Bruce Conner died in the summer of 2008. For those who may not know, he was a Beat generation artist, the first filmmaker to see the value in “found footage”, and an extraordinary visionary. His collages and films are in museums and archives all over the world. Two different people in Buenos Aires, where I was living last summer, mentioned his death to me without even knowing that I knew him. Bruce was a very important person in my life and psyche.
Anthropologists, filmmakers, linguists, musicians, painters, poets, writers — all share a fascination with the 26 letters of the alphabet. An abecedarium is traditionally an educational book for children containing words beginning with each letter, but for centuries it has also been a resource for creative work by artists in almost every media. This history of the abecedarium will look at a selection of artists whose intentions are both to celebrate and disrupt this most basic and widespread system of verbal communication.
NYU’s Cinema Studies Department and Undergraduate Film & TV Department present the 1st Annual Experimental Lecture.
Thinking about Richard Fung’s “Sea in the Blood” By Lynne Sachs Two men swimming, the flow of skin against the skin, and there below the surface of the water is a camera. Richard Fung’s lens is an activated observation machine, the eye gazing at the self. His memory becomes an animal in the pool – […]
Visit to New Orleans Grey afternoon everything carved away gaunt woman in once-tight jeans zig-zags patterns, boulevard desolate. Archeological trash pile not for garbage collector. Everything carved away. Dogs no longer here. Old kitten dangling thread, teasing between splinters from a screen door stretching blissful open and shut by the arm of the wind. Woman […]
STATES OF UNBELONGING a film by LYNNE SACHS in collaboration with NIR ZATS 63 minutes Hebrew spoken by children “When I am big and someone dies, I am going to go to the funeral.” “You can put a doll on the grave, just like in the story.’ Dear Lynne, I patiently wait for the sand […]
From California to Florida to New York to Maryland to Tennessee, I’ve been making and teaching avant-garde film for 20 years. In my experience, there is only one film, of the many works to which I expose my college students, that consistently creates a passionate, call it vitriolic, reaction: Stan Brakhage’s “Window, Water, Baby, Moving”(1959, 12 min.).
A Grapevine to the Sky: A Meditation on Life in Brooklyn by Lynne Sachs Jack must have started his infamous climb to the sky from a backyard in Brooklyn. While not the eponymous beanstalk with which most of us are familiar, the seventy-five foot high Concord grape vine in my backyard reaches so daringly up […]
MAKING AND BEING “DRAWN & QUARTERED” BY LYNNE SACHS My great Uncle Charlie was a prominent Memphis businessman who took a giddy pleasure in shooting some of the most elegant, compassionate photographs I’ve ever seen. I remember his close-up portrait taken in the late 1950’s of a wizened black man looking into the lens. I […]
Seven on Ice by Lynne Sachs 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 […]