In a career that includes nearly 30 works, Lynne Sachs is best known for her experimental documentary and essay films. In this special screening, Sachs introduces two recent films that explore memory within a larger historical context.
The Last Happy Day is Sachs’s portrait of her distant cousin, Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian doctor who fled from the Nazis to Rome, where he was hired by the US Army to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. (38 mins., video)
States of Unbelonging is Sachs’s meditation on violence in the Middle East through the story of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. (63 mins., video)
The National Gallery of Art presents
American Originals Now: Lynne Sachs
Sundays, Oct. 16 & 23, 2012
The ongoing film series American Originals Now offers an opportunity for discussion with internationally recognized American filmmakers and a chance to share in their artistic practice through special screenings and conversations about their works in progress. Since the mid-1980s, Lynne Sachs has developed an impressive catalogue of essay films that draw on her interests in sound design, collage, and personal recollection. She investigates war-torn regions such as Israel, Bosnia, and Vietnam, always striving to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Sachs teaches experimental film and video at New York University and her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Buenos Aires, New York, and Sundance Film Festivals. Her work was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the San Francisco Cinemathèque.
Lynne Sachs: Recent Short Films
October 16 at 4:00
East Building Concourse, Auditorium
Lynne Sachs in person
Three short films exemplify Sachs’ unique approach to nonfiction filmmaking and to the empathetic process of imagining other people’s motivations. Photograph of Wind (2001, 16 mm, 4 minutes) is a portrait of the artist’s daughter as witnessed by the eye of the storm; The Last Happy Day (2009, 37 minutes) uses personal letters, abstracted images of war, home movies, and a performance by children to understand the complex story of Sachs’ distant cousin, Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor who fled the Nazis and reconstructed the bones of American dead; and Wind in Our Hair (2010, 42 minutes) is a bilingual narrative inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. (Total running time approximately 83 minutes)
Your Day Is My Night
October 23 at 2:00
East Building Concourse, Auditorium
Lynne Sachs in person
The Task of the Translator (2010, video, 10 minutes) and Sound of a Shadow (2011, Beta SP, 10 minutes), two recently completed shorts, precede a screening of Sachs’ current work in progress, Your Day Is My Night: “…a collective of Chinese and Puerto Rican performers living in New York explores the history and meaning of ‘shiftbeds’ through verité conversations, character-driven fictions, and integrated movement pieces. A shiftbed is shared by people who are neither in the same family nor in a relationship. Looking at issues of privacy, intimacy, privilege, and ownership in relationship to this familiar item of furniture…I have conducted numerous performance workshops centered around the bed—experienced, remembered, and imagined from profoundly different viewpoints.”—Lynne Sachs. (Total running time approximately 60 minutes)
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are at all times free to the public. They are located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW.
An Open Conversation on Cultural Boycott of Israel All are welcome!
Thursday, September 15, 2011; starting promptly at 7:30 p.m.
Kolot Chayeinu/ Voices of Our Lives: Building a Progressive Jewish Community in Brooklyn, 1012 Eighth Avenue @ 10th Street in Park Slope
You are invited to a respectful and open discussion that begins with a panel of Jews who have many different perspectives about cultural boycott of Israel. During this time when the UN is scheduled to vote on Palestinian statehood, we hope to encourage discussion and thought within the Jewish community about how to best support movements for peace and justice in Palestine/Israel. This evening will provide an opportunity to hear from people with different points of view about whether cultural boycott is an appropriate and effective strategy for doing just that.
Too often these days open discussions among American Jews about Israel, its politics, culture, and government are prevented, often from fear that differences may split apart a community, an institution, or friendships. This open conversation is a way to open up discussion, not shut it down.
Background: Many artists and musicians and others oppose the Israeli occupation and support the cultural boycott of Israel–which is part of the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign—as a non-violent way to press Israel to abide by international law and recognize Palestinians’ human rights and right to self-determination. This boycott includes the decision not to perform or exhibit in Israel or in settlements in the Occupied Territories. This also includes a call to boycott Israeli institutions that are complicit with the occupation. Supporters of BDS and of cultural boycott have joined an appeal called for by Palestinian civil society asking the international community to use this nonviolent tool at a time when the Israeli government, as well as the U.S. and European governments, have failed to act to stop the abuses that are intensifying and when other forms of pressure have not been successful.
Other artists, actors, and musicians and others, also committed to peace and justice, feel differently. They believe that a cultural boycott of Israel does more harm than good and is not an appropriate tool in the Israeli-Palestinian context. They accept—or support accepting—invitations to perform or exhibit in Israel and prefer to keep channels of communication open. When Israeli cultural institutions or artists perform in the US, some of these people prefer to focus on their art, and not to engage in political action such as protests or calls for boycott. Some who share this view about cultural boycott also feel this way about the Palestinian call regarding BDS in general or other specific expressions of it.
The event: On September 15, we are fortunate to hear speakers who have thought deeply about—and been involved in—issues of peace and justice, who have spent time in Israel/Palestine, and who disagree with each other about BDS and cultural boycott. Some of our speakers are active in the arts, and some are members of Jewish groups that focus on peace in the Middle East. Some are members of our host congregation. Our moderator will encourage the speakers and audience to probe deeply into these issues and the many questions that arise as we think and talk together and learn from and listen to each other. There will be time foraudience members to ask questions and engage in discussion as well.
Speakers (organizational affiliation for identification purposes only): Udi Aloni*, Filmmaker; Dalit Baum*, Who Profits?; Jethro Eisenstein, Board of Directors, Jewish Voice for Peace; Roy Nathanson, Musician, member of Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives; Lynne Sachs, Filmmaker, member of Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives; Ron Skolnik, Executive Director, Partners for Progressive Israel (Meretz USA)
Moderator: Esther Kaplan, radio and print journalist; editor of The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute; co-host of Beyond the Pale, which covers Jewish culture and politics on WBAI/New York
*The two Israeli speakers confirmed their participation prior to the July 11 passage in the Israeli Knesset of the “Bill for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel Through Boycott.” This law, which has drawn widespread international criticism, limits freedom of expression and association and exposes Israeli citizens and organizations to litigation and penalties if they publicly call for all kinds of boycotts of Israel, settlements, or the occupation. Both speakers have once again confirmed they will join us.
In 2001 and 2003, I traveled to Owego, New York for a one-week residency at the ever-so-inspiring Experimental TV Center, a funky brick loft in a small upstate village where artists have been living and making video work for forty years. While there, I created images for my films Investigation of a Flame, Window Work and much later XY Chromosome Project, a collaboration with my partner Mark Street.
TRIBUTE TO THE EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION CENTER An evening showcasing the amazing video art created at ETC over the decades from 1970-2007. Friday, July 15th – 7:30pm
Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue New York, NY 10003
The Experimental Television Center is a unique video art production studio in Owego, NY. Since its founding in 1971, ETC has been providing artists with access to the tools of video art production through residencies and grants. The studio includes several one of a kind pieces of video processing equipment including a custom-built Dave Jones Colorizer and 8 Channel Video Sequencer, the Paik/Abe Raster Synthesizer or ‘Wobbulator’ and a custom Dan Sandin Image Processor, among others. This month, after over 40 years of service in the media arts field, directors Ralph Hocking and Sherry Miller Hocking are retiring and closing the Center down. The Standby Program’s has selected this program of videos from 1971 to 2007 that were preserved through their ETC Preservation Program.
Program :
XY Chromosome, Lynne Sachs & Mark Street, 2007, 12:00 min.
An impressionistic odyssey for the eyes becomes both haunting and delightful in this moving image dream expedition.
Lynne Sachs XY Chromosome Project
“Sachs and Street engage in visual and aural dialogue to explore the spaces between abstraction and representation. Street’s inexhaustibly tactile images use handpainted found footage and camera-less films like luminous palimpsests before the eyes. Sachs responds with theatrical, microcosmic worlds where the everyday is defamiliarized through hundreds of trembling and resonating objects.” (Flavorpill.com)
with:
We Can’t Go Home Again, Nicholas Ray, 1970-72, 4:00 min. (excerpt)
Earth Pulse, Gary Hill, 1975, 5:35
etc, etc, Caspar Stracke, 2005, 6:08
Lake Affect, Jason Livingston, 2007, 1:13
Delta Visions, Shalom Gorewitz, 1980, 5:02
Bug-Eyed Ramrod, Matt Schlanger, 1984, 5:48
Transmigration, Julie Harrison & Carol Parkinson, 1987-89, 10:15 (excerpt)
Gender Rolls, Connie Coleman & Alan Powell, 1987, 3:21
Godzilla Hey!, Megan Roberts & Raymond Ghirardo, 1988, 2:20
Dirt Site, Alex Hahn, 1990, 15:53
Wax or the discovery of television among the bees, David Blair, 1991, 13:33 (excerpt)
Red M&Ms, Bianca Bob Miller, 1988, 3:51
Wednesday, May 25 at 7 PM
AFS Screening Room (1901 E. 51st St, Gate 2 by water tower) $5 AFS Members & Students w/ Valid ID / $8 General Public
Q&A with Lynne Sachs via Skype, moderated by Austin experimental filmmaker/teacher Caroline Koebel
“Equal parts humanist and formalist, poet and historian, telling tales that are both timeless and political, Lynne Sachs creates film worlds in which the textures of daily domestic life are seamlessly connected to the realms of war, political activism, and our response to terrorist attacks. In one film, a grid becomes a secret map for understanding the difference between male and female. In another, an affectionate portrait of her young daughter becomes a study of whirling circular energy. For each of these ten shorts, Sachs creates a unique film language, by weaving together images, sounds, and words that evoke a particular way of viewing the world. All of these works reveal a sensibility that refuses to flatten either life or art, insisting on a multilevel reality in which the personal and the universal become doorways to a broader consciousness.” –David Finkelstein, writer for Filmthreat.com
This 62-minute program of ten films is made possible by Microcinema and their outstanding selection of experimental films presented in digital format.
Enchanted Brooklyn takes a look at the evolution of the fairytale film, with classic stories re-invented by contemporary Brooklyn filmmakers.
Films by Georges Melies Cinderella (Cendrillon)(1899), 6 min Kingdom of the Fairies (1903), 16 min Bluebeard (Barbe-Bleue)(1902), 9 min
The program begins with a look at the work of early film pioneer Georges Melies, who created spectacular fairytale films, the likes of which the world had never seen before. Fast-forward 100 years, to present day Brooklyn, where local filmmakers are re-imagining fairy tales and fables in new and experimental ways. Dr. Kay Turner, Brooklyn Arts Council Folk Arts Director, will be on hand to give context about the history and relevance of these magical, classic stories.
The Hunter and the Swan Discuss Their Meeting Emily Carmichael, 8 min
A Brooklyn couple have dinner with a hunter and his girlfriend, a magical swan woman. It doesn’t go well.
Emily Carmichael is in many ways a Renaissance girl. As a Harvard University undergraduate she studied painting and literature, wrote and directed two full-length plays, directed a production of “Macbeth: The Puppet Shakespeare,” for which she designed and sculpted 22 clay puppets, and created the comic strip “Whiz Kidz,” which ran in the Harvard Crimson for two years. In 2006, she entered the MFA film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she has written and directed several live-action shorts and created the animated series “The Adventures of Ledo and Ix.” Carmichael’s films have screened at the Anthology Film Archives, Sundance, Slamdance, the South by Southwest Film Festival, and the CineVegas International Film Festival.
Atalanta: 32 Years Later Lynne Sachs, 5 min
A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me.’ In 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany. Sites affected by international war where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.
Fable in 3 Colors Adam Shecter, 12 min
Borges states in his Book of Imaginary Beings that Hercules could not kill the Hydra’s last head. Instead, it was buried: immortal, dreaming, and hating. Filmmaker Adam Shecter began to wonder what the dreams of a myth would be. Fable in Three Colors represents the fusion of two types of mythology: the personal (dreams) and the cultural.
Adam Shecter is a visual artist and educator living in New York City. Working primarily in 2D animation and editions, his work is greatly influenced by mythology and mass cultural forms: from cinema to Saturday morning cartoons, comic books and music. He has had solo exhibitions of his work at Eleven Rivington Gallery (New York), Konstforeningen Aura (Lund), and Bielefelder Kunstverein (Bielefelder), among others. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006. He has maintained his online test-site, theworldofadam.com, since 2001. His next show, “Last Men,” opens at the Eleven Rivington gallery this month.
The Queen Christina Choe, 8 min
Bobby, a Korean-American teenage outcast, is working at his parent’s dry cleaners on prom weekend. When the prom queen and her boyfriend stop by with their dress and tuxedo, Bobby has his own prom to remember.
Christina Choe is a writer and director. She began her career as a documentary filmmaker and has screened her short documentary films, Turmeric Border Marks and United Nations of Hip Hop at numerous film festivals worldwide, including AFI Film Festival, Seattle, and Palm Springs Shorts Film Festival. In 2002 she received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant for video. She has also worked as an editor/assistant editor for ABC, VH1, HBO and the History Channel. Her feature script, “Guess Who’s Coming For Kimchee” was selected as the winner of the 2007 CAPE (Coalition of Asian Pacifics in Entertainment) New Writers Award for Best Feature Screenplay, the KOFIC (Korean Film Council) Filmmaker Lab, IFP Market Emerging Narrative Program, and placed in the top 20 for the 2008 Bluecat Screenwriting Competition. Most recently, she was also a semi-finalist for the ABC/Disney TV Writing Program. Her first narrative short, The Queen was selected as ‘Best of Fest’ at Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, Telluride, Aspen ShortsFest, Los Angeles Film Festival and nominated for the Iris Prize (UK Film Council). She is currently based in Brooklyn, where she is an MFA candidate at Columbia University for writing/directing and is working on a post-apocalyptic feature script about the future of food.
Fairytale Fragments Li Cornfeld and Paul Snyder, 3 min
Li Cornfeld lives in Brooklyn, where she writes and teaches. Her current projects include a chapter in a forthcoming women’s studies anthology on folklore, feminism, and Hermione Granger, and an etiquette blog,www.civilshepherd.com.
Paul Snyder is a film, commercial and music video editor. He has had the privilege of cutting for Spike Lee, Brett Morgen, and his work with the directors LEGS has been nominated for VMA and AICE awards. Paul works with the editorial company Lost Planet.
ENCHANTED BROOKLYN: Contemporary Fairy Tale Films is part of BAC’s Once Upon A Time in Brooklyn: Traditional Storytellers and Their Tales, a series of public programs and workshops featuring Brooklyn storytellers practicing various genres including folk tales, fairy tale, ghost stories, saints’ legends, personal experience, spoken word, talking drum, narrative dance, and more.
Boredom, murder, dress-up, dress-down, the underworld and the inner world. Angry lost resigned women navigate you through a hormonal roller coaster with this collection of documents of events and emotions. This is a biography of the shadowlands of the female psyche, with no cause or apology. Curated from the Film-Makers’ Cooperative collection by Jasmine Hirst and Katherine Bauer.
I Was a Teenage Serial Killer by Sarah Jacobson
USA, 1993, 27 minutes, Digital Projection, Black and White
Mary was a good girl until she decides to kill all the “sexist pigs.” She of course encounters many, of which, and enjoys killing them.
Psycho Pussy Slaughter by Katherine Bauer
USA, 2007, 10 minutes, Digital Projection
The Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet is brought back from her long slumber on the wine of the Nile. She is defeated, shortly after sacrificing several felines and females in her bloody revenant rituals.
Trailers by Jasmine Hirst
USA, 2011, 30 minutes, Digital Projection, Color and Black and White
I met and filmed Aileen Wuornos on death row in Florida in 1997. We had been corresponding for 5 years when Aileen asked me to film her talking about the truth of her life and crimes as part of her preparation to die. I have
been trying to finish this feature length documentary since then. But can’t. There is something wrong with me. Instead I make two minute trailers about other films I’d like to make. This is a trailer of trailers.
Liar by Anne Hanavan
USA, 2006, 2 minutes, Digital Projection
Fourth in a series of sexually explicit self portraits where the artist works through issues surrounding her past experiences with sex work, rape, and Catholicism.
Heaven by Linda Dement
USA, 1986, 3 minutes, Digital Projection
Punk surreal darkness from the streets of early 1980′s Sydney; artist Jasmine Hirst eats diamonds, a dead pig’s eye is gouged out, a girl aims her rifle & shoots while a voice reads from Bataille’s “The Story of the Eye”
Still Life With Woman and Four Objects by Lynne Sachs
USA, 1986, 4 minutes, Digital Projection, Black and White
A film portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a “character”. By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film is also a tribute to a real woman. – Emma Goldman, 1986
Trick Film by Lotta Teasin
USA, 1996, 6 minutes, Digital Projection
Activities at home with the Mistress and her naughty pet. Starring Y.B. naughty and Ima Bottom.
Death Love by Katherine Bauer
USA, 2011, 3 minutes, 16mm
A girl digs out of the earth what she has lost.
Double Your Pleasure by M. M. Serra
USA, 2002, 4 minutes, 16mm, Black and White
Sound by Jennifer Reeves. Part of the “Ad It Up” series of shorts that are parodies of commercials.
i hate you by Michelle Handelman
USA, 2002, 3 minutes, Digital Projection
Riffing off of Nauman’s early performance tapes, Handelman chants this negative affirmation into a song of personal endearment. Simultaneously self- reflexive, self-conscious, meditative and pathetically funny.
THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA GROUP / THE FILM-MAKERS’ COOP in collaboration with MILLENNIUM FILM WORKSHOP present:
THE URBAN LANDSCAPE IN CINEMATIC TRANSFORMATION
PROGRAM 1: SHORTS: SATURDAY, MAY 7, 7 PM PROGRAM 2: FEATURE: SATURDAY, MAY 7, 9 PM
PROGRAM 3: SHORTS: SUNDAY MAY 8, 2PM PROGRAM 4: FEATURE: SUNDAY, MAY 8, 5 PM
Tickets available at the door for $8
The avant-garde/experimental cinematic form reconfigures traditional narratives and personal experiences, particularly among local subcultures—such as East Village punk, Chinatown markets, Lower East Side rock and roll, and the downtown subversive art and performance scene—creating a parallel between constant evolution of the urban landscape and its inhabitants and the experimental form. We propose to feature avant-garde films from our collection that feature the changing urban landscapes and the people who inhabit them. We’re interweaving the three threads: the urban landscape, the distinct subcultures, and the transformations of the neighborhoods over time, using films from the late 1980s until today.
FEATURING WORKS BY:
Rachel Amodeo Rudolph Burckhardt Bill Brand Donna Cameron
Shirley Clarke Peter Cramer Coleen Fitzgibbons Henry Hills
Philip Hartman & Doris Kornish Ken Jacobs Oona Mekas Marie Menken
Lynne Sachs Joel Schlemowitz MM Serra & Jennifer Reeves Mark Street
Praised by the New York Times as “one of the leading New York independent filmmakers,” Brooklyn-based artist Lynne Sachs has—in a career spanning over twenty years—woven together poetry, collage, painting, politics, layered sound design, and a myriad of cinematic formats to explore the intricate relationship between her personal observations and broader historical experiences. From installations and web projects to essay films that have taken her to the far reaches of the globe, Sachs’ work is strongly committed to a progressive dialogue between film theory, the past and her subjective self.
reRun Gastropub Theater is proud to present two evenings with Lynne Sachs in person to discuss an eclectic, thought-provoking taste of her work to date. “THE WEIGHTLESS BODY: Films by Lynne Sachs” runs April 12 (7pm) and April 13 (10pm).
“The films of Lynne Sachs travel to exotic places, but find themselves concerned primarily with the universal qualities of the everyday. They revisit war zones but refuse to foreground the idea of War as humanity’s most fascinating pursuit. They are experimental in nature yet can offer straightforward and earnest approaches to literal problems. They defy expectations for radical art.” – Susan Gerhard, SAN FRANCISCO CINEMATHEQUE
Two Evenings Only, FREE Admission!
Tuesday, April 12 – 7 PM
Wednesday, April 13 – 10 PM
147 Front Street, DUMBO Brooklyn (2 min. from the York Street stop on the F train)
reRun is DUMBO’s new independent movie theater in Brooklyn. Featuring 60 reclaimed car seats, a full bar and gourmet snack counter, and a twelve foot screen, reRun offers an intimate art-house theater experience. Doors open one hour before the films so show up early since the bar/food shuts down 5-10 mins prior to showtime.
(Doors/Bar open at 6pm, Screenings followed by Q&A)
WIND IN OUR HAIR (2010, 40 mins.)
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, WIND IN OUR HAIR is an experimental narrative about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation, the film is circumscribed by a period of profound sociopolitical unrest. Sachs and her Argentine collaborators move about Buenos Aires with their cameras, witnessing the playful quartet as they wander a city embroiled in a debate about the role of agribusiness, food resources and taxes. WIND IN OUR HAIR also features the daring, ethereal music of singer Juana Molina.
“Sachs’ brilliant mixture of film formats complements the shifts in mood from innocent amusement to protest.” – Dean Otto, Film and Video Curator, WALKER ART CENTER
“The film moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces into the skittering beyond of adolescence, exploding with anticipation and possibility.” – Todd Lillethun, Program Director, CHICAGO FILMMAKERS
ATALANTA: 32 YEARS LATER (2006, 5 mins.)
PROGRAM #2: WEDNESDAY, APR. 13 @ 10pm
(Doors/Bar open at 9pm, Screenings followed by Q&A)
THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE: A MUSEUM OF FALSE FACTS (1991, 30 mins.)
“Throughout THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE, an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title—house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space—without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.'” – Kathy Geritz, PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVES
“The film takes off on a visual and aural collage… combining the theoretical issues of feminism with the discrete and personal remembrances of childhood.” – Heather Mackey, THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN
THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR (2010, 10 mins.)
Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s titular essay through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
PHOTOGRAPH OF WIND (2001, 4 mins.)
“My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means ‘illusion’ in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather—like the wind—something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.” – Lynne Sachs
“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” – Fred Camper, CHICAGO READER
