As the lights came back on in the theater, I sat in my seat, trying to absorb everything that had played on the screen over the last 40 minutes. The camera angles, the plot (or lack thereof), the Spanish words combined with English narration…it was all too much. As I walked out of the movie theater, I felt a sense of disappointment. Why had I sat through that? I had just seen my first “art film,” and I had been completely unprepared for it.
“Con Viento en el Pelo,” (or “Wind in Our Hair”), inspired by the writings of Julio Cortázar, gives the audience an exclusive viewing of life as seen through the eyes of four young girls living in Buenos Aires, Argentina who have yet to discover the outside world that surrounds their “kingdom.” Director Lynne Sachs, an experimental filmmaker born in Memphis, Tennessee, is able to transform the girls’ ordinary lives into something a bit more extraordinary. Though character development is slim, we learn the most about Leticia, a physically disabled, yet confident girl about which the others note, “leads us.” Every day the girls adorn their bodies with colorful swatches of cloth, gaudy masks, and parts of discarded Halloween costumes and anxiously wait for the train to pass by to entertain the boarded passengers with their crazy outfits. They call themselves “statues,” which is a perfect description of their daily show. The train is the girls’ only reminder that there is a world beyond their backyard. The train brings people, noise, and a boy, Ariel, who soon befriends them. He becomes their only concrete form of communication with the outside world by writing them notes and throwing them out the train’s window.
The notes, written in Spanish, are only one of the numerous mediums Sachs employs to convey the movie’s meaning. Spanish dialogue and writing, English subtitles and narration, all contribute to the melting pot of cultural differences expressed in the film. The narrator has a magnificent voice for translating the girls’ rapid chatter. She can turn three minutes of undistinguishable murmurs to one clear line of understanding. In one scene, a girl chants, “Piedra, papel, tijeras”; yet, until the narrator informs the audience that this is simply the game “rock, paper, scissors,” the audience is lost.
Beyond the narrator’s voice, the movie contains few other vocals. This movie consists of one song: “Un Día,” meaning “one day.” Do not walk into this movie expecting a beautiful original score. The rest of the “soundtrack” is simply everyday sounds: birds chirping, dogs barking, kids laughing, the train chugging. At points, this lack of music works: it forces the audience to focus on the natural sounds of daily life. Other times it seems to leave an empty hole in the movie experience. Occasionally, you will hear a reporter on the radio announcing a farmers’ strike. But the girls pay no attention to it. Footage of demonstrations, reports of grain shortage, angry farmers yelling- these sounds barely break into the girls’ laughter as they sit at the table eating a variety of breads, which symbolizes a luxury that the girls take for granted. Only once in the movie does the narrator address the poverty in the surrounding neighborhoods. But the moment is brief, and soon the girls resume whatever game they had been playing before the outside world had intruded. This stark contrast reinforces the innocence of the four girls. The film does a nice job of juxtaposing the girls’ secluded “kingdom” to the chaos of the real world through visuals.
Every camera shot, though oftentimes seemingly random, has been crafted with great care by Sachs. The shots are often close-up, focusing on something that Sachs wants to be sure you notice. For example, you rarely ever see a full, detailed view of the girls. The frame might focus on a girl’s mouth if she is talking, her profile if she posing, her shoes if she is running. But at times, the camera angles are dizzying, forcing the viewer to try to decipher what is happening in the shot, instead of reading the subtitles flashing along the bottom of the screen. Wide-angle shots are rare: the backyard is one of the images that is shown from far away, which effectively relays to the audience how big the backyard, or their “kingdom,” appears to be to the four growing girls.
As I write this review, I realize I liked the film more than I previously thought. I understand and appreciate the careful decisions that went into every frame. Thought provoking and creative, “Wind in Our Hair” took me on a journey that opened my eyes to a life very different from my own. It showed me a genre of filmmaking that I had never been exposed to before, for which I am grateful. However, at times, the film ceased to hold my interest. Without the structure of a typical movie, I was caught off-guard by the lack of any real plot, problem, or resolution. What it lacked in plot, though, it made up for in originality and heart. Overall, the film did not fulfill my expectations and left me rather bewildered; however, from an artistic point of view, this film was satisfying to the eyes and the mind. “Wind of Our Hair” is a refreshing antidote to a movie industry dominated by special effects. If you go into the theater craving an action-packed “Clash of the Titans,” you should probably skip this movie. However, if you are seeking a movie that is artistic and stimulates the mind, “Wind in Our Hair” may be the perfect choice.
Inspired by her children’s ubiquitous ABC picture books, not to mention the traditions of avant-garde alphabetizing, experimental mainstay Lynne Sachs concocted Abecedarium: NYC, an exquisite online corpse of cinematic cartography. Pearls of obscure vocabulary, ranging from “Audile” (one who thinks in sounds) to “Zenana” (in India and Pakistan, an area of the home reserved for women), serve as free-associative prompts for local artists. Clicking a particular letter reveals a corresponding interpretation culled from our fair metropolis. They’re typically short video works, aspiring to (and frequently transcending) a certain iMovie lyricism. The films are intimately observed audiovisual slivers, unfolding over a map that instantly scrolls to each work’s point of origin. Gotham emerges as a palimpsest of momentary glimpses and found poetics.
Sachs’s ever-ready eye is behind the lion’s share of entries: her “Foudroyant” response is a particularly potent rendition of the kaleidoscopic Coney Island film. David Gatten (“Rete”) and George Kuchar (“Pelagic”) contribute, respectively, a city symphony from leafily obstructed vantages and a poignant and peculiar visit to a Bronx funeral home. Beyond its homepage’s elegant interface, the project is meant to stand as an ongoing exploration through participatory blog threads and collaboration with other online media forums. Welcoming work from any and all who visit, the site (co-produced by artist/web designer Susan Agliata) aspires to be a perpetual atlas in progress, a sensorium of ever-accumulating coordinates. Abecedarium: NYC is rife with pockets of Web wonderment, serene handmade meditations, and, perhaps most intriguing, yet-to-be-realized potential.
Published in San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph Lynne Sachs Retrospective 1986 – 2010
Between Yes and No: An Interview with Lynne Sachs by Kathy Geritz
Lynne Sachs and I were graduate students in San Francisco State University’s Cinema Department in the mid-eighties. We met as TAs for a huge undergraduate cinema history class, and became friends as we scrambled to stay two—or at least one—steps ahead of the students. New to teaching, we discussed ideas for films to show in our sections and also shared strategies to get discussions going. One disadvantage we faced was that neither of us had actually taken the film history course; instead, we had fulfilled this requirement through an independent study that entailed viewing films at Pacific Film Archive, where I worked. Together, we watched films religiously every week in a small screening room; but rather than the classics, we were drawn to experimental films, cinematic essays and offbeat narratives that fueled our enthusiasm for our field while providing an idiosyncratic survey of film history. Our friendship deepened during our wide-ranging conversations that continue to this day.
I spoke with Lynne about her film practice by telephone in January 2010. She was at her home in Brooklyn. — Kathy Geritz
What initially drew you to working with film?
All my life I’ve been working in the arts. I drew, took pictures and wrote poetry a lot as a kid. Later, when I was a teenager, I got very excited and disturbed by a number of issues—particularly the reinstatement of the draft and abortion rights. I realized, “There’s this part of me that cares about social and political situations; but, I’ll still need to keep this other part that is about my more private self, the part that wants to play with images and words, exploring the everyday.”
It was 1981, the year I went to live in Paris, when I started going to film programs, and I discovered the films of Marguerite Duras and Chantal Akerman. I also saw classic films like Marcel Carne’s Children of Paradise (1945) at these sweet revival house theaters. I didn’t know terms like “avant-garde” or “experimental film.” I just knew that this kind of cinema was not about plot or movie stars, but about the expression of ideas or what it was to be a woman in the world, which seemed much more visceral and intellectual.
When I returned to the U.S., I didn’t yet think “I want to be a filmmaker;” I was just thrilled by this medium that I had discovered. I finished Brown University with a history degree, and thought I’d like to get into film, so I started to look for jobs in New York. In between desperately looking for paid work, I spent some time hanging out at what I later realized were some very important, even revolutionary, places. One was Downtown Community Television in Chinatown. The other was Global Village in Soho, which was a renegade community of people who had been followers of Marshal McLuhan and were committed to teaching young people about media. In 1984, I had a job answering the telephone and hanging film trims at documentary filmmaker Robert Richter’s office. He said to me, “You’re interested in documentary.You’re just out of college. Maybe you should go to the Flaherty Seminar.” I applied for a scholarship to go in the summer of ‘85. It was by far the most experimentally oriented year they had ever had. VéVé Clark was there to talk about Maya Deren. They showed a film that Meredith Monk had made on Ellis Island. I had never seen a documentary that used dance to create such a fluid access to space. Plus Bruce Conner was there! I said, “This is what documentary can be? Found footage films by Bruce Conner?” It was eye opening for me.
I applied to graduate school at both San Francisco State and San Francisco Art Institute. I had not really completed a film yet, so I wasn’t accepted at SFAI, but I got into State. Eventually I went to both. I’m glad that I went to State first, otherwise I wouldn’t know about film history, film theory or have worked with Trinh T. Minh-Ha. The documentary impulse was a tableau where I thought I would feel comfortable and enthralled. Documentary also allowed me to knock on people’s doors and ask questions, and be the nosy person I thought I already was. But the first four films I made were strictly experimental. I felt that I could only work out my initial investigations of the medium this way. I also had the chance to intern with Bruce Conner in his basement, helping to organize his archive and talking about art for hours. It was, to say the least, a transformational time for me.
Looking back at that time, I think the films of Jean-Luc Godard—particularly Vivre sa vie (1962) and France/tour/détour/deux/enfants (1978)—were major influences on me. …deux/enfants was so fragmented and yet it left you with a philosophy of childhood that we lose as we become adults. Then I saw Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1982) and I knew from then on, I wanted to make experimental documentaries, although I probably didn’t yet use those words. I was already drawn to things that were political but when I saw Vivre sa vie I realized that political work could be more nuanced and more about form. Honestly, I didn’t understand that at all until I got to San Francisco and saw Craig Baldwin’s RocketKitKongoKit (1986) which was so confrontational and engaged. It made me think about culture, knowledge and historiography in an entirely different way.
A distinctive aspect of your films is your capacity to make connections and associations. Sometimes the resonances are immediate and poetic, and other times the associations build over time, which becomes a way of opening up a film.
I feel a closeness with writers, poets and painters, much more than with traditional film “directors.” We share a love of collage. In the kinds of films I make, there are fissures in terms of how something leads to something else. Relationships and associations aren’t fixed. I always learn from an audience, about whether or not the convergence of two images is actually expressing an idea. I hope it’s doing one thing, but I might learn that it is doing something completely different. In this way the films are kind of porous; they are open to interpretation. One thing I realized recently is that I have this rhythm when I make films—ABABAB or yesnoyesnoyesno. For example, I call House of Science a “yes film” because any idea that came into my head, pretty much made its way into the movie. The yes films are full of associations—some of them are resolved and some of them are adolescent; they’re still trying to figure out who they are. Other films are “no films.” Window Work is a single eight-minute image of me sitting in front of a window. It’s very spare and kind of performative. I felt like it had to be done in one shot. “No, you can’t bring in any clutter.” Sometimes I try to make films that don’t have clutter; other times I make films that are full of it.
You have always made both short and long films. Do they offer different things to you?
I love making both. My longer films are almost like diary films. It usually takes me three to four years to make them. In the case of The Last Happy Day youcould say eighteen years, at least in terms of the thinking in my head. The short films have to do with an impulse or an idea that might come to me when I’m taking a shower or eating dinner. Or maybe I read something that sparks me, and I think I’m going to try that out. I’m very envious of photographers, particularly ones who still use darkrooms. They walk into a room with a blank piece of paper and walk out with a thing. It’s that kind of coveting of a thing that often drives me to make short films because I like that they have a relationship to a moment.
Some of your films take the form of a letter, others include notes and observations, others aphorisms. Will you talk about the role of writing in your films?
Writing has always been a vital part of my creative process. In House of Science, I tried to look at all the manifestations of writing. I wanted to include the gesture of journal writing and how that is an extension from your mind to your fingers to the page. I included the sounds of pencil on paper and I even included the sounds of things you might do before you write, as in the sounds of a woman sitting on a toilet and urinating. Some of my best writing has been done on airplanes because I am concentrating and there is nowhere to go. Other times I might be in a subway or walking down the street where I don’t have access to the utensils but I have access to the plodding, pleasurable aspect of putting words in order and expressing an idea.
In Which Way is East, I tried to think about the nature of translation in relation to text as a series of visible icons. I was interested in writing as an articulation of a thinking process but also as an indication of cultural identity. I was exploring the experience of being an outsider or a tourist. I like for my viewer to come to see any language as an opportunity for an awakening outside your most familiar universe. In Which Way is East sometimes you see the unfamiliar lettering of the Vietnamese language while hearing it in English. Other times you hear a parable told in Vietnamese but you see it in English. There are shifts between what is given to you and what’s not given to you. You have to think “How does something that is so familiar in one culture, move to another, and how does it shift in meaning?”
You asked about letters, and yes, this aspect of the creative process has been vital to the way I have written for several films, in particular States of UnBelonging. For two years, I exchanged emails with my former student Nir Zats, an Israeli writer and filmmaker. He was in Tel Aviv and I was in Brooklyn. We struggled during a time of intense Middle East violence to make a film about a woman neither of us had ever known. It took me a year before I realized that our back and forth “conversation” was actually the foundation for the whole film.
Does your working method differ when you begin with another writer’s work as source material?
The seeds of Wind in Your Hair were the stories “Final del Juego” and “Casa Tomada” by Julio Cortázar. I played with his original texts, hoping they would speak to the four “actresses” (including my two daughters) who performed the roles of girls who were just about to reach adolescence. I shot the entire film in Buenos Aires, with a group of Argentine super 8 filmmakers. For both the adults who were making the film and the children who were in it, these stories quickly entered our consciousness. The text gave us a shared experience which in turn allowed us to jump into an extremely playful and engaging dialogue (in Spanish and a little English).
In A Biography in Lilith, I wrote a lot of poetry and then turned it into song with a cellist, a Talmudic scholar, and the wonderful performer Pamela Z. Music enlivened the writing. The poetry was inspired by my having read the Midrash—stories from Jewish folklore and mysticism. It all happened between my becoming pregnant with my first child and giving birth to my second, from 1994 to ‘97. The film reflects that time of my life, when I was keeping journals and was interested in observing the changes in my body, grappling with the oppositions between motherhood and my own sexual identity.
When I was working on The Last Happy Day, the part of the Sandor Lenard story that held me up for the longest time was the Winnie the Pooh part. I knew that this incredibly fascinating distant relative of mine had become famous for translating the Pooh story into Latin, but I couldn’t wrap my head around why someone would do such a thing. In this country, Winnie the Pooh has been trivialized to the basest form of Disney. When a child grows up, he or she grows out of Winnie the Pooh. I have learned that Europeans think Winnie the Pooh has a kind of philosophy to offer children—it represents a child’s first introduction to thinking about the ephemeral, the unattainable. This isn’t necessarily how we see the book. I had to keep doing research so I could excavate Pooh in a way that had meaning for me outside his American identity. I kept rereading the book but it didn’t click. I couldn’t find a way to like him enough to make this movie. Sometimes you come upon a kernel of an idea, and it doesn’t speak to anybody but you. In this case, it was speaking to lots of people but not me. Part of it was that I had the idea to make the film before I had kids, then I had kids, and I started reading the book to them. Once I could bring it alive to children, I knew how to make it into a movie. I hope that all of this “process” does in a sense become revealed in the film.
I’ve heard you refer to your longer works as experimental documentaries or essays, and just now you said they are like diary films. Do these terms mean different things to you?
The key to the whole question of the kind of film I make has to do with how I see process. This goes back to why San Francisco was important to me. I felt like in that city, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, we were so driven by process; we had a commitment to innovation during each and every phase of our production. For me, the film essay isn’t simply a series of questions that are asked about the act of making a film. We often say that the film essay is self-reflexive, that it opens up the maker’s tactics. The difference between process and tactic is that tactic is procedure but process is continual exploration. Process remains unclosed. I’ve always said that an interesting film is never a work-in-progress but rather a work-in-process. That’s where the experimental comes into play, because the maker is continually trying-out strategies, and willing to fail. My measures of success aren’t necessarily that a film is entertaining or that it conveys a sense of authority, but that it takes the medium to a new level of public consciousness. I want the film to struggle to create a new kind of visual expression, moving me and in turn my audience to think in new ways.
Kathy Geritz is Film Curator at Pacific Film Archive and co-editor of Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, to be published in Fall 2010.
Published in
San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph for
STATES OF BELONGING: A LYNNE SACHS RETROSPECTIVE (1986-2010)
APRIL 10-14, 2010
Searching: Lynne Sachs’ Cinema by Lucas Hilderbrand
If I had to choose a single word to encapsulate Lynne Sachs’ cinema, it would be “searching.” Her work is marked by a mode of inquiry, of seeking out connections, of investigation. What is she looking for? Meaning, maybe. But more so, historical consciousness, an ethical way of being in the world, a politics of humanity. I’ve known her to get on a plane to move a film project forward, unsure what she will find when she lands or where the project is going. It seems every time we talk and check in, she’s been someplace else, at work on yet another project. She is indefatigable in her search, and she has been extraordinarily prolific.
With Which Way Is East, Sachs began a series of explorations that are central to her work: exploring geo-political conflict and politics in dialogue with family relations. In Which Way, Sachs visits her sister Dana, who had been living in Vietnam for a year, and this visit produces a cognitive dissonance between the place she saw represented in TV news reports of the Vietnam War as a child and the place she was then seeing as an adult. This tension might also be read as embodied in the celluloid itself: Which Way Is East’s formal signature is its superimpositions, often of blurred streaks of rich green foliage over sharp-focus landscapes, and its general refusal of image-sound synchronization. (Sachs has articulated this film’s form with a resistance to the rise of a common social documentary video aesthetic; with her move from film to video, Sachs would later experiment with frames-within-the frame as an alternative mode of juxtaposition.)
The Vietnam War likewise provides the incitement for Investigation of a Flame, perhaps Sachs’ best-known film. Here, rather than visiting a foreign land in the present, Sachs revisits a local past. While living in Catonsville, Maryland (outside Baltimore), she discovered the actions of the Catonsville Nine, a group of progressive Catholic clergy and believers who dissented against the war in Vietnam by raiding a selective service office and burning draft cards doused with napalm. Investigation explores the ways that ethical and religious beliefs can motivate people to question, even transgress the law; made before but screened after 9/11, the film’s meaning has been accidentally resonant with the later war on terror. In the film, the prosecutor in the Catonsville case raises the compelling archival question of whether the draft records had the right to exist, a peculiar slippage that grants the rights of personhood to inanimate objects, yet one that nonetheless broaches the ways history could be erased through the destruction of records. Even more essentially, the dissenters question the government’s right to dehumanize its people, whether by sending troops into a losing battle or by imprisoning the protesters. In one of the film’s most affecting moments, a participant recalls her first meal after being released from prison: when she stared at the menu at a restaurant, she couldn’t make sense of it and couldn’t decide; she cried because she realized prison had taken away her ability to think for herself.
The effect of war on an intellectual has taken Sachs farther away and yet, in a manner of speaking, closer to home. She has recently worked to unravel the enigmatic story of her distant cousin, anthropologist-doctor-refugee Sandor Lenard. This search began with the succinct The Small Ones, in which Sachs calls our attention to the human cost of war through recovering this cousin’s story of working to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers in Rome during WWII. Sachs continued excavating this complex familial connection in the longer and more ambitious The Last Happy Day. In this second take, we learn that she first heard of this cousin as a child because he had translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin while in exile; this discovery is mirrored by her own children’s contemporary inquiry into his story. A Hungarian Jew, Sandor lived in Germany when WWII began and hid prisoners of war in his apartment while in Rome. After the ravages of war, he moved to Brazil in search of “a far away place” and won a small fortune on a game show that allowed him to buy a house in the woods; although living in exile, he planted “all the fruits that can cure homesickness.” But Sandor’s amazing journey was sullied by the fact that he deserted his family in Europe. Sachs visits one of his sons in Germany, in the attempt to reconstruct Sandor’s story, but he only knows fragments of his own father’s story. He shows Sachs how their shared relatives’ books had once been inscribed with the original family name (Levy) but that this name had been partially torn out of each book and replaced with a less Semitic one (Lenard); this act served to hide an identifiably Jewish name but stopped short of removing all trace of the family’s existence. In a curious way, as in the Catonsville Nine’s symbolic burning, the destruction of documents ultimately points to a larger historical-political truth. Commenting on the impossibility of making truth claims about the past, Sandor’s wife comments, “There are things so old, I’m not sure of the truth.” The Last Happy Day is a film about a life structured by wars and the ways that knowledge of that life has been translated between generations.
More impressionistic in structure yet still working through issues of translation, Sachs’ most recent film, Wind in Our Hair/ Con viento en el pelo (2010) was inspired by Julio Cortázar’s short stories and shot in Buenos Aires. The film’s bilingualism might be seen as a metaphor for the work’s focus on young women transitioning from childhood to more mature sexual desire and political awareness. Early in the film, four girls (including Sachs’ two daughters, who appear in a number of Sachs’ works) play a game of searching behind closed doors and around corners. They wear colorful masks and frequently shriek with a mixture of delight and surprise. The girls play a number of games that they are seemingly too old to play—games they will soon enough leave behind. They experience life the ways we remember childhood as adults—as a series of intense moments, many of them related to the routines of daily chores and materiality of daily life. The film is positively tangible in its attention to the fluff of puppy fur, the crustiness of pastry, the lint on stockings, and the curl of paper that’s dried after being saturated with markers’ wet ink. The film is also about the girls’ glimmers of awareness of the world around them, such as the ambient sound of news radio or television images of protests. One girl describes a dream she had when she was eight, dreaming of being thirteen and being kidnapped; the dream suggests the anxiety of growing older and the ways the specter of The Disappeared continues to haunt the country. Yet the film ends much as it begins, with an eruption of exuberance, as the film transitions again: from video to film, from documentary sound and voice-over to Juana Molina’s “Un Día”, from pensive to quick images of girls again in states of excitement.
Trinh T. Minh-ha has written, “Meaning can be neither imposed nor denied.” It strikes me that meaning is something, in Sachs’ work, that is found. It’s what she searches for, but not in the form of some absolute truth. She finds meaning through productive juxtapositions of sound and image, past and present, near and far, family and politics. But she also trusts the audience to make its own meanings, too, by participating in her search.
Lucas Hilderbrand is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright.
Artist Statement
Published in April 2010
San Francisco Cinematheque’s monograph: Lynne Sachs Retrospective 1986-2010
The Last Happy Day (2009) by Lynne Sachs; digital video, color, sound, 38 minutes
“In 2009, I completed The Last Happy Day, a film that uses both real and imagined stories about Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin of mine and a Hungarian medical doctor. (See text above for description). Several years ago I traveled to Sao Paolo, Brazil to film Sandor’s eighty-five year old wife, Andrietta. She described in vivid, almost dreamy, detail her husband’s macabre work. I listened to her recount his daily contact with the detritus of war, wondering to myself why we so rarely think about who is responsible for “cleaning up” the dead. Later in the film, Andrietta’s graphic, realistic recollections stir visual ruminations on this futile act of posthumous, cosmetic surgery.
“In my previous films, the elusiveness of the biographical impulse pushed me to interweave home-movies, found footage, interviews, and actual letters as a way of exploring the intricacies of my subjects’ lives. Stylistically, I developed a discursive way of working that integrated authentic materials with more artificial, constructed visuals. With The Last Happy Day, I constructed a narrative triangle between Sandor, my Uncle William and myself. While their presence in the film is grounded in a dialogue from the past, my participation is more temporally and geographically fluid, creating an evolving relationship of distance and intimacy through voice and text.
“Early in the film, I jump right into a reverie that introduces Sandor’s strange understanding of the human body—in death and in life. Through an evolving, highly saturated visual language, I contrast the haunting confinement and violence Sandor experienced in Rome during the Nazi occupation with the verdant emptiness of his later life in remotest Brazil. I juxtapose Sandor’s fearless introspection in his unpublished letters with my imagined visualization of his idyllic life in his house in the woods. The geography of his NOW simultaneously saddens and protects him from the threats he fears are still percolating on the other side of the Atlantic. As a way of articulating his longings, I project images from Roberto Rossellini’s hauntingly sad feature film Rome, Open City onto an array of reflective surfaces in Sandor’s vine-covered house in the woods of Brazil.
“Always an exile, a victim of a kind of human ‘continental drift,’ Sandor never felt ‘at home’ in the synthesized post-war euro-culture he found in Brazil. Building a harpsichord on which to play Bach, reading thirteen languages and translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin allowed him to stay connected to an old-world life to which he would never return. Through the visual texture of this film, I use images of landscapes as proscenium, and even as character. The camera searches for familiar terrain, names, and identifiable landmarks: zones of danger, safety, comfort and despair.
“In all honesty, I’ve wanted to make a film about my distant cousin Sandor for over twenty years. His was the only branch of my family that remained in Europe during World War II. During the production, I traveled to Dusseldorf, Germany to meet Sandor’s son, Hansgerd, now in his late sixties. As I stood with my camera, he uncovered a trove of family diaries, letters and inscribed books from the 1920’s and 30’s. Inside each book, Sandor and his parents had meticulously transformed their obviously Jewish name “Levy” to a more Hungarian “Lenard”. Rather than destroying this direct reference to their hidden family identity, Sandor’s family, my sole remaining European relatives, meticulously erased. In their minds, the key to survival in early twentieth century Hungary would be pristine assimilation. My own southern Jewish family in Memphis also refused to grasp fully the catastrophe that was Europe. With far less to lose, their methods of confronting eminent danger were similarly subtle. Keeping this legacy of detachment in mind, I try to create narrative distinctions between close and remote experiences of war. As Sandor’s world fell into a state of hunger and decay, he delighted in the absurd and the arcane. Humor was his life raft, his potent means of resistance. Speaking, reading and writing Latin kept him from what Natalia Ginzburg, another writer trapped in Occupied Italy, called ‘the fury of the waters and the corrosion of his time.’ Through images and writing, implicit connections to our own wartime situation push their way into the fabric of the film.
“Throughout this episodic story, I also work with a cinema-verité style scene of four children (including my two daughters Maya and Noa) grappling with the challenges of putting on a play of Winnie the Pooh, the book Sandor had, strangely enough, chosen to translate into Latin. The children’s extemporaneous conversations express an awareness of both the English and the Latin versions of Pooh, as well as the philosophical ponderings implicit in the text. In my mind, the inclusion of this quintessential sliver of innocence allows me to explore the implicit paradoxes of a life both thwarted and nourished by the contradictions of a troubled time.” (Lynne Sachs)
Con Viento en Pelo begins and ends with the approaching rumble of a train engine. For the young protagonists of the film, the train represents both a source of freedom and an interjection of cold, adult reality into their innocent, sheltered existence. This film forgoes a traditional narrative in favor of an exploration of the sensations that accompany the burgeoning adolescence of four Argentinean girls. This causes the film to unfold as a documentary of emotions, so to speak, rather than a conventional movie. Director Lynne Sachs is far more concerned with capturing textures, sounds, and feelings, the ingredients of memories, than action or dialogue. For example, in an early scene, Sachs juxtaposes a soft-focused close-up of a fluffy, wet dog with the cold, austere barbed wire fences of the Buenos Aires slums.
Central to the film is the dichotomy between the cold, urban adult world and its harsh realities and the warm domestic comforts of the girls’ homes and the lush gardens in which they play. The girls pretend to live in their own kingdom, where the forces of imposing adulthood are kept at bay by the walls of their imaginary fortress. They run, scream, laugh, and play while outside of their domain, their country is fraught with labor strikes and smoldering social tension.
Even in their sheltered existences, elements of reality manage to seep in and take hold of the young girls’ emotions. When asked what she is most afraid of, one of the girls responds with a recount of a dream she had in which she was kidnapped and her parents could not afford to pay her ransom. Adult issues like the threat of poverty or coping with debilitating illness are ever present in the girls’ lives, despite their best efforts to escape.
Leticia, the eldest girl and self-proclaimed queen of the kingdom, is marred by an unnamed ailment, which leaves her limbs stiff and brittle and demands constant attention. Rather than give up in the face of the disease, the girls mock it with youthful abandon. The girls play a game called “statues” in which they try to hold strange poses for as long as they can by the train tracks. In a way, this innocent game seems like a way for the girls to help ease the pain of Leticia’s ailment by experiencing it each themselves. They laugh at it with the belief that laughing at a serious situation can, through some sacred childhood magic, assuage the severity.
The omnipresent train offers the girls their first brush with the excitement and confusion of adolescence. A mysterious boy throws notes to one of the girls each time he barrels past them on his train ride. The mystery and allure of this situation lead them to envision him as a prince charming. However, they are sorely disappointed when the two finally meet face to face and the interaction is awkward and stilted.
Director Lynne Sachs utilizes a mixed-medium filmmaking technique in which documentary footage of Argentinean riots and protests is unexpectedly interspersed within the larger fictitious framework of the film. It seems as if these interjections of real footage into the film mirror the obtrusion of reality into the girl’s sheltered fantasy world. The disorienting effect of this editing drapes a homogenous haze over the film, blending fantasy into reality and vice versa. This exchange culminates in the cathartic final moments when the walls between the harsh, urban adult world and the girls’ kingdom of childhood innocence crumble and the screen is flooded with a rush of excitement and confusion about the adolescent limbo between child- and adulthood. Con Viento en Pelo ends with the images of the rumbling train and the girls’ outdoor safe haven becoming one as they fade into abstraction.
In slightly over forty minutes, Sachs is able to encapsulate not the events of childhood, but rather the sensations and feelings. All the while, the tensions and concerns of the adult world quietly smolder in the background, offering a constant reminder of the limited longevity of childish innocence. The film is often disorienting and confusing, but couldn’t the same be said about the transition from childhood to adulthood? Con Viento en Pelo is an experience intended to be felt rather than understood.
Godard/Mielville and Sachs: Moviemaking & the Unruly World of Childhood
May 23, 2010 7:30 pm Union Docs 322 Union Ave., Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Leave it to Jean-Luc Godard and Anne Marie Miéville to figure out how to use television to reveal the latent brilliance of a child. Created for French television during the radical days of the late 1970s , “France/tour/detour/deux enfant” (1978) is an intimate, provocative and quotidian video essay that uses avant-garde cinema’s techniques in a visual experiment that will change anyone’s perception of the developing mind of a human being. Tonight Lynne Sachs will discuss the way that “France/tour…” influenced her own work as she reflects on the presence of childhood in her twenty-year film career. Beginning in her early twenties when the ambiguity of femininity seemed daunting and problematic to more recent years when motherhood has given her quick access to the conundrums of youth, Sachs, like Godard and Melville, ponders her relationship as an artist to this unavoidable eighteen year odyssey. Sachs will screen Photograph of Wind (3 min., 2001), Atalanta: 32 Years Later (5 min. 2006), and The Last Happy Day (38 min.) in their entirety along with brief scenes from The House of Science (1991) and Wind in Our Hair (2010).
I will be in Memphis on Saturday, April 24 at 6 pm for a “Lynne Sachs Retrospective” at the On Location: Memphis Film Festival at the Malco Ridgeway Theater (5853 Ridgeway Center Parkway). One of the films, The Last Happy Day, began in Memphis with the story of my family’s Hungarian cousin Alexander Lenard. I would love it if you all could join me that evening.
The other film, WIND IN OUR HAIR, was reviewed in the Commercial Appeal April 23, 2010
The Last Happy Day by Lynne Sachs ( 38 min. 2009)The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters between Lenard and her Uncle William Goodman of Memphis, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.
Premiere: New York Film Festival, 2009
“A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story … a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.” George Robinson, The Jewish Week
“Exquisite…Sachs reclaims (Lenard’s) dignity and purpose using letters, newsreel footage, and recreations of his environment as if to channel him back from the past.” Todd Lillethun – Program Director, Chicago Filmmakers
Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo by Lynne Sachs (42 min., 2010)
“Inspired by the writings of Julio Cortázar, whose work not only influenced a generation of Latin American writers but film directors such as Antonioni and Godard, Lynne Sachs’ Wind in Our Hair/Con viento en el pelo is an experimental narrative that explores the interior and exterior worlds of four early-teens, and how through play they come to discover themselves and their world. “Freedom takes us by the hand–it seizes the whole of our bodies,” a young narrator describes as they head towards the tracks. This is their kingdom, a place where–dawning fanciful masks, feather boas, and colorful scarves — the girls pose as statues and perform for each other and for passengers speeding by. Collaborating with Argentine filmmakers Leandro Listorti, Pablo Marin and Tomas Dotta, Sachs offers us a series of magical realist vignettes (rock/piedra, paper/papel, scissors/tijera), their cameras constantly shifting over their often-frenzied bodies. A collage of small guage formats and video, the 42-min lyric is enhanced further by its sonic textures that foreground the whispers and joyful screams of the young girls with the rhythms of a city and a reoccurring chorus of farmers and student protesters. Filmed on location in Buenos Aries during a period of social turmoil and strikes, Sachs and co-editor Sofia Gallisá have constructed a bilingual work that places equal value on the intimacy of the girls’ lives and their growing awareness of those social forces encroaching on their kingdom. “
– Carolyn Tennant, Media Arts Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, New York
“Wind in Our Hair moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces, into the skittering beyond of adolescence, exploding with anticipation and possibility. Argentine musician Juana Molina lends her ethereal sound to compliment the wild mix of formats and styles.” Todd Lillethun, Artistic Director, Chicago Filmmakers
New York University’s Kimmel Center will display Last Address, an exhibition eulogizing a generation of New York City artists who died of AIDS, by the New York-based brother and sister filmmakers Ira Sachs and Lynne Sachs, with designer Bernhard Blythe, Sofia Gallísa, and Andrei Alupului. The exhibition, comprising 13 translucent, color photographs (67 x 42 in.) will be installed on the exterior of the Kimmel Windows Gallery, located at La Guardia Place & West 3rd St. Last Address will open April 9 and remain on view through May 31, 2010.
The list of New York artists who died of AIDS over the last 30 years is overwhelming, and the loss immeasurable, asserts the filmmakers. Last Address uses photographs of the exteriors of the houses, apartment buildings, and lofts where 18 of these artists—Patrick Angus, Reinaldo Arenas, John D. Brockmeyer, Howard Brookner, Ethyl Eichelberger, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring, Hibiscus, Peter Hujar, Harry Kondoleon, Charles Ludlum, Jim Lyons, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cookie Mueller, Vito Russo, Assotto Saint, Ron Vawter, and David Wojnarowicz—were living at the time of their deaths to mark the disappearance of a generation. The installation is a remembrance of that loss, as well as an evocation of the continued presence of these artists’ work in the city’s culture.
“I moved to this city in 1984 and now that I’m in my 40s, I realize even more how I’ve had so few models for how to live a creative life as a gay man,” said Ira Sachs. “I’m winging it, on my own. So many of the men I might have learned from, read about in the papers, seen in the streets, met in a bar, at the theater, died from AIDS in the years before I might have known them. I was a kid. It seemed like it would last forever, but then it was all gone. I wish they were here.”
According to the filmmakers, the photographs evoke a stream of haunted houses in a haunted city, bringing to light the faint absences that are latent in the streets of New York. As the viewer moves closer, the windows will also reveal biographical and professional information that offers a greater sense of the life interrupted. The display is a companion piece to Ira Sachs’ short film, Last Address, which premiered at this year’s Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. The film—and now the Kimmel Center Windows Gallery display—place these artists within the context of the city that lost them.
“In my research and conversations for this piece,” adds Lynne Sachs, who is also an adjunct instructor in the Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at the Tisch School of the Arts, “I have become more and more awed by the sense of creative rapture that these artists brought to their every click of a camera, every brushstroke, every step onto the stage, every puckering of the lips. Often knowing early-on that their lives would never allow them to go gray in the dignity of old age, these artists lived their brief time on this earth to the fullest—offering to us their creative legacy to relish and remember.”
For further information, contact: Kimmel.galleries@nyu.edu; lynnesachs@gmail.com; or sachs.ira@mac.com.
LAST ADDRESS BIOGRAPHIES:
Patrick Angus
1953 – 1992
173 W. 88th St.
Patrick Angus was compelled to paint from childhood. Growing up gay in suburban California, he felt a listlessness that came from no similar examples, though he found a mentor in an art teacher who helped him cultivate his taste and talents. Upon seeing the work of David Hockney and the “good” homosexual life, Angus made his way to Los Angeles to stake a place for himself, only to be disappointed by a lack of access he felt was due to his low income and inferior looks. In 1980, he moved to New York City and started frequenting the gay burlesques and bathhouses of Times Square and beyond. He painted canvases of what he viewed as the “bad” gay life – cruising, hustling, darkness – full of shadowy figures sitting in dark porn theaters illuminated by the glow of the projector and the orange tips of their lit cigarettes. Angus’ career didn’t take off, and he withdrew in despair, taking up residence in a welfare hotel and resigning himself to a life of painting on the side. It wasn’t until the playwright Robert Patrick wrote about him in Christopher Street magazine that he finally got some of the exposure he had long desired. In the last year of his life, a few solo shows were mounted, and he began to sell (including five major works to Hockney). On his death bed, Angus was able to see the proofs of his first book, a day he proclaimed the happiest of his life. He was 38 years old.
Twenty-three years after Stonewall, gay people still have few honest images of themselves, and most of these occur in our literature. Gay men long to see themselves – in films, plays, television, paintings. They seldom do. Obviously, we must pictures ourselves. These are my pictures. – Patrick Angus
Reinaldo Arenas
1943 – 1990
328 W. 44th St.
Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban writer who, despite his early sympathy for the 1959 revolution, grew critical of and was later persecuted by the Cuban government. His significant body of work includes Pentagonia, a set of five novels on the “secret history” of post-revolutionary Cuba. Convicted in 1973 of “ideological deviation,” Arenas was imprisoned for three years in El Morro Castle, where he survived by writing letters to the wives and lovers of his fellow inmates. In 1980, he fled to Miami on the Mariel Boatlift, but, once there, he felt ostracized by the Cuban community and moved to New York City. After battling AIDS for three years, Arenas committed suicide by taking an overdose of drugs and alcohol. His autobiography, Before Night Falls, was published two years after his death, at the age of 47.
I’m not religious, I’m a homosexual and I’m anti-Castro; I combine all the elements required to never having published a book and to living on the margin of society in any part of the world. – Reinaldo Arenas
John D. Brockmeyer
1940 – 1990
157 York St., Staten Island
“The creepiest villain never in a Frankenstein movie,” John Brockmeyer was a 6’5″ titan of the stage, and a force in Charles Ludlam’s New York-based Ridiculous Theatrical Company throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Brockmeyer attended Ohio State University before going on to serve in the Navy. In 1970, he made his debut with Ludlam’s troupe, and quickly established himself as the go-to player for all villainous, dastardly and otherwise insidious personalities. Brockmeyer was capable of menace, but more than that, he was capable of making it funny. He died of AIDS, aged 50, at his parents’ house in his hometown of Columbus.
Howard Brookner
1954 – 1989
405-465 W. 23rd St.
Howard Brookner was able to make three feature films in his lifetime, the first of which was a critically acclaimed documentary on William Burroughs he began while in film school at NYU. He showed great potential from an early age, winning a New England prep school award for an avant-garde play he wrote as a young student at Phillips Exeter, which centered on a toilet. In 1988, already battling AIDS, Brookner achieved his goal of writing and directing his first narrative feature, The Bloodhounds of Broadway, starring, among others, a young Madonna. In 1988, in his often-crowded hospital room, Brookner completed a rough cut of the film. Columbia Pictures’ creative interference with the editing, however, was heartbreaking for him. His lover Brad Gooch said, “It was a very clear decision. Suddenly the movie wasn’t the movie he wanted to stay alive to see.” He died with his family around him, at the age of 34.
There’s so much beauty in the world. I suppose that’s what got me in trouble in the first place. – Howard Brookner, on a note taped to his fridge throughout his last year.
Ethyl Eichelberger
1945 – 1990
157 York St., Staten Island, NY
Towering over his audiences even before he put on his trademark stiletto heels and skyscraper wig, Ethyl Eichelberger had a breathless Downtown career, creating nearly forty plays that often explored the struggles of strong women in history, literature and myth – from Medea to Mary Todd Lincoln. Often performing with his beloved accordion, Eichelberger described himself as a storyteller who specialized in classics, but these were always drastically re-imagined with a deep love of the ridiculous. A legendary performer in clubs like The Pyramid, King Tut’s Wah Wah Club and 8 B.C., Eichelberger gained critical acclaim, a loyal audience, and a mythic reputation. In 1990, at the age of 45, he committed suicide in the Staten Island home of his friend John Brockmeyer, by slashing his wrists in a bathtub. Some claim PS122 is gently haunted by his spirit. One could also go to this homepage here to get spiritual help.
Isis knows it hasn’t been easy! / It’s a lot of hard work being a queen! / And there are factions out there who don’t like what I represent! / Tough noogies! I have a right to be here! – Ethyl Eichelberger, from his play Nefertiti
Félix González-Torres
1957 – 1996
405-465 W. 23rd St.
Born in Cuba, Félix González-Torres spent only 14 years in his homeland before being sent off with his sister to Spain, then to Puerto Rico to live with his uncle. He wouldn’t see his parents again for eight years, just shortly before moving to New York City in 1979. González-Torres’ work, often conceptual in nature, concerned itself with inclusiveness, participation, engagement – sharing. Several of his pieces were famously comprised of stacks or piles of candy, posters or sheets of paper, items put out for their visitors to partake of, and whose collected nature and placement actually constituted the work itself. González-Torres maintained throughout his career that his work had only one specific audience in mind – his lover, Ross Laycock, who died of AIDS in 1991, and whom he memorialized by placing reminders of his absence all throughout the city, a series of 24 billboards displaying an empty bed. González-Torres died at the age of 38, in Miami, Florida.
Keith Haring
1958 – 1990
542 LaGuardia Place
An iconic and prolific artist who strived to create truly public art, Keith Haring drew and painted a singular kind of graphic expression based on the primacy of the line. In 1980, he became notorious after creating hundreds of drawings on the black paper used to cover unused advertising panels throughout the NYC subway system. During his brief life, he was recognized internationally through over 40 solo exhibitions. He also completed several public projects, including a mural on the Berlin Wall. In 1989, he established the Keith Haring Foundation, dedicated to working with AIDS organizations and children’s programs, and which now also strives to expand the audience for his work. Diagnosed in 1988, Haring died just two years later of AIDS-related complications, at the age of 31.
My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic. – Keith Haring
Hibiscus
1949 – 1982
622 Greenwich St.
In 1967, an iconic photo was taken during the March on the Pentagon of a brave, peace-loving teenager in a turtleneck sweater putting flowers into the gun barrels of military police. When that kid grew up, he changed his name from George Harris to Hibiscus. ”He was fascinating even as a small child,” said his mother. ”All the other kids acted out his fantasies. He directed Cleopatra and used the garden hose as the serpent.” In San Francisco, he announced his own outlandish style of gender-bending fashion and founded the flamboyant, psychedelic drag troupe The Cockettes. With productions like Journey to the Center of Uranus and Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma, Hibisicus called for a free theater of spiritual liberation. His second group, Angels of Light, included the likes of his lover Allen Ginsberg in drag. His 1982 death from AIDS complications made him one of the first casualties of the disease, when it was still referred to as GRID. He was 33.
Peter Hujar
1934 – 1987
189 Second Ave
In the ’70s and ’80s, Peter Hujar photographed the wrought underbelly of Manhattan’s Westside with the eye of a classically trained portrait painter whose palette was restricted to, but not limited by, all of the gradations of black and white. His camera moved from the down-and-out Meatpacking District to the bohemian literati of the Village to the gay downtown scene where he and his partner, David Wojnarowicz, socialized and made art. Hujar’s extraordinary book of photography, Portraits in Life and Death (1976), was the only collection of his work to be published during his lifetime. Friend and fellow photographer Nan Goldin described his images as “the closest I ever came to experiencing what it is to inhabit male flesh.” He died at the age of 53.
Harry Kondoleon
1955 – 1994
405-465 W. 23rd St.
Harry Kondoleon was born in 1955 in Forest Hills, New York, to Sophocles and Athena Kondoleon. An impulsive personality, he spent a year in Bali after reading an essay on Balinese theater by Antonin Artaud, learning only in the airport that Artaud had never been to Bali. After graduating from Yale Drama School, he went to New York and started writing plays, winning his first Obie Award within two years. Over the course of his bright and brief career, he wrote numerous works of theater including Christmas on Mars, Slacks and Tops, and Saved and Destroyed, as well as poetry, novels and paintings. In 1993, now sick with AIDS, he worked hard to finish his last novel, Diary of a Lost Boy, partially “as a personal achievement to show I wasn’t dead.” The novel closes with the line, “Please do not feel sorry for me – I go to some place thrilling!” He died at the age of 39.
Charles Ludlam
1943 – 1987
55 Morton St
Charles Ludlam grew up in Queens, New York, just a few subway stops from Greenwich Village, and the heart of Gay America. At twenty-four, he founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, where he wrote, directed and performed in almost every production for the next two decades, often with Everett Quinton, his life partner and muse, by his side. Renowned for drag, high comedy, melodrama, satire, precise literary references, gender politics, sexual frolic, and a multitude of acting styles, the Ridiculous Theater guaranteed a kind of biting humor that could both sting and tickle. His many plays included Turds in Hell, Der Ring Gott Farblonjet, a riff on Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Bluebeard, and The Mystery of Irma Vep, his most popular play, and a performer’s tour-de-force. Ludlam continued working until almost the day he died of PCP pneumonia, just three months after his AIDS diagnosis. He was 44.
Most gay theater either apologizes or pleads for mercy. What I do is not gay theater — it’s something much worse. I don’t ask to be tolerated. I don’t mind being intolerable. – Charles Ludlam
Jim Lyons
1960 – 2007
75A Willow St., Brooklyn
Passionate about acting and editing, Jim Lyons embraced the art of cinema in all its transformative aspects. His best known dramatic roles were in Poison, a seminal film in the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, and his brazen interpretation of the life of artist David Wojnarowicz in the movie Postcards from America. But it was as an editor, his life-long métier, that Lyons expressed his keen understanding of the movies and his love for the world of ideas, working often with the filmmaker Todd Haynes on works such as Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, and Far from Heaven. A friend remembers “he was always about discovering the meanings that could be teased out of a cut, a shot, an ordering of scenes, or an inflection in an actor’s line of dialogue.” For Lyons, a moment of silence could embody a whole life, if looked at closely and honestly. Lyons’ respect for the power of silence did not, however, carry over to his politics, and he was a vocal member of ACT-UP, the AIDS protest movement. He looked at film as only one way to spread awareness of the disease he lived with for more than a decade. He died at the age of 46.
Robert Mapplethorpe
1946 – 1989
35 W. 23rd St
While exploring and documenting New York’s underground S&M scene in the ’70s, Robert Mapplethorpe began to create his signature large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits of naked men. These elegant, precise images triggered some of the most vociferous debates around art and obscenity in the 20th Century. Bridging notions of physical beauty from classical antiquity with a blossoming contemporary gay sexuality, his photos exuded a stark homosexual eroticism that created shockwaves throughout ‘80s America. Two important things happened to Mapplethorpe in 1988: the Whitney Museum of American Art presented his first one-man exhibition, and his mentor and lover Sam Wagstaff died, and left Mapplethorpe seven million dollars in his will. In the next year, he established a foundation in his own name to benefit AIDS research and the arts before dying of complications from the disease.
I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before … I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them. – Robert Mapplethorpe
Cookie Mueller
1949 – 1989
285 Bleecker St
Cookie Mueller was an actress, writer, mother, fashion designer, and go-go dancer. In the 1970s she performed in the John Waters’ film extravaganzas Pink Flamingos and Female Troubles in their shared hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. In Waters’ words, she was “a witch-doctor, art-hag and, above all a goddess.” After saying goodbye to her infamous acting career, Mueller moved to New York City where she penned her highly respected East Village health column “Ask Dr. Mueller.” Shortly before her death from AIDS, at the age of 40, Mueller wrote these words of advice to her readers:
Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free. – Cookie Mueller
Vito Russo
1946 – 1990
401 W. 22nd (building gone)
In the 1970s, Vito Russo traveled across the country giving lectures on the depiction of gay characters in both Hollywood and foreign films. Out of this experience, he wrote The Celluloid Closet in 1981, a groundbreaking study of the representation of gays in the movies. In addition to his work as a scholar, Russo was a fearless leader in the gay liberation movement and a vocal AIDS activist. He co-founded GLAAD, the organization which now presents the Vito Russo Award every year to an openly gay or lesbian member of the media community for their commitment to combating homophobia, as well as ACT UP, the media savvy AIDS protest group famous for their “Silence Equals Death” pronouncement. Russo was 44 when he died, and it is claimed that some of his ashes rest inside the walls of the historic Castro Theater in the heart of San Francisco.
Hollywood, that great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people…and gay people what to think about themselves. – Vito Russo
Assotto Saint
1957 – 1994
360 W. 22nd St.
Assotto Saint (born Yves Lubin) was a Haitian-born poet, playwright and activist whose explicitly black themes made him one of the most important literary voices in the burgeoning gay literary movement of the late 20th Century. To his fellow Haitians, who had also directly experienced the ugliness of the Francois Duvalier era, he offered a spiritual sanctuary, as “a grand, tall queen” who could be both big brother and mother. In addition to his work as a writer, Saint was a passionate advocate for the writings of others in his community, creating his own Galiens Press, and editing The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets. During his lifetime, he was able to publish two collections of his own writing, Stations and Wishing for Wings. Honoring him for their annual literary award, LAMDA described Saint as “one of the fiercest spirits ever to grace the planet.” He died at the age of 36.
Ron Vawter
1948 – 1994
285 Bleecker St
Ron Vawter was the quintessential downtown performer and a founding member of The Wooster Group, an internationally known theater collective based in NYC. He brought to the world of the avant-garde a unique combination of life experiences, including training as a Green Beret in the US Special Forces and his work as a chaplain. In the words of the Village Voice, “Vawter’s resolution of the tensions between theatrical passion and military precision….have not only helped make the Wooster Group a controversial and intellectually assaultive ensemble but Vawter himself a legendary and explosively controlled actor.” In 1993, Vawter, who also appeared in films like Swoon, Philadelphia, Silence of the Lambs, and sex, lies, and videotape, wrote and peformed in his final play, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, a one man show in which he explored the themes of sexual identity through these two infamous men, both of whom died of AIDS. Vawter died one year later on a plane from Zurich to New York, of an AIDS-related heart attack, at the age of 45.
David Wojnarowicz
1954 – 1992
189 2nd Ave
Throughout his brief life, David Wojnarowicz waged a revolt against death. Through his public excavation of his fantasies and above all his dreams, which he systematically wrote down, he created a revolutionary language of art – one that embraced writing, painting, film, installation, sculpture, photography, and performance art. From his teenage years as a hustler in Times Square to his cross-country hitchhiking escapades, Wojnarowicz sought a visceral version of American history that would embrace the spirit and the body of a gay identity. In the late 1980s, after he was diagnosed with AIDS, Wojnarowicz became a highly politicized artist, entangling himself in national public debates about medical research and funding, morality, and censorship. An incendiary collection of his writings, Close to the Knives, was first published in 1991, one year before his death at the age of 37.
I am shouting my invisible words. I am getting so weary. I am growing tired. I am waving at you from here. I am crawling and looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. — David Wojnarowicz
Working since the mid-1980s, variously on lyrical formal shorts and long form experimental documentary, Lynne Sachs’ body of film and video work has explored the relationships between individual memory and experience in the context of large historical forces. Foregrounding personal history and autobiography, Sachs exalts the intimate gesture as perhaps the most heroic of poetic and political acts. With a keen grasp on cultural theory and media history, Sachs’s films avoid academicism in their celebration of life and mindful political engagement, presenting complex pictures of the world with lyrical grace and even joy.
Lynne Sachs: States of Belonging is a four-part retrospective of the filmmaker’s work, presented as a collaboration between San Francisco Cinematheque, Pacific Film Archive, ATA’s Other Cinema and Oddball Film + Video. The series in accompanied by a limited-edition monograph—available at screenings—featuring original writings by Susan Gerhardt, Kathy Geritz, Lucas Hilderbrand and Bill Nichols.
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortazar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Latin America, here’s the world debut of Wind in Our Hair, Lynne Sachs’ experimental narrative about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, the 42-min. lyric is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine sociopolitical unrest. Shot with 16mm, Super 8mm, and Regular 8mm film and video, the rites of passage proceed from train tracks to sidewalks, into costume stores, kitchens, and into backyards in the heart of today’s Buenos Aires. PLUS: In her House of Science: a museum of false facts, Sachs 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—private, public, and idealized space—without wholly inhabiting any of them. The film explores society’s conceptions of woman through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found-footage and voice-over. ALSO Lynne’s Atalanta: 32 Years Later; Noa, Noa; and Photograph of Wind.
Wind in Our Hair (Con viento en el pelo) (2010); Atalanta: 32 Years Later (2006); Noa, Noa (2006, with Noa Street-Sachs); Photograph of Wind (2001); The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991)
States of Belonging, program two
Sunday, April 11 at 8:00pm
Oddball Films
275 Capp St. San Francisco http://www.oddballfilm.com/
“10 Short Films by Lynne Sachs (1986 -2010)”
Curated by Stephen Parr
Lynne Sachs short works reverberate with the distilled quality of poetic moments. From her early work in 16mm film in the 1980s through her later works utilizing the immediacy of videotape, the texture of 8mm film and expanded pallet of digital editing techniques, Sachs’ works celebrate the ordinary and the profound, mapping and defining unmined territories of the human psyche. Elegantly fusing her varied influences of literature, painting and collage into a inviting yet deep and personal space these shorts bristle with the feeling of newly discovered modes of perception and expressions of movement in time. (Stephen Parr)
Still Life With Woman and Four Objects (1986); Drawn and Quartered (1986) Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987); Window Work ( 2001); The Small Ones (. 2006); Atalanta (2006); Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008); Cuadro por Cuardo en Montevideo (with Mark Street, 2009); XY Chromosome Project (2006-2009); Task of the Translator (2010)
States of Belonging, program three
Tuesday, April 13 at 7:30 pm
Pacific Film Archive
2575 Bancroft Way
Between College and Telegraph, Berkeley
“Dotted Lines: Women Filmmakers Connect the Past and the Present”
Curated by Kathy Geritz
Lynne Sachs has been making films for twenty-five years, shifting between short, lyrical works and longer experimental documentaries, all distinguished by her beautiful camerawork and poetic associations. Her most recent film, The Last Happy Day, is a portrait of a distant cousin, Sandor Lenard, whose life was shaped by war and marked by his unusual pursuits. A Jewish doctor living in Hungary, he fled the Nazis in 1938, relocating to Italy. After he later moved to Brazil, he translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. His story is revealed through letters and interviews, punctuated by scenes from Winnie the Pooh acted out by Sachs’s children and their friends. Which Way Is East, made fifteen years earlier, chronicles Sachs’s trip to Vietnam to visit her sister Dana; the pair traveled together from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Impressionistic yet keenly observed, the film reveals details of life during and after the Vietnam War, interspersed with Vietnamese proverbs and voice-over remarks by both Lynne and Dana as well as Vietnamese friends. Both films are part of a larger series, I Am Not a War Photographer, and along with the short cine-poem Tornado, they provide unique perspectives on the personal impact of war.(Kathy Gertiz)
Which Way is East (1994); The Last Happy Day (2009); Tornado (2001)
States of Belonging, program four
Wednesday, April 14 at 7:30 pm
SF Cinematheque at California College of the Arts
1111 Eighth Street (near 16th), San Francisco
The Last Happy Day and Investigations of a Flame
Curated by Steve Polta
A frequent theme in Sachs’ work is the aftermath of war and its lingering effects on multi-generational families. Investigation of a Flame is a work of poetic investigative journalism which explores a 1968 Vietnam War protest in suburban Baltimore. Blending archival footage of the event, period reportage and contemporary interviews with participants Daniel and Philip Berrigan, the film examines the resonances of the act over the succeeding decades. A more personal work, 2009’s The Last Happy Day portrays a distant cousin of Sachs, Sandor Lenard. A Jewish writer and doctor, Lenard fled the Nazis and, post-war, worked with the US Army to identify human remains. Later, while living in self-imposed exile in the Brazilian jungle, Lenard achieved brief fame for translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin. Incorporating excerpts from Lenard’s later letters to his estranged family, and on-screen performances by her own children, the film stands as a moving tribute to quiet heroism. Also screening: Sachs’ 2007 “collaborative update” of Chris Marker’s 1972 short Three Cheers for the Whale. (Steve Polta)
The Last Happy Day (16mm on video, 38 min. 2009); Investigation of a Flame (45 min. color and B&W, 2001); Three Cheers for the Whale
by Chris Mark in collaboration with Lynne Sachs (17 minutes / color, english version, 2007)
