All posts by lynne

Interview with Pablo Marin in Spanish and English in Arta Revista

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May, 2007

When did you first realized that yourself (your presence, your being) couldn’t really take distance from what you were doing? (When did you first realize that you couldn’t really be distant — either your presence or your being – from what you were doing?)

When I look back on my twenty years of filmmaking, I realize that no matter what subject, theme or idea that I am exploring, I somehow leave my fingerprint on the final work. Since I got my start in cinema with 16mm, I had many years of tactility. My skin touched, call it embraced, every frame of film, thus forcing me to examine the frozen moment of 1/24 of a second on a sometimes painfully regular basis. So, on a physical level, I had an intimacy with the filmmaking process that didn’t seem so very far from my prior experience with painting or sculpture.

I am a maker; therefore, I always feel connected to both the process and the final product I am attempting to create. I made “The Tarot”, my very first film, in 1983 at the age of 22 with my best friend starring in a live-action Super 8 animation of a young woman metamorphosizing into various possibilities of herself. The autobiographical aspects to this film were unfortunately too overt, which turned my initial foray into filmmaking into a kind of torturous self-examination of my future. My second film, “Still Life with Woman and Four Objects” (1986), also used a non-professional actress friend playing different fragments of my life, but in this case the exploration was far more elliptical, mysterious and, I believe, thought provoking. Within those few years, I’d seen the mind-blowing cinematic portrait movies of Jean-Luc Godard (“Vivre Sa Vie”) and Chantal Ackerman (“Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”), and there was no going back.

How do you control that presence on frame, on voiceover? I mean, there are times when you restrain yourself from doing or saying something in front of the camera or you embrace it all the way? How this decisions (“improvisation vs. ideas”) affect the final aspect (structure) of your work? (How do you control the presence of a voiceover? I mean, there are times when you restrain yourself from doing or saying something in front of the camera or your embrace it all the way. How does the decision between improvisation and idea affect the final structure of your work?)

I love playing with words, seeing where the actual act of putting thoughts together will take my discursive approach to film collage. Most of my longer films grapple with the intricate relationship between personal experience and broader, political, historical or social realities. I believe that the aural texture of a filmmaker’s actual voice (versus the anonymous voice we usually hear in more traditional documentaries) brings a compelling and immediate connection between the maker and his or her audience. My voice can never be omniscient and this structural limitation allows me to exist in my films more like a character and an author at the same time. In my decade-long series of films entitled I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER, most of the work uses the trope of first person cinema as an invitation into my mind and an admission of vulnerability. I am absolutely convinced that keeping a diary from the first day I begin a film gives me access to the naïveté of my own ignorance. By returning to this writing, I often discover narrative epiphanies that become extraordinarily useful to the search for a cinematic structure. I am able to recollect a time in which I did not know so much, and this in turn becomes critical to my identification with my audience.

Why do you think there are still lots of people (even those related to film) that don’t feel very comfortable watching -thinking and understanding- works that go in categories as “essay film”, “personal documentary”? That whole argument against things that are “subjective” and “ambiguous”… (Why do you think there are still lots of people — even those connected to film – who don’t feel very comfortable watching and thinking about works in the category of a “film essay” or personal documentary? That whole argument against things that are subjective and ambiguous?)

Oh my goodness! You are really getting at the very crux of my position as a filmmaker with a foot in two very distinct, even opposing, filmmaking communities. I identify with both the experimental and the documentary approaches to working with sound and images, and yet I feel profoundly uncomfortable placing myself exclusively in one camp or another. Many experimental films are breathtakingly beautiful but they do not attempt to tackle the conceptual rigour that would take them to another plane of artistic thinking. Most conventional documentaries are completely subject-driven, never allowing for visual metaphor, aesthetic invention or, as you say, ambiguity (the moment when a viewer get a little more power of interpretation!). It’s as if the filmmaker never considered the fantastic possibilities for expression right there inside the lens of his or her camera. For all of these reasons, when I discovered the work of Dziga Vertov (the first to coin the phrase “camera as pen”), Chris Marker and Trinh T.Min-ha (a teacher in graduate school), I moved to a new strata of visual expression we all call the film-essay. Yes, there are those in the film avant-garde who will always resist using words. Yes, there are those in documentary who feel no urge to “get personal”, but for a few of us this is the territory where we thrive.

What have you learn (if anything) from getting yourself (your point of view, your family, your home and daily activities) in your work and in front of the camera? (What possibilities do you see (or have you found) in that ambiguity and subjectivity? What have you learned from getting yourself (your point of view, your family, your home, your daily life0 in front of the camera?)

For a while, my family had a running joke that I could never make a movie without showing – in some fragmented or hidden way – at least part of my body …often nude! Well, that isn’t completely true, but you’ll find me in Drawn and Quartered, The House of Science, Window Work, Which Way is East, States of UnBelonging and The Small Ones. So this dance between an aural and physical presence is most definitely compelling to me. It makes evident the intimacy that exists between the different aspects of my domestic, artistic and professional life. Now that I have children, they too have become involved. I suppose that this blurring of these distinct zones of existence was clearly inspired by the work of Stan Brakhage (the father, so to speak, of American avant-garde film). He never allowed himself to hide behind his work.

por Pablo Marín

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Pablo Marin in Buenos Aires, shooting film for Lynne's film "Wind in Our Hair"

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Hacia territorios inciertos: Dos preguntas a Lynne Sachs

A mitad de camino entre la teoría y la práctica, la obra de la cineasta, profesora, curadora y escritora norteamericana Lynne Sachs se ubica en la encrucijada del cine documental, experimental y de ensayo autobiográfico al mismo tiempo que transciende cualquiera de estas categorías preestablecidas. Su estilo cinematográfico, al igual que su reflexión sobre su trabajo, pone al descubierto a una de las artistas audiovisuales más sorprendentemente atípicas de los Estados Unidos, siempre rigurosa y aleatoria en su renovación.

¿Cuándo te diste cuenta que tu obra iba a estar atravesada por tu presencia, tu vida, tu familia?

Al mirar atrás mis veinte años como cineasta me doy cuenta que, sin importar el tema o la idea que este explorando, dejo mi huella en la obra terminada. Desde mis comienzos cinematográficos en 16 milímetros tuve muchos años de tactibilidad. Mi piel tocó, digamos que abrazó, todos los fotogramas de mis películas, forzándome a examinar ese momento congelado de 1/24 de segundo en una regularidad diaria a veces dolorosa. De ahí que, en un nivel físico, tuve una intimidad con el proceso cinematográfico que no se diferenció realmente de mis experiencias previas en pintura y escultura.

Durante un tiempo, mi familia tenía una especie de burla, me decían que nunca iba a poder hacer una película sin mostrar –de manera fragmentada u oculta- a lo sumo parte de mi cuerpo… ¡generalmente desnudo! Bueno, eso no es completamente cierto, aunque me podés encontrar en al menos seis películas. De modo que esta danza entre una presencia espiritual y física es ciertamente irresistible. Hace evidente la intimidad que existe entre los diferentes aspectos de mi vida doméstica, artística y profesional. Y ahora que tengo hijas ellas también se han involucrado. Supongo que esta suerte de mezcla borrosa de zonas tan distintas fue claramente inspirada en la obra de Stan Brakhage (el padre, por así decirlo, del cine de vanguardia norteamericano). Él nunca se permitió esconderse detrás de lo que hacía.

¿Por qué pensás que todavía hay cierto rechazo hacia categorías como “ensayo cinematográfico” o “documental personal”, hacia las cosas que son subjetivas o ambiguas?

Bueno, esa es exactamente mi posición como cineasta, con los pies en dos comunidades cinematográficas bastante distintas, incluso opuestas. Me identifico al mismo tiempo con la aproximación experimental y la documental al trabajar con imágenes y sonidos, pero a la vez me siento muy incómoda ubicándome exclusivamente en una u otra. Muchas películas experimentales son extremadamente hermosas pero no se plantean incorporar un rigor conceptual que las transportaría a otro plano de conciencia artística. La mayoría de los documentales convencionales se apoyan por completo en el tema, sin permitirse lugar para metáforas visuales, invención estética o, como vos decís, ambigüedad (¡el momento en el que el espectador logra un mayor poder de interpretación!). Como si los o las cineastas nunca considerasen las fantásticas posibilidades de expresión que residen justo ahí en el lente de sus cámaras. Por todas estas razones, cuando descubrí la obra de Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker y Trinh T. Min-ha me transporté a un nuevo estadio de expresión visual llamado ensayo cinematográfico. Sí, están esas personas del cine de vanguardia que siempre se resistirán a usar la palabra. Y sí, están esas otras en el documental que no sienten ningún impulso por “volverse personales”, pero para algunas personas como yo este es el territorio donde crecemos con más fuerza.

For Life Against the War, Again

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” A CINEMA FOR PEACE!  FOR LIFE, AGAINGST THE WAR … AGAIN!”         78 min. DVD 2007
Curator: Lynne Sachs

“In 1967, with the Vietnam War escalating wildly, an invitation was issued to filmmakers to create works running under three minutes in protest against the accumulating carnage. The original organizers chose the rubric For Life, Against the War, and eventually compiled sixty films from the likes of Robert Breer, Shirley Clarke, Storm De Hirsch, Ken Jacobs, Larry Jordan, Jonas Mekas, Stan Vanderbeek, and many others. Now, decades later, an invitation to protest yet another war seemed sadly urgent, inspiring filmmaker Lynne Sachs to ring the clarion once “. . . Again.” The response was overwhelming, with submissions from several generations of artists unified by a singular disgust for the war in Iraq and the foreign policy that perpetuates it. Compiled with works from the overtly angry to the formally forceful, For Life, Against the War boldly announces that artists can take a stand, again and again.”  — Steve Seid, Curator, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum

Filmmaker Participants on DVD: Kevin Barry, Bosko Blagojevic, Elle Burchill, Jim Costanzo, Bradley Eros, Jeanne Finley, Martha Gorzycki, Alfred Guzzetti, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Douglas Katelus, Lynn Marie Kirby, Ernie Larsen, David Leitner, Les Leveque, Cynthia Madansky, Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe, Sheri Milner, John Muse, Martha Rosler, Lynne Sachs, MM Serra, Jeff Silva, Jeffrey Skoller, Mark Street, Cara Weiner, Lili White, Artemis Willis.

Filmmakers Cooperative  www.film-makerscoop.com   212 267 5665
108 Leonard Street, the Clocktower Bldg., 13th Fl. New York, NY 10013
NTSC DVD  TRT:  88 min.

Film-makers’Coop Executive Director: MM Serra

The Village Voice
Film Review
Pro-Life
Artists return to the Vietnam protest model with For Life Against the War . . . Again
by Ed Halter

“Iraq is not Vietnam, as the Bush administration and other Republicans have generously taken pains to remind us over the last half decade, but good luck trying to convince today’s artists of that. Not the kind of artists typically touted at white-shoe galleries, of course, too busy creating precious objects for clueless investors: Far more potent demonstrations of protest and disgust emerge from the rag-tag networks of micro-budgeted experimental filmmakers. With little or no market for experimental filmmaking, the scene consists of only the most devoted individuals, with nothing to lose from saying whatever they wish. The art they create can thereby be rough or polished, face-slappingly blunt or poetically subtle, stridently collectivist or stewed in lonely isolation. For Life Against the War . . . Again, a recent omnibus produced in response to Iraq, includes all these extremes, but nevertheless coalesces into a potent time capsule of how today’s war has churned our inner lives.

For Life updates a concept first enacted in 1967, at the height of the previous debacle. Then, an event called The Week of Angry Art asked 60 filmmakers to make 16mm works of three minutes or less in response to the war in Vietnam; participants included a collection of now-canonical figures such as Jonas Mekas, Robert Breer, and Shirley Clarke, as well as less well-remembered names. Last year, avant-garde film distributor The Film-Maker’s Co-op issued a similar open call for new works about today’s war, resulting in a program of 25 video shorts; both the 1967 and 2007 editions screen at Anthology this week.

A number of the newer videos look to past conflicts as a means of understanding the present: Jeffrey Skoller shoots two-and-a-half unedited minutes of a busy Hanoi street, juxtaposed to a prophetic poem by Ho Chi Minh; Bosko Blagojevic contemplates growing up in the U.S. during the Balkan wars; Lynne Sachs’s The Small Ones remembers her Hungarian cousin, a doctor tasked with reconstructing the bones of American soldiers killed in World War II. Other selections groove on expressive abstraction: Les LeVeque’s nervy STOP THE WAR strobes variations of those three words set to radically altered audio clips of protest chants, while Mark Street contributes a silent flutter of red flowers pressed against 35mm film. Martha Rosler skews patriotism by taping a creepy musical soldier doll blurting “God Bless America,” then revealing its prosthetic-style mechanical leg; M. M. Serra sics her cats on a dopey-faced George Bush toy. But sometimes the crudest are actually the most effective: Witness Jim Costanzo’s The Scream: 21st Century Edition, which blue-screens the artist yelling in pain over news footage of Bush speeches and Baghdad shock-and-awe. Three decades from now, when future media archivists try to understand what it was like for sane Americans to experience the war, Costanzo’s video will remain an effective and emotional artifact.”

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For Life Against the War Again!
DVD – TRT: 88 minutes

List of Films in Order:

1. The Scream: 21st Century Edition     Jim Costanzo
As in the Edvard Munch painting, the artist expresses anger and frustration at America’s illegal war and the attack on our civil liberties. (3 min.)

2. PSA # 11 Fallout     Cynthia Madansky
This public service announcement is part of a series of 15 short films that speak out against the American occupation of Iraq and the act of war. (3 min.)

3. LOST     Jeanne C. Finley & John Muse
Audio diaries of Chaplin Major Eric Olson combine with a single landscape shot. The implications of an Iraqi’s death reveal the complications and tragedy of war.
(3:48 min.)

4. Graven Images     Sherry Millner & Ernie Larsen
The artists’ ongoing “Sight Gag” series views patriotism (particularly post-9/11) as a form of hysterical blindness. (4:31 min.)

5. Words on PEACEpiece     Lili White
Only by dealing with one’s “shadow” can one arrive at peace; a flower chain made by  children during “Culture Day” — in Slovenian, a national holiday. (1.33 min.)

6. Our Grief Is Not A Cry For War     Barbara Hammer
October 11, 2001, Times Square. An ad hoc artist group, puts on a silent demonstration for peace in a time of national war hysteria. Lecturer Louise Richardson, Harvard University. (3:45 min.)

7. Unfurling     Martha Gorzycki
Images from visual culture scroll in a mesmerizing rhythm synonymous with the hypnotic effect of endless consumption, inviting viewers to question their own relationship to consumerism. (3 min.)

8. Night Vision     Alfred Guzzetti
Iraq: an apocalyptic landscape.  (2:32 min.)

9. I Shot a Spider     Elle Burchill
Caught in action, a late-night contemplation. (2:40 min.)

10. Star Spangled to Death     Ken Jacobs
Excerpt from 440 minutes shot from 1956 to 2004. (2 min.)

11. For Life  / Against War    Mark Street
Sometimes only flowers will do — pressed against 35mm film emulsion and exposed to the light — to give an unexpected  respite from world horrors. (2:37 min.)

12. Prototype: God Bless America!     Martha Rosler
A fragment of simulated glee produced by a bouncy robot with prosthetic legs, a movie-villain helmet, a brass trumpet — all with “made-in-China” plastic features. (1:09 min.)

13. Description of a Struggle     Bosko Blagojevic
Remembering the 90s, distracted; a single articulation, a way in. (2:55 min.)

14. The Small Ones     Lynne Sachs
A portrait of Sachs’ cousin, Sandor Lenard, a doctor who reconstructed the bones of dead American soldiers during World War II. Composed of abstracted war imagery and children at a birthday party. (3 min.)

15. Untitled     Kevin Barry
Poem on culture clash in Iraq, inherent racism and our own indifference as we use the resources gathered during the conflict. (1:33 min.)

16. STOP THE WAR     Les LeVeque  (3 min.)

17. PEACE in order to achieve PEACE     M M Serra
My reflections on the regime of George W. Bush. (3 min.)

18. Mutable Fire!     Bradley Eros and Erotic Psyche
Totems of destruction & desire, torn between the ecstasy that propels and the horrors that paralyze, we reveal erotic love to be a resistance to tyranny. (4 min.)

19. The Weather is Clearing Up!     Jeffrey Skoller
In the midst of war, Ho Chi Minh has a vision of happiness — 180 seconds shot in
Hanoi 62 years later contain the image of its actualization. (3:42 min.)

20. PEACE IS…     Rohesia Hamilton Metcalfe
Texts returned by a 9/20/06 Google search for the text “peace is” as a meditation on the consciousness of the crowd at this moment in time. (3:03 min.)

21. Sacco and Vanzetti     Douglas Katelus
Summer in NYC. One just might stumble across a bit of anarchy at Union Square: “know that I love you…know that I love you.” (3 min.)

22.  War Montage     Cara Weiner
Altered images of Iraq and war in general merge to create a visual experience. (3 min.)

23. Ashes, Ashes…     Jeff Silva
Using personal and archival footage to ruminate on the subject of war, the residue of past violence permeates into the present. (5 min.)

24. Peace and Pleasure     Artemis Willis and David Leitner
Performance artist Larry Litt leads “A Peace and Pleasure Talisman Charging Ritual” with Santeria drummers and a Voudun priestess to confuse and repel evil  “Fox-y” media demons. (4 min.)

25. Requiescat     Lynn Marie Kirby
1000 Xs scratched on film become prayers for persons killed in Iraq. Punching the machine during video transfer makes a glitch — marking each death anew. (4 min.)

Watching Richard Fung’s “Sea in the Blood”

Thinking about Richard Fung’s “Sea in the Blood”
By Lynne Sachs

Two men swimming, the flow of skin against the skin, and there below the surface of the water is a camera.  Richard Fung’s lens is an activated observation machine, the eye gazing at the self.  His memory becomes an animal in the pool – at once contrite, angry, lusty and compassionate.  “Sea in the Blood” (26 min., 2000) is convulsively personal, traveling that primal voyage from love of family to love of another, a stranger, merely a human being beyond the scope of the childhood home.   Richard is a devoted, conflicted brother to an ailing older sister with a genetic blood disease that will eventually swallow her up and kill her — prematurely as they say.  This fact is science, uncontested, seemingly apolitical.  Richard is also lover to a man who contracts HIV.  The flow of life’s blood pushes Richard to a heightened state of awareness – Marxist dialectics push into tropical isolation, hard-edged phrases push across screen of lush flora, unwanted “bad news” pushes into extended holiday.

I am a filmmaker equally preoccupied by the tug-of-war between the private and the public, personal experience and the sweep of history, intense intimacy and social consciousness. I know why I am so deeply affected by Richard’s film, and yet I am still grappling with the specific dynamic of this work that makes it resonate outside the particulars of its story, framed by the often-ineffable contingencies of death.  Richard, a Trinidadian citizen of Chinese ethnicity now living in Toronto, begins his narrative with his own young-adult explorations of the European continent with a newfound male lover.  Soon, however, we learn that by partaking of the pleasures of the mind and the body, Richard has neglected his responsibilities as a son and brother.  Through refracted super-8 home-movie footage, the story spins backwards in time, tugging at our emotional capacity to watch both the disappointments and celebrations of a tight-knit family struggling to save their daughter from the ravages of a genetic blood disease.  Her sickness is the result of a rare condition that is simultaneously susceptible and impervious to the advances of modern medicine.

Speaking with eloquence and chilling distance, Richard proclaims “Death was a fact I was born into, like mangos in July.”  When Nan is on her deathbed, Richard is still trying his wings, relishing in his independence, witnessing the living mythologies of Greece and Turkey, and the verdant landscapes of Ireland.  He is flawed, selfish and gloriously human in his willful decision to disappoint his family.  A decade later, he is a cultural soldier, a guerilla, on the battlefront for AIDS awareness with his boyfriend who has been diagnosed with HIV.

In 2006, I realize that “Sea in the Blood” has political potency only partially realized six years ago when Richard completed this experimental documentary.  As viewers, we glean Richard’s appreciation of an activist’s role in a universe that has become more and more dominated by the medical establishment.  Richard tells us that as a teenager he and his sister Nan “would get up in the middle of the night to pee and talk on the porch about the Black Panthers, looking out at the darkness.”  I sit in the darkness of my home watching Richard Fung’s movie, decades later, feeling as if I am now in conversation with him.  We are two filmmakers, male/female, Canadian/American, reminiscing about the exquisite, brutal days when silence somehow equaled death.

Visit to New Orleans

Visit to New Orleans

Grey afternoon everything carved away
gaunt woman in once-tight jeans
zig-zags patterns, boulevard desolate.
Archeological trash pile
not for garbage
collector.

Everything carved away.

Dogs no longer here.
Old kitten dangling thread, teasing between splinters
from a screen door stretching
blissful
open and shut
by the arm of the wind.

Woman again, more gaunt than five minutes ago,
watching me pretend not to watch her,
circles round the globe
and back,
reverse order.
Nothing to do but watch me and I in the same boat
of nothingness
out of which I’ve come to this town to imbibe
and watch her.

WATER SWALLOWED BACK BY LAKE!
Sublime inversion.
Poseidon sweet, head on pillow of sand,
awake with restful qualities.
No lover of Katrina.
No maliciousness above or below the Gulf.
Another sublime inversion.

Caretaker wins award, blue ribbon, but not for his pristine
Bayou tombstones.
No, in this inversion he knows better.
Knows how, is willing, cares for the chest that heaves,
the tight ruddy brown face with eyes
searching for her own leather couch from Levitz.
A parakeet on a sill.
Two-sip-left can of beer.
Envelope of dates and promised dollars.
Proofs of where and when such and such.
Invitation to a party from someone who may want to know
she’s okay.
Or in truth not okay.
Today when everything appears and is
carved away.

Lynne Sachs
December, 2006

The Small Ones

The Small Ones
3 min. color sound  2007

During World War II, the United States Army hired Lynne Sachs’ cousin,  Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This short anti-war cine-poem is composed of highly abstracted battle imagery and children at a birthday party.

“Profound.  The soundtrack is amazing.  The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful.  Good work.” Barbara Hammer

Black Maria Film Festival Director’s Choice Award; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Tribeca Film Festival; MadCat Film and Video Festival; Harvard Film Archive; Pacific Film Archive; Dallas Film Fest; Cinema Project, Portland.

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

This film is currently only availible with password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.

“Living with War” Review of I Am Not a War Photographer screening & talk

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Arts & Entertainment
Living With War
Lynne Sachs explores humanity in wartime
The Cornell Sun
March 2, 2007 – 12:00am

By Julie Block

I’ve never been much of a documentary watcher. When I go to see films, I prefer a personal narrative amidst the social commentary. I feel that quite often, documentaries lose site of the individual in their search for overarching truth. However, I was fortunate enough to have my earlier prejudice corrected after I saw a unique view into humanity by Lynne Sachs at her presentation, “I am Not a War Photographer.”

Co-hosted by Cornell Council for the Arts and the Program of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the program took place this past Tuesday night at the Film Forum in the Schwartz Center. Sachs, a veteran documentarian with a taste for experimental filmmaking presented a series of clips from an earlier set of films that focused on how human narratives and cultures gets lost within war.

After screening much of her oeuvre, Sachs screened her most recent film, States of Unbelonging. Between these segments she answered questions and introduced the following piece. While the films were all beautifully made, it was the insights into Sachs herself that made the night unique and inspiring.

The first film, Which Way is East, is a travel diary that follows Sachs and her sister Dana through Vietnam. From Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, Lynne and Dana spoke with different Vietnamese to get a sense of their culture, traditions and stories outside of the war. At the same time they literally reveal the gruesome underbelly of the war’s impact, going so far as to search in old hidden underground passages and foxholes. The shots in the film are a mix of confused, slow motion abstractions of Vietnam and slow, focused images of objects, scenery and people, lending an understated elegance to this cinematic record of a culture that is almost always perceived in our culture through the lens of a decades-past war.

The second film Sachs showed, Investigation of a Flame: The Catsonville Nine is the basis of her connection to Cornell. The film tells the history of the Catsonville Nine, a group of priests, nurses, and artists who, on May 17, 1968 chose to burn selective service records stolen from a draft office in Maryland. The unviolent protest was led by Father Daniel Berrigan, a former Chaplain of Cornell, and his brother Philip. During the trial, hundreds of Cornell students came down to Baltimore to protest in his defense. It was Sachs’s connection to him through her film that began her relationship with Cornell. The film, according to Sachs, was a look into not only this remarkable group, but also where the line between civil disobedience and a dangerous rebellion lies.

Sachs went on to show Tornado, a three-minute video made in the aftermath of 9/11. In a compelling twist, Sachs chooses not to focus on the faces of her subjects, but instead brings her camera to bear on their bodies and her own hands as she takes charred bits of paper, resumes, calendars and other detritus left over from the twin towers and repeatedly flips them over in her hands. This obsessive twirling gives character to these papers and, in a way, allows them to become silent memorials to the dead.

The last two films that Sachs showed were States of Unbelonging, a profound meditation on the terrorist murder of Israeli Revital Ohayon and her two sons, as well as a clip from The Small Ones, Sachs’s upcoming work. It focuses on her cousin Sandor, and his job reconstructing bones of dead American soldiers from the second World War (For a full review of States of Unbelonging, read Mark Rice’s column on Monday, February 23).

Each film presented was a special look into a time period and culture fractured by war. But instead of taking the traditional route and filming the obvious fractures, Sachs finds the undercurrents and reveals them through voice-over interviews, quotes from poems and images of life rather than death. There’s an intuitive sense to her work, as if she didn’t know what she was looking for but rather followed her instinct through each film.

As she explains it, rather than laying out each work in a linear fashion, she “start[s] from the center and works out” building layer upon layer until that eureka moment comes, after which she knows the movie is complete.

By not charting a direct course, Sachs has the ability to delve into the lives of her subjects and actually explore the struggles and problematic questions that arise from each war. She manages to make every film an organic, breathing entity. Her intense personal connection with her subjects is transmitted in every shot, still and shadow as well as through the narration. Taking her audience with her in her search for answers Lynne Sachs demonstrates that applying the term “war photographer” to her is truly doing her a disservice. In truth, she is a gatherer of worn photographic portraits of people brought together in a mosaic of tragedy, truth and human frailty.

For more information on Lynne Sachs or to see clips from her films, go to www.lynnesachs.com.

XY Chromosome Project #2 “City Salvage”

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Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
With special guests audio pranksters Bosko Blagojevic and Zach Poff

CITY SALVAGE is the second installment of Lynne and Mark’s XY Chromosome project, a dynamic feast for the eyes, ears and mind that considers the cities of HANOI, SANTIAGO, BUFFALO, SAO PAOLO, PRAGUE, NEW YORK, TEL AVIV & SAN FRANCISCO, SARAJEVO.  We’ve joined forces with the preternatural sound magicians Bosko Blagojevic and Zach Poff who will  contribute a live audio performance to our urban stew.

We invite you to drift away with us and be a floozy flaneur!

4 artists!  4 screens!  8 cities!  70 minutes!

CITY SALVAGE  contrasts images and  sounds in a kinetic, charged way.  This is a study of dissonance: abstract material brushed up against the discernible, frenetic versus the more languid, chaotic sound vs. silence, architecture vs. the human element.  The whole is fragmented and surprising like the experience of first walking through a new city.  How does the urban milieu serve our need to explore and wander, to be at once alone and in company? Each of these cities negotiates its urban impulses in  idiosyncratic ways.  As a collection, this evening will consider urbanism by looking closely at these vibrant cities.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn
http://www.monkeytownhq.com/xy2.html

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A Collection of Films Exploring Women, Culture, Science & Myth

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Purchase:

A COLLECTION OF FILMS ON DVD EXPLORING WOMEN, CULTURE, SCIENCE & MYTH BY LYNNE SACHS vol.1

DVD 2005, 65 minutes + extras

Available at Filmmakers Cooperative

http://film-makerscoop.com/rentals-sales/search-results?fmc_authorLast=sachs&fmc_title=&fmc_description=&x=48&y=15

Featuring:

Biography of Lilith & The House of Science: a museum of false facts

This DVD collection presents two of Lynne Sachs’ earlier films with several more recent media works — all of which explore themes of women, culture, science & myth. The creative as well as intellectual inner workings of these projects are revealed for the first time in the context of an elaborately conceived, yet accessible disc.

“Biography of Lilith conveys the real experience – bloody and poetic – of Lilith alive and now in every woman. Bravo! A film felt, imagined, and informed by life.” – Barbara Black Koltuv, Author of The Book of Lilith

“Lynne Sachs’ A Biography of Lilith is a beautifully realized melding of history, mythology, image, and sound that makes us rethink our understanding of a powerful, complex, and significant female figure.”

Prof. Caren Kaplan, Women’s Studies, University of California at Davis

BIOGRAPHY OF LILITH updates the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman and for some, the first feminist. In conjunction with the film, the DVD offers a personal introduction to Jewish Kabbala.

THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE: A MUSEUM OF FALSE FACTS investigates science and art’s representation of women in our society using home movies, collage, found footage and personal remembrances.

DVD FEATURES INCLUDE:

* Over 40 minutes of never-before-seen interviews with four prominent Judaic scholars provide anchors for discussion of the Lilith myth.

* Six of Sachs’ poems which were written during the making of Biography of Lilith

* Thirteen collages with text from The House of Science

* Two Short Films: Window Work and Photograph of Wind

* Filmmaker Biography

* Interactive Menus

* DVD-ROM: Printable Transcript of The House of Science and Poetry from Biography of Lilith

PRINCIPAL CREDITS

Films, poetry, collages, cinematography, direction: Lynne Sachs

DVD design: Rachel Melman

Music: Pamela Z, Charming Hostess

Jewish Scholars: Daniel Boyarin, Tikvah Frymer-Kensky,

Rabbi Meyer Fund, Naomi Mark

SCREENINGS: Museum of Modern Art, the Oberhausen Film Festival, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Delaware Biennial, the Pacific Film Archive, and the Tate Modern. The films have won awards at the Atlanta, New Jersey, Ann Arbor, Athens, Black Maria, Charlotte and Humboldt Film Festivals

States of UnBelonging Transcript

STATES OF UNBELONGING a film by LYNNE SACHS
in collaboration with NIR ZATS
63 minutes

Hebrew spoken by children

“When I am big and someone dies, I am going to go to the funeral.”

“You can put a doll on the grave, just like in the story.’

Dear Lynne,

I patiently wait for the sand to sink, for the water to get clear.

Israel is a very small place and in a way very isolated. Being surrounded by

hostility is definitely getting to me. The hostility of war and terror and the hostility of people’s aggressiveness toward each other. So much hatred.

It is hard for me to become involved as an activist. For now catching up with the headlines over coffee in the morning is enough.

Every now and then I consider coming back to New York, being a student again, carrying a camera.

Hope you are well,

Nir

Dear Nir,

Do you ever have the feeling that the history you are experiencing has no shape?

Even as a teenager I was obsessed with history’s shifts and ruptures. Wars helped us order time. A war established beginnings and endings. There is “before”. There is “during”. There is “after”.

Lynne

PHONE CONVERSATION

LYNNE: Hey, Nir, did I wake you up?

NIR: No, I’m fine.

LYNNE: I just wanted to tell you about this article I read today in the Times that upset me so much. It was about a woman who reminded me of myself. Her name was Revital Ohayon. She was a filmmaker, a teacher, a mother. She was killed on a Kibbutz, Kibbutz Metzer. What do you know about it?

NIR: Oh, yes, it was horrible. Have you heard the details of the story, what happened, that terrorists got into her home when she was at home at night with her two kids and actually shot them. I will think about it and right you more things.

LYNNE: Alright, bye for now.

NIR: Bye, bye.

_________________________________

On my map, Metzer is not far from Jenin, only a thumb’s distance from the kibbutz. Isn’t Jenin a Palestinian refugee camp, the site of killings? All I know is its destruction.

November 15, 2002

How are you Lynne?

Living in Israel is closely related to Buddhist thinking. The encounter with death is so immediate in Israel. You have to be prepared for your own death. As grim as it sounds, it’s just statistics.

Thoughts about death cross people’s minds on a minute to minute basis. Imagine the terror and fear in people’s minds on the other side of the Green Line, on the other side of the Wall.

Yes, I know about Revital. Everyone is talking about it. Did you know her husband heard the gun shots over the phone?

Yours, Nir

Dear Nir,

I’ve made so many phone calls to Kibbutz Metzer. Today I finally reached an elderly secretary. “Yes”, she told me, “this is the Kibbutz where Revital Ohayon lived and was killed.” The woman didn’t seem to know more than that.

I wonder what they make at the Kibbutz factory – jars of pickles, buttons, machine parts?

PHONE CONVERSATION

NIR: Hello Lynne, did I tell you that I saw Revital’s husband, it was on the news, on the weekend broadcast, and they interviewed him about what he was going through, and since you were interested in her I was trying to think about what he’s actually going through….

I have the number for her former husband, Avi Ohayon, the man who heard it all from his phone, as the killing happened.

PHONE CONVERSATION cont

NIR: ….for me usually it’s very alienated, you read the news, you see what happened, but you’re not going to the families of the casualties and asking how they feel, or putting yourself in their situation….

Dear Lynne

Did you know that this week is the Jerusalem Film Festival?

Parallel to it is the Ramallah International Film Festival. Ramallah is a big city on the Palestinian side of the border. I wish I could visit to show my films and also to see film in a theater over there. I would have a drink in the local Palestinian café. See a life that is so close to me and yet so far away. Separated and strange.

It exists as the Palestinian town from the news. I can only imagine, of course, since I have never visited myself. It is quite impossible for me as an Israeli to experience Ramallah.

Ramallah Dreaming.

Soon,Nir

August 18, 2003

Dear Nir,

I need you to somehow get your hands on her movies, and also to photograph the land for me, as Revital would have experienced it – the kibbutz, Haifa where she grew up, the Northern coast, Tel Chai where she went to film school.

I am not asking you as a teacher, but as a friend. Did you know that I have never been to Israel? I missed those few moments of peace.

Lynne

August 20, 2003

Lynne,

It sounds so sad when I read your words, “I missed the few years of peace.” Like missing an old relative that passed away and will never return. I was drafting a message to you when your mail arrived. How can I describe my feelings? It’s all not so clear. I remember the opening sentence from Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, “I can feel the heat closing in.”

Nir

Write soon, tell me what you can do, And, no, this isn’t another assignment, just a request from a friend. Really.

Lynne

By now I think I must have called at least fifty times, only to hear a series of Hebrew numbers recited to me, like a wall of digits forbidding my entrance. If Avi is not reachable, I tell myself that he wants nothing to do with the me, that he has withered with sadness, or that his phone has merely been turned off.

August 25, 2003

Nir,

I called Avi in Tel Aviv again this morning. He is so kind, almost at ease, willing to talk. Yes, he told me, she was just about to finish a film about the “generation gap.” There are so many gaps between us, she was only trying to fill one, with her filmmaking.

I’ve been waiting for eight months to see her movies. Will you go to his home, ask him for the tapes, talk to him, and yes, take your camera? Tell me what happens,

Lynne

Lynne,

I was walking by myself in Metzer this morning.

For a minute, I thought about the terrorist coming towards me.

I protected myself by holding the Super 8 camera in its pistol grip. Transformed

it into an Uzi machinegun.

Then, I came back to my senses, saw an old woman hoeing her garden. Behind the double barbed-wire fence the open fields spread wide open.

More soon,

Nir

I mention Revital’s story to my friend Deborah. I had no idea that she had a personal connection to the kibbutz. Thirty years ago she’d been one of those idealistic American Jewish youths looking for a new way of living, communally, in Israel. Deborah lived on Kibbutz Metzer in 1972, the same place, a very different time.

CONVERSATION W/ WOMAN WHO LIVED ON KIBBUTZ METZER IN 1973

I don’t think there are very many places where the Arab village and the kibbutz are truly living side by side. And there always was a really good relationship between village and the kibbutz. And the very first at had coffee was in the village at Muhammad’s mother’s house. Of course, in Arab house you are always offered coffee and you can’t say no and I have never drunk a cup of coffee before.

The kibbutz was built literally on the dividing line of the West Bank. In fact the and the banana groves we used to work in the banana groves sometimes picking the bananas we were actually in the west bank. And the way that the… the road bet Haifa and Tel Aviv was here. If you went left, you went straight into the village of Metzner and if you went straight and kind of to the right you went to the Kibbutz Metzer.

If the Arabs from the village came to the kibbutz there needed to be a reason for them to come to the kibbutz. Where as if the villagers walked passed the village – if the kibbutzniks walked passed the village they were just walking towards the bus stop.

Going into the west back then was an incredible thing.

[How?]

It was like going to a different country. I mean this was 1973 there was barely – they weren’t even occupied. I mean they were occupied in that Israel controlled them militarily but there were no Israelis there. I mean look at all these villages. There are so many villages. There’s tons and tons. And I bet most of them are gone. This is all around Jerusalem.

I don’t think that they’re anymore, this is all Israeli now.

And when they build this fence between the West Bank and Israel it will probably run right through those banana plantations unless they do what they probably will do which is make a road around them so that the Israelis get the banana plantations and the Arab farmers wont be able to cultivate their crops

Listen to this: Israeli -Arab armistices in 1949 partition. Palestine. Since June 1967, Israeli forces have occupied Sinai, Gaza, all of Jordan and most of the Jordan River and a small area in southwest Syria. So of course it is all of Jordan and most of the Jordan River that we are talking about. And Metzer was just on that border.

PHONE CONVERSATION BTWN NIR AND LYNNE

Hello Lynne. HI NIR. I finally met Avi, Revital’s husband, at the Kibbutz. YOUR KIDDING. Yes, he brought her tapes, and I brought my camera. YOU ACTUALLY MET AVI, YOU ACTUALLY GOT THE FILMS. IT’S BEEN A YEAR SINCE… THAT I’VE BEEN WAITING. I saw the kibbutz, the house was living, where she was killed. I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS.

INTERVIEW WITH AVI OHAYON

She was the kind of person that had to find the exactly right path for her that the way of life that she believes is the only way of life that is right. That is the only way of life that is correct and right for her to live in. And so she struggled are her life to create that path to be able to have a career and to have the most amazing children and to make a path that nothing would come – would hurt the other goal.

Her movie was about three girls that didn’t know each other that met in a coincidence one day. And they went together on a trip and it was the first time that each one of them realized that she doesn’t like what she does in her life. All three of them are living a life that someone else dictated to them. One of them was a married woman with 3 children. The other one had a shop. The third one was a secretary. They had to help one another and by that they understood about themselves.

Her movies will not give an answer at the end of the movie but will make you put a question mark in the right places. To think ok I saw but who do I relate to, who do I think I behave like, who do I think make the right decision for me as a viewer. And even more I think that the goal, as I know Revital, that whatever choice you make it’s the right choice.

September 10, 2003

Dear Lynne

Now I’m testing my senses and trying to capture images of my living environment. Sending it oversees to you. Like caging wild animals.

Nir

Yossi: So where would you like me to begin?

Lynne: Maybe who she was.

Yossi: Who she was? I think I realized who she was only after the funeral. There were SO many people…. throughout sitting Shiva.

I keep thinking Yossi might have been a man I’ve walked past on the sidewalk, rubbed elbows with on the subway. If I could actually hear the tragedy of a violent death caused by hate, the gunshot, the explosion, months later in the minds of a family-member, would I be able to detect such an emotion as I sit next to a stranger? I ask him why Revital chose to live so close to the border of the West Bank. I’m contemplating the degrees by which we measure danger. She might have wondered why I stay in New York City with my 2 girls after September 11th. What does it mean to call a place home, like a squirrel burrowed in a tree she knows is just a leap from the hole of a fox.

DAY CARE CENTER AFTER FUNERAL, CREATING A MEMORIAL, CANDLES

TRANSLATION FROM HEBREW

TEACHER: Yesterday I was at the funeral for Matan and Noam. Do you know what a funeral is? The word funeral comes from Lelavot, to accompany. We accompany the dead to their grave. Then we bury them.

BOY: A grave is only in the ground.

TEACHER: What does a grave look like? When you bury someone what do you cover it with?

GIRL: A grave is only made of dirt. If someone dies, you don’t leave them at home. There is too much blood.

BOY: You need to dig a hole in the earth. You cover them with dirt just like you cover carrot seeds. Then you put a sign with their names on the grave.

BOY: I saw the terrorist who killed Noam and Matan on TV. Do you want to hear something about the terrorist? He has a brain of a chickadee and the common sense of a dog. LAUGHTER

I met a girl in summer camp in 1971. She was tall, lanky with blonde hair, very nice, quiet. One August afternoon, around my birthday, she confided to me that her father had been shot down in an air force plane in Vietnam. It was as if she’d told me that she had leprosy. I was so terrified I really couldn’t talk to her, or even stand near her, the rest of the summer.

TEACHER: We have things of Matam and Noam here. We have their dolls, their pacifiers, their drawings, tooth brushes.

CHILD: We have to take the stuff out so we can remember them, so that we don’t worry about them.

GIRL: If I take things out it will make me sad.

BOY: We are going to see the story again tonight on the news.

September 12, 2003

Lynne,

Now is the month of Elul, a time of repentance and reconciliation before Yom Kippur.

Such an intense period of prayer – -Selihot — a request for forgiveness.

There is this custom of lighting Ner Neshama (a soul candle) on Yom Kippur. A candle for the dead that lasts for 24 hours.

Yona Wallach wrote about it:

“My awareness is fading away, like a soul candle ….”

I like the way her poems sound in Hebrew.

(Yamim Noraim — DAYS OF AWE)

I wonder what this all means to you.

Soon,

Nir

Today I started to read Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish. Do you know it? I got the book a long time ago for 99 cents on St. Marks Place. Why did I start reading it today all of a sudden?

VOICE OF REVITAL COMFORTING HER SON IN HEBREW

AVI: She was lucky to go with them and maybe even luck was not the issue here because there’s no other way, there’s no other possibility that they would have gone without her or that she would have one without them. All three of them were one all the time.

February 24, 2004

Nir,

This morning I finally met Revital’s mother at Yossi’s apartment here in New York. She offered me a delicious cup of berry tea she brought from her home in Haifa. It’s divine, with such a powerful aroma like walking in a field.

Lynne

REVITAL’S MOTHER IN HEBREW: She believed that everything that is happening was not supposed to happen. That expressions from our nation could show the world that this is nonsense. This isn’t supposed to be happening. It’s very important that peace pervades. She took care of people at work, in the army. She wanted everything to be perfect.

YOSSI (R”S BROTHER): I asked her how she could possibly live in this country. I mean this constant stress is unbelievable. So she just created her own bubble and she used that bubble with her two little boys and she blocked herself to the environment and she moved to that little kibbutz where she has a little garden and they plant trees and flowers and she doesn’t read the news, she doesn’t watch the news,. I mean she doesn’t watch the news. And unless something close happenedd to them, the rest she is just oblivious to it.

That Passover was, was one of the bloodiest times of the Intifadah, the uprising. There was a terror attack almost on a daily basis, sometimes two times a day. How can you raise kids in this kind of atmosphere. They knew so much about what was going on.

She tried to keep herself separated from this whole craziness and yet she ended up being a casualty of war.

MOTHER: Well first of all the way it happened, he, the terrorist, managed to jump into her most intimate room where she was with her kids. She covered her kids with her body. They don’t want to give us the details. We didn’t see the pictures but what we heard was that she was screaming “Don’t kill them, just kill me!” That’s what the neighbors heard. They found her hugging her kids. I think that was the most tragic image, the one that moved the world. The Minister of Media sent that image around the world.

As a teenager, Revital used to go to the Judah Desert to learn about and photograph foxes and wolves. She was so interested in science. We thought that would be the direction she would go.

September 23, 2004

Lynne,

I keep growing here in Israel. Many things I would like to talk to you about. Did you know that the murderer of Revital was killed by the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force? I actually saw Avi Ohayon, Revital’s husband a few times on TV today.

The circle of grief hasn’t finished turning.

I learn and watch new aspects of reality every day. By living in my small environment I hope to generate a wave of sanity. I start inwards then I hope to get it out there one day.

Hope you are well,

Nir

Dear Nir,

I’ve been to Bosnia and Vietnam with my camera, made films there, looking for tell-tale signs of conflicts I’d never known. But those wars were over by the time I got there.

The difference between the peacefulness of the images you’re sending me and the hostility simmering outside the frame is so apparent to me. Are you trying to protect me, Nir? . The bombing of a tourist hotel in the Sinai a few months ago, the destruction of a home in the West Bank, the explosion yesterday in a Tel Aviv nightclub. Lynne

December 12, 2004

Lynne,

Today is Tu Bishvat, the birthday of the trees. An almond tree is blooming on Rotchild boulevard. It has white flowers and a really sweet smell.

I think that the olive tree grows very slowly. It has a long history here in Israel. Some are very old. Some have been here since before the country was even established. It has a very unique trunk, like sculpture, the color of bronze. The branch itself is mentioned in the Bible.

In the forest there are Cyprus and Pine and it seems as if they have been there forever, but in reality they were planted by a foundation. The making of a forest. A nation established. The concept of a nation to stay. Marking territory.

My bible teacher used to point to Jewish law: if a soldier needs to cut down an olive tree, he must have permission from a very highly ranked officer in the army.

In my head I compare the status of a person and a tree…. you don’t need special permission to shoot someone if there is a threat, but you need high authority to damage an olive tree. Olive is the color of the soldier’s uniform.

Nir

AVI: My children were four and five. They loved to hear the Muezzin from the village next to Metzer.

BROADCAST ABOUT WEST BANK WALL

Some go through the bottom others go over the top or squeeze through the middle of the wall Israel is building to stop suicide bombers from getting into Jerusalem.

So far, all the wall does, say the Palestinians of Abu Dis where the wall cuts their village in half, has ruined their lives. Israel’s plan is a combined wall and fence to run about 350 miles around most of the West Bank patrolled by police chiefs this part will run 38 miles near eastern Jerusalem with electronic sensors. Rada Audi who has breast cancer must sneak through the wall to get to her clinic and to get to work but it will get worse one day she won’t able to even do that.

RADA: They are forcing us to hate them and it is a very bad thing.

BYSTANDER (off camera): There has to be a better way than to split a village

Eventually the wall won’t only split Abu Dis and it won’t only cut Palestinians off from Israel. Through large parts of the West Bank it will cut off Palestinians from Palestinians.

This is the land that devours it own, I’ve read and read again in the Bible. The land of hyenas and jackals and doves, perpetually dry or consumed by water. It is a land I know now, but only anciently. At last, I can follow the green line with my finger, but I have yet to feel its actual bumps and crevices.

Hello Lynne

When I was 14 yrs old, I took a trip with a summer camp to Ein Gedi, a nature preserve in the desert, next to the Dead Sea. Our bus stopped at a slaughter house to pick up a brown cardboard box filled with little, weak, yellow chicks. As the sun was going down, we drove into the wilderness of the desert. In the darkness, we let the chicks loose and stepped away. Then we illuminated the area with light and waited with binoculars. The night animals started to show up. First the wolves, then the foxes, and when they were done the hyenas and the vultures came to eat the leftovers.

Nir

I’ve been reading the Bible incessantly, compulsively, looking for those few phrases that might give credence to a landscape that makes normal people go mad.

.

AVI OHAYON: Last summer they went to the seashore with Revital. There was a fight between Arabs and Israelis at the beach. One of the guys from the Arab group was hurt and he was bleeding. He ran to the parking where Revital and the children just arrived. She immediately started to call; she rushed him in the car and took him to the hospital. When I heard about it, when she told me what happened, I asked her, “Are you crazy?”

NEWS REPORT FROM CONFLICTS BTWN ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS

REVITAL’S MOTHER: She really didn’t have a childhood. She missed adolescence. She matured very quickly. At our house there was no middle ground, she had to do everything fully. No easy ways to do things. No compromises.

February 27, 2005

Nir,

I’m watching Haifa now, imagining Revital’s childhood in this city, the place where you’ve told me a Jewish girl and an Arab girl might have played together.

Bombs are exploding everywhere this afternoon. The sound is deafening but I can’t hear a thing. Israel. Istanbul. Iraq. Any shake-up on the surface of the earth dislodges my sense of equilibrium.

Newspapers drape us with the numbers of another person’s death. When scanning a page of horrors, I do not grope for mirrors. An open window onto the spectacle of killing. A gust of wind and I almost smell it.

Lynne

TEACHER: Nora can’t have Matan and Noam’s things under her bed. At a certain point, we have to separate from Matan and Noam. We have to collect their things. What can we do with them? What are they?

CHILDREN: Animals

TEACHER: We will have to ask their father what he wants to do with them. What are we going to do with their sheets, pillows, drawings? Do you have any ideas?

GIRL: Give them to their father so he has them in his house.

We can’t leave them outside.

AVI:The pain is so big but still you do not know where to put it ‘ cause you don’t know that kind of pain. You never felt if before. I never felt it before. I couldn’t relate to it in myself because I didn’t know where to put it. It is a different kind of pain you don’t know from before..

R’S MOTHER: During the whole month of sitting Shiva and also during the funeral, it always rained, but every time we arrived at the grave, it would stop raining.

YOSSI (R’S BROTHER) : It happened to us in the funeral. It happened to us in the seven days of the unveiling and it also happened in the 11 months. And the day of the anniversary, we went to the cemetery, the rain stopped. three pigeons actually that landed on the stone, the tombstones, while we were there, while we were saying the prayer for the anniversary… it was like a message from our sister, sending three doves onto the tombstone…

March 1, 2005

I‘ve stopped watching television all together, Nir. I have a rock to put on her grave. I arrive in Tel Aviv on Wednesday at 3:55 PM. Lynne

TITLE:AS I AM HEADING OUT THE DOOR TO THE AIRPORT, MAYA ASKS ME “IS THERE A WAR IN ISRAEL, MOM?”

“NO, NOT TODAY.” I TELL HER.

This is the land that devours it own, I’ve read and read again in the Bible. The land of hyenas and jackals and doves, perpetually dry or consumed by water. It is a land I know now, but only anciently. At last, I can follow the green line with my finger, but I have yet to feel its actual bumps and crevices.

Hello Lynne

When I was 14 yrs old, I took a trip with a summer camp to Ein Gedi, a nature preserve in the desert, next to the Dead Sea. Our bus stopped at a slaughter house to pick up a brown cardboard box filled with little, weak, yellow chicks. As the sun was going down, we drove into the wilderness of the desert. In the darkness, we let the chicks loose and stepped away. Then we illuminated the area with light and waited with binoculars. The night animals started to show up. First the wolves, then the foxes, and when they were done the hyenas and the vultures came to eat the leftovers.

Nir

I’ve been reading the Bible incessantly, compulsively, looking for those few phrases that might give credence to a landscape that makes normal people go mad.

.

AVI OHAYON: Last summer they went to the seashore with Revital. There was a fight between Arabs and Israelis at the beach. One of the guys from the Arab group was hurt and he was bleeding. He ran to the parking where Revital and the children just arrived. She immediately started to call; she rushed him in the car and took him to the hospital. When I heard about it, when she told me what happened, I asked her, “Are you crazy?”

NEWS REPORT FROM CONFLICTS BTWN ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS

REVITAL’S MOTHER: She really didn’t have a childhood. She missed adolescence. She matured very quickly. At our house there was no middle ground, she had to do everything fully. No easy ways to do things. No compromises.

February 27, 2005

Nir,

I’m watching Haifa now, imagining Revital’s childhood in this city, the place where you’ve told me a Jewish girl and an Arab girl might have played together.

Bombs are exploding everywhere this afternoon. The sound is deafening but I can’t hear a thing. Israel. Istanbul. Iraq. Any shake-up on the surface of the earth dislodges my sense of equilibrium.

Newspapers drape us with the numbers of another person’s death. When scanning a page of horrors, I do not grope for mirrors. An open window onto the spectacle of killing. A gust of wind and I almost smell it. Lynne

TEACHER: Nora can’t have Matan and Noam’s things under her bed. At a certain point, we have to separate from Matan and Noam. We have to collect their things. What can we do with them? What are they?

CHILDREN: Animals

TEACHER: We will have to ask their father what he wants to do with them. What are we going to do with their sheets, pillows, drawings? Do you have any ideas?

GIRL: Give them to their father so he has them in his house.

We can’t leave them outside.

AVI:The pain is so big but still you do not know where to put it ‘ cause you don’t know that kind of pain. You never felt if before. I never felt it before. I couldn’t relate to it in myself because I didn’t know where to put it. It is a different kind of pain you don’t know from before..

R’S MOTHER: During the whole month of sitting Shiva and also during the funeral, it always rained, but every time we arrived at the grave, it would stop raining.

YOSSI (R’S BROTHER) : It happened to us in the funeral. It happened to us in the seven days of the unveiling and it also happened in the 11 months. And the day of the anniversary, we went to the cemetery, the rain stopped. three pigeons actually that landed on the stone, the tombstones, while we were there, while we were saying the prayer for the anniversary… it was like a message from our sister, sending three doves onto the tombstone…

March 1, 2005

I‘ve stopped watching television all together, Nir. I have a rock to put on her grave. I arrive in Tel Aviv on Wednesday at 3:55 PM. Lynne

TITLE:AS I AM HEADING OUT THE DOOR TO THE AIRPORT, MAYA ASKS ME “IS THERE A WAR IN ISRAEL, MOM?”

“NO, NOT TODAY.” I TELL HER.

NIR & LYNNE TOGETHER

NIR:A group of a hundred or more religious men are marching down the street, chanting loudly. Can you hear it? The time is 6pm on a Friday evening, quite an unusual sound to hear at this time, something alarming about it, like a revolution.

Time is so poignant now. The right wing blocked a highway on Tuesday ,

Tomorrow the left wing is having a support demonstration at city hall.

LYNNE: It is warm, so peaceful in Tel Aviv, and yet as the sun comes down I hear that unusual chant of prayer from the street. What does it mean?

YOSSI

We just finished the 30 days mourning. It was raining, it was like a message from my sister, sending three doves into the tombstone. By the time we got back home, we received a phone call from the military spokeswoman who gave us the good… I don’t know if it’s good or bad, gave us the news that the murderer who killed my sister and two nephews was ambushed and killed.

AVI: I think Revital knew about life, knew what’s important in life, what I only learned after they went. I think I had to suffer the loss of all three of them to start understanding what she already knew. It’s like the place you’re coming from, trying to do something that is very personal. When you see those pictures coming from Israel each and every day, you stop looking at it as something that happens to people; and you start approaching it as a big thing that goes over in a small corner of the world, but there’s people involved.

If the geographic farness makes you numb and you can’t feel it, it will reach you too. It will happen in Iraq, in Iran, in Syria, in New York, in Madrid, in Ireland, and it will only stop when we start going back to our feelings, and try to relate to the fact that there is a person that could have been my friend, that could have been the brother or sister of someone who just rode with me on the subway. It could be me.

Dear Nir,

I cannot remember if the sun was shining or if I was wearing a sweater, or if I had a cup of tea in my hand when I picked up the newspaper on November 12, 2002. I only know that I saw anguish. My daughters heard the story of Abraham and his two sons this morning for Rosh Hashonah .

LYNNE’S DAUGHTER TELLS STORY OF ABRAHAM, SARAH, HAGAR, ISAAC AND ISHMAEL:

NOA: Abraham wanted a child so badly. He was 100 years old as was his wife Sarah, and there didn’t seem to be a chance. So Abraham decided to take matters into his own hands. He had a son with Hagar, the Arab maid. They named him Ishmael. Then, miraculously, Sarah too became pregnant and gave birth to Abraham’s second son, Isaac. Sarah was jealous of Hagar whose son would always be able to lay claim to being Abraham’s first born. So Abraham asked God to send Hagar and her baby boy to a far off land. God said to Abraham: “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the maidservant into a nation.”

NOA: Since his son had to go in the desert, he must have been really sort of mad.

LYNNE: Who was mad?

NOA: Abraham.

LYNNE: Abraham was mad…

NOA: …because his son had to go in the desert.

LYNNE: Yeah, and how do you think the brothers’ felt that they were separated?

NOA: How do you think?

LYNNE: I think they could have gotten along and lived in the same house together even though they both had different mothers.

NOA: Did, umm, did, did,…who sent them into the desert?

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All the best, Lynne

CREDITS