One of the most underappreciated roles in our society is the labor behind housework and caregiving. There are lots to do to maintain the upkeep of our households — laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc — but these menial tasks keep the household together and, most importantly, keep us alive and put food on the table.
Filmmakers often focus on what’s exciting and entertaining instead of the mundane, which keeps these tasks invisible in pop culture; even filmmakers interested in the charm of daily life would ignore this type of labor. However, housework and caregiving have been explored, particularly, among women filmmakers, who know the internal lives of this hidden labor. Chantal Akerman’s three-hour Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles and Lynne Sachs’ & Lizzie Olesker’s short film The Washing Society, albeit portraying two different kinds of housework, both share a common thread: these films are making the invisible visible.
The Washing Society tells a story about laundromat workers in New York City through vignettes of fiction, nonfiction, and performance art; the film is guided by the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen strike, where hundreds of washerwomen — mostly of African-American descent — went on strike after being underpaid by their bosses. The Washing Society continues this legacy by interviewing two laundry workers and a former laundry worker who went on strike in the 1960s. The film also tells its story through three characters — two women who represent the mostly immigrant, mostly Chinese or Spanish-speaking laundry workers in New York City, and one woman representing the ghosts of the 1881 strike. When we drop off our laundry at the laundromat, we come back with a fresh load of clothing without thinking all the work that is put behind them. Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker focuses the camera on these narrow storefronts, rows and rows of washing machines, and the Sisyphean task of folding and washing clothes to bring forth that invisible labor that people don’t often think of.
Life as a washerwoman in 1880s America
My screening of The Washing Society was followed by a Q&A with feminist Marxist theorist Silvia Federici. Sachs has mentioned about how her work has been based on Federici’s work on Wages Against Housework. In her seminal essay, Federici argued that domestic labor is a form of production used to sustain other forms of work in a capitalist society. However, it is very convenient to make this form of labor invisible. A tenet of its invisibility is to mask this labor into a “labor of love” — that things such as washing clothes are marked as a care, therefore taking out the value of the work performed and expecting that careworkers are doing it based on willingness and kindness. Whereas, the reality is that these workers are indeedworkers and should be valued as such. Federici’s shaping of The Washing Society reminded me of another film, and is a helpful framework to understand it in a Marxist perspective: Jeanne Dielman.
Directed by Chantal Akerman (who has an interest of portraying domestic work on film), Jeanne Dielman is a story about a housewife who has lost her husband, therefore resorting to sex work to support herself and her teenage son. The film focuses on the minutiae of Jeanne Dielman’s day-to-day tasks; running errands is no longer a generally glossed-over issue in this film as we watch Jeanne cook meals, wash the dishes, grocery shop, and do the things we would consider as menial. While The Washing Society raises awareness to this invisible labor by employing narrative and performance art techniques, Akerman forces the audience to watch this invisible labor. The music is very sparse, the camera movement static, the pace moves slowly, making its audience truly see and listen to the details of Jeanne Dielman’s actions. The invisible, then, becomes hypervisible.
The fictional laundromat workers in The Washing Society
Through this hypervisibility there is a visual code that guides Jeanne Dielman’s actions. Once we focus on these mundane everyday scenes, we realize how repetitive it all gets. Folding clothes, chopping vegetables, boiling water. It’s almost like Sisyphus, rolling his boulder to the top of the mountain only to find it down on the ground again. Once the housework is done for the day, there will always be new loads to wash, more mouths to feed. Some would argue that this repetition is a type of performance art — as housework becomes hypervisible, we are exposed to the rhythm of this repetition and we are seeing it as a form of art in this context, rather than a task. The Washing Society continues this by actually transforming laundry work as performance art. In a few scenes, we see the two fictional laundromat workers rhythmically tapping on laundry machines and dancing on top of them. It is a form of ownership of their own labor — in a world where their customers and bosses do not see the value of their work, they make themselves visible.
What sets Jeanne Dielman apart from the women in The Washing Society is the solitary nature of her labor. Where laundromat workers work in groups and can form unions and negotiate against their bosses, Jeanne Dielman navigates through housework on her own. She is rarely seen communicating with people other than her son — we only see her communicate with her friends through mail, or through more laborious requests by her neighbor. She has no space to talk about these things, as the labor she performs at home is timed to a T.
However, what unites the two films are the internal space of the labor of housework. The internal spaces and thoughts of careworkers and houseworkers are often ignored, as people often impose that they’re thinking of care when they are approaching they work. The reality is definitely far from that — in a system where they work endless, repetitive tasks, they are constantly thinking. This thinking is then menifested in a form of action. The 1881 washerwomen of Atlanta forms a union and strikes for better wages. The fictional laundromat workers in The Washing Society expresses this stifled rage through performance. Jeanne Dielman, however, spends more time with her thoughts since her work is extremely solitary, and expresses them in a more pessimistic way.
Jeanne Dielman in the kitchen
What makes Jeanne Dielman’s labor more dire is that her labor isn’t valued in a tangible way. While laundromat workers are able to count their wages and identify wage theft, there is no way for Jeanne Dielman to price the value of her housework. In Capital, Marx took account the labor of housework, and including housework to be valued based on the family breadwinner’s labor-value (although this line of thought has been criticized by scholars like Silvia Federici, who argued to put a direct labor-value of housework itself). However, what happens when this breadwinner is taken out of the equation? Jeanne Dielman has to find a line of work that doesn’t interfere with her housework. In the film, she resorts to sex work, entertaining male guests in her home while her son is away at school. In the dialogue of both forms of labor that Jeanne Dielman performs, we can clearly see how both sex work and housework is tied to patriarchy — it is a form of work that is often invisible, and is dictated by the labor-value of the men who sustain the housewife/sex worker. It is not hard to see how these forms of labor are inherently exploitative to working women like Jeanne Dielman.
When we reflect on working women in patriarcy-dictated forms of labor, we have to also look at how it evolves in the future. Near the end of The Washing Society, Lynne Sachs narrates that most of the laundromats she filmed has closed, due to the rise of instant laundry apps that will pick up your laundry, wash them in an undisclosed location (where workers are completely hidden from their bosses and customers), and bring them back to you. Sachs and Olesker argues (in line with Silvia Federici) that technology has not liberated us. Instead of making work easier, work will eventually increase, and workers’ labor will be more and more alienated. If Jeanne Dielman lives in 2021, indeed, it will be easier for her to find jobs through remote work, but this work will fail to recognize how her housework will be much more laborious. COVID-19 has moved a significant amount of workforce online, and has led more bosses to assume that working from home allows workers more free time. The labor of housework was invisible from family breadwinners, and now is made invisible to bosses as well.
With the far-reaching consequences of technology to housework, we should also think about international solidarity. The rut of technologizing housework will fall to migrant workers and workers from colonized countries, as supply chain technology and transportation has eased the access of cheap labor from around the globe. This exploitation of colonized countries also lies in sex work: sex work has long become a justification for colonialism, and day after day men and women from colonized countries have been forced to enter this inherently exploitative line of work. Historian Gerda Lerner mentions how sex work is “the first form of trade, making them seen as less than human,” and that this is “the beginning of women’s subordination at the hands of men.” This exploitation still continues today through avenues like sex tourism and sex trafficking, which targets the poorest of working class women around the globe. This shows that patriarchy and capitalism definitely works hand in hand with colonialism, and that patriarchy and sexual exploitation are tools to further the empire of capitalism and imperialism.
Both Jeanne Dielman and The Washing Society brings forth these invisible strings in the lives of working women: hidden labor in housework and sex work and the exploitation that comes with it. Jeanne Dielman’s work may be solitary, but as I watched her do her menial tasks I am reminded of the hidden labor in the lives of the women I know. She experiences all of it alone, but her rage is universal, and makes me think about the power that working women around the world hold. These power materializes in labor unions, strikes, and revolutions. Working women around the world constantly continue to uphold the spirit of the women before them who also does this hidden labor, in worse circumstances of the progression of technology and the further alienation of their labor. It is up to us to fight for their rights and make the invisible visible.
The Washing Society and Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles are both available to watch through the Criterion Channel. Besides of watching both films, I also urge you to take action to support the working women in your community. Here are some current efforts in NYC (DM me if you want me to include more efforts):
Workers of the United Jewish Council (a home care agency), who are mostly Black/Latinx/immigrants/women of color, has been fighting to end the 24-hour work shifts imposed by the agency. They are holding a rally on Thursday, December 16 in front of the UJC office. More information on the AIW instagram: @aiwcampaign
After the Q&A, Sachs, Olesker, and Federici highlighted the work of NYC’s Laundry Workers Center. They are an organization aiming to support and protect workers in NYC laundromats. You can donate to their fund or check out their website for the campaigns they are running. More information can be found in their website: www.lwcu.org.
In October 2024, Women Make Waves International Film Festival in Taiwan invited US experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs to lead an interactive workshop “The Body in Space” and attend the QA sessions for her latest short film Contractions and accompanying sound piece We Continue to Speak. Workshop participants attended one online and one in-person workshop. Over a period of a few weeks, each of the 30 participants produced a one-minute video which was then compiled into a single half-hour compilation that was integrated into a live performance as the final presentation for the festival public.
Under the very limited time constraints of the workshop, Lynne Sachs generously shared eight of her own films with the students in advance. Through these films, she encouraged the participants to think about the relationship between the body and space from the perspective of performance and imagery. Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has been rigorously pushing boundaries as an experimental filmmaker and poet. These eight films became an excellent entry point for understanding her recent creative trajectory.
Starting with Contractions (2024) and We Continue to Speak (2024), which were screened during the film festival, we also talked about four works out of the eight works shared in the workshop——Your Day Is My Night (2013), A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) (2019), Maya at 24 (2021 ), and Film About A Father Who (2020). These works can be connected to the discussion of the body, space, and framing during the workshop: the spectrum of the subject matter shifting from works that are more socially engaged and in collaboration with local activist groups or residents; the creative relationship between her and other experimental filmmakers; and, finally to her closest inner circle, herself and family members. Such assumptions lead to a process that moves from the outside toward the inside, like drawing a circle. As time goes by, the overlapping trajectories become more dense, all the issues, subject matters, and emotions are intertwined with each other, and the inside and outside becomes intertwined with each other. All come together. In her practice, Lynne Sachs invited her family members to run and walk in a way that deviate from their daily routine. In the face of the most embarrassing situations or creative difficulties, she mentioned the preciousness of collaboration with others.
Sometime while we talked, a lot of words were left out of the formal interview, and later picked up in random chats, or during a follow-up online interview when she suddenly turned her computer around and let me see the New York street scene through her window.
Q: Maybe we can start from a more social dimension of your work. Let’s start with Contractions, which is very outspoken about the legal situation in US.
You know, in some ways Contractions is outspoken. And in some ways Contractions is a film that recognizes silence. It recognizes that those people who are most affected by any kind of political upheaval often don’t know how to speak, don’t have access to the microphone that would allow them to be heard, and so they had this sensation of being silenced. When I decided to make this film, I was trying to think of a form that could recognize an erasure as much as a presence.
Initially, there was this 2023 call from a filmmaker in California [Kristy Guevara-Flanagan] who was very upset about the end of Roe vs. Wade (the 1973 law that gave women the right to an abortion throughout the US), the new Supreme Court decision which gave each state the right to make its own laws about a woman’s right to have an abortion. She put out an announcement looking for people who wanted to make a film about abortion clinics that no longer offer services. And so about five or six of us responded, and formed the Abortion Clinic Film Collective. I realized that this was an opportunity to go back to my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, because I’m very interested in this relationship we have to the place where we grew up.
I was very upset that something we had taken for granted about the decision-making process about our own bodies had been taken away. We all make assumptions about living in a civil society. You don’t know what you have until you lose it.
I felt like it wasn’t just that our rights were taken away. It was like our faces were taken away and our voices were taken away. I wanted to figure out how I could visualize that. I was actually inspired by Meredith Monk’s Ellis Island (1985) in which she took a group of performers and dancers to an island off the coast of Manhattan. There was this decaying old building. She took performers there and had them interact with the building. The way that performance activates real spaces is very interesting. Kristy Guevara-Flanagan had one requirement for all of the participating filmmakers: we all needed to go to a clinic that used to offer abortion services and no longer does. So I thought, how do I interact with a building? My cousin is an activist in reproductive justice, she performs in the Vagina Monologues every year in Memphis. So she helped me find the people who were in the film.
I actually just finished a part two to Contractions, called This Side of Salina. I collaborate with a Black women’s empowerment group [Layla’s Got You] for that. The film was projected outdoor in Syracuse, New York onto an exterior façade of the Everson Museum of Art, which was designed by the renowned Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei. I have their voices in the film and they also perform in it, a similar spirit to Contractions.
Contractoins
Q: One thing I am also curious about is the covering of faces in Contractions.
Even in New York now, there are religious protesters every single day in front of clinics that offer women’s health services, including mammograms! Abortion is only a small part of what these clinics offer. People are also coming there for urinary tract infections, for example. All of those women are photographed by the protesters because the protesters don’t know who is actually coming to have an abortion. So they film everybody and invade everybody’s privacy.
I could give two answers about the covering of faces. One, the practical answer, is that someone choosing to be in this film was making a decision that was a little bit precarious. I asked everyone to sign a document stating that they were willing to be photographed, but I promised them there would be no faces. And then accidentally, we had one shot where we didn’t turn the camera off after people had already turned their bodies. And I love that shot because I love little mistakes. I needed to go back and ask everybody’s permission to include the shot. So I made a screenshot and I sent it to each person individually. In the film, you see women not only covering their faces but also are bowing. Maybe there’s a little ambiguity here: I’m bowing with strength, but also maybe you’re asking me to be subservient too. Are the performers bowing to the power? And, who’s bowing. I wanted to spark these questions.
Q: Did you come up with the sound piece We Continue to Speak after finishing Contractions?
I realized that personally I was uncomfortable with not letting the women speak because the whole idea was they were silenced. I think they have a lot to say, so I went back to Memphis just a few months later. I got all the women in the film together, plus one of the men in the film. I also interviewed a woman named Dr. Kimberly Looney, who had been the director of medicine for Planned Parenthood in Tennessee, as a central part of the voice-over. She’s very respected in the state of Tennessee and she’s very involved with Black women’s health. But I had told her from the start, you don’t have to put your name in the film because it could cause problems at the hospital where she works. And then she decided that she wanted her name in it. We’ve only shown the film once in Memphis. She came with her mother and her daughter. And she said, “My mother is scared for me, but I’m not scared.”
Q: How long did it take to shoot the film?
About three hours, since it was potentially dangerous to do so. In fact, when we were organizing the production, I had every shot drawn out because I knew we had very little time. I had never seen the building before, but I had drawings imagining it. My cousin and her friend were helping organize everything. She brought a volunteer marshal for security, in case we had protesters or something worse. Keep in mind, this clinic was known for offering abortions. Yes, it was closed, so why would 14 women in patient medical robes be standing in front of that building? People who were very much against abortion might have done anything. One of the local co-producers later told me during the QA of True/False Film Fesitval that we actually had 14 security marshals in different places, like in cars or and behind windows. It just shows you that this issue is very charged. Just a few years ago, several abortion doctors were basically assassinated in the US.
Q: In both Contractions and This Side of Salina you collaborated with the local activist groups and individuals. In Your Day Is My Night, this layer of collaboration transferred to that of the local Chinese community in New York City. This film looks at the shift-bed (temporary) housing phenomenon in Chinatown as a backdrop, resulting in a hybrid documentary-performance project.
One thing that became kind of joyous in the film was that the people in the film found pleasure in playing with the camera. In documentary, there’s a way of emphasizing the moment of the reveal. There’s also this way of developing a trust. And I think both of these systems can be kind of formulaic and manipulative. I just tried to get the participants in the film excited to do something that was different and might bring something new to their own lives. I never wanted them to feel “I’m doing this because this story hasn’t been told before, or people outside the community need to see it.” In fact, there was an exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum we went to yesterday called “Enclave.” I really like the word “enclave.” You could look at Chinatown as an enclave, or this women’s film festival as an enclave. This very thought-provoking exhibition made me reflect on a seemingly hermetic space that can transform into a more porous one.
Your Day is My Night
For this film, I’d conducted audio interviews that became the basis for our film script, distillations you might say of these much longer interviews. In a sense, each member of the cast was able to have fun performing their own lives. If someone is in my film, I like to find ways that they get to be inventive or to harness their own imagination. We were working on this film as a live performance for about two years before it became a film. I thought it was going to be a film, but I didn’t know how to make it. Honestly, I went through a kind of creative desperation, trying to figure what to do. Your Day is My Night was a live performance first, and then it returned to being a film. This is the film that got me excited about working in this way.
Q: It’s a very hybrid film that blurs the docu-fiction boundary. Can you also talk about the Puerto Rican performer?
Well, we’d been working for a year, and one day we all got together – our cast and crew – and the cast told me that audiences would be really bored with our movie because they thought their own lives were really boring. As a group, they suggested that our film needed a better story that people would care about, perhaps some romance. I proposed this idea: What would happen if someone outside, like me or a Puerto Rican woman, moved in? Remember, we were talking about that idea of disrupting a hermetic space! So, I invited a Puerto Rican actress who had worked with me on other projects to join our filmmaking community. Everyone had a much better time once I made it hybrid. We needed to free ourselves from the limitations of our own reality, you might say.
Q: I really like the way you mentioned ‘enclave’ and the idea of porous relationship. I would like to mention A Month of Single Frames here, because in this case, you are dealing with someone else’s materials. The film is made up of Barbara Hammer’s film footage and sound recordings shot in the 80s.
I love finding out that Barbara Hammer came here to Taipei, two times. I didn’t know that until I arrived here. I made two films with Barbara. Barbara and I had known each other since the 80s because we both lived in San Francisco and we were involved in the Film Arts Foundation. And we both moved to New York, so we kept up a lot over that period of time.
In around 2006, she found out that she had ovarian cancer. That was about the time when she turned 60, and I promised to give her a birthday present, which was to shoot a roll of film with her and her wife, Florrie Burke. But she was so busy that it took me years to set up an appointment with her. And by that time, I was quite involved in her life through her cancer. So each time she had chemotherapy, my husband Mark Street would cook and I would deliver, so we were getting closer through that experience.
In 2018, I finally got to shoot the roll of 16mm color film with her. You can see that footage in Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor. I asked all three of these remarkable women artists who also happen to be dear friends, “How does the camera allow you to express yourself?” They all knew each other, but they never expected to be in one cinematic vessel together. Let’s call the film a female bonding moment perhaps. Thinking across generations, Carolee and Barbara were exactly the same age as my mother. They were all born in 1939. Gunvor Nelson was ten years older.
In 2018, when Barbara really knew that she was dying, she asked me and three other filmmakers, including my husband Mark Street, to make films with material that she wasn’t able to finish. So what happened was that she gave me the footage of material she had shot during an artist residency in Cape Cod in 1998, but at first she’d forgotten she kept a detailed journal as well. I asked if I could record her reading out loud from her journal. I thought I’d be able to take it home and pick the parts. But she was in a hurry. She knew that life was not long for her. She asked me to go in the other room and pick out what she was going to read, right away.
One thing that was important to me was to actually find a way to communicate with her, maybe in a kind of transcendent way outside of the film, because she passed away while I was making it, so she never saw it finished. And the text becomes my communication with her and with the audience.
Q: I really like the on-screen texts. They are very beautiful.
Thank you. She never saw that. I felt that I needed to enter the material with her. But also it allowed me to understand something that’s very specific to film. When you’re inside a film, you’re actually in another period of time. We leap from the now to the then or to the future. And as you’re watching the film, you’re actually watching it with Barbara and me next to you. That’s a cosmic thing that film can do that, that you feel like you were in the room with Barbara. And it doesn’t have to do with her being dead or being a ghost. She’s very present in the film. And I knew that and I wanted to celebrate that.
A Month of Single Frames
In fact, Barbara had arranged for all of us to have some funding for the post production from the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio. I flew from New York City to Columbus early one morning so that I would arrive in Ohio ready to start. As I was heading there, I fell asleep on the plane. I woke up and I wrote all the text. It came to me in a dream.
I was thinking about the environment, she had filmed in, the sand dunes in 1998. So it’s kind of like your epidermis, the top layer of your skin. Your skin is the same as the sand, both have evolved over many years; your skin is slightly different, scarred or wrinkled, same with the land. In film, we feel as if we can go back in time. That’s what I was thinking about with Maya at 24. We can go back or simulate going back, and we can feel that there is also a here and now for us. You are here, I’m here. We’re all here. Because it’s activated by you, the audience.
Q: Speaking of Maya at 24, its sense of time is very unique. You film your daughter Maya running in circles, clockwise, at ages 6, 16 and 24, while a sense of time is simultaneously embodied through the movement. Can you talk about this gesture of running in circles?
I like that there’s a way that the person holding the camera loses power and control, while the person running gets to have fun. I like that disorientation. And also I like the eye contact that happens. The person who’s following your directions doesn’t really have to do much, but they’re definitely doing something that’s out of character. Even a little gesture, you notice how the camera is able to see how my daughter moves a piece of hair behind her ear, in a mature kind of way. There’s a moment when she’s 24 where she self-consciously makes this gesture. When she’s 16, she’s more defiant. And when she’s 6, she’s kind of more playful with me, more physical. In fact, I made three films, all shot in 16 mm. The first one is called Photograph of Wind, referencing an expression that I heard the renowned American photographer Robert Frank use. Maya as a word also means illusion. I was trying to hold onto her childhood, but it was ephemeral and it was going away like the wind. I called the second iteration Same Stream Twice. It came from the Greek philosopher Hiraclitus who wrote you can never step in the same stream twice, but in film you can step in the same stream twice. Maya at 24 was shot when she was 24 years old. It’s also about film itself running at 24 frames per second. So it’s a little reference to the materiality of the medium.
There’s something I find very energizing and unpredictable, about the flow of two circles running almost in opposite directions or two circles spinning at different rates so that you have this sense of being behind and ahead. And there’s an unpredictable register, which has to do with the person filming, with my energy, my ability, my stability, and the person who is being filmed. If you are in motion, sometimes you lose a little bit of self-consciousness. You’re just thinking about working together on this very unambitious and unfamiliar project, which is running in circles. So I took that way of working into Film About A Father Who. There’s a point where my father’s walking along in a circle. And my mother did that too.
Q: For Film About A Father Who, I really have to say it was a bountiful watching experience, with materials that span 35 years of documentation and creation that also encompass different mediums including 16 and 8 millimeter, video , and digital. As an experimental filmmaker, how do you perceive the medium in this film?
So, it’s interesting to me to consider that as I was making the film, technology kept changing. There’s an assumption that as technology changes, it witnesses and documents our lives. We assume it gets better, that there is a pure, mimetic relationship to what you see with your eyes and what you record. Even though I see myself as an experimental filmmaker who likes the degraded or imperfect image, the more I looked at my old material, the more critical I was of it. I was critical of the medium, but I was even more critical of my skills. But deeper than that, honestly, was a kind of aesthetic critique of my father and of our lives. I had a lot of embarrassment. I was deeply embarrassed about my work as an artist and about my role as a daughter. That was one of the reasons I couldn’t finish it. I could shoot it, but I couldn’t look at it. I just had a lot of shame.
And I did have anger. Initially, I started the film because I thought my dad was really interesting. He was an iconoclast. He was a rule breaker. He was maybe one of the reasons I found myself making the kind of films that I make. I wasn’t intimidated by odd situations, and that’s the way he was. But then as things kept happening, I became more and more uncomfortable. Sometimes I wanted to make a critical film, sometimes an introspective film. In fact, I discovered that at different points, different camera registers or modalities worked better for different subjectivities.
Film About A Father Who
Q: About degraded image, there is one certain sequence that repeats: kids playing in a little stream. The timing of repetition is quite crucial, too.
I show that little stream three times at three different moments pulled from one long shot, and it’s critical to the narrative of the film. But what is more interesting to me is that each time you as a viewer are thrown back into that scene, you know more. You have gained knowledge, and you have shifted your position from being an outsider to being omniscient. You realize that you have been privy to information and to a complexity that not everyone in the film is aware of, so that’s compelling to me to let the viewer grow with that image. To me, it’s probably the prettiest image in the film.
In Hito Steyerl’s article, In Defense of the Poor Image, her writing is a celebration of how images travel through culture and become changed in the ways that our bodies change. We get wrinkles, and we get less vibrant, and images do the same thing. They reveal something about the time in which they were made, but also the time in which we as viewers currently live. But I didn’t understand how important this was to me as an artist until I made this film. Because, the first time my editor and I went through all the footage, that kind of image (the stream image), was one that I probably dismissed. It was on a degraded, improperly archived tape that my father had shot on Hi 8 in the 1980s. Time had not been kind to the material.
So with Hi 8, you had these tapes that were like the size of your palm. They went into the camera and you would shoot. And then you would go home and you would connect your camera with a cable to a machine with a VHS tape, and you would transfer the original to a VHS tape. And then, you would reshoot over the original tape with new material. There was no original anymore! Everything was just a copy, and each copy was more degraded than the one before it. Since I had forgotten this technical fact, I spent a couple of years trying to find the original of that tape. Then I finally realized that my dad wouldn’t care about the original. He just wanted to collect images and watch them.
I went back to the VHS tape, which was just a considered a viewing format, not of serious historical importance to archivists anywhere. But when I had it digitized, I realized it is a lot prettier than the digital images of today. It looks more like an Impressionist painting. It has more of an essence than a more precise, better preserved image would ever have, plus it’s got Dad’s voice speaking to his children.
There you see these three children, my half siblings. My father was probably standing behind a camera using a tripod. I guess he forgot he was even recording! Consequently the shot was about 8 minutes long, long enough for him to reveal something very loving, stern in a fatherly way, which my dad usually wasn’t, and very relational. He was dealing with children in a very traditional parent-child way. And the other thing about the image is that it had become pink and yellow and soft blue. The image is truly painterly, so beautiful. Everything about it was meaningful to me.
We’re always using the camera to witness other people’s presence in the world, but it’s also such a gift to see how they frame their own world. So that shot of the children in the little stream is how my father saw his younger children, the ones from the 1980s, my half-siblings. And it’s very loving.
Q: As the film attempts to unveil various “truths” in one family, it also unveils another kind of complexity itself, which turn the clear distinction between good or bad totally upside down, maybe that’s where all the love and hate come from.
That was exactly the gateway I had to go through to make this film. It wasn’t a simple judgment or any emotional realization that came to me. I needed to find a place for something else. I think almost everyone has a person in their family that they’re constantly trying to figure out — where to place them in their consciousness. With our parents, for example, they each choose what they want to share with us in the cosmos of family.
In the film, I wanted to find formal ways of articulating transparency, obfuscation, even covering up. But I think what’s more interesting is giving a viewer the ability to understand that everything we interpret comes with layers of meaning. For example, when you see my father in a tuxedo going to these ostentatious galas with my grandmother dressed in a fancy ballgown, what you realize is that there is no transparency here. It’s all performance. That’s why I intentionally use a little bit of Disney music. This scene actually feels very unreal.
Before my father would go see my grandmother, he would always cut his hair. This way his way of being who he wasn’t. And that’s actually one of the most poignant things in the film. Here’s someone whom generally society does not approve of, at least in term of how he conducted his life. But then parallel to it this is a son who could never be himself with his mother. And there’s pathos there. I think where you find pathos in a film is like an entry point. Not pity, not disgust, not just elation because something great happens, but where you find pathos is really important to me.
Film About A Father Who
As a filmmaker, I need to find an interesting moment between every cut. Even in my longer films, I never want a cut to be simply the result of cause and effect. I want an edit between two shots to be an entry point of activation for a viewer, then there’s possibilities of pathos, as well so many other sensations.
Q: In this film, you are not the only person who was filming. Other than the stream sequence shot by your father, we can constantly see your brother filming. In a way, it seems that your family members are quite used to having someone in the family who is filming. Nevertheless, I am really curious what made you want to finish the film?
My brother [Ira Sachs] is a filmmaker who makes narrative films. But there was a period of time where he went with my father to Moscow, and he would sometimes go down to Florida with my father for my grandmother’s birthday.
There was a way that my father would talk to my brother, in that man-to-man kind of way, even though he knew my brother was gay. He would show Ira a list of all the women he’s trying to date or sleep with. My brother found that to be a turnoff, but he kept the camera going.
So that occurred to me. When I was trying to work on this film, I asked my brother if he could look for the outtakes from Get It While You Can (2002), the short film he made from his Moscow footage. In this way, Film About a Father Who would not offer just a single perspective on a man.
Let me tell you one of my favorite images that was shot by Ira. He’s on the bed and he’s listening to our father in the other room with a young woman, during their trip to Russia. Ira’s holding the camera, you see his feet and a floor lamp, and he’s humming to himself. And it’s amazing because you feel like you’re in this young man’s head. It’s so internal. Both scenes are really gendered, but play out by revealing something complex going on between a father and a son.
For me, this all plays out like a Cubist painting, let’s say a Picasso’s painting of his daughter Maya. He’s trying to articulate different planes of perception, and that’s how a family works. That’s what this film is recognizing. Those different points of view. I am trying to see how a family works anthropologically. For example, I got very interested in how lying works in our family. I think all families are built around a series of white lies. People try to protect the ones they want to protect, but they also try to protect themselves.
But the thing is in a film like this, you’re still journeying, since, as a filmmaker, you’re hiding behind the camera too.
Q: This film also tackles some of hard situations. I remember there is a scene where his girlfriend and second wife sit side by side.
I remember the year I shot that scene, in 1992, and I was shooting with a really good 16 mm Arriflex camera. I had just started dating my now husband Mark, who is also a filmmaker, and I asked him to record sound. I looked at that footage right when I got it back from the film lab, and I knew it looked “pretty.” I also knew that it was very dramatic, and very disturbing. It showed two women being very honest about their feelings and their assessment of their situation. But once I looked at it after I got the film footage back, I didn’t look at it for probably 25 years, and it moved around with me in carboard boxes from California, to New York, to Maryland. It moved with me everywhere, and it became this Pandora’s Box saying “Look at me!” And, I couldn’t look at it.
And then, I reconnected with a former student of mine named Rebecca Shapass. She started working with me as my studio assistant, and I just said, “let’s look at the footage together.” For some reason, I never felt embarrassed, and it was a breakthrough. We went through every tape and every roll of film. And that was kind of a watershed moment. I was able to explore ideas with her, as we sat side by side, so she ended up being the editor for the film. We did it together, and it was very freeing for me. I’ll never forget that connection that we had.
註1：本文中文版本原載於國家電影及視聽文化中心出版之《放映週報》776 期 註2: 本文所有劇照皆由琳恩・薩克斯提供 Note 1: For the Chinese version, please refer to Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s Funscreen Weekly No. 776: https://funscreen.tfai.org.tw/article/38821 Note 2: All the film stills used in this interview are provided by Lynne Sachs.
The Cinema Eye Honors Award (CEHA) winners have been announced representing the best in documentary filmmaking for 2024. The historic New York Academy of Medicine in East Harlem was the venue for the Cinema Eye Honors 18th Annual Awards Ceremony. Here are this year’s winners…
Nonfiction Feature Black Box Diaries – Shiori Ito, Eric Nyari, Hanna Aqvilin, Ema Ryan Yamazaki, Yuta Okamura, Yuichiro Otsuka, Mark Degli Antoni and Andrew Tracy Dahomey – Mati Diop, Eve Robin, Judith Lou Levy, Gabriel Gonzalez, Joséphine Drouin Viallard and Nicolas Becker Daughters – Natalie Rae, Angela Patton, Lisa Mazzotta, Justin Benoliel, James Cunningham, Mindy Goldberg, Sam Bisbee, Kathryn Everett, Laura Choi Raycroft, Adrian Aurelius, Philip Nicolai Flindt, Michael Cambio Fernandez and Kelsey Lu Look Into My Eyes – Lana Wilson, Kyle Martin, Hannah Buck and Stephen Maing No Other Land – Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, Fabien Greenberg, Bård Kjøge Rønning, Julius Pollux Rothlaender and Bård Harazi Farbu Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat – Johan Grimonprez, Daan Milius, Rémi Grellety, Jonathan Wannyn, Rik Chaubet, Ranko Pauković and Alek Bunic Goosse Sugarcane – Julian Brave NoiseCat, Emily Kassie, Kellen Quinn, Christopher LaMarca, Nathan Punwar, Maya Daisy Hawke, Mali Obomsawin, Martin Czembor, Andrea Bella, Michael Feuser and Ed Archie Noisecat
Direction Mati Diop – Dahomey Gary Hustwit – Eno Lana Wilson – Look Into My Eyes Elizabeth Lo – Mistress Dispeller Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor – No Other Land Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie – Sugarcane Stephen Maing and Brett Story – Union
Production Shane Boris, Odessa Rae and Talal Derki – Hollywoodgate Emma D. Miller, Elizabeth Lo and Maggie Li – Mistress Dispeller Fabien Greenberg and Bård Kjøge Rønning – No Other Land Paula DuPre’ Pesmen, Aniela Sidorska, Camilla Mazzaferro and Olivia Ahnemann – Porcelain War Emily Kassie and Kellen Quinn – Sugarcane Mars Verrone and Samantha Curley – Union
Sound Design Nicolas Becker – Dahomey Nas Parkash and Patrick Fripp – Eno Alex Lane – Intercepted Tom Paul, Shreyank Nanjappa and Sukanto Mazumder – Nocturnes Ranko Pauković and Alek Bunic Goosse – Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat Peter Albrechtsen, Nicolas Becker and Heikki Kossi – Viktor
Debut Feature Black Box Diaries – Directed by Shiori Ito Daughters – Directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton Frida – Directed by Carla Gutiérrez Grand Theft Hamlet – Directed by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane Hollywoodgate – Directed by Ibrahim Nash’at No Other Land – Directed by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor
Shorts List Semifinalists (nominees to be announced in December) Contractions – Directed by Lynne Sachs | NY Times Op-Docs Eternal Father – Directed by Ömer Sami | New Yorker I Am Ready, Warden – Directed by Smriti Mundhra | MTV Documentary Films Incident – Directed by Bill Morrison | New Yorker Instruments of a Beating Heart – Directed by Ema Ryan Yamazaki | NY Times Op-Docs Love in the Time of Migration – Directed by Erin Semine Kökdil and Chelsea Abbas | LA Times Makayla’s Voice: A Letter to the World – Directed by Julio Palacio | Netflix The Medallion – Directed by Ruth Hunduma | New Yorker A Move – Directed by Elahe Esmaili | NY Times Op-Docs The Only Girl in the Orchestra – Directed by Molly O’Brien | Netflix A Swim Lesson – Directed by Rashida Jones and Will McCormack | POV
Spotlight Black Snow – Directed by Alina Simone Homegrown – Directed by Michel Premo A New Kind of Wilderness – Directed by Silje Evensmo Jacobsen A Photographic Memory – Directed by Rachel Elizabeth Seed Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other – Directed by Jacob Perlmutter and Manon Ouimet
Heterodox Caught by the Tides – Directed by Jia Zhang-ke Kneecap – Directed by Rich Peppiatt My First Film – Directed by Zia Anger Pavements – Directed by Alex Ross Perry Sing Sing – Directed by Greg Kwedar Songs from the Hole – Directed by Contessa Gayles
Broadcast Film Bread & Roses – Directed by Sahra Mani | Apple TV+ Girls State – Directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss | Apple TV+ Great Photo, Lovely Life: Facing a Family’s Secrets – Directed by Amanda Mustard and Rachel Beth Anderson | HBO The Lady Bird Diaries – Directed by Dawn Porter | Hulu Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play. – Directed by Jeremy O. Harris | HBO Spermworld – Directed by Lance Oppenheim | FX
Nonfiction Series America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders – Directed by Greg Whiteley and Chelsea Yarnell | Netflix Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court – Directed by Dawn Porter | Showtime The Enfield Poltergeist – Directed by Jerry Rothwell | Apple TV+ The Luckiest Guy in the World – Directed by Steve James | ESPN Ren Faire – Directed by Lance Oppenheim | HBO Telemarketers – Directed by Adam Bhala Lough and Sam Lipman-Stern | HBO
Anthology Series Conan O’Brien Must Go – Executive Producers Conan O’Brien and Jeff Ross | HBO De La Calle – Executive Producers Nick Barili, Jared Andrukanis, Picky Talarico, Lydia Tenaglia, Christopher Collins, Amanda Culkowski, Bruce Gillmer and Craig H. Shepherd | Paramount+ God Save Texas – Executive Producers Lawrence Wright, Alex Gibney, Richard Linklater, Peter Berg, Michael Lombardo, Elizabeth Rogers, Stacey Offman, Richard Perello, Nancy Abraham and Lisa Heller | HBO High on the Hog Season 2 – Executive Producers Roger Ross Williams, Geoff Martz, Craig Piligian, Sarba Das, Fabienne Toback, Karis Jagger, Jessica B. Harris, Stephen Satterfield and Michele Barnwell | Netflix How To with John Wilson Season 3 – Executive Producers John Wilson, Nathan Fielder, Michael Koman and Clark Reinking | HBO Photographer – Executive Producers Elizabeth Chai Vasarhely, Jimmy Chin, Pagan Harleman, Betsy Forhan, Anna Barnes and Chris Kugelman | National Geographic
Broadcast Editing Girls State – Edited by Amy Foote | Apple TV+ The Greatest Night in Pop – Edited by Nic Zimmerman, Will Znidaric and David Brodie | Netflix Ren Faire – Edited by Max Allman and Nicholas Nazmi | HBO The Saint of Second Chances – Edited by Alan Lowe, Jeff Malmberg and Miles Wilkerson | Netflix Telemarketers – Edited by Christopher Passig | HBO Time Bomb Y2K – Edited by Marley McDonald and Maya Mumma | HBO
Broadcast Cinematography America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders – Director of Photography Jonathan Nicholas | Netflix The Enfield Poltergeist – Directors of Photography Ruben Woodin Deschamps, Carmen Pellon Brussosa and David Katznelson | Apple TV+ Girls State – Directors of Photography Martina Radwan, Daniel Carter, Laela Kilbourn, Erynn Patrick Lamont, Laura Hudock, Thorsten Thielow | Apple TV+ Photographer – Director of Photography Michael Crommett, Rita Baghdadi, Peter Hutchens, Melissa Langer and Pauline Maroun | National Geographic Ren Faire – Director of Photography Nate Hurtsellers | HBO You Were My First Boyfriend – Director of Photography Brennan Vance and J. Bennett | HBO
Not enough is written in English about the Argentine experimental filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch, who departed this plane last May at the age of 96. The filmmaker Lynne Sachs conducted an invaluable Mini DV interview with Hirsch in August 2008—an almost unbroken hour-plus document of the artist (then 80 years old) detailing the genesis of her filmmaking. She took to experimental cinema in her forties, already a bourgeois mother of three, who agreed with the massively influential Argentine art critic Jorge Ramiro Brest that “art, as we knew it, had died… Painting on an easel had died.” Hirsch says she was in an “uneasy marriage” with painting and that “movement meant a lot to me. I suddenly felt I could paint with film.” Hirsch joined her husband on business trips to New York, which is where she saw films like Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) and caught wind of interactive Happenings organized by groups like Fluxus. Soon, Hirsch was involved in experiments that were both indebted to and conceived as a response to this New American avant-garde in Buenos Aires. Especially given this lineage of ideas, it’s insane—shameful, really—that Microscope Gallery’s superb “On the Barricades” is the artist’s first solo exhibition everin New York City. News in late 2023 of Hirsch’s films being restored in collaboration between the University of Southern California and the Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch could not have come at a more opportune time.
The Microscope show spans just under two decades of her work, beginning with films Hirsch described to Sachs as “typical of the Sixties,” sometimes conceived as little more than excuses to gather friends and fellow artists for screenings. In her “group,” she identifies the artist Marie Louise Alemann, the poet of Super 8 Claudio Caldini, the late Uruguayan filmmaker Juan José Noli, and filmmakers Juan Villola and Horacio Vallereggio. These names represent some of the major talents of South American experimental cinema in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, all of them overdue for more exhibitions and screenings. I should mention that last year’s Neville d’Almeida and Hélio Oiticica exhibition Cosmic Shelter, at Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Gallery, as well as the “ISM, ISM, ISM” series organized by Pacific Standard Time in 2018 counter this lack of attention toward Latin American experimental filmmakers. Caldini’s works have also been made available on gorgeous blu-rays thanks to the Antennae Collection and the Argentine filmmaker, curator, and writer Leandro Villara. Nevertheless, opportunities to see these films are frustratingly scant both in New York City and elsewhere.
What’s interesting is that Hirsch describes this era of avant-garde art to Sachs as radical precisely because the works didn’t carry explicit political messages; rather than societal satires, polemics, diatribes, or jeremiads against American influence in Latin America, they represent structural play and personal disclosure. The earliest work on display is Marabunta, a straightforward document of a happening that took place in 1967, after the Argentine premiere of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) in Buenos Aires, where attendees were invited to help themselves to a spread of fruit within a giant plaster skeleton fabricated by Hirsch and her compatriot Alemann. A fascinating and tragic timestamp, Marabunta was shot on a 16mm Bolex by Hirsch’s collaborator, Raymundo Gleyzer, another middle-class Argentine filmmaker of Jewish European extraction, but one whose filmmaking became direct action in the run-up to the Dirty War that began in 1976. Gleyzer was among the estimated 30,000 desaparecidos murdered by the dictatorship, which makes Marabunta a snapshot of a more merciful, open-minded time in Argentina’s history. His masterpiece, The Traitors (1973), is as clear in its blistering indictment of the junta evenly backed by the CIA, the Catholic Church, and the AFL-CIO, as Hirsch’s films are fragmented, abstract, and haunting.
As “On the Barricades” progresses, however, Hirsch’s political ideas come into sharper focus. Come Out (1974) is a visual accompaniment to the 10-minute audio piece by Steve Reich of the same name. While Reich loops, expands, elongates, multiplies, and collapses an original piece of audio—a recording of the 18-year-old Harlemite Daniel Hamm testifying, about his multiple days of being beaten by New York City police officers, that he “had to, like, open the bruise up, and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them”—Hirsch’s 16mm visuals are methodically paced, amounting to a very slow rack focus on the stylus of a turntable, playing an EP of Come Out. In Taller (Workshop), also from 1974, Hirsch suspends the camera on a shot of a wall in her home and describes the contents of the frame; eventually, her narration expands beyond the image on-screen in another hat-tip to Snow. Shot on Super-8mm, Hirsch’s impressionistic 23-minute odyssey Mujeres (1979) depicts different women in a variety of landscapes—domestic, natural, photogenic, obscure—while handwritten words are shorn of context and men appear as imposing phantoms. It’s like a retelling of Adam and Eve from a woman’s perspective, where the loss of innocence is a continuous negotiation (if not a freefall.)
Shot between 1980 and 1983, the photo series Untitled (La vida es lo que nos pasa…) exposes the emptied-out streets of Buenos Aires during the dictatorship, as the filmmaker turns her camera on her own graffiti which, like the aforementioned films, defies sloganeering and easy interpretation. Watching Hirsch work in 2024, it’s impossible not to think we are about to pass through another tunnel of history in which every last critique and observation will be threaded back to the problem of living under corrupt demagogues such as Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Orban, Meloni, and Argentina’s own Javier Millei. Broadly speaking, this tendency is fine—what’s the use of criticism if not to decipher the insane gibberish of the present?—but artworks like these speak to a different rebellion against a different conservatism, the one which discourages people from organizing and performing, from sticking their necks out, from creating spectacles and risking making fools of themselves. This fear of leaping into the dark is just as symptomatic of the collapse of society as are the twin hegemonies of fascism and capitalism. Featuring work in equally intimate, lyrical, political, and structural registers, “On the Barricades” testifies to Hirsch’s fearlessness.
In Payal Kapadia’s radiant Cannes Grand Prix Award-winning “All We Imagine As Light,” three women navigate life in modern-day Mumbai. Lonely senior nurse Prabha has an absent husband working in Germany. Roommate and younger nurse Anu has a semi-secret romance with a Muslim boy. Cook Parvati faces the prospect of losing her home to a greedhead developer. Events cause these women to grow and change as people, including discovering traditions aren’t as helpful in life as expected.
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Was it living under apartheid, pigeonholing as the “racism photographer,” or something else that permanently shadowed the life and career of talented South African photographer Ernest Cole? Raoul Peck’s newest documentary “Ernest Cole: Lost And Found” attempts to answer these questions using Cole’s own words (voiced by Lakeith Stanfield) and Cole’s extraordinary photographs. Can these two sources explain why Cole lived a life of precarity or how 60,000 of Cole’s negatives were found in a Swedish bank safe?
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Peck’s newest film is showing as part of this year’s SFFILM’s Doc Stories film series. The director had appeared at a previous documentary film event with his seminal James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.”
Aside from Peck’s Baldwin documentary, over the years of its existence Doc Stories has shown such powerful films as Matthew Heineman’s “The First Wave,” Ben Proudfoot’s “Almost Famous: The Queen Of Basketball,” and Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ “The Mission.” This year, Doc Stories presents its 10th program from October 17-20, 2024 at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco.
One of the films shown at the very first Doc Stories series was Amy Berg’s “Janis: Little Girl Blue.” This electrifying biopic of rock legend Janis Joplin mixed together the late musician’s personal letters (read by Cat Power), stories from the likes of Pink and Melissa Etheridge, and footage from Joplin’s concerts and studio sessions. This screening is free, but tickets must be requested.
Opening Night honors goes to “One To One: John & Yoko” from directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards. The film follows post-Beatles breakup John Lennon and Yoko Ono as they undergo both a spiritual awakening and a political radicalization during the course of the early 1970s. Aside from personal phone recordings and home video, the film will mix in footage from the 1972 full-length charity concert Lennon and Ono put on for the children of Willowbrook Institution.
When Proudfoot’s Academy Award-winning short film was shown at Doc Stories, it was as part of the New York Times Op-Docs shorts block. This year’s package of shorts includes: Elahe Esmaili’s “A Move” (what results when the film’s Iranian director appears at a family gathering sans hijab), Lynne Sachs’ “Contractions” (a timely and poetic expression of grief and dismay made by reproductive rights activists during the overturning of Roe v. Wade), and Raquel Sancinetti’s animated “Madeleine” (the titular old woman’s refusal to leave her retirement home doesn’t stop her decades-younger companion Raquel from finding a creative way to take the older woman on the journey of a lifetime).
Doc Stories’ other short film block is called “The Persistence Of Dreams.” It includes such shorts as Mona Xia and Erin Ramirez’ “Kowloon!” (would you believe America’s largest Chinese restaurant is located in…Saugus, Massachusetts), Amelie Hardy’s “Hello Stranger” (while her clothes are drying at a local Nova Scotia laundromat, Cooper shares the story of her gender affirmation journey), and Kyle Thrash and Ben Proudfoot’s “The Turnaround” (the story of how Philadelphia Phillies superfan Jon McCann’s plan to turn things around for his beloved baseball team became the stuff of legend).
A different kind of institution saving is chronicled in Elizabeth Lo’s “Mistress Dispeller.” It follows Wang Zhenxi (aka Teacher Wang), a woman who’s part of a growing Chinese industry dedicated to repairing failing marriages. But if Wang’s tactics are anything to go by, her methods raise plenty of ethical red flags. The case followed here involves an errant husband and his mistress, and how Wang manipulates the extramarital lovers to end their affair.
Benjamin Ree’s film “The Remarkable Life Of Ibelin” begins with a different sort of ending: the death of online gamer Mats Steen from a rare muscular disease. But when Steen’s grieving parents Robert and Trude accessed their late son’s blog posts, they discovered that their son didn’t lead a lonely life playing the online game “World Of Warcraft.” Mats was the avatar known as Ibelin, and he wound up forging unexpected bonds with both fellow gamers within the game and beyond.
A different sort of teamwork with far different stakes gets chronicled in Brett Story and Stephen Maing’s “Union.” This documentary follows the efforts of aspiring rapper Chris Smalls to convince the workers at an Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island to join the Amazon Labor Union. Motivational speeches and offers of free marijuana may sound like dubious ways of getting workers to sign up. But the Amazon bosses are notoriously anti-union to the point of using anti-organizing tactics to stop the union. So all’s fair in love and worker relations.
A far more intractable conflict is depicted in the Berlin Film Festival award-winner “No Other Land.” Made by a Palestinian-Israeli filmmaker collective (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor), the film documents the struggle over several years by Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta to prevent the IDF from evicting them and seizing the land for a “training ground” (aka land to be given to Jewish settlers). This film promises to be a hot ticket partly thanks to current interest in Israeli-Palestinian friction. Also, no US distributor has as yet stepped forward to pick up the film for mass distribution.
Speaking of taboo subjects, talking about climate change has led to actual death threats against meteorologists reporting on the subject. In hopes of digging past the heated rhetoric and get back to “what happened and why,” “The White House Effect” from local filmmakers Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos, and Jon Shenk exhume the decades of failed U.S. policy that led in a way to Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The filmmakers show why repeated policy failures on fighting climate change effects can’t be blamed solely on greedhead polluters. There was political maneuvering involved, as seen in what happened to Jimmy Carter’s environmental agenda and George H.W. Bush’s initial support for the EPA.
A country’s government may be a big fan of building grandiose architectural projects. But as Victor Kossakovsky’s new essay film “Architecton” shows, building grandiose physical structures has been a continual human obsession over the centuries of humanity’s existence. Will humanity ultimately pay a price for attempting to satisfy its unending urges to build bigger and allegedly better?
A person who paid a different sort of price is Sara Jane Moore, who was imprisoned for attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Filmmaker Robinson Devor wanted to tell Moore’s story on film. However, the former assassin would agree to an interview only if she was the only person filmed. Devor agreed to Moore’s terms but turned these limitations into Doc Stories’ Closing Night Film “Suburban Fury.” The viewer understands from the start that Moore is an unreliable narrator. But figuring out what parts of Moore’s story are true and which fable is made harder by an inability to verify her story. Was Moore actually an FBI informant whose job was gaining the confidence of political radicals?
(“All We Imagine As Light” screened as part of Mill Valley Film Festival 47. It next screens at 3:00 PM on October 19, 2024 as part of the Third I Film Festival at the Roxie Theatre (3117-16th Street, SF). Following that screening, it will begin a theatrical run on November 22, 2024 at the Roxie Theatre.
(“Ernest Cole: Lost And Found” screens at 11:00 AM on October 19, 2024 as part of SFFILM’s “Doc Stories 10” at the Vogue Theater (3290 Sacramento Street, SF.))
Camden International Film Festival Unveils Politically Packed 2024 Lineup (EXCLUSIVE)
The 20th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival, kicking off Sept. 12, features a lineup full of political, hot button documentaries fresh off showings at Toronto, Venice and Telluride. The Maine-based film festival will unfold in a hybrid format, with both in-person events over a four-day period concluding Sept. 15, and online screenings available from Sept. 16 to Sept. 30 for audiences across the U.S.
In Barbara Hammer’s memoir HAMMER! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life she writes, “My films begin in what I call feeling images, an inseparable unity of emotion and thought/idea/image and internal bodily states of excitement.” Hammer’s desire to wed both emotion and thought, objects and bodies, could also be the epigraph to the experimental filmmaker and writer Lynne Sachs’s ongoing illustrious career. 2024 marks forty years since Sachs took her first video class at DCTV, where their June retrospective From the Outside In honors Sachs’s oeuvre of experimental shorts, cinepoems, and hybrid documentaries that explore feminism, family, New York City, labor, and “internal bodily states of excitement” with radical empathy and joy evinced in the act of their making.
From the Outside In features twenty-four films from Sachs’s body of work spanning 1983 to 2024, as well as an artist talk and workshop on uniting poetry with cinema. This preoccupation with language and translation—or the ever ongoing interplay between the aural, textual, and visual—is always at the forefront of Sachs’s work. In the very first program, “Performing the Real,” her short Fossil (1986) opens with a series of bodies in medium close-up performing various repetitive terpsichorean movements. The VHS camera, handheld, slightly unsteady, traces their shadows and gestures against the room’s white walls. Sachs then cuts to video footage of women in Ubud, Bali, packing sand into their baskets at a river bank. Through juxtaposition, the dance is both an interpretation as well as a translation of the Indonesian women’s labor. As Sachs elaborates in a recent phone interview, the cut is “another type of line break” that allows “the juxtapositions between shots … to have [what we’ll call] free song.”
The Washing Society (2018) expands upon the content and form of Fossil. Sachs initially began this projectwith her co-director/playwright Lizzie Olesker by informally interviewing various people who worked in laundromats to create the play Every Fold Matters, which was performed in laundromats all over New York. The composite of all those different conversations is also the content of her film. In between subjects candidly sharing their experiences of racism or overtime at work, The Washing Society also features actors delivering monologues about laundering or dancers bounding atop site specific washing machines with interpretive abandon. The Washing Society makes visible typically invisible labor both by conducting talking head interviews, as well as by lovingly translating folding gestures into emotive dance. The mix of registers (veering from participatory to performative modes of hybrid documentary), coupled with the chorus of voices, creates a powerful panoply of experiences on this historically marginalized, gendered, and racialized labor.
Swerve concludes “Performing the Real’s” program by deftly (and movingly) uniting Sachs’s interests in translation, language, and text on screen. Inspired by Paolo Javier’s (Queens Poet Laureate 2010–14) sonnets in his 2021 book O.B.B. a.k.a. The Original Brown Boy, Swerve takes place in both an Asian food market and a playground in Queens. As various actors recite Javier’s lines, the camera tracks their movements closely like a confidant; at times, text layers the images, language equally worthy of sight as a face or a hand. Sachs further underscores her love of language in her short A Year in Notes and Numbers (2017) where the camera cuts from marginalia to to-do lists to vital signs in rhythmic succession. Sachs describes A Year as a “concise, autobiographical poem … made from the detritus. [It’s all] about the micro coming together.” Text typically delegated to the margins—or reserved solely for medical spheres—takes center frame.
Elsewhere, like in E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021), the letter becomes another format from which to aurally and textually examine the power and politics of images. E•pis•to•lar•y begins with the white text “Dear Jean” against a black screen, ominously overlaid with the chatter of children and what sounds like a crackling fire. Sachs then cuts to black-and-white footage of the January 6th rioters descending on the Capitol before cutting back to the black screen where white text now states, “I don’t believe that childhood is swathed in innocence.” Each member of this mob was once a child—but children are equally capable of inciting chaos as adults. Sachs subsequently cuts to footage from Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies (1963) as two young children push a large rock from a cliff. When the rock begins its descent, Sachs immediately cuts back to the rioters overturning a barricade; the objects, as well as the sound bridge of the rock falling, links the two disparate source materials. The result is a deeply unsettling collage of mob mentality that activates the viewer not just intellectually, but sensorially due to the match on action cuts and sound bridges. This is a film where the power of images surpasses the power of the written word. Through disquieting visual juxtapositions, Sachs’s E•pis•to•lar•y returns us to Hammer’s “inseparable unity” of embodied violence and political ideology.
Yet, politics—and the politics of identity—are never removed from any of Sachs’s work. She is always already attuned to bodies (both her own and others’), and their multiplicities, gradations, and variations. As Audre Lorde wrote, “It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences”; Sachs’s films live by Lorde’s tenet that difference is worthy of record—and celebration. Some films, like Your Day is My Night (2013), include both English and Chinese subtitles; others, like Tip of My Tongue / En la punta de mi lengua (2017), include Spanish subtitles on screen. Sachs does not always automatically assume her audiences are English speakers. Nor is she interested in documenting a single political or social experience. Nowhere is such a chorus of voices more personally rendered than in Film About a Father Who (2020). Filmed over thirty-five years, Sachs’s portrait of her charismatic yet unknowable father incorporates interviews with family members who provide loving, albeit troubling, insight into Ira Sachs Sr. as a father, husband, lover, and son. As additional facts come to light, Father reveals that sometimes the best story is told by multiple people, not just one.
Contractions (2024)1, a much more performative documentary than Film About a Father Who, stages its bodies, rather than observes them. As an obstetrician and reproductive rights activist narrate their time working in an abortion clinic offscreen, various performers congregate outside a closed abortion clinic in Memphis, Tennessee in a long shot, their backs to the camera. The decision to obscure the faces of the performers is both to protect their privacy as well as to formally gesture to collective solidarity. Though the bodies range in age, race, and nationality, the choreography (and current political landscape) unite them in a post-Roe world, as does the cinematography which holds each and every body in the frame. Though we do not know every person’s individual story, Sachs’s camera does not discriminate. The long shot makes it possible that every person’s body, however anonymous, is seen.
The reproductive politics of Contractions (2024) recalls Sachs’s 1991 film The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts, a more formally embodied polyphonic collage film about women’s bodies. Incorporating archival footage as well as her own home movies, The House of Science is a scintillating examination of sexuality and science’s gendered biases. Whereas Contractions requires (necessarily so) a level of remove due to the anonymity of the actors, The House of Science is much more personal due to Sachs’s incorporation of her own story, as well as varied footage. On a formal level, I would argue Sachs’s works achieve Hammer’s “internal states of bodily excitement” when they are not as performative or tightly choreographed, but more interested in the power of montage, graphic matches, and the interplay between language and sound, because it is not just the actors, but the medium itself which activates new ways of seeing.
In The House of Science, Sachs’s diary chronicles receiving a diaphragm from “Dr. L.” in preparation for going to college, just as Esther Greenwood, in Sylvia Plath’s novel, receives a diaphragm to get out from under the bell jar’s oppressive dome. But Sachs’s doctor doesn’t tell her how to use it. Sachs’s text on screen elaborates:
My memory of being a girl includes a “me” that is two. I am two bodies—the body of the body and the body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. This was the body that was wet with dirty liquids, holes that wouldn’t close, full of smells and curdled milk.
While Sachs may have once described her body as leaky and porous, full of “dirty liquids” and “smells,” her overall filmography affirms a heuristic approach to radical self-acceptance, not just of herself, but of others around her, including friends, family, and fellow artists like the aforementioned luminary Hammer. Through such ongoing generosity at both the level of content and form, Sachs’s films arouse ongoing intellectual and emotional compassion through myriad actors, materials, and mediums.
Contractions will begin streaming in perpetuity on the NYT OpDocs page as part of their coverage of the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to end a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion.
“Although there aren’t as many wide releases as there were last week, at least this week’s two offerings are being released into over 3,000 theaters, and hopefully one of them will break out and save us from the biggest bummer of a summer in recent memory…
I’d usually save this next bit for the Repertory section below, but I don’t often cover stuff out of the DCTV Firehouse, which is in my neighborhood, just maybe a ten-minute walk from where I live. Anyone who has read any incarnation of this column going back to 2001 probably knows how much I generally love the documentary genre, which the Firehouse specializes in. On Friday, they’re kicking off a new retrospective series called “Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In,” with probably the most comprehensive screening of the filmmaker’s work, running from Friday, June 7, through Tuesday, June 11. I haven’t had much of a chance to watch her films, though I have seen her 2020 film Film About a Father Who, which will screen with one of her more recent shorts, The Jitters, and she’ll be there for a QnA with some of her family. It’s a little tough breaking away to get over there this weekend, being that it’s also the opening weekend of Tribeca Festival, but I want to make sure that any doc enthusiasts reading this column are aware of the series and of the DCTV Firehouse.”
From our colleagues at Psyche comes a beautiful short film by Lynne Sachs that is a decades-long collaboration with the late pioneering feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer.
From the Psyche writeup:
In 1998, the pioneering US feminist artist Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) spent a month at an artist residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Feeling “compelled to do absolutely nothing” while living in a dune shack without running water or electricity, Hammer documented her solitude with a journal, a tape recorder and a 16mm film camera. For decades, these materials remained in her personal archive, until, as Hammer was nearing the end of her life in 2018, she entrusted her friend, the celebrated US filmmaker Lynne Sachs, to craft a film with the materials.
For the project, Sachs recorded Hammer reading from her decades-old journals during her final months. Hammer, who is known for her provocative and often controversial artworks, here provides a widely accessible yet distinctive account of solitude, beauty and where these two experiences met during her month on the beach. Her intimate, diaristic account is accompanied by gorgeous nature shots in which she plays with filters and frame rates, seemingly with no other motive than creative exploration. And, connecting past and present through her editing, including the use of words on the screen, Sachs’s treatment provides Hammer’s experience a delicate narrative structure.
In one sense, A Month of Single Frames is a touching coda to Hammer’s life, as the film concludes with the artist revisiting her own poignant meditations on mortality. But, percolating just beneath the surface is a more expansive celebration of artistry, and the artist’s ability to observe, contemplate, refract and give new contours to the world.
In May, 2018, the same year Hammer gave the materials making up this short to Sachs, she attended an event in her honor Temple University, where she spoke to Elisabeth Subrin and Sarah Drury. Read their conversation here, as well as Astra Taylor’s conversation with Hammer from our Winter, 2007 issue. Additionally, Sachs, who was interviewed by Daniel Eagan in 2020, is the subject of a series beginning today at New York’s DCTV.
Experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV in 1984; she and DCTV Firehouse Cinema are celebrating this fortieth anniversary with “Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In,” a five-day retrospective with seven programs comprising two dozen of her works, from 1983’s Ladies Wear to 2024’s Contractions and the world premiere of We Continue to Speak, from the three-minute The Small Ones (2007) and The Jitters (2024) to the eighty-three-minute Tip of My Tongue (2017). Sachs will be at every program, participating in Q&As and an interactive workshop; among her special guests are Tom Day, Sam Green, Tabitha Jackson, Naeem Mohaiemen, Lizzie Olesker, Accra Shepp, and her brother Ira Sachs.
“I walked into Downtown Community TV (DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film. I was twenty-two years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable,” Sachs said in a statement. “From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places, and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.”
The Memphis-born, Brooklyn-based auteur is an open book in her films, melding the personal and the political. In the grainy Ladies Wear, she photographs Ira on the New York City subway as he applies polish to his nails and sneakers. In 2013’s Your Day Is My Night, she documents a group of Chinese immigrants crammed into a closetlike apartment in Chinatown, where they ponder the differences between their lives in America and their native country and wonder if they made the right choice in coming here; there’s a fascinating kind of intervention when a young Puerto Rican woman moves in with them. In The Small Ones, Sachs shares the story of her Hungarian cousin Sandor Lenard, who during WWII in Italy was tasked with “washing, measuring, and cementing the bones of American dead.” His straightforward narration is accompanied by abstract images of war and slow-motion home movies of children at a birthday party. In 2021’s Maya at 24, Sachs depicts her daughter, Maya, at ages six, sixteen, and twenty-four.
Sachs offers a unique perspective of 9/11 in Tornado (2002), her fingers ruffling through ripped paper that floated across to Brooklyn. In the seven-minute Swerve, artist and curator Emmy Catedral, blaqlatinx multidisciplinary artist ray ferreira, director and cinematographer Jeff Preiss, film curator and programmer Inney Prakash, and actor Juliana Sass recite excerpts from Pilipinx poet Paolo Javier’s O.B.B. in a Queens park; words occasionally appear on the screen, including “free emptiness,” “unknown thoroughfare,” and “hum your savage cabbage leaf.” Investigation of a Flame (2001) explores the true story of the Catonsville Nine through archival footage and new interviews, with one member decrying “the obscenity and the insanity” of the US government’s actions, “which are growing more and more obscene and insane.”
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together,” DCTV Firehouse Cinema director of programming Dara Messinger said. “I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy — not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum.”
“I don’t believe that childhood is swathed in innocence,” Sachs writes in e•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021), which contains footage from January 6 and Peter Brook’s 1963 Lord of the Flies. In The Jitters (2024), she cavorts with her partner, Mark Street, and three pet frogs and a cat. She takes a revealing look at the patriarch of her seemingly ever-expanding family in Film About a Father Who (2020). In And Then We Marched (2017), Sachs speaks with Sophie D., her seven-year-old neighbor, over archival footage of suffragists and shots of the 2017 Women’s March for equality.
Sachs shares her real to-do lists in A Year in Notes and Numbers (2017) while tracking her cholesterol, bone density, weight, glucose level, platelet count, and total protein. In Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor (2018), she visits cutting-edge artists Carolee Schneemann in New Paltz, Barbara Hammer in New York City, and Gunvor Nelson in Sweden. In an essay Sachs wrote about the four-minute 1987 silent short Drawn and Quartered, depicting a naked man and woman divided into four frames, exploring the tacit nature of the human body, Sachs explained how she felt at the film’s San Francisco premiere: “Within those few painful minutes, the crowd went from absolute silence, to raucous laughter, and back to an exquisite quiet. I was shaking.” You can expect all that and more over these five days at DCTV; below is the full schedule.
