All posts by lynne

I am Not a War Photographer by Lynne Sachs

I  AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER  by Lynne Sachs

Published on Otherzine:   http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/index.php?issueid=18&article_id=56

It all started with atheism.  I’ve always been troubled by the idea that a person would need to define her entire spiritual world view by relying on beliefs and experiences that were not her own.  I do not believe in God therefore I am an atheist.

So, alas, I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER is what I’ve decided to call a group of five films I’ve made over the last thirteen years.  After breathlessly watching Christian Freil’s “War Photographer” (2001), the utterly transformative documentary on the life of James Nachtway, print journalism’s quintessential career war photographer, I knew that Nachtway’s remarkable credo —

“Every minute I was there, I wanted to flee.  I did not want to see this.  Would I cut and run, or would I deal with the responsibility of being there with a camera?”
(James Nachtway)

— was not my own.

From Vietnam to Bosnia to the Middle East today, the making of my experimental documentary films has taken me to parts of the world I had never expected to see in my life as an artist.   Using abstract and reality based imagery, each new film has forced me to search for precise visual strategies to work with these fraught and divisive locales and themes. Often opting for a painterly rather than a photographic articulation of conflict, I struggle with each project to find a new language of images and sounds I can use to look at these volatile moments in history.  My films and a recent web project expose what I see as the limits of a conventional documentary representation of both the past and the present. Infusions of colored “brush strokes” catapult a viewer into contemporary Vietnam. Floating drinking glasses moving across a Muslim cemetery in Sarajevo evoke a wartime without water. Pulsing, geometric mattes suspended in cinematic space block news footage of a bombing in Tel Aviv.   With each project, I have had to search for a visual approach to looking at trauma, painful memory, and conflict. By using abstraction I am not avoiding the graphic realism that Nachtway so bravely captures but rather unpeeling the outer, more familiar layer, hoping to reveal something new about perception and engagement in cinema.

Poet Adrienne Rich once wrote “A place on the map is also a place in history.”   This intersection of vertical space (i.e. the globe, a continent, a country, a city, a home, a kitchen table) with horizontal time (war, birthdays, holidays, hurricanes) perfectly encapsulates the fascinating paradoxes that are revealed when one travels with a camera.

In 1992, my sister Dana Sachs (author of The House on Dream Street: Memoirs of an American Woman in Vietnam and the novel If You Lived Here) was living and writing in Hanoi for the first of her many years in that Northern, colonial capital so haunted by the French and American wars. Communication between our two countries was still unbelievably difficult — no phone calls, no faxes and of course no email.  This was the first year in which Americans were allowed visas to travel to Vietnam. With my 16mm Bolex packed deep inside a backpack and no particular cinematic agenda, I got on a plane from San Francisco and flew west to see “the East.”

In retrospect, I think I was trying to grapple with a particular view of history inspired by Hayden White’s brilliantly inventive Metahistory, an analysis of our western historical imagination, the ways that we tell stories and order time.  In my mind, there were two opposing views of the timeline of what we call the Vietnam War and what the Vietnamese call the American War (1959 – 1975).  As a history major in the early 1980s, I was already questioning Lyndon Johnson’s problematic role in the escalation of the US assault on Indochina.  While my liberal parents had depicted Johnson as a hero, at least on the domestic front, his model reputation was shattered by my realization that he was also a culpable player in the game of war on the other side of the globe.  Simply put, I wanted to find out how Vietnamese people felt about Americans – from a 1960s president to actress-celeb Jane Fonda, who became a Lefty phenome when she visited Hanoi in 1972.  The Pacific Ocean was a topographical manifestation of this temporal line of history’s ebbs and flows, its moments of crisis, collapse and calm.  I wanted to see it from the other side, to understand the most pivotal events – from the Tet Offensive to the fall of Saigon —  as well as the small personal epiphanies from a Vietnamese perspective.

In my film WHICH WAY IS EAST: NOTEBOOKS FROM VIETNAM, I make it clear right from the start that my1960s childhood experience of listening to Walter Cronkite every evening had a strange, albeit well-informed influence on my understanding of these volatile times.

“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.”

Perhaps even more influential were the ‘70s war movies like “Apocalypse Now”, “The Deer Hunter” and “Coming Home” my father took his three children to see in lieu of the more typical (and perhaps equally “powerful”) Disney kids fare. We had one family friend who had been a soldier in the war.  OJ was a “frogman”, an underwater diver, for the US Army.  He died about 10 years ago from a cancer we all assumed was a result of the occupational hazards of working with Agent Orange. I talk about OJ in the last lines of the film.

Back to my production story.  The early 1990s was a time when documentary makers were embracing video hook, line and sinker.  The ease with which you could shoot sound and picture simultaneously made it almost impossible to resist.  And yet, I felt that I thought more clearly about the properties of images when I collected them separately.  So, I decided to carry my trusty 16mm Bolex with a 28 second shot limit and a small tape recorder.  There would be no synchronous sound and no on-camera interviews.  In exchange for this inability to capture the gestalt of my touristic reality with the push of one button, I would have discrete sensory experiences of light and sound. In addition, I would abstain from using  the zoom lens.  Vietnamese filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha was a teacher of mine in graduate school in the Film Department at San Francisco State.  Her disdain for the telephoto as a tool that enables us to shoot from a distance from our subject imposed a strict discipline on my own relationship to the camera.  The sheer physicality of making an image became critical to my process. I had to move my body to find the frame I wanted.

May 15, my third day in Vietnam. Driving through the Mekong Delta, a name that carries so much weight.  My mind is full of war, and my eyes are on a scavenger hunt for leftovers. Dana told me that those ponds full of bright green rice seedlings are actually craters, the inverted ghosts of bombed out fields.

More often than I’d like to admit, what I saw with my eyes was often not at all what was really there.  On so many levels, looking at the footage from the “field work” I did abroad eventually revealed to me the superficiality of my understanding of the place.  Only after spending two years working with new Vietnamese immigrants in the Bay Area did I begin to grasp the resonating affects of the conflict I too now think of as the American War.

With INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME (2001), I returned to this same period in Vietnamese/American history, only this time from the opposite perspective.  With two young children and a full time teaching position, overseas travel for a production was prohibitive.    I was living in Catonsville, Maryland in 1998 when I first came across the story of the Catonsville Nine, a radical band of Catholic anti-war activists who broke into a draft board office in 1968 and destroyed hundreds of files with homemade Napalm.  I spent the next three years making a film on this extraordinary act of civil disobedience – a performance piece with political dimensions that resonated from coast to coast.  I followed renowned priest Philip Berrigan in and out of federal prison, met Marjorie Melville on a sand dune near Tijuana and interviewed Tom Lewis in the woods the day he was released from a recent stint in prison for knocking a fighter plane with a hammer.

With WHICH WAY IS EAST, I wanted to rely on our shared mental archive of the Vietnam war, to allow that documentation to flow on a charged yet invisible “memory screen” my audience would bring to the theater. This time, however, I desperately needed to find the lost roll of film that a local TV reporter had shot of the action.  With this new project, I became an obsessed detective in search of the proof of a very lofty crime.  Once I found the reporter and convinced him to give me the material, the 400’ of 16mm reversal sound film became sacred contraband I would keep under lock and key.  For the previous ten years of my life, I’d followed the post-modern credo of my fellow experimental filmmakers:  any piece of film was one worth critiquing, parodying or destroying.   Now, I’d met my match.  I would treat this sliver of historical detritus like a family heirloom.

Making films about wars certainly makes the exhibition and distribution process very dynamic.  I began FLAME before September 11th, when any fascination with the long lost art of anti-war protests was considered purely nostalgic.  I showed my movie to a group of San Franciscans in October of 2001 and many of the viewers in the theater expressed horror at the actions of the Catonsville Nine because the very act of breaking the law in the name of one’s god was just a degree away from violence.  Not a question of kind but of degree.  When I showed the film a year after the US invasion of Iraq, people were giddy to remember that there was once a brave, vocal, engaged anti-war movement in this country.

In 2001, I went to Sarajevo with videomaker Jeanne Finley on a fellowship to create a collaborative work with eight Bosnian artists. One year later, we completed the website WWW.HOUSE-OF-DRAFTS.ORG, a virtual apartment building inhabited by nine imaginary characters who have chosen to stay in Sarajevo after the war in the Balkans. From a performance artist who moonlights as a de-miner to a cinematographer who uses his camera to turn a decaying Sarajevo into a bustling Bangkok to a traveler caught by the inferno of a burning library  — the website represents our ruminations on a city and its inhabitants during and after a period of war.  In the process of making this work, I discovered that giving people the license to explore their own histories through fiction was profoundly liberating and creatively regenerative.  Rather than asking our collaborators to speak about the harrowing past they had somehow managed to live through, we encouraged them to create funny, irreverent personas who could speak brazenly “untrue” things, tell jokes, even lie in the most haunting and revealing ways.  Our tendency toward the use of abstracted imagery pushed the questions of authenticity even further away from the burden of fact.

On a November morning in 2002, I sat down to read the New York Times.  To my shock, I came across the story of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and teacher who was killed along with her two sons in a terrorist act on a kibbutz near the West Bank.  In so many ways, her work paralleled my own. I immediately contacted a young Israeli who had been a film student of mine, explaining to him that I wanted to make a movie about this woman but that I was not in a position to fly to the Middle East to shoot the project.  My reasons were two-fold.  First of all, I was disturbed by Israeli political actions in the West Bank and wanted to follow the exigencies of French feminist Helene Cixous “I am on the side of Moses, the one who does not enter…. ‘Next year, in Jerusalem’ makes me flee.”   Secondly, having lived in New York City through September 11, I still felt too unsettled to travel to another place on the globe where violence seemed to run so rampant.  Quite honestly, I was scared. So I convinced myself that I could understand this volatile place by reading novels and ancient texts and looking at Revital’s movies.  STATES OF UNBELONGING was ultimately an effort at making an anti-documentary. Unlike everyone else in the field, I didn’t want to see, hear or smell for myself. I wanted to rely on my imagination, and this intellectual struggle became extremely interesting as a challenge. Ultimately, however, I capitulated to the sensory-deprived documentarian in me and in 2005 I flew to Tel Aviv with my camera.

I have recently finished THE LAST HAPPY DAY, the fifth and final piece in my I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER project.  During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired my Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers.   I am intertwining a silent movie-style narrative, interviews shot in Brazil and Germany and an impressionistic children’s play as part of the production for this elliptical work that once again will resonate as an anti-war meditation.

Lynne Sachs lives in Brooklyn, New York with her partner Mark Street and their daughters Maya and Noa.  She recently finished a collaboration with Chris Marker on a new version of his 1972 essay film “Three Cheers for the Whale”.

Lynne’s films are distributed by www.microcinema.com, First Run Icarus Film (www.frif.com), New Day Films (www.newday.com), Canyon Cinema and the Filmmakers Cooperative.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS:

Dispatches by Michael Herr;  “Ear Before Eye” from Framer Framed by Trinh T.Minh-ha;  “Notes on Travel and Theory” by James Clifford; In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster; Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag; “My Algerience” from Stigmata by Helene Cixous;  Don’t Call it Night by Amos Oz; The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald; The Things We Used to Say by Natalia Ginzburg

REVIEWS:

I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER REVIEW IN BALTIMORE EXAMINER
http://www.examiner.com/a-514942%7EArtful_activism.html

I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER REVIEW ON FLAVORPILL
http://nyc.flavorpill.net/78614

“A reverie of war-torn terrains floats silently across an editing screen, accompanied by long-distance calls between an American journalist and a beleaguered Israeli. Children play in front of a television rolling out images of oddly abstracted battlegrounds. Herein lies the world of director Lynne Sachs, whose films splinter the typical structure of social-issue documentaries, applying an avant-garde sensibility to harsh realities that usually inspire stultifying over-earnestness. In this three-night series of screenings and talks about Sachs’ decade-long appraisal of war, what emerges most is that rare political filmmaker whose forms prove as worthy as her function.” – FLAVORPILL.COM

“Committed Poetics”: Review of I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
in Gay City News by Ioannis Mookas

http://www.gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=17766832&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=569331&rfi=6

“Across three intimate evenings Brooklyn-based avant-documentarian Lynne Sachs presents her lapidary meditations on modern history, political strife, and moral engagement.”

Review by George Robinson of I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER in The Jewish Week, scroll to Jan. 19, 2007.
http://cine-journal.blogspot.com/

Review by Stuart Klawasns  in the Nation
http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20070130/cm_thenation/20070212klawans

“I Am Not a War Photographer,” focuses on Sachs’ meditative, essayistic films about armed conflict: in Israel and Palestine, in the former Yugoslavia and in Vietnam. Among the works to be shown are States of Unbelonging an uneasy exchange of video-letters about murder, mourning and filmmaking on the edge of the West Bank; Which Way Is East, an expressively beautiful diary of a trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi; and Investigation of a Flame, a montage that gives density and weight to contemporary recollections of 1968 and the Catonsville Nine protest.”

–

–

Thoughts on Argentine Cinema by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street

An Argentine excursion: film frames, talk therapy, and ice cream.
By Mark Street and Lynne Sachs (with Pablo Marin)

http://www.gonzocircus.com/blog/?page_id=693

Our cinematic relationship to Argentina began in March of 2007, when the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) invited Lynne to show a retrospective of her films.  During the one week she was in this film-crazy city, she met Pablo Marin and Leandro Listorti, two extraordinarily active Argentine filmmakers with a commitment to making movies and screening and writing about their thriving alternative film community.  While most of Buenos Aires was boasting about the burgeoning movie industry in Palermo Hollywood, or a lunch-time spotting of temporary denizen Francis Ford Coppola, Leandro and Pablo were mining San Telmo flea markets for Super 8 cameras or rushing across the city to see a festival screening by American avant-garde super-star Jonas Mekas, age 80 and thriving.  Lynne’s shared passion for experimental film quickly assured her that she had found a city she wanted to share with Mark, her husband and sometime artistic collaborator.

In June 2008, we packed our bags, got on a plane and moved to Buenos Aires for two months, studying Spanish as a family (with our two preteen daughters), shooting film and diving even deeper into the experimental film scene.  We learned to speak  Argentine Spanish (the “y” sound is pronounced “j”, so “Yo” becomes “Jo” and “pollo” become “pojo”), eat dinner late and spend hours sobremesa (at table) chatting and sipping wine into the night.  This land can make you feel impatient and shallow, as the Argentine filmmakers we met seemed to relish spending time discussing their movies as well as the political issues of the day (multiple agricultural protests) in Europeanist distended style.  Maybe it comes from the Argentine obsession with psychoanalysis, but talk is not considered passé here.
Our apartment was near the Museo d’Arte Latino Buenos Aires (MALBA) where we relished  the best modern art collection in town, as well as a full film schedule.  We saw a Hugo Fregonese retrospective, as well as the hilarious campy ¨Esperando la Carroza¨ by Juan Carlos Lenardi which friends had recommended.  What a way to learn Spanish. It’s like learning English by watching “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
A lynchpin of the scene is the urbane and witty Ruben Guzman. A prolific filmmaker and programmer, Ruben had moved to Canada in the 80’s but recently returned to make work and program in Buenos Aires.  The Kino Palais at the Palais de Glace  shows 4 nights a week in a cavern-like space in the back of the museum. It’s an underground club hidden in a  19th century ice skating rink (no kidding). This is where we presented our X-Y Chromosome Project , a subjective take on global warming, to the Buenos Aires community for three nights in July.  Here’s what they saw:
“From archival snips of an educational film on the weather to cine poems in full blossom, New York film “avant-gardeners” Mark Street and Lynne Sachs present the XY CHROMOSOME PROJECT .This program of 10 short films on both single and double screen gleans audio-visual crops from the dust of the filmmakers’ fertile and fallow imaginations. In this avalanche of visual ruminations on nature’s topsy-turvy shakeup of our lives, Street and Sachs ponder a city child’s tentative excavation of the urban forest, winter wheat, and the great American deluge of the 21st Century (so far).”

Over Peruvian dinner, Ruben introduced us to Federico Windhausen, an Argentine-American media arts historian currently living and teaching in California, but a man whose Argentine roots run deep.  Federico is the best informal cultural guide we’ve ever encountered, anywhere.  He was constantly suggesting film screenings, theatre and dance pieces (in the plaza of the Biblioteca Nacional, for instance) and ice cream (helado) places.  The Argentine obsession with ice cream is legendary.  Once at an asado (barbecue) in the country, the conversation wound its way from politics to movies to children’s attributes with nary a raised voice.  When it came time to order helados  though the guests argued vehemently and passionately in defense of their favorite flavors.

Whenever we found the conversation turning to the subject of Argentine experimental film there was one name that never failed to come up:  Narcisa Hirsch.  Over the last forty years, this grand dame of South American cinema has earned a well deserved reputation for making extraordinary films that are both formally rigorous and deeply personal.  Inspired by the feminists and the Fluxus artists she met and worked with in Europe in the 1960s and ‘70’s, Narcisa brought back her profound appreciation for avant-garde film to the artist community she knew and loved in Buenos Aires.  In the company of her good friend Ruben and Paula Felix-Didier, the director of the Museo de Cine, Lynne spent a fascinating afternoon with Narcisa in her home-studio discussing her forty year filmmaking career, her children and grandchildren and her farm in Bariloche, in the south of Argentina.

Pablo Marin is one of the guiding forces of experimental cinema in Buenos Aires, and his blog La Region Central (title taken from the Michael Snow film) is an amazing living document.  (http://laregioncentral.blogspot.com/)  Once Pablo and Mark spent the hour just before dusk shooting 16mm film around some stands that sell meat and sausages right next to the Reserva Ecologica.  Later Mark and he drank beers in a café on the Avenida Corrientes (sort of the psychic artery of the city).  Mark asked him to give a quick historical overview of the past.

“The early Argentine experimental period is represented by just a bunch of separate films, made by filmmakers that didn’t pursue a total exploration of the medium and, most importantly, didn’t think in terms of a community or movement. Horacio Coppola, a leading name in Argentinian still photography, made a few films during the 1920s and ‘30s.  His most important is “Traum”, a 16mm film that reminds me of the French-German Surrealists.

“Víctor Iturralde and Luis Bras were a couple of pioneers of experimental animation in the ‘50s and ‘60s.  They mostly painted and scratched on celluloid films in 35mm, 16mm and Super 8mm.

“The 1970s and 80s were a strong and vital period for experimental film in Argentina.  An actual alternative film community was born. During the 70s, we experienced a military coup d’etat which resulted in little contact with the experimental film world abroad. Our productions were more scarce and  individualized. Many films were made (mostly all in 8mm and Super 8) but the conditions of exhibition were totally underground and unconnected (garages, houses, etc). All this began to change in the early 80s when Buenos Aires’ Goethe Institute began showcasing as well as protecting these films and filmmakers. Under the Goethe’s umbrella (to put it visually), this kind of film practice could grow without fear of persecution (that’s why the government reaction was never that intense) and with more support for the movement collectively. The highest point of this Goethe period (if one could call it that) was in 1980, when the Institute held a workshop of experimental film with German filmmaker Werner Nekes. In this period many artists were working, such as Claudio Caldini (Super 8, Single 8), Narcisa Hirsch (16mm, Super 8) and Jorge Honik (Super 8). Other names include Juan Villola, Horacio Vallereggio, Marie Louise Alemann, Juan José Mugni and Silvestre Byrón. The films where shown in bigger, more social, environments but the reaction of the audience was mostly hostile. Once at a screening of Caldini’s “Gamelan” the audience started booing and shouting and turning off and on the lights ! It is also important to note that in this period these filmmakers were more in touch with international, experimental film production. To name a few screenings, there’ was  Jonas Mekas’ 1962 screening of “Guns of the Trees” at Mar del Plata Film Fest and in 1965 the Di Tella Art Institut screened a bunch of New American films (Mekas, Brakhage, Warhol, etc.). Besides that, Narcisa Hirsch traveled a lot to buy film prints that even today represent the most important private, experimental film archive in Buenos Aires.

“Since 1990, experimental media has for the most part switched drastically towards video even though makers such as Caldini and Hirsch continue to produce films. The opening of several film schools makes experimental film more accessible and more studied. The public screenings of international works have gained a solid following mainly through Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival and Mar del Plata, and it is also  more common to see screenings of local experimental works at these venues. Some of the important names are: Andres Denegri, Gustavo Galuppo, Gabriela Golder, Ruben Guzman (all in video), Daniela Cugliandolo (Super 8, video) and Sergio Subero (Super 8, video).”

With this backdrop for experimental film all around us, we tried to let ourselves be charged as artists in Buenos Aires, too, and move ahead with our own work. Mark shot 16mm film and videotape attempting to capture the idiosyncrasy of the city, following up on his 2008 film “Hidden in Plain Sight” (a city symphony film shot in Dakar, Hanoi, Marseille and Santiago de Chile).  He became obsessed with the cartonieres, the gleaners who sift through trash to sell cardboard on the outskirts of town, and the portreros, the men who sit behind glass windows at middle class apartment buildings watching and waiting.  He is currently editing the project, tentatively titled “Fans of Argentina”(based on the store displays that feature industrial fans running at different speeds, like enormous film shutters).

With Argentine super 8 filmmakers Leandro Listorti, Pablo Marin and Tomas Dota, Lynne shot an experimental narrative inspired by  Julio Cortazar’s short story “Final del Juego” about four girls who stand by a passing train everyday posing like “sculptures and attitudes.”  The film is very much about longing, the rite of passage between childhood and adulthood, and performance of an inner self.  The crew of cinema friends shot with a real potpourri of formats – from obsolete Kodak Regular 8 to Super 8mm, 16mm and video.  Our daughters Maya and Noa and their two Argentine friends Lena and Chiara Peroni were hopping on and off trains  throughout the summer as part of the production.  The film used the entire city as a set – including the Tigre Train line that sweeps through the Parque Palermo, the majestic Retiro train station, the flea market in San Telmo’s Plaza Dorrego, and a quiet backyard on the outskirts of the city.  The film is completed and is called “Wind in Our Hair”.

Our last day in Buenos Aires we walked a few blocks to a huge multiplex and caught Lucretia Martel’s brandnew “La Mujer Sin Cabeza” while our kids took in a dubbed version of “Mamma Mia” at the screen next door.  As we munched a last alfajore  walking back to the apartment to collect our security deposit we came up with the idea of curating a film screening in NYC upon our return.

Six months later, on February 21, 2009, we showed thirteen Super 8, video and 35mm films from Argentina at Anthology Film Archives in New York City. In curating “Ventana al Sur: An Evening of Argentine Experimental Film” we culled films from a whole array of non-traditional works made over the last 3 decades, some by veteran masters and mistresses (Leandro Katz, Liliana Porter and Narcisa Hirsch) and some by young upstarts and renegades (Pablo Marin, Ruben Guzman, Macarena Gagliardi, Sergio Subero, Leandro Listordi, Ernesto Baca) with newfound passions for the moving image.   Here are descriptions of just a few of the works we showed:

Leandro Katz’s “Los Angeles” (5 min., 16mm, 1976) is  a portrait of a small community living by the railroad tracks in the banana plantation region of Quiriguá, Guatemala. Originally a single take, this film alternates equal number of moving frames and frozen frames as the camera tracks alongside the train station.

Narcisa Hirsch’s “Workshop” (10 min.,16mm 1977) is a structuralist vision. One wall of the filmmaker’s studio as seen through a fixed camera. We see photos she’s stuck on the wall, then there is a dialogue with a male friend to whom she is describing the rest of the walls that you don’t see. A “one upmanship” of a similar film by Michael Snow where he describes a wall of his studio- workshop, by describing what one CAN see.

“Bajo Tierra” (4 1/2 min., Super 8, sound on CD, 2007) is Pablo Marin’s portrait of filmmaker Claudio Caldini who makes a new cinematic offering in front of the no-longer-industrialized Kodachrome.

In “Montevideo” (4 minutes, DVD, 2008) Leandro Listorti looks at the capital of Uruguay reveals, briefly, its characteristic of a Doppelgänger City: a single place cut in two spaces where two pairs of creatures explore the limits of the travelogue.

In “Stock” (5 minutes, 2007, mini DV ) Ruben Guzman follows a boy from La Cruz who walks to school to read aloud the stock market report from the newspaper. We are witness to the last day of capitalism.

Ernesto Baca’s “Nunca Fuimos Allah Luna” (7 min., 35mm, 2008) presents two characters on split screens,, conversing and arguing as the city unspools kinetically behind them.

The show was packed with Argentine expats, curiosity seekers, and hard core experimentalists who wanted to see how subversive cinematic effusions looked from the land where summer is winter and winter is summer.  We served yerba mate from communal gourds at the show—there’s no caffeine in mate, but there is something in there, and the room seemed to float on the wings of a filmic reverie.  We also served sweet dessert churros  (filled with dulce de leche of course) purchased at the famous Buenos Aires Bakery in Queens.
Driving back home we played back images from the screen in our heads—the frantic single frame pace of Narcisa Hirsch’s “Aleph”,  the wry and witty animated vignettes of Liliana Porter’s “Para Usted/For You” and the truncated urban space of Pablo Marin’s “Sin Titulo”, shot on an apartment building roof in Buenos Aires. As distinctive as New York is, it also recalls other cities, in a similar way that Buenos Aires can seem like Paris or Madrid, refracted, if you squint your eyes just right.  As revelers in Brooklyn ducked in and out of bars at 11 pm, it felt as if an Argentine night was just beginning.

Wind in Our Hair Diary

May 16, 2008                                   Brooklyn, New York

Tonight I finished reading Julio Cortazar’s short story “Final del Juego”.  Since I will be spending the summer in Buenos Aires in a few months, I am trying to get a feeling for the city and for the people.  As a mother of two 13 and 11 year-old girls (Maya and Noa), I am drawn to Cortazar’s depiction of a seemingly quiet yet tumultuous moment in three pre-adolescent girls’ lives.  Letitia, Holanda and the narrator (un-named) are spending a few weeks together in a house near the train tracks.  Each day they perform a series of “sculptures” and “attitudes” on a landing looking out over the tracks of a commuter train as it speeds by.  One afternoon, an older boy throws them a note from the train window, indicating that he has been watching them from afar.  The girls are transfixed, exhilarated, confused by this attention.  The game continues for a few weeks longer, anonymously.  Then one day, the boy get off the train and the girls finally have a chance to meet him.  Their conversation is brief, stilted, and uninspired, nothing like what they had imagined. The game is, alas, over.

The painful realization so cleverly hidden behind whimsy, dramatic play and baroque costuming reminds me of the time my own girls are experiencing in their lives now.  I want to turn this story into a experimental film, one that “documents” and explores these sensations that are so close to the ones I too knew in my early teenage years.

June 26, 2008

We’ve arrived in Buenos Aries and I am ready to begin thinking about making Cortazar’s story into a film.  Problem is, I don’t know any other girls, let alone a 15 year old boy, and I only speak a bit of Spanish.  I suppose Maya and Noa will be thrilled to perform, but I want this project to bring me closer to the country while I am here, so it seems that the only way to start is by integrating local people into the production. My dear friend, Paula Felix Didier, now director of the Buenos Aires Cine Museum, volunteers to serve as a make-shift casting director. She quickly, I’d say magically, finds two wonderful Argentine girls who are the daughters of close friends.  Lena and Chiara Peroni, ages 12 and 10, will join our esteemed cast and I will transform the three “protaginistas” into four, no problem.   Their mother Bettina Nanclares will play the mother.  We decide to use their new house in Martinez, a suburb of Buenos Aires as our home location, which is appropriate since the story takes place in an un-named town on the very same Mitre Line they use every day.

Lautaro Cura, a 15 year-old boy who is the son of another friend of Paula’s, also enthusiastically agrees to join the group as the boy on the train named Ariel. We go to his home at 11 PM one evening to discuss the logistics and discover we will need to organize our production around the schedule of his academic exams and rock and roll band practice.  A meeting with a prospective actor for a movie at midnight might seem odd in New York, but in a matter of just a few days, I have discovered that everything of any import in Buenos Aires seems to take place in the middle of the night. No wonder I have already learned the word “madrugada” after less than a week Argentina.  In English we don’t even have a word for the early morning hours just before sunrise.  We are all asleep at that time.   In desperation, I ask Paula to double up on her rolls in this production.  She agrees to play the esteemed roll of Tia Ruth.

July 1, 2008

I have read just enough about Argentine film production to know that collaboration here is not just a matter of necessity but is also a highly respected form of cinematic production.  I invite three marvelous Argentine filmmakers to join me in this collective endeavor.  I first saw Pablo Marin’s and Leandro Listorti’s lyrical Super 8 experimental films when I came to Buenos Aires last year for the film festival. They both see the world through a distinctive, curious lens so I am thrilled they have agreed to shoot the Super 8 and video sections of the film. In addition, they begin to show me the history of Argentine experimental film, starting from the 1960’s to the present.  In this melieu, I  watch the transportive, often dream-inspired films of Narcisa Hirsch, Claudio Caldini and Lucrecia Martel which give me a deeper sense of the visual textures of the urban and rural landscapes surrounding me.  Tomas Dota, a member of the staff of the film festival and a precocious film student, will also help with the production.  We spend a few weeks planning.  At each meeting, Maya, Noa and I become a bit more comfortable with the delightfully obligatory series of “hola” and “adios” kisses. I put everyone’s phone number into my new BsAs cell phone.  My daughters start listening to the pop music of Fabiano Cantilo and Julieta Venegas and eagerly await the premiere of Disney’s “Desafio” (Latin American version of “HIghschool Musical”).   We start a “sabor” competition between various brands of alfahore.  I feel that this is home for the time being.

July 18, 19 and 25,

During this week, I show a series of experimental films that my partner Mark Street and I made in New York at the Palais de Glace, Palacio Nacional de las Artes. www.palaisdeglace.org.  This will also be a week of pre-production. I fall in love with the Cotillion and costume shops on Calle Lavalle in Once.  The colorful stores full of mannequins, bright fabrics and other superfluous yet splendid wares remind me of the Lower East Side of New York City.   With Tomas’ guidance, I obtain Super 8 film stock for our production from a special, somewhat secret source in town.  I learn to take the Collectivos and how to horde  my “monada” so that I can actually get on the bus with the necessary coins.  We try our best to understand the political dynamics that are part of the tensions between the Argentine farmers and the Argentine government.  There seems to be a charged yet fascinating crisis brewing.

July 27, 2008

Production begins in Martinez.  We will shoot every day this week for approximately 6 – 8 hours a day.  This is the first week of Lena’s and Chiara’s winter vacation so I am lucky enough to have their complete attention.  Inspired by the charged, tight-knit home environment I saw in Lucrecia Martel’s “La Cieniga”, I try to create a spirit of emotional electricity in the Peroni home.  As the children move through the rooms of this austere 1970’s haute-modern house, they investigate their various costumes and  begin to understand the personalities of their characters.  Lena is playing Letitia which is probably the most difficult role:  a girl with a pronounced physical disability that makes her posture look awkward and wrought. She is haughty, brilliant and vulnerable.  Chiara plays Holanda, who is clever, patient and naughty.  Maya plays the narrator (whom we name Elena), an observant, overly responsible girl who feels her changes of life painfully.  Noa plays Pilar ( a name all of the girls adore), the fourth, invented character, who is playful and wily.

As a way to get “into character”, I ask them to play a game I have invented called “House Taken Over”, inspired by Cortazar’s haunting story of a brother and a sister who discover that their home is inhabited by the voices, and perhaps the people who own these voices.  They run manically through the house trying to escape the frightful sounds, and ultimately end up outside their very own front door – homeless in a way. Leandro Listorti follows the girls with his video camera, as the girls inhabit their characters in the process of playing the game.  This theater game then leads us to the film shooting of all the interior scenes.

July 28 and 29, 2008

Each girl has one scene in the film in which she discovers some aspect of urban life.  While not precisely in Cortazar’s “cuento” I felt it would add to the sense of the characters to see them outside the comfortable environment of the home.  All of this material is shot with the Super 8 film to give these scenes a more textured, timeless quality.  Leandro Listorti shoots with Chiara on the broad Parisian steps of the the Plaza Francia.  Pablo Marin shoots with Noa under the shockingly modern sweep of the Bibliotecha National and in Ricoleta Cemetario. Tomas Dota, Leandro and I take Maya and Lena to the cotillion stores of Once and along Corrientes,  Buenos Aires’ Broadway chock full o’ elegant, crowded bookstores, three story pizza parlors with elderly men in silk scarves around their necks.  Amidst this milieu, there is also a strange sense of urgency and uncertainty and one must be a bit vigilant and constantly aware, in that urban way we have learned by heart in New York, in order to stay solid and just slightly self-assured, walking through the city streets with girls in costumes.

July 30, 2008

I am getting to know the train route between Capital Federal and Martinez.  Today we spend another 8 hours in the home of the Peroni’s.  Paula Felix Didier joins us in her role as Tia Ruth with Betina Nanclares who is the mother.  We have an outrageous time in the kitchen, following Cortazar’s story rather closely.  In these scenes, naguhty Holanda sneaks into the kitchen to throw wet spoons across the floor and hot water (we faked this) on the dog.  Leandro shoots gorgeous video footage of this hilarious sequence of the events and I imagine that our laughing can be heard to the end of the block.  Perhaps one of those ubiquitous security gaurds stationed in a booth at every corner is wondering what on earth we are all up to.  Later there are quiet scenes in Letitia’s bedroom as she write her private letter to Ariel.

July 31, 2008

We are all exhausted. Recreo and pausa are good words to know.  I go shopping in Once for more props and costumes.

August 1, 2008

One of the most challenging days of all.  We spend about 5 hours at the train station, shooting the girls in their various wacky, poignant, monsterous and beguiling statues and attitudes, all on the grass just beside the train.  Everyone is prepared with a cell phone because we must coordinate Ariel’s ride on the train with the girls performances.  Pablo and Leandro shoot video, I am running around with my 16mm Bolex. Tomas is on the train with Lautaro who is in a grey suit with a book bag as Ariel.  We know all the people in the station, on the sidewalk and on the train are watching us but we throw caution to the wind and keep going. The girls at first are ever so shy and then they just become their characters and relish the world of longing and wonder that we all have created.  The weather is very cold today but we prevail somehow, completely worn out but thrilled as the light disappears and we must go home.

August 2, 2008

Pablo Marin and I take Lautaro (Ariel) and my daughter Maya (the narrator) to the Retiro train station to shoot the nightmare scene as Cortazar had imagined it. The minute we pull out Pablo’s Super 8 camera we are told to leave by the police.  I had spotted an even more nightmarish location for our “pesadilla” scene on my way to the station, a magnificently grotesque sculpture garden behind Retiro, full of dinosaur size animals built by Argentine railway artist Carlos Ragazonni. So we walk to this daunting, hidden, hellish, fantastic place and decide we are lucky to have been evicted from the station today.

August 16, 2008

Our last production day is a continuation of the narrator’s nightmare.  I ask my friend Ynes Oyarbide, a psychoanalyst and a photographer, to join us as an artist consultant.  Her understanding of and appreciation for the layers of meaning behind and inside dreams sparks wonderful tableaux vivant that I think can only enhance this aspect of the movie. We shoot in a wooded area right next to the Mitre train tracks in Parque Palermo. Here  three of the girls, wearing moon masks, dance like ghosts under the trees while the narrator searches for  them in a game of “Gallito Ciego” (similar to our Blindman’s Bluff).  Later, the narrator believes she has failed in the Cortazar game of “statues and attitudes” and looks down at her feet to discover they have become chicken legs. Lastly, all four girls hurl 20 messages, that resemble the ones that Ariel had thrown them, back onto the train tracks.  In my mind, the girls are announcing that they are not dependent on Ariel’s messages for their happiness, but of course who’s to say what any of these wild and wonderful images we have made over the last month really mean. That will be up to our audience to decide.

Lynne Sachs at the Contemporary Art Foundation (Montevideo, Uruguay)

Hear Voices / Lynne Sachs
Contemporary Art Foundation – Montevideo 
Lynne Sachs by Lynne Sachs
July 28, 2009
http://facmvd.blogspot.com/2009/07/0598204-oigo-voces-lynn-sachs-by-lynn.html

Lynne Sachs (NYC), experimental filmmaker will present her latest creation as a pre-premiere “Wind in Our Hair”, it is based on stories by Julio Cortazar, filmed in various formats (16mm, super 8, regular 8mm film, video) digitally mastered and set to music by Juana Molina.

And Which Way Is East (1994) a travel diary filmed in 16mm, which portrays her vision of the documentary that comes from contemplation, from prioritizing the moment and the light it displays, from her way of being in the world. This film was made in Vietnam with her sister the journalist Dana Sachs who lives there.

Awards the film has received: Grand Jury Prize, Atlanta Film and Video Festival; Sundance Film Festival; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Prize, Black Maria Film and Video Festival; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Cinematheque; “Arsenal” Film Festival, Rega, Lativa; Pacific Film Archive; Mill Valley Film Festival; Vassar College; Yale University; Cornell Cinema; SF Asian American Film Festival.

The Last Happy Day

The Last Happy Day
37 min. 2009 by Lynne Sachs

a portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran

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, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.

“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

For password to Vimeo link, please write to info@lynnesachs.com.

Premiere: New York Film Festival, 2009

Broadcast:  Hungarian Public Television, Spring 2010.

Website on Alexander Lenard:   http://mek.oszk.hu/kiallitas/lenard/indexeng.html

Credits:

Cast:

Sandor Lenard voice: Israel John Gerendasi
Sandor Lenard performance:  Donald Moss with Ivan Moss
Winnie the Pooh Performers:  Lucas Fagen, Isabel Reade, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs

Camera:  Ethan Mass, Lynne Sachs
Latin Consultation: Michele Lowrie

Interviews by Lynne Sachs
Hansgerd Lenard, Dusseldorf, Germany
Andrietta Lenard, Sao Paolo, Brazil

Selected Screenings and Honors: Indiewire.Com: Nominated One of the Best “Undistributed Films” of 2009 (Phillip Lopate); Director’s Choice Award, Black Maria Film Festival 2010; San Francisco Cinematheque;  Pacific Film Archive;  Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival, Spain;  University of Chicago; Chicago Filmmakers;  Closing Night Film Singapore Film Festival; International House University of Pennsylvania; Museum of the Moving Image, NYC, 2021; Criterion Channel Streaming.

Criterion Channel streaming premiere with 7 other films, Oct. 2021.

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

lasthappydaysandor-at-autopsy

Last Happy Day still of childupsidedown copy

Looking for Umbels

Umbel plantDI

Filmmaker Lynne Sachs looks for umbels in New York City. An umbel is a flower cluster in which all stalks arise from the same center point.

Moon Watching in the Big Apple

Filmmaker Lynne Sachs wanted to understand the word SELENOGRAPHY so she traipsed around New York City from Fresh Kills State Park in Staten Island (the darkest place in the city) to the Lower East Side looking for the moon.  Made for the Abecedarium:NYC Project (www.abecedariumnyc.org).