“Georgic for a Forgotten Planet” 11 min., video, 2009
“I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. Culled from material I collected at Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark you can see the three moons of Jupiter. An homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple” Lynne Sachs
Screenings: Palais de Glace, Museo National de Artes Buenos Aires; Museo Nacional de Artes, Uruguay; Howl Festival of Art, New York; Monkeytown, Brooklyn; Black Maria Film Fest Award, Director’s Choice; Athens Film Festival
Sunday, April 12, 2009 Georgic for a Forgotten Planet “Lynne Sachs showed one of her latest films, “Georgic for a Forgotten Planet”, last night at ATA, a cultural icon here in San Francisco. The film, like Vergil’s Georgic, is a lovely and meditatively poetic paean to agriculture, although, unlike Vergil, the film’s focus is on the separation of our citified culture from the husbandry of the earth as well as the separation of our own persons from what surrounds us. I was struck in particular by a number of plaintive shots of the Moon over the city, hardly visible against the streetlights, ignored by those below, a forgotten deity.
Many of her films center on ecology and our damage of the same and we saw a number of those as well. Also included on the program were the films of her partner Mark Street, including one of his more abstract works titled Winter Wheat, a beautiful bubbling hand-manipulated piece of 16mm art, which took on an environmental urgency in the context of the other films. ” Erling Wold See Composer Erling Wold’s thoughts at www.erlingwold.com
“From archival snips of an educational film on the weather to cine poems in full blossom, Brooklyn film “avant-gardeners” Mark Street and Lynne Sachs create their 3rd XY CHROMOSOME PROJECT at Other Cinema at ATA in San Francisco. 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).” (72 min.)
“Weather Mix/Collision of Parts” (12 min.)
An overture: Weather Mix considers nature’s uneven keel while Collision of Parts takes us on a twisted roller coaster ride through small forgotten moments in New York City. Sound by computer weather forecasts, Pierre Shaffer and others. M. Street, 2008.
DOUBLE SCREEN “Buffalo Disaster Relief” (9 min.)
Archival footage filmed by the US National Guard of Buffalo, New York’s worst snowstorm on record. Obtained from the US National Archives. People attempt to reclaim their daily vignettes in the course of a larger narrative. M. Street and others, 1972.
& “Window Work” (9 min., sound)
A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that suggest a kind of quiet mystery. Hear the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets on a summer night, jangling toys, the roar of a jet, children trembling at the sound of thunder. Small home-movie “boxes” within the larger screen become clues to the woman’s childhood, mnemonic devices that expand the sense of immediacy in her “drama.” L. Sachs, 2001
“Winter Wheat” (8 min., sound)
Made by bleaching, scratching and painting directly on the emulsion of an educational film about the farming cycle. The manipulations of the film’s surface created hypnotic visuals while also suggesting an apocalyptic narrative. M. Street, 1989.
“Georgic for a Forgotten Planet” (14 min., sound)
I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a 1st Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. Culled from material I collected at Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark at night you can see the three moons of Jupiter. An homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple. L. Sachs, 2009
DOUBLE SCREEN “Sliding Off the Edge of the World” (7 min., silent)
A stab at depicting daily life near the end of time: fleeting images burst onto the screen only to recede from view just as quickly, suggesting transition and decay. Tendrils of images cluster together and then dissipate. A snowy walk, kids in the backyard, it all seems like it could fall apart so quickly. M. Street, 2001
& “Noa, Noa” (9 min., sound)
Over the course of three years, Lynne collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of a Brooklyn park with camera and costumes in hand. L. Sachs, 2006
“Behold the Gowanus Canal” (6 min., sound)
On Earth Day 2008 in Brooklyn, New York, Lynne, Mark and their daughters Maya and Noa float down the Gowanus Canal with environmental visionary Ludger Balan, head of the Urban Divers Estuary Conservancy. Located in the heart of Brooklyn, the canal contains the residual pollution left from decades of disregard for the health and well being of this thriving urban neighborhood and its residents. Finally, the community is waking up to the possible revitalization of this Venice-like waterway. L. Sachs, 2008
DOUBLE SCREEN “Infected City” (14 min. sound)
A coda: the stars and the city meet for one last dance between the known and sublime. M. Street, 2008.
& “New Orleans, Louisiana” (14 min., silent)
One year after Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the levy, and the tragic flooding of New Orleans, Mark and Lynne traveled to this city to help raise money for Zeitgeist Theatre Experiments, a struggling microcinema continuing to show alternative films to the passionate but dwindling local community. This is what they saw as they explored the now famous Ninth Ward and the banks of Lake Ponchatrain. L. Sachs and M. Street, 2006
NOTE: This film’s title is now WIND IN OUR HAIR/ CON VIENTO EN EL PELO
TRACKING LYNNE SACHS TOWARDS THE END OF THE GAME
(English translation of article published on September 6, 2008 in Diario La Republica’ de Corrientes, Argentina)
By Melisa Mozzati
Cold August winter in Buenos Aires. Lynne Sachs and a reduced crew are ready to begin the last shooting day of her first fictional opus. She chooses a small grove next to the Mitre’s train tracks in Palermo’s Park.
The last scenes are filmed in two different formats. Lynne captures images in Super 8 mm meanwhile Tomás Dota, a young Argentinean filmmaker and part of the local group that collaborates in Sachs project does the same in HDV. At one side, the classic and purity of the film dominated by the hand of an artist that feels in her environment with it, at the other side, digital technology in front of the perspective of the new generation. This is experimental cinema. A mixture of format and textures. Different ways altogether in the crucial moment of telling the same story.
Lynne Sachs adventures in a unusual path. As a natural born documentary’s filmmaker, she decides to produce her fist fiction movie in our country. After being invited by the Buenos Aires International Independent Festival (Buenos Aires Festival de Cine Independiente – BAFICI) in 2007, she promised herself to come back this year for summer holidays with her family to try to unveil a hidden project that our land kept for her.
Last May, while she was reading Julio Cortázar short story “Final de Juego” she realized that this would be her fist attempt in fiction. Later in Argentina, her next step was to find the actors and a dear friend of her, Paula Felix Didier, the world wide well known Director of the National Museum of Cinema “Pablo D. Hicken” who recently discovered the Fritz Lang original final cut of “Metropolis”, had the solution. She introduced Lynne to the children who would complete the cast: the sisters Lena and Chiara Peroni and Lautaro Cura. Maya and Noa Street, Lynne´s daughters, were part of the project from the very beginning. Now with enougt teenagers, Sachs could finally say: ACTION! Bettina Nanclares, mother of Lena and Chiara, as well as Felix Didier also took part in the film in the roles of the mother of the girls and Aunt Ruth, respectively.
But Lynne Sachs always escapes from conventionalisms. She added a diversity of looks and textures into this story full of deep emotions that go off like a train running at maximum velocity. For this reason, she used different formats. To her Bolex 16 mm, she added Pablo Marin’s and Leandro Listorti’s Super 8 and Tomás Dota’s digital video all of whome divided the shooting work into several locations. Starting at a house in Martinez that reminds us a 70s manor where the action starts rolling. This was Leandro Listorti´s first task. Then came scenes in Plaza Francia, National Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and Recoleta Cemetery (Cementerio de Recoleta).
Maybe the most complicated obstacle was to film in Mitre’s train station because the train passing, Ariel’s departure and the exact moment when the girls were doing the “postures” had to be precisely coordinated. However, everything was fulfilled with success and after a exhausting day everybody came back home with a smile of satisfaction in their face.
The day before the last was classic, one of those that must be in every experimental film shoot. When Lynne and Pablo Marin were just about to start filming in Retiro´s train station the police came out and they announced that they were not allowed to capture any image there. Very disappointed, they left the place and after only a few minutes walking they discovered a magical place – a garden full of sculpted animals by the Argentinean artist, Carlos Regazzoni. This nightmarish place was the perfect spot to register the proposed scenes.
Finally, we arrive at the cold August winter Sunday of the beginning of these chronicals and the actual end of the production. At this point, the narrator’s nightmare is on set. With the collaboration of psychologist and photographer, Inés Oyerbide, a necessary level of comprehension and appreciation of the several layers of meanings that lay beneath the oeniric moment of the story’s telling was reached.
As good filmmakers, Lynne Sachs doesn’t over explain the story’s closure. She lets us decide what is hidden behind every photogram. She does not overwhelm us with information avoiding our brain to get sleepy in a slow, placid carrousel of images. On the contrary. She invites us to this interesting trip in which anyone can infer what really is in this multi-textured chain that surrounds this magnificent Cortázar short story with so many comprehension levels.
Those who accept the invitation to this playful instant of cinema are welcome. Let’s reach to the end of the game as we like.
BREVIARY
Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Lynne Sachs constantly tries to expose verbal language limitation seeing it as a complex visual and emotional imagery.
Always working in experimental area of cinema, she has dived in a great variety of themes such as genre limitations, radical identities, psico-emotional states, American idiosyncrasy and war conflicts.
Documentary genre is her natural environment but she decided to get into the world of fiction by the hand of one of the most fantastic fictional literature writers. Julio Cortázar´s stories are full of secret games and his work not only awakes a profound interest in readers but also is a connexion with the inner child that lives in ourselves.
Lynne Sachs was not the exception and she also wanted to have fun so she chose Cortázar´s “Final del Juego” (End of the Game) as the plot for her first fiction film, and Buenos Aires, Argentina as the perfect playground.
Filmography
With Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989).
The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991)
Which Way is East (1994)
A Biography of Lilith (1997)
Investigation on a Flame (2001)
The House of Drafts (2002)
States of UnBelonging (2004)
Final del Juego (in production)
By Melisa Mozzati – melisamozzati@hotmail.com – Corrientes, Argentina
SIGUIENDO A LYNNE SACHS HASTA EL FINAL DEL JUEGO
Melissa Mozatti
Diario La Republica’ de Corrientes, Argentina
6 Septiembre, 2008
Frío domingo de Agosto en Buenos Aires. Lynne Sachs y un reducido grupo de colaboradores se dispone a comenzar la última jornada de rodaje de su primera obra de ficción y elige una pequeña arboleda pegada a las vías del tren Mitre en los parques de Palermo.
Las últimas escenas se filman en dos formatos diferentes. Lynne capta las imágenes en Super 8 mientras que Tomás Dota, un realizador argentino y parte del grupo de jóvenes cineastas locales que colaboraron en este proyecto, registra en Alta Definición Digital. Lo clásico del fílmico de la mano de una artista que se siente cómoda en ese formato, por un lado, y la tecnología digital delante de la mirada de la nueva generación, por el otro. El cine experimental se basa en esto. En la mixtura de formatos y texturas, en las distintas formas de ver conjugadas al momento de contar una misma historia.
Lynne Sachs se aventura en un camino distinto. Documentalista por naturaleza, decide realizar su primera producción de ficción en nuestro país. Luego de haber sido convocada por el Buenos Aires Festival de Cine Independiente en su edición del 2007, se prometió volver en este año en unas prolongadas vacaciones junto a su familia para tratar de develar que proyectos le esperaban dormidos en nuestras latitudes.
Lo supo a mediados del mes de mayo mientras organizaba su estadía de varios meses en Argentina. Terminó de leer el cuento de Julio Cortázar, “Final de Juego” y decidió que ese sería su primer film de ficción.
Ya en Argentina, el problema era conseguir actores que llevaran adelante la historia y para tal empresa contó con la ayuda de una querida amiga, nada menos que la hoy muy reconocida por su descubrimiento del metraje original de la famosa “Metrópolis” de Fritz Lang que se suponía perdida para siempre, Paula Felix Didier, directora del Museo Nacional de Cine “Pablo D. Hicken”, que presentó a quienes completarían el reparto del film, las hermanas Lena y Chiara Peroni y Lautaro Cura. Noa y Maya Street, hijas de Lynne, eran parte del proyecto desde un inicio y, uniéndose al resto de los adolescentes, comenzó el rodaje.
La madre de las actrices argentinas, Bettina Nanclares, y hasta la propia Felix Didier también colaboraron en los papeles de la madre de las niñas y de la tia Ruth, respectivamente.
Pero Lynne Sachs escapa siempre a los convencionalismos y a esta historia de emociones profundas que se disparan a la velocidad de un tren agregó diversas miradas y texturas para lo cual eligió mezclar diferentes formatos. Ella, siempre captando las imágenes con su Bolex 16 mm, sumó la Super 8 de Pablo Marin y Leandro Listorti y el video digital de Tomás Dota quienes a su vez se dividieron la tarea de tirar toma en diversas locaciones. Empezando por una casa en Martinez que remite la idea de caserón de los 70s donde inicia la acción en el relato, Leandro Listorti fue el encargado de rodar las primeras escenas. Siguieron las tomas en Plaza Francia, la Biblioteca Nacional y el Cementerio de Recoleta.
Quizás lo más complicado haya sido filmar en la estación de tren Mitre ya que había que coordinar el paso del tren, la salida de Ariel (Lautaro) y el momento en que las chicas hacían las estatuas. Sin embargo, todo salió como debía y luego de un exhaustivo día volvieron todos contentos a casa.
La penúltima jornada fue de antología y de aquellas que deben estar presentes en los rodajes de cine experimental. Cuando Lynne y Pablo Marin se disponían a filmar en la estación de tren de Retiro varios policías se acercaron a impedirlo y decepcionados tuvieron que abandonar el predio aunque minutos después lo agradecieron ya que se toparon con el grotesco jardín de esculturas que se encuentra detrás de Retiro, lleno de animales esculpidos construidos por el artista plástico Carlos Regazzoni. Este lugar pesadillesco fue ideal para registrar las escenas propuestas.
Para finalizar, llegamos al frio domingo de agosto del inicio de esta crónica y del final de la realización. El último día de producción es la continuación de la pesadilla del narrador. Con la colaboración de Inés Oyarbide, psicoanalista de profesión y fotógrafa por vocación, se logró el nivel necesario de comprensión y apreciación de las distintas capas de significado que subyacen en el momento onírico del film.
Como los buenos cineastas Lynne Sachs no nos sobreexplica el relato ni su cierre. Nos deja decidir qué hay detrás de cada fotograma. No nos atosiga de información para que nuestro cerebro se adormezca tranquilamente en el transitar de las imágenes. Todo lo contrario. Nos invita a pasear y a que cada uno conjeturemos a voluntad que se esconde en el encadenado de las diversas texturas que envuelven un magnifico relato de Cortázar con tantos niveles de comprensión como uno desee hallar.
Quienes acepten la invitación a este momento lúdico del cine sean bienvenidos y que cada uno llegue al final del juego de la forma en que guste.
BREVIARIO
Nacida y criada en Memphis, Tennesse, Lynne Sachs intenta constantemente exponer las limitaciones del lenguaje verbal complementándolo con una compleja imaginería visual y emocional.
Siempre trabajando en el área experimental de la cinematografía ha tratado una gran diversidad de temáticas que van desde las limitaciones de géneros, las identidades radicalizadas, los estados psico-emocionales, la idiosincrasia norteamericana y los conflictos bélicos.
El género documental es el medio en donde mejor se siente pero ha decidido ingresar al mundo fantástico y de la mano (o de la pluma si se quiere) de uno de los mejores escritores de literatura de ficción, Julio Cortázar, quien incluye en sus relatos un cariz lúdico que despierta en los lectores no solo el interés obvio en una obra inteligente sino un punto de contacto con el niño interior que no descansa de los juegos.
Lynne Sachs no fue la excepción y también quiso salir a jugar, por eso eligió “Final del Juego” de Cortázar como argumento para su primer film de ficción y Buenos Aires, Argentina, como locación para el mismo.
Filmografia
With Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989).
The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991)
In celebration of PS 1’s WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution:
“Flower Power Movie Flicks” selected by Maya and Noa Street-Sachs
PS 1 Contemporary Art Center Cafe
22-25 Jackson Ave. at 46th St.
Long Island City
www.PS1.org
May 4, 2007
Ask any American child today to name his or her favorite woman director and you’ll probably be left with a long embarrassing silence. Okay then, let’s try again. Name one woman filmmaker, dead or living. Again, no response. It’s a troubling situation that the New York Filmmakers Cooperative has been trying to rectify for the last four decades. In the spirit of PS 1’s WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, young movie enthusiasts Maya and Noa Street-Sachs, daughters of two Brooklyn experimental filmmakers, have put together a splendid afternoon of films by seven of Americas’ most awe inspiring women directors.
From an early garden dance tour-de-force by avant-garde film’s grand-dame Maya Deren to a 1968 political manifesto dressed in visual whimsy, these movies may not be very well known but they are sure to entertain any adventurous 1 to 100 year old child.
“We chose seven fantastic avant-garde films that we thought would fit the theme of flower power. Every one of these movies is made by a woman who experiments by mixing sound, color and image – like a witch stirring her cauldron. We had a great time picking these shorts we hope other children will like as much as we did.” -Maya and Noa Street-Sachs Films:
“Rat Life and Diet” by Joyce Wieland (16 min., 1968)
“Glimpse of the Garden” by Marie Menken (5 min., 1957)
“Bridges Go Round” by Shirley Clarke (18 min., 1958)
“Les Tournesols” by Rose Lowder (3 min., 1982)
“Duck” by Amy Taubin (2 min., 1975)
“Adventure Parade” by Kerry Laitala (5 min., 2000)
“Study in Choreography for Camera” by Maya Deren (3 min., 1945)
Bruce Conner died in the summer of 2008. For those who may not know, he was a Beat generation artist, the first filmmaker to see the value in “found footage”, and an extraordinary visionary. His collages and films are in museums and archives all over the world. Two different people in Buenos Aires, where I was living last summer, mentioned his death to me without even knowing that I knew him. Bruce was a very important person in my life and psyche. In 1985-86, the year I spent working with him, we often drove around San Francisco in his Cadillac looking for Geiger counters to measure the radioactivity under his home. Then we would go back to his studio basement and I would listen to him tell stories about the 1960’s and 70s art scene and about growing up in Oklahoma while he did the work (resplicing his films for preservation) I was actually supposed to be doing for him. I was neither careful, clean nor precise enough for his liking. Then we would have a healthy lunch with Jean, his wife, and I would go home while he took a nap. A few hours later, I would tip-toe back into the house and sit on the couch twiddling my thumbs waiting for him to wake up. Many years later, he gave my daughters Maya and Noa lovely ink-blot drawings they and I will always treasure.
Brings tears to my eyes. Here’s to found images floating away and then back into our grasp.
Lynne Sachs
Published with other Remembrances http://www.sf360.org/features/bruce-conner-remembered
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ARTIST ABECEDARIUM
by Lynne Sachs
Co-director Abecedarium: NYC
Anthropologists, filmmakers, linguists, musicians, painters, poets, writers — all share a fascination with the 26 letters of the alphabet. An abecedarium is traditionally an educational book for children containing words beginning with each letter, but for centuries it has also been a resource for creative work by artists in almost every media. This history of the abecedarium will look at a selection of artists whose intentions are both to celebrate and disrupt this most basic and widespread system of verbal communication.
Linguistic philosopher Johanna Drucker points to the obvious: words come and go while letters remain strikingly constant. Her Alphabetic Labyrinth: the Letters in History and Imagination is a fascinating place to begin exploring the role that these iconic characters have played in the theater of world history and culture. Drucker’s interest in the typography of the Roman alphabet is expansive, allowing her reader to witness the alphabet’s omnipotence as well as its eccentricity. Rather than a dry archeology of language, Drucker leads us into “the realm of imagination and philosophical speculation.” Through her erudition and curiosity, we see each letter as a communicative symbol, a picture, and a discrete aesthetic experience.
According to Drucker, both this alphabet and the Chinese character system began as early as 1700 B.C.E. Remarkable as it may seem, the Arabic, Bengali, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Tibetan languages all stem from one point of origin in the Sinai, the birthplace of both the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. Eventually, the Indo-European languages would grow out of this rich environment, creating the 24-30 letter alphabets comprising the Balkan, Germanic, Indian, Indonesian, Romance and Slavic languages we know today. The non-alphabetic Chinese characters provided the written forms for the rest of the world. With this rudimentary knowledge of the evolution of letters as signifiers and signs, we can start looking at artists who have played with, challenged, punctured, praised and deconstructed words — those lofty yet prosaic creations that come from the permutations and combinations of the alphabet.
THE FUTURIST EXPERIMENT IN EUROPE
The Italian Futurists were notorious for their desire to rip apart every cultural institution in European society. Coming of age in Italy just before the outbreak of World War I, the Futurist movement’s fearless leader Filippo Marinetti brazenly experimented with all forms of typography by putting “words-in-liberty”, on the page and the wall. Their new alphabet epitomized a radical “stati d’animo” (state of mind) in which text was turned upside down, flipped, and graphically transformed. The Futurists even went so far in their desire to shake up the status quo that they wrote a Futurist Cookbook where they invented an edible alphabet that would bake, boil and burn the Italian culinary system like it had never been cooked before.
Just a few hundred miles to the east, the Russian Futurists were doing equally innovative things with the alphabet. Poet Aleski Kruchenykh and artist Velimir Khlebnikov collaborated on the creation of a new, experimental language they called Zaum. Equally committed to the articulation of the horrific and the non-verbal, this Cyrillic version of a futurist alphabet embraced baby talk, onomatopoeia, and insanity. Zaum assigned a characteristic to each sound: the letter A embodied a statement of denial; B was collision or magnification. Some letters took on the qualities of certain colors. No one, not even its inventors, claimed to understand the language of Zaum.
AMERICAN WORD PLAY
With a nod to the original purpose of an abecedarium, Gertrude Stein threw herself into writing an episodic A to Z poem for children in 1940. She aspired to creating a “book I would have liked as a child.” Seventeen years later, her dear friend Alice B. Toklas assisted her in the publication of To Do: Alphabets and Birthdays, a delightful romp through a series of eccentric characters that probably appeals to a open-minded adults more so than an earnest child. In true Stein form, the language is playful and rhythmic – pushing words and their meanings into new galaxies of sense and non-sense. By the time we reach Z, this is where we are:
“Oh dear oh Zero. Zero they said and they felt well fed. Oh hero dear oh Zero….And why is Zero a hero. Because if there was no Zero there would not be ten of them there would only be one….” Gertrude Stein
Equally resistant to the notion of empowering a man-made thing – be it a word, a song or a canvas — with the ability to express an actual emotion, painter Jasper Johns hurled a quiet epitaph at the grandiose vision of Abstract Expressionism with his 1956 painting “Alphabet”. Johns’ large, golden beeswax-and-oil canvas full of letters was the harbinger of an artistic movement glorifying “things that are not looked at.” Over six feet high and six feet wide, this homage to willful banality brought attention to the 26 letters as they had never experienced before.
Like conventional musical notation, the alphabet simultaneously limits and explodes the possibilities for verbal expression. In 1982, experimental composer and philosopher of time and rhythm, John Cage wrote “An Alphabet”, a radio play with characters based on Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce and Eric Satie. The piece creates an imaginary encounter between the narrator and sixteen creative personalities who represent “an alphabet by means of which we spell our lives.” The dialogue between the characters relies on Cage’s infamous chance operations as well as his ingenious mesostic poetry. A mesostic word emerges from a vertical phrase intersecting lines of horizontal text. In contrast to alphabet acrostics where the beginning of successive words follows from A to Z, mesostics emerge from letters found in the middle of a line.
At the same time as Cage was embracing his conceptual alphabet, essayist Susan Sontag was writing her own alphabet on modern dance. Her contemplative yet erudite “Lexicon for Available Light” (1983) looks at contemporary dance through a series of short thought-pieces moving from Beauty to Choreography to Diagonal to Openings to Politeness to Space to Volition to Yearning to Zeno’s Territory. Intertwining a love of both classical and modern choreography, Sontag contemplates the almost typographic postures of a contemporary dancer.
AVANT GARDE FILM MEETS AVANT GARDE ALPHABET
In 1970, American avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton completed his opus on the alphabet and named it “Zorns Lemma”. For six years, Frampton crisscrossed New York City – from Coney Island to the Lower East Side to the far reaches of City Island — carrying a 16mm film camera and looking for words from A to Z. His documentation of signs is an exhilarating history of 1970s New York. This astounding experimental film presents us with a recurring structure that transports the way we look at skyscrapers, subway stops, barbershops, diners and newsstands. With each loop through the letters, purely photographic images begin to replace signs, as a rhythmic kaleidoscopic of activity propels the viewer through the city.
Twenty years later, another New York experimental filmmaker decided to structure a far more autobiographical film around the alphabet, this time in reverse. Su Friedrich’s “Sink or Swim” is an astonishingly intimate yet elleptical portrait of the filmmaker and her relationship with her father. Through this collage oddysey, Friedrich visits all 26 letters, including Zygote (sci-fi footage of the egg and the sperm), Virginity (a fantacy about harems), Temptation (sleek women bodybuilders), Quicksand (abstracted imagery for a terrifying movie) and Ghosts (brooding images of a confrontational letter to her father). Reaching the very core of a young woman’s burgeoning identity, the film has been enormously influential in the realm of both the personal essay film and the experimental film. Friedrich’s inclusion of a girl singing the alphabet song brings to the fore her interest in this linguistic system – in all its glory and rigidity.
THE ABECEDARIAN POEM
New York poet and Abecedarium:NYC artist, Erik Schurink helps us move from a study of the alphabet as visual image to the alphabet poem, what he calls “a succession of letters and a big idea .” The beauty of the abecedarian poem, writes Schurink, is that the poet can apply its format to underscore the vastness of the subject he writes about, or to celebrate the completeness within his subject, however small. Its poetic form is guided by order—alphabetical order — its idea is based on the a to z of things. In his 1983 “ABC,” former poet laureate Robert Pinsky skillfully breaks out of the linear restrained structure of the alphabet, inspiring the reader to do just that with his or her own life—to go beyond the expected while embracing a given structure, even when restrictive.
ABC
Any body can die, evidently. Few
Go happily, irradiating joy,
Knowledge, love. Many
Need oblivion, painkillers,
Quickest respite.
Sweet time unafflicted,
Various world:
X=your zenith.
— Robert Pinsky
Equaling X to an idea described by two words, Pinsky leaves language—ever so briefly—through math, to revisit words, highlighting the distance between their individual and joined meanings. Bibles and biologists start where he leaves off. Do Pinsky’s contemporary “ABC”, Geoffrey Chaucer’s “An ABC” acrostic poem, and Psalm 119 (one of the earliest well-known abecedarian poems) sit around the same table? Alphabet poems of various scales, from three distinctly different continents and eras—can they meet? If not, there is solace in knowing that all of us are abecedarians—beginners in any field of learning. Are we comfortable not knowing? Would we embrace learning to give body to sweet time?
ABECEDARIUM: NYC
In our search for the 26 words which comprise Abecedarium:NYC, we discovered that some words found in a 1968 Webster’s dictionary had essentially disappeared in 2008. By giving 16 artists the opportunity to reflect on the fluid nature of language, Abecedarium:NYC encouraged them to ponder single words — be they familiar or esoteric — in the context of a city of buildings, neighborhoods, and even people whose relevance shifts with the winds of the day. Why is a word so vital to one person and irrelevant to another? How do the changes in words reflect the changes in our society? Over the course of two years of production, Abecedarium:NYC has become a multi-media collaboration reflecting these questions in the context of a sound-image exploration of New York City.
In an age in which definitions are utilitarian, spelling is automatic, derivations are incidental, and lack of common usage means abridgement and eventual death, we can only wonder what the life span for a word like WELKIN might be. Look up to the sky and ask yourself “Is there a word for that sweeping, opening above me?” The fast-disappearing, almost archaic “welkin”, is indeed your answer. Visit this word or GEORGIC, or TYPHLOLOGY, or XENOGENISIS and experience one artist’s interpretation of its meaning. With Abecedarum:NYC, you can ponder not only this suite of 26 expansive, yet little known, words, but also look at a hidden New York City where tall buildings can easily shadow a treasure below.
For more examples of intriguing artist abecedaria, please visit Abecedarium:NYC on http://del.icio.us/Abecedarium.NYC where you can see a wide range of work including an abecedarium of Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts, a folk music abecedarium, an Auschwitz abecedarium, a “Three Stooges” abecedarium and so much more.
RESEARCH SOURCES
“ABC” poem by Robert Pinsky
http://wayneyang.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/abc-poem-by-robert-pinsky/
“A Lexicon of Available Light” in Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag
http://www.susansontag.com/wherethestressfalls.htm
Alphabets and Birthdays by Gertrude Stein, copyright Alice B. Toklas, 1957.
http://www.greeninteger.com/book.cfm?-Gertrude-Stein-To-Do-A-Book-of-Alphabets-and-Birthdays-&BookID=39
The Alphabetic Labyrinth: the Letters in History and Imagination by Johanna Drucker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_Drucker
Chaucer’s ABC Poem
http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Geoffrey_Chaucer/chaucer_poems_CHAUCERS_ABC.htm
Fred Camper’s Review of Su Friedrich’s “Sink or Swim” (1990)
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Friedrich.html
The Italian Futurist Book
http://colophon.com/gallery/futurism/
A New Alphabet Iconographic Language and Textual Embodiment
By Jeanie Dean
http://pw.english.uwm.edu/~jdean/intro.html
Psalm 119
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psalm_119
Shallow Water Dictionary by John R. Stilgoe
http://www.amazon.com/Shallow-Water-Dictionary-John-Stilgoe/dp/1568984081
“Thoughts on The Futurist Cookbook, by F.T. Marinetti”
by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
http://www.nyu.edu/classes/bkg/futurist.dos
Zaum: A Russian Futurist Alphabet
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~janetkki/
“Zorn’s Lemma” by Hollis Frampton (1970)
http://www.ubu.com/film/frampton.html
The Undergraduate Dep’t of Film and TV and The Department of Cinema Studies
The Experimental Lecture “Barbara Hammer: The Cinema of the Optic Nerve” – Film, Video, Performance and Conversation
Friday November 16 7 PM Free
Tisch School of the Arts 721 Broadway Room 109 (Lobby Floor)
World renowned avant-garde filmmaker Barbara Hammer will talk and screen films from a movie career that spans forty years. Hammer will use a performative style that challenges all our assumptions about what a “lecture” should be, projecting unseen treasures from her own archive as well as her award winning shorts Optic Nerve and Sanctus.
Barbara Hammer biography
Barbara Hammer was born on May 15, 1939 in Hollywood, California. She is a visual artist working primarily in film and video and has made over 80 works in a career that spans 40 years. She is considered a pioneer of queer cinema.
Barbara’s experimental films of the 1970’s often dealt with taboo subjects such as menstruation, female orgasm and lesbian sexuality. In the 80’s she used optical printing to explore perception and the fragility of 16mm film life itself. Her documentaries tell the stories of marginalized peoples who have been hidden from history and are often essay films that are multi-leveled and engage audiences viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change. Hammer was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Fall 2005 at the Bratislava Academy of Art and Design, Slovakia; she received the first Shirley Clarke Avant-Garde Filmmaker Award in October 2006 and the Women In Film Award 2006 from the St. Louis International Film Festival. In February 2007, she was awarded a tribute and retrospective at the Chinese Cultural University Digital Imaging Center in Taipei, Taiwan.
She lives and works in New York City.
Program from the screening included below:
Drawing from her film performance and installation work from the 1970’s, Hammer will project
Available Space (1979) with a moving projector; exhibit a blueprint scroll of a complete 16 mm film;
screen “orphan films” from her own archive, and project Optic Nerve (1985) and Sanctus (1990) and speak about her experimental investigations throughout her three decades of film and video making in this first annual lecture at NYU.
Introduction
Talk- Aesthetics _ audience involvement; challenge viewing situation, etc.
Performance Film: AVAILABLE SPACE,, 1979, 16mm, sound, 15 minutes. I will project this myself from within the theater.
Talk- Archive and Discovery
2. Orphan Film_ GERALDINE FERRARO, 1983, 16mm, tape spliced, silent, 1 1/2 minutes Orphan Film,_ DRIVE, SHE SAID,1988, 16mm, tape spliced, silent, approx. 3 minutes. (both on same reel)
Talk_ Structural Film Intervention
Optic Nerve, 1985, 16mm, color/sound, 16 minutes on reel.
Talk-Watson Archive, Body, Health
Sanctus, 1990, 16mm color/sound, 19 minutes on reel. (I need a microphone to mic a metronome I am bringing during the film so live sound will be mixed with soundtrack_if there is one on the lecturn or you plan to have for me that would be fine). I don’t really need a mic for myself in that small room.
Talk_The Scroll Film, 2005_show and tell (this is a handheld unrolled art work_no projection needed).
The X Y Chromosome Project is the creation of artists Lynne Sachs and Mark Street. We make films and performances that use the split screen to cleave the primordial and the mediated. After returning from an inspiring week-long artist retreat at the Experimental Television Center, Lynne asked Mark to collaborate with her on the creation of a piece in which they would each ruminate on the other’s visuals, reacting in a visceral way to what the other person had hurled on the screen. Lynne would edit; Mark would edit. Back and forth and always forward. No regrets or over-thinking. In this way, the diptych structure is sometimes a boxing match and other times a pas de deux. Newsreel footage of Ronald Reagan’s assassination attempt is brushed up against hand painted film, domestic spaces, and Christmas movie trailers. Together, we move from surface to depth and back again without even feeling the bends.
Lynne and Mark live in Brooklyn and have two daughters, Maya and Noa Street-Sachs.
In 2010, Mark Street and Lynne Sachs created The XY Chromosome Project an umbrella for their collaborative ventures. Together they have produced an array of collaborative installations, performances, and two-dimensional art works.
“The XY Chromosome Project follows the career paths of Lynne Sachs and Mark Street. To follow this path is to trace a blueprint on devotion. Working both together and individually for the past 30 years, each artist has carved out their own niche without the obvious influences of being married. They part ways to be left alone to their own creations. It is the respect for the other’s work that bonds them. Left alone, their work could not be more different. Lynne’s work is cerebral and emotional. As seen in her full length films “Your Day is My Night” and “Tip of My Tongue”. She collages the art of storytelling by layering stunning visuals while swimming between reality and performance. Mark is the experimental film hero, a pioneer in film manipulation, an encyclopedia in the world of experimental films. His film work is solely connected to what is possible in the organics of film manipulation. They celebrate experimentation in its truest form. Yet both come down on the same line when it matters most. The line of captivation which as any artist knows is the hardest to achieve.” (Stephen Lipuma, Court Tree Gallery)
Matinee Movies: Mystery, Magic and Marigolds.
Films Selected by and for Kids!!
Curated and Hosted by Maya and Noa Street-Sachs
Sat., October 27th, 2007 at 4pm
We are thrilled to put together a program of Film-Makers’ Cooperative movies that will wow, tickle, spook and surprise a matinee audience of boys and girls who may or may not have ever encountered the splendor of the avant-garde cinema.
Gulls and Buoys (1972) by Robert Breer – 8 minutes
It reminds us of a flipbook with fabulous drawings of nature.
The Red Book (1994) by Janie Geiser – 10 minutes
Spectacular animated cut-outs with lots of color and mysterious images of hands, books, keys and doors.
Little Red Riding Hood (1978) by Red Grooms – 16 minutes
Elaborate costumes and colorful, dramatic scenes with a scary wolf and a nice little girl in red.
Earth Song of the Crickets (1999) by Stan Brakhage – Silent – 3 minutes
Dancing handpainted abstraction with a magical sparkle.
Fragment of an Unidentified Horror Show (1993) by Danny Woodruff – 2 minutes
A creepy weirdo comes across a skeleton in this suspensful masterpiece.
Evil of Dracula (1998) by Martha Colburn – 2 minutes
An animated movie of happy faces with long pointy teeth.
Moshulu Holiday (1966) by George Kuchar – 9 minutes
Set in the Bronx, with hilarious scenes of city life. You’re gonna love the ending.
Maya and Noa are 12 and 10 years old and have grown up in Brooklyn watching avant-garde films with their artist parents – Mark Street and Lynne Sachs.
Program organized by M.M. Serra as part of an ongoing series titled “Cafe Cinema: Cinema of the Unusal”.
where: Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Ave, 212.505.5181)
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. – LR
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GAY CITY NEWS
01/25/2007
“Committed Poetics”
By: IOANNIS MOOKAS
For those who aren’t heading to the anti-war march in D.C. this weekend, Anthology Film Archives wouldn’t a bad place to pool some progressive bonhomie. Across three intimate evenings Brooklyn-based avant-documentarian Lynne Sachs presents her lapidary meditations on modern history, political strife, and moral engagement.
A staple of Gotham’s experimental scene, Sachs in recent months has been touring a set of featurettes plus shorts to numerous venues under the rubric “I Am Not a War Photographer,” besides helping organize the “For Life, Against the War” film happening at Collective Unconscious and shepherding a scholarly project charting the intersections of documentary and avant-garde film. Part of Sachs’ appeal as an artist is her collaborative orientation, co-authoring films with family or former students, and mobilizing teams of cultural activists for ad hoc initiatives.
Anthology’s series opens with a double bill of “Which Way Is East,” recording a journey to Viet Nam, with “Investigation of a Flame,” a remembrance of the Catonsville Nine, a group of American Catholics who memorably protested the U.S. war on Viet Nam. Impressionistic and at times diffuse, “Which Way Is East” is a minor work valuable autobiographically for considering the influence of Sachs’ former mentor Trinh T. Minh-Ha, but also for a possible submerged link with “The Delta,” the first feature by Sachs’ brother Ira, made close to the same time and involving a tormented half-Vietnamese character.
“Which Way Is East” gains from its pairing with “Investigation of a Flame,” a more cogent work that shows the filmmaker’s subject and her artistic approach to good effect. In the world-rocking month of May 1968, the seven men and two women who comprised the Catonsville Nine barged into a Maryland draft board office, seized scores of draft records, and on the lawn outside, incinerated the heap with homemade napalm, mixed from the army’s own manuals. As cameramen shot the black-and-white footage Sachs weaves into her film, the dignified radicals shared words of resistance and simply waited for the fuzz to show up.
Sachs takes this performative civil disobedience and refracts it through present-day interviews, not only with the Nine but also the indignant government secretary whose office they rifled and ordinary Catonsville townsfolk of varied sympathies. Gently the film broaches the price for this act of defiance-months in federal prison for most, and for one, years spent underground, evading her sentence. But for Daniel and Philip Berrigan, among other survivors, that flame still dances even in their winter years. The film succeeds in making the group’s valor palpable, and their example genuinely stirring.
The final program on Sunday presents “States of UnBelonging,” Sachs’ most recent long work, and perhaps her best to date. Like Capote called to Kansas by a chance item in the Times, Sachs discovers her subject reading the newspaper, when she notices a November 2002 report on Revital Ohayon, a young mother slain with her two sons by a Palestinian assailant on a kibbutz in northern Israel. Without delay, Sachs is emailing and phoning her former student Nir Zats, an Israeli citizen, recruiting him as proxy and assigning him to learn everything about Ohayon, her family, and circumstances of the murders.
Like Sachs, Ohayon was a filmmaker, a mother of two, a wife, middle class, Ashkenazi, independent of mind, liberal of outlook, and in the flower of life at the moment of her killing. Yet Sachs quickly pushes beyond facile recognition, interrogating her own desire to see, to know, with questions about the responsibility of undertaking to reconstruct Ohayon’s life and of attempting to address its social contexts from half a world away. At length Ohayon’s husband, brother, and mother enter the film, adding complex and surprisingly unsentimental shadings. Her mother tells how Revital deplored the Palestinians’ dispossession; her brother implies her move to the kibbutz, hard by the Green Line, expressed a willful, imprudent idealism.
After much vacillating, Sachs books her first-ever trip to Israel and meets Ohayon’s widower Avi in person. Well before that point, however, Sachs brings the war back home, pasting unsettling images onto the TV screen in her Brooklyn living room, where her daughters play. Once tuned in, the conflict won’t be tuned out-they can channel-surf for days, but the palimpsest of “other” families destroyed by war haunts the bohemian sanctuary. We come to realize that, in a sense, these images and their corresponding realities have been there all along, waiting to be perceived.
The documentary can trace its history back to the very beginning of cinema, and its more than a century of existence has taken many forms. In the past 25 years there has been a very fruitful intersection between documentary and the diary film favored by many experimental filmmakers. Although Ross McElwee is probably the best-known practitioner of this hybrid, he’s far from the only director working this field. Lynne Sachs, whose recent works are on display at Anthology Film Archives January 26-28, is one of the most capable of these filmmakers, although even less of a household name than McElwee.
Sachs’s name may be familiar to Jewish Week readers. The DVD containing her “A Biography of Lilith” was reviewed here a couple of years ago and her most recent film, “States of UnBelonging” was one of the most overlooked films of 2006. That film, a powerful rumination on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is the final film in the Anthology series.
Ravital Ohayon was a promising young filmmaker and mother of two, living in a kibbutz on the border of the West Bank. One night a single terrorist came into her home and, while her husband listened in horror on the other end of the phone, shot all three. That incident is the jumping-off point for “States of UnBelonging,” an unconventional meditation on terror, family, Israel’s security barrier and the Middle East. Structured as a dialogue between Sachs (in Brooklyn) and Nir Zats, an Israeli filmmaker and former student of hers, this haunting hour-long film traces the aftermath of Ohayon’s death, the reactions of her husband, brother and mother, and the developments in Israeli politics in the three years since.
“It’s a film about being caught in the vortex of war,” Sachs said last fall. “It’s my fourth film about the connection between war and the creative process. I didn’t intend to make four of these but it happens.” Unfortunately, war happens, so the subject keeps coming back. But creation happens too and, as Sachs notes, “States” is also about “what is it to be a mother and an artist and a teacher.” The result is surprisingly beautiful, like the embattled countryside it depicts.
Not surprisingly, the title of the Anthology series, “I Am Not a War Photographer,” addresses Sachs’s ambivalence quite directly. The other films in the series take us to contemporary Vietnam and revisit the anti-war movement and offer a grim look at the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps the most interesting work in the program is a series of short studies for Sachs’s next major project, retelling the story of her Hungarian cousin, Sandor Lenard, who survived the Second World War, served as an anthropologist with the US Army’s Graves Registry unit and finally fled to the jungles of Brazil.
War, creativity, beauty — it’s a depressingly frequent concatenation, but Sachs makes it sing without glorifying death, and that is what makes her films so compelling.
“I Am Not a War Photographer: Films of Lynne Sachs” will be presented at Anthology Film Archives (32 Second Avenue at 2nd St.) Friday, January 26 – Sunday, January 28 at 7:30 p.m. Sachs will present all three nights to introduce and discuss the films. For information, phone 212-505-5181 or go to www.anthologyfilmarchives.org .
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Stuart Klawans Review in The Nation of I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
The Sachs series, titled “I Am Not a War Photographer,” runs January 26-28 and focuses on her 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 (made in collaboration with Nir Zats), an uneasy exchange of video-letters about murder, mourning and filmmaking on the edge of the
West Bank; Which Way Is East (made in collaboration with Dana Sachs), an expressively beautiful diary of a trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi; and Investigation of a Flame, a montage of interviews, archival footage and symbolic imagery that gives density and weight to contemporary recollections of 1968 and the Catonsville Nine protest, in which antiwar activists seized and burned Selective Service records.
