A conversation between Sachs and Edo Choi (Assistant Curator at the Museum of the Moving Image) accompanying the Roxie’s Bay Area premiere of “Film About a Father Who.” The premiere was programmed alongside two shorts programs curated by filmmaker Craig Baldwin.
Read more about the program here.
National Gallery of Art
Family Constructs: New Films by Lynne Sachs
https://www.nga.gov/film-programs/family-constructs-new-films-by-lynne-sachs.html
Curated by Peggy Parsons and Joanna Raczynska.
Streaming now through March 9
Working alone and with various collaborators over the course of 35 years, Lynne Sachs has developed a body of work deeply invested in a range of interwoven personal and ethical subjects. Using all types of media, from 8mm and 16mm film to HD files, her rigorous explorations in sound and image investigate ideas of family, mythology, portraiture, political resistance, feminism, war, and the quotidian. A poet, educator, collage artist, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, Sachs has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts (2014), among many other awards. In January 2021, the Museum of the Moving Image organized a major retrospective of her film work. Here, two recent shorts accompany her latest feature, Film About a Father Who . . ., each reflecting features of the artist’s family.
Lynne Sachs has collaborated numerous times with other filmmakers, writers, and performers in her fertile pursuit of a very personal cinematic language. Made with writer Anne Lesley Selcer, and grounded in a domestic sphere during the COVID-19 pandemic, the new short Girl Is Presence features Sachs’s own daughter Noa carefully sifting through and rearranging curious objects while Selcer recites lines from her poem Sun Cycle. (2020, 4 minutes)
Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne Sachs recorded 8mm and 16mm film, analogue videotape, and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Ostensibly a documentary portrait of a parent, Film About a Father Who . . . reveals as much, or more, about patriarchal silences and omissions than about the subject himself, who remains enigmatic throughout. “My father has always chosen the alternative path in life, a path that has brought unpredictable adventures, nine children with six different women, brushes with the police, and a life-long interest in trying to do some good in the world.” It is also a film about the complex dynamics that conspire to create a family. (2020, 74 minutes)
Silently accumulated handwritten to-do lists and notes to herself become evidence of the filmmaker’s relationship with family, friends, and herself over a limited period of time. These fragments of text and direction on scraps of paper and yellow Post-it notes form an abstract storytelling device—like a personal poem or storyboard for an experimental film. (2016, 4 minutes)
New Documentary “Film About a Father Who” Explores Intriguing Family Dynamics
March 3, 2021
By Mary Magsamen
https://www.mfah.org/blogs/inside-mfah/film-about-father-who-explores-intriguing-family-dynamics
For filmmaker Lynne Sachs, the action of reflecting, recording, and editing a film about her family produces a pretty crazy personal narrative: the new documentary feature Film About a Father Who.
Dynamic Story
Exploring the contradictions and melodrama of her own family, Sachs created her film from footage she has been assembling since 1984, weaving together a visually textural film about her father and siblings with honesty and openness. Her talent is visible because she makes it all look so easy. For film enthusiasts, it is noteworthy that Sachs takes inspiration for the film’s title from the avant-garde 1974 feature Film About a Woman Who.
Sachs’s father, Ira Sachs, Sr.—a colorful personality and resident of Park City, Utah—made a living as a hotel developer and enjoyed partying with women on and off the ski slopes. He fathered nine children by five women, creating this dynamic story.
Complicated Interactions
I had the pleasure of seeing this film at the Slamdance Film Festival, a more-independent alternative to the Sundance Film Festival, both of which take place in Park City, Utah—clearly the right place to premiere this film. I love Film About a Father Who because it demonstrates the director’s filmmaking skills as she unfolds decades of complicated family interactions, particularly with her father. Family can bring out the worst in us, but for the Sachs family, it seems to knit them together, even if uncomfortably.
I asked Lynne about the feedback she has gotten from audiences.
“After watching my film, a man exactly my age wrote to me from Oklahoma to say that he wanted to share the story of his relationship with his mother, and his discovery of adult siblings he had never known. I have had so many conversations with people who told me that their experience of watching my film gave them insight into their own thinking about the imprint of our parents on all of us as children.” —Lynne Sachs
• Film About a Father Who / WATCH HERE Your ticket ($12) supports the MFAH and provides a 3-day pass to the film. SEE THE TRAILER
About the Author
Mary Magsamen is the curator at Aurora Picture Show and an artist who works in collaboration with her husband, Stephan Hillerbrand, as Hillerbrand+Magsamen.
Film About a Father Who (Web Exclusive)
Cineaste
Reviewed by Darragh O’Donoghue
Spring 2021
https://www.cineaste.com/spring2021/film-about-a-father-who
Produced, written and directed by Lynne Sachs; cinematography by Lynne Sachs, Ira Sachs Sr., and Ira Sachs Jr.; edited by Rebecca Shapass; music by Stephen Vitiello; sound collages by Kevin. T. Allen; featuring Ira Sachs Sr., Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, Ira Sachs Jr., Diane Sachs, and Rose Sachs. Color, 74 min. A Cinema Guild release.
As the British say about buses, you wait ages for an experimental film about an aging patriarch by his daughter, then two come along at once.
In October 2020, Netflix dropped Dick Johnson Is Dead, wherein long-time documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson confronted her retired father’s dementia and mortality by staging elaborate tableaux of his imagined death, involving angels, heaven, funeral services, and missiles falling from the sky. By continually casting her father in these fantasy scenarios, Johnson hoped to postpone his real and inevitable death—and, by the end of the film at least, had succeeded in doing so.
Three months later, Lynne Sachs’s Film About a Father Who was also released virtually. It too centers on a charismatic older man in physical and mental decline. Kirsten Johnson is the co-parent of twins with Lynne’s filmmaker brother Ira, so presumably Lynne knew all about Dick Johnson Is Dead when she was making her own work. Still, it still must have been a little galling to see her three-and-a-half-decades-long project eclipsed by a film that was not only released on the world’s biggest moving image distribution service, but also widely featured and reviewed in the press, culminating in a place on many best film of the year lists, such as Sight & Sound’s, where it ranked number six.
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Filmmaker Lynne Sachs with her father Ira Sachs Sr., the subject of her documentary.
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Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson is Dead, about her father, appeared a few weeks before Sachs’s film (Kirsten Johnson with Dick Johnson).
That said, even had Film About a Father Who been released first, or without Dick Johnson Is Dead as competition, it would not necessarily have attained that film’s visibility or reach. This is partly due to Sachs’s career-long assertion of creative independence and her reluctance to court major studios or platforms like Netflix as so many of her peers have. Sachs is one of those awkward filmmakers with one foot in the art world, where many of her films are screened and even generated (through grants, residencies, fellowships, and the like), and the other in the documentary or essay film world. In practical terms, this means that she has a foot in neither; the art world doesn’t recognize her as a moving image artist (she is not represented by a commercial gallery, the sine qua non for institutional recognition), and her documentaries and essay films don’t conform to the rigid formulae demanded by studios and networks. As a result, Sachs’s exemplary body of work over thirty years has been largely ignored—as far as I am aware, she is yet to receive a feature, interview, or full-length review from any of the major English-language film periodicals. Compare this to the widespread coverage granted the fiction films of her brother Ira, who has engaged with both mainstream distribution and the star system (one movie even stars a former James Bond!). The price for Lynne Sachs’s preciously guarded independence has been critical invisibility. We must try harder.
But the film also resists mainstream co-option by its refusal to offer simplistic characterization or narrative. Dick Johnson is a model of probity, as a professional (he worked as a clinical psychiatrist), husband, and father; a religious man, his path never deviated from accepted norms of middle-class respectability. Ira Sachs Sr. is a sketchier figure, and as a result, Film About a Father Who is a sketchier film. Dick Johnson may feature in various fantasy scenarios, but he remains the same, recognizable person, physically and morally. Ira Sr.’s elusive identities are first signaled by his sundry business cards—he worked as a “hippie” entrepreneur, buying up unpromising tracts of land in remote areas and developing them—as if he were some sort of undercover agent. His latter-day presence as a beaming, seemingly vacant good ol’ boy is supplemented by footage from half a century’s worth of home movies in diverse formats (mostly shot by Lynne and both Iras), interviews past and present with Ira Sr. and his family, photographs, letters, and even vintage commercials.
The documentary or essay film is often compared to a detective story, with an investigator uncovering or sifting through evidence, parsing essential information from a mass of raw data, before arriving at a singular truth and resolution. Film About a Father Who is an antidetective story—the more we discover about Ira Sr., the less we know. A better metaphor for his narrative might be an endless Russian doll, or a defective onion—layers of skin are peeled away to reveal only more layers, although the peeler still ends up in tears.
This ambiguity and indeterminacy is indicated by Sachs’s title—Film About a Father Who. “A” father, not “my father,” not All About My Father or something. “A father” distances the subject from the film in the manner of a fairy tale or myth, appropriate for a man who wanders in and out of assorted lives with little thought for the havoc he wreaks. “Who”—a father “who” did what? “Who” is Ira Sachs Sr.? The “who” may also reference the popular BBC/NBC television series Who Do You Think You Are? This genealogy format is structured around a subject–detective’s search through the archives and historical sites in order to construct their family tree. These subjects may find out more than they wanted to, but the format—question, quest, revelation, affirmation—never changes. Film About a Father Who shares similar themes and motifs, but its outcome couldn’t be more different.
The film’s conceptual and narrative structures are introduced by two sequences that, at first, seem uncharacteristically labored and literal, but resonate powerfully as the film develops. In the opening sequence, before any voice-over contextualizes what we see, an old man sits having his hair cut by a woman who is eventually revealed as the man’s daughter, and the film’s director Lynne Sachs. The hairdresser’s attempts to unravel the sitter’s matted hair mirrors the work the filmmaker will have to do on the clotted narrative strands of Ira Sr.’s life story. This sexually potent, Jewish alpha-male winces as his hair is manipulated, perhaps reminding us of the Old Testament story of Samson and Delilah, the emasculation of a virile hero by his treacherous lover. In its quiet, patient, loving, intimate way, Film About a Father Who is a work of emasculation and betrayal, a feminist critique of patriarchal structures embedded in the family as rigorous as anything by Yvonne Rainer, whose 1974 classic Film About a Woman Who inspired Sachs’s title.
But that very quiet, patience, love, and intimacy is part of the sequence too—for Lynne Sachs at least, Ira Sr. is a man worth spending time with, not least because he was not always there. The profusion of home movies in Film About a Father Who is misleading, as it occludes the unfilmed gaps when Ira Sr. was not present, when he left his first wife Diane (mother of Lynne, Ira, and their writer sibling Dana) for a trail of other women, including at least one other wife and numerous children. The media-savvy Sachs family—if nothing else, the film can be watched as a history of communications technology, as succeeding generations of cameras, televisions, video formats, and mobile phones appear as part of the familial mise en scène—shoot hungrily today because there may not be anything to shoot tomorrow. The fact that Ira Sr.’s other families were not as technologically adept as the Sachs’s mean that these parts of his life are not visually represented, their documentation dependent on hearsay, rumor, speculation, and oral histories that are occasionally, understandably, embittered. Such camera-free environments may have been part of the appeal of these other lives for a showman who is happy to perform for the camera but shrinks when it tries to peer behind the mask of bonhomie.
In the second key sequence, the now middle-aged Lynne, Ira Jr., and Dana sit on a bed like children, discussing their parents. They differentiate their characters in terms of grammar and punctuation:
Ira: Mom was providing an example that was much more linear.
Dana: And stable. There were no question marks when you were in [Mom’s] house, and with Dad’s, there was all question marks. You didn’t know what could happen.
Lynne: With Mom there was a sense of…I was obsessed with grammar [as a child]. Grammar was worth understanding because once you had grammar you had total transparency. And Mom understood the grammar of…
Dana: In Dad’s life there was no grammar. There was no punctuation—
Lynne: There was no grammar…
Dana: Well, there was punctuation…
Lynne: Exclamation marks!
Dana: And question marks!
Lynne: Exclamation marks and questions marks. With Mom…periods and commas…and the comma gave you a sense, you knew where things went. The thing was, you had the commas and the pause and they were exquisite. They were just right, and you felt affirmed.
Dana: Well, she was steady, and she would keep things in discrete pieces. Life was very…you knew where the boundaries were, and his was always opening up into something. Like a colon opens onto something else—
If the first sequence signifies Lynne’s attempt to unravel the multiple strands of her father’s life, the film proper is an attempt to find a new grammatical form for the unsettlingly open, nonlinear, exploratory, unstructured, opaque, irregular, boundaryless narrative of Ira Sachs Sr., one that could not be contained by conventional film grammar.
This grammar is structured by its subject’s and the film’s relation to time. The classic detective story is defined by time—a crime has been committed that disrupts the flow of time; the detective establishes a chronology of events that restores it. In Dick Johnson Is Dead, Kirsten Johnson tries to stop the flow of time altogether, resulting in a deliberately static, repetitive work—the longer I keep things the same, the longer Dad will stay alive. Film About a Father Who, by contrast, can’t stop time. As edited by artist Rebecca Shapass, it is a vertigo of time, a criss-crossing of past, present, and future, producing a hall of mirrors wherein present-day Ira Sr. confronts his former selves, the time-traveling Father Who as Doctor Who. He never stands still, and neither does the film, resulting in a work as mercurial and fugitive as life itself, resistant to harmonious closure.
Sachs’s focus on her own family is typical of a certain strand of American avant-garde filmmaking—think of Jonas Mekas’s diaries, Stan Brakhage’s processed home movies, or Stephen Dwoskin’s ghostly portraits of long-deceased family members. In an interview with Reverse Shot, the house magazine of New York’s Museum of the Moving Image—which hosted a virtual retrospective of her work in January—Sachs discusses other experimental films about difficult fathers by Su Friedrich (Sink or Swim, 1990) and Alan Berliner (Nobody’s Business [1996]—Berliner is credited as an artistic advisor on Film About a Father Who). The joys and travails of family life are a recurrent subject in Sachs’s work—as it is, indeed, of Ira Jr.’s, with his films’ weak or difficult husbands and fathers. In particular, Lynne has confronted her own parenthood with portrait films of her children, such as a series that captures her daughter Maya at various ages (Photograph of Wind, 2001; Same Stream Twice, 2012; and Maya at 24, 2021), that anticipates in reverse many of the procedures of Film About a Father Who.
Film About a Father Who could have been a monumental film, a “summa” of a life’s work (Sachs will be sixty this year) as well as a multilayered portrait of a complex man. Such finality and thematic bombast is anathema to Sachs, however. This is a film, after all, as interested in the ritual of an old woman putting on a pair of stockings as it is in the great themes of Family, Identity, Time, or American Masculinity. Sachs’s aesthetic has always been defined by the fleeting and provisional, by the rejection of a saleable authorial style, and by formal and philosophical “lightness,” what the French praise as légèreté, the ability to find forms that critically distance subject matter that is emotionally volatile, even traumatic, with wit, illumination, empathy, and nimble intelligence. To call Film About a Father Who Sachs’s “best” or “breakthrough” film would be to miss the point. Like her great predecessors Jonas Mekas and Chris Marker, each work by Sachs—whether it is a film, a poem, a performance, or a Web installation—is a fragment of a larger body of work that is simply “the work.” One hopes that someday Sachs’s achievement will be recognized as the major contribution to modern American cinema it is.
Darragh O’Donoghue works as an archivist at Tate Britain in London.
Copyright © 2021 by Cineaste Magazine
Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 2
http://www.kinorebelde.com/lynne-sachs-complete-filmography/
Kino Rebelde has created a retrospective that traces a delicate line connecting intimacy, power relations, violence, memory, migration, desire, love, and war in Lynne’s films. By looking at each of these works, we can see a director facing her own fears and contradictions, as well as her sense of friendship and motherhood. Moving from idea to emotion and back again, our retrospective takes us on a journey through Sachs’ life as a filmmaker, beginning in 1986 and moving all the way to the present.
With the intention of allowing her work to cross boundaries, to interpret and to inquire into her distinctive mode of engaging with the camera as an apparatus for expression, we are delighted to present 37 films that comprise the complete filmmography, so far, of Lynne Sachs as visual artist and filmmaker. Regardless of the passage of time, these works continue to be extremely contemporary, coherent and radical in their artistic conception.
Kino Rebelde is a Sales and Festival Distribution Agency created by María Vera in early 2017. Its exclusively dedicated to promotion of non-fiction cinema, hybrid narratives and experimental.
Based on the creative distribution of few titles by year, Kino Rebelde established itself as a “boutique agency”, working on a specialized strategy for each film, within its own characteristics, market potential, niches and formal and alternative windows.
This company supports short, medium and long feature films, from any country, with linear or non-linear narratives. They can be in development or WIP, preferably in the editing stage.
The focus: author point of view, pulse of stories, chaos, risk, more questions, less answers, aesthetic and politic transgression, empathy, identities, desires and memory.
Kino Rebelde was born in Madrid, but as its films, this is a nomadic project. In the last years María has been living in Lisbon, Belgrade and Hanoi and she’ll keep moving around.
Festival Distributor and Sales Agent born in Argentina. Founder of Kino Rebelde, a company focused on creative distribution of non-fiction, experimental and hybrid narratives.
Her films have been selected and awarded in festivals as Berlinale, IFFR Rotterdam, IDFA, Visions Du Réel, New York FF, Hot Docs, Jeonju IFF, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Sarajevo FF, Doclisboa and Viennale, among others.
María has a background as producer of socio-political and human rights contents as well as a film curator.Envelope
Lynne Sachs (1961) is an American filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances.
Working from a feminist perspective, Lynne weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with renowned musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project.
Between 1994 and 2009, Lynne directed five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany – sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own perception.
Over the course of her career, she has worked closely with film artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Ernie Gehr, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, and Trinh T. Min-ha.
“For more than thirty years, artist Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts.” (Edo Choi, Assistant Curator of Film, Museum of the Moving Image)
This five-part retrospective offers a career-ranging survey of Sachs’s work and includes new HD transfers of Still Life With Woman and Four Objects, Drawn and Quartered, The House of Science: a museum of false facts, and Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam.
Note: The following programs can be rented individually or as a package. A new video interview and between Lynne Sachs and series curator Edo Choi is also available as part of the rental fee.
For rental and pricing information, please contact: info@canyoncinema.com
All films are directed by Lynne Sachs.
Program notes by Edo Choi.
Program 1: Early Dissections
In her first three films, Sachs performs an exuberant autopsy of the medium itself, reveling in the investigation of its formal possibilities and cultural implications: the disjunctive layering of visual and verbal phrases in Still Life with Woman and Four Objects; un-split regular 8mm film as a metaphorical body and site of intercourse in the optically printed Drawn and Quartered; the scopophilic and gendered intentions of the camera’s gaze in Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning. These experiments anticipate the range of the artist’s mature work, beginning with her first essayistic collage The House of Science: a museum of false facts. Itself an autopsy, this mid-length film exposes the anatomy of western rationalism as a framework for sexual subjugation via a finely stitched patchwork of sounds and images from artistic renderings to archival films, home movies to staged performances.
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986, 4 mins.) – New HD transfer
Drawn and Quartered (1987, 4 mins.) – new HD transfer
Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987, 9 mins.)
The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991, 30 mins.) – new HD transfer
Program 2: Family Travels
One of Lynne Sachs’s most sheerly beautiful films, Which Way Is East is a simultaneously intoxicating and politically sobering diary of encounters with the sights, sounds, and people of Vietnam, as Sachs pays a visit to her sister Dana and the two set off north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The film is paired here with a very different kind of family journey The Last Happy Day, recounting the life of Sachs’s distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Jewish Hungarian doctor who survived the Second World War and was ultimately hired to reassemble the bones of dead American soldiers. Here Sachs journeys through time as opposed to space, as she assembles a typically colorful array of documentary and performative elements, including Sandor’s letters, a children’s performance, and highly abstracted war footage, to bring us closer to a man who bore witness to terrible things. This program also features The Last Happy Day’s brief predecessor, The Small Ones. Program running time: 73 mins.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994, 33 mins.) – new HD transfer
The Small Ones (2007, 3 mins.)
The Last Happy Day (2009, 37 mins.)
Program 3: Time Passes
Twenty years unspool over nine short films: portraits of Lynne Sachs’s children; visits with her mother, brother, niece and nephew; a tribute to the city where she lives; and scenes of sociopolitical trauma and protest. Nearly all shot on super 8mm or 16mm, and often silent, each work is at once a preservation of a moment and a record of change, seamlessly weaving together the candid and the performed gesture, the public and the private memory, in a simultaneously objective and subjective posture toward the passing of time. Program running time: 51 mins.
Photograph of Wind (2001, 4 mins.)
Tornado (2002, 4 mins.)
Noa, Noa (2006, 8 mins.)
Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008, 11 mins.)
Same Stream Twice (2012, 4 mins.)
Viva and Felix Growing Up (2015, 10 mins.)
Day Residue (2016, 3 mins.)
And Then We Marched (2017, 3 mins.)
Maya at 24 (2021, 4 mins.)
Program 4: Your Day Is My Night
2013, 64 mins. “This bed doesn’t necessarily belong to any one person,” someone says early in Your Day Is My Night. It could be the metaphorical thesis of this film, perhaps Lynne Sachs’s most self-effacing and meditative work. A seamless blend of closely observed verité footage, interpretive performance, and confessional monologues and interviews, the film doesn’t document so much as create a space to accommodate the stories and experiences of seven Chinese immigrants from ages 58 to 78 who live together in a “shift-bed” apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Sachs’s quilted sense of form achieves a new level of refinement and delicacy in collaboration with her cameraman Sean Hanley and her editor Amanda Katz, as she works with the participants to exhume a collective history of migration and struggle.
Program 5: Tip of My Tongue
2017, 80 mins. Sachs’s richly generative Tip of My Tongue finds the filmmaker responding to her 50th birthday by gathering twelve members of her generational cohort—friends and peers all born between 1958 and 1964, and originating as far as Cuba, Iran, and Australia—to participate in the creation of a choral work about the convergent and divergent effects history leaves upon those who live it. From the Kennedy assassination to Occupy Wall Street, the participants reveal their memories of, and reflections upon, the transformative experiences of their lives. Set to an ecstatic, pulsing score by Stephen Vitiello, the film interweaves these personal confessions with impressionistic images of contemporary New York, obscured glimpses of archival footage, and graphically rendered fragments of text to create a radiant prism of collective memory. Preceded by Sachs’s frantic record of accumulated daily to-do lists, A Year in Notes and Numbers (2018, 4 mins.).
Thanks to:
The Cinematheque – Vancouver
Film About a Father Who – USA, 2020, dir. Lynne Sachs, 74 min.
Streaming
February 5 (Friday) through February 18 (Thursday)
“Sachs achieves a poetic resignation about unknowability inside families, and the hidden roots never explained from looking at a family tree.”- Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
“This is not a portrait. This is not a self-portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” So experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs describes her beguiling new documentary and its profoundly personal intent: to reconcile the complicated relationship between herself and her bohemian father. Blending an array of home-movie footage shot between 1984 and 2019 (a veritable showcase of evolving media formats, from 8mm to digital), Film About a Father Who offers a kaleidoscopic view of Sachs’s hippie-businessman father, onetime “Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah,” whose knotty, often contradictory identities are slowly untangled by the documentarian and her network of equally bewildered siblings — many born from different mothers, some kept secret from each other. Throughout this candid, bravely public act of introspection, Sachs expresses conflicted empathy for the aging patriarch, a jovial but emotionally reticent man now in his eighties, and interrogates the bond implicit in father-daughter, and sibling-to-sibling, relationships. Its open-ended title is a nod to Yvonne Rainer’s 1974 study of female multiplicity, Film About a Woman Who.
This rental includes a Q&A between Lynne Sachs and film critic Ela Bittencourt.
Watch an introduction to the film from Lynne Sachs below.
To stream this film:
https://cinemaguild.vhx.tv/unavailable
This will take you to Cinema Guild’s streaming platform, where you can watch the film. Purchase a virtual ticket for $12 CAD (you may need to create an account first). Once a virtual ticket has been purchased, you have three days to watch the film.
If you are having technical issues with the stream, please click here.
This film is available to stream in Canada only.
Your ticket purchase supports The Cinematheque.
“[A] brisk, prismatic, and richly psychodramatic family portrait.” Ben Kenigsberg, New York Times
“Formidable in its candor and ambition … A chapter in a continuing stream of work by an experimental, highly personal filmmaker.” Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily
In Their Own League
SUNDANCE REVIEW: “FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO”
POSTED ON FEBRUARY 17, 2021
By Joan Amenn
https://intheirownleague.com/2021/02/17/sundance-review-film-about-a-father-who/
Year: 2020
Runtime: 74 minutes
Director: Lynne Sachs
Writer: Lynne Sachs
Part of the lineup of documentaries having to do with family histories at Sundance and also shown at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City in an exhibition of her work, Lynne Sachs’ “Film About a Father Who” (2020) is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. Like looking through a View Master only to see that the duo of photos are slightly askew, the film always seems to be a little off kilter in portraying its subject, Ira Sachs Sr. What starts as a bemused tolerance by his children devolves into a pained recognition that their father was far more serial in his multiple amorous relationships than they ever imagined. At one point called the “Hugh Hefner of Park City, Utah” there is a feeling of wistfulness in the affection shown to the pater familias Ira, as if all of his children know that his love is ephemeral and needs to be captured while they still have his fleeting attention.
Home movies capturing memories over years give a dreamy quality to what at times seems a detective story. Why were there names crossed off their father’s insurance policy? Who are those people? Lynne’s father is seen always benignly smiling but it seems to be a mask he hides behind as his children discover more and more siblings they never knew existed from his brief encounters with various women over decades. Their grandmother is very vocal in her disapproval of her son’s behavior but is never seen directly confronting him about it in the film. Lynne mentioned in the round table discussion at Sundance following the screening of documentaries that “home movies” are often seen as a way to capture celebrations in life. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, all of these happy memories don’t address what else happens in a lifetime. “Film About a Father Who” shows a man who had many lives with many families who didn’t know they were making memories with someone who was in many ways a stranger to them, with many secrets.
The playfulness of a repeated montage and the charm of the director’s father go a long way in keeping the film from veering into bitterness rather than focusing on the sweetness of family reunions of both known and recently met siblings. However, a little more focus on what having such a chaotic force for a father did to his children and then as adults trying to reconcile their lives with his would have been less frustrating. We are left with words left unsaid and smiles covering anguish over a man who needed to be loved so much but couldn’t completely commit himself to love in return.
Join director Lynne Sachs in conversation with filmmaker and long-time friend, Iddo Patt, as they explore the deep Memphis roots of her recent documentary, Film About a Father Who. They will discuss her personal revelations and discoveries since this deeply personal film premiered one year ago.
Austin Chronicle
Film About a Father Who
2021, NR, 74 min. Directed by Lynne Sachs.
REVIEWED BY JENNY NULF
FRI., FEB. 12, 2021
https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2021-02-12/film-about-a-father-who/
Film About a Father Who, Lynne Sachs’ family self-portrait, opens with a shot of the documentarian brushing her father’s hair. Her gentle combing is then disrupted by a knot that won’t detangle. Sachs fights it, nervously laughing as she does, but refusing to give up. It’s a scene so personal, the act of grooming your own parent, but Sachs makes the audience aware that even in tenderness there is pain.
Ira Sachs Sr., we soon discover, has a complicated relationship with his daughter. She jokes he’s the “Hugh Hefner of Park City,” which is as playful as it is scathing, but there’s a sharp truth to his nickname. Sachs Sr. wasn’t just briefly unfaithful to his wife but has nine children with five different women. His lifestyle made him the black sheep of his family, and left his own mother ashamed and disgusted. She snarls in one interview about how her son has become an incredible disappointment, always on his phone and never present because he’s too busy toggling multiple women.
Sachs’ downward spiral into her father’s personal life has been in the works for roughly 26 years, with footage collected from 1984 to 2019. By using a mixture of 8mm film to pristine digital, her experimental documentary feels worn, an eclectic mixture of home videos that blends in with the film’s familial nature. Moments of Sachs as a child playing with her father are juxtaposed with interviews with the mothers of his children, whose openness with Sachs and the camera is intimate and brutal. Tears choked back, Sachs Sr.’s girlfriends have complex emotions toward their kids’ father, a man who betrayed their trust but who they also genuinely loved.
But Sachs doesn’t want to paint a picture of hate toward her father. This is the man who spent time with her on the self-proclaimed Bob Dylan Day, a man who has given her a large network of siblings to bond with. While family doesn’t mean everything, family is something that is a stable anchor to have when things feel hopeless, and while each child has complex feelings toward their father, it is also because of their father that they have a gigantic support circle who can (mostly) relate.
At one point in the film, Sachs explains that it’s her “reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.” Film About a Father Who is not meant to give Sachs answers to her labyrinth of affection toward her father, but rather used to understand the man from whom she seeks so much approval. The film circles back to that opening scene of hair brushing, but the knot is no longer there. She’s finally tackled it and moved past it.
