All posts by lynne

New Films by Lynne Sachs Reviewed in Chicago Reader

Chicago Reader
The Films of Lynne Sachs
Review by Andrea Gronvall
March 12, 2010
Family, history, and oblivion pervade these two short works. With the experimental documentary Last Happy Day (2009, 39 min.) Sachs reconstructs the life of a distant relative, Hungarian doctor Sandor Lenard, who escaped the Holocaust, settled in Brazil, and, among other things, translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. Sachs’s daughters and their friends read from this text and and recite bits of Lenard’s biography, providing a piquant tonal contrast to the archival footage and the interviews with his son and his second wife. A visit to Buenos Aires and short stories by Julio Cortazar inspired the dreamy narrative Wind in Our Hair (2009, 42 min.), which deals with sisterhood, children’s games, passing trains, and brief encounters.

Otherzine Review of Experiments in Documentary Issue of Millennium Film Journal #51

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Looking Glass

by Gerry Fialka

19 Feb 2010

[Reviewed: ‘Millennium Film Journal’ #51]

How do you make art that is not art? Duchamp did it with readymade meta-cognitive creations. He helped spawn motionless dance, invisible art, silent music (John Cage’s 4’33”), the unreadable book (James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and George Manupelli’s unwatchable Film For Hooded Projector. And why make art that’s not art? That’s a good question. I wouldn’t want to ruin it with an answer. But learning how to cope with the hidden effects of what we invent may help. Duchamp sparked awareness of the sense-ratio-shift caused by inventions. He morphed the visual experience into the conceptual experience. Marshall McLuhan probed that “why” with his “media fast” proposition. It grew out of Ezra Pound’s “artists are the antennae of the race, broadcasting the hidden environments of inventions so we can cope with them.”

How do you make a doc that’s not a doc? How do you make an experimental film that is not one? How and why do moving image experimenters and documentarians combine their genres? Howard Guttenplan’s Millennium Film Journal (Spring/Summer 2009, #51) deeply penetrates these questions and creative cross-fertilizations. Guest editors, Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs have gathered innovators to fill 100 pages of insights. Jill Godmilow’s advice to abandon “truth claims, intimacy and satisfying forms” recalls genre-bending pioneer Luis Bunuel’s “I have always been on the side of those who seek the truth, but I part ways with them when they think they have found it.” Reading MFJ raises new questions. Richard Fung queries, “What kind of truths can be communicated better in documentary than in fiction – and vice versa?” This echoes Faulkner’s “Sometimes the best fiction is more true than journalism.” The essays provoke us to examine the motives and consequences of these media practitioners.

Here are my favorites:

1) Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner “unmask” the genre with essential observations on Bunuel’s Las Hurdes, which “will always stick in the craw of the powers that be.” How do you make an experimental doc that’s not an experimental doc? Luis did. His “thank God I’m an atheist” embraces contradiction. Larsen and Millner’s astute word choice “radical in-betweeness” mirrors McLuhan’s axiom “the gap is where the action is.”

2) Deborah Stratman astonishes with keen intelligence. She out-quotes me with Straub, Godard, Bunuel and Trinh Min-Ha. But it’s the Kafka axiom that ice-picks our foreheads with “what are we reading for?” She asks the reader to send her recommendations of new ways to see and think about the world. Stratman is not afraid to use all caps in a “LAWLESS PROPOSITION.”

3) Mark Street’s grassroots essay is a needed relief from the wild sea of polemic discourse. His simple story of a parents’ party for school kids communicates warmly the concerns of intention in the creative process. The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything as well as they can. Street lays it on the line with “it’s hard to communicate…I often find myself tongue-tied.” (Artists often aspire to make that which words can’t describe.) The honesty blossoms from unknowing into epiphany, much like Hilderbrand’s brilliant introduction entitled “Contradiction, Uncertainty, Change.” “The aesthetic of ambiguity” recharges Robert Dobbs’ “Ambiguity is a sign of human maturity.”

4) Hilderbrand and Sachs provide a chance to ponder the many connections between reality and experiments in documentaries. I recently interviewed Jay Rosenblatt, who said Chris Marker was an important influence because of “how he imagined Marker made Sans Soleil.” Rosenblatt could read and study all about Marker’s background, process and intentions till the cows come home. But in the long run, it’s how the perception resonates that’s vital.

What does it become when pressed to an extreme? That’s the fourth question of McLuhan’s Tetrad – the reversal. Kierkegaard wrote “Life can only be understood backwards, but we must live it forward,” which reverberates with Lynne Sachs’ remembrance “When I was six years old, I would lie on the living room couch, hang my head over the edge, let my hair swing against the floor and watch the evening news upside-down.”

5) Liza Johnson articulates the potential in her “small gesture of making the film (South of Ten)” with the statement “nothing is inevitable.” Johnson’s use of the word “inevitable” reminded me that MFJ’s inspired exploration of moving image art is, indeed, in the printed word medium, instead of being a film. This flips Hollis Frampton, who once said that one should lecture on film in the dark.

The word “inevitable” was also used by Marshall McLuhan, who probed form and content issues. He wrote “It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can get through.” Millennium Film Journal #51 provides that inevitable looking glass.

What does the experimental documentary flip into when pushed to an extreme? How do we develop the skills to analyze this question? Can we master the ever-changing language of experimental documentaries so we can assimilate them into our total culture heritage? Since 1995, I have curated such films in my Documental series via Chris Marker’s words: “in the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints, and mirrorlike fugues. Out of the these juxtaposed memories is born a fictional memory.” Or it’s like Guy Maddin says: “manufactured memory.” By hybridizing two genres, filmmakers have accumulated images that “can have conversation among themselves – or better yet, a musical conversation that sings to us about the differences between past and present, witness and participant.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum.

THE END

by Gerry Fialka

19 Feb 2010

[Reviewed: ‘Millennium Film Journal’ #51]

How do you make art that is not art? Duchamp did it with readymade meta-cognitive creations. He helped spawn motionless dance, invisible art, silent music (John Cage’s 4’33”), the unreadable book (James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) and George Manupelli’s unwatchable Film For Hooded Projector. And why make art that’s not art? That’s a good question. I wouldn’t want to ruin it with an answer. But learning how to cope with the hidden effects of what we invent may help. Duchamp sparked awareness of the sense-ratio-shift caused by inventions. He morphed the visual experience into the conceptual experience. Marshall McLuhan probed that “why” with his “media fast” proposition. It grew out of Ezra Pound’s “artists are the antennae of the race, broadcasting the hidden environments of inventions so we can cope with them.”

How do you make a doc that’s not a doc? How do you make an experimental film that is not one? How and why do moving image experimenters and documentarians combine their genres? Howard Guttenplan’s Millennium Film Journal (Spring/Summer 2009, #51) deeply penetrates these questions and creative cross-fertilizations. Guest editors, Lucas Hilderbrand and Lynne Sachs have gathered innovators to fill 100 pages of insights. Jill Godmilow’s advice to abandon “truth claims, intimacy and satisfying forms” recalls genre-bending pioneer Luis Bunuel’s “I have always been on the side of those who seek the truth, but I part ways with them when they think they have found it.” Reading MFJ raises new questions. Richard Fung queries, “What kind of truths can be communicated better in documentary than in fiction – and vice versa?” This echoes Faulkner’s “Sometimes the best fiction is more true than journalism.” The essays provoke us to examine the motives and consequences of these media practitioners.

Here are my favorites:

1) Ernie Larsen and Sherry Millner “unmask” the genre with essential observations on Bunuel’s Las Hurdes, which “will always stick in the craw of the powers that be.” How do you make an experimental doc that’s not an experimental doc? Luis did. His “thank God I’m an atheist” embraces contradiction. Larsen and Millner’s astute word choice “radical in-betweeness” mirrors McLuhan’s axiom “the gap is where the action is.”

2) Deborah Stratman astonishes with keen intelligence. She out-quotes me with Straub, Godard, Bunuel and Trinh Min-Ha. But it’s the Kafka axiom that ice-picks our foreheads with “what are we reading for?” She asks the reader to send her recommendations of new ways to see and think about the world. Stratman is not afraid to use all caps in a “LAWLESS PROPOSITION.”

3) Mark Street’s grassroots essay is a needed relief from the wild sea of polemic discourse. His simple story of a parents’ party for school kids communicates warmly the concerns of intention in the creative process. The Balinese have no word for art, they do everything as well as they can. Street lays it on the line with “it’s hard to communicate…I often find myself tongue-tied.” (Artists often aspire to make that which words can’t describe.) The honesty blossoms from unknowing into epiphany, much like Hilderbrand’s brilliant introduction entitled “Contradiction, Uncertainty, Change.” “The aesthetic of ambiguity” recharges Robert Dobbs’ “Ambiguity is a sign of human maturity.”

4) Hilderbrand and Sachs provide a chance to ponder the many connections between reality and experiments in documentaries. I recently interviewed Jay Rosenblatt, who said Chris Marker was an important influence because of “how he imagined Marker made Sans Soleil.” Rosenblatt could read and study all about Marker’s background, process and intentions till the cows come home. But in the long run, it’s how the perception resonates that’s vital.

What does it become when pressed to an extreme? That’s the fourth question of McLuhan’s Tetrad – the reversal. Kierkegaard wrote “Life can only be understood backwards, but we must live it forward,” which reverberates with Lynne Sachs’ remembrance “When I was six years old, I would lie on the living room couch, hang my head over the edge, let my hair swing against the floor and watch the evening news upside-down.”

5) Liza Johnson articulates the potential in her “small gesture of making the film (South of Ten)” with the statement “nothing is inevitable.” Johnson’s use of the word “inevitable” reminded me that MFJ’s inspired exploration of moving image art is, indeed, in the printed word medium, instead of being a film. This flips Hollis Frampton, who once said that one should lecture on film in the dark.

The word “inevitable” was also used by Marshall McLuhan, who probed form and content issues. He wrote “It’s inevitable that the world-pool of electronic information movement will toss us about like corks on a stormy sea, but if we keep our cool during the descent into the maelstrom, studying the process as it happens to us and what we can do about it, we can get through.” Millennium Film Journal #51 provides that inevitable looking glass.

What does the experimental documentary flip into when pushed to an extreme? How do we develop the skills to analyze this question? Can we master the ever-changing language of experimental documentaries so we can assimilate them into our total culture heritage? Since 1995, I have curated such films in my Documental series via Chris Marker’s words: “in the fashion of a musical composition, with recurrent themes, counterpoints, and mirrorlike fugues. Out of the these juxtaposed memories is born a fictional memory.” Or it’s like Guy Maddin says: “manufactured memory.” By hybridizing two genres, filmmakers have accumulated images that “can have conversation among themselves – or better yet, a musical conversation that sings to us about the differences between past and present, witness and participant.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum.

THE END

http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/?issueid=23&article_id=99

Lynne Sachs at Chicago Filmmakers

Chicago Filmmakers logo

http://www.chicagofilmmakers.org

Chicago Filmmakers
Friday, March 12th, 2010 – 8:00 PM
5243 N. Clark St., 2nd Floor

NEW FILMS BY LYNNE SACHS
TALES FROM SOUTH AMERICA
Filmmaker In Person! Jewish-Hungarian doctor Sandor Lenard fled Budapest shortly before World War II for the safe distance of Brazil. He abandoned his medical practice and took up translating “Winnie the Pooh” in Latin, which soon became an international bestseller. Filmmaker Lynne Sachs discovered him only recently through letters to an uncle, and pieced together a sense of his life and personality in the exquisite new film LAST HAPPY DAY (2009, 39 min.). Her daughters are enlisted to dramatize bits of his life, and Sachs sets out to reclaim a bit of his dignity and purpose using letters, newsreel footage, and recreations of Sandor’s environment as if to channel him back from the past.

Argentine author Julio Cortazar is the inspiration for WIND IN OUR HAIR (2009, 42 min.), which loosely interprets stories in the collection “Final de Juego” against the backdrop of social and political unrest in contemporary Argentina. In her first attempt at narrative filmmaking, Sachs still retains her associative, playful structure and documentary eye. Four young women, again played by Sach’s daughters and family friends, grow restless at home and begin to make their way through Buenos Aires in search of excitement and eventually to a fateful meeting at the train tracks near their home. The film moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces and 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.

The Task of the Translator

Latin student hand at window

The Task of the Translator (10 min., 2010)

Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of  a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses.  Second, she witnesses  a group of Classics scholars confronted  with the  haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.

“In The Task of the Translator, Lynne Sachs turns her original, probing eye to the ways in which we struggle to put words to the horrifying realities of War.  In her subtle, trademark shifting between the intimate, personal space of a few individuals and the cavernous, echoing ambiguity of larger, moral questions, Sachs stakes out unsettling territory concerning what it means–what it feels like–to be made into unwitting voyeurs of Mankind’s most grotesque doings.   At the same time we find she is also talking, with startling deftness, about the way that all artists are, in the end, engaged in the task of the translator: stuck with the impossible task of rendering imponderables, unutterables, and unsayables, into neat representations to be consumed, digested, perhaps discarded.  We are not, however, left despairing; a pair of hands, caught again and again in the beautiful motion of gesticulation, is far from helpless or mute.  This image captures, rather, the supreme eloquence of the effort to translate, and the poignant hope represented by this pungent, memorable film itself.”      — Shira Nayman,   author of the novels The Listener and Awake in the Dark,

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

3RD ANNUAL EXPERIMENTAL LECTURE: Ken Jacobs ” CUCARACHA CINEMA”

jacobs_2 poster

 

 

 

 

NYU Cinema Studies, NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, and NYU Undergraduate Film and Television present
The 3rd Annual Experimental Lecture

Ken Jacobs ” CUCARACHA CINEMA”
Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2010
6:15 p.m.   FREE

Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
721 Broadway, 6th Fl.
Michelson Theater

 

“Most movies just make the time pass. Jacobs suspends time. He holds it up to the light so you can see it, letting it flicker for us a little longer. Finally, you see everything you have been missing.” (Manhola Dargis, New York Times)

“Ken Jacobs’ teaching was ecstatic. It was like a volcano.”
(J. Hoberman, former student and film critic for The Village Voice.)

 

 

Ken Jacobs has been making avant-garde film in New York City since the late 1950s. He is the director of “Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son” (1969, USA),” Star Spangled to Death”(2004, USA), and numerous other cinematic visions on celluloid and tape. Jacobs, who taught for many years in SUNY Binghampton’s renowned program on avant-garde film, coined the term paracinema in the early 1970s, referring to cinema experiences provided by means outside of standard cinema technology.

“It’s not natural for anybody with a sex drive to be hopeless. In fact it’s a contradiction in terms, or something. However, we can’t consider Obama’s betrayal -protecting the Bush-Cheney secrets, expanding the war/s, fucking over the peons while rewarding Wall Street thugs, etc, etc- to be leading towards anything other than ka-boom!   Sexy Ken is not hopeless. Because my interest in cinema has much to do with 3D perception I need to learn more about cockroaches, the likely inheritors of the planet,. I’m tuning my art to accommodate cockroach concerns. You don’t catch me whining; I adapt, and Cucaracha Cinema is clearly the next big thing. We’ll intersperse short and long works during the talk and the audience should feel free to say or ask anything — but stick to art, to the discussion of its intrinsic dynamics and we’ll let the rest of the world go by. There will be new works that require “free-viewing” in 3D.” (Ken Jacobs)

Lynne Sachs presents three films in Pamplona, Spain

Last Happy Day still of childupsidedown copy

Still from “The Last Happy Day” by Lynne Sachs

A filmmaker who started work in the second half of the Eighties, Lynne Sachs effortlessly saunters between film, video, the internet and gallery installations. Principally concerned with the involvement of individuals in History, Lynne Sachs’ films often adopt the film essay form to explore the interrelationship between collective and subjective memory. Her films mix the most experimental and poetic of approaches with live recording, archive material and a range of narrative sources, all with the same air of ease.

To celebrate her participation on the Punto de Vista 2010 jury, we would like to make the most of the occasion to present two of her films: Investigation of a Flame and The Last Happy Days. Both films approach periods of war (Vietnam and the Second World War, respectively) to probe the responses of specific individuals in the face of such circumstances. Both leave the public wondering about their own ability to react in today’s no-less belligerent climate. And as the cherry on the sundae, the session is to be brought to a close with Three Cheers for the Whale, the English-language version of a 1972 Chris Marker film (Vive la baleine) which Lynne Sachs personally oversaw in 2007 and which has never been screened in Spain before. For Punto de Vista, the honour of presenting all these films for the first time in Spain is more than just a simple luxury.

Lynne in Punta de Vista

Blogs and Docs interview with Lynne Sachs (Spanish)

Blogs and Docs interview by Pablo Marin with Lynne Sachs: http://www.blogsandocs.com/?p=216 anan

Su estilo cinematográfico, siempre en movimiento, se ubica en la encrucijada del cine documental, experimental y de ensayo autobiográfico al mismo tiempo que transciende cualquiera de estas categorías preestablecidas. Territorio estético en constante tensión, difícil de explicar con palabras, su visión creativa se expande de fotograma a fotograma como esos organismos microscópicos capaces de multiplicar su tamaño y forma en cuestión de minutos. Siempre rigurosa… siempre aleatoria. Y renovadora, claro.

Trabajando con, contra y más allá de la realidad. Una entrevista con Lynne Sachs.

A mitad de camino entre la teoría y la práctica, la obra de la cineasta, profesora, comisaria y escritora norteamericana Lynne Sachs es prácticamente única. ¿Única? Sí. Su estilo cinematográfico, siempre en movimiento, se ubica en la encrucijada del cine documental, experimental y de ensayo autobiográfico al mismo tiempo que transciende cualquiera de estas categorías preestablecidas. Territorio estético en constante tensión, difícil de explicar con palabras, su visión creativa se expande de fotograma a fotograma como esos organismos microscópicos capaces de multiplicar su tamaño y forma en cuestión de minutos. Siempre rigurosa… siempre aleatoria. Y renovadora, claro.

Durante el pasado mes de abril, Lynne Sachs visitó Buenos Aires bajo el marco de la nueva edición del Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (Bafici 2007) para presentar tres de sus películas: Which Way is East (1994), Investigation of a Flame (2001) y States of UnBelonging (2005). Además, ofreció como actividad paralela un workshop dedicado a su obra y a los caminos paralelos del documental.

En medio de la catarata de imágenes profundamente evocativas que caracterizan su cine (esto es, en completo estado de exaltación y trance), tuve la posibilidad de charlar, junto al programador del Bafici Leandro Listorti, con una de las documentalistas más encantadoramente atípicas de los Estados Unidos.(1)

Venís presentando este workshop a lo largo del mundo, ¿cómo surgió la idea?

Lo que me atrajo de la idea de preparar una suerte de clase única fue tratar de ver la realización de trabajos que respondan a la realidad en dos maneras diferentes. Cada vez que quieres interpretar algo que sucede alrededor tuyo, lo haces desde un lugar interior y de otro exterior. Y la parte interesante es donde esos dos lugares convergen. La primera parte es aquella en la que decidí mostrar pequeños trabajos que hice que pienso que son expresiones directas de algunas observaciones muy pequeñas dotadas de una carga visual electrizante que presencié a lo largo de mi vida. Y luego esa expresión inmediata o articulación volcada hacia el cine. La segunda parte trata sobre la continuación de este interior pero sumándole el exterior. De manera que son respuestas inmediatas al mundo visible. En conjunción con nuestra manera de darnos cuenta de la dialéctica, de esas tensiones que nos rodean para mí como la intersección entre un reconocimiento personal y una conciencia más pública.

¿Cómo llegaste a la definición de que “no soy una fotógrafa de guerra”?

Surgió al darme cuenta de que había hecho varias películas que trataban el tema de la guerra, no era que no lo notara, pero en un momento lo vi más claro, en cierta manera la idea apareció como lo hizo con mi definición de que no soy agnóstica. Dando una idea de lo que no soy, creo que le doy un giro a lo que soy. De hecho el 99.9% de la gente no es un/a fotógrafo/a de guerra. Diciendo eso, estoy diciendo que soy una persona común y corriente.

Todas tus películas, incluidas esas que mostraste en el workshop, tienen una estructura muy poco rígida, casi como improvisada, ¿piensas que es posible iniciar un proyecto sin tener una idea definida?

Pienso que la mayoría de las cosas devienen de la observación. Es interesante porque he trabajado de ambas maneras. En mi película The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991), comencé con una idea sobre mi resistencia como mujer en la manera en que la ciencia determina cómo debe ser una mujer en el mundo, y esto históricamente estuvo ligado a una percepción masculina. De manera que realicé una película desde el amor a la ciencia pero en oposición al establishment científico. Esa fue mi idea. Pero lo curioso es que también terminó siendo una de mis películas más experimentales, realizada a partir de collages, found footage y extrañas performances. Pero sí, todo partió de la base de explorar mi relación con la ciencia, específicamente en relación a los cuerpos y resultó en un cruce entre la ciencia y el arte. Por otra parte muchas de mis películas siguen un criterio del “all yes” (todo vale): cualquier idea, cualquier pensamiento, cualquier cosa que me haya ocurrido, es introducido en la película. Eso ocurre en Which Way is East, la cual comenzó sin demasiadas ideas. A diferencia de la mayoría de los cineastas norteamericanos que filmaron en Vietnam, traté de ir con la mente en blanco. De modo que es una mezcla, que comienza de cualquier manera pero rara vez parte de un guión.

En tu última película States of UnBelonging eso se refleja muy bien. Es una película situada en el medio de las ideas y lo espontáneo: comienza con un suceso histórico (el asesinato de la cineasta israelí Revital Ohavon durante un ataque terrorista a un kibbutz) pero a medida que avanza vas incorporando el proceso creativo en tiempo presente, sin eliminar ciertas fallas o dudas.

Eso no fue algo que planeé. Las dudas también son muy importantes, la mayoría de las veces sirven para que la audiencia establezca una conexión con la película, para que se adapte. Ken Jacobs es un cineasta que siempre me inspiró con su teoría de que hacemos un cine “de errores”. Pero no es tanto como querer filmar con cierto nivel de exposición de luz y que no salga de esa manera: es pensar que si el sonido no salió significa que no quería salir de esa manera. Es algo más espiritual. Es tratar de tener una naturaleza menos controladora. En cierta forma es como decía Jonas Mekas, “hacemos films del color de la sangre”. Y no es que queramos hacer películas con sangre, sino tener una relación corpórea con el material.

LYNNE SACHS Notes to future lovers: an interview

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LYNNE SACHS
Notes to future lovers

December, 2009
by Nayantara Parikh  (a student of Lynne’s)

I asked Lynne Sachs if I could interview her and she said yes. I had spoken to Lynne so much over the semester that her constant counsel fitted in, as though I had been interviewing her for the last four months. Strains from Lynne’s work bled into what I had wanted to talk to Julia about. The ideas tumbled onto each other like a pile of puppies being fed from the same mother. In some of Lynne’s words: War is a shared experience that breaks down the routines of ours lives, a moment of crisis that is just BIGGER.

When we spoke I asked her about her collection of five films, “I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER”, why this theme? What drew you to it? She said how there was no specific plan—she just kept following the themes that drew her in. They began to revolve around war; it drew her in because of the breakdown of daily life and rawness of the situations that war creates. “They could have even been about snowstorms, or any major event in the climate”, something that would affect and connect all of us. How does one process horror? How does a society process what is happening when all that is tangible of that society is in the process of being destroyed? Things that are left: fragmented identity, stories, fables that weave ways to perceive.  The only way to deal with what is happening around you when it is too much to process is to maybe turn it into a fable, with animals talking instead of people, with people surviving on poison instead of bread and water. I know it sounds a bit vague, but one can’t pinpoint these things I feel. Sadness is strange and vast. In STATES OF UNBELONGING, Lynne focuses on a filmmaker from Israel, Revital Ohayon, who was killed along with her two sons in a terrorist attack near the West Bank. Her husband says, “The pain is so big, you don’t know where to put it.”

Last night I woke from nightmares again. What monsters were chasing me, I don’t know, but I was to scared to move. In my half sleep state I knew they were there watching me; I tried to breathe quietly, and then sleep grabbed me up and flung me back into the darkness.

In The Last Happy Day (2009), the fifth I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER film, Sachs follows the story of her Hungarian cousin Dr. Sandor Lenard, who was hired by the American army during WWII to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Later on, when he was in Brazil, he translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin, and in the film a group of children read and work on a theatre piece of it. It is “a meditation on war’s perverse and provocative stamp on the imagination”, says Sachs.

In Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam(1994), Sachs visits her sister Dana in Vietnam. They travel together from Ho Chih Minh City to Hanoi and on the way weave parables and images and conversations together to form the texture of Vietnam through their experience of it. Dana apologizes to a veteran at one point, and later tells her friend Phong about it. He says, “War is like a volcano. You can’t control it, so you do what you can to save yourself.” Images blur the screen: greens and whites dragging across and smudging into themselves. Tall trees lined up, I see them as though I am driving past in a car. I feel the humidity hanging on my skin, spices infiltrating the air and wrapping themselves around me—this  reminds me of home. There’s a shot of a woman washing clothes in a bright red bucket, we see her through the open bathroom door, as though we are peeking at her from a rooftop.

The slimy green water stained bathroom wall was like the one behind the house. I know that specific shade of green. It reminds me of that crisp winter morning my sister and I decided to play a war game, which is different from most of the online money making games I generally liked to play. It was foggy and pretended we were secret agents, hidden and undercover. We climbed up to the water tanks on the roof and opened them to drop the secret codes. We didn’t know but two lizards were precariously balanced on the edges of the tanks. As we opened them, the lizards tumbled in and began flailing. We woke up my father and had to drain all the water from the tanks so that none of us got sick. We felt so guilty we stopped playing war games, and when enough time had passed for us to forget the guilt, we were too old to play.

Back to images of Vietnam. I see a tall, white building, it fills the screen. It looks like something official, maybe a university building or a house of parliament. Sach’s voice begins to talk about her meeting with someone named Coy. The VietCong burned down Coy’s house during the Tet Offensive in 1968. Coy’s father had been collecting books since he was a boy. When their house was burned all his books burned with it, in it. Coy said his father went crazy after that. Sach’s and Dana’s voices talk one through Which Way is East. Each sentence is like a diary entry, a note to the viewer, so personal that one can’t help but be drawn in. The first time Dana speaks, I thought it was a child’s voice.

….ashes and the smell of burned wood. searing through and cracking the spines of books. a lifetime’s worth of stories. where do burned stories go?“When you love someone, you love everything about them. Even their footsteps. When you hate someone, you hate everything about them, even their existence.”

Some one says, “It’s raining so heavy, it reminds me of the war we fought against the American B-52s.”

Last year I visited my grandmother in Germany. A storm started to break out and she got progressively nervous as it got worse. “I want to go home”, she kept saying. Later my mother explained to me that it reminded her of the war, and the bombs, and that the sound of thunder would always remind her of the planes flying overhead.

In the film, Sachs turns down a street, and realizes that it is the most peaceful street she has seen in Vietnam. None of the doors to the houses are wide open, and there is no commotion. Her guide tells her that this was the street the soldiers brought prisoners to shoot them. “No one wants to mingle with their ghosts.” The vague images would convey a feel of the place for sure, but the voices are what make it feel as though the Sachs sisters are not blind tourists visiting and showing us some faraway place that we know nothing about. We are immersed as visitors who are lovingly shown a place that is more than the American War that happened to it.

Language is inextricably bound to culture. When you speak the language, understand its nuances, its twists and turns, you can begin to communicate from within the society instead of as an outsider. In both Which Way is East and Wind in Our Hair (2009) Sachs uses the language of the place to further integrate and understand. Dana Sachs speaks Vietnamese and Sachs’ daughter learn Spanish in Wind in Our Hair.  They play out the words, repeat them, let them roll around their mouths, sensing the correct hardness of D’s and softness of S’s.

Filmmaking always makes me wonder how one is supposed to balance the work aspect and the family aspect of one’s life. I sometimes think that there could be no possible way to balance film and a regular life. Art takes over, it allows no room for anything else. I am crazy when I create, I am unpleasant, I am unreasonable, and there is no room in my life for anything other than my creation and me. Not the most fun thing to be around. Lynne has found a way to integrate her life into her work, and her work into her life; they fit together. I asked Lynne and she said that her daughters are around her a lot of the time, so it only makes sense for them to find their way into her work. Rather than discard the personal, Lynne embraces it, and that’s exactly what draws one in. Her films live in the realm of public space, but are wrapped in personal space. The documentary aspect comes in on two levels—the actual thing she is documenting, Vietnam for example, and then, her experience of it. Instead of pushing the personal away to “focus” on her work, she pulls it closer, unintentionally so, weaving it into each film.

A pair of feet in socks run across the screen, followed by three more similarly socked pairs. I hear laughter. This is Wind in Our Hair, Sachs’ film that tries its hand at following a vague story line based loosely on Julio Cortazar’s story End of the Game. Four girls are visiting a house for a short period of time. They grow bored, as there is not much to do and find some fun in waiting for the trains to pass at the tracks nearby. The are all about thirteen years old, on the cusp of something new, waiting for the changes to take place, waiting to be one step closer to growing up. Two of the girl’s are played by Sachs’ own daughters. She used 16mm, Super 8mm, 8mm, and video to shoot it.

Remember when my hair was long, it curled all the way down my back and you loved it, more than me I thought on some days. My friend told me one day, “women tend to carry history, identity, and heartbreak in their hair. No wonder we try to change it all the time.” I thought about that later, after 13 inches of my hair heavy with your love had been cut and placed into an envelope sent away to some one who had none.

Plants appear in a lot of Lynne’s work. Sneaking in at the corner of a frame in some places, taking over the whole screen in others. She told me that that she around the time she had her daughters, she got interested in the plants; she knows all their names. Walking around the city, her daughters and her could suddenly share the experience of knowing what would bloom when, and knowing that the nasturtium are late this year, or something else is early. In STATES OF UNBELONGING Revital Ohayon’s mother says of her, “She was so interested in nature, we thought she’s become a scientist.” Odd coincidences draw us to our subjects.

When I had to do my Abecedarium project earlier this semester, I was having problems making my film. Lynne gave me a piece of advice: some films are yes films, and some films are no films. Neither name gives a negative or a positive context. When making a Yes film, say yes to everything, anything that calls out to you, anything that feels right. When making a No film, you stick a story, you keep to your plan and you see it through. Of Sachs’ work, Wind in Our Hair is an example of a NO film, while The Last Happy Day is an example of a YES film. I made my film a YES film and ran with it.

STATES OF UNBELONGING uses Lynne’s voice and the voice of her Israeli friend Nir Zats as they try to find out more about Revital Ohayon. The voiceovers are the backing and forthing of their letters to each other. One of the moments in the film is Ohayon’s two sons’ day care centre at the kibbutz where they lived. The children talk about what to do with their toys and things. Shots of the toys recall ones we see at the beginning of the film. A horse, a tower, a pile of balls, dinosaurs too. Text lights up the screen in white. “I am not a war photographer. All I have is my imagination.” Lynne

Dear Lynne.

I hope I have managed to get across at least some of what I wanted to. I made this a Yes essay for me. I just went where the wind took me. Some of it is perfect, like how I wanted, and some of it is far from it. Thank you for letting me interview you. [art] lives in the lining of your skin. I always seem to wish I had more time.

 

Home is a strange thing. The day I interviewed Lynne Sachs, I called and she asked me to call back in some time because she was putting her daughters to bed. One of my biggest worries is that I won’t be able to balance work and have a life at home, but I suppose the trick is to intertwine the two, so that neither one is in neglected, and so that both benefit from it. I suppose this is the secret of having enough time.

FILM LIST (films used for this piece)

States of Unbelonging, 2006. Israel and New York.

Which Way is East, 1994. Vietnam.

The Last Happy Day, 2009.

Wind in Our Hair, 2009. Brazil.

Wind in Our Hair

TRAILER:

COMPLETE FILM:

Wind in Our Hair
40 min., 2010,  by Lynne Sachs

Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, “Wind in Our Hair” is an experimental narrative directed by New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, “Wind in Our Hair” is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest. Shot with 16mm, Super 8mm, Regular 8mm film and video, the film follows the girls to the train tracks, into kitchens, on sidewalks, in costume stores, and into backyards in the heart of Buenos Aires as well as the outskirts of town. Sachs and her Argentine collaborators move about Buenos Aires  with their cameras, witnessing the four playful girls as they wander a city embroiled in a debate about the role of agribusiness, food resources and taxes. Using an intricately constructed Spanish-English “bilingual” soundtrack,  Sachs and her co-editor, Puerto Rican filmmaker Sofia Gallisa, articulate this atmosphere of urban turmoil spinning about the young girls’ lives.   “Wind in Our Hair” also includes the daring, ethereal music of Argentine singer Juana Molina.

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“Inspired by the short stories of Julio Cortázar, Lynne Sachs creates an experimental narrative about a group of girls on the verge of adolescence. While their lives are blissful and full of play, the political and social unrest of contemporary Argentina begins to invade their idyllic existence. Sachs’ brilliant mixture of film formats complements the shifts in mood from innocent amusement to protest. ”   – Dean Otto, Film and Video Curator, Walker Art Center

“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 gage 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

“Argentine author Julio Cortazar is the inspiration for WIND IN OUR HAIR (2009, 42 min.), which loosely interprets stories in the collection “Final de Juego” against the backdrop of social and political unrest in contemporary Argentina. In her first attempt at narrative filmmaking, Sachs still retains her associative, playful structure and documentary eye. Four young women, again played by Sach’s daughters and family friends, grow restless at home and begin to make their way through Buenos Aires in search of excitement and eventually to a fateful meeting at the train tracks near their home. The film moves from childhood’s earthbound, cloistered spaces and 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

“I completely felt Cortazar’s stories throughout. The fluidity in which a ludic and serious tone mix and the combined sense of lightness and deepness capture the author’s vision.” – Monika Wagenberg, Cinema Tropical

Selected Screenings:

Palais de Glace, Buenos Aires
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN http://calendar.walkerart.org/event.wac?id=5786
La Habana Festival de Cinema Latinamericano, 2010
Anthology Film Archive, New York

See Spanish version here:   http://www.lynnesachs.com/2011/01/04/con-viento-en-el-pelo-de-lynne-sachs/

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