go back.

12. We discover that you are paying special attention to the social issues

like politics, war, and woman’s right, etc. Why are you interested in the

above mentioned topics or what inspires you to display these themes?

I really can’t help thinking about these issues, but I suppose it is the fact that I work with these themes from the perspective of an artist that makes my reactions more like the work of poets, essayists, novelists, or painters. By not working as a journalist, I am free to work in a very subjective, personal way. I rely on grants, awards and sales of my work to keep it going, While the commercial world exists, it is not really the place for this kind of media.

13. Do you like the form of address as female director, feminism director

or the classification like this?

I like the term filmmaker, because I do not really work with the traditional hierarchies of the movies business where I direct lots of members of a crew. To say filmmaker, is to imply a hands-on relationship to the medium, and a sense of collaboration with my peers.

14. Among your movies, I saw the ones bearing heavy documentary elements

such as Which Wa y Is East and Investigation of a Flame, and also the ones

bearing the experimental features like The House of Science and A Biography

of Lilith. It seems that you are maneuvering between the documentary and

the experimental movie and incorporating the experimental movie’s

technique in the documentary. Do you lay particular emphasis on the

experimental movies or the experimental features of movies or something

else?

Yes, to experiment is to always require a level of fun, curiosity and play – even with very serious subjects.

15. It is a pity that I can’t see more of your works. Finally, can you

tell me your views on your own works and movie?

I am finishing a DVD this week which has poetry, collage, long and short movies, strange interviews — all of which are part of the making of several of my films from the 1990’s. Finally there is a medium and a technology that can contain the meandering, whimsical, socially concerned, politically committed, artistic adventures which are part of my art making practice. Every new project I make seems to feel like the hardest, but then again it is also continually challenging and fascinating and I cannot imagine doing anything else. Here is a description of my current project which will be done this year:

“States of UnBelonging” is a 70 min. video-essay in post-production which explores the complex ways one person understands another across cultural, historical and familial divides. I look at two people: Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin and a writer who fled the Nazis and ended up in remotest Brazil; and, Revital Ohayon, an Israeli woman filmmaker killed by gunfire. Beginning with war and its impact on the smallest and largest moments of life, this video responds to two distinct experiences of tragedy and transformation. Sandor devised his own way to survive the traumatic events of his life. A Hungarian Jewish doctor, he worked for the US Army during World War II reconstructing the bodies of dead soldiers. His letters to my great-uncle are a fascinating yet personal treatise on modern society, war and the creative process. I juxtapose Sandor’s fearless introspection on the two World Wars with a visualization of his idyllic life in the “invisible house” in the woods. Building a harpsichord on which to play Bach and translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin hurl him away from the memories he finds so difficult to escape. Revital was shot by militants in a kibbutz known for its positive relations with a neighboring Arab village. Without taking sides or casting blame, her tragedy touched me deeply when I came across it in the newspaper. Like me, she was a mother, a filmmaker and a teacher. After a year of dogged research, I am now editing interviews with her family, material from her films, and landscape imagery from significant places in her life. My process uses authentic and fabricated imagery, moving from observation to invention. “States” pushes audiences to think epistemologically, to wonder about the ways that they are coming to “know” these two individuals. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, these portraits explore multiple planes, offering simultaneous, contradictory views that allow us to see beyond the surface of the skin, inside.

To Build a House

To build a house on a mountain,
I find a place in my room where a cloud meets my eye.
Capture the wind with my lips.
Take notice of a bird writing eloquent script
across the sky.

Flickering in the morning yellow,
Aspen leaves turning somersaults,
Dark, light, dark, light.
A moon and its negative
Multiplied by a thousand.

A cosmos of arboreal splendor.

Spring green beckoning me –
Shyly into the somber quiet of the wood.

Where do I put a memory of silence?
I carve a groove just deep enough,
And delicately place the wedge of delicious
Extravagant emptiness
Inside the fissures.

Protected and preserved I forget the silence is there
Until it has mischievously flown away,
Like the birds I saw that morning –
Writing their indecipherable messages across the paper
I sadly allowed to float away.

Lynne Sachs

Review of Which Way is East and Investigation of a Flame in LA Weekly

LA Weekly, Nov. 22, 2002 Vol. 25, No. 1

Filmforum – Two Films by Lynne Sachs

By Holly Willis

In her new film, Investigation of a Flame, experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to May 1968, as the U.S. under Lyndon Johnson grew increasingly embroiled in Vietnam, and sentiment about the war was decidedly split. The film opens with a volatile mix of footage showing Johnson addressing the nation, shots of American troops carrying injured soldiers, and home-movie footage of teenage boys.

Rather than focusing on the era at large, however, Sachs examines a single incident, when nine Vietnam War protesters in Catonsville, Maryland, poured homemade napalm on draft records and set them on fire. Footage of the event shows the well-dressed, courteous “Catonsville 9” – who included peace-activist Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan – gathered around their small fire, calmly explaining their objections to the war; after they were arrested, they even sent flowers to a clerk who had been treated brusquely in the tussle.

While the event illustrated a quiet defiance, it more powerfully sparked other acts of civil disobedience, and Sachs included contemporary interview footage in which she asks many of those involved to comment. The result is a complex rumination on the power of protest.

In her earlier film Which Way is East? Sachs travels with her sister to Vietnam, looking for traces of violence in the often-beautiful countryside. Together the films offer thoughtful reflection on the traumas of the past, the continued mistakes of the present and the necessity to reflect actively on our government’s wartime antics.

Review of Investigation of a Flame in The Nation

Films, The Nation

June 10, 2002

By Stuart Klawans

Screening Schedule: Speaking of people who broke rules, Lynne Sachs has made a fine, artful documentary about the Catonsville Nine, the war protesters who walked into a Selective Service office in 1968, grabbed as many files as they could carry and burned them with homemade napalm.

She’s got the surviving protestors down on film, Philip and Daniel Berrigan among them; and she’s got other interested parties too, including the district attorney who prosecuted the Nine and one of the jurors who convicted them. The juror weeps now, out of respect for their courage.

The film is titled Investigation of a Flame, and it’s showing in New York at Anthology Film Archives, May 29-31.

The distributor is First Run/Icarus Films, (800) 876-1710.

First Steps in a Terra Incognita

First Steps in a Terra Incognita (2002)
4 1/2 min.
by Lynne Sachs

House of Drafts/ Dom Promaha is a virtual apartment building inhabited by the imaginary characters created by eight Bosnian and two American media artists. Our characters have refused the opportunities of exile and instead have chosen to stay in Sarajevo. We invite you to enter this apartment building through our website or by watching the tape as a way of meeting the characters who live here.

This building relies on an architecture comprised of images, sounds and text. The project as a whole is shaped by our autobiographical experiences as they are filtered through poetic reflections, original music, and video. From a performance artist who moonlights as a de-miner, to a cinematographer who uses his camera to turn a decaying Sarajevo into a bustling Bangkok, to a traveler caught by the inferno of a burning library — the website and corresponding video represent our ruminations on a city and its inhabitants during and after a period of war. On the website you are invited not only to enter and explore our House of Drafts but also to participate by leaving your own writing and images on the walls of the space.

Created by Jeanne C. Finley (San Francisco) and Lynne Sachs (New York) with the participation of Larisa Hasanbegovic, Adla Isanovic, Timur Makarevic, Tvico Muhidin, Alma Suljevic and Enes Zlater (Sarjevo, Bosnia Herzogovina).

Script for Investigation of a Flame

Investigation of a Flame

By Lynne Sachs

Transcription

…If I should leave you, I do remember all the good times. Long days filled with sunshine, and just a little…

Tonight the cup of peril is full in Vietnam. Tonight as so many nights before young Americans struggle and young Americans die in a distant land. Tonight as so many nights before the American nation is asked to sacrifice the blood of its children and the fruits of its labor for the love of its freedom.

…and just a little bit of..

Our country says its independence rests in large measure, on confidence in America’s words and America’s protection. Undermine the independence of another; abandon much of Asia to the domination of communists.

And we do not intend to abandon Asia to conquest.

The ancient Israelites used to believe that in the stream of blood in a person’s body, the spirit reigned. And it’s a pretty accurate depiction of the reality, you know, and in Biblical lore too, blood is the sign of the covenant between God and us.

Not too many years ago Vietnam was a peaceful if troubled land.

I had a lot of anger, and I certainly didn’t like the idea of old generals sitting behind the lines, serving me up on a platter in Vietnam. And if the Vietnamese were being killed you could do a commensurate; you would do something strong, something risky.

The war was getting worse, and young draft resistors had actually started to burn their draft cards, which they were sent to Allenwood for two years. They really led the way. Those 18 year olds, 17 year olds, who went to prison.

And we said well let’s do something to these draft records. And that’s how we emerged with the idea of putting blood on those records. First of all to show what they are, they are blood. Blood is real, that’s not paper.

All of us active in the interfaith peace mission, walked in to the door of the main selective service headquarters in Baltimore with little containers of blood in our pockets, and we had looked at the place before because we wanted to be sure that you know that there’d be no, uh, if there were armed guards, we just wanted to be clear about what we were doing. And that whatever we would do that it would be a non-violent witness.

This covenant, this agreement between god and us, is sealed in Christ’s blood. This is the blood of the covenant as he said before he went to his execution. But anyway this was all misunderstood and our using of blood and it was denounced and ridiculed and misinterpreted and ridiculed and so since we were so strongly opposed to the war, we started thinking about other symbols.

And then we published something against the war, I think it’s the biggest ad that was published against the war in the whole county.

Oh, do you have a copy of that?

Yes.

I’d love to see that.

It was a 2-page spread in The Baltimore Sun. We knew that Johnson read that paper; it was one of the 3 or 4 papers he read, so we joked about it, and you know our little vision of Johnson taking a crap in the next morning and opening this, the The Baltimore Sun and seeing a 2 page spread with a promise that more was to come.

And we will stay until aggression has stopped.

Well this is the story of the infamous incident at Catonsville, Maryland, in May of ’68. My brother’s involvement of course went back to ’67, because he and 3 others had already burned their draft files in inner-city Baltimore, and they were out awaiting sentences and Phillip came up to Cornell and stayed overnight, I guess we stayed up most the night talking, and he said, some of us are going to do it again, and you’re invited. Where upon I started to quake in my boots. It had really never occurred to me that I would take part in something that serious as far as consequences went. But the idea of putting myself in to the furnace of the king, or being thrown there, was a pretty shocking and new. So I told Phillip, “Give me a few days to think this over and pray over it, and I’ll let you know.” So I did, I went through some very serious soul searching and talked to my family and couldn’t see, I’ll put it negatively, I couldn’t see any reason not to do it. I didn’t’ want to do it, but I couldn’t not do it.

By the time the Catonsville Nine happened, they switched from blood to fire.

The enemy, they’re no longer closer to victory. Time is no longer on his side. There is no cause to doubt the American commitment.

…and decency and unity, and love. Amen. And we unite…. And identify with their interests… And we stand witness…Unite in taking our matches, approaching the fire…

The idea of going into a selective service office, taking out files, and then taking them outside, where there would be no danger to the building or and people and burning them with napalm, that would be homemade napalm according to the handbook that the green berets had.

And he says it was just gasoline and soap suds – not soap suds, but Ivory flakes, the soap powder; and you stir it into the gas; you’re supposed to actually heat the gas and we figured the heck with that, but they just stirred it into the gas until it jellied a little bit which was our napalm. And the idea of it though, how it sticks to people you know you can’t pat out the fire, it just gonna stick to you and continue to burn. To me it was just overwhelming to think about that and using that.

Bureaucracy is fantastic. We walked in and nobody would look at us. Tom came up and started reading. “We are a group of clergyman and laymen concerned about the war.” And nobody would look up.

….based on the situation now, you can’t participate.

Alright.

…what we’re looking for now…

I was sitting at my desk doing my work, and these two ladies were in the office with me and those two gentleman came up in the hall outside there, and I said, “Yes sir, may I help you?” And so then right on top of him came another man. And then he started to come in; he looked right; he looked in here and then he looked over there, and he said, as he walked into the office and I said, “ What can I do for you?” And with that all of the rest of them came all of a sudden. Quickly. And the one man with the trash burner, he went around to my files and stood there and started dumping files into this trash burner, and this one man, I tried to prevent it, this one man attempted to stop me from doing it, and he did succeed.

I felt that we were doing the right thing by being there because I was sold on the idea that we were trying to fight communism in that part of the world. And that China and the other countries might be involved and I thought, I figured that we were a free country and had all the benefits of being in a free country and I was all for helping out any country that could fight communism. So I never even thought about being in a draft board except for helping my country and the boys that were going over and actually fighting for that war. I was trying to help them. Particularly ones that had gone for long years before and had to have some relief by sending them new recruits, and that’s what happened when you drafted new people you were able to send them, the people that were already over there fighting, some help.

Poor old Mrs. Murphy, they grabbed her, I think there was some sort of tussle, and there was a feeling she was defending her turf and in order to get to the records, they had to get her out of the way. I mean that’s an assault, that’s not the way we’re supposed to react to each other as citizens.

We’re gonna take you to the station…. Right in the back here.

Now you had to draft people, in order to replenish our forces and in Vietnam where we had half a million troops. So when you started messing with selective service, you were messing with the core of the whole war effort.

We’re all part of this. It is a symbolic message, bringing home to the American people that while American’s who are, while people throughout the whole world in especially in Vietnam now are suffering, and being napalmed, that these files are also being napalmed, so that these lives can find the same freedom. Amen. We think also those negotiating in terrorism, be asked through this action, that they take there work seriously, especially the Americans. And understand that Americans are able undergo some risk in the name of justice and the name of the dead.

It was like just trying to put a log in the path of the government, you know, to try to stop it from, to stop and reconsider what, what’s going on here, you know. And you know that it’s like a miniscule little log that you’re getting into, but what I wanted to do anyway, I said that is was similar to like children in a bus coming down a hill and the bus was a runaway bus and that what you really had to do was like something was gonna, you had to smash into it, into this other vehicle that was going to smash into the children in order to stop it so that you would prevent the kids from getting injured or hurt. And I still think that Catonsville was that, was just a little attempt at trying to stop the war.

Three, two, one, zero .We have commit. We have, we have lift off. Lift off at 7:51am….the clock is running…

We’re all at death’s throw now…

Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses and we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not to temptation, but deliver us from evil, amen.

You might say almost the residue of Pope John XXIII’s ideas, are spread throughout the Catholic world, you know, the American Catholic world and these guys all kind of came up to be Americans. So it’s kind of interesting that he kind of culled them out.

What does that mean, what does that mean Pope John XXIII culled them out?

Well, Pope John XXIII was the guy who, the first thing that he did when he went into the Vatican was opened up the curtains and said, “Let’s let some light into this church.” He more than any Pope, since or before, called for the resuscitation of the social gospel. That the church has to be about fighting poverty and fighting oppression and fighting war. So I think that, you can ask them themselves, but that all these folks are definitely children of John XXIII spiritually. And that’s when kind of liberation theology, which Pope John Paul has really quashed came to the fore. You know, the whole idea that the gospel has to be a living thing, even revolutionary.

Well this was a former priest and former nun, and they had met in Guatemala and had fallen in love and married. And came back and their whole focus as far as the trial was concerned and the action, was to shed light upon the betrayal of Guatemala by the US government.

She’s up their in the mountain and what am I gonna do? Stand around and baptize and say mass? No I can’t do that. So she got me more involved in Guatemala and I got her involved in Catonsville. It’s kind of reverse of it you know. And you know she said, well the only way that we can maintain our relationship is if we go through it together.

I was still full of the possibilities of a real revolution taking place, and a change where there would be a greater justice and then I just started thinking how does anyone dare go against the power of the United States. United States isn’t with you even though your cause is just. Forget it.

Not only are we killing people through violent physical war, but we are also killing them through the extension of our economical political empire. So let us all pray for those people who are dying from hunger and starvation throughout the world so that American’s can have a higher standard of living.

When people started calling me a communist, then I said now I understand, you’re a communist when you are looking for social justice. You’re a communist when you’re looking for the rights of the underdog. That’s the way they use the label. And so that for me became a huge change and I began to see US foreign policy in a whole different light.

Now were looking straight down over Australia, now we have the terminator out our right window, we have the whole further part of the world out one window. Fairly fantastic. The world is a different thing for each one of us, I think that each one us will carry his own impression of what we’ve seen today. You know my own impression is that it’s a vast, lonely, forbidding type.

But we were frankly worried about the state of euphoria that was beginning to set in, in the public mind about how easy this particular thing was. Light a match at the pad, the bird goes up, everything is great. Guys come back down again, you’ve got some heroes.

I remember our one friend who gave us a flag, and he, remember him Rita, and he, I thought he had three young children, and he was a helicopter pilot and he was very, he was a recruiter too, but then they called him back to active service, as a helicopter pilot and he died, he was killed in the war. And things like that happened all during our time of service. And we were strictly for the men who served for our country, so whether or the not government was right or wrong, I’m not in a position to know. I had to take what was told to me at that time. And what I understood at that time. So I don’t know whether it was right or wrong or why or who or what. We just tried to help, we just tried to help out to make our boys as safe as we could and send them people to help them when we could.

It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. It is a crime against mankind. And so are the fires of war and death.

Napalm, which was made from information and from a formula in the United States Special Forces handbook, published by the school of special warfare, by the United States.

We all had a hand in making the napalm that was used here today.

These were folks who went to burn records that they thought had no right to exist. Well if everybody who feels that certain records don’t have a right to exist are entitled to do that, there is not only anarchy; there is a tearing of the social fabric that is intolerable. And I didn’t feel any sense of guilt or regret at prosecuting, what I regarded as excessive arrogant attempts to inflict their views on others. That’s not the way a democracy is supposed to work. You can’t burn what you hate.

We regret very much, I think all of us, the inconvenience and even the suffering that we brought to these clerks here; it was done so quickly and we hoped that they wouldn’t be so excitable over a few files, it’s very hard to bring home exactly what they are doing by being custodians of such files, but we certainly want to say publicly our apologies for hurting them.

And we tried to interpose ourselves between them and those who were gaining the drafts files here on the ground from the cabinets themselves. But I think that in a sense, we were a little unsuccessful, because we did have to struggle a bit with them, and I’d just like to repeat what Dan has said, we sincerely hope we didn’t injure anyone.

Um, I tended to be too damn angry all the time. I was ashamed of this country, and what we were doing in Vietnam and I was ashamed to be an American and I was angry as hell of over it, you know? And while I would never raise a hand against another human being, there was too much contempt in me and too much hatred of the system here. Forgetting of course, that the system is made up of people and according to our tradition and our religion and according to our scripture, we’re obligated to love the people. We’re obligated to love even our enemies. We’re obligated to love the people. And there wasn’t much of that in my make up in those days. Yet at the same time I was deeply convinced even then of the necessity for direct action. And now I know that it is the only resource that people have.

Well the Catonsville episode called to mind then, the life of a great Catholic lawyer the patron saint really of all lawyers, Thomas Moore, and the scene that makes this point best, is a scene in which Moore’s about to be betrayed by a disappointed office seeker and Moore’s family urges Moore to arrest him because he’s bad. And Moore, the lawyer, says, “There’s no law against that.” And he self righteous son in law, Roper says, “There is God’s law.” And Moore says, “Then let god arrest him.” And the impatient son in law says with sophistication upon sophistication. “Sheer simplicity,” says Moore, “The law, Roper, the law, I know what’s legal, not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal.” And Roper says, “Man’s law, above God’s?” “No, far below,” says Moore, but let me draw your attention to a fact, Roper, “I’m not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong which you find such plain sailing, I can’t navigate; I’m no voyager, But in thickets of the law, there I’m a forester. I doubt there’s a man alive who could follow me there. Thank God” He said. And his wife then says, “While you talk, he’s gone, the bad guy’s getting away.” “And go he should,” says Moore, “if he was the devil himself, until he broke the law.” And Roper, now outraged, says “so now you give the devil the benefit of law?” Moore, “Yes, what would you do Roper? Cut a great road through the law? This country’s planted thick with the laws coast to coast, man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand up right in the winds that would blow then? Yes I’d give the devil the benefit of the law for my own safety’s sake.”

We’ll take you to the station. Right in the back of the paddy wagon. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

These individuals were certainly at the very least, guilty of malicious destruction of property, and at the very worst, possibly even treason. The country was engaged at that time in a war, even thought it was an undeclared war, and certainly this action would give aid and comfort to the enemy.

In the race to the moon, in the race to the moon. Oh mister spaceman, you sure have started something, oh mister spaceman, don’t you know you got my heart a pumpin’, oh mister spaceman, I want to be spaceman too…

Oh mister spaceman don’t you know you got my heart a pumpin’, oh mister spaceman, I’m not really very far behind…

There wasn’t a single dinner conversation in Catholic families, that didn’t refer to that action, where people weren’t arguing passionately about it one way or the other.

And it split so many people, so many families, churches, clubs, what not, in Catonsville, because some of the people would say, it’s wonderful what they did, it needed to be done. Vietnam is not where we should be. Then part would say, they shouldn’t of done it, it’s a crime, they shouldn’t of done it. Everyone I knew, thought the government was doing the right thing. Then after that we began to have questions and we began to have concerns.

Ground action during the day was reported to light and scattered. The most significant engagement during the past few days took place near a US Special Forces camp in the central lowlands. It came after enemy troops…

As the trial progressed, I began to develop a lot of feelings for what they were doing, how much courage it took for them to do what they did. They surely knew it was going to change their whole life. I’m sorry.

It’s ok.

I could never be that courageous, never.

We strategized from the start. Our whole idea was to dispense with bullshit and with niceties of the courtroom to draw the thing tight like a spring. Each of you tell your story, where have you been with your life, and how did you come here.

And the whole process of the way that the judge handled the trial, really gave us a tremendous opportunity to speak. He asked me, “Well why didn’t you do this in Guatemala?” Well, I really, I relaxed then, and then I laughed out loud, I said, “Cause I’d be dead. You don’t demonstrate in a country that doesn’t let people speak out. I mean that’s one of the advantages of being an American. Why am I here. Why am I here, because you i have an opportunity to speak. Even if, I mean, this is civil disobedience. Taking part, and being willing to take the punishment for it, but allowing me to do it.”

They walked two miles, about 3,000 of them. The march was peaceful differing only from an ordinary parade by the chants, “end the war and the draft.”

Well, on a dolly, you know, they rolled in these boxes, these wooden boxes, that were the size of infant caskets. And I had seen infant caskets with the bodies of infants in Vietnam, burned infants. And so I just went like that and that’s were the booing started.

And what was, the people in the courtroom, did they know, who, how was it described, what was it, can you tell me what was in those boxes?

In the boxes in the courtroom?

In the courtroom.

Well there were nothing but burnt, have burned ashes papers and so on and so forth and they introduced those as evidence, as though they were important, you know and and they were nothing. We had burned papers instead children, that was our crime.

In Baltimore today, 9 Catholic war protesters were sentenced to federal prison for burning draft card records. The prison terms range from 2 to 2 and half years. Most of the active opposition to the Vietnam war in the United States…

Nixon was invading Cambodia and bombing Laos and Cambodia; the war was worse than we started. It had advanced into those other countries. There was huge turmoil on the campuses all over the country; strikes and occupations and so on. And a few of us decided when we were summoned, to give ourselves up, that that would be like giving ourselves up to military induction. They were worsening their criminal war and we were giving ourselves in, I said, “What is this?” So I went underground, a delaying tactic. It was to call more attention to the war. And in the process, give Mr. Hoover a headache. And a backache.

And that rationale, really caught fire, both within the Catholic left and throughout the country, and emboldened a lot of peolpe. If Catholic priests can go and make a statement like that about the war, surely in small way, I can do something, if only to speak up in some small gathering and express my opposition to the war.

I’ve been underground, if you can call it that, for only a short time. I was supposed to show up at the federal marshal’s offices in Baltimore on Thursday, April 9^th at 8:30 am, to begin serving my sentence, which is 2 years, I think. We’d gotten together, the remaining 8 of us, about a week or so before that and the decision that came out of the meeting, was that we would do our own thing. I hadn’t intended at all to show up, but then neither had I intended to, so to speak, go underground. I don’t think the feds are looking very hard for us, because we’re certainly not the 10 most wanted, and yet in one sense, I think we must very irritating to them and in this perhaps is our greatest impact.

The idea of jail doesn’t bother me that much. The idea of cooperating with the federal government in any way at all, irritates the hell out of me. My alternatives are, to go to jail, go above ground with an assumed identity, stay underground, or leave the country. Anyway I choose, the government is choosing for me. But what we’re questioning is their right, and they lost that right, because of the obscenity and the insanity of their actions, were are growing more and more obscene and insane.

Mr. McKinley, he didn’t do no wrong. He rode on down to Buffalo, and he didn’t stay too long, hard times, hard times, hard times….

I believe if we are really confronting the empire as Christians as that’s what we’re called to do, that’s a very clear Biblical message, and we have to be prepared for disruption. If we’re about, we need change through non-violence, then we should think seriously about being free enough to go to jail.

The train, well the train, running on down the line. Blowing out of a Henry station, McKinley is a die’n, hard times, hard times….

And so they took me to a restaurant to have a real meal for the first time and they hand me the menu and they said, “What would you like to order?” and I couldn’t believe it but I could not order, I could not think for myself, I could not figure out, “This is what I would like.” It’s not like, “Oh boy, I’m finally out, this is what I want.” I just couldn’t. And they looked over and they said, “Well just take your time, pick whatever you want,” and finally, tears came to my eyes and I just felt so helpless. It was like the first time that I was able to do anything for myself, ‘cause you can’t even get an aspirin, you know when you have a headache, you just go to the medicine cabinet and get and aspirin and you’re all set. Here you have to put in a request and beg and it’s a very dehumanizing kind of experience.

The rationale of those actions of going to jail, was that first, it’d fill up the jails, well you know it’s not gonna fill up the jails, two it would radicalize people, three, it would build communities, out of people coming out of jail, going into jail would build communities. I don’t, I think it’s failed on every score there.

I can’t achieve identity with the poor except when I’m in jail. I always tend when I feel, when I start feeling sorry for myself, I always tend to think, about what it would mean if I stopped. So that’s a terrible prospect, and I’ve never been able to acclimate to that, and I won’t I hope that I can keep going until I die.

I very definitely see myself as a criminal. I think if we’re serious about changing this society, that’s how we have to see ourselves. We’re all out on bail, and let’s all stay out.

And if you look back on their lives, they never really stopped. They never really stopped. And there are not many people around like that. They, they, they felt so strongly about what they were doing and about what the government was doing that they were willing to risk everything.

…now Roosevelt is in the White House, he’s doin’ his best, and McKinley, he’s in the graveyard, taking his rest, hard times, hard times, hard times….

The Vietnam war, produced the largest and most significant movement against war in American history, so I could see this myself and through the course of the war, as the acts of civil disobedience multiplied.

…yes, Roosevelt, he’s in the White House, drinking out of a silver cup, and McKinley, he’s in the graveyard, and he’ll never wake up, hard times, hard times, hard times….

Mr. McKinley, he didn’t do no wrong. Just rode on down to Buffalo, but he didn’t stay too long, hard times, hard times, hard times….

What Catonsville did was they became a kind of model for, you know, all those others, they were the Catonsville Nine, they were the Milwaukee Fourteen and they were the Camden Eight and they were the Boston Five.

One unit moves up the hill and drops a violet smoke bomb, to designate their point of contact with the enemy at the top. With the enemy positions marked, allied planes roar over the hill, and send napalm flaming along through the enemy bunkers.

Enemy troops moved into one little village only three hundred yards away, and started mortaring the camp. Most of the villagers were out of the way, when American air strikes were called in to silence the mortars. Now the villagers move their few remaining possessions to a hamlet even closer to the camp. Pigs and chickens and whatever is left where their houses used to be. The Special Forces know they will have to work hard later on to regain the confidence of these villagers. But even with the air attacks, it is still to Hattan, that these mountain people turn for security. Intelligence indicates, that this is to be the night of the attack on the base camp, so the Special Forces, want to take outpost four by nightfall. But the Special Forces unit still can’t dislodge the enemy after three tries, so a mobile strike force is sent up to assist in the assault.

I’m gonna throw a smoke right below me, and everything below this smoke is enemy, I say, and everything below the smoke is enemy, just have ‘em work the whole hillside below me, uh, copy..

Was that Frank?

Lynne Sachs and Investigation of a Flame in Baltimore Sun

Igniting a Movement
Baltimore Sun, May 3, 2001

Lynne Sachs’ new documentary on the Catonsville Nine shows us an era of protest beginning with soul-searching and civility.

By Carl Schoettler

Article on Lynne Sachs in Baltimore Sun

The Catonsville Nine have become legendary in the three decades since the group’s May 1968 “action” against the war in Vietnam, perhaps the most famous protest during an epoch of dissent and discord in the United States.

Filmmaker Lynne Sachs takes a fresh look at the seven men and two women who made up the Catonsville Nine, their friends and their detractors in her impressionistic documentary, “Investigation of a Flame,” which opens the Baltimore Film Festival tonight.

Sachs, who has been making films since 1989, moved to Catonsville about three years ago when her husband, Mark, also a filmmaker, took a teaching post at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

She began hearing Catonsville Nine stories. She heard people once arrived at UMBC believing Catonsville was a hotbed of radicalism because of the Nine. She started reading about their protest, and she was hooked. She began looking up the people caught up in the action, and her project began taking shape.

Howard Zinn, the historian who wrote “A People’s History of the United States,” told her that the Catonsville Nine “became a kind of model for all the others. There was the Milwaukee Fourteen and the Camden 28 and the Boston Five.”

All the “Number People,” as they were then called, mostly disparagingly, and all the others who protested against the war, went to jail and helped bring about peace.

As a reminder for people for whom the war in Vietnam seems as remote as the Peloponnesian War, the Nine entered a Catonsville draft board, took records and burned them in a trash container in the parking lot.

The Catonsville Nine may have been models for the dissent that followed, but their protest was the most civil of disobedience.

“The myth of the ’60s is that anybody who cared had long hair and was on psychedelic drugs,” says Sachs, 39. “They were living an alternative lifestyle, so they had these alternative ideas.”

But in archival footage she unearthed, mostly unseen for three decades, the action unfolds almost as a religious rite, purification by fire, perhaps. The Nine clasp hands and recite the Lord’s Prayer. They apologize for jostling a couple of clerks. They finally file quietly into a paddy wagon as a cop counts them off, “… seven, eight, nine.”

The whole action takes perhaps 10 minutes.

“I was kind of intrigued by it as a kind of performance piece,” Sachs says.

She’s not a political documentarian. Her style is impressionistic, her images lyrical, as Jed Dietz, the director of the Baltimore Film Festival suggests, even poetic. She found her closest rapport with Daniel Berrigan, for example, when they talked about his poetry.

“To me it was like they were in their costumes, their clerical collars and the women in their skirts,” she says, of the action. “I think it was very well thought out. It was saying that they were people from Middle America, citizens of the United States who were passionately against the war.”

“And they were older, too,” Sachs adds.

Daniel Berrigan was the oldest at 47, Philip was next at 44, all the rest except Tom Lewis, 28, and David Darst, 26, were in their 30s. They were not counterculture hippies, rebelling against their parents.

Darst died in an automobile crash in October 1969. Mary Moylan, who was in her late 30s in May 1968, went underground for nearly 10 years after the trial. She died alone and infirm in April 1995.

The tone in the archival footage is quiet, almost somber. The Nine seem a bit uneasy. They were uneasy, even Daniel Berrigan.

He recalls for Sachs that his brother was awaiting sentencing in the 1967 Baltimore Four protest, where he helped pour blood over draft files at the Custom House. Daniel was a professor at Cornell University when Philip came up in the spring of 1968.

“He said some of us are going to do it again, and you’re invited,” Daniel Berrigan says. “Whereupon I started quaking in my boots.”

Berrigan’s face in close-up in Sachs’ film is a glowing landscape of the furrows and planes earned in a lifetime of activism and poetry. He will be 80 next Wednesday.

“It had never really occurred to me that I would ever take part in something that serious as far as consequences went,” he says. “The idea of putting myself in the furnace of the king … was pretty shocking and new.

“So I told Philip give me a few days to think this over and pray over it, and I’ll let you know. So I did. I went through some pretty serious soul-searching and talked to my family. I couldn’t see any reason not to do it. I didn’t want to do it. But I couldn’t not do it.”

Sachs has been making documentaries since 1989, when she completed her thesis film for a masters of fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. (She received her undergraduate degree in history at Brown University.)

She’d grown up in Memphis, Tenn., and her first film was “Sermons and Sacred Pictures: The Life and Work of Rev. L. O. Taylor.” He was a fiery African-American minister from Memphis who made his own films of black life in the south in the 1930s and 1940s.

She’s made a half-dozen movies since then, notably “Which Way Is East.” Her sister, Dana, lived in Hanoi for about five years, fell in love with Vietnam and produced her own book: “The House on Dream Street: Memoirs of an American Woman in Vietnam.”

Sachs visited her for a month or so in 1992. They traveled from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, and Sachs came back with the makings of a film about her relationship with her sister and Vietnamese culture. Her trip to Hanoi also gave her a certain cachet with the Catonsville Nine.

For the Catonsville film, she often had to catch her subjects more or less on the run. She interviewed Philip Berrigan in her car.

“Which isn’t the most visually alluring thing,” she says. “He was only out of prison for about a year in this whole project, and he had warned me there was going to be another action and either I was going to talk to him or he was going to be out of commission.”

Philip Berrigan is jail today. He’s serving out a sentence for banging on some military airplanes at the National Guard base at Middle River in an anti-nuclear “action” aimed at highlighting U.S. use of depleted uranium weapons and the source for AR-10 upper’s parts. “I called him one day,” Sachs says, “and I said can I interview you sometime in the next week, and it was raining. And he said you have to do it today, right now, because I paint houses for a living. If you want to do it we have to do it now because I can’t paint the house I was going to paint.

“I had none of my equipment. Nobody to help me. I had to pick him up in my car and go to the Knights of Columbus building.”

The building housed the Catonsville draft board office in 1968.

“He wouldn’t go inside. So we had to do it in the car,” she says. “This was the closest he wanted to get to that building and to those memories and to that time.

“I can’t achieve identity with the poor except when I’m in jail,” Berrigan says. “When I start feeling sorry with myself, I always tend to think about what it would mean if I stopped. That’s a terrible prospect, and I’ve never been able to acclimate to that. And I won’t. I hope that I can keep going until … until I die.”

A letter from Mary Moylan, while she was underground, is read in the film. “I very definitely think of myself as a criminal,” Moylan says in the letter. “I think if we’re serious about changing this society, that’s how we have to see ourselves. We’re all out on bail, and let’s all stay out.”

Sachs caught Tom Lewis, the artist who was at both the Catonsville Nine and Baltimore Four protests with Berrigan, coming out of prison.

“He was walking out the door,” she says, when she showed up to interview him. His wife, Andrea, and daughter, Nora, then 6, were there, too. Nora, a lovely child, blonde and blue-eyed, nestles in his arms during the film interview and walks with her father in the woods as he answers questions.

Lewis was in Allenwood for an anti-nuclear “action” at the Bath Iron Works in Maine, where he and Philip Berrigan and Susan Crane from Jonah House and three others poured blood on an Aegis destroyer, hammered on the components of missile launchers and unfurled their Prince of Peace Plowshares banner.

The Catonsville Nine survivors all remain social and political activists. And for that matter Mary Murphy, a clerk at the draft board now in her middle 90s, still believes she was doing the right thing.

“I was sold on the idea we were trying to fight communism in that part of the world,” she told Sachs.

Steve Sachs (no relation to the filmmaker), who led the prosecution of the Nine, hasn’t changed his position one whit in 33 years. He opposed the war, but his belief in the sanctity of the law seemed and seems immutable: The Nine erred when they took the law into their own hands at Catonsville. In the film, he reads from St. Thomas More, the great Catholic humanist lawyer beheaded by Henry VIII, to argue his case.

“I didn’t feel any sense of guilt or regret at prosecuting what I regarded as excessive, arrogant attempts to inflict their views on others,” says Steve Sachs. “That’s not the way democracy is supposed to work.”

Steve Sachs and Mary Murphy, and Daniel Berrigan, John Hogan, George Mische, Tom and Marjorie Melville from the Catonsville Nine, and their admirers and supporters, detractors and opponents plan to be at the premier of Lynne Sachs’ film tonight.

“Jed Dietz said let’s bring everybody in and see what happens,” Sachs says. ” ‘Let’s put all these live wires together and see what incendiary events we get.’ ”

“None of them have seen the movie,” she says. “And they’re all coming.”

Investigation of a Flame in the New York Times

Daniel and Philip Berrigan in Investigation of a Flame

Keeping Alive the Spirit of Vietnam War Protest

By Francis X. Clines, New York Times, May 3, 2001

CATONSVILLE, Md. May 2 — As they round out their eighth decade, the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, are entitled to retire from the protest wars, but they are still up to their fervid old ways of getting arrested in nonviolent resistance to American military policy.

No one is more delighted at their constancy than Alva Grubb, one of the jurors who reluctantly convicted Phil Berrigan 33 years ago in one of the brothers’ then-famous protest trials — the “Baltimore Four” resisters who spilled pig’s blood on military draft records and helped stoke the furious national debate over the morality of the Vietnam War.

Never ones to protest once, the Berrigans, amid that trial, organized the Catonsville Nine act of resistance: They walked into the Knights of Columbus Hall here in their Catholic clerical garb, seized documents from the Selective Service military draft board and burned them in the parking lot.

“This little village never got over the audacity of their protest,” said Ms. Grubb, a 79-year-old resident who opposed the Vietnam War then and now. “But just look at Phil Berrigan all these years later, still getting arrested for the courage of his convictions. He had very strong opinions and that’s what this country is about.”

Two years’ fresh imprisonment in Ohio for nonviolent interference with a modern weapons system is the reason Phil Berrigan, 77, will miss the Maryland Film Festival’s premiere on Thursday of “Investigation of a Flame.” This is a documentary by Lynne Sachs about the protest events that made this unpretentious suburb on the cusp of Baltimore a flash point for citizens’ resistance at the height of the war.

“Phil’s been consistent; he’s been faithful; he’s been stalwart;” said Elizabeth McAlister, his wife. She awaits his next return from prison to Jonah House, a Baltimore religious residence for eight people who are still dedicated to a level of nonviolent protest forged in the Catonsville Nine days.

“Phil’s been amazing,” said Ms. McAlister, who noted that Daniel Berrigan, who will be 80 on Sunday, has not lost his protest edge either. “Dan was last arrested Good Friday” at a demonstration in New York.

After the film is shown at The Senator theater in Baltimore, there will be a discussion featuring protest participants, law enforcement principals and assorted adherents of the Berrigans’ tradition.

“I left the seminary in ’67 to protest the war,” said Brendan Walsh, a gray-haired activist just up the road in West Baltimore at Viva House, once a sanctuary for conscientious objectors and now a soup kitchen for the city’s teeming poor. “The war keeps coming back; it’s forever,” said Mr. Walsh, noting how it retains a definitive power in American life, exemplified lately by former Senator Bob Kerrey’s admission of killing Vietnamese women and children.

“Back then, we thought Vietnam was some terrible aberration but the country would come to its senses so that we could engage the poverty of the cities,” Mr. Walsh said, grimacing. “To see 250,000 flee this city since then and things get worse for the poor — that’s the craziest thing of all about that war.”

Ms. Sachs, who created an earlier documentary in touring post- war Vietnam, lives here and decided to explore the protest story as Catonsville’s asterisk in history. She found assorted characters still firm to fiery on the topic. The Selective Service clerk, Mary Murphy, once a famous figure here for signing every eligible male’s draft card, remains opposed to what she views as the Berrigans’ intrusion on the government’s war mission, just as Ms. McAlister remains proud.

“This has been an odyssey,” said Ms. Sachs, a 39-year-old who has been fascinated since childhood by the war’s divisiveness. “I’m interested in pivotal choices people make in their lives, the moments from which there’s no turning back,” she said, noting she came to admire the consistency of the mutual antagonists in an argument that still rages.

At the Knights of Columbus hall, the only contentious event in sight lately was a bingo game. But Wilbur Baldwin, a 79-year-old veteran of World War II, recalled the Catonsville Nine days and his distaste for the behavior of the dissenters.

“The Berrigans are troublemakers,” Mr. Baldwin said. “That’s a war we never won,” he said, looking back and glowering as he blamed the use of the defoliant Agent Orange for the death of his brother, Frankie, in Vietnam. This was exactly the sort of war technology decried by the Berrigans, but Mr. Baldwin was adamant. “The Berrigans are troublemakers.”

And on a good day, they remain troublemakers, by the accounting of Tom Lewis, one of the Baltimore Four who, like the Berrigans, has been arrested many times over the years. Most recently Mr. Lewis, a 60-year-old artist close to the Catholic Worker movement in Worcester, Mass., was arrested at a Raytheon weapons factory where he prayed and blocked a road to protest against a part of the Star Wars research program known as the “Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle.”

“My feeling is the Vietnam War was a war against the poor,” said Mr. Lewis. He views Star Wars as a continuation of the same issue from his protest youth, contending that it shows military spending as overshadowing the unmet needs of the poor. “There’s been a certain consistency in making nonviolent creative statements against the madness,” the aging protester said as he took inventory on all the troublemaking still sparked by the Catonsville Nine. “An important consistency.”

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

Investigation of a Flame