“The wonderful thing about NYC is that you can experience so many different kinds of environments. This uncharacteristically sunny November afternoon I catch up with Lynne Sachs, who has had work screened at the last two VideoFest. I compliment her on her beautiful website and we talk about the use of text and media and history in her work.” Raquel Chapa, Ass. Dir. Dallas Video Festival
Why have certain kinds of documentary and non-narrative films emerged as the most interesting, exciting, and provocative movies made in the last twenty years?
The eye as a mediator is only able to focus on one thing at a time, with everything around that point of focus being lost to obscurity; this forces a piecemeal understanding of one’s environment. The filmic eye in The Last Happy Day, too, is an obscuring and complicating force, which helps to form the film’s language. Sachs manipulates her camera very deliberately, employing the difference between sharp-focus and soft-focus.
In an interview with Otherzine experimental fil maker, Lynne Sachs talks about realizing “that there was a pattern emerging in my work, a rhythm between films that were open to changes brought by the times and films that followed a very clearly defined vision or concept. ” Later in the interview she relates what she is trying to do in her films to the avant garde poet, Gertrude Stein’s desire to “create provocative ruptures between the sign and the signifier, between the way we are taught to speak (to communicate) and the way we ultimately choose to express ourselves (art).”
Too often these days open discussions among American Jews about Israel, its politics, culture, and government are prevented, often from fear that differences may split apart a community, an institution, or friendships. This open conversation is a way to open up discussion, not shut it down.
A program of films by women who look at the world through the lens of motherhood
Enchanted Brooklyn takes a look at the evolution of the fairytale film, with classic stories re-invented by contemporary Brooklyn filmmakers.
En 1991, realiza una conexión entre sus lecturas teóricas y su práctica artística. Tanto los revolucionarios textos de pensadoras feministas francesas del siglo pasado como un nuevo estilo narrativo en la propia escritura de Sachs despiertan en ella la necesidad de bucear en un nuevo nivel de conciencia de su ser y como conclusión desarrolla un lenguaje cinematográfico muy personal que combina una aguda critica, collages, found footage, metáforas y performances que lleva el título de “House of science: a museum of false facts”.
Sachs’ films are searching, inquisitive projects — quests of discovery (and self-discovery) that yield facts and insights that become even more meaningful when they are shared with audiences as art.
In my twenty year relationship as audience to Lynne Sachs’ filmworks, I have always admired her amazing ability to connect the very personal, physical relationship of ‘selfhood’ to film and film history and to collage a variety of complex themes into one complete film, often with challenging ambiguity and open endedness.
