Category Archives: synopsis

Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam

Note: To watch the full film, click here or scroll to the bottom of this page.

by Lynne Sachs in Collaboration with Dana Sachs
33 min.

“A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the
whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.”

In 1994, two American sisters – a filmmaker and a writer — travel from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Together, they attempt to make a candid cinema portrait of the country they witness. Their conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary revels in the sounds, proverbs, and images of Vietnamese daily life. Both a culture clash and an historic inquiry, their film comes together with the warmth of a quilt, weaving together stories of people the sisters met with their own childhood memories of the war on TV.

When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana Sachs’ travel diary of their trip to Vietnam is a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt. “Which Way Is East” starts as a road trip and flowers into a political discourse. It combines Vietnamese parables, history and memories of the people the sisters met, as well as their own childhood memories of the war on TV. To Americans for whom “Vietnam” ended in 1975, “Which Way Is East” is a reminder that Vietnam is a country, not a war. The film has a combination of qualities: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history’s scope, and a critical ability to discern what’s missing from the textbooks and TV news.
from The Independent Film and Video Monthly, Susan Gerhard

“Captures the Vietnam experience with comprehension and compassion, squeezing a vast and incredible country into an intriguing film.”
Portland Tonic Magazine

“The sound track is layered with the cacophony of bustling city streets, the chirps of cicadas and gentle rustles of trees in the countryside, and the visuals, devoid of travelogue clichés, are a collage of pictorial snippets taken from unusual vantage points…. What comes through is such a strong sense of the place you can almost smell it.”
The Chicago Reader

“It’s really a magnificent film about translation, with the play of light and shadow mirroring the movement between language, cultures, and moments in time. It brought back memories of my own years in east Asia, too. The light was exactly the same!”
Sam Diiorio

“Before Sachs experienced her epiphany, she made Which Way is East (1994), an arresting, painterly exploration of Vietnam. As one of the first American filmmakers granted permission to shoot in Vietnam, Sachs had the weight of responsibility and expectation on her shoulders. Despite this, the film has a sense of lightness and freedom, especially in its aesthetic and aural approach: it begins with a stilted photographic trajectory, literally rendering the moving image as a series of broad brush strokes, while the almost endlessness of the cicadas’ chirrup pitch moves the image along, though not necessarily forward. It is a sensory introduction, rather than a history lesson, and here Sachs’ work is at its most successful, inviting us, as viewers and listeners to be in this depiction of Vietnam, not to look at or hear a presentation of it. Eventually, Sachs and her camera will arrive somewhere static, she will then switch to a show and tell mode, which is informative but less awesome. She flits between the two with relative ease for the remainder of the film, letting her observations and those of her sister, Dana, interpolate the experience. It is as much about making her own memories as it is the chasing of those left behind by others. Her sister’s remarks are among the most revelatory, “I hate the camera,” she muses, “The world feels too wide for the lens and if I try to frame it, I only cut it up.” Holding a camera and being a filmmaker are not one and the same, “Lynne sees it through the eyes of its lens,” she continues, “It’s as if she understands Vietnam better when she looks at it through the lens of her camera.” For Sachs, the practice has always been the pursuit. She instinctively knew, even before it occurred to her laterally, to share the filmmaking in order to make it more accessible, more honest and more like the world it hopes to offer. It may have taken her another almost twenty years to fully understand and break with the idea of documentary as an act or approach, but there is a silver lining of melancholia inside Which Way is East? It makes me wonder if 1) she already knew and 2) if the practice, though expressive and creative as an outlet is also overwhelming, as there is some sadness here.”
Ubiquarian: “The Process is the Practice: Prolific and poetic, experimental and documentary filmmaker, Lynne Sachs, lights up this year’s online edition of Sheffield Doc” by Tara Judah, June 21, 2020
http://ubiquarian.net/2020/06/the-process-is-the-practice/

Awards:
Atlanta Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize; New York Film Expo, Best Documentary; Black Maria Film Fest, Director’s Citation; Big Muddy Film Festival, Honorable Mention.

Screenings:
Sundance Film Festival; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Cinematheque; “Arsenal” Film Festival, Riga, Latvia; Pacific Film Archive; Mill Valley Film Festival; San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival; Whitney Museum of American Art; Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020; Criterion Channel Artist Focus; Museum of the Moving Image; Metrograph Theater, NYC 2021.

Criterion Channel streaming premiere with 7 other films, Oct. 2021.

Library Collections:
Amherst College; Arizona State University; University of California, Berkeley and Irvine; Duke University; Hong Kong University of Science; New York University; New York Public Library; Penn State; Rutgers University; University of Iowa; Minneapolis Public Library; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; University of Virginia; Northwestern; Seattle Public Library

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

Interview in the Independent Film and Video Monthly

Experimental Filmmaker Lynne Sachs
The Independent Film and Video Monthly
March, 1994

By Susan Gerhard

Lynne Sachs calls her latest film, Which Way is East?. A “work-in-process.” She uses the phrase to describe those of her experimental documentaries that evolve over time. This particular one started as a road trip and flowered into a political discourse: It’s a half-hour travel diary of her trip to Vietnam – a collection of tourism, city life, culture clash, and historic inquiry that’s put together with the warmth of a quilt.

That warmth is no accident. For Sachs, film is folk art. Pieces are crafted much as they’re conceptualized. Her work is hands-on everything, from the film itself to the machines she reshapes it on. “I was welding electronics on this machine one hour ago,” Sachs notes casually as we settle in to watch Which Way Is East? on a portable six-plate flatbed. She later describes the optical printer – the machine she uses to double-expose and linger over particular frames – like it’s a family heirloom. “An optical printer is sort of from that era of the sewing machine. You hear every single stitch.”

Sachs sees film as a mutable thing, as her phrase “film-in-process” indicates. She’s turned two of her films into installations: The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), in which she torches a doll house and the anti-feminist myths contained inside it, metamorphosed into a three-dimensional exhibit at Artists’ Television Access in 1991. And work-in-process States of UnBelonging turned up as an installation in 1992 at Buffalo’s Hallwalls Center for the Arts.

Like most of Sachs’ films, Which Way Is East? is personal. In 1992 Sachs slipped her Bolex camera into her backpack and went to visit her sister in Vietnam. There she shot 40 minutes of film, much of it a few frames at a time out the window of a room where, due to illness, she was confined to her bed. When she returned to the United States, she put together a 30-minute film that combines Vietnamese parables, history, and memories of the Vietnamese people she met, as well as her own childhood memories of the TV war.

In the film, Sachs recalls visiting Vietnam’s Museum of War Atrocities. While standing in the American Wing, she looks across the street and notices that another part of the museum is closed. Her sister explains that Vietnam’s relations with China are good, so there are no visiting hours for viewing China’s war atrocities.

To Americans for whom “Vietnam” ended in 1975, Which Way Is East? is a reminder that Vietnam is a country, not a war. The film has a combination of qualities that make Sachs well admired among Bay Area experimental filmmakers: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history’s scope, and a critical ability to discern what’s missing from the textbooks and TV news.

A 1979 graduate of Brown University, Sachs traded her history degree for a Bolex camera. She moved to San Francisco in 1985, got a Masters in Cinema from San Francisco State, and earned an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Since then, she’s worked her way from office temp and sound technician to filmmaker and lecturer, and has exhibited in festivals ranging from Atlanta to Oberhausen.

Which Way Is East? continues a practice she began with he 1989 project, Sermons and Sacred Pictures. This half-hour film depicts the life of Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Memphis preacher and filmmaker who, in the 1920s, gave witness to the idea that film, as a medium of self-representation, could affect people. He made and exhibited films of his congregations’ baptisms and daily lives.

“[Taylor] preserved something; [he used] that relationship of being an artist to bring something back to the place,” says Sachs, who has a similar modus operandi. She showed Taylor’s films to a congregation in San Francisco when she was collecting sounds from the church for Sermons and Sacred Pictures. The churchgoers recognized scenes from Taylor’s films: aunts, uncles, places. It brought their South back to them.

Making Which Way s East?, she made another connection – this time across continents. Sachs asked a number of Vietnamese Americans to help her decipher parables and read the stories she gathered from conversations in Vietnam for the film’s narration. In the process, many recognized their own stories. Sometimes, Sachs gets a personal invitation to dinner when the day’s work is done.

Sachs’ populism is not a hobby. In her daily double-life, she’s a teacher. She’s constantly impressed by the visions and skills of first-time film and videomakers in her courses at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. She’s also pleased to be able to watch her favorite films (works by former San Franciscan Bruce Conner, for one) again and again – and get paid for it. But it’s in the six months between teaching gigs when the real work gets done; when she descends into her studio and concentrates, uninterrupted, on her film craft.

“I like the term ‘filmmaker,’” she told the San Francisco Bay Guardian, “because it’s like the word homemaker,” Sachs has reinvented that word in the same way she reinvents film.

Susan Gerhard

Susan Gerhard is a film critic for the SF Bay Guardian.

The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts

“The House of Science: a museum of false facts”
30 min., color, sound, 1991

“Offering a new feminized film form, this piece explores both art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural college. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming of age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.” (SF Cinematheque)

“A disturbing discovery and a remarkable exposition. The film demonstrates Sachs’ natural gifts as an autobiographer, a philosopher and a true artist.” (Melbourne Film Festival)

“The film takes off on a visual and aural collage…combining the theoretical issues of feminism with the discrete and personal remembrances of childhood.” ( San Francisco Bay Guardian)

“Throughout ‘The House of Science’ an image of a woman, her brain revealed, is a leitmotif. It suggests that the mind/body split so characteristic of Western thought is particularly troubling for women, who may feel themselves moving between the territories of the film’s title –house, science, and museum, or private, public and idealized space — without wholly inhabiting any of them. This film explores society’s representation and conceptualization of women through home movies, personal reminiscences, staged scenes, found footage and voice. Sachs’ personal memories recall the sense of her body being divided, whether into sexual and functional territories, or ‘the body of the body’ and ‘the body of the mind.'” (Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archives)

Charlotte Film Festival, First Prize Experimental; Atlanta Film Festival, Honorable Mention Experimental; International Audiovisual Experimental Festival, Arnheim, Netherlands; Black Maria Film Fest, Juror’s Award; Hallwalls Center for the Arts, Buffalo, NY; Humbolt Film Festival, Teffen Filter Award; Museum of Modern Art, Cineprobe; Portland Museum of Art, “Icons, Rebels and Visionaries”; Athens Film Festival, Experimental Prize; Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Germany; Utah Film Festival, First Prize Short Film.

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

“The job required her to eat like a bird.”
“Only decades later did the three tennis players learn of the dangers of the sun.”
“She was beginning to wonder how to reconcile the seemingly incompatible differences between the rhythm of her heart and his.”
“At night they gathered together on the mountain.”
“Tracing a topographical map of her chest proved far more interesting than she’d expected.”
“Four mismatched birds perched for a single moment in the crevices of her midwinter mind.”
“Her eyes followed us with great intensity as we wearily traipsed through the final gallery of the 18th Century French Wing.”
“The House of Science: a museum of false facts”

RECLAIMING WOMANHOOD – ON LYNNE SACHS’ ‘THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE’

Cinea Berlin
By Tijana Perović
July 1, 2020
https://cinea.be/reclaiming-womanhood-on-lynne-sachs-the-house-of-science/

In The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991), Lynne Sachs curates a moving-image exhibition of womanhood, carefully sampling artifacts from the past (fabricated truths built to sustain male dominancy), intertwined with empirical artifacts of her own history (personal truths and memories). Through the power of visual and aural association, several domains of the exhibit simultaneously unfold in front of us: the personal, the public and the historical. Sachs drifts between these domains smoothly until a whole network of information is gently bestowed upon us. We start with the image of a doctor guiding a woman into a glass booth, followed by him setting a model house on fire, and the sound of Sachs’ voice, telling us about her experience of being examined by an apathetic gynecologist while pregnant. The image of the detached male doctor lingers with us for the whole length of the movie, along with his perverse power over a female body, over her right to “bare armor”—as in, contraception—and over her right to give birth. Together with Sachs, we wince at the story of her obtaining a contraceptive diaphragm. The doctor has no issue sending her off into battle with her new armor and zero instructions on how to do it. “I leave his office fully equipped, protected, and completely incapable of placing that plastic sheath over my cervix. Where is my cervix?” Next, we see a naked woman rolling up and down a sand dune unceasingly.

Another moment sat with me throughout the movie, that of a little girl. A little girl learning to read, stumbling through the grotesque words of Dr. Cesare Lombroso, naively walking us through his diagnosis of a nine-year-old female, a “born thief”. Sachs explores the concept of criminal atavism by juxtaposing her daughter’s voice with the delusional criminalization of women based on their physical appearance. By pairing images of female child-like playfulness and purity with delusional artifacts of the late 19th century, she amplifies the gap between the male study of women and women themselves. She flows between the public, mainstream, male rationale and the private, subjective female counter-experience. We are left with the uncomfortable ambiguity of child-like giggles of lightness and historical screams of darkness.

At the core of Sachs’ exhibit lies her most intimate gaze upon womanhood. It is articulated into unspoken words on the screen:

“I am two bodies—the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk.” (We hear pencil scratches.)

The body of the body of a woman is biologically destined to be softer and therefore more fluid. All this fluidity, open space, holes, smells are often psychologically coupled with shame. Sachs’ words here represent the experience of most girls becoming women. This body of ours is too visceral for both us and the world to accept.

“The body of the body moves in cycles, and with every repetition there is a sensation of pain. The arrival of the body of the body forces the body of the mind to take notice, begrudgingly so. With legs crossed, the blood is caught just before it crosses the border into the public domain” (We hear a person peeing and a loud flushing of the toilet.)

Not only is the body of the body full of liquids and smells, but they threaten to spill over into the public domain. Our bodies and all their products are trained to be confined.

“Filled with infectious, infected liquids, we hold in the blood, the water, the sneeze, the wax, the hair, the pus, the breath. All that is ours to let go, to release onto this earth is held in, contained. I am the cauldron of dangerous substances.”

To defeat this imposed belief system of male ideas which we were fed throughout our lives is to inspect and observe your body for yourself. It takes a lot of courage to look into your own body with curiosity, rather than shame.

“I trace a path across my chest, searching for surprises I’d rather not find, knots in the fabric.”

Women are being re-educated to examine themselves instead of being examined by the cold metal-handed gynecologist. However, self-examination carries a burden of unforeseen surprises. Releasing our juices into the public, into the mainstream. Bravely facing the knots in the fabric as early signs of our bodies decaying.

“Undressed, we read our bodies like a history. Scars, muscles, curves of the spine. We look at ourselves from within. Collect our own data, create our own science. Begin to define.”

Built from the inside out, this new laboratory pushes against the walls of the old structure. An incendiary effect, but not arson.

When we are brave enough to look into the stretch marks, the scars, the wobbles, the curves, we own our space, our fluids and our bones. We collect and process our data, introduce new terminology. We allow for the soft to be malleable, buoyant, rather than flaccid and weak. We allow for differences. We allow for change. We allow for expression to re-place suppression. We become safely vulnerable instead of avoidant or anxious. We spit our words and meanings out instead of swallowing them.

In between the personal and the public domain lie Sachs’ women. These are real, physical women, subjects of anatomical studies, as well as women in paintings, subjects of the male painter’s gaze. The first, forced silent, the latter, painted static, confined to a space in history, “to be taken”. We witness a female artist looking at men looking at women.

Despite the immanently observational, passive and saddening tone of the movie, there is a promise in this exhibit. A promise that by carefully unfolding and studying the history of womanhood, one is already shaking the habitual. Sachs’ voice is not passive at all, it is rather filled with precisely focused meditative anger, an eloquent scream for justice, live from the gynecologist’s office, calling for help and cooperation.

To aid and support this novel conception of womanhood, we seek out new imagery, new viewpoints, new forms. Sachs’ filmography is a great start. The House of Science shifted my gaze to earlier works of art, predating celluloid. I searched for an alternative museum of womanhood. In particular, the Viennese modernist painters Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka stood out as engaging with the representation of women: as neither virgins nor whores, allowing their female subjects to escape this demeaning cage. They let their subjects move around freely, be comfortable, take up space, lie down wrapped up in themselves. Schiele went one step further: painting anger and anxiety on the faces of his subjects. “By exploring such subjects, the three artists simultaneously exhumed their own sexuality: their fears, sorrows, hopes, and ecstasies…their women do not necessarily submit passively to the male artistic gaze. They look back and demand to be understood on their own terms.”1 These were not the only attempts by men to redefine womanhood in a feminist way. However, the others were often buried and forgotten, most likely because they were single, isolated sprouts of change.

Although revolutionary, the idea that cooperation could displace competition has certainly taken root lately. This idea insinuates that equality is actually a lot more functional and productive for all parties involved. A very timely example would be the evolution of a virus (or a random constituted body of persons, empowered by the state, with a specific aim, e.g. to enforce the law). If a virus were to survive, it would have to evolve in a cooperative manner with its host. Eventually, many highly infectious and pathogenic viruses have decreased their pathogenicity in order to keep their hosts alive. Some have even been completely eradicated over time. This gives me hope, both for us as a species and us as women. However, to put this into practice, we need both the unspoken voices to be heard and the destructive, competitive voices to fade out. It would have to be a cooperative effort.

EINDNOTEN

Jane Kallir, ‘Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka – Men Looking at Women Looking at Men’, p. 59, in: Agnes Husslein-Arco Jane Kallir and Alfred Weidinger, The Women of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, 2015

https://cinea.be/reclaiming-womanhood-on-lynne-sachs-the-house-of-science/

Sermons and Sacred Pictures

Trailer:

Full Film:

“Sermons and Sacred Pictures: the life and work of Reverend L.O. Taylor”
29 minutes, Color and B&W, sound, 1989

2015 Screening at the Museum of Modern Art

An experimental documentary on Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister from Memphis, Tennessee who was also an inspired filmmaker with an overwhelming interest in preserving the social and cultural fabric of his own community in the 1930′ s and ‘ 40’ s . I combine his films and music recordings with my own images of Memphis neighborhoods and religious gatherings.

Taylor photographed and filmed businesses and schools in the black community, trips to the National Baptist Convention, baptisms, funerals, social events, and individuals in the quiet dignity of their everyday lives. Over the years he compiled an extraordinary record of black life in the South before the Civil Rights movement captured the attention of the nation. Sermons and Sacred Pictures combines Rev. Taylor’s black-and-white films and audio recordings with color images of contemporary Memphis neighborhoods and religious gatherings. Commentary by his widow and others who knew him forms an intertwined narrative focusing on Rev. Taylor as a pioneering documentarian and social activist. Taylor emerges as a man of humor, piety and intelligence, vibrantly involved in the community he loved.

Supported by a Pioneer Fund Grant for Emerging Documentary Filmmakers and a Film Arts Foundation Development Grant.

“Sermons and Sacred Pictures has a magical quality….It brings to life the work of Rev.. Taylor through his community filmmaking efforts. The film in turn affirms African-American identity and spirit.” Elaine Charnov, Margaret Mead Film Festival

“Viewers will be fascinated by this half hour documentary…among the highlights of the Margaret Mead Film Festival.” J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Screenings and Festivals include:
Museum of Modern Art, New York (1989 and 2015)
“Best Short Documentary” 1989 Athens (Ohio) Film Festival
CINE Golden Eagle
Margaret Mead Film Festival
Robert Flaherty Film Seminar
American Anthropological Association honoree, 1991
Black Cultural Expo (Memphis) honoree
National Education Film Festival Award
“Best Documentary” Sinking Creek Film Festival, Nashville
WKNO Memphis, WYBE Philadelphia

In the library collections of: Duke, Los Angeles Public Library, Memphis State University, Newark Public Library, Northwestern, New York University, Reed College , Stanford and Temple

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

The Randy Band Film (1988)

The Randy Band Film
3 min. 1988
Directed by Lynne Sachs

In the mid 1980s, I heard Memphis’s very own RANDY BAND and decided I would collaborate with their bass player Randy Chertow on a movie. Tommy Hull wrote this song “You” and I shot this Super 8 Movie to go with his great melody. In this movie, you will see band members Chertow, Tommy Hull and George Reineke. You will also see my wonderful sister Dana Sachs and great friend Kathy Steuer. I too have a small cameo you might catch. Some of the film is shot in the Fairgrounds in Memphis and some in the now long gone but dearly cherished MUSEUM OF THE UNKNOWN in Marin County, California.

Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning

“Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning”, 9 min. color 16mm. 1987.

Like an animal in one of Eadweard Muybridge’s scientific photo experiments, five undramatic moments in a man’s life are observed by a woman. A study in visual obsession and a twist on the notion of the “gaze”.

Presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “American Century”, 2000.

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

Drawn and Quartered

“Drawn and Quartered”, 4 min. color 16mm. by Lynne Sachs
Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium, 1987

“Images of a male form (on the left) and a female form (right) exist in their own private domains, separated by a barrier. Only for a moment does the one intrude upon the pictorial space of the other.” – Albert Kilchesty, LA Filmforum

San Francisco Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, Installation at Pacific Film Archive “Way Bay 2” Survey of Bay Area Art 2018; Camára Lucída Festival de Ciné 2021 , Museum of the Moving Image 2021

MAKING AND BEING “DRAWN & QUARTERED”
an essay 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 would sneak into the back hall of his house to look at this image, as if those large eyes revealed to me all the horrors of a segregated South that was beginning, thank god, to disappear. The face still haunts me.

None of Uncle Charlie’s children or even grandchildren took much interest in photography. My teenage obsession with the camera thus became the reason we developed such a long-lasting relationship. He and I would spend hours together looking at the photographs we’d both taken. These were the first rigorous, aesthetic dialogues around image-making I’d ever had.

One afternoon in 1984, when were sitting side-by-side in Uncle Charlie’s study pouring over some travel slides, I announced that I wanted to be a filmmaker. I was 22 years old. Uncle Charlie’s response was immediate and silent. He got up abruptly, pulled an object from a bureau drawer, and handed me a heavy, brown camera that looked and felt like an army hand grenade. This was the first time I had ever seen a Regular 8 Filmo camera. He carefully explained to me how a 50 foot reel fit into the casing, that I needed to shoot half the reel one way, then open the camera, flip the reel and camera and shoot the rest. “Beware,” he warned me, “if you forget to shoot the second half with the camera right-side up the world will appear topsy-turvy. After you shoot all three minutes, send the film to a lab to have it processed and split down the middle.”

“SPLIT IT DOWN THE MIDDLE?” I thought to myself, “How violent, how intriguing, how corporeal.” Strangely enough, I didn’t actually use the camera until three years later. It was the fall of 1987, and I was a new graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute. By this time, I’d aligned myself with the film avant-garde. Every normal way of doing anything with a camera was anathema. My little Filmo cine hand grenade still had an aura I couldn’t resist. It finally beckoned me to be used. On one of those rare, warm San Francisco afternoons I convinced my new boyfriend John to follow me to the roof of the Art Institute to make the first movie I would ever shoot in Regular 8mm. Despite having no experience whatsoever with the camera, I’d meticulously planned every shot we would make together. Perhaps I’d been inspired by the organized fluidity of Maya Deren’s “Choreography for the Camera”. Just as significant, I believe, were the mechanical properties of that Filmo. What would happen if I didn’t rip apart the spinal chord of the film itself?

Once we reached the roof, I surprised John by informing him that we would both have to take off our clothes. I then explained that I would shoot images of him for the first 1 1/2 minutes of film and that he would shoot the second half of me. He wasn’t happy with the rules, but he accepted them for the three hours it took. That must have been the year I first encountered Laura Mulvey’s theory of the “male gaze”, seen Carolee Schneeman’s “Fuses”, pondered Yvonne Rainer’s “Lives of Performers”. The artistic practice of being a feminist in the late 1980’s was whirling wildly in my mind.

When I took the roll to the lab, I begged them NOT to split the film as they normally would, to leave it all in tact after the processing. The resulting 8mm footage was simultaneously thrilling (artistically) and humiliating (personally). There were our two nude bodies on the same screen but also divided by four equilateral frames. I looked at John (fine…); John looked at me (yikes!). Within the parameters of the image gestalt, we are dancing together without ever touching. Our two bodies remain totally distinct and apart.

My immediate reaction took me directly to the editing room where I cut out all the frames of my face. I wanted to erase myself from the film. I held these “out takes” in my hand, breathing a sigh of relief at knowing that my nude body could never be identified. Then I felt strangely ashamed at my own un-hip cowardice. A few days later, I returned to the splicer and “reconstituted” my body by replacing my face, owning up to what I’d made, and, in a way, accepting my own body with all its flab and flaws. This was years before the time of “nondestructive” (digital) editing, so if you were to look closely at the finished film print now on 16mm you would see those cuts (SCARS!!). You would see the mark making that reveals so much about my apprehension in those days.

At that moment, the technological limitations of Uncle Charlie’s hallowed regular 8mm Filmo movie camera lead me to a know place as an artist. Scared and anxious but also aware of a burgeoning excitement, I named my little movie “Drawn and Quartered”. Months later, I screened the silent movie to a packed audience at San Francisco’s Red Vic Theatre on Haight Street. Within those few painful minutes, the crowd went from absolute silence, to raucous laughter and back to an exquisite quiet. I was shaking.

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

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects

“Still Life With Woman and Four Objects”

4 min. B&W 16mm.1986

A film portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a “character”. By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film is also a tribute to a real woman – Emma Goldman, 1986 .

2020 – 4k Digital Preservation by BB Optics.

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. — “The Televisual Woman’s Hour” by Aaditya Aggarwal, Canyon Cinema Discovered

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

Fossil

“Fossil” by Lynne Sachs (1986)
VHS and 3/4″ Video

The village women of Mambai in Bali, Indonesia collect sand and stone from the river. Each woman sells what she has gathered for construction material. But the river is more than a place to work. It is a place to bathe, wash clothes, laugh and tell stories.

“The labor of women in Indonesia is geographically and temporally removed from the labor of workers in New York City, but how might we think across the material intersections and connections of these various people, or the ways in which we are all materially implicated in both neighborhood and global structures of hidden labor? How does cinema help (formally) represent these structures? ” (Stephen Woo, Brown University)

“Fossil” is a collaborative performance piece crated by David Bronstein, Debbie Crowell, Ed Mitchell, Lynne Sachs, and Gede Tjok. The dance evolved through discussion and movement exercises as a collective response to the images from Mambai.

This project was supported by an artist-in-residence grant from Downtown Community Television (New York, NY).

The Tarot

The Tarot by Lynne Sachs
Super 8mm, color, silent, 3 min. 35 sec., 1983

Filmed on the Lower East Side of New York City and featuring Kathy Steuer.

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs