The core of this haunting meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed near the West Bank. Director Lynne Sachs creates a film on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging letters with an Israeli friend. Together, they reveal Revital’s story through her films, news reports, and interviews, culminating in heartbreaking footage of children discussing the violence they’ve witnessed. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film becomes a cine-essay on fear and filmmaking, tragedy and transformation, violence and the land of Israel/Palestine.
RECENT NEWS! Oxford University Press publishes an in-depth analysis of the film in Tim Corrigan’s “The Essay Film – From Montaigne, After Marker”. You can find the book here.
“3 Stars! Presents a mature, artistic meditation on Middle East violence.” Video Librarian
“Parallels the layers of history of the Middle East – demonstrating the possibilities as well as limitations of bridging the gap between Palestinians and Israelis engaging the politics of conflict.” Dr. Jeffrey Shandler, Dep’t of Jewish Studies, Rutgers University
“Both humanist reverie and implicit cautionary tale.” Village Voice
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
Note: To preview a full length version of this film in English or with Chinese subtitles, please contact director Lynne Sachs at lynnesachs@gmail.com
LIBRARY COLLECTIONS
Bard High School/Early College, Barnard College, Brown University, City University of New York, Cornell University, Duke University, Georgetown, New York University, Princeton University, University of California, University of Texas & others.
5 min. color sound, 2006
16mm film released on MiniDV & DVD
A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me”. Now in 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.
“Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings.” George Kuchar
This film is currently only available with a password. Please write to info@lynnesachs.com to request access.
Noa, Noa by Lynne Sachs with Noa Street-Sachs 16mm released on DVD or Mini DV 8 min., B&W and Color, sound 2006
Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand. Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic “Crawdad Song”.
Screening: Anthology Film Archive, New York, May 2006
After two weeks of persistent pleading, a young girl with wispy brown hair and long fingers convinced her parents that she had not only memorized the way through the woods but that she could be trusted to stay strictly on the well-trodden path. This was her first time to take the long, familiar walk alone to the pond on the other side of the stream and down the vine-covered hill.
“Remember dear, no ice allowed,” her mother called as the girl traipsed across the kitchen floor and scooped up her muddy boots from the rack.
After pulling oversized red gloves a few inches past her wrists, she awkwardly tucked her ears under her new knit cap. Heading out the back door of the farmhouse, she noted seven cracks spreading across the cement sidewalk. Yesterday there had been only six. The girl thought to herself, in a light-hearted sort of way, “Perhaps an earthquake shook the ground last night. ” She carefully stepped over a rusty hoe, picked up a branch that had recently fallen from the sick elm tree and strolled toward the pasture beyond the barbed wire fence.
At this point in her life, she had no name so we will continue to call her “girl” for the time being. Indeed, the day the girl was born her mother and father had decided not to give her a name, despite the grumblings among the doctors and nurses at the hospital. Her parents, Rupert and Agnes, had never truly fancied their own names, those which they had received as babies in the small town of St. Michael on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the early 1960’s. They could see no reason to punish their own daughter with a name she too might detest.
As you can imagine, life immediately became rather challenging. A child without a name gets lost very easily in the maternity ward. A girl without a name does not get a turn feeding the mice in kindergarten. A six year old without a name sometimes is forgotten on the afternoon school bus, only to find herself alone at the bus barn on the wrong side of town. So it was that on this day, March 10, 1988, her seventh birthday, this nameless girl gave herself a name. From now on, she would call herself Seven.
It wasn’t really that she couldn’t think of a better name; and it certainly wasn’t that she had a fondness for numbers. Math had lost its glamour the minute subtraction entered the picture. There were seven acres on the farm her parents had been trying unsuccessfully to sell for the last year. She also had a vague memory of hearing that some people called the number seven lucky. Really, it was very simple; she liked the way it sounded.
A few minutes into the dark, sylvan woods, she boldly lay a small log across the stream to cross the newly thawed water. Once safely and dryly on the other side, she picked up a stick and scratched a few designs in the mud by the old, forgotten fishing dock under the bank.
It was as if the soft, wet earth had absorbed the sound of her mother’s warnings in the living room just a half hour earlier. Seven almost nonchalantly began to walk across the frozen pond at the back of her grandfather Mortimer’s abandoned farm. In fact, she’d never known this man but she got tears in her eyes every time her mother’s father was mentioned. She thought of her grandfather as a dear friend with whom it might be fun to go fishing, an activity she’d never been given the chance to investigate. Seven’s mother had recently become a vegetarian, and she didn’t approve of this kind of sport, not even for old time’s sake.
Seven remembered hearing about Mort’s old sow giving birth to a blind piglet on a June morning in 1965. Her grandfather carried the fuzzy pink newborn into Agnes’ bedroom just as she was opening her eyes. He’d bragged for years that he was the only Jewish pig farmer in the state of Maryland.
Everything about Mort was full of color. Seven had heard a lot of talk about his funny looking asparagus bush shooting green sprouts into the sunshine. She adored the field of yellow daffodils he’d planted 50 years ago that still persisted in coming up despite a recent decade of complete neglect.
One evening, last October, Seven’s Great-Aunt Hallie beckoned Seven to her side with her craggy, bejeweled finger during a large family gathering. Seven thought to herself that Aunt Hallie smelled like a musty coatroom after a heavy rain, and she hoped it wasn’t obvious that her nose pointed in exactly the opposite direction from that of her aunt. Aunt Hallie had always been irritated that Agnes, her niece, had never given her own daughter a name. It seemed silly and improper, qualities Hallie was unable to tolerate. “I’ve been watching you, dear”, said her great-aunt. “You walk through a door and survey the room like my brother, your grandfather, used to do: you wait; you think and then you seem to pounce.” From that moment on Seven felt a secret connection to her grandfather, and she no longer detested her aunt’s smell quite so much.
Seven tiptoed across the ice, imagining her grandfather in overalls walking just a few feet ahead, pole in hand, a slight whistle floating like moth wings into the crisp afternoon air. A flock of ducks drew sinewy designs in the sky, as if they were writing a secret message for wandering eyes below. She clung tightly to a stone in one pocket and a button in the other and stepped further across the icy surface.
Within a few minutes, her toes felt uncomfortably cold and damp. Seven stooped down to pull up her wet socks, still imagining the old man forging a path towards the glistening center of the pond. The sun played a clever game of hide-and-seek behind a cloud nestled between the branches of some giant oaks along the edge of the field. The wind brazenly hurled a ball of sage bramble against her legs, startling her and causing her to drop the button into a fissure in the ice she hadn’t seen before.
It was at this moment that Seven observed something unusual about the ducks. What she noticed was neither their graceful beauty nor their loud quacking calls but rather the fact that they were flying south instead of north. She pictured her grandfather turning his neck to speak:
“They’re flying in the wrong direction. It’s almost springtime. Something funny is going on here.”
“Must be some broken branches being pulled along by the large gust of wind,” Seven thought to herself. Then a fantastic booming sound from far away in the woods distracted her for a moment. She wondered if a tree had fallen or maybe a hunter had shot a rifle. The ducks too were jostled by the noise. They flew all this way and that like marbles across the kitchen table.
A strange series of shapes were whirling and spinning high in the sky near the birds.
Seven tied her second shoelace and looked up once more. In the distance, she made out the words “Turn around. The ice is cracking” across the pale pink sky.
The stars were beginning to peek out of the darkness when Seven finally reached her yard. The chickens were filing into the barn, and the smell of freshly baked birthday cake floated deftly from the kitchen. Shivering yet relieved, she drew a backwards seven on the moist glass window, thereby announcing her new name to her family and the world.
Lynne Sachs
273 Carroll Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
718.522.5856
lynsachs@aol.com
It’s taken me seventeen years to realize what an inspiration Gunvor Nelson is for me as a filmmaker, a teacher and a mother who allowed her work as an artist to grow and change as a result of her decision to become a parent. Aspects of the life she led in the Bay Area during the mid-to-late 1980’s resonate for me often, and in many surprising ways. I remember the exasperation I felt as one of her graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. In my opinion, my final 16mm film was taking far too long to complete. Gunvor sat with me at the Steenbeck editing table and emphatically explained that I would soon be longing for the feeling of being thoroughly and passionately inside my work. When the film was done, I would miss the joy of that private world, the sensation of being consumed by the creative process.
Well before I had my own two daughters, I watched Gunvor’s marvelous cinematic meditations on childhood, pregnancy and family. From “Schmeerguntz” to “My Name is Oona” to “Red Shift” to “Time Being”, Gunvor looked at the relationship between mothers and daughters with an unflinching eye. I watched these movies in my mid-twenties with rapture. The result was a seismic shift in my sense of possibility – both personally and artistically. When Gunvor took out her Bolex camera, the strangest, most intriguing transformations would happen on the screen. Green apples would devour themselves with unfathomable delicacy. Snowstorms would purr like a prowling cat. Unlike so many filmmakers I knew in the Bay Area who had chosen the ease and excitement of the city, Gunvor lived in an isolated, windswept house perched above the Pacific Ocean. As I continue my life as a filmmaker in Brooklyn, New York, I sometimes think about the occasional, early morning walks the two of us took across the verdant hills of the Marin Headlands.
After twenty years in the Bay Area, Gunvor Nelson returned to Sweden, where she continues to produce moving image pieces.
Just when I am on my way to becoming,
My eyes open and you are there.
Is Eden large enough for the two of us?
Wherever I turn,
there are branches pulling at my hair,
Earth between my toes and under my tongue.
I slither and sometimes I use my wings.
Let’s slither together.
(ADAM: “I’m working on my posture…”)
Earth becomes dirt becomes dirty.
Bent knees turn into corners.
Am I not right for this world?
Before you, I did not know I was I.
Now this I is part of my unbecoming.
Man Alone in House
Does this empty house invite the outside in?
No one told him to be fearful.
Asleep almost, he listens to the bones of the house.
His breath just constant.
Between two thoughts —
sleep.
Wetness creeps across skin like glue.
Seed is stolen.
Lilith plays thief tonight.
By the window, by the door,
Wings bristle lightly against branches.
Wedding Poem
Morning sunlight taps groom on shoulder,
A day of ring exchanges.
Paper signing, blood marks.
Bride will dance seven circles round him.
Each revolution strengthens the wall,
Closes the window,
Shuts the door to the thief he knew the night before.
Breathless before so many eyes.
She careens to a stop,
Foot hits glass,
Tiny shards spray across ground.
An owl perched on a tree above
Blinks, shivers and flies into a cloud.
Birth Poem
At last, nine full moons leave bare
The dust against the sky.
Air fills up with brightness.
A clumsy baby drops.
Dice on a betting table
Or rich, ripe fruit atop worn grass?
Mother Speaks to Baby
I’m learning to read all over again,
a face, this time, connected to a body.
At first, I feel your story from within–
Nose rubs against belly, elbow prods groin.
Your silent cough becomes
a confusing dip and bulge.
You speak and I struggle to translate.
I lie on my side, talk to myself,
rub my fingers across my skin, from left to right.
I read out loud,
and I hope you can hear me.
I’m learning to read all over again
but this time I have a teacher.
A smile comes over your face.
Lips flutter, flutter, quiver, turn up to touch cheek.
I know, am told, have heard — that
in the dark, under your cradle,
there in the empty space of dust between
lies Lilith.
I catch the reflection of my face in her eyes.
I am a snake, a spider, the flame of a burning sword,
a feather that tickles at the nape of your neck,
broken glass and nakedness.
I touch your nose and her spell is broken,
something lost and nothing gained.
For a moment your head swishes between ears,
to say no, to resist and then to sink into
nothing more than a pillow.
No Kingdom There
(Inspired by Isaiah 34)
Streams turn to pitch.
Soil into sulfur.
Land burns.
Night or day, a pure dry thirst.
Vines twisting upward,
gnarled and gray,
soon become tomorrow’s smoke.
And still, the hawk and the hog possess the dying tree.
The owl and the raven drop down to lower branches.
In the distance, nailed to a post, the words:
This Begins the Line of Confusion
Call it–
“No Kingdom Here.”
No bosses, no princes, no popes.
Only splinters tearing skin,
and thorns inside doorways.
Only wildcats gnawing at hyena necks,
and jackals lurking in the wood.
While all the goats called Evil cry out
“Bah, bah.”
Here too Lilith will lie down
and find a place to rest.
Rudy Burckhardt’s Life and Work: How Wide is Sixth Avenue by Phillip Lopate
Reviewed by Lynne Sachs
For over twenty years, writer Philip Lopate was lucky enough to call artist Rudy Burckhardt (1914-1999) a friend. An afternoon visit to Burckhardts Chelsea loft would usually include a cup of tea or a bottle of beer and a home cooked meal. In his new book, Rudy Burckhardtís Life and Work: How Wide is Sixth Avenue (Harry N. Abrams, 2004), a portrait of Burckhardt that includes over 100 of his photographs, Lopate poignantly remembers the lively conversation, the smell of good food, and the art he saw inside the quintessentially urban live-work space of this profoundly committed artist. Lopate writes: “You might take a quick gander at a painting he was working on in the backroom, or some photographs on the wall: the long, paint-spattered table usually held an editing set-up with take-up reels for his film of the moment, with a shot list beside it and a paperback book, face down, where he’d left off reading.” For most filmmakers today, our medium is too often sequestered from the other arts, while Burckhardt, it seems, relished in the paint under his fingernails.
Rudy Burckhardt’s Life and Work is an insightful, frank and compassionate character study of this mostly unheralded Swiss-American artist. Lopate interweaves astute interpretations of Burckhardt’s films and photographs with a fascinating and at times intimate narrative of his youth in Europe and his adult life in New York City. Burckhardt, observes Lopate, was the primary photographer of the maveick 1940’s New York School, one of the most celebrated artistic circles in the history of 20th Century American art, putting him in company with the likes of painters Willem deKooning, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, and Red Grooms [all painters? YES]. Without an in-depth study of the work of Rudy Burckhardt there would be a gap in the canon of American photography and experimental film. However, Lopate’s book, he says, is “not so much spotless objectivity as the promotion of a more complex understanding of Rudy Burckhardt, by exploring a life resonant in enigmas, and by trying to interpret the rich body of images he left us.”
Keeping that in mind, Lopate observes that EVEN AS a very young artist, Burckhardt was always fascinated by both the harshness and beauty of life in a modern city. “Walking and taking pictures became inextricably linked [FOR HIM],” Lopate writes. A nineteen-year-old in 1933, Burckhardt obediently traveled from his protected, pristine Geneva family home to study medicine in London. Quickly distracted from the classroom by the surprisingly harsh realities of the Depression- burdened metropolis, young Rudy was drawn to the slums, the men and women standing in line for a meal, all the daunting signs of poverty that other members of the bourgeoisie had chosen to ignore. Burckhardt himself wrote of these times in his memoir collection, Mobile Homes. With camera in hand, he was prepared to witness life at its most difficult, and even made the claim of being “elated by the smell of urine.”
With documentary filmmaking still in its early years of development during and after WWII, what was then known as ‘reality based’ Filmmaking had yet to find a definitive identity in the worlds of art, academe, or popular commercial culture. Robert Flaherty was traipsing around the sub-arctic giving earnest, perhaps deceptive, drama to the lives of its native people. John Grierson was working with the backing of the entire Canadian Film Board. And Dziga Vertov was imbuing his each and every breathtakingly graphic composition with a political imperative. In the larger American cities, it was becoming more and more common to see a photographer with a small motion picture camera tucked under his or her arm, patiently waiting for a disheveled woman to turn her face in such a way, or the light to pass across a cement skyscraper. This entourage of committed artists, which also included Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt, perceived “the street as the meeting-place of class contradictions, aesthetic anomalies and historic eras (modernism versus flea market agora.),” writes Lopate. In Burckhardt’s first impressionistic film documentaries from this time, Lopate notes, the work reveals to us an “acceptance of the obdurate, sadly loving world, an amazing facility for composition, perfect use of natural light and a tactful holding of a shot for just long enough.” For Burckhardt, the evolution from photographer to filmmaker was inevitable, and in the end, he came to feel that filmmaking is what he did best.
After a series of precise analyses of Burckhardt’s elegant black and white photography, Lopate turns to his movies, including “The Climate of New York” (1948) and “How Wide is Sixth Avenue”[Date TK 1945], where Burckhardt provides a “gentle, slightly melancholy observation of ordinary people caught moving, from close-up and from far way.” Reading Lopate’s book inspired me to watch again several of Burkhardt’s films with a new, better-informed eye. For example, watching “Under the Brooklyn Bridge” (1953), I witnessed for the first time through Rudy’s lens, a gaggle of gleeful, naked boys frolicking in the East River, with its swirling, treacherous currents.
In “Default Averted” (1975), Rudy responded with compassion and artistry to New York City’s brush with bankruptcy. As Lopate writes: “In it we see buildings being demolished, the city under siege from snow and creditors all to the music of Thelonious Monk and Edgar Varese.” Watching Rudy’s series of Times Square films produced during this fragile era in the city’s history gave me the chance to relish in his astonishing and loving celebration of life at its most fraught, edgy, and exuberant. Even after thirty years, the colors that Rudy captured seem as spectacular and tawdry as ever. It is this exquisite sensitivity to all things visual, especially the lines, tensions and excitement of an urban landscape that would eventually serve as inspiration to another generation of reality-based shooters such as Peter Hutton, Nick Dorsky [see story pg TK] and Warren Sonnbert.
In the realm of the movies, Rudy’s love of the image remained strictly “amateur,” rarely availing him any monetary compensation. It wasn’t until the 1960ís, when America experienced the awakening of a transgressive, fluid, hippie culture, that Burckhardt’s irreverent, bohemian oeuvre began to garner attention. Young people searching for an art form that was free and unadorned embraced Rudy’s “underground, pro-sex, anti-Hollywood revolution,” He was willing to stand before his own camera, boney and nude; he was spiritually bemused by the shapely beauty of a mushroom in the dark, wet soil. [Is this also a quote?NO] It was at this point that Burckhardt began to identify with the Experimental Filmmaking movement in America that had grown out of Dada, Surrealism, and chance performances.
At times raunchy, often child-like, purposefully naive, and intensely identifiable with the poetic impulse, Rudy’s narrative experiments pushed the boundaries of expectation in absolutely every direction. Indeed his chaotic and inventive story-films integrated an outlandish selection of film tricks that hark back to the days of George Melies, magician and pioneer of the early cinema, magic and all. Intensive collaborations with his poet friends Taylor Mead, Edwin Denby, and John Ashbery contributed to the feeling that Rudy’s social life was an intricate part of his creative life.
In this rich, stimulating environment, Rudy’s six-decade commitment to all forms of artistic expression was rigorous, disciplined and far-reaching. Seemingly disinterested in spinning a love of the moving image into a full-blown career, he never referred to himself as a director, but rather simply as an artist, a 24-hour participant in the creative process. His wife Yvonne, describes it simply in Lopate’s book: “He could photograph, paint and film all in one day.”
During the 1950’s, he collaborated with the enigmatic, eventually renowned, Queens, New York artist Joseph Cornell on “What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street” and Mulberry Street, two short masterpieces of color and lyricism, each also a loving homage to the wonders of the city they both called home. Today, these two works along with 52 others are in the permanent collection at the New York Filmmakers’ Cooperative. Over the decades, retrospectives of his work have been shown in museums, film festivals and cooperatives. And with the publication of Lopateís remarkable portrait, we can only hope for a resurgence of Rudy Burckhardt film screenings.
As an experimental filmmaker with an intimate relationship to documentary, I am heartened by the life-long relationship Burckhardt had to exploring the world around him with compassion as well as invention. Equally enthralled by the experience of lugging my heavy 16mm camera across town to witness the colors of the morning sun, and by the splendid collaborations I have had with other artists, I am drawn to the methods of working that were so integral to Burckhardtísís process.
And now, after finishing Rudy Burckhardt’s Life and Work: How Wide is Sixth Avenue, I find myself presented with a rather intriguing dilemma. Do I rush over to the Filmmakersí Coop to watch Burckhardt’s Haiti, Caterpillar, Square Times, Default Averted, Doldrums, Central Park in the Dark, Night Fantasies and Indelible?
Or, do I pull out my Bolex and head for Times Square?
Lynne Sachs is a New York filmmaker and writer who produces experimental documentaries, installations and web projects (www.house-of-drafts.org).
PUBLISHED IN THE INDEPENDENT FILM AND VIDEO MONTHLY
1. As far as I know, you have always been teaching in the field of movie in
the university. Which courses do you mainly teach? That has brought a lot
of convenience to your creative work.
I have been teaching since 1989, on and off, which gives me time to make my films.I see teaching as an extension of the over all exploration that is part of making art.Whenever I discover a new, challenging film or video I am lucky enough to have an audience that is ready, willing and able to watch it.This can be so thrilling.In addition, I often show my own works-in-process (I do not say “progress” because I like to celebrate the act of making as much as the act of completing) to my students, which makes me feel as vulnerable as they do when they present an evolving work of art to me, their professor.I mainly teach film and video making courses in an art context, that is I do not teach people the formula for making a Hollywood style movie, but rather a moving image work that comes from the artist-student’s own vision.I also teach lecture courses on experimental and documentary film.This fall I will be a visiting artist at New York University.
2. Among your students or the entire university, are there many people who
are engaged in the creation of experimental movies? Naturally, your
students and you often communicate with each other, and therefore, do you
influence each other? Or can you get some inspirations from the
communication?
I think every new work of art is an experiment in expression, so I do not measure a film’s success by it ability to replicate the standard, commercial fare we are shown in most mainstream theaters.For the most part, I teach with other artists, not just filmmakers, so I am lucky enough to be around people with paint under their nails.
3. I have learned from the material that you began to make experimental
movies from 1989. Although you have only made nine up till now, you have
won a lot of prizes and awards and drawn attention from people. Do you
still give first priority to teaching?
I would honestly say that my priority is to my films, and that my teaching is an extension of the dialogue that goes with that creative process.
4. I was very glad that I interviewed your husband Mark in May. However, I
didn’t know your relationship until you told me that. Aha! By the way, I
think you can talk about him and his movies.
I am truly enthralled by my husband Mark’s films.He is a pioneer in the world of hand-made films, and our house is a place where he often disappears down in the basement to paint on each and every frame.I also am enthralled by his newer work, more dramatic video pieces in which he works with actors to create a remarkable synthesis of real and imaginary landscapes of human experience.
5. During the interview with Mark, I got to know that you ha ve two lovely
children. I think both of you are very happy, because you have a happy
family, a career you like, and moreover mutual communication. Do you
usually talk about your movies and your own ideas? It can be said that
movie has been incorporated into your life.
We talk a great deal about our films, especially the struggles of the process – from problems with our computers to a roll of film that is disastrously overexposed to an actor who failed to show up for a shoot.This may sound rather prosaic, but it is so important to have someone in your life who is willing to listen to the dirty details of movie making.We also understand one another’s need for privacy, and share a respect for one another’s need to search for a visual form of expression that takes risks – all alone.My form of filmmaking is perhaps different from his in that I am often trying to articulate my feelings, or concerns, about something going on in the world, something I hope will change in time.
My films are cine-essays, a play between image, sound and text that is very close to the work of Chris Marker, the French filmmaker.
The biggest project of our life weighs about 100 lbs, that is our two daughters, whom we take to avant-garde movies all over New York City.For the most part, they find it a pleasure, though sometimes they wish we appreciated Disney more than we do, alas.
6. The question I am going to ask you, I think, is the one many other
people will also ask. Is your creative work influenced by Mark, or vice
versa, or you have mutual impact?
I believe I take more chances, jump into the crazy world of public exhibition, stay up till the middle of the night editing, travel to places like Vietnam or Bosnia – with confidence and excitement, with my camera in hand because I know I have the support of my life partner, Mark Street.Sometimes he is also my very harshest critic, and I just wish he would not be so honest!
7. Mark’s movie Excursions and yours Which Way Is East are very similar in
form. What’s more, the two movies were shot in the same year. Can you talk
about these two movies?
I think your observation is extremely insightful and I appreciate your close attention to our work.Both of those films are so-called travel films.He went to Mexico in “Excursions” and I went to Vietnam in “Which Way is East”.We did these things at a time when we did not yet have children along with us, with all of the real and emotional baggage that
children bring along.So, I think these movies are about both a physical and a psychological journey that comes with being in a new place and feeling very, very independent, far away, totally observant and aware.The films reflect a time in history that was very open and cross-cultural, and I miss that spirit as I think travelers are far more cautious now, since the changes that have happened over the last few years.
8. In Which Way Is East, we saw the effects somewhat like the traces of
film scratching, which we usually see in experimental movies and in the
movies made by Mark. But your movies appear in the form of the documentary.
Why do you want to deal with the frames of your movies in this way?
I like your attention to detail, to the notion of the frame.With our progressive movement toward a completely digital way of working, there seems to be less and less sensitivity to these details….the brush strokes of cinema that all work together to create a different kind of visual vocabulary than any other medium.So, in my own way, I am also experimenting all of the time with new ways of expressing my thoughts to my audience.In Which Way is East, Biography of Lilith and Investigation of a Flame, I play with focus, framing and texture to bring about surprising ways of seeing things in the real world.In WWE, blurry streaks of light from a moving car become are transformed into a dreamy, sumptuous entrance into the flaura of Vietnam.In Lilith, a spider and a jelly fish send us into a primordial Eden.In Investigation,red flowers transform into a splash of blood.Objects from everyday life take on a new relationship to the eye and the imagination.
9. We don’t see the way you deal with the documentary in China. Is it a
common way of creation in Ame rica? Or can we say that it is pretty free to
create a documentary there?
I am really thrilled that you ask this question about documentary.I think the changes that are going on in this field are happening because artists who are trying to explore their responses to what they see in the world with a camera are frustrated by the conventional, network news ways of observing.We as experimental documentary makers want to create new ways of expressing our ideas with very precise uses of images and sounds; each new project necessitates a personal, original mode of working with the media.We cannot feel at ease with a language of the dominant cinema, or the dominant power class.Form and function once again are intertwined.Right now I am working with the filmmaker Jem Cohen (go on the web to get information on his films) to make a book with six other makers (probably including Paul Chan, Travis Wilkerson, Bill Brown and Deborah Stratman).This will be an artist manifesto, in the grand tradition of the 1920’s Russsian revolutionary filmmaker Dziga Vertov, we hope!By the way, have you gone to see the Web artist documentary I made with artists in BosniaWWW.house-of-drafts.org.This is another example of experimenting between documentary and fiction.Please take a look.
10. Among the four movies you gave me, A Biography of Lilith is my
favorite. I like its form, its frame, and its music. However, at the same
time, it is the movie that is the most difficult to understand, because our
religious belief has no relation with the Jesus Christ. Could you talk
about this movie?
Biograph of Lilith represents a very intense period of my life – from 1995 –1997 – when I went from being a single woman, independent, working doing whatever I like to being a mother who still wanted to keep the liberated side of my existence in tact.Making this film was part of my search for a woman in history, or at lest mythology, from my own ethnicity as a Jewish woman.In the process, I discovered new ways of working with music that were astonishingly exciting.I found an opera singer, a cello player and a rock and roll band.They were all ready, willing and able to take my poetry and turn it into song!Regarding the Judao-Christian paradigm you mentioned that is so far from your own, Lilith most definitely represents a challenge to the creation myth, to the subservience of women and all that comes with that all-powerful bit of Western folklore.
11. Which Way Is East and Investigation of a Flame are both about the
Vietnam War. These two movies were produced in 1994 and 1997 respectively.
After such a long lapse of time, what recalled you back to the War?
I was a child during the 1960’s and Vietnam always represented something far away and Other during that time in America.I wanted to break that symbolic barrio to our understanding of that place and its people by bringing color, sound, voice to the culture of Vietnam.I wanted to look at our shared horizon across the Pacific Ocean, across history, and to try to understand the events in a new, more open way.Traveling in Vietnam as an American woman in 1992 was rare, so the Vietnamese people were very willing to talk and to tell me and my sister their thoughts on our shared history.With Investigation, I wanted to find out more about a group of people who sacrificed so much in their lives for something they believe in so deeply.Everyone should have a few moments like this sometime in their lives, a time of profound choice from which you can never go back.
12. We discover that you are paying special attention to the social issues
like politics, war, and woman’s right, etc. Why are you interested in the
above mentioned topics or what inspires you to display these themes?
I really can’t help thinking about these issues, but I suppose it is the fact that I work with these themes from the perspective of an artist that makes my reactions more like the work of poets, essayists, novelists, or painters. By not working as a journalist, I am free to work in a very subjective, personal way.I rely on grants, awards and sales of my work to keep it going,While the commercial world exists, it is not really the place for this kind of media.
13. Do you like the form of address as female director, feminism director
or the classification like this?
I like the term filmmaker, because I do not really work with the traditional hierarchies of the movies business where I direct lots of members of a crew.To say filmmaker, is to imply a hands-on relationship to the medium, and a sense of collaboration with my peers.
14. Among your movies, I saw the ones bearing heavy documentary elements
such as Which Wa y Is East and Investigation of a Flame, and also the ones
bearing the experimental features like The House of Science and A Biography
of Lilith. It seems that you are maneuvering between the documentary and
the experimental movie and incorporating the experimental movie’s
technique in the documentary. Do you lay particular emphasis on the
experimental movies or the experimental features of movies or something
else?
Yes, to experiment is to always require a level of fun, curiosity and play – even with very serious subjects.
15. It is a pity that I can’t see more of your works. Finally, can you
tell me your views on your own works and movie?
I am finishing a DVD this week which has poetry, collage, long and short movies, strange interviews — all of which are part of the making of several of my films from the 1990’s.Finally there is a medium and a technology that can contain the meandering, whimsical, socially concerned, politically committed, artistic adventures which are part of my art making practice.Every new project I make seems to feel like the hardest, but then again it is also continually challenging and fascinating and I cannot imagine doing anything else.Here is a description of my current project which will be done this year:
“States of UnBelonging” is a 70 min. video-essay in post-production which explores the complex ways one person understands another across cultural, historical and familial divides. I look at two people: Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin and a writer who fled the Nazis and ended up in remotest Brazil; and, Revital Ohayon, an Israeli woman filmmaker killed by gunfire. Beginning with war and its impact on the smallest and largest moments of life, this video responds to two distinct experiences of tragedy and transformation. Sandor devised his own way to survive the traumatic events of his life. A Hungarian Jewish doctor, he worked for the US Army during World War II reconstructing the bodies of dead soldiers. His letters to my great-uncle are a fascinating yet personal treatise on modern society, war and the creative process. I juxtapose Sandor’s fearless introspection on the two World Wars with a visualization of his idyllic life in the “invisible house” in the woods. Building a harpsichord on which to play Bach and translating Winnie the Pooh into Latin hurl him away from the memories he finds so difficult to escape. Revital was shot by militants in a kibbutz known for its positive relations with a neighboring Arab village. Without taking sides or casting blame, her tragedy touched me deeply when I came across it in the newspaper. Like me, she was a mother, a filmmaker and a teacher. After a year of dogged research, I am now editing interviews with her family, material from her films, and landscape imagery from significant places in her life. My process uses authentic and fabricated imagery, moving from observation to invention. “States” pushes audiences to think epistemologically, to wonder about the ways that they are coming to “know” these two individuals. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, these portraits explore multiple planes, offering simultaneous, contradictory views that allow us to see beyond the surface of the skin, inside.
To build a house on a mountain,
I find a place in my room where a cloud meets my eye.
Capture the wind with my lips.
Take notice of a bird writing eloquent script
across the sky.
Flickering in the morning yellow,
Aspen leaves turning somersaults,
Dark, light, dark, light.
A moon and its negative
Multiplied by a thousand.
A cosmos of arboreal splendor.
Spring green beckoning me –
Shyly into the somber quiet of the wood.
Where do I put a memory of silence?
I carve a groove just deep enough,
And delicately place the wedge of delicious
Extravagant emptiness
Inside the fissures.
Protected and preserved I forget the silence is there
Until it has mischievously flown away,
Like the birds I saw that morning –
Writing their indecipherable messages across the paper
I sadly allowed to float away.
In her new film, Investigation of a Flame, experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to May 1968, as the U.S. under Lyndon Johnson grew increasingly embroiled in Vietnam, and sentiment about the war was decidedly split. The film opens with a volatile mix of footage showing Johnson addressing the nation, shots of American troops carrying injured soldiers, and home-movie footage of teenage boys.
Rather than focusing on the era at large, however, Sachs examines a single incident, when nine Vietnam War protesters in Catonsville, Maryland, poured homemade napalm on draft records and set them on fire. Footage of the event shows the well-dressed, courteous “Catonsville 9” – who included peace-activist Catholic priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan – gathered around their small fire, calmly explaining their objections to the war; after they were arrested, they even sent flowers to a clerk who had been treated brusquely in the tussle.
While the event illustrated a quiet defiance, it more powerfully sparked other acts of civil disobedience, and Sachs included contemporary interview footage in which she asks many of those involved to comment. The result is a complex rumination on the power of protest.
In her earlier film Which Way is East? Sachs travels with her sister to Vietnam, looking for traces of violence in the often-beautiful countryside. Together the films offer thoughtful reflection on the traumas of the past, the continued mistakes of the present and the necessity to reflect actively on our government’s wartime antics.
