1972 – France – [30′ reduced to ?] 18′ – 35 mm – Color
After Mario Ruspoli’s Les hommes de la baleine (1956), with commentary written by Chris Marker, the two men decided to work together on a new film about cetacean fishing: Vive la baleine. This time, however, there was no question of showing traditional sperm whaling. It’s purely and simply about denouncing an unacceptable massacre, that of the blue whales, the largest animal that has ever existed.As the 2004 La Rochelle Film Festival aptly summed it up, “for a part of humanity, the whale initially represented an essential means of survival. Then came industrialization, and with it big business. Whaling became a means of making a profit. The slaughter could begin. That’s the story told in this no-nonsense documentary.” Although today a moratorium prohibits whaling, and despite the fact that Japan, Iceland and Norway continue their exactions under scientific pretexts, the figures are there.
Indeed, the International Whaling Commission (IWC), founded in 1948, had set up a whaling management system that proved to be a total failure. “The conversion system known as the Blue Whale Unit (BWU), which establishes equivalence between the different baleen whale species according to the average quantity of oil that can be extracted from them (1 blue whale = 2 fin whales = 2.5 humpback whales = 6 Rudolph’s whales), as well as the establishment of a global quota for all whaling nations, led to the massacre of the largest whales and brought their populations to the brink of extinction. It wasn’t until the 1960s that country quotas were adopted, and in 1972 the Blue Whale Unit was abolished.“
Mario Ruspoli, always passionately involved in his projects, didn’t stop there. In addition to his film, he published a second book on the subject entitled Whale Men (1972), in reference to his first film of the same name (1956), which had been released shortly after his book In Search of the Sperm Whale (1955). In this second opus, Ruspoli takes stock of the hunt, following the Stockholm Conference in June 1972, which called for a ten-year halt to whaling to allow cetaceans to renew themselves. He tells us, among other things, that in 1964, the peak of the massacre, 357 gunboats and 23 floating factories killed 33,001 cetaceans, including 372 blue whales, and that of the 150,000 blue whales alive in 1930, less than 1,000 remained in 1966, a massacre mainly due to the Norwegians.
In 2007, Icarus published a heavily revised English version, as Lynne Sachs, who worked actively on the translation with Chris Marker, tells us.
“Three years ago, Jon Miller, president of our mutual distributor Icarus Films, contacted me to see if I would be willing to assist Chris in the making of a new English version of his 1972 film Vive la Baleine, a passionate, collage-based essay film on the plight of the whales. Of course, I was honored and immediately said yes. For one whole year, Chris and I corresponded weekly as we re-wrote and updated the narration and I searched for a male and a female voice-over actor to read the two parts. He renamed the new 2007 version of his film Three cheers for the whale. It is distributed with other “bestiary” films he has made including The case of the grinning cat.
Be that as it may, Three Cheers for the Whale is an exemplary documentary in its didactic approach, as well as being a scathing pamphlet against the mercantilism of the fishing industry. It’s also worth noting the scarcity of documents concerning this film, about which little or nothing is known. In 2016, Argos Films and Éditions Montparnasse released a remarkable boxed set of Mario Ruspoli’s films, including Vive la baleine and Les hommes de la baleine, with an extensive, well-detailed booklet.
Finally, in the “Nota filmografica” inserted at the end of the volume (pp. 193-196) of Scene della terza guerra mondiale 1967-1977, the Italian version of Fonds de l’air est rouge, published in 1980, mention is made of a film entitled Vive la banlieue (Long Live the Suburbs), co-directed by Marker and Mario Maret in 1972. There’s no doubt that it’s actually Mario Ruspoli’s Vive la baleine.
Livre – 1972 – 148 p.
Coffret dvd – 2007
Coffret dvd – 2011
Générique (début, dans l’ordre d’apparition, complété par le site du Festival de La Rochelle) Argos Films – 1972 Vive la baleine baleines: Mario Ruspoli vivats: Chris Marker assistés par: Germaine et Mario Chiaselotti [voix off:] voix magistrale: [Louis] Casamayor voix intérieure: Valérie Mayoux voix musicale: Lalan [van Thienen] générique: Timour Lam [montage, son_et commentaire: Chris Marker] [image: Michel Boschet] [production: Argos Films] Version anglaise (2007): (sous titrage du générique début) Three cheers for the whale whales: Mario Ruspoli cheers: Chris Marker master voice: Leonard Lopate interior voice: Emily Hoffman (ajout générique de fin en anglais) English version supervisor: Lynne Sachs English sound mix: Bill Seery original title drawings: Timour Lam English titles: Kelly Spivey English translation: Liza Oberman A first run Icarus release
Frequent Filmwax guest filmmaker Lynne Sachs returns to discuss a retrospective of her work to be presented by DCTV. The series, called “From the Outside In“, runs June 7th — 11th at DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in Lower Manhattan. 2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV. In From the Outside In, we traverse Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.
“40 years ago, Lynne Sachs took a video class at Manhattan’s DCTV (Downtown Community Television Center). In the next four decades she made dozens of remarkable films and beginning this Friday, June 7, DCTV will present From the Outside In, seven programs showcasing the variety of her important work with the artist present at each screening. Go here for program and ticket information.
Her films have been influenced (either cited by her or by my estimation) by many great artists and movements: Vietnamese filmmaker and professor Trinh T. Min-ha (whose classes I also attended while at San Francisco State University), Chris Marker (“Sans Soleil”), the dance/film aesthetics of Yvonne Rainer and Meredith Monk, early underground filmmakers like Bruce Baillie, body art performance artist Carolee Schneeman, pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer, American feminist documentary filmmaker Martha Rosler, left politics, the French avant-garde lettrism movement, post-colonial studies, Nina Menkes and much more. She is one of the most important American experimental filmmakers still active today.
Here are my personal and political notes on ten of her films I viewed or re-viewed recently. All of them are included in the DCTV programs.
Ladies Wear (1983) Lynne and her brother (film director Ira Sachs) both paint their nails while on a subway car. (An ‘80s subway decorated by graffiti; they get off at the Spring street stop.) Themes: NYC, gender, graffiti as a form of public cosmetics. Her first film.
Fossil (1986) In Mambai in Bali, Indonesian female workers dredge sand from the river onto containers they balance on their heads. This is contrasted with a dance performance by Sachs and other dancers as response to the movements of the Bali workers. Mixing the workaday rhythms of laborers with a modern dance interpretation is a tactic she will employ in many of her films.
Drawn & Quartered (1987) A nude male and female are separated into four quadrants of the film frame. Sachs says this was the year she “first encountered Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’, seen Carolee Schneeman’s ‘Fuses’, pondered Yvonne Rainer’s ‘Lives of Performers.’”
Investigation of a Flame (2001) We are in Chris Marker territory here. (And please see his incredible 1977 film, “The Grin Without a Cat.”) Stock footage of the Vietnam War is intercut with the story of the Catonsville Nine. In 1968 Daniel Berrigan and eight other Vietnam War protestors stole boxes of selective service records to a park and burned them with homemade napalm. Sachs interviews the participants, including a female clerk at the selective service office who explains why she felt she failed American soldiers who wouldn’t be relieved by new recruits. A moving exploration of our moral responsibility to confront the foreign policies of our country, no matter the cost to us.
Tornado (2001) A short meditation on 9/11. She folds a torn calendar of September 2001 while explaining how her daughter’s response to the tragedy was to “mourn the twins.”
The Task of the Translator (2010) Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” this short contrasts the improbable assignment of Latin scholars translating a newspaper story about Iraqi burial rituals with accounts wartime cosmetic surgery and human remains.
The Washing Society (2018) Co-directed with Lizzie Olesker, this 44-minute film is one of my favorites. Workers at a few of the thousands of NYC laundromats talk about their work days as ghosts from an 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta reappear. Intimate connections (like the one I have with my local laundromat workers) are being replaced by “super laundries” where conditions are more factory-like. (Recall that a super laundry was atop the meth lab in the TV series “Breaking Bad!”) Required reading: Chapter 10 (“The Working Day”) of Karl Marx’s “Capital: Volume 1.”
A Year in Notes and Numbers (2019) Closeups of to-do notes are combined with test results from her annual physical. This is a beautiful example of making art out of miscellaneous documentation.
E•pis•to•lar•y: Letter to Jean Vigo (2021) What does Jean Vigo’s great 1933 film “Zero for Conduct” have to do with footage of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol building? When is anarchy good and when is it bad?
Swerve (2022) I have written about this short film here.
‘I am overwhelmed by simplicity. There is so much to see.’
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.
It is this short film that catapults Lynne Sachs and positions her as one of the first feminist filmmakers of experimental cinema.
Faust: who is she?
Mephistopheles: Look at her carefully. This is Lilith.
Faust: who?
Mephistopheles: Adam’s first wife. Beware of her beautiful hair, the only finery that she shows off, when she catches a young man with it she does not let him go easily.
With a unique sensibility and poetic vision, Lynne Sachs is an American filmmaker who challenges the conventions of experimental cinema. Through her works, she explores themes such as identity, memory and family, creating intimate and emotional pieces that invite reflection. Her distinctive style and commitment to innovation have made her a leading figure in the world of independent film. In this review I will talk about one of the most significant shorts of her career: A Biography of Lilith . And I will speak of it as a maximum expression of semantics.
I met Lilith in my last year of high school, at a Catholic school. My approach to religion had been limited to wearing a skirt on Sunday mass until I was 7 years old. My dad stopped believing in institutions and I stopped believing in God. My interest in other beliefs was not above average, but everything changed when I heard her name.
I asked the same question as Faust in Goethe’s play, and the Mephistopheles of my own drama answered the same: “she is Adam’s first wife.” I did not dare deny her existence for two reasons. The first, because of the ignorance in which I knew she found me: I refused to know more about the Bible; the second, because the idea of a woman before Eve who turned her back on the creator seemed impossible to me, however, it gave me a hope that burned in my chest. Not denied, but demortified, I let myself be carried away by Lilith’s presence in my daily life. I discovered, then, that if God were a woman, then it would be her.
Mentioned by contemporary authors as “the first feminist woman,” Lilith is born from mud. God gives her Eden to him under the same limitations as her successor, but Lilith rebels against Adam’s desires, without him being able to understand that her pleasure also matters to her. Unlike Eve, Lilith is not born from Adam’s rib, so she thinks by and for herself. In the sexual act in which Lilith demands to get on top, Adam does not allow it and she flees to the Red Sea. She meets Lucifer, gives him wings and God gives her an opportunity to return, under the same conditions. Lilith chooses her freedom and, presumably, she is the one who disguises herself as the snake. As part of her punishment, she is condemned to be the infertile woman. Lilith grows and develops in today’s world as the witch who is guilty of the guilt of women of the same condition as hers, as well as the lust of men and also the cause of crib death.
Lilith becomes a fable, the monster who sleeps under the bed of adulterers and impious people, sometimes lulling the crib of a newborn. She is stripped of her own history. Lilith does not appear in The Bible, and yet she exists in the Catholic imagination. She appears for the first time as a literary figure in Goethe’s Faust , briefly (1808 years after The Creation) and begins, at a snail’s pace, to gain visibility . Today, Lilith is one of the greatest symbols of the feminist movement. We carry her in her chest and she burns inside us stronger than ever. It no longer appears only in intellectualism, nor only in books of canonical literature. She becomes Lucifer’s wife in television series, she is painted and sculpted in contemporary art, sociological theses are written under her own name, Drag Queens dress like her on reality shows . Lilith, today, is on everyone’s lips. But, as in Genesis, I think it is important to go back to the beginning to understand the feminist Lilith beyond her sexual liberation.
I remember when I finally discovered what the apple represented in the creation story. Clinging to the little interest she found in Catholicism, I discovered that the apple represents modesty in conservative discourses, which is why Eva covers her naked body. But, this didn’t make sense to me. If Lilith was the daughter of God and had disguised herself as a snake, why prohibit Eve from what freed her? In this same speech, I forgot that the characters in The Bible are, above all, human, and that the ultimate goal of this text is to talk about forgiveness and goodness. I also remembered that it was we who have distorted and polarized belief.
Then I understood that the apple actually represented knowledge, reason, the word. Lilith gave consciousness, first to Eve and then to Adam, about themselves and their surroundings. She gave them free will. And if man is in the image and likeness of God, it is because of his ability to create from the word. If words make reason, and if reason is what differentiates us from animals, then I had no choice but to conclude: if God is a woman, that woman is Lilith. She gave us the gift of knowledge.
After this journey of reflection, which took me approximately 7 years, I keep coming across Lilith: a challenging woman. And this time she did it under the name Lynne Sachs. She understands, as much as I do (or at least I want to think so), the role that Lilith occupies both today and in history, our history. In her short film, A biography of Lilith, she shows us a bar dancer, Cherie Wallace, whom Sachs interviews about some ideas that, if in themselves are a topic to talk about today, in the early 2000s They were barely placed on the table. She talks about men who take refuge in women from the gallant life, from adoption, about women who belong to that world and who are forced to give birth. But the most surprising thing is that she does it from an intellectual and ethical maturity that little is expected of women in her context (and again, I repeat: much less in the early 2000s).
However, it is not the answers or the supposed interview (since we never hear the questions) that we focus on. They only help us understand Lynn’s Lilith. A narrating voice tells the story of Lilith, precisely the one that I have explained previously, but in the images we see representations of her if she belonged to our present day. We see a woman arriving naked to her Eden (which I interpreted as her backyard) full of branches, grass, and a man’s green areas.
So, when the narrator tells us about the relationship between Adam and Lilith, we see this previously naked woman wearing shorts and surrounded by pages, while the man generates approaches that she rejects. She wants to read. But he tries to deny the knowledge. Then, he runs away. Cherie is baptized in the black sea as she discovers her freedom. And somewhere between the present and the past, she becomes a dancer. All this while Sachs places passages of Lilith in the different conceptions that she has of her: witch, lust, stalker, infertile and child murderer. However, as we watch Sachs’ short, Cherie tells the demons accompanying her: “all the children in the world are my children.” Have we not all been guided by the same rule? (Or has teaching made me crazy and I agree with her?: All the children in the world are my children). She doesn’t embarrass us, or I think she shouldn’t embarrass us.
Machismo is not genetic, it is historical. Women and men were not molded by clay, no. We were shaped by our own circumstances. Exiled from Eden, with arms open to knowledge, this is how we wanted to do it. The difference is that women have carried the guilt, the sin… because that is how the beginning of the story tells it. We stay at home and dedicate ourselves to the family. And that is, I believe, our best historical quality: that above all things, we put life first. No, I am not talking about anti-abortion campaigns, but precisely the opposite. Cherie Wallace, in the Lynn Sachs short, basically says that she couldn’t give a child a decent life. She understands her job, she doesn’t intend to leave it, but she understands the weight of carrying a life, a life other than her own and one to which she would not like her baby to belong. So, she gives him up for adoption. Lynn Sachs makes the first approach to Lilith as a human character, as perhaps the Apostles once wanted to make it known.
Lynne Sachs understands the symbology of Lilith as much as feminist women do; not in the archaic text, but in her own life. In her short film Biography of Lilith (1997) we navigate the words of Cherie, who conveys in them a ring of social and emotional responsibility about being a woman in the current era, about the birth, desire and regret of the masculinized man. It is this short film that catapults Lynn Sachs and positions her as one of the first feminist filmmakers of experimental cinema. Sachs also compiles fragments of the fables of Lilith the witch, Lilith the child stalker, Lilith the female demon, Lilith lust, the sinful Lilith, the stormy Lilith, and the Lilith Pandora. Using voice-over narration and Wallace’s voice, he dismantles the metamorphoses of this mythological character, present in the religious imagination, to turn her into her last figure: Lilith, a woman free from male pleasure, a sorora woman who acquires and shares knowledge, woman who liberates her equal, condemned woman and, more than anything, woman of this and all the revolutions that come after.
2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV. In “From the Outside In”, we traverse Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.
Performing the Real Fri June 7 at 7 PM Q&A with Sachs & Lizzie Olesker (co-director of The Washing Society) moderated by filmmaker Sam Green
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst. Special guest: Paolo Javier (Swerve, poet collaborator).
Fossil, 1986 12 min • The Washing Society 2018 44 min • Swerve, 2022 8 min
In this intimate artist talk and workshop, Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing.
Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Ladies Wear, 1983 3 min• Tornado, 2002 4 min • Your Day is My Night, 2013 63 min
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
The Small Ones, 2007 3 min • The Task of the Translator, 2010 10 min • E•pis•to•la•ry: Letter to Jean Vigo, 2021 5 min • Investigation of a Flame, 2001 45 min
Heavy with chains that bind, this program of films magnifies Sachs’ feminist gaze through her personal diaries, family portraits, and women’s testimonies.
Drawn & Quartered, 1987 4 min • The House of Science, 1991 30 min. • And Then We Marched, 3 min. 2017 • A Year in Notes and Numbers, 1987 4 min. • Carolee, Barbara and Gunvor, 2018 9 min. • Maya at 24, 2021 4 min. • Contractions, 2024 12 min • We Continue to Speak, 2024 4 min
Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Accra Shepp (member of TOMT cast) moderated by Tabitha Jackson
In A Month of Single Frames (2019, 14 min), Lynne explores filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s experience of solitude. Her text on screen brings them together in multiple spaces and times. In Tip of My Tongue (2017. 84 min.), she gathers together 12 fellow New Yorkers — born across several continents in the 1960s — to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together they examine the ways in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are.
Conversation with Lynne Sachs, Dana Sachs, and Ira Sachs
Film About a Father Who (2020, 74 min) is Lynne’s attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, her cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, she allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. In The Jitters (2023, 3 min), Lynne performs with her partner filmmaker Mark Street, celebrating who they are independently and together.
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators, and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum.” – Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema
“I walked into Downtown Community Television (now DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film. I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.” – Lynne Sachs
Individual tickets for screenings are $16, and $8 for DCTV Members. The artist talk is $20, and $10 for DCTV Members. A Series Pass grants access to all screenings for $80, and $40 for DCTV Members – artist talk is sold separately. A special print monograph will be included with the purchase of a Series Pass, and on sale at Firehouse.
Founded in 1972, DCTV (Downtown Community TV) has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. In September 2022, DCTV opened the Firehouse Cinema, a documentary theater where filmmakers and film lovers can come together in appreciation of nonfiction film.
Thank you to DCTV, Film-Makers Cooperative, Cinema Guild, and Sylvia Savadjian.
2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV, and in celebration, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in NYC will be presenting an extensive retrospective. Taking place June 7-11, the series features 24 of her films plus a sound-collage world premiere associated with her latest film, Contractions, which was a selection at True/False, Prismatic Ground, and DC/DOX 2024). The upcoming New York Times Op-Docs release, which takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic, will premiere at the NYT timed to the 2nd anniversary of Roe v Wade being overturned.
Titled Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In, the retrospective traverses Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. The program notes continue, “From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.”
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum,” said Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema.
“I walked into Downtown Community TV (DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film,” said Sachs. “I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.”
Founded in 1972, DCTV has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. A community of and for documentary filmmakers, DCTV is a unique space where screenings, discussions, youth media, continuing education programs, and filmmaking resources exist side by side with award-winning productions.
Check out the schedule below and get tickets starting May 8 here.
Friday, June 7
Program 1: Performing the Real
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst.
Opening Night: Friday, June 7th, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker moderated by Sam Green
FOSSIL 1986, 12 min The village women of Mambai in Bali, Indonesia collect sand and stone from the river. Each woman sells what she has gathered for construction material. But the river is more than a place to work. It is a place to bathe, wash clothes, laugh and tell stories. Fossil is a collaborative performance piece that evolved through discussion and movement exercises in a collective response to Lynne’s images from Mambai.
THE WASHING SOCIETY Co-Directed with Lizzie Olesker, 2018, 44 min When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. Inspired by To ‘Joy My Freedom author Tera Hunter’s depiction of the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta and historian Silvia Federici’s writing on reproductive labor, Sachs and Olesker’s film investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of The Washing Society through interviews and observational moments. With original music by Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in The Washing Society creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
SWERVE 2022, 8 min A market and playground in Queens, New York, a borough of New York City, becomes the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Saturday, June 8
Program 2: Frames and Stanzas: An Artist Talk and Workshop
Saturday, June 8, 12pm In this intimate artist talk and workshop, filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will present excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing. Films to be screened include: A Biography of Lilith, Starfish Aorta Colossus, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home.
Program 3: It’s a Hell of a Place A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Saturday, June 8th, 4pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
LADIES WEAR 1983, 3 min Filmed with Sachs’ brother, Ira Sachs, on the New York City subway.
TORNADO 2022, 4 min A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ Tornado is a cine-poem shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11th. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these signed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.
YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT 2013, 63 min Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.
Program 4: Fightless
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
Saturday, June 8, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Naeem Mohaiemen
THE SMALL ONES 2007, 3 min During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery, and home movies of children at a birthday party.
THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR 2010, 10 min Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO 2021, 5 min In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic, Zero for Conduct, in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, she wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can so quickly turn into chaos and violence.
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME 2001, 45 min On May 17, 1968, nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm. Investigation of a Flame is an intimate look at this unlikely, disparate band of resistors – the Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known – who broke the law in a poetic act of civil disobedience. The publicity and news coverage from the ensuing trial helped galvanize an increasingly disillusioned American public. Sachs has combined long unseen archival footage with a series of informal interviews with Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Howard Zinn, Tom Lewis, and Marjorie and Tom Melville and others to encourage viewers to ponder the relevance of such events today.
Sunday, June 9
2024 marks 40 years since experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs took her first video class at DCTV, and in celebration, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema in NYC will be presenting an extensive retrospective. Taking place June 7-11, the series features 24 of her films plus a sound-collage world premiere associated with her latest film, Contractions, which was a selection at True/False, Prismatic Ground, and DC/DOX 2024). The upcoming New York Times Op-Docs release, which takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic, will premiere at the NYT timed to the 2nd anniversary of Roe v Wade being overturned.
Titled Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In, the retrospective traverses Sachs’ documentary films, defiant of traditional genre or style. The program notes continue, “From peering out, collecting others’ experiences and world events, to looking inward, reflecting on familial histories and entanglements, Sachs weaves the political with the personal. Through this seven-program series of screenings and discussions, with Sachs and collaborators in front of and behind the camera, this retrospective celebrates Sachs’ distinctive artistry and groundbreaking career.”
“I’ve been in awe of Lynne’s fearlessness and desire to create, make meaning, rip apart, and piece together. I see her as the epitome of an indelible artist who is driven by curiosity and empathy – not fame, industry demands, or commercial algorithms. And I appreciate her sincere gratitude to her collaborators and to DCTV, honorably looking back but always steps ahead. Good documentary filmmaking cannot happen in a vacuum,” said Dara Messinger, Director of Programming, DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema.
“I walked into Downtown Community TV (DCTV) in 1984 thinking I needed to take some classes on how to make a documentary film,” said Sachs. “I was 22 years old and open to any possibility, any guidance, and totally impressionable. From that moment on, I learned to challenge every conventional expectation about working with reality. It’s an honor to bring these seven programs back to the Firehouse Theater. As I continue to explore the connections between the body, the camera and the materiality of film itself, I reflect on those early experiences that taught me to reflect upon my own relationship to the people, places and events I continue to witness as a filmmaker.”
Founded in 1972, DCTV has grown into one of the leading documentary production and film education centers in the country. A community of and for documentary filmmakers, DCTV is a unique space where screenings, discussions, youth media, continuing education programs, and filmmaking resources exist side by side with award-winning productions.
Check out the schedule below and get tickets starting May 8 here.
Friday, June 7
Program 1: Performing the Real
Eschewing the inherent distance in ethnography and observation, the responsive movement and poetry in this program’s films shine a light on Sachs’ creative impulse to drive collaborative participation and honor the role of catalyst.
Opening Night: Friday, June 7th, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Lizzie Olesker moderated by Sam Green
FOSSIL 1986, 12 min The village women of Mambai in Bali, Indonesia collect sand and stone from the river. Each woman sells what she has gathered for construction material. But the river is more than a place to work. It is a place to bathe, wash clothes, laugh and tell stories. Fossil is a collaborative performance piece that evolved through discussion and movement exercises in a collective response to Lynne’s images from Mambai.
THE WASHING SOCIETY Co-Directed with Lizzie Olesker, 2018, 44 min When you drop off a bag of dirty laundry, who’s doing the washing and folding? The Washing Society brings us into New York City laundromats and the experiences of the people who work there. Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker observe the disappearing public space of the neighborhood laundromat and the continual, intimate labor that happens there. Inspired by To ‘Joy My Freedom author Tera Hunter’s depiction of the 1881 organization of African-American laundresses in Atlanta and historian Silvia Federici’s writing on reproductive labor, Sachs and Olesker’s film investigates the intersection of history, underpaid work, immigration, and the sheer math of doing laundry. Dirt, skin, lint, stains, money, and time are thematically interwoven into the very fabric of The Washing Society through interviews and observational moments. With original music by Stephen Vitiello, the film explores the slippery relationship between the real and the re-enacted with layers of dramatic dialogue and gestural choreography. The juxtaposition of narrative and documentary elements in The Washing Society creates a dream-like, yet hyper-real portrayal of a day in the life of a laundry worker, both past and present.
SWERVE 2022, 8 min A market and playground in Queens, New York, a borough of New York City, becomes the site for the shooting of a film inspired by Paolo Javier’s Original Brown Boy poems. Wearing the tell-tale masks of our daunting now, five New York City performers search for a meal while speaking in verse. The film itself transforms into an ars poetica/cinematica, a meditation on writing and making images in the liminal space between a global pandemic and what might come next.
Saturday, June 8
Program 2: Frames and Stanzas: An Artist Talk and Workshop
Saturday, June 8, 12pm In this intimate artist talk and workshop, filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share her insights in bridging poetry with cinema. Participants will explore the intersection between moving images and written or spoken words. Lynne will present excerpts from her own films that explore the activation of archival images, visualization of poetic texts, overlaying text on image, expanded cinema performance, oral history, and the film essay. As part of the class experience, participants will explore their creative practice through writing. Films to be screened include: A Biography of Lilith, Starfish Aorta Colossus, Visit to Bernadette Mayer’s Childhood Home.
Program 3: It’s a Hell of a Place A love letter to New York City – when love can also be critical, baffling, sometimes painful. The films in this program all take place in our metropolis called home.
Saturday, June 8th, 4pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Tom Day, Executive Director of Film-Makers Cooperative
LADIES WEAR 1983, 3 min Filmed with Sachs’ brother, Ira Sachs, on the New York City subway.
TORNADO 2022, 4 min A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs’ Tornado is a cine-poem shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11th. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these signed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.
YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT 2013, 63 min Immigrant residents of a “shift-bed” apartment in the heart of New York City’s Chinatown share their stories of personal and political upheaval. As the bed transforms into a stage, the film reveals the collective history of the Chinese in the United States through conversations, autobiographical monologues, and theatrical movement pieces. Shot in the kitchens, bedrooms, wedding halls, cafés, and mahjong parlors of Chinatown, this provocative hybrid documentary addresses issues of privacy, intimacy, and urban life.
Program 4: Fightless
Violence begets violence, as protest and resistance begets change. In this program, Sachs’ films dissect war, civil disobedience, and the sociopolitical tides from WWII to Vietnam and today.
Saturday, June 8, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by Naeem Mohaiemen
THE SMALL ONES 2007, 3 min During WWII, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired Sachs’ Hungarian cousin, Dr. Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This elliptical work, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of Sandor’s letters to Sachs’ family, highly abstracted war imagery, and home movies of children at a birthday party.
THE TASK OF THE TRANSLATOR 2010, 10 min Sachs pays homage to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” through three studies of the human body. First, she listens to the musings of a wartime doctor grappling with the task of a kind-of cosmetic surgery for corpses. Second, she witnesses a group of Classics scholars confronted with the haunting yet whimsical task of translating a newspaper article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. And finally, she turns to a radio news report on human remains.
E•PIS•TO•LAR•Y: LETTER TO JEAN VIGO 2021, 5 min In a cinema letter to French director Jean Vigo, Sachs ponders the delicate resonances of his 1933 classic, Zero for Conduct, in which a group of school boys wages an anarchist rebellion against their authoritarian teachers. Thinking about the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol by thousands of right-wing activists, she wonders how innocent play or calculated protest can so quickly turn into chaos and violence.
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME 2001, 45 min On May 17, 1968, nine Vietnam War protesters, including a nurse, an artist and three priests, walked into a Catonsville, Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records, and burned them with homemade napalm. Investigation of a Flame is an intimate look at this unlikely, disparate band of resistors – the Catonsville Nine, as they came to be known – who broke the law in a poetic act of civil disobedience. The publicity and news coverage from the ensuing trial helped galvanize an increasingly disillusioned American public. Sachs has combined long unseen archival footage with a series of informal interviews with Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Howard Zinn, Tom Lewis, and Marjorie and Tom Melville and others to encourage viewers to ponder the relevance of such events today.
Sunday, June 9
Program 5: Bodies and Bonds
Heavy with chains that bind, this program of films magnifies Sachs’ feminist gaze through her personal diaries, family portraits, and women’s testimonies.
Sunday, June 9, 2pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs + Dara Messinger
DRAWN AND QUARTERED 1987, 4 min A male form and a female form exist in their own private domains, separated by a barrier. Only for a moment does the one intrude upon the pictorial space of the other. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium.
THE HOUSE OF SCIENCE 1991, 30 min A defiant feminist mosaic on the ways that science enters our culture and defines what it is to be a woman. At age 30, Lynne Sachs wondered why so much about our culture simply made her feel bad about her body. She wrote in her diary, shot film with her friends and collected archival footage from educational films on menstruation and childbirth. By giving new meaning to the “body of the body” and the “body of the mind,” she works to dismantle those stereotypes of women rooted in Western patriarchy.
AND THEN WE MARCHED 2017, 4 min Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this recent footage with archival material of early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote,1960s antiwar activists and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment. She then talks about the experience of marching with her seven-year old neighbor who offers disarmingly insightful observations on the meaning of their shared actions.
A YEAR IN NOTES AND NUMBERS 2017, 4 min A year’s worth of Lynne’s to-do lists forces her to confront the unavoidable numbers that are part and parcel of an annual visit to the doctor. The quotidian and the corporeal mingle and mix. Family commitments, errands and artistic effusions trade places with the daunting reality of sugar, cholesterol, and bone.
CAROLEE, BARBARA & GUNVOR 2018, 9 min From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists and dear friends who had embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, she shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
MAYA AT 24 2021, 4 min Lynne films her daughter Maya in 16mm black and white film, at ages 6, 16 and 24. At each iteration, Maya runs around her mother, in a circle, clockwise, as if propelling herself in the same direction as time, forward, on celluloid at 24 frames per second. Conscious of the strange simultaneous temporal landscape that only film can convey, we watch Maya in motion at each distinct age
CONTRACTIONS 2024, 12 min In 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States ended a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion. This film takes us to Memphis, Tennessee where we contemplate the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic. We listen to an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive justice activist. We watch 14 women who witness and perform with their backs to the camera. In a place where a woman can no longer make decisions about her own body, they speak with the full force of their collective presence. A New York Times: Op-Docs release.
WE CONTINUE TO SPEAK 2024, 4 min. 33 Sec., sound collage Sachs records the participants in her film Contractions as they vocalize their reactions to the reduction of women’s bodily autonomy in the US. World Premiere.
Monday, June 10
Program 6: Tip of My Tongue + A Month of Single Frames
Monday, June 10, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Accra Shepp (photographer, member of cast) moderated by Tabitha Jackson
A MONTH OF SINGLE FRAMES 2019, 14 min In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had a one-month artist residency in the C-Scape Dune Shack which is run by the Provincetown Community Compact in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The shack had no running water or electricity. While there, she shot 16mm film with her Beaulieu camera, recorded sounds with her cassette recorder, and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her dune shack images, sounds and writing to Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material.
TIP OF MY TONGUE 2017, 83 min To celebrate her 50th birthday, Lynne gathers together other people, men and women who have lived through precisely the same years but come from places, like Iran or Cuba or Australia or the Lower East Side, not Memphis, Tennessee where Sachs grew up. She invites 12 fellow New Yorkers to spend a weekend with her making a movie. Together, they discuss some of the most salient, strange and revealing moments of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive examination of the way in which uncontrollable events outside our own domestic universe impact who we are. They move from the Vietnam War protests to the Anita Hill hearings to the Columbine Shootings to Occupy Wall Street as the film becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. Traditional timelines are replaced by a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression.
Tuesday, June 11
Program 7: Film About a Father Who + The Jitters
Closing Night: Tuesday, June 11, 7pm Q&A with Lynne Sachs and Ira Sachs
THE JITTERS 2024, 3 min In 2023, the University of Indiana commissioned Sachs and 16 other filmmakers to make a film to celebrate the first “Century of 16mm.” Lynne decided to create a film that reflected who she was at this moment in her life. The Jitters becomes a performance with her partner Mark Street (also one of the commissioned artists), celebrating who they are independently and together … along with their three pet frogs.
FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO 2020, 74 min Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Sachs shot 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images of her father, Ira Sachs Sr., a bon vivant and pioneering businessman from Park City, Utah. Film About a Father Who is her attempt to understand the web that connects a child to her parent and a sister to her siblings. With a nod to the Cubist renderings of a face, Sachs’ cinematic exploration of her father offers simultaneous, sometimes contradictory, views of one seemingly unknowable man who is publicly the uninhibited center of the frame yet privately ensconced in secrets. In the process, Sachs allows herself and her audience inside to see beyond the surface of the skin, the projected reality. As the startling facts mount, Sachs as a daughter discovers more about her father than she had ever hoped to reveal. A Cinema Guild release.
On March 28, acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs visited the CODE^SHIFT lab to host a workshop and screening of her latest film, “Contractions“. During the session, Sachs presented the 12-minute short film and engaged with participants, sharing tips for conducting oral history research and documentary filmmaking.
Sachs, who is based in Brooklyn, has had a 30-year career as an experimental filmmaker and poet. Born in Tennessee, she completed her undergraduate studies at Brown University, studying History with a focus on studio art. Sachs has produced over 40 films in addition to live performances, installations, and web projects. She has tackled a myriad of topics, often confronting social and political issues. According to Sachs’ website, her films have screened at MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), Tate Modern, Image Forum Tokyo, Wexner Center for the Arts, as well as festivals worldwide.
“The workshop was so amazing! I appreciate being able to discuss the film with the director. You could tell she was passionate about health and reproductive rights for women. As an audience member, the film held my attention and left me feeling inspired and moved. Lynne was able to give her audience a glimpse into the new challenges women and healthcare professionals are facing after the overturn of Roe v. Wade. I am thankful that Dr. Srivi provided a space to discuss such an important issue.” – Minnie McMillian, PhD Student (Psychology), College of Arts & Sciences
It was Sachs’ latest residential commission that brought her to Syracuse. In 2023, she received the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) Support for Artists grant, and she is in the city to create commissioned work for the Urban Video Project (UVP), a media art program which projects the work of filmmakers and video artists onto the facade of the Everson Museum of Art in downtown Syracuse. During the workshop, Sachs was joined by Anneka Herre, faculty member in Syracuse’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and UVP Program Director.
To create her ongoing project, titled “Citizen Second Class” , Sachs plans to work with local artists, reproductive care providers, and activists to explore issues of reproductive justice and bodily autonomy. She is particularly interested in doing so through the lens of Central New York’s history with womens’ rights. This project is part of a larger effort in which Sachs is involved, called “The Abortion Clinic Film Collective”, a group of artists from around the country who came together in the wake of the landmark 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v Wade.
“This is such a timely moment for a film like Contractions, which discusses the discontinuation of abortion services in Memphis. I felt privileged to see the screening with the director Lynne Sachs, along with other women concerned with the state of women’s health and reproductive rights in the country. Lynne’s film transported us to the testimonies of health workers who have experienced firsthand the effects of the overturn of Roe v Wade in such a sensitive, touching, and poetic way that makes it hard to describe. I’m still thinking about her film, and I feel incredibly moved to have been a part of the screening of her film here at Newhouse.” – Raiana de Carvalho, PhD Student (Mass Communications), Newhouse School
After the session, Lynne sat down for a video interview for CODE^SHIFT’s ongoing “Chai with Srivi” series. Speaking to undergraduate RA Nicole Cheah, Sachs detailed how she came to be the storyteller she is today, what feminist filmmaking meant to her, her ongoing project in Syracuse, and more. Once edited, the interview will be published on the CODE^SHIFT YouTube page.
“What is the responsibility for a film festival during the oppression of Palestinians in Israeli-controlled Gaza and the efforts of various liberation movements in countries like Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Senegal? Should film festivals even occur? There are ever-evolving questions that cause me to be skeptical about the politics and rationale to cover influential fests like IDFA, Sundance, and Berlinale when they play both sides in their statements: remaining damn near silent or criminalizing artists stating their solidarity with Palestine and not abiding by the inimical IHRA definition of anti-semitism (meaning any critiques of Zionism) respectfully. On February 23, the True/False Film Festival in liberal Columbia, Missouri, demanded an immediate ceasefire with a pro-Palestinian stance and recognized Palestinians’s multi-generational fight for their emancipation. The demand offered many first time and veteran attendees a haven to form a political alliance with the fest’s ideology and use their playfulness in creative nonfiction as social activism, as the six-thousand-plus signatory coalition—Film Workers for Palestine—held the banner “Ceasefire Now” at the fest’s annual March March.
True/False puts their money in their mouth with their words as they amplified Yousef Srouji’s Three Promises (2023) as the True/Life Fund recipient. His hour-long documentary is an extension of his eponymous 2022 short. The director’s mother, Suha, captures home videos of her family life, her spouse Ramzi, Yousef, and his sibling Dima in Palestine during the early 2000s. The Second Intifada emerges at this time to combat the Nakba dispossession of Palestinians, and Suha’s intimate cinematography grounds us with the family at their several homes as we hear bombs and gunshots miles away. Yousef spreads his family’s archival catalog in non-chronological order, as the trauma caused by the violence prevents him from thinking linearly. Yet, the narrative choice evokes the ever-lasting feeling of belonging among his Christian family as they celebrate Christmas and he lives out his childhood. Three Promises is a cathartic, healful endurance against the ongoing genocide in Palestine. With True/Life’s attentive lens in recognizing the vividness of Suha’s DV footage, they will send the proceeds to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and towards Yousef’s efforts in manufacturing a sustainable digital archive for home videos made in Palestine, thus preserving the country’s history, as the Israeli military has already destroyed many of Al Jazeera’s archives to date.
Deracination is a common theme that permeates this year’s six world premiere features (nearly all directorial debuts) at True/False, such as what it means to be an artist in gentrified NYC in Elizabeth Nichols’s lyrically punk Flying Lessons (2024), as well as filmmaker Rachel Elizabeth Seed finding her matriarchal lineage through her mothers’ images in her riveting A Photographic Memory (2024). The one that holds me dearly is Emily Mkrtichian’s There Was, There Was Not (2024). Named after an Armenian aphorism, it analyzes the makeup of the Republic of Artsakh through Judo champion Sose, minesweeper Sveta, politician Siranush, and women’s center owner Gayane. In 2018, the territory celebrated thirty years of peace following a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but the homelands were demolished in 2023. To honor the characters’ joy and resistance, Mkrtichian negotiates how much outsiders should know about violence in the little-known Artsakh through text. However, the context felt out of place as most of the text happens in the second half with little room for character growth. Though she could have condensed some of the history, Mkritichian’s intimate compositions on holding onto her protagonists during griefful moments redirect the structure of There Was, There Was Not. Therefore, the film isan observational heart pounder that explores the acts of preservation, mourning, and displacement.
Another True/False selection that mirrors its philosophy of finding new visual grammar with political sensibilities is João Pedro Bim’s Behind Closed Doors (2023). The all-archival doc follows a revelation of a 1968 previously-obscured audio recording of Brazil’s National Security Council enacting the Institutional Act. No. 5. The act suspended many civil rights, including habeas corpus, and was written after the 1964 Brazil coup d’état. His tethering of archival, nationalist images, and sounds (predominantly a record scratch) elicits outrage, revolt, and power to the people. His overlay of clips theorizes the normality of propaganda and shows how media mediates the spread of totalitarianism to the public. The strength of the people is what feared the council and unspooled regression to ensure hierarchical control in today’s Brazil. It is a Godardian essay on the banality of evil and a catastrophic shutdown of democracy. The film’s structure also speaks to the daring spirit of its next festival appearance in NYC’s First Look Film Festival (along with the aforementioned Flying Lessons) at the Museum of the Moving Image for conveying a contemporary message from past media sources.
Shorts at True/False are never to be underestimated for their ingenious experimentations. They are provocations instead of proof of concepts for potential feature-length adaptations. The Pope of Trash, John Waters, will likely perceive Evan Gareth Hoffman as a disciple of garbage cinema with his archival short Nortel (2024). Hoffman shared with the crowd that he agglomerates the “trashiest options” available (silly promotional materials, reality TV clips, “shoplifting TikToks,” skincare social media enthusiasts, reverb voiceover, etc.) to examine the eponymous corporation and its CEO Frank Dunn’s rise and decimation after they constructed literal flying cars in the 1960s. Hoffman undercuts them with a hilarious soundtrack (consisting of songs like Black Eyed Peas’s “I Gotta Feeling” and Taylor Swift’s “You’re On Your Own, Kid”) juxtaposing with Dunn’s doom. In what one might consider a narrative Rick and Morty “Interdimensional Cable” episode, Hoffman goes outside the box with the concept of sponsored content by finding the incongruity and the goad in publicity campaigns. Commercials aren’t just documents in Hoffman’s palms but also a radicalization and a search for truth in the digitalized age.
Filmic poet Lynne Sachs cranks in a new short with Contractions (2024), surprisingly her first work at the twenty-one-year-old fest after her heavy output of films like the poetic short Swerve (2022) and personal feature Film About a Father Who (2020). Shot on the first anniversary of the reversal of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2023, in Sachs’s hometown, Memphis, a driver named Jane and gynecologist Dr. Kimberly Looney narrate the intense experiences of getting people abortions in states with legal facilities (Illinois, for example). We see opaque pairs of pregnant people and their escorts (all actors) line up and slowly enter the building. The cast’s gestures enact trauma, nerves, and capriciousness in doing something once legally acceptable that is now the opposite. They carry a history where their reproduction rights are currently in paralysis.
Motifs of open and closed spaces once liberating for pregnant people are refined into barriers that prevent them from fulfilling their wishes. Due to the fact they made the film in Tennessee, a place where they could get arrested, Sachs and her producers, Emily Berisso and Laura Goodman, said in their Q&A that they enlisted security to protect them from prosecution, which elevates Sach’s heedful balance of spreading enough sobbing information and protecting her sources simultaneously. Unbeknownst to the rest of the team, Berisso assembled thirteen additional volunteer marshals and a medic in this labor of love. Recalling the ending of BlacKKKlansman (2018), snippets of the blue sky become black and white as we head into the upside down.”
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 6, 2024 6pm – 8pm Note: The Westbeth Gallery will open at 6pm on that day.
Westbeth Gallery 55 Bethune Street, NY, NY Gallery hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 1-6 pm and by appointment
Westbeth Gallery is pleased to present Women on the Verge, a group exhibition of artists affiliated with the29.art, a digital platform seeking to create opportunities for self-identified women working in the arts. It is a group of more than twenty-nine well-established, mid-career, and emerging artists, diverse in practice, medium, age, ethnicity, and background.
The exhibition is curated by Kathy Brew and features films, art, poetry, and performances by the following artists:
Kathy Brew Yoshiko Chuma Martha Edelheit Michelle Handelman Julia Heyward jennifer jazz Pamela Lawton Stefani Mar Aline Mare Lucia Maria Minervini Helen Oji Janet Panetta Jeanne Quinn Melinda Ring Felice Rosser Lynne Sachs Susan Salinger MM Serra Shelly Silver Pamela Sneed Lila Zemborain
