Tag Archives: Every Fold Matters

Lynne Sachs Delivers 2022 Les Blank Lecture at the BAMPFA

My I.O.U to the Real
2022 Les Blank Lecture
Berkeley Art Museum/ Pacific Film Archive
April 6, 2022

A PDF version of the lecture is available here:Download

When Pacific Film Archive curator Kathy Geritz invited me to give the 2022 Les Blank Lecture, all of my experiences, challenges, obstacles and revelations regarding what constitutes the real came tumbling into my mind. I immediately confronted and embraced the life I’ve lead in the cosmos of the cinema, and more specifically my I.O.U, my gratitude, to that real for simply providing me with so much to think about and so much to record with my camera.

Tonight, I will share with you a selection of observations I have made in the course of creating approximately 50 films, installations, live performances and web art projects. Whether a 90 second ciné poem or an 83 minute feature, I learned early-on that my process of making films must push me to engage directly with the people with whom I’m working in a fluid and attentive way. I’ve never been truly comfortable with the term “director” or the hierarchical configuration of a movie set. I am a filmmaker who looks for other committed artists who are willing to collaborate with me in an adventure. These inventive souls are not my crew. We talk. We listen to each other. I pay them for their time and expertise. And then we set off on a journey.

Of course there are the people in front of the camera, what many documentary makers refer to as their subjects. In narrative film, these are the actors or, thinking in the aggregate, the cast. Again I find both of these monolithic terms anathema, an insult to their human presence. From my very first 16mm film “Still Life with Women and Four Objects” made in 1986, I asked the woman, the star in the film, to extract herself from “the objects” in order to shake things up for me. I wanted her to shift away from simply being a living, breathing prop. I invited her to bring something from her home that meant a great deal to her to our first day of shooting. She delivered a framed black-and-white photograph of early 20^th century feminist-anarchist Emma Goldman. At the time, I had no idea who Emma was. I quickly learned. I, and with my four minute film, were forever changed. I’d claim for the better. I’ve been listening and learning from all the people involved in my films ever since.

This leads me to another perhaps more intricate form of entangling myself in the creative process. Between 2011 and 2013, I worked with seven Chinese immigrants between the ages of 55 and 80 living in the so-called “Chinatown” areas of NYC. Together, we made “Your Day Is My Night”, a hybrid documentary on their immigration experience and their lives in the place each of them calls home. Hybrid is the keyword here, for it was my interaction with these participants that sparked me to find a completely new approach to my documentary practice. I started this project with the intention of discovering more about these people’s lives through a series of one-on-one audio interviews. Then, I turned each of these conversations into a monologue that I gave back to each person so that they could perform their own lives by both memorizing their lines and also improvising, all in a dramatic context that gave them the freedom to express themselves, and a release from the intimidation and vulnerability of not knowing what would happen next. According to the seven people in my film, this in turn gave them the liberty to play with their spoken words with whim and impetuousness, not to feel indebted to the limitations of their own historic realities. At my performers’ insistence, we ultimately moved the hybrid nature of the piece one step further. As a group, they pushed me to search for a story beyond their lives. They wanted me to make their job of articulating their experiences more interesting so I brought in one “wild card”, a Puerto Rican woman actor who would move into their shared, filmic apartment. Her arrival transformed the piece into a story that embraced each person’s immigration experience without being confined by it.

Over a two year period, we took our live performance with film to homeless shelters, museums, universities and small theaters throughout New York City. I then turned our collective work into a film. From this experience, I learned that even a more conventionally narrative film is simply a documentation of a group of people making something together. My integration of a traditional observational mode with a more theatrical engagement gave me the chance to reflect on the work I had done over 25 years earlier, as the sound recordist on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s “Surname Viet Given Name Nam”. This film also challenges monolithic notions of documentary truth. Some of you saw it in this very room when Minh-ha gave the 5^th Annual Les Blank lecture.

I also wanted to share something about the exhibition of “Your Day is My Night” which adds another layer to our conversation around collaboration both within the film’s production structure and its exhibition. The first evening that we presented this piece to an actual audience, there was a rather typical post-screening Q and A. There I stood with all of the participants in the film. When members of the audience asked these seven Chinese immigrants to the US how they felt about working on this rather experimental film, they all became quiet, then they whispered together and a few minutes later, one spokesperson came forward to say simply “We do what Lynne tells us to do.” There was a hush in the room. No one knew what to say. Honestly, I felt embarrassed, at a loss for what to do. I put my microphone down, walked over to the group and explained that in the US it was okay for them to say whatever they wanted publicly, to express their feelings about their experiences without any punitive repercussions. At the next screening, they each energetically took the mic from me. With the help of a translator, they articulated their own interpretation of our shared creative process. Never before had they had the opportunity to talk so freely in public, in China or in the US.

The performers in “The Washing Society” which you will see tonight gave me another kind of gift in terms of their response to and expansion of my creative practice. In 2014 and ’15, playwright Lizzie Olesker and I traipsed around New York City trying to record interviews with laundry workers. Most of them were recent immigrants who did not yet speak English or have their legal documents for living in the United States. Neither their bosses nor their husbands wanted them to talk to us. Thus, they refused to be on camera. So the two us confronted this “production obstacle” head-on. We conducted a series of informal non-recorded interviews and then we wrote a play that used the stories we’d heard as source material for a live performance and film. We called it “Every Fold Matters”. We worked for over a year with four professional actors and dancers who were open to devising a strategy for making a site specific piece that would be performed in actual laundromats around the city. In the process, we borrowed from reality in order to create a new hybrid reality.

Veraalba, one of our performers, was formally trained as a dancer but also deeply influenced by the radical choreographic gestures of feminist thinker and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer. Through her physical investigations of folding laundry, the piece gained an exhilarating gestural vocabulary that gave our show and then our film its rhythm and its musicality.

Jasmine, an actor in the film with traditional theater experience, embraced our whole, inclusive process so profoundly that she transformed herself from an eager, responsive actor into a generative contributor. One day during our rehearsals, she texted me with the words “I’ve been living with my grandmother Lulabelle all of my life but she never told me she had worked in a laundry from 1968 to 1998 until I started working with you all on this show.” A few days later, we were filming with Jasmine and her grandmother while she conducted the first documentary interview of her life. She asked her grandmother about her collective actions for better wages and working conditions. The openness of our process gave her the chance to find out more about the woman with whom she’d lived all her life. In addition, this intimate cross-generational exchange between two women in a family gave a new layer to our film.

Now, I would like to take you on a journey through my aesthetic, material trajectory as an experimental documentary filmmaker. I need the word experimental here because it commits me to pursuing formal investigations of the medium. This is the only way that cinema can continually tackle, confront, even tickle my curiosity about the world. What is particular to me about cinema is its embrace of sound with, alongside, underneath and beyond image. In the late 1980s, I made my first longer format documentary “Sermons and Sacred Pictures”, a 30 minute portrait of Reverend L. O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister who also shot 16mm film and collected sound recordings. At a certain point in the film, audiences are in total darkness while they hear the chatter of church congregants at a baptism in a river. At the time, this film was rejected for TV broadcast because the station producer assumed viewers would give up and turn off their televisions. Tonight I think about this film I made in my late 20s with a new perspective. I think at this moment about what theorist and poet Fred Moten calls “hesitant sociology”, and about the ways that we can integrate a propensity for abstraction into an endeavor to bring attention to a subject that might not have received its rightful place in history. Where do education and exposition end and aesthetic rigor begin? Do we necessarily lose the impact of the former when we give light to the later?

In “Which Way is East”, a diary film made in Vietnam in 1994, I begin with a series of richly colored Kodachrome brushstrokes juxtaposed with my own voice-over remembering what it was like to watch televised images of the war in the late 1960s. As a six year old child, I would lie on the living room couch with my head hanging upside down watching the screen, inverting the images, unintentionally abstracting them somehow. At that age, I just barely understood the dismal war statistics I was hearing. Within my film, I decided to make this oblique reference to the archival images of the Vietnam War rather than delivering actual illustrations from the time period. That was enough. I expected my audience to work hard to fill in this absence, a pointer to the horrifying collateral damage of the US involvement in Vietnam. Each viewer has to reckon with their own relationship to this history, as full or empty as it might be. At the time, I was cognizant of Belgian filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s refusal to provide a visual proof in the form of archival footage from the concentration camps in his 1985 “Shoah”, an episodic series on the Holocaust. At that time in history, forty years after the end of World War II, he felt that that haunting power of those images would be even more searing if his audience had to rely on their internal repository. Just in the last year, I had the chance to read historian and theorist Tina M. Campt’s new book Listening to Images in which she prompts readers to look at archival footage in a way that forces us to hear what was never recorded, to bring our imaginations into the synthesis and recognition of a partial history that needs, at long last, a place in our communal consciousness. The lacunas are mended by my, your and our active modes of participation. Both Lanzmann and I resisted the inclusion of images of horror, cautious about our own complicity by including them, assuming their implicit power that comes from absence.

Two weeks ago, I went to Berlin to shoot for a new film I am making called “Every Contact Leaves a Trace”. I spent several days talking with an 80-year old German woman about many things, including the moment when she first became aware of the concentration camp atrocities that had been committed by the Nazis, the everyday men and women who lived in her own town. She had the chance to watch archival footage of systematic killings and so much more in Alan Resnais’ 1956 documentary “Night and Fog”. It all became absolutely clear. Here was the proof. When I heard this woman speak of the potency of these images, I immediately asked myself if I had failed in my own work. I’d assumed the existence of an internal archive of the horrors of the Vietnam War. In fact, it might not have been there, at least to a younger audience. Had I failed in my own obligation to manifest a history that needed examination?

In addition to a deep involvement from my compatriots in front of and behind the camera, I have come to expect a parallel engagement with my audience. In order for a multi-layered cinematic experience to happen, there must be a “synaptic” event that transpires. Only through this internal occurrence can we register meaning. My awareness of the aperture inside the camera convinces me that we must find intimacy with light to accomplish this kind of charged flow from screen to eye. I have had the same Bolex 16mm camera since 1987. I know her well and feel as if she knows me.

As we sit here together in this room, I would like to share with you just five images from my entire career as a filmmaker. They are part of my IOU to light, the only continuous collaborator who has remained with me for all of these years.

This is an image from “Still Life with Woman and Four Objects” (1986) a film falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem. It’s a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts, interweaving history and fiction. This is the film I mentioned earlier with the framed photo of Emma Goldman.

In this image of an avocado pit just peeled and prepared for growth, you see a slant of sunshine coming through a skylight in the ceiling. This is the first time that I truly learned how to transform – via an awareness of aperture and f-stops – what the eye sees into something only the camera can witness.

In “Window Work” (2001) a woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper– simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery. I am the performer!

Here, my hermitic, domestic space is ruptured by a backlit newspaper. It glows. As cinematographer and performer, I discover how to sculpt light through silhouette.

In, “Your Day is My Night” (2013) immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval.

Here light transforms Mr. Tsui’s profile into a gently sloping landscape. He fills the frame completely and in the process conveys awareness and presence.

Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, I shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of my dad. “Film About a Father Who” (2020) is my attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. Here, my father has photographed three of my siblings playing in the water in the early ‘90s.

This time worn image reveals my dad’s point of view. There is no detail. Only light and color affirm a quality of compassion and observation, simply through the texture.

This is one of the last shots from “Film About a Father Who”. It’s clearly a degraded piece of old video, having lost all of its color and detail. And yet, in its starkness, this high contrast black and white image evokes a pathos. After spending 74 minutes with me in the film, viewers are able to fill in what is missing.

In each of these light-sculpted images, I explore the concept of distillation which has always been at the foundation of my work. I am an experimental filmmaker and a poet. Thus I am far more interested in the associative relationship between two things, two shots or two words than I am in their cause and effect, or their narrative symbiosis. For me, a distillation is a container for ideas and energy, a concise manifestation of a multi-valent presence that does not depend on exposition. A distillation is not a metaphor; it’s more like metonymy and synecdoche, where a part stands in for a whole, and is just enough.

I once asked a student of mine why she wanted to make documentary films. She told me that she wanted to make gifts. Just that single word helped me to better understand the ways that this kind of practice can embrace so much about life. Working with and beside reality allows us to feel relevant but also gives us the chance to share something we love with others. Through his engaged, compassionate, ingenious approach to filmmaking, Les Blank gave us approximately 50 gifts. His vision of music, food, culture, and humanity came through every frame of film.

I too have made about 50 films, web art projects, performances and installations. Like Les, each endeavor reveals my curiosity and awe for the world around me, my I.O.U to the Real.

NYU’s Asian Film and Media Initiative & Cinema Studies present Every Fold Matters

NYU’s Asian Film and Media Initiative & Cinema Studies present

EVERY FOLD MATTERS
Created by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs

TWO SHOWS!
Friday, March 3, 2017
3:30 PM
5:30 PM

Michelson Theater, Dept of Cinema Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
New York, NY 10003

EVERY FOLD MATTERS is a live performance and a film project that looks at the charged, intimate space of the neighborhood laundromat and the people who work there. Set at the crossroads of a Brooklyn neighborhood, we meet three characters in a real laundromat — a uniquely social and public space that is slowly disappearing from our changing urban landscape. Based on interviews with New York City laundry workers, the project combines narrative and documentary elements as it explores personal stories of immigration, identity, money, stains and dirt.

Featuring performances by: Jasmine Holloway, Veraalba Santa, Ching Valdes-Aran.

March 3rd performances sponsored by the Asian Film and Media Initiative in the Department of Cinema Studies.

“The legacy of domestic work, the issues surrounding power, and the exchange of money for services are all potent themes which rise to the surface and bubble over in dramatic, thrilling escalations of the everyday.” (Brooklyn Rail)

“Spotlights the often-invisible workers who fold the clothes, maintain the machines and know your secrets.” (In These Times)

“The intersection of film and performance, reality and imagination, employee and customer, historical fact and personal anecdote…You made us rethink the laundromat as a site of urban convergence, where strangers (of different races, religions, languages and classes) make ritualistic visits to a public space that’s also a functional extension of their own homes.” Alan Berliner, filmmaker

EVERY FOLD MATTERS has received support from New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (through Dirty Laundry/Loads of Prose), Women and Media Coalition, and Fandor FIX Filmmakers.

Our collaborators include acclaimed downtown actors Ching Valdes-Aran, Jasmine Holloway, Veraalba Santa, and, film editor Amanda Katz, cinematographer Sean Hanley and sound artist Stephen Vitiello.

Open to the public free of charge.

Every Fold Matters

A hybrid experimental film and live performance that looks into the charged intimacy of washing clothes in a neighborhood laundromat.

EVERY FOLD MATTERS is a live performance and a film project that looks at the charged, intimate space of the neighborhood laundromat and the people who work there. Set at the crossroads of a Brooklyn neighborhood, we meet four characters in a real laundromat — a uniquely social and public space that is slowly disappearing from our changing urban landscape. Based on interviews with New York City laundry workers, the project combines narrative and documentary elements as it explores personal stories of immigration, identity, money, stains and dirt.

“Spotlights the often-invisible workers who fold the clothes, maintain the machines and know your secrets.” (In These Times)

Our collaborators include acclaimed downtown actors Ching Valdes-Aran, Jasmine Holloway, Veraalba Santa, and Tony Torn, film editor Amanda Katz, cinematographer Sean Hanley and sound artist Stephen Vitiiello.

EVERY FOLD MATTERS began as a site specific performance with film presented by Loads of Prose at the New Lucky Laundromat in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn in early 2015. The Workers Unite! Film Festival later hosted a performance and awarded us the Best Feature Narrative prize. We are now developing our performance into a film, and recently received support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Women and Media Coalition. This summer Fandor.com awarded us a $5,000 matching grant for the creation and distribution of the film.

“I remember each and every face of every customer.”

We are excited to bring EVERY FOLD MATTERS into a more purely cinematic realm by weaving together additional documentary material collected in interviews, original text, and both raw and impressionistic images.

You can read press on our EVERY FOLD MATTERS live film performance here:

THE NEW YORKER

IN THESE TIMES

THE BROOKLYN RAIL

Our Performers

Jasmine Holloway is a singer and actress who has performed in productions at the Harlem Repertory Theatre as well as in the highly acclaimed Generations at Soho Rep. Jasmine was nominated for the Richard Maltby Jr. Award for Musical Theatre Excellence during the 2013 Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival.

Veraalba Santa is an actress and dancer and a member of Caborca Theater. She has degrees in Theater and Dance from the University of Puerto Rico and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. In New York City, Veraalba has worked with Sally Silvers, Rojo Robles, Viveca Vazquez and Rosa Luisa Marquez.

Tony Torn was last seen on stage in the title role of Ubu Sings Ubu at The Slipper Room, a rock opera adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi which he created and co-directed. An actor and director known for his extensive work with Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, Tony recently made his Broadway debut in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

Ching Valdes-Aran is an Obie award-winning actor who has appeared on and off Broadway, including The Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, La Mama, Women’s Project, CSC, Mabou Mines, Ma-Yi Theater Company, La Jolla, Center Stage, Yale Rep, and ACT. Her film work includes roles in Lav Diaz’s From What is Before (Golden Leopard Award, Locarno Int’l Festival) and Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe.

Our Collaborative Team

Lynne Sachs is a co-director. She makes films, performances, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at NYU and lives in Brooklyn. www.lynnesachs.com

Lizzie Olesker is a co-director. She is a playwright, director and performer. Her plays have been developed and presented at New Georges, Invisible Dog, Ohio Theater, Dixon Place, HERE, Cherry Lane, and Public Theater. Her work has received support from the Brooklyn Council for the Arts, the Dramatists Guild, and New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published by Heinemann Press and in the Brooklyn Rail. She teaches playwriting at NYU and the New School, and lives in Brooklyn.

Sean Hanley is our Cinematographer. He is a non-fiction filmmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. His short works have screened at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the New Orleans Film Festival. Sean teaches cinematography at Hunter College and was a cinematographer and co-producer on Lynne Sachs’s Your Day is My Night (2013). He is the Assistant Director of Mono No Aware.

Amanda Katz is our Associate Producer and Editor. She works professionally as a Film Editor, and is currently working with Lynne Sachs to craft her latest feature film. Her own work has screened at The Ann Arbor Film Festival, Doc NYC, Encuentros del Otros Cine Festival International, and Microscope Gallery. Her most recent film received funding from the New York State Council On The Arts and The Austrian Cultural Forum in New York. Amanda is a MFA candidate in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College.

Stephen Vitiello is our composer, an electronic musician and media artist. Vitiello’s sound installations have been presented at MoMA, MASS MoCA, the Whitney Biennial, and on the High Line in NYC. Vitiello has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Scanner, Steve Roden, Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Interns and web design: Christine Dickerson, Mars Marson, Boyd Chayanon

The Peculiar Intimacy of a NYC Laundromat

When it was a reading series staged in laundromats around the country, The New Yorker described “Every Fold Matters” as a “collaborative, site-specific performance exploring the strange intimacy of the everyday ritual.” The series used performers to act out themes of gendered work, gentrification, and the intermittent weirdness of city life. Playwright and director Lizzie Olesker and filmmaker Lynne Sachs are reuniting to turn the live performance into a film. For Polarr, Emily von Hoffmann spoke with them to find out more.

https://medium.com/@pixelmagazine/the-peculiar-intimacy-of-a-nyc-laundromat-871e454a7ead#.ngqfqtz19

Emily von Hoffmann: How did the live performance of ‘Every Fold Matters’ evolve into the idea for this film?

Lizzie Olesker & Lynne Sachs: When we began our site-specific collaboration EVERY FOLD MATTERS, we knew that we wanted to incorporate moments of film into the live performances. The text for the piece was developed through conversations with laundromat workers in different neighborhoods of NYC. This was a challenging process as people were often reluctant to speak about their experiences for fear of repercussions, language barriers, etc. We did shoot one conversation with a laundromat owner in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

This filmed segment opened our performance at New Lucky Laundromat in Brooklyn and we felt it expressed something texturally and conceptually revealing. We also filmed some of the actors’ monologues and found these to have a particular intimacy reflecting the subject of laundry and caring for other people’s clothes. During the run of the performances, we decided that we’d like to adapt the entire piece to film, taking the material we’d developed in a different direction. We adapted the text into a shooting script and spent time thinking about new images and ways of exploring the physical space of a working laundromat for film.

EvH: You became interested in a particular laundromat because of its unique neighborhood & demographics. Can you describe the laundromat from the film, and what is special about it?

LO & LS: Super Suds Laundromat is located in Boerum Hill very close to where we both have lived for many years. On the corner of Nevins and Bergen streets, it is an urban crossroads between different Brooklyn neighborhoods where people of varied backgrounds and economic classes come together to do their wash. In an area that is rapidly changing and becoming further gentrified, Super Suds is one of the few laundromats left.

Ironically, another larger laundromat where we did an early performance of EVERY FOLD MATTERS has since closed, to make way for a high-rise apartment building/development. Super Suds is warm, bustling, with typical waves of hectic energy followed by a quiet sense of calm.

When we approached Super Suds about shooting our film there, the owner was very excited and supportive about bringing cultural work into his laundromat.

EvH: This could be a story about gentrification (as laundromats dwindle in number), gendered work and invisible workers, the periodic strangeness of life in New York, or the taboo of airing one’s actual dirty laundry in public. The laundry workers perform a private task in a public space, and therefore are allowed to observe private details of their customers’ lives. Because of this, it seems like you decided to frame this story primarily as one about intimacy. Would you say that’s accurate, and can you elaborate more on how these themes will manifest in the film?

LO & LS: Clearly you are really connecting to the core of what we are trying to do. The array of quotidian experiences that each of us has as city dwellers is astonishing. Restaurant customers walk into French bistros or Japanese sushi bars and expect to be transported by the tastes of the food, the unfamiliar music and the exotic objects on the walls.

But still, there remains a quality of distance between the cook and the person who eats her food. In a nail salon, a woman bows down to color and file her customer’s toes. These experiences are an inherent aspect of the social contract that structures city life. In a laundromat, there is also a very specific and precise closeness that develops. When you bring your shirts and pants to the store to have them cleaned by someone, you are literally sharing your “dirty secrets.”

The fabric is like a new epidermal layer that connects you to a total stranger who becomes responsible for this extension of your body. We are trying to convey something about this link between total strangers through the abstracted textures, the choreographed movements and, of course, the texts of “Every Fold Matters.”

Our research for the original performance and now the film, began with a year long series of informal interviews with Spanish, Chinese (we worked with a wonderful translator) and sometimes English speaking workers in laundries in Brooklyn and Manhattan. This immersive documentary-style engagement also revealed to us how precarious this service industry has really become. Several of the stores where we have performed our piece have closed — to be replaced by more lucrative, less personal apartment buildings or businesses.

EvH: You describe this as a hybrid work of experimental cinema that combines narrative and documentary elements. What does that mean exactly?

LO & LS: There are so many ways that EVERY FOLD MATTERS is creating really interesting artistic convergences and clashes. Lizzie’s background is in playwriting and live performance. Lynne’s is in experimental and documentary film. By making a “hybrid” work, we are not expecting to concoct the proverbial “melting pot” of these distinct sensibilities, but rather to build a discursive, charged confrontation of the real and fictional, the abstract and the natural. We want our audience to be aware of the collage nature of the piece. We love the performative monologues of David and Albert Maysles’ classic documentary “Grey Gardens”, but we are also very inspired by the inventive austerity of Andy Warhol or Chantal Akerman.

EvH: Can you share some of your inspirations, for this project or in general, of any medium?

LO: I was very inspired by Lynne’s project YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT. I loved the way she handled the performance aspect of it — there was a beautiful, simple directness and richly specific sense of detail in its form and content. The visual artist Anne Mourier has done amazing work involving laundry- her work has definitely inspired me. I’m on Book 3 of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, and have recently read her other fiction. I greatly admire her fearless, passionate writing and way of dealing with the often unrecognized details of her female characters’ lives.

LS: When we were looking for performers to be in EVERY FOLD MATTERS, I was able to see Jasmine Holloway sing in Soho Rep’s GENERATIONS, which transformed the entire theater into a South African village, including the seats of the audience. This immersive connection between the performance and the viewing of it was extraordinary. Tony Torn’s bawdy yet vulnerable interpretation of Pere Ubu in UBU ROI in a Downtown cabaret was one of the most daring performances I have ever seen. We invited both of these actors to be in our live performance and now our film. In addition to becoming cast members, they have also contributed two of the most important personal stories of our piece. This integrated way of working is critical to the EVERY FOLD MATTERS process.

EvH: Can you describe whether and how the themes in this work complement or depart from your previous work? When did you become interested in these themes?

LS: As an experimental documentary filmmaker, I have been fascinated by the way that people perform their lives. In 2013, I worked with Chinese immigrants who live or have lived in “shift bed houses” in Chinatown to make YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT a series of live performances and then a film which I premiered at the Museum of Moderns Art and then screened in the US and abroad. We collaborated on a live performance that brought stories from their lives into a space where they were able to reveal and invent. I relish the moment when my “subjects” become collaborators, bringing their own sense of play to the project. I think EVERY FOLD MATTERS pushes this creative exploration even further. Lizzie has an uncanny way of listening to conversation and turning it into poetry.

LO: In my previous works for theater, I’ve wanted to open up the experience of invisibility, particularly as it relates to domestic labor. I often use historical and contemporary research about work issues to inspire characters, images and stories. My most recent play, EMBROIDERED PAST was about a family who obsessively keeps things. It began by looking at the way objects can function in our lives, leading to a kind of everyday, ordinary hoarding. Caretaking, another “invisible” form of work, is a theme I investigate through drama. This all seems related to laundry and the way we must find ways of caring for the things we keep closest to our bodies.

Interview by Emily von Hoffmann and Polarr — Pro Photo Editor Made for Everyone. Follow Polarr on Twitter and try our products.

All photos by Sean Hanley.

Pixel Magazine Blog

Online Blog of #Polarr. Find us at @polarrist — Pro Photo Editor Made for Everyone. https://www.polarr.co

Third Man Records to feature experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs

Third Man Records to feature experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs
by Joe Nolan
2015

Knoxville-born Quentin Tarantino is argu- ably Tennessee’s most important contribution to popular film, but there’s another filmmaker whose personal, sometimes mesmerizing, body of work has made her the Volunteer State’s most visible ambassador to the world of ex- perimental film. Lynne Sachs is currently a New Yorker, but the Memphis-born director will be in Nashville for The Light and Sound Machine’s presentation of Yes/No: The Cinema of Lynne Sachs on Thursday, Sept. 17, aTt 8 p.m. in the Blue Room at Third Man Records. Sachs will be presenting a selection of films from her 30-year career followed by a Q&A event.

Sachs divides many of her movies into two categories: “Yes” films and “No” films. In film- maker and critic Kevin B. Lee’s short video essay, Yes and No Films, he interviews Sachs about the distinctions between the two:

“I have a group of films I’ve made called my Yes films and I have a group of films called my No films. The Yes films are films where absolutely anything goes… Then I have the No films—but, No is not bad. The No films have a really clear idea, and I’m like quite focused.”

Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986) is one of the Yes films Sachs will show on Thursday. It pictures a woman putting on a black-and-white-checkered houndstooth coat. She then takes an avocado from a pantry and peels it before balancing the pit on the top of a glass of water. She sits at a table eating a meal—a man stops briefly at the table. The last scene pictures the woman putting on the coat again, inter-cut with shots of her sitting on the bed, seeming to comment about the author of a letter.

That might sound like a rather random ar- rangement of events, and it is, and that’s part of the beauty of Sach’s “anything goes” Yes films.

But it’s not the content that makes Still Life notable, it’s the context Sachs creates around it that lashes these rituals and actions into a more dynamic whole: During the first coat shots, a voice-over sounds like it’s reading from a script, describing “scene one” and then “scene two,” while the coat shots repeat themselves— the lack of repetition in the ongoing voice-over tells the viewer that the shot has been cut that way on purpose. This makes the viewer aware of the script and the editing as well as the woman and her coat. The film was made in the late 1980s but it speaks directly to the French New Wave films of the 1960s with their mischievous love of techniques that pointed cinema back at itself, not allowing audiences to get lost in the illusion of a seamless narrative. The use of mismatched scenes and voice-overs seems specifically out of Jean-Luc Godard’s cinema and it’s no surprise that Sachs credits his Vivre Sa Vie as an influence here.

The poetic intimacies of nude images and naked interactions are the subject of the silent study of male and female forms, Drawn and Quartered (1986). I love the punning title here—the camera crawls around the “out- line” of necks and shoulders, along fingers and feet from the point of view of an artist’s hand drawing the figures. Sachs also divides her screen up into four quarters, nodding to male/female duality while also disorienting the viewer and turning the experience into a sensual confusion of androgynous play. Drawn is a No film that Sachs directed with strict limits she illuminates at the Fandor.com streaming film site:

“I shot a film on a roof with my boyfriend. Every frame was choreographed. Both of us took off our clothing and let the Bolex whirl and that was it. Pure and simple.”

Thursday’s screenings will also include Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987), which is a companion piece to Still Life; Investigation of a Flame (2001), an experimental portrait of Vietnam War peace activists; Photograph of Wind (2001), Sachs’s meditation on passing time and her growing daughter, Maya; Noa, Noa (2006), Sach’s exploration of childhood play with her daughter, Noa. Sachs will also show selected scenes from Every Fold Matters (2015) and screen her newest work, Starfish Aorta Collosus (2015).

Fandor’s Keyframe Interviews Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker

FIXshorts: Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker

‘We really did not want to say goodbye to this brilliant, imaginative and totally committed group of actors and media artists.’

September 19, 2015

Editor’s note: Fandor recently announced the expansion of its FIXshorts film initiative, featuring four original short film projects as well as a short created from Tombstone Rashomon, to be directed by legendary filmmaker Alex Cox. Fandor is again partnering with crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, contributing half of the initial budget and providing reward benefits for the Kickstarter campaigns. Here, we introduce two of those filmmakers, Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker, who are raising funds for Every Fold Matters, a hybrid experimental film that looks into the charged intimacy of washing clothes in a neighborhood laundromat.

Keyframe: What first inspired you to make films?

Lynne Sachs: What other medium could allow me to throw together my love of poetry, investigative reporting, musique concrète, street theater and abstraction?

Lizzie Olesker: I come from a theater background, and this is actually my first experience making film, though I’ve worked in film a bit as an actor (and stuntwoman) on independent and larger commercial films. I never thought I would direct a film but now that I have, I feel more inspired about this process.

Keyframe: What inspired you to make this (FIXshorts) film?

Sachs: There was an incredible collective spirit that was part of our series of live performances. We really did not want to say goodbye to this brilliant, imaginative and totally committed group of actors and media artists. So we said, ‘Let’s make a movie!’

Olesker: It’s because of Lynne who brought her singular cinematic sensibility to our theatrical collaboration. The film segments she made for the performance were particularly rich and evocative. It made me want to explore in a more purely visual way, moving into places that are very different from what can happen in live performance.

Keyframe: How are you going to film it?

Sachs: Sometimes we shoot in a laundry using a documentarian’s observant eye. Other times we integrate our script into a wildly expressive sliver of fiction. We are working with cinematographer Sean Hanley, editor Amanda Katz and composer Stephen Vitiello to create an edgy, impressionistic work of hybrid cinema.

Olesker: When we started shooting, I was amazed at the intense combination of high organization and playful spontaneity that making film demands. There’s a sense of performing and not performing that I really loved. Decisions and changes can really evolve as you go, with the creative imagination happening in a very collective way. One needs to have a strong vision and at the same time, a willingness to shift and let go of things that aren’t working.

Keyframe: What three directors or artists have most influenced you (and why)?

Sachs: I have been deeply moved by the intuitive observations of Chris Marker, the hard-hitting clash of images in the collage films of Bruce Conner and the very personal cutting of Gunvor Nelson. Over the course of my life as a filmmaker, I was able to work with each of these artists.

Olesker: Because my background is in theater and playwriting, I’ve been inspired by people like Anton Chekhov, Euripides, Bertolt Brecht, Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy and Caryl Churchill. But there are artists who also inspired me like Louise Bourgeois and the pioneering portraitist Alice Neel. Film directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman and Mike Leigh are among my favorites.

Keyframe: What was the last film you saw in a theater?

Sachs: Last Tuesday afternoon, I went to the IFC theater in Manhattan to watch Wim Wenders’ The American Friend. I want to savor cinematographer Robby Müller’s sense of color for a long, long time.

Olesker: My eighty-seven-year old mother really wanted to see Trainwreck, with Amy Schumer, and so we did at her local neighborhood theater.

Laundromat Workers Air New York’s Dirty Laundry

Features » July 14, 2015

https://inthesetimes.com/article/new-york-laundromat-workers-air-dirty-laundry-in-performance-piece

Laundromat Workers Air New York’s Dirty Laundry in Performance Piece

A new film/performance spotlights the often-invisible workers who fold the clothes, maintain the machines and know your secrets.

BY Michelle Chen

Paradoxically, though the coin-operated laundromat is designed to replace the labor of hand-washing, as with many other modern conveniences, the workers remain necessary, though erased.

Nestled in the crevices between corner bodegas and twisted alleys, the corner laundromat is the town square of the postmodern city. It’s where neighbors gather to gossip and strangers gather to check help-wanted ads as their dirty underthings mingle. And nowhere is the laundromat a more central institution than in New York City, where the premium on urban space makes it difficult to fit washing machines inside apartments that are barely big enough for the tenant to turn around in, much less a spin cycle.

It’s in this churning admixture of the personal and public that filmmaker Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker stage their documentary-fiction-performance piece, Every Fold Matters.

The project foregrounds the often-ignored workers who wash drop-off loads and manage the self-service machines. Paradoxically, though the coin-operated laundromat is designed to replace the labor of hand-washing, as with many other modern conveniences, the workers remain necessary, though erased (just as vacuum cleaners are still operated by housekeepers, and mechanized agriculture still relies on “stoop labor”).

Sachs, who has also chronicled the lives of migrant workers and Vietnam War protesters, tends to explore the overlooked corners of civilization, and the people who fold your sheets are among the least visible in the city. Still, the stories of laundry workers can’t be done justice just by depicting them as exploited laborers; they speak before the camera about both what they love and what they hate about their jobs. And often the workers emerge as spectators of the quotidian drama of the city, as they seek to scrub out people’s hidden stains.

Sachs and Olesker constructed the script out of real interviews with laundry workers in New York over a period of months. In one scene, performers act out the methodical steps of shirt-folding in a percussive drum-dance ensemble. In another, an actor playing a laundry worker reflects on how she falls into an imaginative trance as she fingers strangers’ sordid secrets:

All you get is their name and their bag of dirty stuff—you write it on a tag—a tag for all that sweat, coffee, period stains, and… whatever. … you can tell someone’s story just by what they’ve worn, how it’s dirty—you know?

The actors “playing” customers among the machines and countertops may elicit confused double-takes and chuckles from passersby (The production was originally commissioned as part of “Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose,” a series of laundromat readings and performances organized by Emily Rubin, now in its tenth year.)

Sachs has arranged with local laundry businesses to stage and screen the show during business hours. “Ideally,” Sachs says, “the laundromat doesn’t even close, so we catch people as they’re doing their personal domestic work, cleaning their clothes. But then we have other people come in intentionally to see it. I kind of like the ambiguity around what’s a spectator.”

But finding a willing venue is a challenge; Sachs notes that some owners are uncomfortable about possibly disrupting business by hosting a seated audience among the regular launderers.

As documentary-fiction, Every Fold’s actors voice narratives composed from interviews with workers, in actual laundry settings, blending real and fictional scenes to evoke the common experiences of urban laundering: Between the clicks of quarters, quiet courtships are sparked in shy tussles over misplaced lingerie. Ethical dilemmas spiral out of a dryer that drops a carelessly crumpled $20 bill into an anonymous fist. The workers’ stories mediate between the public aspect of the business—serving impatient, sometimes mentally unstable customers—and the private realm as they poke through snatches of strangers’ lives, from loose change to bloodstained tank tops.

I attended a performance in May as part of the Workers Unite! Film Festival. Held at the old lithographic workers’ union hall in New York, it had a different feel, since it was set in a real auditorium with no washing machines. But the setting allowed the labor ethos of the project to shine through. In one scene, performer Jasmine Holloway recites the manifesto of the 1881 Atlanta washer woman’s strike in the voice of a black 19th-century laundress: “We will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices. Don’t forget this!”

Cut to another scene, generations removed from the barrels sloshing with lye and starch: Holloway plays a contemporary laundry workers, recalling tenderly how her mother taught her how to fold, pressing each crease with care, even knowing it will be soiled again in minutes: “Take your time. Make every fold matter. Put yourself into it. Like you mean it.”

Holloway, whose grandmother worked in a laundry center, exudes proud rage when channeling the protesting washer woman, but puts just as much passion into the hypnotically rote folding of a simple swatch: the same pair of hands, reaching across generations and between the screen and real life.

For the last scene, the actors speak in their own voices about their own memories of doing laundry—or not being able to, as when one man discovered one day that his old neighborhood laundromat had closed:

But when I got to the corner, the laundromat was gone… It was one of the only places where you still can talk to strangers.

Laundromats are shuttering across the city, following the trend of gentrification and the growing prevalence of laundry facilities in building basements or apartments. But Every Fold Matters drives home why such community spaces remain irreplaceable: As they mill through the liminal space between machines and aisles, customers become both spectators and performers—just as on any given day at a laundromat, the collapse of public and personal space creates the perfect stage.

Sachs’s last film shone light on a different crack in the cityscape: the shift-bed apartments in Chinatown where men share a mattress with strangers. Every Fold continues to rub its nose in the seams of the urban landscape, exploring how scarce space in a Malthusian social crucible draws us together in a statically charged bond.

Every Fold Matters is a work in progress, and the filmmakers are planning to schedule more on-site performances and complete a film version.

Michelle Chen

Michelle Chen is a contributing editor at In These Times, a contributor to Working In These Times, and an editor at CultureStrike. She is also a co-producer of Asia Pacific Forum on Pacifica’s WBAI. Her work has appeared on Alternet, Colorlines.com, Ms., and The Nation, Newsday, and her old zine, cain. Follow her on Twitter at @meeshellchen or reach her at michellechen [at] inthesetimes [dot] com.

Lynne Sachs Spotlight – “Women of Fix” on Fandor

We are Spotlighting the “Women of FIX” on Fandor.

-What are some of the major obstacles you’ve met as a filmmaker?Convincing my 103 year old grandmother that what I do is worthy. I don’t think she will ever understand that creative pleasure, dare I say artistic recognition, has any worth whatsoever. She measures success in $$. One day, I hope she will applaud the fact that I have found something I simply love to do.

-What are some awesome moments you’ve had as a filmmaker?Spending weekly Tuesday mornings talking with Bruce Conner in his San Francisco studio; introducing my crying baby to Stan Brakhage; learning to edit from Gunvor Nelson; recording sound and syncing dailies with Trinh T. Minh-ha; dancing with my boyfriend and now husband Mark Street in a George Kuchar movie; hanging out with Craig Baldwin in his editing cave; taking my young daughters to Paris to spend a day with Chris Marker.

-What are your views on women in film and how the industry can help solve the problem of diversity?
Twenty years ago, I asked a group of college age students to name their favorite film directors. No woman was on the list. Then I asked them to name one woman director. They found that task very difficult. Then I asked them to name a single film made by a woman. That resulted in a very short list, and for the most part they only knew a few female movie stars who had tried their hand at directing. Not much has changed in the last two decades. Women filmmakers must make work that reflects their vision rather than embracing the point of view of a commercial industry ethos that, for the most part, refuses to recognize our view of the world.

-Tell us how Fandor’s FIX program has helped you!
Fandor’s FIX program has put my work in a eclectic, unpredictable, thought-provoking context where people discover my work through direct search and absolutely hilarious randomness. My most popular Fandor film is A Biography of Lilith, an experimental documentary about Adam’s first mate in the Garden of Eden. Lilith was expelled from the Garden, and thus history, because she wanted to be on top in sex. Who knew that a feminist movie about gender politics, sensuality and the Bible would draw so much attention?

artwork, synopsis

Laundry Collage

Image March 13, 2015 lynne Leave a comment

Every Fold Matters

EVERY FOLD MATTERS
a site-specific performance about working in a laundry
by Lizzie Olesker and Lynne Sachs

“All you get is their name and their bag of dirty stuff- you write it on a tag. A tag for all the sweat, blood, food, coffee stains, and whatever….”

EVERY FOLD MATTERS is a collaborative, site-specific performance with film about the work of doing laundry by playwright/director Lizzie Olesker and experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs. With text developed from interviews with NYC neighborhood laundromat workers, EVERY FOLD MATTERS looks at the charged, intimate experience of cleaning other people’s clothes in a public workspace. Presented by Emily Rubin’s Wash and Dry Productions, performances of EVERY FOLD MATTERS unfolded at the New Lucky Laundromat on Lafayette Avenue in Clinton Hill Brooklyn, February 12-14, 2015. The Manhattan Community Arts Fund and the Brooklyn Arts Council awarded initial support for EVERY FOLD MATTERS, After the New Lucky Laundry performances, we will produce an EVERY FOLD MATTERS film, a hybrid work that will incorporate both our performance and documentary materials.

“Sometimes they hide the stains. They’ll put it in a bag and won’t tell you. Maybe they think you won’t take it?”

EVERY FOLD MATTERS looks at the seemingly mundane, everyday world of laundry through a personal and social lens, providing new insight into the way we take care of the things most close to our bodies. Stories around intimacy, clothes, dirt/stains, money, and time are revealed through heightened dialogue and gestural, choreographed sequences — all set amidst the washers and dryers of a working laundromat. EVERY FOLD MATTERS provides an opening into a historic form of domestic work which is mostly unseen, or at least unnoticed, tended to by those who go unrecognized and undervalued.

“My customers count on me. They think we do magic.”

EVERY FOLD MATTERS was originally commissioned by Emily Rubin as part of Wash and Dry Productions’ Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose series, with support from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, and presented on the Lower East Side at Gentle Wash Laundromat. In 2014, Lizzie Olesker was awarded $2200 from the Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) to further develop and perform EVERY FOLD MATTERS. Lizzie then invited Lynne Sachs to collaborate on the project, bringing her innovative approach in creating hybrid documentary work. After early showings in Brooklyn at the Old Stone House and Atlantis Superwash Laundromat, Lizzie and Lynne continued developing the piece through further interviews and collaborating on a new script. Emily recently secured a new site-specific venue at the Lucky Laundromat in Brooklyn. Acclaimed, multi-talented performers Veraalba Santa, Ching Valdes-Aran and Jasmine Holloway have joined the production. Musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello will create a responsive sound design for the upcoming performance and film.

“My mother in Hong Kong, she showed me … no dryers. We would just hang them. I helped her with the easiest stuff, like folding underwear. And then you practice, practice, practice…”

Lead collaborating artists Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker have long admired one another’s work. Each has over 30 years experience making original performances and films, following their own path in making their projects happen. Taking the chance to bring a hybrid, experimental performance into a surprising, real-world environment inspires both artists and their audience.

“I remember each and every face of every customer.”

Through local press, social media, online publicity, and neighborhood flyers, the EVERY FOLD MATTERS team reached out to both NYC audiences at large and the Clinton Hill community.

“The laundromat is one of those places you think will be there forever. It’s one of the only places where you still talk to strangers.”

Emily Rubin’s Wash and Dry Productions has been producing Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose since 2005 when it started as an experiment in a laundromat in the East Village. Since that time, Rubin has presented more than 150 emerging and established writers and performers amidst the washers and dryers of neighborhood laundromats throughout NYC. EVERY FOLD MATTERS will be Wash and Dry Productions’ first event in the year-long 10^th Anniversary Celebration of Loads of Prose.

Link to Brooklyn Rail article: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2015/02/theater/laundromat-theater-where-every-fold-matters

Link to New York article: http://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/above-and-beyond/dirty-laundry-loads-prose

Link to Every Fold Matters Full Dress Rehearsal:
https://vimeo.com/119853367
password: everyfoldmatters

Our Directors, Producer and Production Team

Lizzie Olesker (co-director, writer) is a playwright, director, and performer whose work focuses on finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Plays and performances have been developed and presented at New Georges, HERE, the Ohio Theatre, Invisible Dog, Dixon Place, Old Stone House, Cherry Lane Theater, Clubbed Thumb, Intiman (Seattle) and Public Theater.

Emily Rubin (producer) founded Wash and Dry Productions in 2005 to produce Dirty Laundry: Loads of Prose, a reading and performance series that takes place in laundromats around the country. Rubin is the author of the novel STALINA (Mariner Books) and is at work on another novel and memoir about urban homesteading. www.emilyrubin.net

Lynne Sachs (co-director, writer) is fascinated by the intersection between documentary film explorations and live performance. Her hybrid film works have screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance, Punto de Vista, the China Women’s Film Festival and the Vancouver Film Festival. She is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow in the Arts. www.lynnesachs.com

Stephen Vitiello (music) is an electronic musician and media artist. Vitiello’s sound installations have been presented at MoMA, MASS MoCA, the Whitney Biennial, and on the High Line in NYC. Vitiello has collaborated with numerous artists including Pauline Oliveros, Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Scanner, Steve Roden, Taylor Deupree and Ryuichi Sakamoto. www.stephenvitiello.com

Sean Hanley (film production), Amanda Katz (performance and film assistance) and Luo Xiauyuan (research and translation).

Our Performers

Jasmine Holloway (performer) is a singer and actress who has performed in productions at the Harlem Repertory Theatre as well as in the highly acclaimed GENERATIONS at Soho Rep. Jasmine was nominated for the Richard Maltby Jr. Award for Musical Theatre Excellence during the 2013 Kennedy Center College Theatre Festival.

Veraalba Santa is an actress and dancer and a member of Caborca Theater. She has degrees in Theater and Dance from the University of Puerto Rico and the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. In New York City, Veraalba has worked with Sally Silvers, Rojo Robles, Viveca Vazquez and Rosa Luisa Marquez.

Tony Torn was last seen on stage in the title role of Ubu Sings Ubu at The Slipper Room, a rock opera adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi which he created and co-directed. An actor and director known for his extensive work with Reza Abdoh and Richard Foreman, Tony recently made his Broadway debut Breakfast At Tiffany’s.

Ching Valdes-Aran (performer) is an Obie award-winning actor who has appeared on and off Broadway, including The Public Theater, New York Theater Workshop, La Mama, Women’s Project, CSC, Mabou Mines, Ma-Yi Theater Company, La Jolla, Center Stage, Yale Rep, and ACT. Her film work includes roles in Lav Diaz’s FROM WHAT IS BEFORE (Golden Leopard Award, Locarno Int’l Festival) and Julie Taymor’s ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.

Website of Filmmaker Lynne Sachs