All posts by lynne

Sachs assists Chris Marker updating his 1970s Whale Film

Three Cheers for the Whale
by CHRIS MARKER

17 minutes / color
Release Date: 2007

Lynne Sachs worked for a year with Chris Marker, her friend of more than twenty years, on rewriting and researching for a new English version of his 1970’s collage film on whales.

Chronicles the history of mankind’s relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry.

Chris Marker’s co-director, Mario Ruspoli (1925-1986), descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, had been a journalist, painter, and ethnologist before discovering his vocation as a documentary filmmaker. In the Sixties he became one of the founders-along with Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, and Chris Marker-of the “direct cinema” movement, pioneering in the use of new lightweight cameras and synchronous sound recording equipment. Ruspoli’s eclectic filmography includes documentaries on medical, scientific, anthropological and historical subjects.

http://homevideo.icarusfilms.com/new2007/whale.shtml

“In San Francisco in the mid-1980s, I saw Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil”. I witnessed his mode of daring, wandering filmmaking with a camera. Alone, he traveled to Japan, Sweden and West Africa where he pondered revolution, shopping, family, and the gaze in a sweeping but intimate film essay that shook the thinking of more filmmakers than any film I know. Marker’s essay film blended an intense empathy with a global picaresque. Simultaneously playful and engaged, the film presented me with the possibility of merging my interests in cultural theory, politics, history and poetry — all aspects of my life I did not yet know how to bring together – into one artistic expression. In graduate school at that time, I wrote an analysis of the film and then boldly, perhaps naively, sent it to Marker. In a last minute note, I also asked him if he would like an assistant in his editing studio.

Several months later, his letter from Paris arrived with a slew of cat drawings along the margins. In response to my request for a job, Marker cleverly explained that, unlike in the United States, French filmmakers could not afford assistants. And, in response to my semiotic interpretation of his movie, he explained that his friend (and my hero) Roland Barthes would not have interpreted his film the way that I had. Marker suggested that we continue this conversation in person, in San Francisco. Not long afterward, I found myself driving Chris from his hotel in Berkeley, California to Cafe Trieste, one of the most famous cafes in North Beach. There we slowly sipped our coffees in the last relic of 1960s hippy culture, talking about his films, his travels, and my dream to be filmmaker. As the afternoon came to a close, I politely pulled out my camera and asked him if I could take his picture. “No, no, I never allow that.” And then he turned and walked away, leaving me glum, embarrassed and convinced that my new friendship with Marker was now over.

Over the next two decades, Chris and I spoke on the phone occasionally and I attended several of his rare public presentations. Three years ago, Jon Miller, president of our mutual distributor Icarus Films, contacted me to see if I would be willing to assist Chris in the making of a new English version of his 1972 film “Viva la Baleine”, a passionate, collage-based essay film on the plight of the whales. Of course, I was honored and immediately said yes. For one whole year, Chris and I corresponded weekly as we re-wrote and updated the narration and I searched for a male and a female voice-over actor to read the two parts. He renamed the new 2007 version of his film “Three Cheers for the Whale”. It is distributed with other “bestiary” films he has made including “The Case of the Grinning Cat”.

After we had completed the film, I traveled to Paris with my daughters to talk with Chris about a wide range of things — our collaboration, Stokely Carmichael (a Black activist in the American civil rights movement), Russian documentary, cats and tea. Just before we left his home, he showed me a scrapbook he’d been collecting for several years. Chris had accumulated hundreds of pictures and articles on a young African-American politician who had just embarked on a campaign to become the next president of the United States. Chris was convinced that this virtually unknown candidate could stand up to a historically racist United States of America and win. I was doubtful.” (Lynne Sachs)

Experimental documentary maker Lynne Sachs, new member of Punto De Vista 2010 International Jury

The documentary maker Lynne Sachs will join the other four members of the Punto de Vista 2010 International Jury, namely, Alisa Lebow, Santos Zunzunegui, Jean-Pierre Rehm, and Maria Pallier.

A multidisciplinary artist, Lynne Sachs has been involved in film, video, installation, and web projects. Her works, drawing on different essay forms, are explorations of the relations between the personal, the political, and the experiences of history. Ms Sachs also teaches experimental film and video at the New York University. Her latest projects are The Last Happy Day and Wind in Our Hair, both released in 2009. The former tells the life story of a distant relative of hers, Sandor Lenard, one of the leading personalities of Hungary’s twentieth-century intelligentsia. He took part in the Allies’ corpse recognition after World War II and translated A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh into Latin –an eccentricity that earned him temporary fame. The latter, documentary fiction, was inspired by the short stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar and was shot in Buenos Aires. Previous projects include XY Chromosome Project # 1 (2006), Tornado (2002), and Investigation of a Flame (2001). Some of these films will be screened at Punto de Vista, and their creator will be present in the theatre to share her views on them with the audience.

Lynne Sachs’s work has been supported by fellowships from prestigious American institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation, Jerome Foundation, or the New York State Council on the Arts. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Pacific Film Archive, the Sundance Film Festival, and the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival, BAFICI.

Lynne Sachs at University of Chicago Film Studies Center

An Evening with Lynne Sachs
University of Chicago Film Studies Center
Saturday, March 13, 2010 – 7:00pm
5811 South Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall 306, Chicago, Illinois 606

Introduction by Professor Michele Lowrie, Classics Department

New York filmmaker Lynne Sachs presents The Last Happy Day, an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and Sachs’ distant cousin. 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. Sachs’ essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.

In conversation with Classics Professor Michèle Lowrie (who acted as an adviser on the film), Sachs will discuss her cinematic process for making this portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran. From Lucretius’ sublime but wise “On the Nature of the Universe” to Euripides’ lurid Bacchae to Michael Ondaattje’s harrowing vision of Billy the Kid, Sachs will review the range of literature that fed her creative process. In the same spirit of experimentation, she will screen her companion piece, Cosmetic Surgery for Corpses (10 min., 2010) which witnesses a group of Latin scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin.

(Lynne Sachs, 37 min, DVD, 2009)

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Classics, Rhetoric and Poetics, and Jewish Studies

History of NYC reviews Abecedarium:NYC

Here is a review of the interactive website I worked on btwn 2006 and 2008. It was an amazing way to learn about the city. So far we have more than 300 creative videos, poems and photos posted from the public as well.

A HISTORY OF NEW YORK website describes Abecedarium:NYC: “A wonderful, continuously expanding site sponsored in part by New York Public Library: Abecedarium:NYC. The whole thing seems designed to lead you down the path of hours spent exploring. The perfect site for people who love words as much as they love New York.”

http://ahistoryofnewyork.com/2009/09/abecedariumnyc/

Being and Seeing with Jem Cohen

A Pigeon on a Spiral Staircase:
Being and Seeing with Jem Cohen
by Lynne Sachs

A few nights ago, on the first crisp evening of autumn, I emerged from a film screening at the Millennium Film Workshop onto East 4^th Street in Manhattan with Jem Cohen. Nested in the sublime clutter and cacophony of the Lower East Side, this block between 2^nd and 3^rd Avenue is home to some of the most innovative theater and film venues in New York City. It’s a dark, quiet, albeit decrepit, building that seems to hide its cinematic and theatrical secrets with a kind of futuristic pleasure. As we headed east toward the subway that would lead us both to our homes in Brooklyn, Jem gasped, not really out of fear or even surprise, but rather as if an internal light had gone on inside his mind, awakening a memory he needed to release. “Wait,” he exclaimed, “let’s go this way instead. I want to show you the most beautiful building in New York City.”

How could I say no?

Now as I’ve already hinted, East 4^th Street is hardly considered an architectural showplace, for even the most astute cognoscenti. I immediately flashed upon the rest of my evening, wondering how much time I could allow for this aesthetic adventure. We crossed the street, mid-block, and stood just 15 seconds later in front of several typical rectangular constructions with four-paned windows and unadorned doorways. “See, there it is.” I looked but I did not see. “There, that white(ish) building with the exterior spiral staircase.” And there it was. I’d walked down this block hundreds of times but had never observed this spinal cord-like staircase that climbed up the facade of an unassuming apartment building. Sinuous, decadent and magically awash in light, the staircase gave fantastic elegance to the street. But this was not all.

Jem would never allow his “audience” (me) merely to witness this awe inspiring structure without revealing a moment of “ah, ha!,” Roland Barthes’ punctum, the time when a photographic image moves from the informational to the visceral to the emotional. Jem recounted a night years before when he had stood alone exactly in the same place – 16mm Bolex and tripod in hand. As he admired the building at 62 East 4^th Street, he noticed a pigeon preparing to fly from a window of the building. He quickly reached for the trigger of his movie camera. Something large and ominous, however, distracted him at the same moment. A black hawk was swooping down as if from the clouds. This larger bird caught the hapless pigeon and devoured it.

“Did you get it on film?” I asked.

“No, I did not.”

But for me, Jem had captured that dramatic New York moment. Like no other filmmaker I know, Jem Cohen has collected thousands of junctures, ruptures and sutures like this one – whether on film, on video or in his mind. These visual treasures are his because he witnessed them, reflected upon them and remembered them in his life-long search for the essence of city life.

In the first few seconds of his film “Long for the City”, an 8-minute portrait of NYC poet, singer and songwriter Patti Smith, we look at the Manhattan skyline through a smattering of wispy grasses. Seduced by the optical possibilities of scale, Cohen’s camera makes this Walt Whitman-esque flora equal in stature to the imposing buildings perched behind. This tension between nature and city continues to create sparks – both aesthetic and emotional – throughout the rest of the film. While Smith ponders her fraught relationship with her New York City, she is always wondering if she belongs, where she will thrive. Like Cohen, Smith has unflinching devotion to the buildings that give New York City its visual textures.

“I saw passersby that didn’t really see me. I saw people defacing a beautiful building near my house with advertising. I saw myself 30 years ago.” (Patti Smith)

Listening to Smith, we catch a glimpse of the city once again, refracted, earthen-flat, in a puddle on the sidewalk. Both Cohen and Smith imbue the artificial structures and the nature that peeks from behind with an exquisite intimacy.

“Twigs, scaffold, gravedigger, pollen which makes me cough….” (PS)

We are all pigeons, I suppose, relishing in the treasures of the trashcan, destroyed by the violence of the skies, always capable of flying away, somehow here.

In the final image of the film, Cohen’s camera dwells tenderly on a corpulent pigeon on a cement ledge, not so different from the one he’d seen attacked in flight on East 4^th Street. Again, we hear Smith’s voice, somehow speaking for the two of them.

“Am I a country person or a city person? I am always longing for the sea. If I had to choose between the city or the sea, I’d choose the sea and long for the city.”

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent film, “The Last Happy Day”, is an experimental documentary that premiered at the 2009 New York Film Festival.

On camera interview with Lynne and Mark at Union Docs

My husband Mark and I talk about the things we care about in the realm of cinema.

http://www.uniondocs.org/mark-street-and-lynne-sachs/

Based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, UnionDocs is a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization. Our mission is to present a broad range of innovative and thought-provoking non-fiction projects to the general public, while also cultivating specialized opportunities for learning, critical discourse, and creative collaboration for emerging media-makers, theorists, and curators.

Lynne in the NYT’s for Views from the Avant-Garde

VIEWS FROM THE AVANT-GARDE (Friday through Sunday) Presented as a sidebar to the New York Film Festival, this annual survey organized by Mark McElhatten and Gavin Smith offers an enlightening overview of recent activity in a field, the “experimental” film, that is still yielding vital work despite decades of critical neglect. Among the 60 or so titles on offer are new works by Leslie Thornton, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Harun Farocki, Michael Snow, Peggy Ahwesh, Lewis Klahr, Ken Jacobs, Lynne Sachs, Ernie Gehr and other giants of the avant-garde, as well as a generous selection of films by emerging artists. At 3 p.m. on Saturday there will be a tribute to the late Chick Strand, a major figure in the field, whose interests ranged from ethnographic documentaries to sensual abstractions and creatively edited found-footage films. Walter Reade Theater, 165 West 65th Street, Lincoln Center , (212) 975-5600, filmlinc.org; $11. (Kehr)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/movies/02movies.html?_r=2

Jewish Week Review of “The Last Happy Day”

www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c344_a16848/The_Arts/Film.html

by George Robinson

It would be tempting but altogether too glib to make a similar comparison between recent American documentaries and Lynne Sachs’ fascinating 38-minute film “The Last Happy Day.” Sachs takes a very unconventional approach to the Holocaust-related story of her distant cousin, a Jewish-Hungarian doctor named Sandor Lenard. Lenard fled Germany shortly before the war broke out, abandoning his medical practice and his non-Jewish first wife and son. He turned up in the unlikely haven of Fascist Italy, where he hid escaped POWs in his attic apartment in Rome. Eventually, he worked as a forensic anthropologist helping the American army’s Graves Registry unit in identifying the remains of GIs.
Finally, the pressures of the Cold War, with the threat of renewed and even more cataclysmic violence sent him in search of “a quiet, green, safe place,” which he eventually found on a mountaintop in Brazil. There he embarked on a quixotic project, translating “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, one of the 13 languages Lenard spoke and wrote. The resulting book, “Winnie Ille Pu,” became an unexpected international bestseller, bringing him a brief taste of fame.

Sachs’ previous work (“States of unBelonging,” “A Biography of Lilith” among others) has frequently been reviewed in these pages. Her approach to documentary is experimental and unconventional. In her new film, which is playing as part of the Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde” program, she offers seemingly unrelated images of a quartet of children, two of them her daughters. They are playing at and reading from the Milne books about Pooh, one of them occasionally adding narration of Lenard’s story. But juxtaposed with this cheerful scene are tinted and otherwise altered newsreel footage from WWII, clips from “Open City” and readings from cousin Sandor’s letters to another American relative who, like Sachs, lived in Memphis, Tenn.

The result is a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy. Lenard says in one letter, “Wars have decided my life,” and admits that “the only medicine against world events is distance — safe distance.”

“Lebanon” and “Views from the Avant-Garde,” which includes “The Last Happy Day,” are part of this year’s New York Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 11 at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. For more information, go to www.filmlinc.com.

Cuadro por Cuadro (Frame by Frame)

“Caudro por cuadro” (Frame by Frame)
by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
8 min., 2009

In “Cuadro por caudro”, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguan media artists to create handpainted experimental films in the spirit of Stan Brakhage. Sachs and Street collaborate with their students at the Fundacion de Arte Contemporaneo by painting on 16 and 35 mm film, then bleaching it and then hanging it to dry on the roof of the artists’ collective in Montevideo in July, 2009.

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

The Last Happy Day Premieres at NYFF

Sunday, Oct. 4 at 3pm
Views from the Avant-Garde Program #8
Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center
Tickets: $11; $8 senior; $7 member, student, child

The Last Happy Day
Lynne Sachs, USA, 2009, 38m
Nothing is Over Nothing
Jonathan Schwartz, USA, 2008, 17m
The Exception and the Rule
Brad Butler & Karen Mirza, U.K./India/Pakistan, 37m
TRT: 93m

Tickets go on sale on September 13 at 12:00 noon.
By Phone CenterCharge, 212 721 6500
In Person: Walter Reade Theater Box Office

The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary on Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin of director Lynne Sachs. Lenard was a doctor and writer with a Jewish background who fled the Nazis during WWII. During the war, the US Army hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task which catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs’ film, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, uses letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, and interviews.The

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs

Experimental documentary maker Lynne Sachs, new member of Punto De Vista 2010 International Jury