The microcinema as we know it today began in 1994 when Rebecca Barten and David Sherman, filmmakers and “accidental neologists,” started operating Total Mobile Home microCINEMA illegally out of the basement of their rented San Francisco apartment, building benches that seated thirty and cutting a projection booth into a hole in the wall. Small informal cinematheques and film clubs had, of course, existed since the beginnings of cinema. What Barten and Sherman brought was not only a practice, but also an ethos that stressed the values and benefits of the smaller-scale, and spoke to a generation dissatisfied with the impersonal limitations of older, top-down models. “As filmmakers reliant upon our own funds, functioning totally out of the mainstream, we wanted to create an intimate non-institutional space right in our basement, where the distance between film and audience and artist and audience might be activated and transformed,” they later reported. “Our operating budget was extremely low—we used discarded, donated, and rebuilt equipment, made our own seats, designed our own posters and calendars, and did publicity word-of-mouth and through the local free papers. Our standards for any particular show were extremely high—even at our tiny scale, we believe that we competed favorably with the corporate megaplexes in the quality of our film prints, sound system, and amenities.”
Total Mobile Home ran for four years, hosting over 120 events, often with filmmakers in person. The literally home-made cinema allowed for an intimacy impossible at traditional venues. “Our audiences responded wonderfully, often remaining well after the show to participate in all sorts of conversations that went late into the night. As small as we were, we got correspondences from all over the world, from people passing through San Francisco, curious about or interested in bringing their own films to our space.” The model was designed as self-sustaining, and their space never received grants; its economics depended on Barten and Sherman’s total commitment and the reciprocal support of their audiences. “With a suggested $5 donation at the door, we managed to ‘float’ our cinema, meeting our modest operating costs and offering visiting artists $100 honorariums (which filmmakers incidentally often refused as excited as they were by such a special exhibition context). We used the word TOTAL as the first word in many of our programs because of the built-in rebellion factor: TOTAL war, TOTAL failure, TOTAL rube goldberg, TOTAL tantric tantrums, and TOTAL ARTIST MONSTER were some examples.”
In a rare East Coast appearance, Barten and Sherman will join us at Light Industry to survey the history of Total Mobile Home, through a program that includes films by Guy Sherwin, Lynne Sachs, and Scott Stark; restored video documentation of Luther Price performing Clown 2: Scary Transformation and Stuart Sherman performing A Christmas Spectacle; footage of salons with Bruce Baillie and Sidney Peterson; George Kuchar’s video portrait of the space, Cellar Sinema; a re-examination of TMH’s Home Mail Project, that included photographs by Carolee Schneemann, Robert Frank, and Rudy Burckhardt; as well as recorded oral histories from Brian Frye, Steve Anker, and other eyewitnesses.
Tickets – Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.
B-Roll Zine Bazaar will feature a curated selection of artists and book-makers offering zines, prints, and ephemera. The bazaar will take place in the Mana Legacy cinema room on the first floor of Mana Contemporary, with a 6-hour long screening of silent diary films happening simultaneously. Vendors and filmmakers TBA in early October.
About B-Roll Press & Zine Bazaar
B-Roll Press is a micropress founded by Saint Piñero and Sage Ó Tuama in 2020, publishing zines by photographers and filmmakers who focus on the personal and poetic from the fringes of society. B-Roll is one facet of Saint and Sage’s shared curatorial practice which also encompasses Film Diary NYC.
The first edition of B-Roll Zine Bazaar will be an experiment that merges our film curation with our interest in self-publishing.
Places, Politics, Performances: Diaries from the Film-Makers’ Cooperative
Curated by Matt McKinzie and Robert Schneider for B-Roll Press’ Zine Bazaar, organized by Saint Piñero and Sage Ó Tuama
Join us at Mana Contemporary on SUNDAY, OCTOBER 20th, at 12pm, for a program of silent diary films from the FMC’s collection, curated by Matt McKinzie and Robert Schneider for B-Roll Zine Bazaar, organized by Saint Piñero and Sage Ó Tuama of Film Diary NYC!
PROGRAM:
I. Diaries of Performance:
She/Va, Marjorie Keller, Super 8mm-to-digital, 3 minutes, 1973
How a Sculpture Eats a Painting, Marja Samsom, Super 8mm-to-digital, 5 minutes, 1975
Picnic, Marja Samsom, Super 8mm-to-digital, 3 minutes, 1975
Hoover, Marja Samsom, Super 8mm-to-digital, 3 minutes, 1977
II. The Personal is Political:
The Jitters, Lynne Sachs, 16mm-to-digital, 3 minutes, 2023
Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts, Edward Owens, 16mm-to-digital, 6 minutes, 1966
Elegy in the Streets, Jim Hubbard, 16mm-to-digital, 30 minutes, 1989
III. Out of the City and Into the Countryside:
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Jonas Mekas, 16mm-to-digital, 16 minutes, 2003
Home Movies / NYC to San Diego, Taylor Mead, 16mm-to-digital, 13 minutes, 1968
Sidewalks, Marie Menken, 16mm-to-digital, 6 minutes, 1966
Lights, Marie Menken, 16mm-to-digital, 6 minutes, 1966
Excursion, Marie Menken, 16mm-to-digital, 5 minutes, 1968
Notebook, Marie Menken, 16mm-to-digital, 11 minutes, 1962
Farm Diary, Gordon Ball, Super 8mm-to-digital, 64 minutes, 1964
Total Run Time: 174 minutes.
*To be screened twice during the zine bazaar.
Notes by Matt McKinzie and Robert Schneider:
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative is honored to present a three-hour program of silent diary films for B-Roll Press’ Zine Bazaar at Mana Contemporary, organized by Saint Piñero and Sage Ó Tuama of Film Diary NYC. One of the oldest and largest distributors of avant-garde films, video, and media art in the world, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (FMC) was founded in New York City in 1961 by a group of 22 experimental moving image artists aiming to cultivate an alternative space for filmmakers working outside of the mainstream. With works like Walden (1969) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972), FMC co-founder Jonas Mekas helped pioneer the “diary film,” defined by Film Diary NYC as “experimental, autobiographical films that capture the personal history and daily experiences of the filmmaker.” In presenting this collection of diaristic work, we hope to echo Mekas’ and Film Diary’s mission of championing art that illuminates its makers’ interiorities, observations, day-to-day experiences, and the spaces and communities in which they live and work.
Split into three sections, this lineup highlights work from the FMC’s holdings that spans from its inception in the early 1960s to as recent as 2023. The first section examines the role of performance and role-playing in personal filmmaking. In former FMC director Marjorie Keller’s Super-8mm found footage/home movie She/Va, a young dancer is “re-choreographed through film editing.” Subsequently, the Super-8mm self-portraits How a Sculpture Eats a Painting, Picnic, and Hoover find performance artist Marja Samson acting out micro-narratives in disparate everyday settings, in turn presenting a “conceptual museum fantasy,” a “Georges Méliès-influenced scene interrupted by a tiger,” and a “glamorous resistance on housekeeping.” That Samson’s and Keller’s films engage with gender roles and notions of femininity and performance feels pertinent considering they were made during the height of the second-wave feminist movement in the 1970s.
Lynne Sachs’ recent 16mm short The Jitters is classified by the artist as a “performance,” thereby bridging the first section with the second, which consists of diaristic work that exemplifies the adage “the personal is political.” In The Jitters, Sachs and her partner Mark Street “jitter” around their bedroom in the nude, as captured by Sachs’ Bolex. Sachs writes: “I wanted to create a film with my Bolex 16mm camera that reflects who I am at this moment in my life. I bought my camera in 1987, used. It has lived with me for four decades, and it has witnessed pretty much every aspect of my existence.”
Equal parts playful and revelatory, The Jitters is as much a performance as it is a radical celebration of bodies, intimacy, aging, and longevity — the longevity not only of Sachs’ and Street’s partnership, but of Sachs’ four-decade relationship with her filmic apparatus and its role in documenting her life and the lives of her friends and family.
Friends and family are recurrent in the work of Edward Owens, a Black, gay filmmaker who was, for decades, written out of the history of the American avant-garde despite being a key member of the New American Cinema movement and a protégé of both Jonas Mekas and Gregory Markopoulos. His mother and friends appear frequently in his work, though perhaps most indelibly in his 1966 evocation Private Imaginings and Narrative Facts. Made at the height of the Civil Rights movement, Owens’ intermingling of dreamlike footage of Black and white relatives and peers feels groundbreaking, as does the tender intimacy with which he conveys them. Owens’ footage of his mother in particular, engaging in quotidian activities at home (resting, conversing, smoking a cigarette, having a glass of water), offers a rare antidote to the images of suffering and subjugation experienced by Black people that were rife in mainstream American filmmaking throughout the 1960s.
While Owens does not explicitly contextualize these private moments from his personal life within a broader historical or political moment, Elegy in the Streets sees Jim Hubbard directly correlate home footage of his partner Rober Jacoby (who passed away due to complications from AIDS) with 16mm footage of AIDS marches, protests, and vigils in the 1980s. Hubbard notes: “The film attempts to create a filmic rendering of the elegiac form, utilizing a procession of mourners, a catalog of flowers, a visit to the underworld and other poetic techniques… The film is nearly 30 minutes long and silent… that is a lot to ask of an audience, but it is silent for several crucial reasons. First, it is a literalization of the phrase ‘Silence = Death.’ Second, I live in New York City, a very loud place to live and, for me, silence is a great luxury. Third, I believe that film is a visual medium and sound is typically used to manipulate and limit the emotional response of the audience. I want each member of the audience to experience the film uniquely and personally. Silence forces the viewer to really look at what there is to see.”
In addition to “exploring the AIDS crisis from both a personal and a political perspective,” Elegy in the Streets functions as a city symphony film — composed of images of New York City, its residents, and its infrastructure during a significant historical period. This designation bridges the second section of the program with the third and final one, which presents a suite of diary films exploring lived environments.
In effect, this section charts a filmic journey out of the city and into the countryside, beginning with Jonas Mekas’ Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which amalgamates footage Mekas shot while first living in Williamsburg in 1950 with footage of the same neighborhood that Mekas shot in 1972. Critic Max Goldberg describes the film (which was not assembled and placed into distribution until 2003) as a “pocket-sized city symphony” in which “bygone Brooklyn is richly evoked in the everyday life of the street: the elevated train, Lithuanian storefronts and especially in the faces of children surprised to encounter this man with a movie camera.” Similar to Mekas’ Williamsburg, Brooklyn is Taylor Mead’s Home Movies / NYC to San Diego, which takes the viewer on, as Mead himself described it, “The Grand Tour” through a “millennium of culture” and was shot on the “cheapest, littlest hand-held camera I could buy.”
Four shorts by Marie Menken follow, wherein the trailblazing avant-garde filmmaker documents (to quote John Hawkins) “the magic patterns in the pavements of a city” (Sidewalks) and abstractly renders displays of Christmas lights on a wintry nighttime stroll (Lights), before embarking on a sped-up boat ride outside of New York (Excursion) and landing in a sylvan environment of trees and leaves far beyond the metropolis (Notebook). Gordon Ball’s hour-long personal documentary Farm Diary (which concludes the program) continues that sylvan journey, and features “ghostly strangers” (among them: Peter and Julius Orlovsky, Candy O’Brien, and Allen Ginsberg) on Ball’s mountaintop farm during, to quote Ginsberg, “the archetypal first year back to the land.”
TENGGER is a family of traveling musicians. The pair, Itta from South Korea and Marqido from Japan, create psychedelic New-Age drone magic using vocals, Indian harmonium, toy instruments, synthesizers and electronics. The duo started out as “10”, but since the birth of their son RAAI in 2012 (who accompanies them on tour and contributes vocals, synths, and also dances on stage), they have rechristened themselves TENGGER; which means “unlimited expanse of sky” in Mongolian, to mark the expansion of the family.
The family’s annual pilgrimages influence every aspect of their art.
FOREVER OVERHEAD
Forever Overhead is the meeting of head and sky, the in-between space where boundaries blur and anything seems possible. Seeking to recapture the utopian imagination of childhood wastelands, the brother-sister duo explore the infinite variations of songwriting and improvisation, weaving a pop-folk-noise landscape rich in contrasts and ambitious harmonies. With two voices, and playing every instrument they come across, their music is made up of suspended moments where sweetness rubs shoulders with the strange, and nothing is ever quite ordinary.
PROJECTION
“A Month of Single Frames” by Lynne Sachs 14mn
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer took up an artist residency in a shack with no running water or electricity. There, she shot films, recorded sounds and kept a diary. For decades, these documents remained in her personal archive, until, as she neared the end of her life in 2018, she entrusted her friend, renowned American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, with the task of making a film from them. Through her own film, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places the text on screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.
Join us at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts for a free invite-only screening of six 16mm prints of films by provocateur, collagist and found-footage whiz BRUCE CONNER. Hosted by New York filmmakers Mark Street and Lynne Sachs (XY Chromosome Project).
Thursday, May 16, 2024 6 – 8 PM (doors open at 5:30, limited seating) 40 Lincoln Center Plaza
Film Study Center, 3rd Floor | Free
Drawing byBrendan Winick
Street and Sachs first met in San Francisco in the late 1980s when Bruce Conner’s aura as an avant-garde filmmaker was legendary. They both watched everything he’d made, including “A Movie”, his brazen, sardonic salute to the detritus of popular culture and were smitten. “Report” is a kick in the gut, an indictment of media saturation, and a surprisingly elegiac commentary on the Kennedy assassination. “Valse Triste” moves beyond irony to create a dream-like tender world of the imagination. “Marilyn Times Five” pushes all our buttons, simultaneously titillating and infuriating the feminist in both of us. “Mongoloid” pre-curses the MTV era and stands as one of the first rock videos ever made. “Cosmic Ray” animates a Ray Charles tune with a witty mélange of unexpected recycled images. Please join us for this evening in celebration of the work of film artist Bruce Conner, an adept dumpster-diver into the trashcan of history!
LYNNE’S NOTES My background as Bruce’s intern in 1985: Trying to re-splice his films. Driving him around SF in his Cadillac convertible to look for geiger counters to buy – fear of radioactivity Love of gospel music Lunch Fear of dying My children’s birth Helping him interpret highbrow texts on his work Story of MoMA show His attendance at premiere of Sermons and Sacred Pictures
A MOVIE 1958, 16mm, b&w/sound, 12min. Music by Ottorino Respighi “Pines of Rome” (Pini di Roma)
“… a montage of found materials from fact (newsreels) and fiction (old movies). Cliches and horrors make a rapid collage in which destruction and sex follow each other in images of pursuit and falling until finally a diver disappears through a hole in the bottom of the sea – the ultimate exit. The entire thing is prefaced by a girl from a shady movie lazily undressing. By the time A MOVIE is over she has retrospectively become a Circe or Prime Mover.” – Brian O’Doherty, The New York Times” Using only found footage, Conner has created one of the most extraordinary films ever made. One begins by laughing at the juxtaposition of cowboys and Indians, elephants and tanks, but soon the metaphor of association becomes serious, as we realize we are witnessing the apocalypse.” – Freude
REPORT 1963-1967, 16mm, b&w/sound, 13min. Soundtrack: “Four Days That Shocked The World” (1963)
“Society thrives on violence, destruction, and death no matter how hard we try to hide it with immaculately clean offices, the worship of modern science, or the creation of instant martyrs. From the bullfight arena to the nuclear arena we clamor for the spectacle of destruction. The crucial link in REPORT is that JFK with his great PT 109 was just as much a part of the destruction game as anyone else. Losing is a big part of playing games.” – David Mosen, Film Quarterly
“Conner is the most brilliant film-editor of the avant-garde. In REPORT he has used newsreel footage and radio tapes of President Kennedy’s assassination to produce a thirteen minute movie that captures unbearably, yet exhilaratingly, the tragic absurdity of that day.” – Jack Kroll, Newsweek
VALSE TRISTE 1978, 16mm, sepia/sound, 5min.
“VALSE TRISTE is frankly and gracefully autobiographical of Conner’s Kansas boyhood. Here, the period of the 1940s of his source materials parallels his own life experiences.” A line of dark, wet cars file across a flooded road; a man and a boy ceremoniously burn leaves; a businessman at his desk turns to look over his shoulder to the photo of a locomotive on the wall behind him; a medium shot of an engineer in the cab of his locomotive; a shard of rock shears from a quarry wall and plunges into water …” – Anthony Reveaux
Nostalgic recreation of dreamland Kansas 1947 in Toto. Theme music from I Love a Mystery radio programs (Jack, Doc, and Reggie confront the enigmatic lines of railroad trains, sheep, black cars, women exercising in an open field, grandma at the farm …) Meanwhile, a 13-year-old boy confronts reality. Sibelius grows old in Finland and becomes a national monument.
MARILYN TIMES FIVE 1968-1973, 16mm, b&w/sound, 13.5min. With Arline Hunter
“A young woman, allegedly Marilyn Monroe, is seen with pitiless scrutiny in the arena of an old girlie film. The reiteration of five cycles rotates the commodity of her moon-pale body as her song repeats five times on the sound track … ‘I’m through with love.’ The last shot terminates a final reward of stillness as she is seen crumpled on the floor.” – Anthony Reveaux
The image, or Anima, of Marilyn Monroe was not owned by Norma Jean any more than it was owned by Arline Hunter. Images can sometimes have more power than the person they represent. Some cultures consider that an image steals the soul or spirit of the person depicted. They will dwindle and die. MARILYN TIMES FIVE is an equation not intended to be completed by the film alone. The viewer completes the equation.
MONGOLOID 1978, 16mm, b&w/sound, 3.5min. Music by DEVO “Mongoloid”
A documentary film exploring the manner in which a determined young man overcame a basic mental defect and became a useful member of society. Insightful editing techniques reveal the dreams, ideals and problems that face a large segment of the American male population. Educational. Background music written and performed by the DEVO orchestra.
Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, happier than you and me. Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, and it determined what he could see. Mongoloid he was a mongoloid, one chromosome too many. And he wore a hat, and he had a job And he brought home the bacon so that no one knew
COSMIC RAY 1961, 16mm, b&w/sound, 4.5min. Music by Ray Charles “What’d I Say” Live from Atlanta (1959)
“COSMIC RAY seems like a reckless collage of fast moving parts: comic strips, dancing girls, flashing lights. It is the dancing girl – hardly dressed, stripping or nude – which provides the leitmotiv for the film. Again and again she appears – sandwiched between soldiers, guns, and even death in the form of a skull positioned between her legs. And if the statement equates sex with destruction, the cataclysm is a brilliant one, like an exploding firecracker, and one which ends the world with a cosmic bang. Of course, the title also refers to musician Ray Charles whose art Conner visually transcribes onto film as a potent reality, tough and penetrating in its ability to affect some pretty basic animal instincts. But if such is the content of the film – that much of our behavior consists of bestiality – the work as a whole stands as insight rather than indictment.” – Carl Belz, Film Culture
2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV. In “From the Outside In”, we traverse Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.
Performing the Real Fri June 7 at 7 PM Q&A with Sachs & Lizzie Olesker (co-director of The Washing Society) moderated by filmmaker Sam Green
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst. Special guest: Paolo Javier (Swerve, poet collaborator).
Fossil, 1986 12 min • The Washing Society 2018 44 min • Swerve, 2022 8 min
In this intimate artist talk and workshop, Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing.
Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Ladies Wear, 1983 3 min• Tornado, 2002 4 min • Your Day is My Night, 2013 63 min
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
The Small Ones, 2007 3 min • The Task of the Translator, 2010 10 min • E•pis•to•la•ry: Letter to Jean Vigo, 2021 5 min • Investigation of a Flame, 2001 45 min
Heavy with chains that bind, this program of films magnifies Sachs’ feminist gaze through her personal diaries, family portraits, and women’s testimonies.
Drawn & Quartered, 1987 4 min • The House of Science, 1991 30 min. • And Then We Marched, 3 min. 2017 • A Year in Notes and Numbers, 1987 4 min. • Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, 2018 9 min. • Maya at 24, 2021 4 min. • Contractions, 2024 12 min • We Continue to Speak, 2024 4 min
Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Accra Shepp (member of TOMT cast) moderated by Tabitha Jackson
In A Month of Single Frames (2019, 14 min), Lynne explores filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s experience of solitude. Her text on screen brings them together in multiple spaces and times. In Tip of My Tongue (2017. 84 min.), she gathers together 12 fellow New Yorkers — born across several continents in the 1960s — to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they examine the ways in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are.
Conversation with Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, and Ira Sachs
Film About a Father Who (2020, 74 min) is Lynne’s attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, her cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, she allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. In The Jitters (2023, 3 min), Lynne performs with her partner filmmaker Mark Street, celebrating who they are independently and together.
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators, and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum.” – Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema
“I walked into Downtown Community Television (now DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film. I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.” – Lynne Sachs
Individual tickets for screenings are $16, and $8 for DCTV Members. The artist talk is $20, and $10 for DCTV Members. A Series Pass grants access to all screenings for $80, and $40 for DCTV Members – artist talk is sold separately. A special print monograph will be included with the purchase of a Series Pass, and on sale at Firehouse.
Founded in 1972, DCTV (Downtown Community TV) has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. In September 2022, DCTV opened the Firehouse Cinema, a documentary theater where filmmakers and film lovers can come together in appreciation of nonfiction film.
Thank you to DCTV, Film-Makers Cooperative, Cinema Guild, and Sylvia Savadjian.
The 19th edition of Ambulante Documentary Tour dedicates this year a retrospective to American filmmaker Lynne Sachs, in collaboration with the Cineteca Nacional México, the Laboratorio Experimental de Cine, the Centro de Cultura Digital and Kino Rebelde. For the first time a selection of Sachs’ work is brought to Mexico, a must-see reference in avant-garde cinema in recent years. His work, as personal -sometimes even intimate- as it is political, is characterized by an uncompromising aesthetic search and experimentation that resorts to documentary, essay, collage and an endless number of formal and technical explorations.
A pioneer of experimental documentary in New York, Sachs’ work takes cinema into the realm of the poetic and beyond reflection. She introduces us to a personal and tireless search; she questions concepts so deeply rooted in the personal, the affective and the political. The border between work and life blurs, disappears and is molded into vital events where the body, death, war and feminism become vivid concepts that the sensitive and critical gaze of the artist questions.
There are many ways to approach Lynne Sachs’ poetics. On the one hand, her contemplation and respect for life allow things to be as they are; on the other hand, she is driven by a radical political action where her voice merges with other voices, where her gaze generates a collective rhythm: the poetic cry that cries out for kinder political places for all. In making the selection of films for the programs, we decided to focus on the theme of the family, as the tension between the biographical and the non-biographical brings us closer to the two main veins in Sachs’ work.
The section is comprised of two feature films: Your Day is My Night, a film that explores the collective history of the Chinese community in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues and theatrical pieces; and Film About a Father Who, in which Sachs films his father over 35 years to better understand her bond with him and her siblings.
In addition, two programs of short films are presented: the first is composed of endearing works about people intimately linked to Sachs’ own life, such as Work at the Window, Atlanta Thirty-two Years Later, A Month of Stills, With Wind in My Hair, And Then We Marched, Maya at Twenty-four, A Year in Notes and Numbers, and Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor.
The second program has a filmic character, as it is composed of films that will be screened in 16 mm: Attracted and Divided, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, Which Side is East: Vietnam Notebooks, A Biography of Lilit, Photograph of the Wind and The Nerves.
In these programs the political is transformed into a cinema of formal exploration, with no limits to perception. The materiality, which is detonated from the intimate, carries out dislocations from experimentation and critical thinking generates ruptures from the formal. The world is seen through the rhythm of a body moving in circles, as in Maya at twenty-four where the filmmaker films her daughter Maya at six, sixteen and twenty-four years old running in circles around her mother, as if she were propelling herself in time towards the future. Lynne reacts poetically and politically with movement to the systematic and violent territorialization that acts on our own bodies.
Manuel Trujillo “Morris Experimental Film Laboratory
The retrospective is made up of two programs of short films -one screened in film and the other in digital format-, and the following feature films:
Your Day is My Night | Your Day is My Night | Lynne Sachs | United States | 2013 | Chinese, English and Spanish | Color | 64′. Several immigrants living in a small apartment nestled in the heart of New York’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval.
Film About a Father Who | Lynne Sachs | United States | 2020 | English | Color | 74′. For 35 years, Lynne Sachs recorded her father to understand the ties that connected her to him and her sisters. She discovered much more than she imagined.
The Filmic Invocations Program consists of the following titles:
Drawn and Quartered
The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts
Which Way is East: Notebooks from Vietnam
A biography of Lilith
Photograph of the wind
The Jitters
And the Digital Invocations Program is made up of the following titles:
Window Work
Atalanta: 32 years later
A month of single frames
With the wind in my hair
And Then We March
Maya at twenty-four
A year in notes and numbers
Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor
Program of activities in Mexico City:
Thursday, April 11
Cineteca Nacional Mexico
17:00 h : Master class : Frames and stanzas. Lynne Sachs on film and poetry.
Lecturer: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
19:00 h | Function + Q&A | Your Day Is My Night
Lecturer: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Friday, April 12
Cineteca Nacional Mexico
7:00 p.m. : Screening + Q&A : Film about a father who is a father.
Featuring: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Saturday, April 13
Centro de Cultura Digital
11:00 h | Workshop: Opening the family album*.
By: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
*Only for registered and accepted participants.
16:00 h | Function + Q&A | Digital Invocations Program
Participant: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
Sunday, April 14th
Digital Culture Center
Day | Invocations
11:00 h | Workshop: Opening the Family Album*.
By: Lynne Sachs, filmmaker.
*Only for registered and accepted participants.
4:00 p.m.: Filmic Invocations Program.
18:00 h | Screening of the results of the workshop “Opening the family album”.
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 6, 2024 6pm – 8pm Note: The Westbeth Gallery will open at 6pm on that day.
Westbeth Gallery 55 Bethune Street, NY, NY Gallery hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 1-6 pm and by appointment
Westbeth Gallery is pleased to present Women on the Verge, a group exhibition of artists affiliated with the29.art, a digital platform seeking to create opportunities for self-identified women working in the arts. It is a group of more than twenty-nine well-established, mid-career, and emerging artists, diverse in practice, medium, age, ethnicity, and background.
The exhibition is curated by Kathy Brew and features films, art, poetry, and performances by the following artists:
Kathy Brew Yoshiko Chuma Martha Edelheit Michelle Handelman Julia Heyward jennifer jazz Pamela Lawton Stefani Mar Aline Mare Lucia Maria Minervini Helen Oji Janet Panetta Jeanne Quinn Melinda Ring Felice Rosser Lynne Sachs Susan Salinger MM Serra Shelly Silver Pamela Sneed Lila Zemborain
This Sat., Feb. 17, at 12:00 p.m., we’ll be celebrating our annual Presidents Day weekend event, the Welcome to Boog City 17.5 Arts Festival. We will livestream the goings-on to
Join us for the launch of poet Rachel Edelman’s new collection of poems, Dear Memphis, on Saturday, February 17, at 144 Montague St and via Zoom! Doors will open for a wine reception for in-person guests at 6 PM and readings will begin at 7 PM. Lynne Sachs and Diane Exavier will open for Edelman. Book signing to follow.
Note that by attending this event, you agree to abide by our code of conduct and COVID-19 policy below. Effective January 8, 2024, all event attendeesexcept readers at a safe distance on stageare required to wear masks due to the current rise in cases in NYC. Our full policy can be found at the end of the event description. Brooklyn Poets reserves the right to dismiss from our programs any participant found to be in violation of these policies. Thank you for respecting our community.
About Dear Memphis
“What do I know of exile?” asks the speaker in Dear Memphis, standing inside the colliding geographies and intimate economies of the American South. Offering a direct address to the city where the poet grew up, this collection explores the displacement and belonging of a Jewish family in Memphis, Tennessee, alongside their histories of community and environment. The simultaneous richness and spareness of Edelman’s poems sing with their attention to the particular body and what it cannot carry, what it cannot put down. Through letters, visual art, city documents, and dialogue, Dear Memphis excavates ancestry, inheritance and the ecological possibility of imagining a future.
About the Author
Rachel Edelman is a Jewish poet raised in Memphis, Tennessee, who writes into diasporic living. Dear Memphis, published by River River Books, is their debut collection of poems. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, the Seventh Wave, the Threepenny Review, West Branch and many other journals. They have received material support from City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, the Academy of American Poets, Mineral School, Crosstown Arts, and Tin House, and finalist commendations from the Adrienne Rich Award, the Pink Poetry Prize, and the National Poetry Series. Edelman earned a BA in English and geology from Amherst College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She teaches language arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where embodiment and care root her personal, poetic and pedagogical practice.
About the Opening Acts
Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet who grew up in Memphis and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Over the last four decades, she has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of documentary, performance, and collage. Her films and poems explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences, often from a personal, self-reflexive point of view. With each film, Sachs investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself. Her early works on celluloid offer a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her vision ever since. Early in her career, Lynne returned to her hometown to make Sermons and Sacred Pictures (1989), a documentary on the life and work of Reverend L.O. Taylor, an African American minister and filmmaker from Memphis. Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, and Sundance. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival, Festival International de Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival.
Diane Exavier is a writer, theatermaker and educator working at the intersection of performance and poetry. She is author of the poetry collection The Math of Saint Felix and the chapbook Teaches of Peaches. Diane concerns herself with what she recognizes as the 4 L’s: love, loss, legacy and land. Her work has been presented with the New Group, BRIC Arts, Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place and more. She has been commissioned for new play development by the Sloan Foundation, the New Group, and Lucille Lortel Theatre. Most recently, Diane coedited the 2023 new critical edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane. A 2021 Jerome Foundation finalist, Diane lives and works in Brooklyn.
Tuesday, December 19, 2023 18:00 The program is carried out in cooperation with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Rijeka, Croatia. Entrance is free.
Kino umjetnica (Cinema artist) is a complementary film and video program conceived as a side program to The Visible Ones exhibition, which will be realized from December 15, 2023 to February 6, 2024 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, as a project of inter-museum collaboration between five museums (MSU Zagreb, MMSU Rijeka , Art Gallery Split, Art Gallery Dubrovnik, Museum of Fine Arts Osijek). The exhibition presents an overview of the recent work of female artists, in order to raise awareness of the need for equal visibility and representation of female artists in museum collections and exhibition programs. The production of female authors covers a wide range of topics and sensibilities and represents more than ninety female authors, and is the result of research into the representation of female artists in the art collections of museum institutions. At the same time, it presents certain aspects and mapping of the contemporary artistic practice of female authors in Croatia.
The Kino umjenica screening program is performed in the form of a dislocated dispositif from the museum’s white cube into a cinema hall or black box, in order to further expand the context and direct the focus towards the rich and diverse audiovisual production of female artists, which is formed precisely in the intermediate space of contemporary art and film. It includes two programs Topographies, Spaces, Gaps (MMSU 16.12) and Woman in the Mirror (Art-kino 19.12).
As part of the Woman in the Mirror program, three films will be shown – The Cat is Always a Woman directed by Martina Meštrović, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor by Lynne Sachs and Woman in the Mirror by Jagoda Kaloper.
Correspondence between Programmer Branka Bencic and Lynne:
“Dear Lynne, hope you are well I am getting back in touch since I would like to organize a screening and bring back together works CAROLEE, BARBARA AND GUNVOR by Lynne and A Cat is Always Female by Martina Mestrovic and Tanja Vujasinovic along with a experimental documentary by Jagoda Kaloper Woman in a Mirror (2011, 47 min) It is 1 cinema screening. It would take place at Art Kino in Rijeka, Croatia on Dec 19th, 2023…
Jagoda Kaloper was an actress and visual artist working with Jugoslav directors such as Dusan Makavejev, starring in WR Mysteries of Organism, Krsto Papic etc… This is her autobiographic visual essay.
Branka Bencic”
“Hello Branka,
I am so glad that we were able to work out this screening plan for “Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor” to be included in your program Visible (visibility of woman artists in museum collections). I have now read about Jagoda Kaloper. I have seen Makavejev’s WR but I was not aware of her name until you wrote to us. The first time that I saw WR was in San Francisco in the mid 1980s and Makavejev was there in the room. I remember timidly/ boldly (not sure which?) raising my hand to ask a question from the audience. He seemed to be offended by something I said, and I remember feeling a bit embarrassed and a bit proud, all mixed into one emotion. Anyway, if you have more info on Jagoda please send it along. All the best, Lynne”
“Dear Lynne
As promised, I am sending you an essay I wrote in 2011 about Jagoda Kaloper’s film Woman in a Mirror, when the film was produced Jagoda was an amazing woman, gentle, and full of stories, she took part in the student movement in 1968, hang out in the famous marxist summer school Praxis in the island of Korčula late 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxis_School#Kor%C4%8Dula_Summer_School
she was famous actress starring in Yugoslav cinema including Makavejev
also, she was a visual artist that imagined first land art pieces in Yugoslavia and Croatia and interventions in public space in early 70s and worked as a graphic designer
Best regards
Branka”
Original Text in Croatian: Kino umjetnica komplementaran je filmski i video program zamišljen kao popratni program uz izložbu Vidljive, koja se realizira od 15. prosinca 2023. do 6. veljače 2024. u Muzeju moderne i suvremene umjetnosti, kao projekt međumuzejske suradnje pet muzeja (MSU Zagreb, MMSU Rijeka, Galerija umjetnina Split, Umjetnička galerija Dubrovnik, Muzej likovnih umjetnosti Osijek). Izložba predstavlja pregled recentnog stvaralaštva umjetnica, kako bi se osvijestila nužnost za ravnopravnom vidljivošću i zastupljenošću umjetnica u muzejskim kolekcijama i izložbenim programima. Produkcija autorica obuhvaća širok raspon tema i senzibiliteta te predstavlja više od devedeset autorica, a plod je istraživanja zastupljenosti umjetnica u umjetničkim zbirkama muzejskih institucija. Ujedno predstavlja određene aspekte i mapiranje suvremene umjetničke prakse autorica u Hrvatskoj.
Program projekcija Kino umjetnica izvodi se u obliku dislociranog dispozitiva iz muzejske bijele kocke u kino dvoranu ili black box, kako bi dodatno proširio kontekst i usmjerio fokus prema bogatoj i raznolikoj audiovizualnoj produkciji umjetnica koja se formira upravo u međuprostoru suvremene umjetnosti i filma. Obuhvaća dva programa Topografije, prostori, praznine (MMSU 16. 12) i Žena u ogledalu (Art-kino 19. 12).
U sklopu progrma Žena u ogledalu prikazat će se tri filma– Mačka je uvijek ženska u režiji Martine Meštrović, Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor autorice Lynne Sachs te Žena u ogledaluJagode Kaloper.
