American filmmaker Lynne Sachs immerses us in the secrets of her art, especially in her touching documentary film About a Father Who. Sachs discusses how this intimate project, which focuses on her complex relationship with her father, challenges the rules of traditional documentary. She boldly addresses society’s fear of the camera and its power to reveal uncomfortable truths. Furthermore, Sachs deepens her use of silence as a tool for contemplation, breaking with conventional cause-and-effect editing techniques. This powerful combination invites the viewer into a deeper, more reflective experience.
Chapters
What led you to become a filmmaker?
What role do image and sound play in your cinematic grammar?
What are the challenges of documentary filmmaking in a time marked by social media?
What drives you to make your films the way you do?
How does your family feel about you always filming with your camera?
Silences mark your films in a very powerful way; could you explain to us how you use them in editing?
Bio
Lynne Sachs is an American filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work explores the complex relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving text, collage, painting, politics, and sound design into layers. Strongly committed to a feminist dialogue between film theory and practice, she seeks a rigorous interplay between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each new project. Her moving image work ranges from experimental short films to rehearsal films and hybrid live performances.
October 17th 2024 from 11 AM to noon at the CODE^SHIFT Lab (425, Newhouse 3, Reading Room)
The Newhouse School’s CODE^SHIFT lab invites you to an interactive discussion with Lynne Sachs, a documentary filmmaker and Light Work commissioned artist. Using her film “Which Way is East,” Sachs will discuss how to establish trust with sources and conduct interviews with empathy while working on media projects. The session will conclude with a discussion on her latest collaboration with Light Work/Urban Video Project, “This Side of Salina.”
This session is co-hosted by Profs Lauren Bavis (MND) and Srivi Ramasubramanian (COM) for CODE^SHIFT Lab in collaboration with Light Work
CODE^SHIFT is Collaboratory for Data Equity, Social Healing, Inclusive Futures and Transformation. CODE^SHIFT is a multidisciplinary col(lab)oratory research space for communication and data justice and or addresses contemporary social issues using data, media, design, technologies, art, and storytelling. CODE^SHIFT is a research project led by Dr. Srivi Ramasubramanian and hosted at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
The full video of Chai with Srivi episode 10! Lynne Sachs, an American experimental filmmaker and poet, discusses unconventional approaches toward filmmaking and how a feminist lens can bring life to cinema. In Episode 10 of Chai with Srivi, she shares her thoughts on the battle for bodily autonomy and how she hopes her films help educate people on the women’s plight.
LYNNE SACHS And as far back as I can remember, dad engaged with the world in ways that inspired, excited and sometimes confused me. How do you feel, dad? Very funny. Oh, let me go do my hand.
NICOLE RIVERA So nice to meet you. I’m glad to have you here for Imagen TV Plus. And tell us a little bit about the documentary that you present these [films from] 2024 to and for Ambulante. Yes. Go ahead.
LYNNE SACHS Well, actually, I’m having a retrospective, so I showed 15 films in four programs. Okay. And then, some of them were feature length films, and some of them were short films. And then I also taught a master class where I showed some films and talked about the relationship between film and poetry. And then lastly, I taught a workshop, called Opening the Family Album, which covered a whole month of interactions with 16 participants, 16 artists, filmmakers from Ciudad de México. We met several times on zoom, and then we met in person, and then we created a live expanded cinema documentary performance. So I was very involved with Ambulante.
NICOLE RIVERA Wow. It’s amazing. I totally… I didn’t know that, but it’s amazing. And I feel like it’s really on the line of the work you made that is really personal. So tell us more about… about you, about how you become a part of the cinema environment. how you decide to create the personal masterpieces.
LYNNE SACHS I don’t know if I have made any masterpieces, but I have made a lot of films. and some of them are very short. The shortest one is 90s, and the longest one is 83 minutes. So it’s a full range of films. But I got involved in filmmaking because I was very interested in images. I was very interested in history, but I was also interested in what’s going on in the world and how we as artists can engage in very deep ways and begin to ask people to question their reality. And so film seemed like the right place for that, because film can contain all of those sensibilities in one space
NICOLE RIVERA And of course, actually this topic that you, mentioned about to question your reality, it’s really interesting for me talking about your job because, the documentary that I have the chance to check, it’s, to the, I mean, okay, the documentary that present, it’s about the Chinese community in New York. It’s amazing to see it because I feel like, like Mexican, like people who didn’t live in New York. We had this image of New York that the American cinema and Hollywood sell to us. So to see another perspective of New York is pretty interesting, because it’s a reality that we don’t know and we don’t even imagine.
So how… how do you feel to share with the world this, this other side of, of places that we think we know, we don’t know. And we can see the other faces of the cities that are so famous. But this place is not. Tell me, tell me more about that.
LYNNE SACHS Really love your question. I think that is exactly why I make films. I want to look at the other side of reality. Because in our culture, the global culture, sometimes we think the reality that is produced by commercials, by Hollywood is an opportunity to understand how a place or a person lives. It exists. But that’s not true. And that’s the job of a documentary filmmaker. And so actually, I’ve been making many films before I made your Day Is My Night, but I decided that I wanted to commit myself to looking at my own city and not to need an airplane ticket to make a documentary film. A lot of people think the job of a filmmaker who works with reality is to first buy a plane ticket and go somewhere exotic, and to begin to understand that maybe I’ve done that enough in my life. So I wanted to understand the reality that’s around me all the time. And also to see that my city, New York City, has many different layers of experience. So I decided I wanted to understand the experience of immigration and what it is like for people who are living in a place but only temporarily, or people who are having to share a home in order to make it possible to be where they want to be. And a new understanding of what family is. The family isn’t just a father, mother, and three kids.
A family is… can be something more, surprising. And it can be where you feel calmest and where you feel that you can be yourself. And I saw that when I started to talk to the people in Your Day is My Night, many of whom came here decades ago. So they were reenacting their lives from before, and some of them were articulating their lives from the present course. And actually, I think that’s a beautiful part of your job. It’s not about, like, to go somewhere exotic is to go inside to understand, the, the places that form part of your own life in case of New York as part of your life, because you’re from Brooklyn, and I think this this is so personal because you you have to go inside of these people lives. And I think that could be really telling you more than to cross the world, to go to another place you used to contact with the people next to you sometimes could be really challenging.
NICOLE RIVERA Can you tell me more about…
LYNNE SACHS That’s exactly true, because, for example, I rode the subway yesterday in the metro here in Mexico City, and when you’re on the train, you’re very close to other people. But you don’t say, excuse me, could you tell me about your life? Yeah. And, so I think that it’s very delicate because in documentary film, you don’t want to knock on the door or the window and say, open up your life to me because I’m powerful, or I carry the camera, or I’m from another part of this society, and I want to know how you live your life, which is very different from mine, because you don’t want to be voyeuristic. You don’t want to just look in and exploit. So for me, it’s very important to establish relationship and to work with people who are your subjects also as your collaborators, as the people who can also come up with creative ideas and they can say, this is good for me, this is not good for me. and so I think there’s a lot of listening and collective, processing that can happen within a documentary that usually doesn’t happen in a narrative film, because in a narrative film, you have the executive producer, then you have the director, and then you have all those other people. Oh, I forgot way up here… the movie stars. So you have the executive producer, the movie stars, and the director, and everybody else is kind of secondary. so I think that you need to break up that hierarchy. Yes. Because it’s not about telling a story that you want to tell. It’s to hear a story and to let others talk through your camera.
NICOLE RIVERA You it’s like, yeah, it’s like, work. They work together. Yeah. So I think it’s… it’s beautiful. But I don’t know what you think. This is the way I see documentary. You are not just entering the life of this person. You let them enter into your life. So true, so true. So I want you to know, to tell us about how this process had been for you to let them enter into your life.
LYNNE SACHS Yeah. I loved when you said that in a documentary, you don’t go to the set with an agenda. You don’t go with a thesis. I’m trying to prove something. You go to listen. Not well… I think there’s a difference between listening and hearing. You always hear. But when do you listen? And I think you brought up that distinction. So, for example, with Your Day is My Night. I made that film over about a year and a half, but then I have remained in contact with the people in the film. So we have lunch, and we meet for additional screenings. There are ways that we can try to stay in contact. Two of the women in the film are now in their early 90s there, and they’re still doing well. So I feel very honored that I met them in their early 80s. Now they’re in their early 90s, but their role models, for me, they’re heroes. I think that’s beautiful about great documentaries like the way your life, the story. You know, you experience the story when you are telling it to the others. It’s different than cinema that you just tell a story.
NICOLE RIVERA You finish this and that’s all… know you did you become part of that. So I want you to tell us all your story. That would be…which how would you feel about the experience that you have been in all this process? Who was main, learning about this, the oldest project in your life to be a documentary?
LYNNE SACHS Like, who was a mentor or an inspiration? Yeah. Well, I was very inspired by a French filmmaker who’s extremely famous. He died, his name was Chris Marker, and he made films going back to the late 1950s. And he was very much an observer. But he also brought another side that’s very important to me, which is he had a lot of introspection and he had a lot of doubt. And I think when you’re making these kinds of films, you have to maintain your doubt. So you have to always question your assumptions and. Find yourself with your subjects and, and realize that the obstacle to working with that person might be what’s most important and that that questioning of yourself, the ability to cry because you think you’ve almost failed.
But then to say, well, what did I learn from that person is something I learned from Chris Marker and, something I hope I keep.
NICOLE RIVERA And it’s amazing. And yeah, I feel like to have always this though it lets you continue with this constant learning, not to impose a story. You let the story flow. But tell me in all this process through all these years, who did it, the biggest challenge for you?
LYNNE SACHS Oh, the biggest challenge. Let me think. Oh, the challenge that took me 35 years, actually, was to make a film about my father, which is a film I showed here at Ambulante and we showed it at the Cinemateca Nacional. And, that film actually has probably been seen by more people than any of my other films. It was…distributed theatrically.
So it went to theaters and it was on some major streaming services, and it was very hard. And it’s definitely my most personal film, because in a way, it’s easier to ask questions of the people you know the least, but to ask the questions of your own parent is very vulnerable and a little scary.
NICOLE RIVERA I hope we can be there in your projection, because this sounds like a really interesting project because. Yeah, actually. And that’s what I tell you before something, sometimes it’s harder to go inside of us than to the other side of the world. Yes. So that’s amazing. And so we are really glad to have you here for Imagen TV Plus, there’s something else that you want to share with us to recommend some of your screenings during the festival. Feel you’re free to talk to the camera.
LYNNE SACHS Well, I made many films in my life, and I haven’t had that many opportunities to show so many of them together. And I feel very, very, very supported by Ambulante and also by the Centro de Cultura Digital. Both of those organizations have worked very hard to think about curating my work. I also, I should say, brought five films in their original format on 16mm, which many people in Mexico City are thrilled about. They like to see analog. So that has been very, very important. And, I thought I would share this t-shirt.
NICOLE RIVERA Yes. You want to tell us a little bit more about her t-shirt? Because it’s pretty and can you tell me the story? Okay, I seen okay.
LYNNE SACHS Cinema Que Agita, Cinema that agitates which to many people, that sounds… not very good. But actually to agitate is to stir, to create a motion is to bring new ideas, is to change you. And this t-shirt is from the Costa Rica Film Festival, which presented a retrospect of my work also. So I thought it would be a good t-shirt to wear in another country where people speak Spanish and to have this way of thinking about what cinema can do to us.
NICOLE RIVERA Yes. Because the main topic about this t-shirt, it’s the possibilities to “agitar” the world through the cinema, through the documentary. So that’s the special thing about this t-shirt.
So thank you to share that with us, to agitar with us.
LYNNE SACHS You’re very welcome. I know it’s so good to meet you. And I appreciate it.
Lynne Sachs: I’m just going to pour my tea and then we’re going to get going on this. We could just keep talking about the South.
Erin Zona: Do you ever go back?
LS: Well, I do because my mother lives in Memphis. But is it okay for me to tell you this? … Actually, this relates to Carolee. So, you know, Carolee was involved in various anti-Vietnam War efforts, collective efforts. Omnibus projects. Viet-Flakes [1962–67]. Do you know that film of hers?
LS: I think she was really interested in how artists came together [around] issues that they cared about. So I’m going to tell you about something that I’m doing next week. [It’s about the] control of women’s bodies. Very fundamental to Carolee. So once abortion, the whole abortion issue, was transformed by the passage of the Dodds decision in the Supreme Court [referring to the June 2022 decision in Dodds v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization]. As you know, many states in the United States now have proclaimed that women can no longer make their own choices about their bodies.
So a woman at UCLA put out a call for artists who work in film to join her in an omnibus project in which you would go to a state where abortion is no longer legal and make a short, sort of personal film. And the premise of it for everyone is the same. So someone’s going to North Dakota. Someone went to Kentucky, probably Arkansas. There’s about eight of us. I’m going back to Memphis and I’m doing this performative piece at a building which is called Choices, but it’s been shut down. I’m working with 12 probably, at the most, women. … They’re going to be in robes so from the back we’ll see their bodies, but you won’t see their faces at all. And they’ll be in different poses standing around the building. We have to shoot it very quickly because it’s on a busy street. And so if people see us there, especially women in robes, that could create a big … that could be potential for tension.
EZ: Yeah.
LS: So anyway, that’s what I’m doing. I have to get releases, even though we’re not seeing anyone’s faces … and they don’t even have to put their name in the credits. But I’ve learned from the women who helped me get the people together that they’re all so excited. They’re saying, “thank you,” because they care about it.
EZ: You’re doing that next week?
LS: Yeah, I’m doing it Saturday. A week from today. Everyone who’s shooting a film like this is shooting around a building or doing something related to a building that no longer provides these services. … Then the other part is that everyone has a voiceover of someone who’s been affected by this decision. I actually have two women. One was a woman who performed abortions through Planned Parenthood for years and is an activist in the Black community. She’s an OB-GYN. And then the other person is a woman who used to stand and accompany women who are getting out of their cars and walking to the front door of this building, protecting them. Now there’s no longer a reason to do that because there’s no services in the building. She’s now a driver, like what people [used to] call a Jane. And she drives people all the way to Illinois.
EZ: Wow. Amazing.
LS: Yeah. So she’s the other voiceover.
EZ: How exciting.
LS: It has to happen quickly, but I’m looking forward to it.
EZ: That’s great. Thanks for sharing. … Can you tell me a bit about who you are as a filmmaker and how you arrived at that choice as an artistic genre?
Listen 7:48LS: I have been making films for exactly 40 years. The very, very first film that I made was a Super 8 film in 1983. It really was a vessel into which I could discover something about myself. Now, I had never watched movies that way before. But a few years before that I had seen work by Chantal Akerman or even the author Marguerite Duras, and I had one of those “bing” moments where I said, “Oh, wait, women make films?” People make films that are personal in the way that writing a journal can be, or drawing or painting or taking a photograph? It had that intimacy and also that sense of autonomy, that it can be an extension of your imagination in this very interior way. But then it also takes you into the world and has a fluidity between your home space and your public self. And that was just a shock to me.
I actually took a Super 8 class at an art school in New York City. I’d already finished college and I finished the film. I remember the teacher said to me, “Oh, you must have been a liberal arts student,” because the film didn’t really depend on a kind of script with a punch line at the end. It was much more associative and textural and very much about process. I probably couldn’t have used any of those words before, and it actually featured my closest friend who had grown up with me in Memphis. We were both in New York at this moment. We were trying to figure out who we were going to be in our lives, and the film gave me that possibility. In some ways I’ve been doing that ever since. They’re not all in any way autobiographical, but they are imprinted with a moment in time. I love that working that way can give me solace and awareness and can give me an opportunity to think about politics and other things beyond my own sphere. And poetry does the same thing for me. I just like seeing how images and text can confront each other and embrace each other.
EZ: Is there a moment in time, as you were becoming the artist that you are today when you were … at the beginning of your professional career, where you remember a work of art or a film that was really influential to you? That still is part of your forming, I guess?
LS: Hmm. Okay, I’m going to answer this question and you’re probably going to say, “Oh, she planned that,” but I really do mean it. In 1986, I made a film called Drawn and Quartered, and the film was shot on the roof of the San Francisco Art Institute where I was a student. I asked my then boyfriend to take off his clothes. I took off my clothes and we each took the camera back and forth and filmed each other. And I used an old regular 8[mm] camera and didn’t develop or process it in the traditional way, so it [ended] up being a frame with four images … quartered. And so I played on that word “drawn” and that form of punishment, to draw. Like when you draw and quarter, you split someone into four pieces. It’s very violent. But in this case, it was actually kind of like a love poem.
Lynne Sachs, still from Drawn and Quartered, 1987.
I think I probably had seen Fuses [1964–67] by that time. And so the idea that you were both holding the camera and in front of the camera … oh, I’m almost positive. I had to have seen it, because in 1987 I went back to Memphis to teach a summer class–not that I really knew anything, but, you know–to some college students. … I was pretty young then. But anyway, I remember showing Fuses, and I can tell you that was actually problematic. So I know I’d already seen it, and I know that I had thought it was revelatory and that it was a film in which both the man and the woman were engaged with each other, celebrating each other. I guess I could say empowered in some ways, but also not empowered–just being. Should I tell you about showing the film?
EZ: Yes … and also I would like for you to speak to Fuses for you as an audience member and about [the film] in the wideness of the world.
LS: Fuses had been really important to me. But I have to say, at the same time, I read Laura Mulvey’s article [“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 1973] … on the male gaze, and it was extremely important and very influential. [Mulvey] said that whether or not you’re a woman or a man or now we would say are nonbinary, you still pick up a camera and you replicate the male gaze because you’ve been so influenced by culture that you have to really reconfigure your way of seeing in order to confront that. And it’s not any more powerful for men than it is for women because we’re so conditioned that way. … [Mulvey asked,] What was it to frame the body with a camera, whoever’s body, and how was that presented in a somehow male inflected way? That was a really important essay. People still read it today. … And so, to read that and then to see Fuses at the same time was like finding a manifestation of what it was to make images from a female perspective. To say, “yes, we understand what you’re saying of popular culture, Laura Mulvey. But this is what it is to experiment.” That’s why I actually like the [phrase] “experimental film,” because you’re pushing, you’re trying out new things and you don’t know what the answers will be. So those two experiences coming together were so important to me.
Carolee Schneemann, still from Fuses, 1964-67
LS: I remember showing Fuses to, I think, a group of young women. And I was, gosh, like 25 or 26 at the time. I guess I was just teaching a workshop on filmmaking in Memphis. I showed Fuses and I didn’t frame it. I just showed it because I thought it could stand on its own; I wasn’t testing the audience or me. But you know how that is. Like, “let’s talk about who Carolee Schneemann is,” and the group of students were very critical of it, and they didn’t like that she showed her body in this very sensual way. I got very defensive. … I continued to show it–I never hesitated–but I wasn’t at that moment prepared for the nuances of what it is to be a feminist, and now I think I can acknowledge that different women have different ways of representing the body. And Carolee’s way suited so many people. She’s a hero, but other people have ambivalence about [the film], or, let’s say, critique. But that makes the work just as strong to me. So that was an interesting experience. And I was very deflated. I was, at the time, so upset. I couldn’t even find the words because I just wasn’t prepared to have to defend that film the way I had to.
EZ: And so was that a college class? …
LS: I think it was college students.
EZ: Okay. And it was even after you framed it and contextualized it within the theories that you said. Were people open to it or was there pushback?
LS: I think they were more open to it. But now, I have to say, I’m remembering it the way I want to remember it. I really don’t know. I don’t remember what happened afterwards. I just remember the film was over and I thought we’d have this really exciting, enthralled conversation. And they turned to me, and they were a bit hostile. We’re in a period of reflection on identity and gender right now. But that was also happening in the ’80s. So that was a period in which women probably thought [about] the ways you [could] dress to make yourself less sexual or less desirable. You know, like how to cut that, the male gaze.
EZ: Yeah.
LS: I think that was definitely an entry point for me, with Carolee. It was because of all the ways that she would continually prove to me that I have patriarchal eyes, even if I’m a lesbian, even if I have this much experience in the world, that her ability to stay sharply aware of that and constantly be ready to sort of flip the conversation to make you see, right, that way. And I think that combination of reading the Laura Mulvey piece and looking at Carolee’s just was an explosion in our ways of thinking about what we call somatic cinema. What is it to have the body centered but not objectified?
EZ: It’s very interesting. And I’m not a filmmaker, just so you know, but I understand large concepts around the male gaze. …
LS: I’m neither a theorist or historian.
EZ: Me neither.
LS: But, you know, I like to explore.
EZ: … I’m curious, do you go to the theater and see films a lot?
LS: These days … I watch a lot of film, but I would say honestly, I watch more at home. And I’m still excited by the moving image, and I love being in a room with people, but I don’t necessarily find that it’s compromised watching it in a more private space. On the other hand, I think for that absolute immersion, there’s just nothing like that separation you feel and the fact that a theater space is so hermetic and so you’re contained. It’s the psychic nature of the film. Like you’re at one with the film, or theater, or any performance experience of that sort. So I have to say I could go more. But luckily, in New York, we do have so many alternative venues that aren’t just for commercial cinema and …
I’m going to weave in a story about Carolee here. I always invited Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer to any kind of film that I had; they were on my New York email list, let’s say. And that could be hundreds of people. They were the only two people who consistently would write me a note saying, “Dear Lynne, I’m so sorry, I cannot attend your whatever it was. I wish you the best and I hope to come next time.” It was done in the most polite way, and it was like a deep acknowledgment. And both of them did that. It’s like their moms trained them to do it or their fathers. Something about them compelled them to show respect for the other person. To be kind of formal in that engagement across a generation. It just was very touching how consistent that was.
Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer at Schneemann’s home in New Paltz, NY, 2010s.
EZ: I love that.
LS: Have other people told you that she did that?
EZ: Well, it’s funny that you mention that. Would it be through email?
LS: Yeah.
EZ: I love reading correspondence in general, in archives and around individuals that I’m, for whatever reason, intellectually interested in. And I always have found myself admiring that when I am working in someone’s archive and I find evidence of a thank you note over something like this. I try to be like that. I wasn’t trained that way. We never did thank you cards in my family. It’s not as if it’s part of my …
LS: Yeah. Can I show you something?
EZ: I’d love to see it.
LS: I am obsessive about letters. Even emails. To me, emails are letters. So I save letters, all my letters. I have for a few years. … What I do every year is, if I get a good letter–I’ve saved everything from Carolee, for example–I just make a PDF of it immediately, especially if it’s a whole thread and then in January of the next year I print them. And I mean, that’s not a waste of paper. It’s only one [year]. That’s not that much paper.
EZ: I really admire that you’re doing that. …
LS: I think it’s really important. And you’re an archivist, so you would probably agree.
EZ: Do you have any pets? An animal that was meaningful to you for some reason?
LS: … I’ve had a cat, a couple of cats, for the last 20 years. And I used to talk to Carolee about cats. She had very strong opinions about what to feed your cat and the connections that you had [to] your cat. And I do have a very strong memory of being in the hospital with Carolee after she broke her hip in about 20–2016 or ’17 I think [referring to Schneemann breaking her hip during a lecture at NYU in 2014]. She actually gave a lecture that I invited her to give, and I saw her fall.
Carolee Schneemann and Lynne Sachs at NYU, 2014.
EZ: Oh, no.
LS: Yeah. She gave the lecture with the broken hip. Did you know that?
EZ: I think I did [hear about] that.
LS: And then she went to the hospital. She actually wanted to go out for dinner too!
EZ: Of course.
LS: Anyway, when I went to see her in the hospital, we talked about things. You know, what’s good to feed a cat? What do you do with an old cat? We had lots of conversations around cats. And of course, I knew about Fuses being sort of the point of view of a cat. But the other thing I’m going to say that she didn’t have is that I have three pet water frogs. I bought tadpoles in 2004 for my daughters to see how tadpoles turn into frogs, and I still have those frogs in basically a hamster tank.
EZ: Here?
LS: Here, upstairs. I just fed them today. So I have 19-year-old frogs, water frogs.
EZ: 19?
LS: Yeah.
EZ: Wow. I did not know that they lived …
LS: I think I should win some kind of award or recognition. Maybe some of the oldest frogs on earth and they’re upstairs.
EZ: And how big are they?
LS: They’re like the size of your palm.
EZ: Wow. What are their names?
LS: They don’t have names. They’re just called the frogs.
EZ: How funny. I love it. … I have three deer that eat in my backyard. And I just named them all Tina and I call them the three Tinas.
LS: Oh, that’s good. So it means that when we go out of town, somebody either comes by to feed the frogs and the cat. But a cat, you can’t leave for that long… a couple days. The frogs, you could leave as long as you want, as long as you just feed them. And they have marbles in the tank because well, to keep them entertained. I always think I’m going to forget to feed them, and so when I walk by the bathroom where they are, they’ll move a little bit and then it jiggles the marbles and it reminds me, I usually remember, but sometimes I think I might forget. And so those are my animals.
EZ: I love it. Thank you.
LS: You have three deer and I have three frogs.
EZ: You might have touched on some of this, but feel free to repeat yourself. How did you first become aware of Carolee? How did you meet for the first time?
LS: I first became aware of Carolee Schneemann because of Fuses and because I was living in San Francisco and she was so important to the whole pedagogy of the film department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Any course on avant-garde film would probably include a film of hers. It could be Plumb Line [1968–71], or it could be Viet-Flakes, but it would find its way into the syllabus, let’s say the curriculum. At that point, people, at least in San Francisco, were really talking about her as a filmmaker. They weren’t talking about her as a painter, that’s for sure. It just didn’t come up. And I think that happened to her disappointment, you know. … Then in 1991, she was a visiting artist at the San Francisco Art Institute and it just so happened that my friend Mark Street, who ended up becoming my husband–we’ve been together all these years–was in her class. Somebody suggested to her that she invite me because I had made a film called The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts. It was a collage film that explored how art and then science were culpable in forcing women to look at their bodies in a certain way. From menstruation to the shape of your body to how you imagine your future, things like that. … I don’t think she had seen it, but she asked me to come show it in the class. We sat in front of the class having a great old time talking, and we didn’t talk to the students that much, but they were there. And so that was the first time we met. And that was probably the fall of 1991. I did not have her as a teacher because I had already finished at the Art Institute a couple of years before, but Mark was in the class … [and] he got to know her as a student.
I was not in touch with her until years later because I moved here to New York and I was involved with the Filmmakers Co-op and so we would often show her films and sometimes she would come through. I ended up being on the board of the Co-op for 17 years. Carolee’s work was in the collection, and she was around a lot, and coming to some of the Co-op events. You know what, I kept wanting to go to her house to film with her, but she was so busy. And finally, she let me come film when I made Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor. We spent time together then and we kind of became close and spent a lot of time talking on the phone when she was going through a lot of struggles. She gave me some good advice about my own daughters. Sometimes admonishing, sometimes supportive. She was very open about those things. And I would go up to–what’s the name of the–
EZ: Springtown Road.
LS: Springtown Road. I would go through New Paltz and to her house and spend time there and shoot Super 8 film with her and go to the movie theater or out for dinner. Things like that.
Carolee Schneemann and Lynne Sachs at the Egg’s Nest in High Falls, NY, 2017.
EZ: I wanted to ask you about [the house], because Carolee had such an important relationship with her home.
LS: Yeah.
EZ: I would be curious about your first visit there. And maybe if there was anything significant about the tour that she gave you of her home and studio, and what animals were there at the time.
LS: I love that you asked about the animals. The first time I went to her [house] was probably 2016. … [We] went out to the other building, the studio, which she was very proud of. In some ways, I got the feeling that it was more storage than active. That it was too new and too kind of austere compared to her house. I didn’t necessarily get the feeling that she would go out there every day to her studio. But when I went to her house … I’ll never forget, one day we were sitting outside on the porch and I saw a blue jay that the cat had brought in. I have a picture of it. It’s so beautiful. The cat had brought and left [it] on the porch, the way cats do. And, you know, most people would see a dead animal and want to get rid of it and this dead animal was definitely going to stay there for a long time, because I think she admired the bird alive, but she also admired the bird as an object and as a connection to her cat and to nature, and to all the rites of passage for all of us. And it wasn’t sad at all. It was just kind of glorious that it was there.
Blue Jay at Carolee Schneemann’s home in New Paltz, NY, 2017. Photograph by Lynne Sachs.
EZ: I love that story because it is something that I think I learned from Carolee. Especially with relationships to animals that are our pets. That we are responsible for, but in Carolee’s world, the cats were themselves. It wasn’t as if they are a pet in the same way that someone else might have a pet. I mean, La Niña, probably the cat who was the one who killed the bird, had this agency. And, you know, magic, for lack of a better word, that Carolee would see in an animal. I love that. And that’s something that I learned, as you go through grieving processes with animals where they grow old and then they die. And you as a human have to you participate within all of that and observe death. And it’s her way of being in the world, with nature… [it] was something I really responded to, having known her as a person.
LS: So you did get to know her in the years that you…
EZ: I met her in 2017. I’m 43, so I think I was first exposed to her work through the Angry Women book; there’s a chapter about her.
EZ: … 1996 or whenever that book first landed in my hands, it was fairly new. When I got my job at Women’s Studio Workshop [residency and artist’s book publisher in Rosendale, NY] and was moving to the area, I discovered that she lived just down the street. She would make prints at the studio and knew the founders of Women’s Studio Workshop. I very quickly sort of forced people to introduce me to her and then we did a project together. We did a reprinting of Parts of a Body House Book that Women Studio published, and so I worked with her on it. She died while we were still making it, but we finished it after. She had given me permission to finish the book if she died while we were making it. We had just finished all of the creative components, the paper colors, all the ways that things were going to land in re-printing right before she died.
LS: What is the name of that book?
EZ: It’s called Parts of a Body House Book. It was originally published in 1972, and we did a pretty straightforward facsimile of the copy that she had that she has in her house. And I think it’s still in her home collection.
LS: Can I order it from you all?
EZ: It’s an artist’s book, so it’s a little more on the expensive side because it’s handmade …
LS: But there are still ones left?
EZ: Oh, yeah, … we still have a few. We only made 90. …
LS: Lucky for you to be involved.
EZ: Oh my gosh, I was so happy. I told her I wanted to do a project with her. I said, “What do you want to do?” And then she said, “I have a book that no one has seen.” And she went up and got this book and she said, “We should reprint this.” And I was really … I loved the project. It’s one of the proudest things I’ve done as publisher, for sure. Definitely.
LS: Oh my God, yeah.
EZ: La Niña actually finished the book because Carolee was going to do these paintings on the back of each book. She died before she was able to do that. So what we did was we had La Niña walk across with this beet-juice-and-mud mixture that we had made.
La Niña during production of Parts of a Body House Book, 2019. Photograph by Natalie Renganeschi.
LS: Oh, I love that. That’s totally in her spirit.
EZ: Let’s go back to … you mentioned the cat, the blue jay. I love that. That’s a great story. When you would visit her in New Paltz, you were filming, but would you sit in the house together?
LS: We did sit in the house, mostly in the kitchen. Sometimes I would sit and she would actually do work. … She was always very attentive to responsibilities that she had and phone calls she had to take care of and trips she was organizing and taking care of business and things like that. So sometimes I would just kind of be there. I don’t think she felt obligated to entertain me at times. And also, she was not well, so sometimes she would just lie down for hours, and maybe La Niña would be on the bed. And then she said I could film. That’s why I have some nice footage of the house without her in it, [and] some of it with her in it. I was just trying to engage and fill up my time and I knew it was special. I remember going upstairs with her and she really didn’t have the energy to go upstairs, you saw where she had all those pictures, you see it in the film, where she had all the pictures from the war in Syria and the devastation. She was trying to figure out how to integrate that and what the dialogue was between aesthetics and horror. I think she was very torn about that. She was–I’m being kind of literal–she was tearing those images. You’ve seen them, right?
EZ: I have … in the upstairs studio. …
LS: Yeah. And so you had that [studio] room and then you had that other room that was more like slides and archival things. But I could tell … maybe I’m reading into things, that it wasn’t just that she was feeling physically weak. It was that the images themselves were not just painful, but that she didn’t know. … I don’t want to say she didn’t know what her role was… she was trying to figure out how to be with them, supportive of them, critical of them. What was it to be… constantly to be an artist with such deep concerns about the world? The tearing of it seemed so important, because it’s also a violent thing to do, to tear an image. It’s both violent, but it’s also being willing to touch. I mean, you probably know that, right after September 11th, she made [an artwork] with the image of the person, the falling body [referring to photographic grid Terminal Velocity, 2001]. … It was a man jumping out of one of the World Trade Center buildings before it fell. And it was a kind of iconic image of, do you know about this story?
LS: It quickly became an iconic image of desperation. Someone throwing themselves out of a building, you know, from 90 stories above. I remember seeing [Terminal Velocity]. … Some people were very critical of it because they felt that 9/11 couldn’t be touched. But other people said, what more of an homage to the death than showing this figure, this last gasp before dying of this single person. And also, as we know, it’s much more possible to feel empathy towards one person than towards 2,000, in a way. You can be upset about the aggregate of 2,000 people dying, but to see one person jumping, you feel this cathartic relation. You feel, there but for the grace of God, “I would have jumped.” … You feel this individual. So it had all of that. But at the time, I think that she was criticized for using that image in an art piece.
EZ: And why do you think… I mean, why would that not work in a place like New York versus…?
LS: Especially in New York, people were very sacrosanct. You know, [taking on a mocking authoritative tone], “That is very precious, and you can’t touch that.” And, you know, the more people said you can’t do something, she was going to do it. She wasn’t trying to draw attention to how you might feel about the people who were responsible for the building coming [down] … it wasn’t an argument. It was pathos, right there in front of your eyes. But in New York, that was problematized or complicated. … Looking back on her work, her video work was often dealing with political subjects. And I mean this as different from her film work … for example, I’ll tell you [about] that piece at Eyebeam [Devour, 2003] … [When] I went to Eyebeam, it wasn’t quite set up. She was installing it herself. And this is in 2003. You know, [even] a person of that stature, because she went from painting to video to sculpture, she didn’t necessarily find her work at that point in the most lofty of situations. I mean, Eyebeam was a not-for-profit. It’s hard to imagine now because she just had that show at the Barbican [referring to Schneemann’s 2022–23 retrospective Body Politics] and, you know, her work is so elevated. But even in the early 2000s, she was definitely a one-woman band doing everything herself.
EZ: It definitely felt that way, at least when I met her. … I met her after the show at MoMA [referring to Schneemann’s 2017–18 retrospective Kinetic Painting]. Do you think, for you, that was a significant …?
LS: The PS1 [exhibition]?
ES: PS1, yeah.
LS: Well, I went to the show a couple of times, but one of the times I took my mom. She was here from Memphis, [and] it was so important to me to introduce my mom to Carolee’s work and to convince her that this was important to me as an artist and as a feminist and as a thinker. I pushed my mom. And in a way, it wasn’t the right way to do it. [The artwork] either speaks to you or it doesn’t. She had pieces in which she used index cards and she talked about … do you remember?
EZ: It’s ABC – We Print Anything – In the Cards [1977]. It’s one of my favorite works of art.
EZ: It’s an artist’s book. And I think that what you’re speaking to, there was a projection that was showing the cards. And then, I don’t know if [it was in] that exhibition, they had the film of her reading the cards. I know she’d done several iterations of it. … ABC is Anthony [McCall], Bruce [McPherson], Carolee. It is about 100 plus cards that are different colors that are her navigating through the relationship with Anthony ending and her relationship with Bruce starting. For that show they represented it through a slideshow of the images.
LS: But the cards, some of the cards were there in the vitrine.
Card from Carolee Schneemann, ABC–We Print Anything–In the Cards, 1976-77.
EZ: Some of the cards were there, yeah. And the book itself, outside of the performance …
LS: I want to get this book too!
EZ: Oh my gosh, I [am] on a waiting list for this one, where I say … “Collectors, if you ever find this book, a copy for sale, you have to let me know.” It’s so rare to find. It’s in collections.
LS: Oh, so I’m not going to find it.
EZ: It’s museum stuff. I don’t know what your collection budget is, but …
LS: No, I won’t find that unless you reprint it.
EZ: [Laughter.] But anyway, you were saying …
LS: It’s so interesting the way institutions can validate people. And yes, it was at PS1, so I have a feeling she probably felt that was one step down from being … like you said it was at MoMA.
EZ: I know I did.
LS: But it wasn’t at MoMA.
EZ: You’re right.
LS: It was at PS1 MoMA, and that’s in the borough and that’s a different thing. And I have a feeling she felt a little … and I’m guessing. I did not talk to her about it, so we’re just projecting. But that building has a quaintness. It’s very important, but … it’s not MoMA, you know? It’s not the international tourists. Museumgoers might go, they might not go. So it’s interesting it wasn’t at MoMA. And the other thing I’ll say, like when she got a recognition for lifetime achievement from the Venice [Biennale], I remember talking to her about it … and she wanted to go to Venice and get her lion or statue, but they weren’t even giving any money … but a prize. It was more like, “Yay! You get a lifetime achievement award.” And she said, “But I need the money.” But she still went because she wanted to be connected to that.
I have one other story to tell you about ways that Carolee really fought for herself. Is that okay for me to tell you?
EZ: Of course.
LS: In 2000 or so, I was living in Baltimore and teaching at Maryland Institute College of Art, and my husband taught at University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Carolee was invited to come as a visiting artist, and two things happened that I’ll never forget. One was that she was giving an artist talk and at the end a student in the audience stood up and asked, ”Do you feel like you’re a failure because you didn’t have a child?” And you could tell that had been asked before, and it was not devastating to her–to Carolee–but it was insulting. I think the student, young woman, felt that she could ask it because so much of the work was autobiographical, so much was about the body, so much was about women’s anatomy, so she maybe felt that it was all in the same voice. I remember that was so–not naive–but so conventional as a way of thinking, of measuring a woman’s success. You know what I mean?
EZ: Yes. And what did Carolee say? I can imagine her.
LS: Like you’re horrified. She just said, “I didn’t want children. I was so focused on my work that you’re asking me the wrong question. I didn’t feel ever that I failed. It wasn’t part of what I was trying to do.”
EZ: Yeah.
LS: So that was one thing. But at the same time, she had to leave a little early because they were taking a picture at the Whitney Museum of important artists of the day, including Rauschenberg and probably Jasper Johns and others, and she had been invited to be a part of this big photograph, a group picture. And she knew that she’d probably be the only woman, or maybe there was one other, I don’t know who. So she had to rush back to be in the photograph.
EZ: Wow.
American Century Artists Shoot (detail), Whitney Museum, 1999. Photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.
LS: And I think she knew that she needed to carve out her place for us. …
EZ: To go back, I have some questions about New Paltz and the house. When you visited her there, did you all go out to eat? You said you went to the movies. …
LS: We went to a movie. I don’t know why I remember this, but I feel like at some point we sort of held hands in the movie. I was just like, “Oh, this is so thrilling. I can’t believe this is happening.” And I mean, it was just affectionate. And then we whispered to each other that we hated the movie and we left early.
EZ: Do you remember what movie it was?
LS: No, I don’t remember. It was so bad. It was a totally mainstream commercial movie, and neither of us were interested. It was just like, you know, you asked if I like to go to movies. It was a nice ritual that actually wasn’t that good. And then we went to dinner. There was a place near town, sort of a farm-to-table, beautiful restaurant. And it was there where I was talking to her about what concerns I had about my girls’ love life because, you know, I was just kind of like letting it all hang out. And she said, “You need to let them have their own life.” She kind of admonished me in a sweet way.
EZ: Are there any other things that you would want … that come to mind if you think about her home or visiting her or the filming?
LS: Oh, let me think. I mean, I think one of the wonderful things about that house, just to me, was that it allowed the outside in and the inside out. Like the windows always being open and the sense of the vines almost coming through the window. I liked how it was in the land, and that she’d let it age without updating the oven or the ceiling or anything. I liked that you saw time pass there and it had that beautiful glow to it. I felt it was so connected to even the dirt outside, you know, and she wasn’t fussy in any way with all of that, even though she knew that people would treasure that building.
La Nina at Carolee Schneemann’s home in New Paltz, NY, 2015.
EZ: I can relate to what you’re saying, especially because there are a couple of scenes in Kitch’s Last Meal [1973-78] where she’s dumping water on the porch and sweeping the water off as a way of mopping dirt off of the porch and it’s kind of an old-fashioned mopping, way of cleaning an outdoor porch. And she’s hanging laundry in a couple of parts.
EZ: Me too. But the reason I bring that up in context to what you said is because there’s this way where the connection to the dirt and the land and the material and the aging of that house, and that Carolee lived there … I don’t know, it’s almost as if you could imagine women for hundreds of years pouring water and sweeping the porch, and everyone was important but forgotten because of society.
LS: Oh, I love the way you put that, yeah. Kitch’s Last [Meal] is a film that you watch and you just want to scream with excitement. I just can’t believe what an energizing experience that is. And the double screen. … It’s just absolutely brilliant.
EZ: I was thinking about it when you were speaking earlier about your film that you made with your boyfriend at the time and the multi-views and thinking about Fuses. There’s one part in Kitch’s Last Meal where she and Anthony [McCall, Schneemann’s partner during the making of the film] are walking in the snow and they switch camera views. So you see him, you see her, and it just has this timeless, ageless quality of two people in love walking in the snow. [It] is just perfectly captured.
Carolee Schneemann, still from Kitch’s Last Meal, 1973-76.
LS: I wrote something on Kitch’s Last [Meal]. I feel like I should look for it, but anyway. I just love the split screen and the dynamics between very precise texture and daily life. And I love that it’s supposed … to have slippage, where different things happen. I mean, I know there exists a file where they’re together now, right?
EZ: Mm-hmm.
LS: But originally it was shown as two projectors, I believe. Did you know that?
EZ: Yeah. Did you see it in that format?
LS: I think I’ve only seen it as a digital version.
EZ: The digital. Me too.
LS: But I can’t sit here and just recollect images. Can I just read something that I wrote? … [Reading from letter Sachs wrote to Carlos Kase] “Just a little over a year ago, you graciously sent me ‘Art, Life, and Quotidiana in the Observational Cinema of Carolee Schneemann,’ your Millennium Film Journal essay on Carolee’s Kitch’s Last Meal. I noticed in your text that you refer to CS as Schneemann and that is, of course, the right thing to do. But since she was a dear friend, I need to refer to her in a more personal way. I know that you too had a relationship with her, so I think you will understand, especially since what I’m writing here is not public. Watching this film was cataclysmic, spiritual, ecstatic for me. I was able to see it online during the Rosendale tribute to her work.” Do you know what I’m talking about?
There’s a woman who did a whole [referring to Women in Experiment: Carolee Schneemann and Barbara Hammer, a film presentation at the Rosendale Theatre organized by Pam Kray, 2021]. … Anyway, [continues reading] “I assumed at the time that I’d seen it before. Maybe I had not, because I emerged proverbially–since I was at home of course–a different, slightly better human being. Reading your text was as close to being inside the film as I can think that I could ever be. I’m so taken with your precise eye, your willingness to allow. … This gave me a chance to think about the treatises she was offering us, which worked in contrast to the intimate domestic energy. Your article is a journey that runs so close to the film that it’s scary in the best of ways. You treat it as the time-based experience that it is. I happened to have read the 1953 panel discussion on the poetic in cinema, which included Maya Deren, Willard Maas, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas and Parker Tyler. Those guys just didn’t get it when Deren spoke about the vertical experience in non-narrative film. I think that having Schneemann there to pontificate with all the others would have done just the trick. Plus, her film breaks all expectations and is also kind of architecturally vertical as well.”
EZ: And that’s when you saw that film [referring to the presentation at Rosendale Theatre]? I had seen the film right before that. Actually Rachel [Helm], the manager of the Schneemann Foundation, played it for me in Carolee’s studio on an iMac after Carolee had died. It was a while after. I was sitting in her studio, second floor in the house, watching it on her computer.
LS: Oh, nice.
EZ: And I just thought, “Wow, this is really special.”
LS: I bet you had the shivers.
EZ: I did, because, you know, at a certain point when you see her working in her studio and things that are happening in that film, I would look and say, “Is that that door”? You know what I mean? That’s one of the experiences for me that comes through in her photography work and her artist’s books, but her film work also. …
LS: I think that Carolee let us feel excited about getting in front of the camera and getting behind the camera. Not doing it as an actor, but doing it in this tactile way that you were so present in the act of making something and you didn’t know where it was going to go. You just followed that journey. It’s the opposite of, in film, this notion of planning all the time. That’s how cinema works. That you execute something that comes out of a paper planner and she was just … this idea that you’re always present, just very present in the possibility of change. I love that.
EZ: Let’s go ahead and jump to your film. Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor. I’d like for you to talk about that.
LS: Sure. As I was saying earlier, I think one of the great things about filmmaking is being responsive to a moment and being in a moment. … So with that in mind, I never said “I’m going to make a film about three great women artists.” I just knew that it was nourishing for me and interesting and inspiring to spend time with artists whose work I deeply admire, but also whose process and immersion in their own investigations was so specific. I just wanted to spend time with Carolee. I just wanted to spend time with Barbara Hammer and I just wanted to spend time with Gunvor Nelson. And I took a camera because I knew it was a vital and special experience that I was having. But then I was actually involved in a performance installation presentation at Microscope Gallery, and at the time they were in Brooklyn, so I just put all the three films together. And I said, “that would be kind of interesting.” And in a sense it was like the opposite of how films are usually made about famous people, because usually it has to have this, you know, [taking on an authoritative tone] a famous biopic, and this is the story and this is how you get to know whoever it is better. But I didn’t pretend to think that what I had done was going to tell you an enormous amount about any one of these artists. What I did think was that they were all living in the world at the same time and all extremely focused and driven … and that the camera was always a muse and also a challenge for them.
Poster for Lynne Sachs, Carolee, Barbara, and Gunvor, 2018.
LS: I shot all the footage over a period of a couple of years. And then I said, “Oh, I’m going to make this movie. I better go talk to them.” And by that point, both Carolee and Barbara were not well, and we all thought that Barbara Hammer was less well, but Barbara was much more public about her illness than Carolee was. As you probably know, they died within a month of each other [Schneemann died on March 6, 2019 and Hammer died on March 16, 2019]. They had very different approaches to illness. That’s not in the film, but I will say that Carolee was more alternative about the medical system and more suspicious of it, and Barbara went through chemotherapy three times. I think they both wanted to live, but they wanted to deal with the institution of the medical system in different ways. Also, Barbara Hammer was much more political and forthright about the fact that when she wanted to die, she wanted to die, and she wanted it to be her own choice. And Carolee was much more hidden and sort of protective about that, you know.
EZ: Why do you think that is?
LS: That’s a good question. It’s interesting. Of the three women who are in the film, Barbara and Carolee were much more public people in the world than Gunvor Nelson was. And to my surprise, Barbara became extremely well recognized later in her life. There’s something happening now in the art world: like, “Let’s recognize older women artists.” I have another friend who’s in her early eighties and she said, “Lynne, I should have given you more paintings 20 years ago, because now they’re selling off the easel.” There’s a wonderful recognition, but also why is this happening? Is it being monetized too much by collectors? Let’s look at the invisible women and make them visible again–I’m definitely suspicious of that. And it’s interesting because both Barbara and Carolee painted [and] painting ultimately will always make more money than filmmaking … this kind of filmmaking. If you can sell a painting, you can get a different level of recognition in the marketplace, and the films will never have that. They both wanted recognition for their work that would give them more financial stability. And, you know, Barbara painted a lot. You probably don’t even know that.
EZ: No.
LS: She had gallery shows within the last ten years. Several. With hundreds of paintings. I actually didn’t realize that either. And I didn’t realize how important painting was to Carolee until the PS1 show. I think it was heartbreaking for both of them and also a wallet breaker that they didn’t sell more paintings. [Carolee would] say I’m a painter and I use a camera also. … I don’t think she ever said I’m a filmmaker.
EZ: No, I think if she was referred to as one, she would correct the person.
LS: And say, “I’m an artist.”
EZ: Or a painter.
LS: A painter.
EZ: And I think that [she saw] all of her work through the lens of “this is a painting.”
LS: Yes! I agree with you.
EZ: I do think that was something that was important to her. And I wonder if her decision to go through illness and even death in a more quiet way has something to do with those other ways in which she didn’t want to become these archetypes … not wanting to be identified as a dying artist who wasn’t recognized, and that becomes what you’re remembered for. Having control over that narrative.
LS: I’m just guessing that it was somewhat, probably quite disconcerting, all the focus on, [Interior] Scroll [1975] which she had done as a young woman. Every time she spoke, that piece would be discussed and so much of her more recent work wasn’t written about as much. That was upsetting.
EZ: I agree with you. It’s an important piece, and it becomes more amazing the more you know about all of her other work.
LS: Yes.
EZ: But on its own it’s easy to remember. You know, that’s one thing that when I try to tell someone about Carolee, something about her work, I say, “You know this artist. She did this.” … And you know that only, but now let’s talk about the other things.
LS: I don’t even know who took that photograph, but it is fantastic.
EZ: Anthony McCall did. He took the ones that are the most famous. But she did that performance [in 1975 and 1977]. Is there anything else about your film, about the experience that you’d want to have [on record]?
LS: I’ll just say, sometimes you just cannot predict how much work that you make, especially in collaboration with an artist, can transform your own life. That I’m having this experience, I think, is more because of the film than because I knew her–because there was a way that that film places her with her peers and gives you a sense of Carolee as a feminist but also as a woman of that generation. What they were discovering together, you know. She was so supportive of the film, as was Barbara, as was Gunvor, because I think they felt like their arms were locked together, like [they were] marching together. When I showed it at the Museum of Modern Art, Carolee came and we all went out with my daughter, with Kathy Brew [artist and videomaker]. We all went out. And Barbara. I’m trying to remember exactly. Together, for a 9-minute film, but we are all in that same space together and that was meaningful to me, and validating for my own relationships with other artists.
Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer, and Gunvor Nelson, photo composite by Lynne Sachs.
I guess I’d say that the gifts that Carolee gave to other artists as a friend were always so critical … so essential. And they weren’t ever as a mentor, and I think that’s a really important distinction–that she wanted to have comrades of all ages and experiences who were working with passion. She saw herself as an equal, even though she had this lifetime of experience. I guess I would say she’s a role model for me in that way because I’m 61 and young men and women, but maybe more women, write to me. And you could say, “Oh, I don’t have time to talk to them,” but I really do my best because I learn from them and it also gets me excited about continuing the process. Even teaching, for her, I could tell was exciting. She didn’t necessarily want to teach in this sort of strictly scholarly way where she created … you know, I never saw a syllabus. I wasn’t a student of hers, but I think she liked imparting her thoughts and looking at work by younger artists. I think that’s really vital to me, and I hope I can do the same.
EZ: That’s amazing. I think that’s a great way to end, because people becoming acquainted with her work and who she was as a person through these types of stories. I think that everything that you just said says a lot about who she was as a person, as well as within the framework of her work. … And I think she always liked trying out new things and making mistakes.
LS: The sculptural piece that looks like a wing–some sort of Greek sculpture of a bird or an armature, a human armature that moves. It’s kinetic, that sculpture, but it has a very raw feeling to it. I think that when you were in her studio, you’d see something like that and you’d go “Oh, I had no idea that she was creating kinetic sculptures that were very much not female.” I mean, that’s another thing. She had so much work that wasn’t strictly exploring women’s bodies. And I think she would have felt that we were narrowing her if that was all that history gave her. That’s why, in some ways, I feel it’s problematic to say, “Oh, she was a great feminist performance artist, conceptual painter, thinker.” She is a feminist, but it didn’t define everything. Or maybe the point is to expand what is feminism, so that you’re not just looking at the canon. Which she knew very well.
“Narcisa Hirsch in Berlin in 1928. Argentine by choice, she is a filmmaker, with a long career in experimental cinema. In the 60s and 70s she expanded her activity in the form of installations, objects, performances, graffiti, urban interventions.
In her works she exposes central themes such as love, birth and death, or questions about the feminine condition, recreated through a particularly intimate language of images, with a marked visual and sound poetry. To date she has made more than 30 films in super 8, 16 mm and video.
Since the ’60s, Narcisa Hirsch has given as much importance to experimental cinema as to everything related to it (film archives, sound archives, books, photographs, etc.). Thanks to this visionary spirit, she has gathered, over the years, an impressive archive that includes a collection of national and international films, film material, sound, photographs, among others.” – https://filmotecanarcisahirsch.com.ar/
Interview with Narcisa Hirsch by Lynne Sachs August, 2008, Buenos Aires
In August of 2008, I was living in Buenos Aires with my family. I was able to meet and spend quite a bit of time with artist filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch.
In this conversation, we talk about so many things including: her belief that painting on an easel had died, “Happenings”, her collaborative Marabunta (1967) feminist performance, her discovery of 16mm, watching Michael Snow’s “Wavelength”, creating “Taller” a response to Snow’s ideas, a 16mm visualization of Steve Reich’s “Come Out”, her friend and collaborator Marie Louise Alleman, “Fuses” by Carolee Schneemann which was her first film purchase, making films in the troubled 1970s in Argentina, owning films by Su Friedrich and Stan Brakhage, rejecting making feature films with a script, filming daily life, her being world famous for 50 people, remembering Laura and Albert Honig (Argentine experimental filmmakers), support from the Goethe Institute, making “radical” work that did not threaten the government, “I didn’t go to jail because they didn’t want me,” giving away 500 little dolls on the street and saying “you have a baby” in NYC, London and Buenos Aires. All of these Happenings were filmed and each was very different, she was doing this during the same time that Cesar Chavez was encouraging people to boycott lettuce. She defines what a “happening” is including public participation and very much not a conventional gallery show, art was no longer “re-presentation” but now is a situation, not isolated from the public but including the public. They talk about Ramundo Glazer who was one of the Argentine disappeared.
Then we watch her film response to Steve Reich’s “Come Out”, film diary footage from summer 1973, close ups of leaves and water, her feet, a fly, her shadow in the sand as she carries her film camera, cherries on skin, a fly, a mouth luxuriating at the taste of fruit, a baby on the grass., a breast and a belly in the sunlight, a fly.
with Paula Felix Didier, Ruben Guzman, and Maya and Noa Street-Sachs
Flo Jacobs, Ken Jacobs, Luis Recoder, Lynne Sachs, Mark Street, Malcom Turvey, Federico Windhausen
Roundtable on Digital Experimental Cinema
Published Summer 2011 by MIT Press
Malcolm Turvey: We are here to discuss the various ways digital technologies have, and have not, impacted experimental filmmaking. There was a time, in the mid-1990s, if not before, when some people argued that digital technologies were revolutionary and that they would fundamentally change filmmaking. Now that the dust has settled, or at least started to settle, and we can look back over the last fifteen or twenty years, the “digital revolution” might not seem like a revolution at all. We want to talk about both what has stayed the same and what has changed in experimental filmmaking thanks to the advent of digital technologies.
Ken Jacobs: I think those people were right, but they were premature. They first made that argument about analogue video. But analogue video was not the way. There were people, like myself, who saw it as a great but transient medium. We saw good things being done, but now those things have gone.
Turvey: Are you talking about video art?
Ken Jacobs: Yes.
Federico Windhausen: When video art emerged, was it being discussed as something that experimental filmmakers would have to address? I have always had the sense that experimental filmmakers in the era of analogue video art felt that they could keep their distance from it pretty easily.
Flo Jacobs: That’s because the film-developing labs were still functioning.
Windhausen: So it wasn’t a threat? It was something you could easily avoid?
Ken Jacobs:That’s right.
Windhausen: Do others recall the situation the same way?
Mark Street: I remember the discussion about who was a video artist and who was a filmmaker, and how they had different purviews. You said the advent of analogue video art-so you’re talking about the early 1960s?
Windhausen: The moment of wider dissemination of the technology in the late 1960s and ’70s.
Street: In the 1980s, when I went to film school, there was still that distinction, but it started to mean less. People were making choices about shooting on analogue video based on economics, not based on content or aesthetics. When I first went to film school, people would ask, “Is it a film, or is it a videotape?” But ten years later, it didn’t seem to matter as much.
Windhausen: Were you around when Canyon resisted distributing on video?
Street: Well, some at Canyon resisted and some didn’t. There were some who felt that video was a threat, as you say, and there were younger people who felt that it really didn’t matter what medium was being used, that what mattered was the work itself. I remember being pulled both ways.
Flo Jacobs: Don’t you think the change really occurred when cheaper editing soft-ware like Final Cut Pro became readily available? Before that, there was Avid, but Avid was expensive. Then Final Cut Pro changed everything.
Turvey: When was that, Flo?
Flo Jacobs: 1999.
Windhausen: Right around the time that cheap digital cameras came on the market.
Lynne Sachs:I think that was a revolution in terms of access. Because of its accessibility, more people could enjoy the freedom of using the new media for creative thinking. People started to believe you could be a “filmmaker” without being a “director,” and that making a film could be an autonomous act from start to finish, as painting and writing are. That was very radical, because before that, there was a hierarchy in filmmaking (except among experimental filmmakers who tried to work outside that hierarchy). I think there has been a very important shift in society’s understanding of filmmaking. People realize that the resources are there to do it individually. This “democratization” is not just a political shift; it’s a paradigmatic shift in that it allows filmmaking to be the product of a truly individual vision, as Stan Brakhage and others always advocated.
Windhausen: But hadn’t the Bolex 16mm film camera already enabled a lot of what you’re talking about? It facilitated a shift from thinking about becoming a director within the industry to thinking about oneself as a creative artist working individually outside the industry. The difference in the digital era is that there’s already a long history of experimental filmmaking, and that history has valorized and legitimized the notion of the individual film artist that you are talking about, whereas when the Bolex emerged, people like Maya Deren in the 1940s had to stake their claim to being a film artist.
Street: There’s another history at work too, and that’s the history of video art, which is a half step toward what you are talking about. Because analogue video was a popular, anti-high-art medium, it spoke to the idea that you could own your own camera and respond to television and things like that.
Ken Jacobs: The first video cameras were pricey-they weren’t that inviting. I remember one thing that shocked me was their low resolution. Ralph Hocking ran a video center, a lab upstate, and in his own work he consciously exploited video’s “low-res” rather than imitating film.
Sachs: The shame of the digital world is that as the machinery gets more and more advanced, there is an attempt to mirror reality as closely as possible. That is what I think is so disturbing, whereas the avant-garde is not trying to mirror reality. We’re trying to shape, investigate, play with, and sculpt it. High-definition is so unappealing to me because of that.
Luis Recoder: You used the word “sculpt,” and I think that film is becoming more of an art because of these crises. The digital wants to emulate film, and it is in a crisis: it doesn’t have a history. While that is going on, filmmakers like myself can work with film in a way that maybe you weren’t able to at one time. It’s a different kind of a possibility, I think.
Turvey: Do you mean that digital technologies show filmmakers ways to use celluloid that they might not have thought of before, ways that emphasize film’s differences from high-definition digital video?
Recoder: Yes, filmmakers and projection artists can work with celluloid in ways that are highlighted and assisted by this crisis, rather than evading or negating it.
Sachs: What do you mean by “crisis”?
Recoder: Well, you were saying that you’re not crazy about high-definition, right? I’m not crazy about it either. For instance, when you go to a film festival and bring your video, you don’t know what it’s going to look like when it’s projected, whereas with film, you have a better idea of what it’s going to look like and you can work with the projectionist to get it right. Video artists can sometimes do the same thing. They can run tests to see the quality of the projection. But often, you take your video to Sundance, or international film festivals, and it’s a bummer when you see it projected. With the medium of film, you have more control. I mean, you can even bring your own projector!
Ken Jacobs: I disagree. I can’t imagine a level of control over film that compares to the control you have with video.
Flo Jacobs: Except that you had fantastic problems switching over to PAL and Progressive Scan. You had disasters.
Ken Jacobs: Yes, there were problems. But let’s not forget the computer. It is this fantastic brain that can do anything. It gives just incredible freedom and control.
Sachs: For a while, one was totally dependent upon institutions in the city to convert from NTSC to PAL. But these days I can do much better conversions using Final Cut Pro and some other compressors than they can do. It takes a little while, but it looks perfect, going from PAL to NTSC or the other way.
Windhausen: But you’re talking about the advantages of video in production and postproduction, while Luis was talking about control over projection enabled by film.
Ken Jacobs: But there is a forward momentum with digital video, an urgency that’s lacking with film, which is just dying. There are only two film-processing labs in the city now. These problems with video will cease to be problems after a while. Video is constantly improving.
Flo Jacobs: But the other problem with digital video is preservation. What’s going to happen in ten years?
KenJacobs.The labs tell us that the only way to preserve digital video is to put it on film-on 35mm. [Laughter.]
Sachs: There are also the changes in our thinking brought about by these new technologies. The practical changes they occasion are a big part of our daily lives. But the changes in our thinking are harder to grasp. The other day, I was watching experimental documentaries by students from UnionDocs, and I asked them a question about sound, and every single student had downloaded their sound from the Internet. For them, it wasn’t about listening, about the surprise of finding something in the world around you. Instead, they seem to want to work in a cleaner comfort zone. Of course, we all work with found footage, and I adore that. But the surprises that come from working in the field teach you something about who you are in the world. I asked these people, who are all in their early-to-mid-twenties, if they ever go out into the world to listen to and record sounds. Their answer was no, for the most part. For them, filmmaking is more about acquiring the world than engaging with it.
Windhausen: Mark, do you find this with your students?
Street: I can make an analogy with books. I was talking to a student the other day and I said: “You’re looking for a book and it’s in the intellectual vicinity of these other books, so you go to the library to look for the book, and if the book isn’t there, there might be other books close by that could be of interest.” But it was an alien concept to this student-the idea of wandering and browsing and letting the library take you where it will. Nowadays there really is a more acquisitional approach to sound and images. It’s more like “I’m looking for this; let me go and get it” rather than “I’m going out to shoot and maybe I’ll happen on something by chance.” I think that’s a weakness of the digital age.
Ken Jacobs: They live only in their own times. They are not listening to the world, just making something out of the computer.
Turvey: Hold on. Isn’t it possible to discover something by chance on the Internet as well?
Sachs: That’s what they said to me. They said, “We find the most amazing things on the Internet,” and I said, “Oh, I spend plenty of time on the Internet, I know!” But they think: why go listen to the birds if you can download all these bird sounds without even knowing which birds they are?
Turvey: Lynne and Mark, if I understand your work correctly, you use multiple formats to shoot on, right? Do you do so because each medium offers different possibilities or advantages?
Street: For me, yes. I was in the basement today looking at a 16mm print that Craig Baldwin sent to me. I had to go downstairs and thread up the projector just to look at it, and there are limitations involved in that, just as there are limi- tations involved in shooting 16mm and Super 8mm film. I try to let those limitations speak, while also enjoying the freedom of the digital age. These days I transfer everything to digital, so I feel I can go out and shoot a roll of film and it’s OK to be defined by that roll for two minutes and forty seconds. But then I transfer it to digital and that opens up other possibilities.
Ken Jacobs. What moves you to still shoot film?
Street: I like the texture of it; I like the fact that when you shoot a roll of film, it becomes a specific entity and it’s unlike any other thing. It has its own weight and characteristics. You know? Thirty-six exposures: a roll of still film becomes like a little narrative, a little vignette of sorts. And I think that’s use- ful. I remember when I first started shooting videotape, I would fall asleep looking at my footage. [Laughter.] There was so much of it. I had six hours of footage. It used to be I had two rolls! You’d made it work, you’d make it count. So I like those limitations, I like being hemmed in, because making work is always about overcoming the obstacles.
Turvey: You are also interested in 35mm film, right? That’s fairly unusual within the experimental-film world. Didn’t you use 35mm film trailers in Trailer Trash [2009]? Where does that come from, that attraction to 35mm?
Street: Well, for a very brief and misguided period of time, I thought I could circumvent the fact that 16mm was disappearing in the early 1990s. I made a film called Sliding Off the Edge Of the World [2000] in 35mm in the hope that I could maintain the purity, such as it is, of the filmgoing experience. I was motivated, in part, by the experience of trying to show my films on 16mm. I would pay for a 16mm print and spend a lot of time and money figuring it out, only to be asked: “What’s that?” or, “Don’t you have that on tape?” Or to be told: “The projectionist is not here.” So I made a few 35mm films, and as I worked at a lab, it was easy for me to do that. However, Trailer Trash was finished in mini-DV, and I don’t really have any desire to work in 35mm anymore.
Windhausen: Ken, you did a couple of found-footage films on 35mm as well, right? Is it Disorient Express [1996] or Georgetown Loop [1996] that’s available on 35mm?
Ken Jacobs: Both are.
Windhausen: For the size of the image, because they are widescreen?
Ken Jacobs: That’s right. I hear what you’re saying about the intensity of using film. It costs so much, the meter is always running, and I honor that. But I enjoy having too much stuff on video, and then looking through it and seeing what unexpected thing I find, something I just couldn’t plan.
Turvey: So you find the extra volume of material facilitates creativity and surprise?
Ken Jacobs: I look at that stuff the way you might look at the world with a film camera. You pick it up from the world, but I’m looking at this already-recorded stuff to see what’s there that can suddenly be made vital.
Turvey: Luis, if I understand your projection process, you use 16mm film exclusively,is that right?
Recoder. And 35mm.
Turvey: You are from the youngest generation of filmmakers in this room, and so that means you would have gone to school in the 1990s, would that be right?
Recoder: Yeah, mid-’90s.
Turvey: Can you say something about why you work with celluloid film?
Recoder. I think it has a lot to do with what Lynne said earlier about the availability of media. Digital made celluloid film more available. You can now find it in a flea market for really cheap. I entered filmmaking at that moment in the mid-to-late-’90s when the hierarchy between celluloid film and digital wasn’t there. I didn’t have that kind of baggage, the view that one medium is more authentic than the other. It was more about availability and economic factors. Working with a projector and found footage, by chance I became a projectionist. I was going to festivals and was invited into the booth to set up my projector, and I learned about projection that way. I discovered possibilities within the realms of the theater and the booth, and the division between what’s hidden and what’s not, the apparatus and the audience. So it was really a schooling through the rear end of cinema, through the projection booth, which happened by chance. It wasn’t that I wanted to make films; it was more that I was led into it.
Windhausen: Guy Sherwin says that as well-that you can now buy film projectors really cheap. For him, digital has made it easier to work in film projection and performance than it was before, because you can just go on eBay and buy all these cast-aside film projectors that nobody wants anymore. Luis, you’ve been appearing at what I assume are expanded-cinema festivals. Have you seen other artists at these festivals working in video in ways that run parallel to, or in interesting contrast with, what you do in film?
Recoder: Not as much,but there are a few people working with old analogue video equipment from the ’70s, so there is a revival, a backwards gaze at the medium of video itself. I think it’s because it’s so hands-on. Even in music there is a revival of the old analogue hands-on process. It’s all due to performance, the desire to perform with the medium. Earlier, I used the word “control,” but really I think it’s an improvisational process. There’s control in the sense that you know what different things are going to do, but then the performance opens that up into messier, less controlled ways of working with the material.
Windhausen: So in your experience of going to these festivals, there has been a revival of expanded cinema largely in the photochemical-film and analogue-video modes, but not so much in the digital-video mode?
Recoder: I haven’t really seen digital video, but I’m sure it exists, more so in the art world than in the film world. At film festivals-not just at expanded-cinema events but also traditional film festivals-they are opening up spaces for installation art and performance, and my partner Sandra Gibson and I fall into that niche. A lot of festivals, even big ones like Sundance, want to highlight materiality. In a strange way they are becoming “structural materialists,” albeit unconsciously. They invite us because they want materiality, again due to the crisis occasioned by digital media. With digital media, there is nothing material to see or touch as a medium.
Sachs: I think one of the interesting directions that the digital world is taking us toward is a fetishism of decay. We miss decay, so we have to create the activity of something physical breaking apart or aging. In the world of architecture they create furniture that looks faux-worn and antique. It is very peculiar to me that there are digital effects that can create scratches and dust. We don’t want things to age. Nevertheless, we miss the chemical reactions, the fact that physical things change, so we simulate decay. It’s so strange. The desire for decay is a nostalgia for the aura of the original and its physical transformation. In digital, the original isn’t transformed, but we want it to be. I don’t necessarily aspire to this myself, but then I find myself including things like the flash-out flames, and I use found footage because it adds a texture that gives me so much delight. I think it does the same for the audience, who say, “Oh, I really like that,” because it doesn’t look realistic, it doesn’t look like television or digital video. That’s why there’s a desire for decay.
Windhausen: But it’s also a desire for the material markers of the filmstrip, as in the simulated end-of-roll light flares you now see in those spots for the Sundance channel. Things that experimental filmmakers first discovered about film or liked to reveal to an audience are now so easy to achieve digi- tally.
Street: But isn’t it a nostalgia on the part of the younger generation for something that never existed? The great “experimental” filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola said that he has no hankering for film. He lived it, but his daughter who didn’t live it, Sophia Coppola, wants to shoot on film all the time. I used to have this idea that you could go out and get projectors, Dumpster-dive, buy stuff on eBay, etc., and create a DIY punk film aesthetic. Then a student brought in an old camera, a regular 8mm camera, and it was rigged in a weird way with a funny magazine, like a regular 8mm magazine that you would pop in. I had never seen anything like it, so we poked around on the Internet and discovered you could buy those magazines through a Web site. There was a guy in L.A. who was tinkering with and remaking them and then selling them for $70 or $80 each. I realized there was something faux-nostalgic about this. It wasn’t about finding the detritus of the culture and using it. Rather, it was about re-creating it, in an anachronistic way, like wearing a pince-nez or jodhpurs or something like that.
Turvey: So decay and obsolescence have become commodified and cliched?
Street: That’s how I felt, that people are paying too much for these things. Why not just use a video camera that’s cheap and that’s the lingua franca now, you know?
Ken Jacobs: But the marks of these older technologies mean something. They ring a bell, they do something. I studied decay, OK? My Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son [1969-71] is really about decay, among a lot of other things. It wasn’t about nostalgia, it was about asking, What is this old stuff? What is it made of? What is its character as a series of light impressions?
Windhausen: There is a video by the artist Cory Arcangel called Personal Film [2008], which is full of the effects you are talking about, but he made it on a desktop digital imaging program and had it transferred to 16mm film. It has flame-outs and scratches and count-down leader, and when you look at it in the installation space-it was at Team Gallery a couple of years ago-it’s a 16mm projector projecting a 16mm film. If you don’t read the text about it, then you don’t know that it was all done on a digital desktop. For better or for worse, he’s someone whose work reflects how that younger generation works with digital imagery.
Ken Jacobs: But that’s to make nonsense out of this stuff. The flameouts-I kept them in my films for a number of reasons. I wanted to say, “This is the end; I can’t shoot anymore, because I have no other roll of film.” But I also wanted to say, “This is film; this is the character of film. What I’m showing you are unedited rolls from a camera; I left the flash frames in”-that was part of the statement. And now you can make it happen digitally, and it doesn’t connote anything. It doesn’t signify. It’s just an effect.
Sachs: That’s why I think that the flash-frame only exists as a conceit, as a metaphor. It’s no longer indicative of something material.
Windhausen: Luis, you choose not to show your audience what you’re doing in terms of the photochemical film processes and the projection processes that you’re working with. What’s your sense of how they understand the images that you’re creating, given the lack of knowledge about photochemical film that we’ve been talking about. Do you care?
Recoder: Yeah, I do.When I started doing projector performances,a lot of the people who came to see the show were let down because there was no performance in the traditional sense. I wasn’t in front of the screen doing things. Nowadays, when you are talking about expanded-cinema shows, that’s what they expect-there are a lot of younger artists putting projectors in front of the audience and in front of the screen, so that you can see what they’re doing and can see the effects of what they’re doing. I try to work with the audience’s anticipation of this kind of performance and their subsequent disappointment, where the whole spectacle maintains itself as an illusion and then breaks down. The audience is confused about what they’re really seeing and what’s really happening. Is it film? Is it video? I work within the space of that confusion.
Windhausen: But does what you’re doing remain, then, a mystery for the audience?
Recoder: Slightly. We reveal it sometimes afterwards, during the Q&A.
Windhausen: Ken, at times you have shown audiences what you’re doing and at times you deliberately hide, or stand in front of, the apparatus.
Ken Jacobs: That’s only with the Nervous Magic Lantern. I don’t want people to think that they understand it because they see its parts. It is completely mystifying to me, doing it, and I don’t want an easy answer for them.
Windhausen: Do you care whether they think they see a film performance or a video performance? Some of my students get it wrong if they don’t see the apparatus.
Ken Jacobs: No, I don’t care. I don’t want them to think that they’ve seen video, although I’m not consistent. We were in Paris, and the interest in seeing the machinery was so strong, I just opened it up. I want people to realize that it really is a magic lantern. That’s all it is. The result is coming from these primitive means. To have someone think it’s video would be disappointing.
Now, some of it is being recorded on video. There is a DVD of a piece I did with John Zorn, Celestial Subway Lines/Salvaging Noise [2004], so I guess I don’t think that it’s always so important that one see the machine. I also want the effects onscreen to be appreciated for themselves.
Flo Jacobs: But you can’t record it at all; it’s impossible. Every time we rehearse, it’s different, no matter what you do.
Ken Jacobs: What Flo is saying is that each time I do it, I improvise. I can’t repeat what I did a previous time.
Street: I’m just wondering: if flash-frames are film ephemera and Joan Jonas’s vertical roll is early video ephemera, what are the ephemera for digital video? What do people show when they’re showing us the subconscious of the medium?
Windhausen:Ken shows artifacting, pixelation …
Street: Ernie Gehr shows the space between the frames, as in Crystal Palace [2002]. I guess that’s it.
Windhausen: What we’re talking about are the medium-specific gestures that are typically made when a medium emerges and artists want to see what are, for example, the unique artifacts of decay within that medium, or something like that, right?
Street: Right, things that remain particular and idiosyncratic to that medium.
Windhausen: Cameras these days are like computers in that they have built-in obsolescence, like laptops. After a certain number of years, a camera is going to be off the market and obsolete. You and Lynne still work with mini-DV rather than HD, so you’re already old-school. Ken, meanwhile, has moved on to high-definition (he’s the youngest of all of us). [Laughter.] Last year Ken had a Creative Vado High Definition handheld pocket camera, and now he’s already got a new one that I’ve never even seen before. It doesn’t even have a viewfinder or a screen! So the question becomes: why bother doing medium- specific work when your medium is obsolete within a year?
Ken Jacobs: Young people, I believe, are sampling. They encounter something, they get an idea, and then they go for something else. The idea of making a discrete work that begins here and ends there is passe.
Windhausen: At the Oberhausen Film Festival’s retrospective of his work this year, Fred Worden said something similar when discussing his newer work in video. Filmmakers can now continually revise their work, because they have it on a hard drive. You just look up a particular file and continue working on it. The open work is becoming more of a norm now.
Street: I think that openness is good. I always encourage my students-this is Final Cut Pro talk-to create a new sequence every time they sit down to edit, as if they are reinventing the film every time. Filmmaking was linear; it involved a progression. As you edited it, the film hopefully got better, shorter, clearer. But in the digital age, you can sit down on a Tuesday and reinvent your film and on a Wednesday reinvent it again; you are not bound by a linear progression.
Windhausen: You don’t have the point of termination of having to pay for the print, for example.
Street: There was also an investment in every one of your gestures. A splice had better be good, because it was costly to go back. But with digital, you can experiment and play around because nothing is irrevocable. Very few of my students take me up on that, though. It’s usually still one sequence that they invest in and keep trying to improve.
Sachs: There is a term used today, which is “non-destructive.” The way we work now is that everything is protected. You’re never really working with what you did yesterday but rather with a duplicate of it, so that if you don’t like what you do today you can always go back to what you did yesterday. But when you were editing with film, you didn’t have that freedom. You were working with a work print, and if you cut it, of course you could put it back together, but most of the time, if you did intricate cutting, you were going towards some- thing and you weren’t going to break up all those little frames again. It was essentially destructive; there was no return. But now we want the constant capability of returning to something as if we were striving towards perfection and any risk we take might lead us astray from that perfect end.
Ken Jacobs: Are you saying this is positive or negative?
Sachs:I don’t know. It’s positive because I’m used to it now, but I don’t know if it makes me more risk-averse or less.
Turvey: So if it’s so easy to alter and go back, how do you know when a film is finished? What is the criterion, now, for a finished film?
Ken Jacobs: Oh, wait a minute. That’s nothing new. One simply senses that it is done, just like with a painting or a poem or anything else. You step away and it’s done. I don’t think that’s changed. I want to say this: Kino’s Avant-Garde 3 DVD contains Danse Macabre [Dudley Murphy, 1922], The Petrified Dog [Sidney Peterson, 1948], Plague Summer [Chester Kessler,1951], TheDeath of a Stag[Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1951], Image in the Snow [Willard Maas, 1952]- all of these could have been shot on video. There are very few films that pertain to the twenty-four frames per second, or sixteen frames per second, of the film strand. It takes some of Brakhage’s work, or Kubelka’s, to say, “Yeah, that had to be shot on film.”
Windhausen: What about Wavelength[Michael Snow, 1967]?
Ken Jacobs: Wavelength could have been shot on video, too.
Windhausen: Snow might say that you go from a long shot to the close-up of the postcard with the waves, which is a pyramid-shaped trajectory, whereas the projection from the film projector to the screen forms an inverse pyramid.
Street: But doesn’t that concern projection rather than being shot on video? There is the distinction between showing something on a small screen versus a large screen, and the distinction between shooting something on film and video. For example,I saw Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce1080 Bruxelles [Chantal Akerman, 1975] at Film Forum, and I had only seen it on VHS on the small screen. When you see it big, it all comes together, and when you see it small, it’s nothing. It’s a question of kind not degree.
Ken Jacobs: Scale is enormously important. It’s the same thing with music. Scale is significant.
Windhausen: Interesting. So what you’re saying is that for a large number of experimental films, there is not much lost if you watch them on video?
Ken Jacobs: No, I am saying that there is nothing lost if you make them on video; there is if you watch them on a monitor.
Windhausen: Oh, OK. Now, related to this and to distribution issues, there seem to be more festivals showing experimental work now than ever before. So do you find that your work is being disseminated more than ever before? To what degree are the festivals more important or more prominent than exhibition venues like Anthology Film Archives? Also, none of you have films on the Web. None of you have Web sites where full, high-definition versions of your work can be seen. Why not? •
Ken Jacobs: I’m unhappy when things are shown in less than optimum conditions. It makes me very unhappy, and that’s why it’s really important to make hard copies. Hard copies exist when people really care about work, people who want to have a DVD or something.
Windhausen: And is more of your work being seen, not just at festivals but in venues that are interested in showing works by Mark Street or Ken Jacobs, now that they can find a DVD to rent?
Ken Jacobs: Yeah, and they can find us.
Windhausen: OK, so how many of you travel with your work? One of the core values
of experimental film is the temporary community of the theatrical audience, the people in the seats who are watching your film. If film exhibition becomes Web-based, you lose that temporary community, potentially. Is that something that you are reluctant to let go of? Do you care?
Street: I’m reluctant. When you’re in your house, you’re surrounded by the things that you love, that you bought-bourgeois trappings-and I think you’re less able to take risks. But when you go sit in a theater, there’s a social contract. I’m watching Jeanne Dielman, I’m bored, but I’m not going to get up. I’m going to stick it out because there’s a social contract and I’m part of the temporary community you mention. I have a film festival at the end of every semester with my students, and the students ask, “Why? Why do we all have to get together at 7 p.m. on a Thursday? Can’t I just look at a disc, can’t you just give me a disc? Is it going to be on the Web?” It’s a very telling, contemporary question.
Ken Jacobs: And when they look at a disc, they skip through the film, the fuckers. [Laughter.]
Street: I like the social part of it. I think it’s important to be in the same room with the work and experience it as a group in the dark.
Ken Jacobs: I disagree. It’s always just me and the work. I’m not even with Flo when I’m watching this thing. I’m with the person who conceived and presented it,just like reading a book. I’m alone. I don’t want people around.
Sachs: You asked about whether we travel with our work. I actually make a lot of effort to travel with my work, and it’s extremely disruptive to family life and work life. But it’s very important to me. It keeps it alive. It makes it human. Many times I am paid an honorarium but they say, “We want you to be here,” and it’s not very much money. Nevertheless, I do my best to go with the films if I can. It’s worth it to me to feel that aliveness the way musicians do, or the- ater people. It’s not as if my work is all over the place in stores and it has this productive presence in society.
Windhausen: I can imagine younger filmmakers thinking that Web distribution is fine because they will get feedback from blog comments or things like that. But I haven’t seen it. I still find that younger filmmakers want a body of peo- ple responding directly to their work.
Ken Jacobs:I would very much love for my stuff to be available. Free is OK with me, although every so often I realize that’s not realistic. We need the money, there should be some money coming back, but really I just want the work simply out there, and as good as it can be.
Flo Jacobs: What Ken really wants is to travel with live works, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense. It’s easy for him to just put a DVD in the mail, so the only reason to travel is to perform.
Street: For you, Luis, the DVD does not exist, right?
Recoder. No, we have DVDs. We like to have our work seen by as many people as possible, and not everyone can invite us, not everyone has those resources. Our work has been shown on DVDs in installations, at places where they couldn’t invite us to go and do performances. For me, the medium of digital video is irrelevant; it’s just another distribution format. What we do is not video art. Some people might see it that way,but that’s not really a direction that I’m interested in.
Ken Jacobs: I’m someone who really likes working with accidents, and to me, video is a vast accident, you know, unplanned, unexpected, wow!
Turvey: Can you give examples?
Ken Jacobs: Well, I work with these miniature digital cameras, and I can’t see through them. For years I worked without a reflex lens, and it was a major thing in my life when I could afford to buy one with a built-in viewer. These miniature digital cameras are cheap models, unbelievable models. They focus by themselves, they get the right light levels by themselves. You press a button to turn them on and another to take a picture. Yes, there is a lot they don’t do, but it’s so much fun exploring what they can do, much of which is unexpected. So, I’m really grateful.
Turvey: Ken, would you ever go back to shooting on film?
Ken Jacobs. I’m not inclined to. Before I worked in digital video, I had pretty much stopped filming. One reason is that I had accumulated so much footage and I just didn’t want to add to the number of unfinished works. They were very hard to finish; I never had the money. Flo Rounds a Corner [1999] was the first video I did, but it made finishing Star Spangled to Death [1957-2004] as a video thinkable. Forty years, or something like that, after I started it on film, I was able to finish it as a video, and I’m so grateful.
Windhausen: You were talking earlier, Mark, about medium-specific gestures like the vertical roll, and I was thinking of work like Paul Sharits’s from the ’70s, which was accompanied by Sharits’s theoretical statements, which would undergird, or run parallel to, the work he was doing. In the digital era, while there are academics who theorize about digital media, it doesn’t seem to be the case that experimental filmmakers are taking that step. As they move into digital, they don’t appear to be writing theoretical texts about the prop erties, possibilities, or capacities of the medium, or making work that says , “Maybe digital is this.” Instead, they seem to be working intuitively with the materials, and the theoretical stuff is left largely to academics.
Street: It’s interesting to put it that way. I wonder if it’s because every-thing seems possible in the digital world, so filmmakers don’t feel the need to highlight the limitations in the way that they did with film.
Ken Jacobs. It takes an exquisitely disturbed person to dwell on what they can’t do. [Laughter.]
Street: I think it’s interesting, the idea of theories or manifestos about the properties of a medium. Think of Fred Camper’s “The Trouble with Video~ [1985] and the update. I don’t agree with him, but it’s interesting that he compared film and analogue video. I don’t know that any filmmaker is doing that with digital. It’s too easy, in the digital world, to think that the latest thing is the new language and is not to be questioned. I see that right now with the 16:9 aspect ratio, for instance. It used to be that we had 4:3 or 16:9, that there was a choice. But in the last two years, I’ve noticed with my students that it’s not a choice any- more. They use 16:9, and that’s it.
Windhausen: So can we agree that the filmmakers here are relatively conservative in that they prefer to show their work in a theatrical projection situation where the temporary community of an audience has to watch the work from beginning to end?
Ken Jacobs: And you can’t go to the bathroom! [Laughter]
Flo Jacobs: No, it isn’t! That’s not conservative.
Windhausen: It is today. You’re conserving it as a tradition. It’s a valuable tradition but it’s a conservative move.
Flo Jacobs: Do you want to walk into the middle of Strangers on a Train [Alfred Hitchcock, 1951]? I don’t think so. ls that being conservative?
Windhausen: I guess I mean new work.
Recoder: I think you can be more radically conservative now in the gallery. There are things that we are doing, my partner and I, that no theater is going to show. They are too long, or too boring, whereas in the gallery you can show them.
Windhausen: You’re making gallery work now?
Recoder.Yes.
Windhausen: But you’re in the minority here, is what I’m saying.
KenJacobs: All of us make work that begins at one time and ends at another time. We want it to be seen that way!
Sachs: I do have a piece on the Internet called Abecedarium: NYC [2009], and every time that I open it, aspects of it are different. It will speak back to me based on the climate, on how the public participates.
Flo Jacobs: In terms of being conservative, I think the work has to be seen from beginning to end. You can’t just stroll in, visit it, and stroll out. You can say the same thing about a painting. You wouldn’t want somebody to cut a detail out of a painting at the Met and hang that up, would you?
Windhausen: Well, there’s a difference between a perpetually open work and one that’s finished. I’m thinking, as a point of comparison, of new-media artists, who make work that’s interactive and continually open to change. It can be entered into and left behind at any point.
Flo Jacobs: But that’s their concept, that’s their work.
Windhausen:Another shift is that television is more cinematic, now, in every way, and people emulate the film theater in their homes.
Ken Jacobs:That’s good, because what about the kids who are looking at a cluttered monitor while watching a movie in bed?
Sachs: Or three movies!
Windhausen:”What’s wrong with that?” the kids would say.
Ken Jacobs:That’s right, they would say that. But they would not understand the problem.
Sachs:That is a real function of the digital, the fact that people believe that it is just as good an experience to watch more than one thing at once.
Ken Jacobs: Multitasking.
Sachs: Or multi-watching. It’s not even a task, because they’re not having to do something. It’s a “more is better” attitude.
Windhausen: In relation to this, I was thinking, Luis, that what I’ve seen at expanded-cinema festivals is a lot of work that is ambient, where I have the sense that the artist expects you to dip in and out of it in a relatively aleatory and arbitrary way, whereas what I’m accustomed to in single-screen theatrical, experimental films is having my attention be directed from beginning to end.
Ken Jacobs: OK, there was this guy named Andy Warhol [Laughter], and he introduced “background paintings” to convivial meetings, with people drinking and talking in front of something that looked expensive. That is a huge tradition now. I call it “stuntism”-fifty paintings of Marilyn Monroe or whatever. It’s not about asking people to learn how to see and to look at something very intently.
Turvey: But there are different kinds of work, right? So, obviously, your work demands and requires an intense perceptual engagement. But that’s not true of other kinds of work, or some television shows, or other things that one might consume on a smaller screen.
Ken Jacobs:T here are households where the TV is the first thing on and the last thing off.
Turvey: What I mean is that there are different viewing modes appropriate to different kinds of work. Just because people are watching three things at the same time on small screens doesn’t mean they are watching them inappropriately. For example, it would be foolish to sit and watch a CNN broadcast with the perceptual intensity that one would watch a work you make.
Ken Jacobs: Yes, I think we are what they call fascists. We want to dominate your complete attention.
Recoder: I think that’s what you were asking about, Federico, the aleatory, “in and out” perceptual experience of a certain kind of performance. Allowing that sort of open play and knowing that you have audiences who have all kinds of attention spans is to be anti-fascist, I think. And when you take out narrative and images, you are completely lost. One of the things that brought me to the avant-garde was the experience of viewing. I felt that I could walk in and walk out of it, not physically but perceptually. It allowed me to be in a space where there is a confusion between “Am I making this? Or is this making me?”
Windhausen: But you are articulating something very different from what these three filmmakers do in their single-screen works. Maybe you’re an exception, Ken, but most of the work that you’ve all made has a beginning, middle, and end, and you place a value on directing the viewer through the work. But with expanded-cinema pieces, as Luis has said, it’s the viewer making the work in an aleatory process that is equal to or of more value than being directed through the work.
Ken Jacobs: I don’t direct anybody. I am fascinated, and if I remain fascinated from beginning to end, that’s all the direction that goes into it.
Street: But Federico, there was ambient work that you dipped into and out of in the ’50s and ’60s. I don’t know that it’s technological.
Windhausen: It wasn’t the dominant mode. I’m talking about dominant modes within experimental cinema.
Street: So you think the dominant mode of experimental cinema today is aleatory?
Windhausen: No, I think it’s the dominant mode of expanded cinema.
Street: Right, but I think that’s a style, and I don’t think it’s any greater today than it was in 1969, or 1959, even.
Windhausen: Well, it’s certainly more popular today than it was back then.
Street: Maybe, but there has always been artwork that is non-directive, that allowspeople to engage it with various degrees of attention. It would be interesting to compare this new paradigm, as you describe it, to Christmas on Earth [Barbara Rubin, 1963], or something.
Windhausen: I’m not saying that those precedents don’t exist; I’m just saying that they weren’t as prominent as they are now.
Recoder: I’m interested in the word Federico used, “conservative.” I’m wondering where that’s coming from, as if you were trying to pin us all down.
Windhausen: I was talking about the theatrical situation with the temporary community and everyone looking at the same screen at the same time. That’s a long-standing value within the tradition of experimental film, one that I hope continues. But it is “conservative” from the perspective of the new-media artist.
Street: I’m conservative in that sense. I’ll sign.
