Tag Archives: A Month of Single Frames

Body of the Body, Body of the Mind by Cíntia Gil / 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND
Lynne Sachs Artist Profile
April 26 – May 1, 2023
69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
Curator: Cíntia Gil

Program notes by Cíntia Gil:

The title of this retrospective quotes Lynne Sachs in her 1991 film “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”. It speaks of a zone of experimentation that crosses Sachs’ work and grounds filmmaking as a practice of dislocating words, gestures and modes of being into open ontologies. What can be a woman, a word, a color, a shade, a line, a rule or an object? The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind is another way of saying that things exist both as affections and as processes of meaning, and that filmmaking is the art of not choosing sides in that equation. That is why Sachs’ work is inseparable from the events of life, while being resolutely non-biographical. It is a circular, dynamic practice of translation and reconnection of what appears to be separated.

There are many ways of approaching Lynne Sachs’ full body of work, and many different programmes would have been possible for this retrospective. Films resonate among each other. Like threads, themes link different times. Repetition and transformation are a constant obsession in the way images, places, people and ideas are revisited. While looking for an angle for this programme, I tried to look at some of the threads that seem to me the most constant, even if sometimes subterraneous, throughout the films. The three programmes are not systematically bound by themes or built around typologies. There are three different doors to the same arena where body (and the ‘in-between’ bodies) is the main ‘topos’: translation, collaboration, and inseparability of the affective and the political. Yet, none of these terms seems to truly speak of what’s at stake here.

Lynne Sachs knows about the disequilibrium that happens between words and concepts, and about the difference between the synchronicity of life and the linearity of discourse. She also knows that words can be both symptoms and demiurgic actors. That is maybe why she writes poems, and why this programme was inspired by her book, “Year By Year Poems”[1].

1975 [girls with fast lane dreams]

Teachers push us to the precipice –

trick us with conundrums we mistake for algorithms

catch us in a maelstrom of dizzying numbers.

Searching for the exit door

I discover quick methods for finding north –

solace in the gravitational pull of geography

and head for the first opening from a school

with too many ambitions

penalty points

and girls with fast-lane dreams.

Talking about the making of “Which Way is East”, Lynne Sachs said: “the most interesting films are the ones that ask us to think about perception, that don’t just introduce new material.”[2]. Both Lynne Sachs and her sister Dana, a writer, lived the Vietnam War through television – a middle-class childhood sometimes haunted by images of that war that seemed both far away and fundamental to their generation. When Dana moved to Vietnam in the early 1990s, Lynne visited for a month, and they made a film. The film begins with a sequence of movement shots, colors, fleeting forms, interrupted by a popular Vietnamese saying about a frog and the horizon. Three layers come together, predicting one of the strongest traits of Lynne’s work: the world seen through the rhythm of a moving body, and the dialogue between different modes of feeling and thinking. [Lynne’s childhood Vietnam War images were black and white, upside down; the Vietnam landscape in 1991 is crossed on a motorbike, and nature is motion and strangeness; “a frog sitting on the bottom of a well, thinks the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot”.]

A travelog in Vietnam became a dialogue of perceptive discoveries, glimpses of meaning and, most importantly, of the many ways of being just here and now, together, facing abysses that should not eat us alive. How to not be eaten alive by life’s infinite and sublime abysses?

Girls with fast-lane dreams is another way of referring to an impulse for joy.

Girls looking at girls, girls playing with girls, Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer collaborating on an impossible film. How to work on beauty, without monumentalizing it? How to work on death without freezing the life within? A kid once told me: “you have to pass it through the inside, and let it out through your smart eye”. Is that translation? Isn’t “A Month of Single Frames” the translation of a place and a body, the conditions of light seen through embodied solitude?

There is some kind of radical positioning of Lynne Sachs’ gaze (gaze is a pace and a gesture, and that is its politics): allowing things to unfold as they are, knowing that it is the very act of filming them that constitutes their becoming. Noa becomes play with light. Maya becomes time and unsurmountable individuality. Central Park becomes a porous membrane for the circulation between a musical movement and the event of an emotional form.

1997 [Another baby girl drops down]

(for my daughter, Noa)

Again, nine full moons leave bare

the dust against the sky.

Air fills up with brightness.

Another baby girl drops down.

Dice on a betting table

or rich, ripe fruit atop worn grass.

The political comes forward when things are dislocated from their assigned places, becoming eloquent. When a field of possibilities is problematized by different temporalities, different meanings attach to the same words. New symptoms (not symbols) emerge from the same myths. To the territorialization of body, Lynne Sachs responds with the unspeakable layers of desire, underpinning the history of the body. To the typification of identity, cinema responds with the history of gesture.

Feminism in Lynne Sachs’ work comes from an obsession with ontological fluidity – women as possibilities, bringing with them the memory of what has not been captured by politics, the promise of kinder political places. Such invention requires the deconstruction of the gaze, the transformation of language through the power of a thinking (collective) body. Collective as in-between, in circulation, in transition with others: the Lilliths who may or not become mothers in “A Biography of Lillith”, the enfolding body in “Drawn and Quartered”, the collage that renders old measures useless in “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.

Materiality is a key aspect in this cinema, it sustains the emergence of a filmic gesture. The presence of things in their most concrete form, be it a birth, a hand helping to translate an idea, a splash of light on a face, the astonishment of a baby in front of a camera. Things occupy a certain space, move in a certain way, and their sensuality is never sublimated or forced into metaphors. It is their material presence that saves them from their assigned roles and chains of meaning, revealing their vitality as a principle for a political imagination.

“Incendiary, but not arson.”[3]

2009 [scars     muscles    curves of the spine]

I hold the mirror just inches away and look

shy

detached

brave

I touch myself with knowledge

Scars muscles curves of the spine

I trace a path across my chest

searching for surprises I’d rather not find –

knots in the fabric

Translation comes, then, as a movement between transmitted memory, embodied experience, affective vocabulary and the never-accomplished labor of form. Nothing stays determined within a field of possibilities, but the field itself is in a constant motion, resignifying every aspect, reconnecting every moment in time, every glimpse of an image.  The work done around Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin, seems key to consider her full body of work. “The Task of the Translator”, presents three movements, three ways of looking for the body. It starts with the reassemblage of bones of dead American soldiers during WWII by Sandor Lenard, in a sequence that will come back in “The Last Happy Days”. Here, translation is both an effort to make sense of the materiality of time and history, and a question about the translatability of such. Like in “Which Way is East”, how can history be translated through the gestures of the present, of the living? Is the way the past escapes linearity and expresses its vitality?

The second movement in “The Task” shows a group of scholars translating an article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. Tentative words and articulations around a table, hands helping meaning through gestures. Is Latin a dead language? Sandor Lenard, after moving to Brazil, translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. What paradox lies in the gesture of translating a children’s story into a dead language? Translation is a game of materiality, of dislocating the world into another regime of forms and movements. Allowing language to pass through the materiality of the present time. In “The Last Happy Day”, children tell the story of Sandor Lenard while rehearsing Winnie the Pooh. Translatability through bodies and gestures, vitality: one does not simply look at the past, but rather invents a dialogue of embodied time. In “The Task of the Translator”, suddenly the camera leaves the scholars and focuses on the drops of rain on a foggy window, and on the gestures of a hand, before we start hearing radio news about human remains after an attack.

Translation keeps all things alive at the same time – even the matter of death.

Cíntia Gil

Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon Theatre and Film School) and holds a degree in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto). From 2012 to 2019, Cíntia Gil served as co-director and then director of Doclisboa – International Film Festival. From 2019 to 2021 she has directed Sheffield DocFest in England. In 2022, Cíntia started the programme of screenings and study groups “Artistic Differences”, at UnionDocs (NY), as a co-curator together with Jenny Miller and Christopher Allen. She is part of the programming team of Cannes Directors Fortnight.

Gil has curated a variety of contemporary and historical film series, retrospectives and exhibitions, besides publishing articles in various publications. In addition, she has taught seminars, lectures and workshop  in different institutions (Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico, EICTV in Cuba, HGK Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany among others), and she is a project tutor for the Master on Creative Documentary at the Pompeu Fabra University . She has also served on juries in international film festivals, such as Berlinale, Cairo Film Festival, Mar del Plata, Jerusalem Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, London Film Festival, IDFA, Taipei IDF, FidMarseille, Seville European Film Festival, DokuFest, Ficunam, DocsNYC, Guadalajara, among many others. She has been a member of the executive Board of Apordoc – Associação pelo Documentário, the Portuguese documentary film association since 2015.

[1] Lynne Sachs, “Year by Year Poems”, Tender Buttons Press, NY, 2019

[2] “Observe and Subvert”, interview by Inney Prakash for Metrograph, December 2021

[3] In “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.

69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen – Profile programmes / Experimental Cinema

69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen – Profile programmes
Experimental Cinema
By Marcos Ortega
April 14, 2023
https://expcinema.org/site/en/events/69th-international-short-film-festival-oberhausen-profile-programmes

The 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is presenting five shows of works by filmmakers and artists from different generations and countries who work with the short form in very different ways. They come from the arts, experimental or documentary film, their themes are personal, political or historical, they use performances, collages, text or feature film elements, demonstrating the enormous range and versatility of the short form.

Marcel Broodthaers, Belgium (1924-1976)

A programme of rarely shown cinematic works by the Belgian artist

A poet who decided to become a visual artist at the age of 40, Marcel Broodthaers created a fascinating body of work in a relatively short time, consisting of texts, drawings, paintings, publications, photographs, sculptures, installations – and films. With limited economic and technical means, Broodthaers produced idiosyncratic works that explored the boundaries and rules of film. Oberhausen will be showing a selection that concentrates on Broodthaers’ work as a filmmaker rather than on the exhibition or performance documentaries that were also made. The works are presented in loose chronological order, from Défense de fumer (1967-70) to La Bataille de Waterloo (1975), compiled by curator, scholar and author Xavier García Bardón.

The highlight of the programme is an Expanded Cinema work conceived especially for the festival, presenting projects in which Broodthaers made the screen an integral part of the work. On 28 April, in a special screening outside the cinema hall, a number of his films will be projected onto three special screens. The festival would like to thank Maria Gilissen Broodthaers for her collaboration.

Teboho Edkins (Germany/South Africa)

An agent between cultures

Born in the USA, raised in South Africa and Lesotho and now living in Germany, Teboho Edkins sees himself as a mediator and translator between cultures. His documentary works provide insights into the world of South Africa and Lesotho in particular, be it the gangs of Cape Town in his “gangster trilogy” Gangster Project (2011), Gangster Backstage (2013), and Gangster Film (2020) or the culture of cattle herders in Lesotho as in Shepherds (2020). Both Gangster Backstage and Shepherds won awards at Oberhausen. Edkins’ films are documentary in nature, and he shows them in art contexts as installations as well as at numerous film festivals. In 2020, his feature-length film Days of Cannibalism screened at the Berlinale, and his new short film Ghosts was selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.

The programme is curated by art historian and curator Susanne Touw.

Alexandra Gulea (Romania)

The first complete show of her short films

Alexandra Gulea was born in Bucharest and studied art in Bucharest and Paris as well as film in Munich. With her expressive, mostly documentary films she has won numerous prizes, including at Oberhausen. Now the festival is showing the first complete show of her short films. She often sheds light on institutional and social constraints, for example in Dumnezeu la Saxofon, Dracu’ la Vioara (The Thumb Twiddlers, 2003), where she portrays the residents of a psychiatric home in Romania, or in Valea Jiului – Notes (2018), which is about the quasi-orphaned children of parents working abroad. Most recently, she won the Prize of the German Competition at Oberhausen with Ńeale azbuirătoare (Flying Sheep, 2022). In the film, she tells the story of her grandparents, who were members of the persecuted Aromanian minority.

Curated by the author, film curator and teacher Madeleine Bernstorff.

Lynne Sachs (USA)

Body of the Body, Body of the Mind

The New York experimental and documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs is one of the pioneers of feminist experimental film. In around 45 feature and short films to date, she explores the connection between the body, the camera and the materiality of film, mixing personal observation and historical experience, essay, performance, poetry and collage. She won the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen in 2020 with A Month of Single Frames; now the festival is presenting a showcase of her work whose central topos is the body. Three programmes, inspired by Sachs’ 2019 poetry collection Year by Year Poems, explore three different approaches: translation, collaboration and the inseparability of the affective and political. Twelve films from 1986’s Drawn and Quartered to Maya at 24 (2021) form a cross-section of Sachs’s work, compiled by publicist, programmer and curator Cíntia Gil.

Lynne Sachs’ new work Swerve has been selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.

Yamashiro Chikako (Japan)

An international discovery

Born in Okinawa, video artist Yamashiro Chikako is well-known in her home country, but has yet to be discovered in Europe. In Oberhausen, she won the ZONTA Prize for Tsuchi no hito – 2017 gekijyoban (Clay Man – 2017 Film Ver.) in 2018; now the festival is presenting a first show of her work in Europe. Since the 2000s, Yamashiro has been artistically exploring the history, social issues and geopolitical conditions of her homeland. Her focus is above all on the consequences of the American occupation, its cultural influences, the blending of traditional culture and American elements: Ryukyu singing meets Verdi opera, Japanese cowgirls meets spoken word poetry. Curated by Okamura Keiko, curator of contemporary art, Oberhausen shows an overview of Yamashiro’s short film work.

Full festival programme:

https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets

69th Festival: Five Profile Programmes Press Release / 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen

69th Festival: Five Profile programmes Press Release
69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
April 13, 2023
https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/press/detail/69th-festival-five-profile-programmes/

69th Festival: Five Profile programmes

13.04.2023 Press Press Release News

69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 26 April – 1 May 2023

Five Profile programmes:

Marcel Broodthaers, Teboho Edkins, Alexandra Gulea, Lynne Sachs, Yamashiro Chikako

The 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is presenting five shows of works by filmmakers and artists from different generations and countries who work with the short form in very different ways. They come from the arts, experimental or documentary film, their themes are personal, political or historical, they use performances, collages, text or feature film elements, demonstrating the enormous range and versatility of the short form.

Marcel Broodthaers, Belgium (1924-1976)

A programme of rarely shown cinematic works by the Belgian artist

A poet who decided to become a visual artist at the age of 40, Marcel Broodthaers created a fascinating body of work in a relatively short time, consisting of texts, drawings, paintings, publications, photographs, sculptures, installations – and films. With limited economic and technical means, Broodthaers produced idiosyncratic works that explored the boundaries and rules of film. Oberhausen will be showing a selection that concentrates on Broodthaers’ work as a filmmaker rather than on the exhibition or performance documentaries that were also made. The works are presented in loose chronological order, from Défense de fumer (1967-70) to La Bataille de Waterloo (1975), compiled by curator, scholar and author Xavier García Bardón.

The highlight of the programme is an Expanded Cinema work conceived especially for the festival, presenting projects in which Broodthaers made the screen an integral part of the work. On 28 April, in a special screening outside the cinema hall, a number of his films will be projected onto three special screens. The festival would like to thank Maria Gilissen Broodthaers for her collaboration.

Teboho Edkins (Germany/South Africa)

An agent between cultures

Born in the USA, raised in South Africa and Lesotho and now living in Germany, Teboho Edkins sees himself as a mediator and translator between cultures. His documentary works provide insights into the world of South Africa and Lesotho in particular, be it the gangs of Cape Town in his “gangster trilogy” Gangster Project (2011), Gangster Backstage (2013), and Gangster Film (2020) or the culture of cattle herders in Lesotho as in Shepherds (2020). Both Gangster Backstage and Shepherds won awards at Oberhausen. Edkins’ films are documentary in nature, and he shows them in art contexts as installations as well as at numerous film festivals. In 2020, his feature-length film Days of Cannibalism screened at the Berlinale, and his new short film Ghosts was selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.

The programme is curated by art historian and curator Susanne Touw.

Alexandra Gulea (Romania)

The first complete show of her short films

Alexandra Gulea was born in Bucharest and studied art in Bucharest and Paris as well as film in Munich. With her expressive, mostly documentary films she has won numerous prizes, including at Oberhausen. Now the festival is showing the first complete show of her short films. She often sheds light on institutional and social constraints, for example in Dumnezeu la Saxofon, Dracu’ la Vioara (The Thumb Twiddlers, 2003), where she portrays the residents of a psychiatric home in Romania, or in Valea Jiului – Notes (2018), which is about the quasi-orphaned children of parents working abroad. Most recently, she won the Prize of the German Competition at Oberhausen with Ńeale azbuirătoare (Flying Sheep, 2022). In the film, she tells the story of her grandparents, who were members of the persecuted Aromanian minority.

Curated by the author, film curator and teacher Madeleine Bernstorff.

Lynne Sachs (USA)

Body of the Body, Body of the Mind

The New York experimental and documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs is one of the pioneers of feminist experimental film. In around 45 feature and short films to date, she explores the connection between the body, the camera and the materiality of film, mixing personal observation and historical experience, essay, performance, poetry and collage. She won the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen in 2020 with A Month of Single Frames; now the festival is presenting a showcase of her work whose central topos is the body. Three programmes, inspired by Sachs’ 2019 poetry collection Year by Year Poems, explore three different approaches: translation, collaboration and the inseparability of the affective and political. Twelve films from 1986’s Drawn and Quartered to Maya at 24 (2021) form a cross-section of Sachs’s work, compiled by publicist, programmer and curator Cíntia Gil.

Lynne Sachs’ new work Swerve has been selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.

Yamashiro Chikako (Japan)

An international discovery

Born in Okinawa, video artist Yamashiro Chikako is well-known in her home country, but has yet to be discovered in Europe. In Oberhausen, she won the ZONTA Prize for Tsuchi no hito – 2017 gekijyoban (Clay Man – 2017 Film Ver.) in 2018; now the festival is presenting a first show of her work in Europe. Since the 2000s, Yamashiro has been artistically exploring the history, social issues and geopolitical conditions of her homeland. Her focus is above all on the consequences of the American occupation, its cultural influences, the blending of traditional culture and American elements: Ryukyu singing meets Verdi opera, Japanese cowgirls meets spoken word poetry. Curated by Okamura Keiko, curator of contemporary art, Oberhausen shows an overview of Yamashiro’s short film work.

Full festival programme:

https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets

Download stills:

https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/press/#c261

Accreditation deadline: 17 April 2023

https://www.kurzfilmtage.de/en/visit/#t2638

Oberhausen, 14 April 2023

Press contact: Sabine Niewalda, T +49 (0)208 825-3073, niewalda@kurzfilmtage.d

Lynne Sachs Profile / 69th Oberhausen Short Film Festival

Lynne Sachs Profile
69th Oberhausen Short Film Festival
May 1, 2023
Program 1 – [girls with fast lane dreams]: https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets?v=1493
Program 2 – [Another baby girl drops down]: https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets?v=1494
Program 3 – [scars     muscles    curves of the spine]: https://kurzfilmtage.filmchief.com/shop/tickets?v=1495

Lynne Sachs Artist Profile Trailer

Lynne Sachs 1 – [girls with fast lane dreams]

An overview of the films of the New York pioneer of experimental documentary. Sachs’ films are inseparably linked to events of life, though they are resolutely non-biographical. Inspired by her poetry collection Year by Year Poems, the central “topos” of these programmes is the body (and the bodies „in-between“). The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind leads from the Vietnam War to feminism to death.

Films in this Program

A Month of Single Frames
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2019

In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her archive. She gave her Duneshack materials to Lynne. ‘The words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film.’

Noa, Noa
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2006

Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand. Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic ‘Crawdad Song’.

Drift and Bough
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2014

A winter morning in a Central Park covered in snow. Graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The black lines of the trees against the whiteness become an emotional drawing. Stephen Vitielloʼs delicate yet soaring musical track seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to the sky.

Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1994

Lynne and her sister Dana travelled from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. Their conversations with strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. Lynne and Dana’s travel diary revels in the sounds, proverbs, and images of daily life. Their film becomes a warm landscape that weaves together stories of people they met with their own childhood memories of the war on TV.

Lynne Sachs 2 – [Another baby girl drops down]

Films in this Program

The House of Science: a museum of false facts
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1991

Combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural collage, the film explores the representation of women and the construction of the feminine otherness. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming-of-age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.

Drawn and Quartered
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1986

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. A declaration of desire of and through cinema.

Maya at 24
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2021

‘My daughterʼs name is Maya. Iʼve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.’ Lynne filmed Maya at ages 6, 16 and 24, running around her, in a circle – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward.

A Biography Of Lilith
Lynne Sachs
USA, 1997

Off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, updating the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as a mother.

Lynne Sachs 3 – [scars     muscles    curves of the spine]

Films in this Program

The Task of the Translator
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2010

Three studies of the human body compose an homage to Benjamin’s The Task of the Translator. Musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind of cosmetic surgery for corpses. A group of classics scholars confronted with the task of translating an article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. A radio news report on human remains.

The X Y Chromosome Project
Mark Street, Lynne Sachs
USA, 2007

Sachs and her partner Mark Street use the split screen to cleave the primordial to the mediated. Their diptych structure transforms from a boxing match into a pas de deux. Newsreel footage brushes up against hand painted film, domestic spaces, and movie trailers. Together, Sachs and Street move from surface to depth and back again.

Starfish Aorta Colossus
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2015

Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8 mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns. Paolo Javier invited Lynne to create a film that would speak to one of his poems. She travels through 25 years of her 8 mm films.

The Last Happy Day
Lynne Sachs
USA, 2009

In 1938, Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian doctor, fled from the Nazis to Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army hired him to reconstruct the bones of dead American soldiers. Eventually he moved to Brazil where he embarked on the translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin. The film weaves together personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children’s performance.

BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND
Lynne Sachs Artist Profile
April 26 – May 1, 2023
69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen
Curator: Cíntia Gil

Program notes by Cíntia Gil:

The title of this retrospective quotes Lynne Sachs in her 1991 film “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”. It speaks of a zone of experimentation that crosses Sachs’ work and grounds filmmaking as a practice of dislocating words, gestures and modes of being into open ontologies. What can be a woman, a word, a color, a shade, a line, a rule or an object? The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind is another way of saying that things exist both as affections and as processes of meaning, and that filmmaking is the art of not choosing sides in that equation. That is why Sachs’ work is inseparable from the events of life, while being resolutely non-biographical. It is a circular, dynamic practice of translation and reconnection of what appears to be separated.

There are many ways of approaching Lynne Sachs’ full body of work, and many different programmes would have been possible for this retrospective. Films resonate among each other. Like threads, themes link different times. Repetition and transformation are a constant obsession in the way images, places, people and ideas are revisited. While looking for an angle for this programme, I tried to look at some of the threads that seem to me the most constant, even if sometimes subterraneous, throughout the films. The three programmes are not systematically bound by themes or built around typologies. There are three different doors to the same arena where body (and the ‘in-between’ bodies) is the main ‘topos’: translation, collaboration, and inseparability of the affective and the political. Yet, none of these terms seems to truly speak of what’s at stake here.

Lynne Sachs knows about the disequilibrium that happens between words and concepts, and about the difference between the synchronicity of life and the linearity of discourse. She also knows that words can be both symptoms and demiurgic actors. That is maybe why she writes poems, and why this programme was inspired by her book, “Year By Year Poems”[1].

1975 [girls with fast lane dreams]

Teachers push us to the precipice –

trick us with conundrums we mistake for algorithms

catch us in a maelstrom of dizzying numbers.

Searching for the exit door

I discover quick methods for finding north –

solace in the gravitational pull of geography

and head for the first opening from a school

with too many ambitions

penalty points

and girls with fast-lane dreams.

Talking about the making of “Which Way is East”, Lynne Sachs said: “the most interesting films are the ones that ask us to think about perception, that don’t just introduce new material.”[2]. Both Lynne Sachs and her sister Dana, a writer, lived the Vietnam War through television – a middle-class childhood sometimes haunted by images of that war that seemed both far away and fundamental to their generation. When Dana moved to Vietnam in the early 1990s, Lynne visited for a month, and they made a film. The film begins with a sequence of movement shots, colors, fleeting forms, interrupted by a popular Vietnamese saying about a frog and the horizon. Three layers come together, predicting one of the strongest traits of Lynne’s work: the world seen through the rhythm of a moving body, and the dialogue between different modes of feeling and thinking. [Lynne’s childhood Vietnam War images were black and white, upside down; the Vietnam landscape in 1991 is crossed on a motorbike, and nature is motion and strangeness; “a frog sitting on the bottom of a well, thinks the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot”.]

A travelog in Vietnam became a dialogue of perceptive discoveries, glimpses of meaning and, most importantly, of the many ways of being just here and now, together, facing abysses that should not eat us alive. How to not be eaten alive by life’s infinite and sublime abysses?

Girls with fast-lane dreams is another way of referring to an impulse for joy.

Girls looking at girls, girls playing with girls, Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer collaborating on an impossible film. How to work on beauty, without monumentalizing it? How to work on death without freezing the life within? A kid once told me: “you have to pass it through the inside, and let it out through your smart eye”. Is that translation? Isn’t “A Month of Single Frames” the translation of a place and a body, the conditions of light seen through embodied solitude?

There is some kind of radical positioning of Lynne Sachs’ gaze (gaze is a pace and a gesture, and that is its politics): allowing things to unfold as they are, knowing that it is the very act of filming them that constitutes their becoming. Noa becomes play with light. Maya becomes time and unsurmountable individuality. Central Park becomes a porous membrane for the circulation between a musical movement and the event of an emotional form.

1997 [Another baby girl drops down]

(for my daughter, Noa)

Again, nine full moons leave bare

the dust against the sky.

Air fills up with brightness.

Another baby girl drops down.

Dice on a betting table

or rich, ripe fruit atop worn grass.

The political comes forward when things are dislocated from their assigned places, becoming eloquent. When a field of possibilities is problematized by different temporalities, different meanings attach to the same words. New symptoms (not symbols) emerge from the same myths. To the territorialization of body, Lynne Sachs responds with the unspeakable layers of desire, underpinning the history of the body. To the typification of identity, cinema responds with the history of gesture.

Feminism in Lynne Sachs’ work comes from an obsession with ontological fluidity – women as possibilities, bringing with them the memory of what has not been captured by politics, the promise of kinder political places. Such invention requires the deconstruction of the gaze, the transformation of language through the power of a thinking (collective) body. Collective as in-between, in circulation, in transition with others: the Lilliths who may or not become mothers in “A Biography of Lillith”, the enfolding body in “Drawn and Quartered”, the collage that renders old measures useless in “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.

Materiality is a key aspect in this cinema, it sustains the emergence of a filmic gesture. The presence of things in their most concrete form, be it a birth, a hand helping to translate an idea, a splash of light on a face, the astonishment of a baby in front of a camera. Things occupy a certain space, move in a certain way, and their sensuality is never sublimated or forced into metaphors. It is their material presence that saves them from their assigned roles and chains of meaning, revealing their vitality as a principle for a political imagination.

“Incendiary, but not arson.”[3]

2009 [scars     muscles    curves of the spine]

I hold the mirror just inches away and look

shy

detached

brave

I touch myself with knowledge

Scars muscles curves of the spine

I trace a path across my chest

searching for surprises I’d rather not find –

knots in the fabric

Translation comes, then, as a movement between transmitted memory, embodied experience, affective vocabulary and the never-accomplished labor of form. Nothing stays determined within a field of possibilities, but the field itself is in a constant motion, resignifying every aspect, reconnecting every moment in time, every glimpse of an image.  The work done around Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin, seems key to consider her full body of work. “The Task of the Translator”, presents three movements, three ways of looking for the body. It starts with the reassemblage of bones of dead American soldiers during WWII by Sandor Lenard, in a sequence that will come back in “The Last Happy Days”. Here, translation is both an effort to make sense of the materiality of time and history, and a question about the translatability of such. Like in “Which Way is East”, how can history be translated through the gestures of the present, of the living? Is the way the past escapes linearity and expresses its vitality?

The second movement in “The Task” shows a group of scholars translating an article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. Tentative words and articulations around a table, hands helping meaning through gestures. Is Latin a dead language? Sandor Lenard, after moving to Brazil, translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. What paradox lies in the gesture of translating a children’s story into a dead language? Translation is a game of materiality, of dislocating the world into another regime of forms and movements. Allowing language to pass through the materiality of the present time. In “The Last Happy Day”, children tell the story of Sandor Lenard while rehearsing Winnie the Pooh. Translatability through bodies and gestures, vitality: one does not simply look at the past, but rather invents a dialogue of embodied time. In “The Task of the Translator”, suddenly the camera leaves the scholars and focuses on the drops of rain on a foggy window, and on the gestures of a hand, before we start hearing radio news about human remains after an attack.

Translation keeps all things alive at the same time – even the matter of death.

Cíntia Gil

Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon Theatre and Film School) and holds a degree in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto). From 2012 to 2019, Cíntia Gil served as co-director and then director of Doclisboa – International Film Festival. From 2019 to 2021 she has directed Sheffield DocFest in England. In 2022, Cíntia started the programme of screenings and study groups “Artistic Differences”, at UnionDocs (NY), as a co-curator together with Jenny Miller and Christopher Allen. She is part of the programming team of Cannes Directors Fortnight.

Gil has curated a variety of contemporary and historical film series, retrospectives and exhibitions, besides publishing articles in various publications. In addition, she has taught seminars, lectures and workshop  in different institutions (Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico, EICTV in Cuba, HGK Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany among others), and she is a project tutor for the Master on Creative Documentary at the Pompeu Fabra University . She has also served on juries in international film festivals, such as Berlinale, Cairo Film Festival, Mar del Plata, Jerusalem Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, London Film Festival, IDFA, Taipei IDF, FidMarseille, Seville European Film Festival, DokuFest, Ficunam, DocsNYC, Guadalajara, among many others. She has been a member of the executive Board of Apordoc – Associação pelo Documentário, the Portuguese documentary film association since 2015.

[1] Lynne Sachs, “Year by Year Poems”, Tender Buttons Press, NY, 2019

[2] “Observe and Subvert”, interview by Inney Prakash for Metrograph, December 2021

[3] In “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.

Short Film Programme: Best of Accomplices / Frauen Film Festival

Short Film Programme: Best of Accomplices
Frauen Film Festival
April 23, 2023
https://frauenfilmfest.com/en/event/short-film-programme-best-of-accomplices/

Short Film Programme: Best of Accomplices

Seven colleagues from three different generations explain their personal film choices.

By and with: Cana Bilir-Meier, Lisa Domin, Jennifer Jones, Claudia Richarz, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Betty Schiel and Maxa Zoller.

23 APR 2023 16:30
Schauburg Dortmund

ROSALIE AND LÉONTINE GO TO THE THEATER
Romeo Bosetti
FR | 1911 | Short film, Silent film | 4’ | OW

Rosalie and Léontine Go to the Théâtre shows us the audience at a vaudeville theatre. It is refreshing to see […]

[TUNIS] / [ تونس ]
Lia Sáile
DE | 2018 | Experimental Documentary | 15’ | OW

Every word, every syllable, every nuance is discussed, interpreted, rejected and translated anew. Translating a poem into another language and […]

SEMRA ERTAN
Cana Bilir-Meier
AT | DE | 2013 | Experimental | 8’

Semra Ertan was born in Turkey in 1956 and moved to her parents to the federal republic of Germany in […]

A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES
Barbara Hammer, Lynne Sachs
US | 2019 | Short film | 14’ | OFe

A Month of Single Frames is a poignant dialogue between film-maker Lynn Sachs and her late friend Barbara Hammer. Barbara […]

PLUTONIUM BLONDE
Sandra Lahire
UK | 1987 | Experimental | 15’ | OFe

As penetrating as X-rays and as colourful as fireworks: Sandra Lahire’s film about female workers at a nuclear plant in […]

CUT PIECE
Yoko Ono
US | 1965 | Performance | 8’ | OW

Yoko Ono sits on stage, a pair of scissors in front of her. She asks the audience to cut open […]

RESERVATION
Clara van Gool
NL | 1988 | Short film | 9’ | OW

Leaves rustle. Foxes stir. Cracked brick walls beguile. Black and white frames flicker, leap, and shudder as two women, clad […]

Description of Program
https://frauenfilmfest.com/en/movie-category/focus-2023-en/

FOCUS

Focus: Accomplices

For over 130 years, women have contributed to creating images for the cinema. Stories of self-empowerment lie at the heart of all important feminist movements. Cinema enables us as film-makers and audiences to show solidarity with people of yesteryear and perhaps even fall rapturously in love with them. In all decades – since the silent films of the 1910s – radical, anarchic heroines have inspired us, and we can connect with them as accomplices through time and across generations. Valuable clues into current feminist practices lurk in the archive.

We’ve gone for a bold concept with the Focus section: We’ve formed groups spanning various timeframes. We look for common links, friction points and feelings to make the experience of encountering other people a less solitary one. This time-crazy idea is inspired by Carolyn Dinshaw’snconcept of »Communities Across Time«. In »Getting Medieval«, the historian evokes queer communities in the late 14th century based on medieval texts, opening up for us and herself a desire across centuries where past and present touch.

Our programme invites you to interact with women accomplices across time. Cinema is such an ideal medium for this, as the audience and the characters on the screen can experience direct relationships while time axes can be turned all ways. We can mobilise greater energy for feminist causes when we know the achievements of different feminist positions outside our own radius.

Description of Festival
https://frauenfilmfest.com/en/festinfo/mission-statement/

Internationales Frauen Film Fest Dortmund+Köln is Germany’s largest forum for women in the film industry and presents outstanding films by women spanning all genres and styles. For almost 40 years the festival has played an active role in ensuring that films by women directors are seen, appreciated and celebrated. We promote the influence of women in all fields of the cinema industry, mainly as directors, but also cinematographers, producers, scriptwriters, composers, songwriters and, actors to name but a few.

Lynne Sachs: films made by a woman who… / AgX Boston Film Collective

Lynne Sachs: films made by a woman who…
AgX Boston Film Collective
February 23, 2023
Event on March 4, 2023
https://agxfilm.org/events/2023/3/4/lynne-sachs-films-made-by-a-woman-who

Lynne Sachs: films made by a woman who…

  • Saturday, March 4, 2023
  • 7:00 PM  10:00 PM
  • 144 Moody StreetBuilding 18Waltham, MA, United States (map)

A night of short films and discussion with legendary filmmaker Lynne Sachs  featuring some of her works on/about/alongside women be they daughters, mentors, idols or friends.

Lynne Sachs will attend in person for a post-screening discussion.

FILM PROGRAM – Screening order subject to change

Photograph of Wind | 4 min | 16mm | b&w and color | silent | 2001
My daughter’s name is Maya.  I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy.  As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather  – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Screened in 16mm.

Noa, Noa | 8 min | b&w and color | sound | 2006
by Lynne Sachs with Noa Street-Sachs
Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand.  Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic “Crawdad Song”.

Same Stream Twice | 4 min | 16mm | b & w and color | silent | 2012
by Lynne Sachs with Maya Street-Sachs
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.  Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her – different but somehow the same.

“And Then We Marched” | 3 min |S8mm | sound | 2017
Lynne shoots Super 8mm film of the Jan. 21 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. Lynne then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions.

Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor | 8 min | Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital | 2018
Three renowned women artists discuss their passion for filmmaking.
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.

A Year in Notes and Numbers | 4 min | video | silent | 2018
A year’s worth of to-do lists confronts the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone.

A Month of Single Frames | 4 min | color | sound | 2019
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in Cape Cod. While there, she shot 16mm film, recorded sounds and kept a journal.  In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her Duneshack materials to Lynne and invited her to make a film.  “While editing the film, the words on the screen came to me in a dream. I was really trying to figure out a way to talk to the experience of solitude that Barbara had had, how to be there with her somehow through the time that we would all share together watching her and the film.  My text is a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces at once.”

Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home| 3 min | 16mm | b&w | sound | 2020
In July 1971, avant-garde writer and language poet Bernadette Mayer produced Memory, a multimedia project in which she shot one roll of 35mm film each day and kept a daily journal. In honor of the project’s compilation and release as a book, Lynne Sachs embarks on a study of the memory and language of place. Journeying to Mayer’s childhood home in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens, Sachs pays homage to Mayer in a collage of architecture, light, and rhythm. 

Maya at 24| 4 min | 16mm | b&w | sound | 2021
with editing and animation by Rebecca Shapass
music by Kevin T. Allen
Lynne Sachs films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle – clockwise – as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age.

 Total Running Time: 42 min.

Doors open at 6:30PM – Show at 7:00PM
Seating is first-come, first served.
Admission is free, however a $5-10 suggested donation is encouraged. Donations will be split between the guest artist and AgX. Donations help support future film programming at AgX.

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems / The Flowchart Foundation

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems – a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop, with Lynne Sachs
The Flowchart Foundation
Workshops on February 28 & March 7, 2023
https://www.flowchartfoundation.org/text-kitchen
Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/frames-and-stanzas-video-poems-with-lynne-sachs-tickets-503517894577

The Flow Chart Foundation’s Text Kitchen is a series of hands-on workshops providing writers and other art-makers with opportunities for deep exploration into poetry and interrelated forms of expression.

UP NEXT:

Frames and Stanzas: Video Poems
a virtual filmmaking and poetry writing workshop, with Lynne Sachs

Tuesday, February 28 & Tuesday, March 7 (registration includes both sessions) 6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT) on Zoom

When award-winning Brooklyn filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs first discovered The Flow Chart Foundation’s enthusiasm for poetry as a conduit for an interplay with other artistic modes, she knew that we would be a great place to offer a workshop that would nourish a deeply engaged dialogue between the written word and the image.In this two-part virtual workshop, Sachs will share insights and experiences she has in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words over the course of two three-hour evening meetings (participants must be able to attend both sessions). Lynne will guide the workshop on a creative journey that will include writing several poems in conjunction with shooting moving or still images. Lynne has always been fascinated by the conversation between large-scale public events beyond our control and our subsequent internal responses to those experiences. Her workshop will build itself around this public/private convergence. 

We encourage those with backgrounds in either or both poetry and image-making to sign up. Participants will need only a smartphone for creating their short films. Because creative collaboration between participants is a vital part of the experience, Lynne will carefully pair participants based on a questionnaire sent after registering. Note that this is not a tech-focused workshop, though some basic tech instruction will be shared. Lynne’s virtual workshop will include the screening of some of her own recent short film poems, including “Starfish Aorta Colossus” and “Swerve” (2015, 2022 made with poet Paolo Javier), “A Month of Single Frames” (2019), “Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home” (2020), as well as excerpts from her feature “Tip of My Tongue” (2017). Join us in this 2-week multimedia investigation of the sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences that all come together in a video poem. We could not be more delighted to be launching the Text Kitchen workshop series with this event. 

Workshop fee: $80

Queer Filters: Legacies and Artifacts / Festival International du Film d’Amiens (FIFAM)

Queer Filters: Legacies and Artifacts (Filtres queer: héritages et artifices)
Festival International du Film d’Amiens (FIFAM)
Curated by Matthias Smalbeen, Caroline Alonso, Etienne Commaux, Louise Camerlynck, and Victor Berquez
November 11, 2022
https://www.fifam.fr/en/

We are a group of five students in our second year of a cinema master’s degree in the UPJV’s University in Amiens (France). We have the opportunity to be charged by the FIFAM (Festival International du Film d’Amiens) and by its artistic director, Marie-France Aubert, to organize a carte blanche during the festival. Our screening will take place on the 12th of November and takes part in a partnership between our University and the festival.

So, we got the idea to show three works that could create a visual history of lesbian and queer films and representations.

We would love to show to the public during the festival A Month of Single Frames by Lynne Sachs.

English translation of poster:

CARte blanche M2 Cinema, UPJV

Caroline Alonso, Victore Berquez, Louise Camerlynck, Etienne Commaux, Matthias SMalbeen

A Month of Single Frames and Les Démons de Dorothy
Followed by a discussion with Alexis Langlois

Queer filters: Legacies and Artifices

A Month of Single Frames, Lynne Sachs

“Barbara Hammer, famous lesbian experimental filmmaker, begins her own dying process by revisiting her personal archives. She donates some of her images, sounds and writings to filmmaker and friend Lynne Sachs and invites her to direct her own film with this material.”

Dorothy’s Demons, Alexis Langlois

“Director Dorothy is unleashing on a script, when a call from her producer breaks the mood: enough queer comedies, it’s time to start making mainstream films! To avoid sinking into despair, Dorothy seeks solace in the Romy the Vampire Slayer series.”

SATURDAY November 12, 4.45 p.m., Orson Welles cinema as part of FIFAM

Original French text:

CARTe blanche M2 Cinéma, UPJV

Caroline Alonso, Victore Berquez, Louise Camerlynck, étienne Commaux, Matthias SMalbeen

A Month of single frames et Les démons de Dorothy
Suivie d’une discussion avec Alexis Langlois

Filtres queer : héritages et artifices

A Month of Single Frames, Lynne Sachs

“Barbara Hammer, célèbre cinéaste expérimentale lesbienne, entame son propre processus de mort en revisitant ses archives personnelles. Elle donne une partie de ses images, de ses sons et de ses écrits à la cinéaste et amie Lynne Sachs et l’invite à réaliser son propre film avec ce matériel.”

Les démons de Dorothy, Alexis Langlois

“La réalisatrice Dorothy se défoule sur un scénario, lorsqu’un appel de son producteur casse l’ambiance : assez de comédies queer, il est temps de se mettre à faire des films grand public ! Pour ne pas sombrer dans le désespoir, Dorothy cherche du réconfort dans la série Romy the Vampire Slayer.”

SAMEDI 12 Novembre, 16h45, cinéma Orson Welles dans le cadre du FIFAM

Between Sight and Touch: Selected Shorts by Barbara Hammer / e-flux Screening Room


Between Sight and Touch: Selected Shorts by Barbara Hammer
e-flux Screening Room
September 19, 2022
Screening on September 22, 2022
https://www.e-flux.com/live/491616/between-sight-and-touch-selected-shorts-nbsp-by-barbara-hammer/

Introduction by Lynne Sachs

“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.

​​For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Category

Film, Sexuality & Eroticism, Feminism

Subject

Experimental Film, Video Art, Queer Art & Theory

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.”

Affairs of the Art: This is How I See You / dotdotdot – Open Air Kurzfilmfestival

Affairs of the Art: This is How I See You
dotdotdot – Open Air Kursfilmfestival
August 8, 2022
https://dotdotdot.at/programm/this-is-how-i-see-you/

SEKUNDENARBEITEN
Christiana Perschon, Österreich 2021, 14 min

*WOMEN (VALIE)
Karin Fisslthaler, Österreich 2021, 7:30 min

DAS BIN NICHT ICH, DAS IST EIN BILD VON MIR
Christiana Perschon, Österreich 2021, 9:30 min

BEATRICE GIBSON TO BARBARA LODEN, NINA MENKES AND BETTE GORDON
Beatrice Gibson, Großbritannien 2022, 4 min

DIANA TOUCEDO TO DANIÈLE HUILLET
Diana Toucedo, Spanien 2022, 8 min

*WOMEN (NICO)
Karin Fisslthaler, Österreich 2021, 2:30 min

A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES
Lynne Sachs, USA 2019, 14 min

About the Affairs of the Art program

This Maria Lassing-like express lesson on the history of art takes us directly into the heart of this year’s focus program, searching for propitious places from which creativity emerges. After all, creativity is essential for dealing with the daily struggle between coping with everyday life, inspiration crises, striving for recognition, self-marketing and self-optimization pressure. How could all that be reconciled with an artist’s own identity? Which subversive methods can help to skirt the laws of the art world that are so hostile to art? Four film nights – with a special focus on the fight for gender equality that artists have waged for future generations – afford resistive considerations and creative strategies for self-empowerment.

After the rain, magic happened. 💜

What a memorable night! A heartfelt thank you to 80 (!) people who were holding out in the rain with us to see the short film program THIS IS HOW I SEE YOU from our focus program AFFAIRS OF THE ART on the big screen in the garden cinema of @volkskundemuseumwien.

Timing could not have been better: Right after the start of the film screening the rain stopped and we enjoyed magical encounters on screen as well as a film talk with Christiana Perschon and Karin Fisslthaler after the screening.

The film program featured seven short films by women filmmakers paying tribute to iconic women artists and filmmakers who have waged a fight for artistic autonomy and gender equality for future generations: Lieselott Beschorner, VALIE EXPORT, Karin Mack, Barbara Loden, Nina Menkes, Bette Gordon, Danièle Huillet, Nico and Barbara Hammer.