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First Steps in a Terra Incognita

FIRST STEPS IN A TERRA INCOGNITA BY LYNNE SACHS

Feb. 17, 2001 I tell my next door neighbor that I’m going abroad for a couple of weeks and she wishes me a good vacation. I tell my old boyfriend Sam, I’m going to Sarajevo on a student exchange program, and he asks me how it will feel to be part of target practice. I feel a shiver surge through my body, pushing me to come up with some equally witty, sardonic retort. I never was as clever as he, maybe that was our problem. It’s as if I’d strolled into a restaurant to meet a guy I used to kiss but hadn’t seen in years. I’m in a new dress that I think makes me look very chic, and he asks me if all the pressure of being in college has forced me to stop running. I take a big gulp and start reminding this guy I hardly know or care about that the war in Bosnia has been over for five years. I recite statistics and quote diplomats and still feel somehow wounded. My muscles just aren’t what they used to be and I am actually wondering if I’m strong enough for this crazy journey.
You see, my step-father is Serb, at least that’s how he refereed to himself until I was about eleven years old. That was about 1991 and things were getting really horrible in this country whose name most of my friends could hardly spell.
My mom traveled by herself through Yugoslavia. She collected a drawer full of Tito paraphernalia. One evening when I was about eight, she regaled all of us with her adventures. Camping out in Lubjliana with two timid Dutch brothers, barricading herself into a rented room at the end of a dark hall in Zagrab, getting off the train at midnight in Belgrade with hundreds of soldiers there as if to meet her at the station. This was my first real chance to invite a bunch of girls to a sleep over at my house, and my mother keeps us up all night talking about her European escapades. All I can really see that came out of this is that she’s married to a man who now refers to himself as a Yugoslavian but who formerly was proud to say “I am a Serb.” Sometimes I wonder if the reason she chose him is because he reminds her of those adventurous years in her twenties.
Anyway, it’s all kind of complicated because part of the reason I’m going to Bosnia is because I really need to understand that time in her life. I need to know why she was so transformed by those few months she spent by herself in Yugoslavia and why she gravitated toward a man like him. The more I learn about this part of the world, the more I find my head starting to spin. By allowing their pasts to emerge through the landscape, I am able to pull apart a wrought mess of conflicting information.

May 18, 2001 I’m flying into Sarajevo now realizing that I don’t actually have any one place etched in my mind’s eye. For me, this ungrounded sense of the city’s physical qualities is something I will only be able to savor a few more minutes. Unlike Paris or Rome, cities with a specific, timeless character, Sarajevo is a mismatch of horror and multi-ethnic notions of community. I know there was a time when one could arrive in this city struck by the mingling of its people and its cultures. That’s what a bird might have seen from a car before all of this lively color was quickly dimmed, squelched and killed. So now I guess I should think about the mountains but all I really can wonder about it whether or not the kids will be smiling.

June 20, 2001 In the tub I am intoxicated by the warm, clear, clean water. My mind travels; my body stays put, and the room is locked shut, set apart from the busy chatter in the living room of Dzenid, my uncle; Amra, my aunt: and Timur, their teenage son. They talk of dinner plans, the closing of a Sarajevo bank, the last time they saw my stepfather Robert. Or at least this is what I imagine they are saying. Really, I understand nothing of Bosnian and so I invent not only the words but also the emotions. Everyone in this house is a character in my radio play, and I am the naked director in the tub, the privileged thief of all the hot water left in this city. For these fifteen minutes, this new family of mine becomes the actors in a story I’m free to improvise. Soon the lovely hot water will become tepid. There will be no more of the precious liquid until the morning. I grab a towel, dry off and put on my clothes. As the water flows down the drain, wickedly, as if to tease, I am quickly reminded of my own, unshakable awkwardness. Whoever said that ignorance is bliss?
These new post-war days are like a fabulous blue sky that engulfs us with warmth and good spirit. For my cousin Timur, however, each numinous cloud is a clever reminder of the rains that fell and fell and just wouldn’t stop. “This bathtub,” he laughs, “the one you claim each night as your private luxuryship, was once dismantled, carried four flights down to the backyard and filled with dirt. Of course no one had enough water upstairs to take a bath, so my mother claimed it for herself, filled it with dirt and watched her green beans and a transplanted rose bush grow there through four summers of shelling. Now that it’s back upstairs, I can’t imagine you could ever really get clean in it.”

July 3, 2001 The B shelf of the tourist section in the used bookstore on 7th Avenue is lined with vibrant paperbacks full of details about scuba diving in Bermuda, tropical adventures in Bali and cheap eating in Beverly Hills. There is nothing on Bosnia. I’m hardly a seasoned traveler, yet, but I do know that a dog-eared guide book can serve as a real companion when traveling alone. Yes, I have a few so-called family members who will meet me at the airport in Sarajevo, but how will I know what to do after that? Somehow I feel that my whole sense of independence as a 20 year old woman in a foreign country depends on my ability to look through such a text. But there is nothing to be found and so I carefully, almost apprehensively, unfold the wrapping paper around a book my step-father must have hid in my suitcase just a few days before I left New York. It’s a tattered, hard-back copy of some Balkan tome I’d never intended to peek into. You see, I met this gift with the hard-scrabble resentment an ice skater feels when someone offers her a pair of knee pads. I had no use and no interest in anything more Robert thought I would need. He’s the kind of man who considers himself an expert on everything from inter-galactic phenomenon to fashion so I really wasn’t keen on giving him the thrill of guiding me through his own country if he wasn’t even brave enough to return himself. He says he’s too old. Is he too old for the nine hour plane trip? Too old for foreign water? Too old to go back to the place of his youth where time has not frozen, pristine, tree-lined, scar-free. I didn’t even realize that I had actually lied to the airline functionaries when they asked me “Have you remained with your luggage the entire time? Are you fully responsible for everything it contains?” With the flippant brilliance of a girl on her own for what feels like the first time, I unpack my suitcase in my new Sarajevo home only to find to my complete surprise a well-worn copy of his book, Bosnia Chronicles. Now as I begin to read, I realize this is not actually a dry historical treatise, but rather a highly compelling philosophical voyage through a land torn by the yearnings of east and west, cosmopolitan desires and the reveries of geographic isolation. Despite myself, I am consumed.

August 5, 2001 I don’t know why a full eclipse sends shockwaves through my cornea. I don’t know why I can’t get along with the man my mother loves. I don’t know how my Uncle Dzenid holds a teacup with such elegance using only a thumb and an index finger.

Aug. 28, 2001 Timur and I are just about the same age, our birth dates hovering around the year 1980 like hungry flies on a peach. We talk about listening to U2 as teenagers. I in the comfort of my best friend’s refurbished Volkswagen bug and he in the basement of his four-story apartment building, pedaling a makeshift bicycle that generated just enough power to run a transistor radio. We sit drinking Turkish coffee in the kitchen. It’s Saturday morning, no work today, so he finally agrees to take a walk through Sarajevo with me. Somehow I feel that there is an unspoken contract, a promise of sorts, between us. We will talk about Madonna’s comeback at age 40 (the same age as our mothers so we giggle at this one), our interest in yoga, how much memory our computers can store, but we will not discuss the war. At every turn in the road, with each bullet hole I see in a wall, I resist the temptation to ask. I want him to tell me if these skeletons of buildings that look as if they were bombed not more than a week ago are there to remind us of the war, if they are invisible to the people who walk past them everyday, or if they have been left to decay, allowing the winds to carry their dust , grain by grain away to the sea. I never imagined that cement could be twisted into such horrid sculpture.
The bitter coffee burns holes in my gut.

Sept. 1, 2001 My mother called today, in the late afternoon, just as the prayers had begun at the mosque a few blocks away. I was watching the shadows from a group of swallows swooping and swaying through the air, listening absent-mindedly to the Muslim chants, thinking about nothing and feeling a heightened sense of presence when the phone rang. Aunt Amra, who speaks no English at all, picked up the receiver and immediately dropped it in my lab, as if to say she had no interest whatsoever in communicating with her brother-in-law’s family. Ever since I arrived here I’ve come to realize that she, more than anyone else in this house, resents that my parents did virtually nothing to help her or her children except for making an occasional, expensive international call. So now, when the phone rings, and she realizes it’s my mother, she uses a beautifully choreographed gesture of disdain to reveal her real feelings.
I’m no more happy than she to hear this familiar voice.

Sept. 4, 2001 My fingers follow a path through murky water, old, dry morsels of bread, broken toys. I touch a wall, before I know it is there, startled not by the wall itself, but rather by the cracks and fissures in its surface. At nine years old, I memorized the ridges and gullies of my grand-mother’s skin, observing an intricate web of surface texture that gave clues to the mystery of her life. Each freckle, each shift of pigment, each mole, the number and the star etched on her shoulder. I transcribed meticulously, as a way of unearthing an anatomy of time, when she slept, … as she did most of the daylight hours those months before her death. At night she was startled by the slightest shift of our old, rumbling house. Awake, awake, awake, she drove us mad with concern. And now in the squid ink darkness of this Sarajevo night, I am again confronted by her skin, this time as a wall in an ally behind our apartment. It’s as if she’s standing there before me, finally demanding an explanation for my invasion of her skin.

Sept. 5, 2001 My body is a suitcase full of souvenirs from the falls I have taken in my life. The scar between my eyes came from a dive I took at age seven into a backyard pool near my mother’s home in Memphis. My shoulder length red hair has just the slightest resemblance to a fried egg. It’s what’s left from my botched attempt to transform myself a few hours before college graduation. Too much peroxide landed on the back of my head that morning. I whispered some insult to myself and went on to accept a diploma in the afternoon. To this day, I am not sure if my grand-mother was weeping out of pride or sorrow.
I have a tattoo on my right hip that uses my own invented alphabet from childhood.
My voice is embarrassingly soft, so soft it draws far more attention than it deserves. People always assume I am telling secrets.

Sept. 5, 2001 An unforgettably warm winter day. I watch peer into the courtyard of the old mosque from my window three floors above. The young mother with the turquoise veil pulled tight across her head scoops the water into her palms, then tenderly lets if fall into the mouth of her son below. I watch his jaw, imagining the liquid as it passes into his throat, and down. How did it feel five years, I wonder, when her mother merely wet the inner lining of her cheeks? Was it enough for her daughter to forget her thirst? A tall businessman in an Italian suit looks left, then right, perhaps ashamed I think, bends over, awkwardly you know, like he’s wincing with an old back injury, takes a gulp of water without wetting his hands, then quickly scoots along. The white rabbit with a somewhere called nowhere to go. More water continues to form a liquid arch that soars up, then dives down onto the polished cobblestones below.

Sept. 7, 2001 Sarajevo airport. A place is not a thing, but rather an uncontrollable sensation of memories that twitch at my nose, make me swell when I have nothing in my mouth, bring a stream of tears to my eyes when I am not sad.
This is a place I don’t just want to remember. How do I keep the dirt under my nails? How do I breath the air and keep it there, locked tight inside my lungs. In a jar, I preserve a street I never had the chance to follow to the end.

Sept. 9, 2001 On a large treeless hill in a wooded area across from the house where I grew up, sit about a dozen stately homes half way through their construction. It’s late spring now and they’ve been that way for about six months. The first time I saw this new addition to the patchwork quilt of new housing communities, I decided I would use my imagination to inhabit each and every house. There were the Ringels with their just-a-little too rambunctious dog and their commitment to good cookware. Then the Bradley’s with two boys and one on the way, a playroom large enough for a track and a husband with a long-awaited promotion at the firm. In my mind, I couldn’t figure out why this impeccably dressed couple drove only one rundown car that needed a paint job. Their muddy yard titled on a grate that exceeded the forty-five degree limit for a swing set. Things just didn’t quite fit. In fact, I believe, it is the Davis’ fragmented, no longer modular, life that was the first clue that the situation on the hill was not what it had first appeared to be.
You see I’d known this particular hill on an intimate basis ever since the summer between ninth and tenth grade when there were still at least a dozen Japanese Maples left. It was there in that high summer glow of moonlight that I first let Phil, the gangly boy who walked with me silently to the bus stop, reach under my shirt. I figured nothing too complicated would happen considering Phil’s taciturn ways and his inability to do anything with great panache. He was so extraordinarily tall that I took great pleasure watching him wander absent-mindedly amongst the maples in the warm, midnight air. It seemed right that his head soared amongst the delicate web of branches that sheltered our place below the sky.
It makes me sad to think that I have absolutely no mental image of Phil’s face. He is even gone from my peripheral vision. All I have left is the memory of his strange smell — like dirt from a garden rinsed with Ivory soap– and his height. I remember something about his having had a twin brother who died at birth. Could that boy possibly have been as tall and also fit inside his mother’s womb?
With all of the maples gone, it is becoming more and more difficult for me to remember either the touch of his hands or even the way his curly hair would get tangled in the branches. I’d always thought I could come back to this spot, whenever I fancied, to claim those strands of hair. I would giggle, thinking what it would be like to come home after years away, how I would steal a moment from a family dinner, run underneath a maple and delicately untangle a lock of his hair. Then I would seal it in an envelope, look his name up in the phone book and send it to him. Somehow the entire gesture seemed more like an archeological research project than a mean-spirited mockery.

Sept. 16, 2001 A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Last Tuesday, September 11, I saw one of the two Twin Towers vomit dark clouds of venom into the air. Before my eyes, what appeared to be an unimaginable accident of chance was transformed into something unworthy of a breath. Unable to comprehend the reality of death, my neighbor’s son mourns the death of the twins. Like my friends in Sarajevo ten years ago, my house of drafts is pummeled by the danger that is now the wind.

Interview with Scott MacDonald

Interview with Scott MacDonald by Lynne Sachs
Published in the Independent Film and Video Monthly

I’ve been teaching filmmaking and film studies for just about a decade, and nothing has helped me introduce my students to the wonders of an alternative cinematic vision better than Scott MacDonald’s three volume set of books entitled A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. These intimate, forthright and revealing conversations offer readers the chance to immerse themselves in the creative process and thinking of 63 different contemporary filmmakers. With the passion and insight of someone who believes in the importance of avant-garde film, MacDonald conducted his first interview in 1979 with Hollis Frampton. He’s been listening to the reflections of makers such as Charles Burnett, Craig Baldwin, and Yvonne Rainer, ever since. These in-depth conversations give readers the feeling that they have spent hours with a filmmaker. Autobiographical connections to moments in the movies, expansive explanations of narrative decisions, struggles in the realm of everything from finance (approach to the Remote Quality Bookkeeping for help in this field) to illness — here is the life of an artist as told to a writer who believes deeply in the work at hand. After twenty five years of full time teaching at Utica College in Central New York, MacDonald retired this year in order to devote himself to writing Volume Four in the series. In August, I decided to turn the microphone back on MacDonald.

Lynne:    How and when were you first drawn to avant garde film?
Scott:    The experience that changed me with avant garde film was seeing Larry Gottheim’s Barn Rushes, Ken Jacobs’ Soft Rain, Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity, Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes — all on one Saturday afternoon in the Spring of 1972. I was teaching American literature and a standard film course (Griffith, Keaton, Murnau, Lang, Renoir) at Utica College at the time; and I sat there so furious I couldn’t speak. I HATED this stuff. It just made me FURIOUS! Well, I kind of liked Barn Rushes; it reminded me of Monet, but the others, they were shit! I didn’t get Soft Rain at all. Serene Velocity totally annoyed me; and The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes revolted me. I remember being doubly steamed after the screening because everybody seemed to take this stuff seriously. I fomented against the films all the way home in the car and spent days bitching about this atrocity of a screening. Then it hit me that I was still thinking about this stuff.   I actually couldn’t get it out of my mind. By the end of the year, I found I wanted to do it to my students because I knew it would energize the classroom incredibly.
Lynne:    Could you talk about trying to have a relationship with this kind of work while living in Central New York?
Scott:    Thoreau talks about how every walk you take in nature is a pilgrimage in which you try to win back the Holy Land from the Infidels.   Going to the avant garde screenings in New York City was my pilgrimage   By the mid-1970’s I was planning my season around the schedules from Anthology Film Archive, Collective for Living Cinema, Millennium Film Workshop and Film Forum.
Lynne:    I noticed you dedicated one of your books to your students and the insights you’ve gotten from them. What films have most excited your students and turned them on to this kind of film making?
Scott:    Window Water Baby Moving by Brakhage is as powerful now for undergraduates as it ever was, maybe more powerful now because they’re not used to looking closely at anything, especially a body and especially a female body in process. I use Window Water Baby Moving in virtually every class I teach, including written composition, and it blows classes away continually, creates incredible discussion. The other one is Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line which for me is one of the great teaching films of all time. It’s a 10-minute single-shot film of fog lifting over a green Upstate New York landscape. Beautiful. A meditational film. And food for fury for my students who are so frustrated with it after a minute or so, they don’t notice the tiny horses that cross the image halfway through, and are dumfounded when I ask them after the screening if they saw the horses. “Don’s miss the horses” becomes a mantra for the course from then on.
Avant garde film is probably the best set of teaching devices in existence. That people don’t use these films more often in academic work, especially at the college level, is astonishing. I mean, if you want to get students to think, argue, talk, really reconsider their media training, their whole experience of a consumer culture, nothing is better. So, one of the ironies to me of this whole history is that here’s this pedagogical resource of unparalleled value that fuckin’ nobody seems to use. This stuff remains in the margin when it should be part of everybody’s introduction to American culture, to environmental studies, to art history.
Lynne:    Talk about an interview that moved you absolutely to the core, that changed your perspective on that person’s films, or maybe on film in general.
Scott:    One of the things I committed to when I decided to do interviews is that I didn’t want to be a journalist. I’m not after exposé. I’m not trying to catch somebody saying something that later they regret . I really wanted to create a space where filmmakers could say what they wanted people to know about their work. I tried to interview Yvonne Rainer in 1985 or so, for the first A Critical Cinema book, before I really understood her films, because everyone seemed to think she was important, and I guess I couldn’t resist the idiot’s urge to be stylish; but when I called her to ask “how she found” the edited interview, she said, and I quote — it’s etched on my soul– “I found it singularly boring and redundant.” Ouch. I deep-sixed that interview! But later in 1990, when I saw Privilege, I suddenly GOT Rainer’s postmodern aesthetic and her dispersion of so many of the conventions of both commercial and avant-garde film. I loved the film in part because it helped me understand my partner Pat’s menopause, to be interested in it, to share the frustrations and the excitments of it. And Privilege helped me to understand the earlier Rainers that had befuddled me so. So I called her up and said “Would you be willing to try it again? I loved Privilege. I get it. I want to interview you again.” And she said “Okay.” Talking with Yvonne about her films was a wonderful reward.
Lynne:    I felt like you got Ross McElwee to enter this revealing, very thought provoking space of reflection that I hadn’t seen in his films. Instead of being glib and self-mocking, he seemed much more down-to-earth and contemplative. He says these really personal things to you about being a film maker and what the camera means to him philosophically. He explains his movies ever so simply –“I create a persona; it’s not really me.”
Scott:    Well, I guess I felt very simpatico with Ross. I’ve always felt that if I were born in North Carolina I might be Ross! I thought his creation of a persona for his films that was him, but only one version of him, one aspect of the more complex individual not just behind the camera, but behind the film, was very much like what happens in some of the books I was teaching in my American literature class; Hemingway’s character, Nick Adams, is based on Hemingway but he’s only a version of Hemingway that Hemingway uses to explore certain experiences.
Lynne:    Talk about your interview with Yoko Ono. I thought that reading it taught me a great deal about the conceptual vision. She’s also just so funny.
Scott:    Yeah, she is. I really enjoyed the process. I think that her influence has always been very underrated. Ono’s minimalist, structuralist aesthetic produced some remarkable work, especially No. 4: Bottoms and Film No. 5 (Smile), that can stand beside Michael Snow’s Wavelength as crucial works of the 1960’s. Lots of people saw the work and when I looked at the stuff again it just knocked me out. If you want to get a rise out of a nineties audience, show Bottoms. You realize when you see it how our butts have been colonized. It’s a fantastic cultural document but it’s also a wonderful movie. And I think almost everything I’ve seen of hers I’ve really, really liked.   I think she was glad to be able to talk about the work without talking about John Lennon. Both she and John Waters, and later, Sally Potter–filmmakers much in the public eye– were unusually forthcoming, generous interviewees. On some level, they were the easiest. They were totally prepared; and they seemed to appreciate that someone had actually looked at their work closely and was willing to take some time and have some patience with it.
Lynne:    Where do people of color fit into the avant-garde for you?
Scott:    I’ve always been interested in ethnicity in film. The film course I most enjoyed teaching at Utica College was African-Americans in Film, which I taught every other year for 20 years. Like so many of us, I slowly became aware that there was an alternative vision amongst Black independents — Oscar Micheaux and the Black Underground, Melvin Van Peebles “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song”, Kathleen Collins’ “Losing Ground”, Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust”, Charles Lane’s “Sidewalk Stories”. And the more fully aware of this history I became, the more I wanted to interview filmmakers whose work seemed to challenge viewers the most. I had a great time interviewing Bill Greaves about “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” and it was a pleasure to talk with Charles Burnett. “Killer of Sheep” is a favorite of mine.   I never interviewed anyone who let it fly the way Christine Choy did — I can’t believe that shit she says and later admits to having said. I admire her engagement with the confusions of ethnicity in America. Chris is part Chinese, part Korean, and somehow a quintessential American. What is she? Her films sometimes deal with this kind of ethnic complexity in an interesting way.
Lynne         What is Critical Cinema?
Scott:    When I was first seeing these movies, they were like critical notations on conventional film-going for me. The films are also a form of religion for me. In Lost, Lost, Lost, Jonas Mekas portrays himself and Ken Jacobs as the monks of cinema. I’m not a Catholic but I certainly am a Protestant version of that. I believe in this work. I believe that people who don’t make a lot of money in a capitalist economy who put thousands of what little money they have into making a film that they know cannot possibly make that money back, are doing something that is fundamentally spiritual.
Lynne:    You rarely compare these films to mainstream cinema, you rarely bring that up at all.
Scott:    Well, commercial film is certainly an understood context for all my work. One of the themes of A Critical Cinema 4 will be filmmakers who have worked as part of the avant-garde and as members of the Industry. My interview with Sally Potter in A Critical Cinema 3 is a premonition of this theme.
Lynne:    Talk about some narrative directors who interest you. Do you also rush out to see mainstream movies?
Scott:    Sure. I like lots of commercial filmmakers and films: Jonathan Demme, Carl Franklin, often Spielberg. I remember calling up a filmmaker friend of mine after seeing Titanic and saying to her “Have you seen Titanic?” and she said, “I’m not going to support that shit!” And I said, “You mean you want it to fail?” And she said, “Yes, I want it to fail.” And I said, “Well, if Hollywood fails, you’re out of business, too. Kodak’s not making film stock for avant garde filmmakers.”
Lynne:    Have you ever thought about making a movie?
Scott:    The thought fills me with horror. I would rather dig a hole. But I hope my interview books reveal an element of creativity–I just need to be creative in the service of other creators; that’s my MO. The Critical Cinema books have always been nonfiction novels. When I was studying American literature in graduate school, one of the dimensions of modern American fiction that interested me most was the fascination of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell and Richard Wright with writing narratives that take place entirely in dialogue.    Also, my graduate studies in the 1960’s brought me into a lot of contact with James Boswell’s documentation of Samuel Johnson’s career; Boswell Life of Johnson is an early nonfiction novel. Like me, Boswell was Scottish (well, I’m just partly), and he made himself a kind of country bumpkin character who came to London to meet the sophisticates — sometimes I play the country bumpkin card too.
Lynne:    What’s your interview process?
Scott:    I see my interviews as a reaction to the usual sense of an interview as a quicky: you know, you tape the person, have someone transcribe the tape, and do some editing and, bam, an interview. I want to honor the independent filmmakers I admire by taking time with them and their work. Some of my interviews take as long as five years. I begin, whenever it’s possible, by looking at every film an interviewee has made, as carefully as seems justifiable. Once I feel I know the work well enough to be able to surprise the interviewee, I begin recording tapes. I talk as extensively as possible with the maker. I used to transcribe the tapes myself, by hand, so that I’d internalize the way the maker talks, so that I could create their evocation in the finished interview; but that wore me out.   Speed is virtually never a factor. Sometimes an interview passes back and forth between me and the filmmmaker many times–a different level of conversation. One of the reasons I waited so long to interview Stan Breakage, for instance, is that I couldn’t figure out how I’d ever look at all the work, and even if I did, he’d have made so much new work that I’d still not be able to start talking. I’d be like Sisyphus in the Greek myth. But I do have a Brakhage interview underway; it will be in the fourth volume.
Lynne:    Which film makers do you see taking risks aesthetically or politically today?
Scott:    There are all kinds of risks. Cameron took a hell of a risk making Titanic. And in a culture which tells us all the time to consume as much as we can, making films that ask for quiet, patient, loving attention–the way so many of the filmmakers I interview do–is also a risk. Of course, in a culture where you can’t get attention unless you eviscerate a nun, it may not seem like a risk; but beauty IS a risk in film. In the classroom, most of the avant-garde remains risky, in the sense that it confronts, annoys, angers students–which of course gives a teacher something to work with. My students sometimes complain that the avant-garde filmmakers I show them are pretentious. Sure! I’m all for pretentiousness–if you’re NOT pretending to do something important, something worth my time, my life, get out of my face! Go be a regular guy or gal somewhere else. I want you to try to do something that moves me, shocks me, makes me fell like the moron I often am, teaches me, helps me grow.
Lynne:    What’s the weather report for avant-garde film?
Scott:    As usual, it’s the worst of times AND the best of times. One moment it seems as if the avant-garde will be gone and forgotten in a week; the next moment, I’m thrilled by how alive it is. Film itself may be gone someday, not just avant-garde film–but we can sing it as it goes; hell, we’ve been enjoying the demise of the novel and of painting for centuries.

Published in THE INDEPENDENT FILM AND VIDEO MONTHLY

Mary Moylan: Nine Years Underground

“Mary Moylan: 9 years underground” by Lynne Sachs
a multi-media biography using video, audio, postcards and artifacts
Premiere: Maryland Film Festival, Charles Theatre; Maryland Art Place Artist Residency

Mary Moylan, a 32-year-old registered nurse and midwife from Baltimore, was one of two women in the infamous 1968 anti-war group the Catonsville Nine. A feminist and a passionate critic of the Vietnam War, Moylan was sentenced to several years in prison for burning draft files with homemade napalm. From 1970-79, she lived underground, in disguise, traveling from city to city across America. During this time, Moylan –the felon on the lamb– created a fabulous wigged persona who wrote hilarious, yet strident letters to the world at large from her place “underground.” Mary Moylan: Nine Years Underground is a visual meditation not only on Moylan’s life as a woman in America in the 1970’s but also on the role of civil disobedience in American culture and politics.

Entire piece measures 24’’ long x 24” wide x 24”high with simple electrical connections to TV/DVD ; all electronic appliances are hidden within purse and small suitcase. Gallery visitors listen to actress reading Moylan’s letters through headphones in purse. Small television images of a woman’s hands in handcuffs are under glass casing. Video and slide documentation give some idea of project, though set will no doubt change with the particulars of a space.

____________________

Below are excerpts from articles and interviews on Mary Moylan. Some of these texts are also under glass casing in the installation

Nine Catholic clergymen and laymen who oppose the war in Vietnam doused the Selective Service records of 600 draft-age men with napalm and set them afire yesterday in a cement lot behind the Catonsville draft board. …among the demonstrators was Mary Moylan, a 32-year-old registered nurse and midwife from Baltimore. The Baltimore Sun
May 18, 1968

A chipper Mary Moylan, the missing Catonsville Nine defendant who turned herself in to federal authorities after nine years in hiding, took the phone at the Women’s Detention Center today and gently refused to be interviewed.
“Where have you been these last nine years?” she was asked.
“Here and there,” Moylan answered, and laughed heartily.
“What have you been doing?”
“Oh, this and that.” The Baltimore Sun, June 20, 1979

Mary was so successful in her Orphic descent underground she lost contact with old comrades, friends and family. Some of the people who loved her most never saw her again. “She talked to me about things I would not have talked about,” remembers her sister Ella. “She didn’t go to our mother’s funeral in 1970 because she believed the FBI would be there. I think they were.” Mary Moylan died sometime in late April in Asbury Park, N.J. She was 59, alone and blind” The Baltimore Sun May, 1995

Below are authentic handwritten year-book style writings about Mary found on side panels of piece. These are thoughts by those who knew her before her life underground:

“I remember the bell she wore during the trial in Baltimore, a constant and wonderfully irritating tinkling throughout the proceedings.”
Bill O.

“After the action in Catonsville, we piled into the police van. I stared at Mary’s bright red hair and then noticed she was sliding her hands, ever so delicately, out of the cuffs.”
John H.

“She lay on the beach, a stack of trashy romance novels on her right side, Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture on the other.”
Willa B.

“She and the other members of Women Against Daddy Warbucks hurled 1000’s of draft files from an office building in Times Square.”
Bill O.

“She wouldn’t stay with families, the whole time she was underground. ‘Hon, it’s too damn dangerous,’ she told me. ‘If the FBI storms in looking for me, there’ll be gunfire. I can’t take that kind of risk with kids around.’”
Willa B.

“I met her on the boardwalk at Rehobeth. She was wearing a wig and stood a little hunched over.”
Brendan W.

“I think she died alone, somewhere in New Jersey, almost blind.”
Brendan W.

The House of Drafts: A Bosnian-American Web Collaboration

THE HOUSE OF DRAFTS/ DOM PROMAHA
www.house-of-drafts.org

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).

Web site consultation and development donated by Teri Rueb.

Supported by ArtsLink, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art and Women Make Movies. The House of Drafts videotape is available by contacting either Jeanne or Lynne by email through the site address.

Horror Vacui: Nature Abhors a Vacuum synopsis

A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that suggest a desire to fill time with either movement or thought. Sometimes she hears the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets in a Baltimore summer night. Other times jangling toys dissolve into the roar of a jet overhead, or children tremble at the sound of thunder. The small home-movie boxes within the larger screen are her gestural forms of memory, clues to her childhood, mnemonic devices that expand on the sense of immediacy in her “drama.” These are the empty moments of a waking mind. (Lynne Sachs)

Presented in a very bare bedroom-like space with a window, two chairs, a bed, a small old fashioned television, a throw rug and a bookshelf. Gallery visitors are allowed to walk in the space, sit on the chair, and lie on the bed.

Above the real bed, we see the black and white representation of another bed with a moving colorful image on one pillow. In contrast to the noisy immediacy of the day, this bright red image of azaleas is fleeting, nocturnal, imprecise. It is merely a remnant of a small desire.

Before the real bed, a small black and white television screen becomes the transition between the day of the woman at the window and the night of the bed. Once again, we are witnessing a relic of a human presence, a state of unbelonging in which the mind moves between here and there without ever truly inhabiting anywhere. On the screen, we watch the shadows of a person moving silently through a domestic space.

REVIEW
“Witnessing a relic of a human presence, a state of unbelonging in which the mind moves between here and there without ever truly inhabiting anywhere. Horror Vacui makes us ponder why we seek constantly to fill our minds with words, music, clatter, stuff. At first glance, the installation seems to consist only of a bedroom and three ever-changing videos. Stay awhile. As you soak up your surroundings with its soft lighting, constantly moving images and shadows that flicker against the sparse furnishings — your mind wanders. On screen images of ordinary objects seem weirdly evocative. A duster complete with a bushy top of feathers begins to resemble a palm tree. You will discover that a great deal is happening, some of it inside your own mind. But the magic of the installation occurs in the moments between sounds.” (“Portfolio”, The Baltimore Sun, Holly Selby)

Tornado

Tornado
4 min.color video 2002 by Lynne Sachs

A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ “TORNADO” is a poetic piece shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these singed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

Photograph of Wind

This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.

“Photograph of Wind”

by Lynne Sachs
16mm, b&w and color, 4 min. 2001

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.

“Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

San Francisco Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival

For inquiries about rentals or purchases please contact Canyon Cinema or the Film-makers’ Cooperative. And for international bookings, please contact Kino Rebelde.

Interview & Review of Installation by Lynne Sachs in Baltimore Sun

Putting Clutter to Rest
Baltimore Sun, Sept. 24, 2000

Using a camera as her paintbush, Lynne Sachs has created a place to quietly confront our need for constant clamor.

By Holly Selby

When was the last time you heard yourself think?

Probably not on the way to work Friday; you were playing the radio and returning a few phone calls. Probably not at dinner last night, either. Remember? You watched CNN while you ate. Probably not the last time you visited a museum: You listened to an audio-guide while gazing at the art.

Lynne Sachs, a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker, has created an exhibit with special resonance for people in the era of multi-tasking. Her School 33 video installation, “Horror Vacui: Nature Abhors a Vacuum,” makes us ponder why we seek constantly to fill our minds with words, music, clatter, stuff.

Sachs thinks of film as painting. She painted, drew and wrote poetry as a teen-ager in Memphis, Tenn. But it was not until she was a history major at Brown University – and spent a year studying in Paris – that she discovered film as an art form. “When I found out people could use film in the same way as a paint brush, it just blew my mind,” says Sachs, who for three years has lived in Catonsville with her partner Mark Street, an associate professor in film at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. “I discovered the idea of being a ‘filmmaker,’ that it wasn’t about a crew and a director and a hierarchy of people.”

The artist’s work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and at the Delaware Museum of Art in Wilmington and has won awards at the New Jersey Film Festival, the Athens (Ohio) Film Festival, and the New York Film Expo.

Now Sachs, who this fall is teaching a video class at the Maryland Institute, College of Art, is working on a documentary, funded in part by the Maryland Humanities Council, about the Catonsville Nine, a pioneering group of protesters against the Vietnam War in 1968 came to be called.

Since 1998, when she began the project, she has been haunted, she says, by the story of Catholic priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, who with seven other people went into a Catonsville draft board office, removed records and burned them in front of a crowd of reporters and onlookers. They were convicted and sentenced to prison.

When not working on the documentary, Sachs shoots other images incessantly, saving them, sometimes for years, until they begin to form patterns in her mind. “The idea for this installation didn’t evolve at once,” she says. “Part of being an experimental filmmaker is that you shoot all the time. It’s like a painting: You don’t know where you are going.”

A meaningful phrase

She heard the term “horror vacui” for the first time about a year ago. “It means fear of emptiness, or a compulsion to fill,” she says. The notion struck a chord.

“I wondered about my own restlessness. As an artist you have this compulsion to create all the time. And I wondered about being able to live with my own thoughts. I heard the words and I looked at this work I had been collecting and I realized this is something that I had been thinking about for almost a decade.”

Sachs has created a deceptively simple installation at School 33. Step behind a heavy black curtain and into a small, dimly lighted bedroom. At first glance, the installation seems to consist only of a bedroom and three ever-changing videos. Stay awhile. You will discover that a great deal is happening, some of it inside your own mind.

The walls and ceiling are white; the floor gray. A four-poster bed sits in front of a window. The bed’s white sheets and coverlet are turned down – ready for someone to retire for the night. Two chairs painted ghostly gray line the wall.

As you soak up your surroundings with its soft lighting, constantly moving images and shadows that flicker against the sparse furnishings – your mind wanders. On-screen images of ordinary household objects seem weirdly evocative. A duster complete with a bushy top of feathers begins to resemble a palm tree. A siren can be heard. Is that part of the installation, or the muffled sounds of real Baltimore?

Just what is real?

Sachs plays with this question: real or unreal? You are inside the white bedroom, shut away from the “real” world, yet everything here – bed, chairs, television set – is entirely familiar one minute and peculiar the next. You can look out the window, but it is really a video screen.

Through the window, an image appears of the artist performing mundane household activities: sweeping the floor, talking on the telephone, reading a newspaper, washing a window. Peer through this “window” to a point beyond her and you see an image of tree branches dancing in the breezes of a sunny summer day.

Sachs plays the role of producer, camera operator and actor. She filmed herself while watching her image on a monitor, choreographing her movements in reaction to the play of light and shadow and line. “I could watch myself as I did it so, just like when you are painting, you can change the paint or the brushstrokes, I was moving my body for graphic effect.” he says. “It is going back to still lifes. That is how I set it up.”

There also is an image above the real bed: that of a large, white bed. On one pillow, a crimson azalea flickers like a fragment of a dream. This image, the artist says, is “all about the lushness of the flowers, desire, and the empty pillow next to you.”

At the foot of the real bed, a small television sits atop a table. The black-and-white scenes on its screen have the eerie familiar/frightening qualities of film noir. With her camera, Sachs allows you to glimpse a lamp and its shadow, the edge of a telephone, the silhouette of a person reading a newspaper. Light and shadow change the arrangements of ordinary objects into painterly compositions.

The longer you stand inside the installation, the more your see, or think you see. Stare at the sheets of either of the beds – the one you can touch or the image of the bed on the wall – and you begin to notice how the light plays on the wrinkles in the sheets, or how shadows seem to form shapes on the pillow. A dialogue occurs between images. You occasionally see the artist reading a newspaper in the window as the shadow of a person reading a newspaper appears on the smaller television screen. “At times, these images are about specific things,” says Sachs. “At other times they are really about textures and light.”

No sounds of silence

Sound plays a role, too. As the images flicker, you hear crickets chirping, rain falling, cheerful voices, a pop song – noises that can be heard on a Baltimore summer evening. Sachs gives each sound equal weight: “It is as though the thunder has the same value as a pop song and as a child crying. It is more about the play between the sounds than the sounds themselves.

Percussive sounds, created by Baltimore composer and musician Tom Goldstein, are woven into the sound track. Goldstein watched the window several times, adding sounds, one by one, that correspond to particular gestures. Sachs says, “The piece has several layers of sound and yet it is really spare, which I really wanted. That was the challenge: To find real world sounds and sounds that are musical that work.”

But the magic of the installation occurs in the moments between these sounds. “The sounds in your head happen when there is no sound,” the artist says. “I would love it if someone sat down for awhile to think about the installation. I would love it if someone would lie down on the bed and just think.”

What would happen if you put down your newspaper right now and listened? You hear the rustle of paper, the clink of a coffee mug being placed on the kitchen table, a siren in the distance, the happy shrieks of a child next door, the rush of a shower running upstairs, the thump of a dog’s tail on the floor, the hum of a refrigerator, your breath.

Article on Lynne and Ira Sachs in Memphis Commercial Appeal

The Commercial Appeal, Memphis, Friday March 31, 2000

Memphis Inspirations Come Home in Films by Two Sachses

By John Beifuss

This weekend’s Memphis International Film Festival will be a homecoming of sorts for brother-and-sister filmmakers Ira Sachs and Lynne Sachs.

“Ira and I, we’re in the same field, and that’s thrilling,” said Lynne, in a telephone interview this week from Baltimore, where she lives with her husband and two daughters. “But even though Memphis in a real sense is responsible for us getting into filmmaking, we have a totally different approach.”

Ira, 34, is earning recognition as a director of fiercely personal and uncompromised independent narrative films.

Lynne, 38, whose interest in film was fueled by a student job at the Center for Southern Folklore, is a creator of what she describes as “experimental” documentaries that merge “history and memory and the artistic gesture.”

“We both have sort of insider-outsider relationships with the city,” said Ira, who plans to return to Memphis this fall to shoot his second feature, Forty Shades of Blue, for executive producer Sydney Pollack, director of The Firm.

“I’m incredibly familiar with every shopping center and every liquor store and every new construction project, so it’s very real and intimate, but I haven’t lived here in 12 to 15 years,” said Ira, in a phone interview from his home in New York. “That outsider status allows me to come back to the city and look at it and try to understand it, and maybe see some things that people who live here don’t always notice.

Ira will be at Rhodes College on Saturday and Sunday to present screenings of three of his productions: Lady (1994), a 28-minute film focusing on a sexually ambiguous redhead; Vaudeville (1991), a 55-minute roundelay about a group of dysfunctional musical revue entertainers stranded overnight in small-town America, and The Delta, a critically acclaimed 1996 feature about the relationship between a privileged young Memphian and a mixed-race Vietnamese refugee.

Lynne won’t be in town, but the film festival will present two of her documentaries: the 33-minute Which Way Is East (1994), an autobiographical chronicle of a journey through Vietnam made in collaboration with her sister, Dana Sachs; and Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989), a half-hour portrait of the late Rev. L.O. Taylor, a popular Baptist minister in Memphis who owned a movie camera and filmed baptisms and other events in the African-American community in the 1930’s and ‘40s.

The two Central High School graduates both return to Memphis from time to time to visit their mother, retired Rhodes College professor Diane Sachs. Their father, Ira Sachs Sr., now lives in Park City, Utah, site of the Sundance Film Festival, where, coincidentally, both The Delta and Which Way Is East have been screened.

“I think my dad gave us this spirit of jumping into situations and taking risks,” Lynne said, “And my mom had this sensitivity, and an appreciation of poetry and all things artistic.”

Ira and Lynne both credit their father with much of their movie education, however.

“We were children of divorce,” Ira said, “and I would say every weekend we went with my dad to the movies.”

Said Lynne: “That was the divorced dad thing to do – go to El Chico and have cheese dip and then go to the movies.”

Said Ira: “And that usually meant going to the movies he was interested in seeing – Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation, Death Wish.”

Lynne: “ He didn’t want to see The Love Bug.”

Ira: “I still feel like ‘70s films are the best, and a lot of that I think is because I had pretty organic reactions to those movies when I was a kid.”

The Malco Highland Quartet wasn’t the only influence on the future career of the siblings, however, Ira learned about acting, producing and dramatization as a student involved in the Park Commission-sponsored Memphis Children’s Theater, “the only truly integrated environment I’ve ever been in in my whole life. I still think of it as this magical place where because we were all kids and we were all doing theater together, there was this real sense of community.”

Lynne, meanwhile, was exposed to landmark motion pictures like Mr. Hulto’s Holiday when longtime city schools teacher Lore Hisky formed a film society at Central High. Lynne had always written poetry and painted, but she began to feel that film was “a place where I could put all of these passions together.”

In the early 1980s, Lynne got a job at the Center for Southern Folklore, and one of her first assignments was to catalog about 15 hours of film footage photographed by Rev. Taylor and donated to the center by his widow, Blanche Taylor.

“That place had a big impact on me,” Lynne said of the currently homeless Center. “I never even knew that film could have such an impact and be so oriented toward the community.”

Lynne became fascinated by the silent footage of these “Taylor Made Productions,” as hand-lettered title cards called the works. She learned that Taylor would travel from church to church and show his short films to eager crowds, who enjoyed seeing themselves and their neighbors without ever considering that what they were looking at would prove to be rare and invaluable historical footage of the Memphis black community.

Taylor became “my main inspiration as a filmmaker. I shoot almost everything myself, and he did, too. He had this total immersion in the making of his films, and that’s how I work,” said Lynne, who said it takes her about two years to finish one of her short films.

Lynne’s other “filmic discourses” include such nonfiction aural-and-visual collages as A Biography of Lilith (1997), described as “an evocative meditation” on “Judaism and patriarchal history”; The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), “a new feminized film form” that explores “art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage”; and Blasted Into Consciousness (1984), which uses news clippings to examine a group rape in Fall River, Mass.

Needless to say, you won’t find these works on the shelves at Blockbuster Video. But they have carried Lynne to festivals, screenings, seminars and teaching jobs at the Art Institute of Chicago, Temple University, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Sydney Film Festival in Australia, to name just a few locations.

Which Way Is East, in fact, recently was screened during a prestigious program at the Whitney Museum in New York titled “The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-2000.” Reports Lynne: “There were seven people in the audience. Who goes to museums on a Wednesday afternoon?”

Lynne’s current project is The Catonsville Nine, a documentary look at what has happened to the two women and seven men in a Catholic activist group in Baltimore who went to a local draft office in 1968, grabbed hundreds of Selective Service records, took them outside to a parking lot and burned them with napalm. All of them went to prison for up to three years for this act of protest against the Vietnam War.

Ira, meanwhile, is working on he casting of Forty Shades of Blue, from a script he and co-writer Michael Rohatyn developed last year at Robert Redford’s Sundance Writers Lab.

Ira described Blue as the story of a woman in her mid-30s who lives with “an older man who’s a rock and roll legend – sort of a cross between Sam Phillips and Jim Dickinson, but a real boozer and a womanizer.” The focus is on “the woman you always see in the movies but the story never really looks at. She’s on the arm of the wealthy man, but she’s over to the side. She’s the blond. Not the powerful masculine center, but the woman on the periphery.”

Like his sister, Ira has a very impressive resume, with press clippings that include a laudatory two-page review of The Delta (now available on VHS from Strand Home Video) by Newsweek’s David Ansen, who called the extremely low-budget work “the most memorable film in competition at Sundance” in 1997. In addition, Ira’s films have been screened at festivals around the world; and he was the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Grant for Media Artists,

And all of that will earn you less money than directing Leprechaun in the Hood. “The difficult thing is to keep making films,” Ira said. “The Delta was helpful for establishing me with a certain identity in the professional world, but you can’t make a career out of films like The Delta. You have to try to bridge the distance between being independent and being commercial. Sydney Pollack being involved in Forty Shades of Blue was a great moment. He really loved the scripts and saw what could be done with it.”

As for the third Sachs child: Dana’s only film project was Which Way is East, but the 37-year-old sibling is awaiting the release this year of her first book, The House on Dream Street: A Memoir of Hanoi, to be published by Algonquin Press.

Various Experimental Film Programs

“New Experimental Film Works”
at the Fells Point Creative Alliance. Baltimore, Maryland
Presented by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
Thursday – December 9, 1999

From Ann Arbor to Austin to Arcata, local fimmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs have been travelling to film festivals around the country and in Europe this year showing their own work and watching an amazing selection of new alternative cinema. Tonight they will bring back to Baltimore some of the most compelling, ground-breaking experimental films being made in America today. A surreal allegory on a Canadian farm, a meditation on Cuban streetlife, an Eastern European tease on the notion of history– the work is audacious, lyrical and on occasion sublime. Two of the filmmakers — Paula Froehle (Chicago) and Jenny Perlin (New York City) — will attend their Baltimore premieres in order to discuss their work and to answer questions from the audience.

“Chemistries”, Daven Gee, 10 min.
“Meditations on Revolution, Part I” by Robert Fenz, 10 min.
“The Whole History of That” by Jenny Perlin, 17 min.
“We are Going Home” by Jennifer Reeves, 10 min.
“Fever” by Paul Froehle, 6 min.
“Flight” by Greta Snider, 7 min.
“Twilight Psalm II: Walking Distance” by Phil Solomon, 15min.

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DIS PLACE MENT:
5 States of UnBelonging

LINK Film and Video Program
March 31, 2000

Curated by Mark Street and Lynne Sachs

“Fells Point 99”, Isaac Cynkar, 1999
(4 min. excerpt)

“Sight Unseen (a travelog)”, Jonathan Robinson, 1990
(5 min. excerpt)

“Land Without Bread”, Luis Bunuel, 1932
(6 min. excerpt)

“Mercy”, Abigail Child, 1989
(3 min. excerpt)

“The Past is a Foreign Country”, Joanna Racynskza, 1998
(5 min. excerpt)

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs