The 4th edition of MajorDocs claims calm and pause in domestic audiovisual creation
From October 4 to 8, 8 films from around the world will be screened, and professional conferences will be organized, such as the master class of the Venezuelan Goya nominee Andrés Duque
‘Film about a father who’ is an autobiographical documentary by American filmmaker Lynne Sachs . The experimental filmmaker from Brooklyn spent 35 years recording this film from digital images of her father.
“I’m very happy to have done it, but also very scared every time I have to show it. It is a vulnerable film for me and my father, although it is also a project that has given me many opportunities . I was able to talk to people about their relationship with their parents and what they learned from it, as well as what they don’t want to repeat from their parents,” explained Sachs.
In this way, the fourth edition of MajorDocs has started . In a current situation in which cinema is consumed in haste, the festival claims calm and pause in domestic audiovisual creation .
From October 4 to 8 , 8 films from around the world will be shown; all, from the author’s subjective point of view . Professional conferences are also organized , where the master class offered by the Venezuelan Andrés Duque , nominated for a Goya for the documentary ‘Iván Z’ , stands out.
Spanish original:
La 4a edició del MajorDocs reivindica la calma i la pausa en la creació audiovisual domèstica
Del 4 al 8 d’octubre, es projectaran 8 pel·lícules d’arreu del món, i s’organitzaran jornades professionals, com la classe magistral del veneçolà nominat als Goya Andrés Duque
‘Film about a father who’ is an autobiographical documentary by American filmmaker Lynne Sachs . The experimental filmmaker from Brooklyn spent 35 years recording this film from digital images of her father.
“I’m very happy to have done it, but also very scared every time I have to show it. It is a vulnerable film for me and my father, although it is also a project that has given me many opportunities . I was able to talk to people about their relationship with their parents and what they learned from it, as well as what they don’t want to repeat from their parents,” explained Sachs.
In this way, the fourth edition of MajorDocs has started . In a current situation in which cinema is consumed in haste, the festival claims calm and pause in domestic audiovisual creation .
From October 4 to 8 , 8 films from around the world will be shown; all, from the author’s subjective point of view . Professional conferences are also organized , where the master class offered by the Venezuelan Andrés Duque , nominated for a Goya for the documentary ‘Iván Z’ , stands out .
We are very pleased to announce our line up of programs this October at e-flux, featuring live music, screenings, and talks.
This week, on October 7, join us for Playthroughs, featuring live music with Keith Fullerton Whitman on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his landmark album Playthroughs, followed by a Q&A with Whitman moderated by writer and musician Sasha Frere-Jones. Next week, on October 11, join us for A Life on Video: Shigeko Kubota’s Broken Diary, a screening of select works by the acclaimed Japanese video artist followed by a conversation with Eimi Tagore-Erwin, Juno Peter Yoon, and Lukas Brasiskis, and organized as part of the Revisiting Feminist Moving Image series. On October 13, Johanna Gosse will give a talk titled Altered States: Bruce Conner’s Border Crossings accompanied by a screening of Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, as part of our continuing Film Beyond Film lecture series. See more details on these programs below.
Other October events include Digestion, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale presented on October 17 and hosted by Lydia Kallipoliti (co-curator, 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale) and Christina Moushoul (assistant editor, e-flux Architecture). On October 18, Slow Growth, presented by Flaherty NYC as part of the “let’s all be lichen” series programmed by asinnajaq, will feature a screening of Sunna Nousuniemi’s Boso mu ruovttoluotta (Breathe me back to life) and Nivi Pederson’sPilluarneq Ersigiunnaarpara (Happiness Scares Me No More). On October 20, A Souvenir of Frictions willfeature three films by Peng Zuqiang followed by a Q&A with the artist. On October 24, we celebrate the publication of Elizabeth Povinelli’s new book Routes/Worlds (2022, e-flux journal and Sternberg Press). And on October 25, we host a screening of selected works by Peggy Ahwesh, followed by an in-person discussion with the artist. We wrap the month’s programs on October 27 with A Reality Between Words and Images, a screening of works by Lynne Sachs with the artist in attendance.
Stay tuned for more information on upcoming events this fall!
Join us at e-flux for the twentieth anniversary of the album Playthroughs, featuring a live music performance by Keith Fullerton Whitman and a Q&A with Whitman moderated by writer and musician Sasha Frere-Jones. Playthroughs was released in October 2002 on the label Kranky to much critical acclaim from Pitchfork and other publications—and to this day remains one of Whitman’s most beloved albums. It consists of drone-heavy ambient music composed entirely using processed guitar sounds (acoustic and electric). The album follows in the footsteps of Steve Reich and other musicians within the contemporary classical umbrella. Read more on the event here.
Join us at e-flux Screening Room for A Life on Video: Shigeko Kubota’s Broken Diary, a screening and discussion of videos by Shigeko Kubota, curated by Juno Peter Yoon and Lukas Brasiskis. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Yoon and Brasiskis, and Eimi Tagore-Erwin. Over her five-decade career, Kubota forged a lyrical confluence of the personal and the technological, often merging vibrant electronic processing techniques with images and objects of nature, art, and everyday life. An active participant in the international Fluxus art movement in the 1960s, Kubota was strongly influenced by the art and theories of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Her distinctive fusions of the organic, the art historical, and the electronic are at once poetic and witty. Focusing on several, often interconnected themes, Kubota’s works include installations that pay direct homage to Duchampian ideas and icons; those that reference Japanese spiritual traditions of nature and landscape, particularly water and mountains; and a series of diaristic works chronicling her personal life on video. In this screening, we will focus on the latter component of Kubota’s body of work—her autobiographical videos, collectively titled Broken Diary, that evolved since 1970. Self-Portrait (ca. 1970–1971), Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky (1973), My Father (1973–1975), and SoHo SoAp/Rain Damage(1985) perfectly represent Kubota’s poignant and wry autofictional observations of the everyday, characteristic of a strong sense of feminist identity. Read more on the event and films here.
Join us at e-flux Screening Room for Altered States: Bruce Conner’s Border Crossings, a lecture by Johanna Gosse, with a screening of Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1959–1967, 3 minutes). This talk focuses on Bruce Conner’s LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, an exemplary instance of experimental film’s engagement with the psychedelic counterculture. Inspired by Conner’s experience living in Mexico City in the early 1960s and his avid experimentation with psychedelics, particularly hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms, the film features ethnographic views of rural village life, cameos from LSD guru Timothy Leary, and multiple allusions, literal and symbolic, to an atomic mushroom cloud, all set to a lively rock soundtrack by the Beatles. The talk will trace how the twin motifs of border crossing and atomic anxiety surface in LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS, and in turn, how Conner’s film illuminates the complex cultural politics of race and nation within the 1960s counterculture. The discussion will focus on how the film’s psychedelia is shaped by a colonialist logic of “expansion” and (self-) discovery, in which primitivist projections of Indigeneity play a constitutive role. Read more on the lecture here.
Accessibility –Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. –For elevator access, please RSVP to program [at] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space. –e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.
Stay tuned to upcoming programs on our website, or subscribe to our Screening Room mailing list here.
Lynne Sachs, ‘godmother’ of MajorDocs, opens the festival
This documentary film exhibition kicks off this Tuesday with the screening of ‘Film about a father who’
Palm | 03 10 22 | 17:33 | Updated at 17:34
MajorDocs, the documentary film festival that makes a virtue of slowness, kicks off this Tuesday from the Fundació Sa Nostra and opens the doors to 5 days in which documentary, domestic and archive cinema will be the true protagonist. 5 days to reeducate the gaze and silence the noise, reflect, discover and enjoy other realities and other gazes. 5 days of cinema understood as art, culture and creation, space, reflection and dialogue.
Lynne Sachs, filmmaker, poet and artist based in New York, will be in charge of opening the festival from 6:30 p.m. at Fundació Sa Nostra with her latest film Film about a father who. More than a film, it is a portrait filmed between 1984 and 2019 in Super 8, 16 mm, VHS and HD and that Lynne Sachs uses to delve into the controversial figure of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a complex, playful, selfish man. and charismatic man who led a life full of secrets, children and wives –9 children and 5 wives to be more exact– and who, with his lies and silences, marked the lives of everyone around him. A documentary film that, delving into the figure of a blurred father, tries to understand the bond between a daughter and her father. A well-assembled portrait of a diverse family, their memory and memories.
After the screening, the musical note will be provided by Joana Gomila and Laia Vallès , two artists who have shaken the world of traditional music with a style that is as personal as it is daring and an expansive and transgressive sound.
Starting on Wednesday, October 5, CineCiutat will become the venue for the 8 films that will compete in the official section: ‘El silencio del topo’, by the Guatemalan documentary filmmaker and producer Anaïs Taracena; ‘Ardenza’ by Daniela de Felice; ‘A night of knowing nothing’, debut feature by Mumbai-based Indian filmmaker Payal Kapadia; ‘We, students’ by actor, director and sound engineer Rafiki Fariala; ‘Herbaria’ by film director, producer, programmer and projectionist Leandro Listorti; ‘La playa de los Enchaquirados’ by the director born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Iván Mora Manzano; ‘Rampart’ by Marko Grba, director and writer born in Belgrade; and ‘Aftersun’ by Catalan director Lluís Galter.
Check the schedule for October 5, times and location:
Sa Nostra Foundation.
At 10 am, Masterclass by Lynne Sachs: The body, the camera and matter.
At 12 noon, doc-Session given by the filmmakers Anaïs Taracena and Leandro Listorti: Search or find. The language of non-fiction.
CineCiutat.
At 5:30 p.m., ‘We, students’ by Rafiki Fariala.
At 5:30 p.m., ‘The silence of the mole’ by Anaïs Taracena.
At 7:30 p.m. ‘Ardenza’ by Daniela de Felice.
At 7:30 p.m. ‘A night of knowing nothing’ by Payal Kapadia.
Tickets can be purchased both at www.majorDocs.org and at the CineCiutat box office.
Admission: €5
Reduced ticket for members of CineCiutat, students and retirees (only at the box office): €3.50
Subscription for 4 screenings (only at the box office): €15
Spanish original:
Lynne Sachs, ‘madrina’ del MajorDocs, inaugura el festival
Esta muestra de cine documental arranca este martes con la proyección de ‘Film about a father who’
Palma | 03·10·22 | 17:33 | Actualizado a las 17:34
MajorDocs, el festival de cine documental que hace de la lentitud una virtud, arranca este martes desde la Fundació Sa Nostra y abre las puertas a 5 días en los que el cine documental, doméstico y de archivo será el auténtico protagonista. 5 días para reeducar la mirada y acallar el ruido, reflexionar, descubrir y disfrutar de otras realidades y otras miradas. 5 días de cine entendido como arte, cultura y creación, espacio, reflexión y diálogo.
Lynne Sachs, cineasta, poeta y artista afincada en Nueva York, será la encargada de inaugurar el festival a partir de las 18.30h en Fundació Sa Nostra con su última película Film about a father who. Más que una película, es un retrato filmado entre 1984 y 2019 en Súper 8, 16 mm, VHS y HD y que Lynne Sachs utiliza para adentrarse en la controvertida figura de su padre, Ira Sachs Sr., un hombre complejo, vividor, egoísta y carismático que llevó una vida repleta de secretos, hijos y mujeres –9 hijos y 5 mujeres para ser más exactos– y que, con sus mentiras y silencios, marcó la vida de todo el que le rodeaba. Una película documental que, buceando en la figura de un padre desdibujado, trata de entender el vínculo entre una hija y su padre. Un retrato bien ensamblado sobre una familia diversa, su memoria y sus recuerdos.
Tras la proyección, la nota musical la pondrán Joana Gomila y Laia Vallès, dos artistas que han sacudido el mundo de la música tradicional con un estilo tan personal como atrevido y un sonido expansivo y transgresor.
A partir del miércoles 5 de octubre, CineCiutat se convertirá en la sede de las 8 películas que competirán en la sección oficial: ‘El silencio del topo’, de la cineasta documental y productora guatemalteca Anaïs Taracena; ‘Ardenza’ de Daniela de Felice; ‘A night of knowing nothing’, ópera prima de la cineasta India establecida en Mumbai Payal Kapadia; ‘We, students’ del actor, director e ingeniero de sonido Rafiki Fariala; ‘Herbaria’ del director de cine, productor, programador y proyeccionista Leandro Listorti; ‘La playa de los Enchaquirados’ del director nacido en Guayaquil, Ecuador, Iván Mora Manzano; ‘Rampart’ de Marko Grba, director y escritor nacido en Belgrado; y ‘Aftersun’ del director catalán Lluís Galter.
Consulta la programación del 5 de octubre, los horarios y la localización:
Fundació Sa Nostra.
A las 10h, Masterclass de Lynne Sachs: El cuerpo, la cámara y la materia.
A las 12h, doc-Session impartida por los cineastas Anaïs Taracena y Leandro Listorti: Búsqueda o hallazgo. El lenguaje de la no-ficción.
CineCiutat.
A las 17:30h, ‘We, students’ de Rafiki Fariala.
A las 17:30h, ‘El silencio del topo’ de Anaïs Taracena.
A las 19.30h ‘Ardenza’ de Daniela de Felice.
A las 19:30h ‘A night of knowing nothing’ de Payal Kapadia.
Las entradas se pueden comprar tanto en www.majorDocs.org como en la taquilla de CineCiutat.
Entrada: 5 €
Entrada reducida para miembros de CineCiutat, estudiantes y jubilados (sólo en taquilla): 3,50€
Join us on the first Saturday of every month for our Poetry Reading series. Each gathering will include a reading by that month’s Featured Poet, followed by a discussion with the poet.
November’s Featured Poet is Lynne Sachs. She is an experimental filmmaker and poet, whose films and poetry combine to explore family, feminism, form, and process. Her book, Year by Year Poems, contains one poem for each year of her live so far, “filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.” (Phillip Lopate).
First Saturday Poetry is curated and presented by award-winning poet Vasiliki Katsarou. Vasiliki is a Geraldine R. Dodge Poet and a regular Teaching Artist at the Hunterdon Art Museum, and is also a filmmaker. For many years, she ran the well-loved poetry-reading series at Panoply Books in Lambertville. Her books, including the full-length poetry collection, Memento Tsunamiand the contemporary poetry anthology Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems, are featured for sale at the Bookshop.
First Saturday Poetry Readings are free and open to the public.
Asiliki Katsarou (curator), Lynne Sachs, and Barbara de Wilde (bookstore owner)
Lynne during Frenchtown Books reading outside with the almost full moon
A strong interest in the social, political, and cultural contexts has always been part and parcel of a good variety of experimental filmmaking practices, even though canonical works on experimental cinema tend to focus solely on the formal explorations that supposedly reflect the filmmaker’s own (hermetic) subjectivity. Because of this exclusive focus on formal experimentation, the socio-historical, cultural, and representational politics, ethics, and concerns of much experimental work remained unnoticed until recently. Focusing on the theme of the aesthetics of socio-political unrest and protest, this program showcases examples of experimental filmmaking that are fictionally constructed or experimentally reconstructed in formally explorative and reflexive ways demonstrations, rallies, marches, and sit-ins.
Screening Premiere: October 2, 2022 @ 1:15pm, Roxie Theater, San Francisco Streaming Online: October 2-8, 2022
Films in this Program
Introduction to Insurgent Articulations Ekin Pinar Program Curator
Pig Power Single Spark Film 1969, 8 minutes, b&w, sound, 16mm
Impressionistic peace riots and marches. More art than documentary. Brief remarks by participants. A flavor of the skirmishes of the times.
Anti-war demonstration, 1968, New York City march to Sheep’s Meadow, shows Vets against the war, Yippies, arrests, and flags of a half-forgotten revolution.
About a strike in which women are involved, but told in a very different way.
Digital file for online presentation courtesy of CFMDC. Rent from Canyon Cinema
Sisters! Barbara Hammer 1973, 8 minutes, color, sound, 16mm
A celebration and collage of lesbians, including footage of the Women’s International Day march in SF and joyous dancing from the last night of the second Lesbian Conference where Family of Woman played; as well as images of women doing all types of traditional “men’s” work.
Preserved for Barabara Hammer by BB Optics, Inc. and the Academy Film Archive with support from NYWIFT Women’s Film Preservation Fund. Digital file for online preservation courtesy of Electronic Arts intermix. Rent from Canyon Cinema
New Left Note Saul Levine 1968-82, 26 minutes, color, silent, 16mm, 18fps
As editor of New Left Notes, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Levine was at the center of multiple radical political movements. For this film, he employs a rapid fire editing style to create a frenetic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the antiwar movement, women’s liberation and the Black Panthers.
Restoration 16mm blows-ups of 8mm films by the National Film Preservation Foundation, Anthology Film Archives, and BB Optics. Rent from Canyon Cinema
Gay Power, 1971/2007/2012 Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett & the Women’s Li… 2012, 33 minutes, color, live sound, 16mm
“’Gay Power’ is a collaboration between Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett – a leading feminist author and activist since the 1960s – and the Women’s Liberation Cinema. The film in¬stallation utilizes footage shot by Millett and the Women’s Liberation Cinema docu¬menting the Second Annual Christopher Street Day Parade in 1971. The parade, which is still held annually, celebrates the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community [are these meant to be capitalized??], and campaigns for liberation. The images of the 1971 demonstration, which took place just two years after the Stonewall riots, show a crowd of 6,000 marching from the West Village to Central Park, through a far more openly homophobic New York City than the one we know today. Hayes and Millet have created a voiceover soundtrack to accompany — or speak with — the footage. As two voices from different generations, Hayes and Millet address the footage and the ‘movement’ from two distinct historical positions. Neither voice commands authority over the moving image, intimating both the coherence and incoherence of historical documentation, and illuminating the ways in which history is often rewritten accord¬ing to the present.(Tanya Leighton Gallery)
Digital preservation courtesy of the Outfest UCLA Legacy Project
One the nature of the bone Elena Pardo 2018, 2 minutes, color, sound, digital video
The concept of memory and image are mixed in this piece to reveal the continuity in the justifications that the Mexican Government issues to perpetuate violence. Mexico was ruled for 80 years by the same political party, during which power passed unchanged from one president to the next in what some people call a “soft dictature”. These were the years of bloody repressions. One of these terrible events was the massacre of students in 1968 at the Tlatelolco square.
*In Mexico we use the term “hueso” (bone) to refer to power. A politician fetches a bone, a slice of power.
Rent from Canyon Cinema
A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message Rhea Storr 2018, 12 minutes, color, sound, digital video
Celebration is protest at Leeds West Indian Carnival. A look at forms of authority, ‘A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message’ asks who performs and who spectates. Following Mama Dread’s, a troupe whose carnival theme is Caribbean immigration to the UK, we are asked to consider the visibility of black bodies, particularly in rural spaces. The film considers how easy it is to represent oneself culturally as a Mixed-race person in the UK and the ways in which Black bodies become visible, questioning ownership or appropriation of Black culture.
Rent from LUX
B.L.M. Toney W. Merritt 2020, 1 minute, b&w, sound, digital video
In support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Rent from Canyon Cinema
Investigation of a Flame Lynne Sachs 2001, 45 minutes, color, sound, digital video
On May 17, 1968 nine Vietnam War Protesters led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan, walked into a Catonsville Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with homemade napalm. Investigation of a Flame is an intimate, experimental documentary portrait of the Catonsville Nine, this disparate band of resisters who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience.
Recording of the full lecture “Under Our Skin – An Exquisite Copse” by Peter Cramer and Jack Waters
Photo by Mike Bailey-Gates
NYU’s Cinema Studies Department and Undergraduate Film & TV Department present the 12th Annual Experimental Lecture
Friday, Nov. 11, 2022, 7:00 PM Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor Free and open to the public in-person.
Since 2008, the Experimental Lecture Series has presented veteran filmmakers who immerse themselves in the world of alternative, experimental film. Our intention is to lay bare an artist’s challenges rather than their successes, to examine the gnawing, ecstatic reality of the work of making art. Our previous speakers for the Experimental Lecture Series have been Peggy Ahwesh, Craig Baldwin, Abigail Child, Nick Dorsky, Bradley Eros, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Ken Jacobs, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneemann, M.M. Serra.
– Programmed by Lynne Sachs
“Under Our Skin – An Exquisite Copse”
Peter Cramer and Jack Waters
“As a queer interracial couple living with AIDS, our background as filmmakers and dancers transitioned into a media driven interdisciplinary practice largely due to the conditions of living in a viral culture. Our interest in collaboration is a direct result of our desire to create a radically different environment for making art and cinema. The Covid pandemic has also accelerated our drive for an interactive relationship with our audience, both live and virtual. Receiver becomes producer. Lecture becomes lab becomes party! We use our gender fluidity with its transgressive inclination against racial and nationalistic containment as a catalyst for change – at the very least exposure to difference both pleasurable and uncomfortable.”
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Named “New York City’s Most Radical Queers” by I-D Magazine, multi-media artists Peter Cramer and Jack Waters are constantly in the process of creating performances, films, videos, installations and works of social practice. Musically minded as well, their queer-skinned kitchen band NYOBS performed “Memories That Smell Like Gasoline – Reading David Wojnarowicz” at the Whitney and “Spaghetti Wrestling” in Naples, Italy. Their 40-year collaboration includes dozens of projects including a live cinema/action of Wagner’s Ring Cycle for the legendary queer media festival MIX NYC and “Sunscreen Test Boulevard In The Sand” made for the art activist organization Visual AIDS. Waters performed the title role of Jason Holliday in the acclaimed 2015 indie film “Jason and Shirley” for which he is a co-writer. The film is in the collection of MoMa with a recent run on The Criterion Channel. His film “The Male Gayze” was included in the Whitney’s “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity In American Art”. On the cusp of the coronavirus pandemic, Cramer and Waters premiered “GENERATOR – Pestilence Part 1” in 2020 at the East Village’s renowned avant-garde theater La Mama. Waters and Cramer are co-founders and directors of Le Petit Versailles, a community art garden in the Lower East Side that screens free experimental, underground movies outside under the trees.
“The Televisual Woman’s Hour” Essay by Aaditya Aggarwal
In what is now widely regarded as the world’s first public demonstration of television, a human face could not be fully transmitted. In 1926, Scottish inventor John Logie Baird came close, visualizing a ventriloquist’s cartoonish dummy named “Stooky Bill” with the help of radio technology. This puppet-like caricature presented stark enough contrasts in color required, at the time, to transmit an image.
Over the years, the television began to capture figures, faces, and objects with sharper clarity. During the 1920s, film laboratories started to photograph stock models to better calibrate desired exposure and color balance of black-andwhite film reels. In the essay “The China Girl on the Margins of Film,” Genevieve Yue describes the use of the inappropriately named “China Girl” in Western countries as a figure used as a color tone “next to color swatches and patches of white, gray, and black.”1 She was almost always unknown, young, female, conventionally attractive, and contrary to the name’s racial connotations, white. Never screened on film or television, her likeness offered engineers a so-called normative “skin-tone” to mute and elevate contrasts for film, so that the white face could be better visualized on screen.
It wasn’t until the 1940s that a televised woman could be perceived in full color. Post-World War II, TV became widely popular across homes and businesses in North America and the United Kingdom. In 1940, Baird began working on creating a fully electronic color television system called Telechrome. This system revealed an image that veered between cyan and magenta tones, within which a reasonable range of colors could be visualized. By the mid 1960s, this television box set began to depict an even wider range of colors. A growing influx of pinks, purples, yellows, and greens in our home screens began to shape newer practices of looking.
Frequently sighted on analog televisions was a rainbow screen, formally known as SMPTE color bars. A testing pattern employed by video engineers, this arrangement compared and recalibrated a televised image to the National Television System Committee’s (NTSC) accepted standard. Often used in tandem with images of the China Girl, SMPTE bars were typically presented at 75% intensity, setting a television monitor or receiver to reproduce chrominance (color) and luminance (brightness) correctly. Its vertical bars—positioned in the screen from left to right, in white, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red, and blue—were often accompanied by a high-pitched tone.
Enabling more sophisticated, accurate, and textured imagery, this new color television began to usher a distinctly erotic encounter between the appliance and its viewer. From the early 1970s onwards, with the arrival of subscription-based cable networks like HBO, soft-core porn became a staple of private viewing. In her video work No No Nooky T.V. (1987), Barbara Hammer references this genre of late-night, often pay-perview programming, deconstructing its portrayals of female pleasure and physicality. Lensing an Amiga computer with her 16mm Bolex, the artist stages and contorts the alphabet with sensual and cryptic animation. A remix of patterns, shapes, and letters accompanies a sterile, computerized voiceover: “By appropriating me, the women will have a voice.”
Reappropriating pornographic language, No No Nooky T.V. reflects on the tactility of the television. One glimpses a TV in bondage, wrapped in black cloth and white twine. Later, it is clasped in multiple bras. Typed into a computer, one message reads: “Does she like me? WANT ME? DESIRE ME? KILL FOR ME? LUST FOR ME?” Another artfully scribbles “dirty pictures” in bejeweled cursive. There is a hilarity in Hammer’s harnessing of a screen in this material way, made absurd by technoincantations of text littered in different fonts.
Echoing Hammer’s sapphic television, mostly bereft of live bodies or physical performers, is a work like Removed (1999) by Naomi Uman. Using bleach and nail varnish on found European porn films from the 1970s, Uman selectively erases and manually empties out physical bodies of actresses. Whitened, unrecognizable female silhouettes clash against magenta-tinted bedroom surroundings, depicting the televised woman as an open, blank, animated space.
The artist’s removal of the corporeal feminine starkly contrasts against color television’s historic hypervisibility of women’s bodies. Typifying the latter is a work like Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut’s Waiting for Commercials (1966- 72), where a montage of found Japanese commercials from the 1960s is populated by gleeful stock performers, mostly composed of young women. Inhabiting the screen in between programs, female models in ad breaks market a range of products—from Pepsi-Cola to cosmetics to apparels. In Paik and Yalkut’s selection, the televised woman bursts as an object of curiosity for her viewers; albeit in heightened artifice, her joy of selling drink or dress is unparalleled.
Intrigued by representations of femininity and desire, Waiting for Commercials evidences the ubiquity of the televised corporeal feminine; one that Removed visually effaces or that No No Nooky T.V. only teases with mere glimpses—sing-song figures, euphoric, ecstatic, enthralled by touch, excited by commodity These works engage multiple figurations of the “televised woman,” a conception that continually structures and stages a viewer’s sense of tedium, anticipation, and disclosure.
—
When I approach the history of television, the appliance reveals itself as a predominantly women’s medium. From cosmetic commercials to exclusive interviews to narrative melodrama, women’s television—or television catered specifically to female viewers—is formally diverse, nudging and mirroring its spectators in intimate and discerning ways. Of its many subgenres, one that offers its viewers both entertaining and pedagogical conceptions of womanhood is the soap opera. Whether it is the exaggerated intensity in plot twists of Days of our Lives (1965-present) or the moral polarity of female characterization in Dynasty (1981-89), soap operas instill in us a measure of persistent expectation. In her essay “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Form,” Tania Modleski emphasizes a soap’s tendency to inevitably return towards anticipation. She notes: “Soap operas invest exquisite pleasure in the central condition of a woman’s life: waiting—whether for her phone to ring, for the baby to take its nap, or for the family to be reunited shortly after the day’s final soap opera has left its family still struggling against dissolution.”
2 In its most effective moments, a soap avoids narrative resolution to unrealistic ends. Dramatizing traditional ideas of motherhood and wifehood, soap protagonists and antagonists continually revert to domestic cliffhangers. In a scene from Days of Our Lives, for example, a slyly dainty and theatrically erudite Alexis Colby (played by a breathy, extravagant Joan Collins) makes eye contact with her ex-husband’s current wife. The camera zooms in on Alexis, the antagonist, as her eyebrow arches and head tilts in quiet disdain and alerted defense. Seesawing between seduction and virtuosity, soap characters surprise each other with turns of phrase. And while each episode oscillates between familial bliss and disorder, a soap never ends.
In certain video works that employ techniques of appropriation and repetition, one can invert and rethink the soap’s televised woman and the format’s grammar of female interiority. Opening Lynne Sachs’s black-and-white experimental diaristic short Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986), for instance, is a tight close-up of a woman putting on a fall coat. We are immediately transported into an urban home with a female occupant—an introductory premise that is outwardly ripe for soap opera. As Sachs’s camera steadily studies the creases and folds of her subject’s clothing and her strands of hair, a voiceover announces: “Scene 1: Woman steps off curb and crosses street.” Sachs repeats the same shot, while the voiceover seemingly jumps ahead in time: “Scene 2: Holding a bag of groceries, she opens the front door of Blue Plymouth.” In its third repetition, there is further narrative disjuncture. The same woman puts on her coat as the voiceover narrator reveals her limitations, casually puzzled: “Scene 3: I can’t remember.” The muted recitation of screenplay directions both embraces and negates the lack of resolution of a TV soap. We are left wondering about the events that may have transpired in the protagonist’s life in the empty gaps of voiceover between scenes. However, Sachs’s repeated, naturalistic mundanity of domestic chores defies the desirous expectation—or the incomprehensible plot turn—that one historically expects of women’s melodrama.
Similarly, Cauleen Smith’s faux-memoirist recollection of her alter-ego Kelly Gabron plays on narrative gaps, unreliable narration and spectatorial mistrust, all elements that fuel television. In her video, Chronicles of a Lying Spirit (by Kelly Gabron) (1992), a series of photographs are revealed by competing voiceovers. A montage of personal archives and found images sparsely captures a scattered history of Black American television, film, and media.
Stripped of any moving bodies or live action, Smith’s experimental biography rejects the commandments of a televisual motion picture. In a static slideshow of film reels, her work repeats its tellings. She employs two voiceovers: in the first narration, a sterile, automated male voice booms over Kelly’s inaudible narration; the second time, Kelly’s voice is clearer, more comprehensible, eclipsing the man’s. Simultaneously, both voiceovers narrate conflicting accounts of Kelly’s life as a Black woman artist navigating a predominantly white male art world. While the man’s narration flattens her narrative into racist tropes of Black deprivation, Kelly’s account is affective, specific, and anecdotal. Concluding the work, the latter’s narration corrects the errors of the former. Deeply invested in an aesthetics of self-portraiture or autofiction, the works by Sachs and Smith read as artistic variations on or intentional detours from the soap format. Historically, women’s television is also informed by slice-of-life profiles that capture the quotidian feminine in documentary style—the woman-led talk show is, in this sense, an uncanny cousin to the oft-ludicrously fictional soap opera. This subgenre of programming arguably originated from scripted sketchbased programs like the Lucille Ball-led I Love Lucy (1951-57) as well as daytime reality-based shows like The Loretta Young Show (1953-61) and The Betty White Show (1952-54). From BBC’s Woman’s Hour (1946-present) to the French program Dim Dam Dom (1965-73), dramatized stories of real-life female figures often blended with interview-based programs. A female presenter, in turn, became a hyper-televised woman. Her success relied on her performance as a triple-threat in roles of cultural commentator, comedian, and confidante. In solo interviews, journalists like Barbara Walters adroitly shifted or affirmed national narratives, oftentimes muddying their newsworthy interviewees’ vulnerable reputations.
Sandra Davis’s That Woman (2018) wryly replays and reenacts one such cultural moment on television. Airing on March 3, 1999, the now-infamous interview between Barbara Walters and Monica Lewinsky ruled the prime-time slot—a block of broadcast programming taking place during the middle of the evening—across television screens. Satirizing a mythos of televised womanhood, Davis’s work begins as the text “20/20 WEDNESDAY” flashes on ABC’s news network from the original interview. In this archival footage, an iridescent background shimmers while an energetic piano interlude plays. In Davis’s reenactment, conversely, a Lewinsky lookalike impersonates the original’s expressions and responses. She is seated before George Kuchar, who plays Walters in a blonde wig with laughable earnestness. One anecdote from fake-Lewinsky follows another, as the low-budget, camp reenactment is interrupted by selective outtakes from the original conversation. A stern Walters interrogates, while Lewinsky nervously gestures. At one point, there is a close-up of fake Lewinsky’s black leather strapped stiletto boots.
Davis’s reappraisal of this episode captures the coercive candor and pronounced intensity of appointment television, where primetime interviews oddly invoke the narrative melodrama of soap opera. For instance, much like the soap heroine, a talk show’s subject is also activated by the zoom-in, a technique frequently employed in sensationalist news telecasts and scandalous journalistic exposes.
Writing on the invention of the close-up in silent film, Béla Balázs describes its “intimate emotional significance” and “lyrical charm” in Theory of the Film, recalling “audience panic” at the first sight of a close-up of a smiling face in a movie theater.3 The format of a televisual soap furthers Balázs’s argument of a close-up’s ability to reveal “unconscious expressions,” in discomfitingly proximate confines, scanning a poreless, powdered face. In moving close-up, the televised woman spans the expanse of a screen, intimating what Rawiya Kameir describes as the “pointed drama” of a zoom-in in her 2016 review of Solange’s A Seat at the Table. “Moments later,” she writes, “the world beyond her falls away…”4
A zoomed-in figure becomes as solitary as a television box set, her presence both disarmingly novel and routinely domestic. But what are the limits of her close-up? Does the televised woman ever exit our saturated screens? Emily Chao’s hermetic close-up in her black-and-white work No Land (2019) comes to mind. Over the course of two minutes, she zooms into a square-shaped, TV-like black sheet pinned on a tree trunk, surrounded by wild, dense forestry. Invoking the early invention of analog screens, one is unable to visualize any corporeal form or countenance in its frame; the transmitter of images instead becomes the image itself, bearing a haptic imprint of its televisual women—invisibilized stock model, adorned brand ambassador, exalted porn star, scheming soap vamp, jovial female presenter, overexposed subject—always visible in the interiors of your living room.
Edited by Girish Shambu
______________
1 Genevieve Yue, “The China Girl on the Margins of Film,” October 153 (2015): 96–116.
2 Tania Modleski, “The Search for Tomorrow in Today’s Soap Operas: Notes on a Feminine Narrative Form,” Film Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1979): 12–21.
3 Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, trans. Edith Bone (Dover Publications, 1970). 4 Rawiya Kameir, “Solange, In Focus,” The Fader, Oct. 6, 2016, https://www.thefader. com/2016/10/06/solange-a-seat-at-the-table-essay.
4 Rawiya Kameir, “Solange, In Focus,” The Fader, Oct. 6, 2016, https://www.thefader. com/2016/10/06/solange-a-seat-at-the-table-essay.
How to protest 1. Create a clear message 2. Make noise 3. Occupy a significant space 4. Engender fear through the sudden movement of a large mass of people, for example a march
How to celebrate carnival 1. Create a costume with a clear identity or message (…) 2. Make noise 3. Occupy a space significant to the community 4. Create a spectacle through the movement of a large mass of people, for example a parade. 5. Protest joyfully. —Rhea Storr, A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message, 2018
The opening voice-over of A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message (Rhea Storr, 2018) outlines the dissenting, performative, affective, and public nature of protest events. While Rhea Storr poses a clear message as the prerequisite of protesting, the form and organization of the social event articulates the un-straightforward substance of protest. The film begins with this claim and challenges it through its course in a manner that mirrors protest events’ process of expression. Insurgent Articulations examines this parallel between protest as a cinematic subject matter and protest as determining the form and organization of film.
Focusing on the aesthetics of socio-political protest, the program showcases experimental films that reconstruct demonstrations, rallies, marches, and sit-ins in formally reflexive ways. In doing so, Insurgent Articulations explores cinematic reconstruction, reenactment, and the fictional fabrication of protest. These methods emphasize the productive tensions between on-site recording, retrospective consideration, and creative invention of political events. At the same time, these cinematic articulations of insurgent acts resist injustice, exclusion, and repression in ways that resonate with the challenges of protesters’ congregating bodies as they claim the right to express themselves in public space.
One of the many “turns” that have defined moving image culture in the last 25 years or so is documentary. Defined by a sustained and intense attention to the actual and fabricated Sisters!, Barbara Hammer archival, historical, and/or ethnographic documents, traces, and fragments of real and fictional events, beings, and objects, this tendency questions the authoritative, factual tone of conventional forms of documentary. Common strategies include re-enactments and re-stagings, essayistic modes, blurring of the factual and fictional, use of non-indexical media (especially animation), as well as aesthetic manipulation of the indexical documentation of the matters of the “real” world. As Hal Foster has noted, this documentary turn shifts documentary practice from deconstruction to reconstruction, engaging with the format as a critical and interpretative mode instead of a descriptive one. 1 Rather than claiming a direct mediation of the outside world, then, this mode approximates affective, corporeal, and situated/partial truths.
The documentary turn is unmistakably a reaction to the rise of digital media and the attendant proclamations of the “death of the indexical.” Yet, streaks of these self-reflexive documentary modes have existed in experimental film practices from the 1960s onwards. A strong interest in the social, political, and cultural aspects of our lifeworlds has been a significant part and parcel of experimental filmmaking practices. Yet, standard histories of experimental cinema outline a canon defined by subjective formal experimentations of the 60s that shifted in the 70s to a structuralist mode concerned with cinematic form. Because of this past focus on formal experimentation, the sociohistorical, cultural, and representational politics, ethics, and concerns of much experimental work remained unnoticed until more recently.
Insurgent Articulations puts contemporary work in dialogue with the histories of experimental documentary—highlighting correspondences of subject matter, representational strategies, and organizational modes. This retrospective assessment challenges the periodizing accounts of experimental film history by underlining the experimental film production’s persistent interest in the social and political events of the world. At the same time, the program invites viewers to reconsider the false binary between aesthetic experimentation and a political commitment to the actual world.
Experimental films that take protest as their subject provide an especially fecund ground for the examination of the tightly woven interchange between formal experimentation and political subject matter. In her discussion of protest, Hito Steyerl emphasizes two interrelated layers of expression: The first layer involves what is being protested and the discovery of an appropriate and effective verbal and visual language for the substance of protest. The second concerns how the assembly of people organizes itself for the purpose of protest and communicates this internal organization to the public. 2 The films in this program articulate both levels of articulation. They visualize assemblies of resistance, while also reflecting formal, structural, and organizational concerns that parallel the aesthetics of protest. Reflexively considering issues of witnessing, performance, assemblage, and the formation of counterpublics both in terms of aesthetic form and political content, the films highlight the fluid and complex relations between art and politics, and fact and fiction.
As its Latin root protestare suggests, acts of protest are always a matter of public witnessing that concerns both the people assembling to oppose, resist, and struggle as well as those who behold, take notice of, attend to, and document these events. Aesthetic manipulation and/or reconstruction of the protest events in these films reflexively engages with the political implications of the ethnographic gaze of the camera and the filmmaker’s act of witnessing. For instance, Demonstration ‘68’s (Dominic Angerame, 1968-74) fitful starts and stops of the footage along with the, at times, hazy quality of the imagery owing to the use of an 8mm camera, gives a reflexive quality to this film documentation of a 1968 anti-war march towards Central Park’s Sheep’s Meadow. This subtle formal attention to the role of the filmmaker as mediator within the activist space of the protest vis-à-vis the act of witnessing becomes a more explicit structuring element in Gay Power, 1971/2007/2012 (Sharon Hayes, Kate Millett, and The Women’s Liberation Cinema, 2012). The film brings together raw footage shot by Women’s Liberation Cinema (including Kate Millett, Susan Kleckner, and Lenore Bode among others) at the 1971 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade and Gay-In, Kate Millett’s commentary on the footage thirty years after the event, Solidarity, Joyce Wieland and Sharon Hayes’s narration of her own reactions to this historical footage. The resulting complex, multilayered text puts various modes of witnessing in conversation with one another: through the lens of the camera (Women’s Liberation Cinema), as a retrospective act (Millett), and as a documentary spectator and reassembler (Hayes).
The presentational aspects of protest events directed at onlookers clearly produce a performative dimension. Replay, retrospection, and reenactment involved in the multilayered structuring of Gay Power simultaneously indexes these performative aspects of protest events. In its analogy between a carnival and a protest parade, A Protest, A Celebration, A Mixed Message also highlights this performative dimension at the Leeds West Indian carnival in Yorkshire, UK. The film emphasizes the racial dimension of the performance in its arrangement of white people as spectators and Black people as performers who are, at the same time, consciously defiant of the white gaze. Yet, a sudden shift to the calm countryside where Storr walks alone in her parade costume calls attention to a different spatial context that lacks an audience for a protesting/ performing rural, mixed-race body. In a similar vein, the editing tactics of Sisters! (Barbara Hammer, 1973) brings together footage from First Women’s March (Height Ashbury, San Francisco, 1973), a concert at the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference (UCLA, 1973), and several women performing putatively male labor in conscious address of the camera. In Investigation of a Flame (Lynne Sachs, 2001), the editing similarly alternates between different performative events: the archival footage of the Catonsville Nine burning draft records, military parades featuring children dressed up as soldiers, and Catonsville home movies in which addressing and playacting for the camera reign.
A protest event becomes a performative one to the extent that it is a bodily assembly of people enacting solidarity and resistance for others to take notice. Underscoring the distinction between the freedom of assembly and freedom of expression, Judith Butler describes how the corporeal, performative gathering of a group of people forms an extra layer of meaning beyond the verbal expression of the protest. 3 This distinction between verbal expression and bodily performance is exactly what configures the image-sound relations in Solidarity (Joyce Wieland, 1973). Focusing on a strike at the Dare Cookie Factory in Kitchener, Ontario, the film edits together the feet, shoes, and legs of marching and picketing workers with the organizer’s speech on the soundtrack. Despite the unified message on the level of verbal expression, the defamiliarization achieved by the unusual attention to the feet emphasizes the plurality in solidarity. Such a parallel between cinematic editing and the structuring of protest is the organizational principle of New Left Note (Saul Levine, 1968-82), which not only assembles bodies but also assembles events with different temporal registers. New Left Note articulates this intertextuality through its fast-cut editing of scenes from various protests by the Black Panthers and feminist and anti-war movements among others. On the nature of the bone (Elena Pardo, 2018) likewise establishes a link between the massacre of students in 1968 at the Tlatelolco Plaza and the current political atmosphere in Mexico. Through its juxtaposition of past and contemporary found footage, photographs, and drawings, the film offers an animated reenactment of history.
While protest events usually involve a bodily assembly, not everyone has physical access to material spaces of protest. As a compensation, people have used cellphone cameras and the internet to not only record and circulate images more widely than ever before, but also to create alternative modes of protest across online platforms. Films in this program alert us to another history of mediating, constructing, and reconstructing protest. The brief yet powerful B.L.M. (Toney W. Merritt, 2020) focuses on the occupation of the putatively public sphere by police while simultaneously constructing a new platform of resistance. Pig Power (Single Spark Film, 1969) brings together footage and testimony from several contemporary protests in a style that emulates and subverts the newsreel format (conventionally intended for a mass audience) to create counterimages addressed to a counterpublic.
The films in Insurgent Articulations establish spatial and temporal connections across multiple sites of protest. Doing so, these films also hint at the community-forming capabilities of the circulation and exhibition practices of experimental cinema in the form of co-ops and cine clubs (for instance, Canyon Cinema and The Film-Makers’ Cooperative in the US, Nihon University New Film Study Club in Japan, and Genç Sinema in Turkey, to name only a few). In their thematic, organizational, and formal interest in the significant social and political events that are shaped by and, in turn, constitute our shared lifeworlds, the works in this program go against the theoretical and historiographic traditions that have for so long associated avant-garde film practices with individualistic forms of expression. They suggest new ways of engaging with histories of experimental cinema that highlight resonances, continuities, and entanglements that challenge established periodizations and geographic boundaries. Across this rich tapestry of experimental representations of protest, we find another mode of resistance—one that defies easy historical categorization.
Edited by Tess Takahashi
_____________
1 Hal Foster, “Real Fictions,” in What Comes after Farce? Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 154.
2 Hito Steyerl, “The Articulation of Protest,” in The Wretched of the Screen, eds. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 78.
3 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2015), 8.
Lynne Sachs’ film output is prolific and varied, encompassing documentaries, essay films, non-narrative experiments, and installations. Like many feminist filmmakers, a theme running through her work is the insistence that the personal is important. Whether one’s own body, private moments in a doctor’s office, or one’s sense of family and home, our personal lives are saturated with socio-political meaning. Many meanings are imposed upon us by culture (such as how we experience gender in the world); some meanings we create ourselves (what we choose to value in the face of our acculturation); and some meanings are a rebellion, an attempt to press against the harmful constrictions within culture (reformulating a fluid experience of gender).
Sachs has explored this theme of the personal in different ways across her career, sometimes reflecting inward and sometimes turning the gaze of her camera outward. In The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991) and A Biography of Lilith (1997), Sachs turns her attention to the complicated relationship cis women have with the maternal.
The House of Science begins with an anecdote of a woman attempting to prevent pregnancy. The narrator tells us about visiting a male gynecologist to request a birth control device. Onscreen we see a mid-century image of a man in a lab coat putting a woman in a cage, and the voiceover tells us about asking this male authority figure for permission to have sex, to have sex while still controlling whether to have a child. He grants her this permission, giving her a diaphragm, but doesn’t tell her how to use it, deflating her power over her own body.
Thirty-one years later, this anecdote should feel like a relic of a previous era when male doctors adjudicated under what circumstances women were allowed to control when they have children. However, the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe and Indiana’s own abortion ban that went into effect this past week expose the fragility of all rights and the enduring power of patriarchal authority over our bodies. The salience of The House of Science persists.
A Biography of Lilith uses the mythological Judaic figure of the first woman as synecdoche for misogynistic ideas that continue to plague Western culture. At the same time, the film offers a counternarrative, celebrating birth and the enjoyment one can experience by the feeling of their own body. It’s a contradiction of freedom and constriction.
In her contribution to Essays on the Essay Film (2017), Sachs describes Lilith as “exploring the ruptures that both women and men must confront when transitioning from being autonomous individuals to being parents with responsibilities.”
The film contains footage from the birth of her second daughter. It’s not a birth film, per se, but Lilith exists in conversation with the home birth films of Stan Brakhage and Gunvor Nelson. In a 2007 Camera Obscura article, Sachs reflects on the impact Brakhage’s Window Water Baby Moving (1959) has had on her film practice. In some ways, her interests mirror Brakhage: “Shooting my own material and engaging with the detritus of popular culture in found footage, I, too, am exploring the intimate, often problematic relationship that exists between the camera and the body.”
However, the gaze of the person experiencing childbirth and pregnancy is not the same as the partner watching from a distance removed. The embodiment that Sachs has experienced and her feminist values cause her to reflect, “…I watch this film with great ambivalence, wondering how Jane might have felt there, sprawled out before her husband’s camera, and later across thousands of movie screens. Is she painfully vulnerable, or is she the essence of strength and courage?”
Perhaps both. Lynne Sachs’ films remind us that we move through life carrying this contradiction — bodies vulnerable, but strong.
Laura Ivins loves stop motion, home movies, imperfect films, nature hikes, and Stephen Crane’s poetry. She has a PhD from Indiana University and an MFA from Boston University. In addition to watching and writing about movies, sometimes she also makes them.
“Welcome to ‘Between Sight and Touch: Selected Shorts by Barbara Hammer’
Which is Part of EFlux Screening Room’s
Revisiting Feminist Moving-Image Art, a monthly series of screenings aimed at revisiting the origins, contexts, developments, and impact of feminist video art and experimental cinema around the world from the 1960s through the present.
It’s really an honor for me to have the chance to introduce this exciting and thought provoking selection of films by artist and dear friend Barbara Hammer.
Tonight you’ll be watching.
“Psychosynthesis”, “Women I Love”, “Sync Touch”, “No No Nooky T.V.”, “Save Sex”, and “Lesbian Whale”, accompanied by a screening of “A Month of Single Frames”
Barbara Hammer and I met in 1987 in San Francisco, a mecca for alternative, underground, experimental filmmaking. She taught me the fine, solitary craft of optical printing during a weekend workshop, thus beginning a friendship that eventually followed us across the country to New York City.
Tonight you will see her 1975 “Psychosynthesis” and her 1981 “Sync Touch” both of which will give you a sense of her masterful ability to use this extremely technical analog machine which was absolutely essential to her practice as a filmmaker who wanted to both celebrate and deconstruct – a word of the day – the culture she saw swirling around her. In “Psychosynthesis”, Barbara goes completely auto-biographical, but in oh so psychodelic way, using her body and her archive of family photos to investigate who she was and who she wanted to be. You will see her unbelievably skillful use of mattes and superimpositions here. Pre computers, this kind of image manipulation took incredible skill! Made around the same time…yes Barbara was extremely prolific, her film “Women I Love” is an openly Lesbian, openly compassionate embrace of the women in her life she holds dear. How extraordinarily brave Barbara was in the mid 1970s!
“Sync Touch”, a favorite of mine for a long time, is an exhilarating celebration of the haptic – skin to skin – in all its manifestations and a precise, ingenious investigation of feminist theory – which Barbara was clearly exploring in profound ways at the time.
Barbara first decided to call herself a moving image artist at a time when the separation between the practice of making films and the practice of making video were very, very different. More than a painter choosing oil over acrylic, a moving image artist who sided with celluloid was forced to decide how she wanted to embrace or reject a long legacy of mostly male produced media that were circulating on screens or on tv. For the most part, Barbara opted for the film side of things, but in 1987 her 12min “No Nooky TV” arrived in the scene. I dare say, the videomaking would never be the same again. This brazen, text based send up of all things “broadcast” took the body language of experimental film coming out of the 60s and 70s and transformed into a TV-minded send up of advertising, news, and mainstream graphic design – transposing the culturally tame words of the media mainstream with words like Boob, Cunt, Do It. Literal becomes Cliteral and away we go. Plus Barbara has figured out how to make and disseminate all of the wildest 1980s character-generator signage to make her feminist discourse look like something you might have seen lit up in Times Square. In her 1993 “Save Sex”, we see Barbara’s AIDS activism in full force. This Hammer-esque public service announcement type of piece that celebrates SAFE SEX while while also advocating for “saving” sex at the same time.
You will see Barbara’s face and body in most of the films curator Lukas Brasiskis is presenting tonight. Barbara always had an uncanny ability to understand herself from the inside out and from the outside in. Her films were visceral and personal. In both subtle and overt way, they were also intentionally political calling attention to the sexual inequities she witnessed everywhere.
Now I will tell you a bit about “A Month of Single Frames”, the film I made with and for Barbara.
Some background. Between 2015 to 2018, Barbara agreed to be part of the making of my short, experimental documentary Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (2018) a three-part film that includes Carolee Schneemann and Gunvor Nelson. All three were renowned artists and beloved friends, just a generation older than I, who had embraced the moving image throughout their lives. I shot this film with Barbara near her home and studio in the West Village.
In 2018, Barbara asked me to come to her home to discuss something she needed to say in person. I immediately faced a complicated set of emotions. This was around the time she gave the talk “The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety)” at the Whitney Museum. I knew that this tête-à-tête would involve some kind of good-bye, but I had no idea that she had decided to share a part of her personal archive, and thus a part of her being on this earth, with me. Filmmaking, in the tradition that Barbara and I have espoused for most of our lives as experimental makers, involves a deeply focused solitary period of introspection. A complementary aspect of our practice, however, calls for playful, engaged exchanges with all of the people in the film — both in front and behind the camera. Fundamental to Barbara’s sense of herself as an artist was her commitment to deep and lasting intellectual engagement with her fellow artists in the field, particularly other women who were also trying to find an aesthetic language that could speak about the issues that meant so much to us. By asking me to work with her, alongside her but not “for” her, Barbara, a feminist filmmaker, was actually creating an entirely new vision of the artist’s legacy.
While writing the text for my own film, the words I placed on the screen came to me in a dream. By the time I finished my film, Barbara had died. I quickly realized that this kind of oneiric encounter could become a posthumous continuation of the dialogue I had started with Barbara.
I hope you enjoy this program, a part of a magnificent series of films and videos made by women over the years. If you are interested in reading more about my work with Barbara, you will find an essay I wrote in Camera Obscura: a journal on Feminism, Culture, and Media published last year.
I also hope that you will join me for EFlux’s presentation of my work on Oct. 27, 2022 when I will be able to join you in conversation here in Brooklyn.
Between Sight and Touch: Selected Shorts by Barbara Hammer With a video introduction and special screening by Lynne Sachs
Admission
starts at $5
Date September 22, 2022, 7pm
172
Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA
A
lesbian/feminist aesthetic proposing the connection between touch and sight to
be the basis for a “new cinema.”
—Barbara Hammer
Join
us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, September 22 at 7pm for Between
Sight and Touch, a screening of selected works by Barbara
Hammer, featuring Psychosynthesis, Women I Love, Sync
Touch, No No Nooky T.V., Save Sex, and Lesbian
Whale, accompanied by a screening of A Month of Single Frames by
experimental documentary filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs, who will
also be introducing the evening via video.
Barbara
Hammer (1939-2019), a pioneer of queer experimental filmmaking in the US,
devoted most of her five-decade artistic career to the deconstruction of
normative understandings of gender and sexuality. She was attempting to build a
new cinema via material explorations of onscreen representations of the female
body and analysis of the functioning of the film medium itself. This program
features Hammer’s lesser-known short films and video works in which the artist
questions the strict boundaries between the representation of gender and
sexuality and the exploration of one’s body—between sight and touch.
Between
Sight and Touch is part of Revisiting Feminist Moving-Image Art, a
monthly series of screenings at e-flux Screening Room aimed at revisiting the
origins, contexts, developments, and impact of feminist video art and
experimental cinema around the world from the 1960s through the present.
Films
Barbara
Hammer, Psychosynthesis, 1975, 6 minutes
“The sub-personalities of me, as baby, athlete, witch, and artist are
synthesized in this film of superimpositions, intensities, and color layers
coming together through the powers of film.” (Barbara Hammer)
Barbara
Hammer, Women I Love, 1976, 23 minutes
A series of cameo portraits of the filmmaker’s friends and lovers intercut with
a playful celebration of fruits and vegetables in nature. Culminating footage
evokes a tantric painting of sexuality sustained.
Barbara
Hammer, Sync Touch, 1981, 10 minutes
“…The film explores the tactile child nature within the adult woman
filmmaker, the connection between sexuality and filmmaking, and the scientific
analysis of the sense of touch.” (Barbara Hammer)
Barbara
Hammer, No No Nooky T.V., 1987, 12 minutes
Using a 16mm Bolex and Amiga computer, Hammer creates a witty and stunning film
about how women view their sexuality versus the way male images of women and
sex are perceived. The impact of technology on sexuality, emotion, and the
sensual self is explored through computer language juxtaposed with the everyday
colloquial language of sex.
Barbara
Hammer, Save Sex, 1993, 1 minutes
A minute-long, partly animated color video that is a humorous plea for good
sex, safely prophylactic though it may be.
Barbara
Hammer, Lesbian Whale, 2015, 6 minutes
A video animation of Hammer’s early notebook drawings set to a soundtrack of
commentary by the artist’s friends and peers.
Lynne
Sachs, A Month of Single Frames, 2019, 14 minutes
In 1998, lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer took part in a one-month
residency at a Cape Cod dune shack without running water or electricity, where
she shot film, recorded sound, and kept a journal. In 2018 she gave all of this
material to Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with it.
Accessibility –Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue. –For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space. –e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.
Barbara Hammer was born in 1939
in Hollywood, California. She lived and worked in New York until her death in
2019. With a career spanning fifty years, Barbara Hammer is recognized as a
pioneer of queer cinema. Working primarily in film and video, Hammer created a
groundbreaking body of experimental work that illuminates lesbian histories,
lives, and representations. Hammer has stated: “My work makes these invisible
bodies and histories visible. As a lesbian artist, I found little existing
representation, so I put lesbian life on this blank screen, leaving a cultural
record for future generations.”
