Tag Archives: press

This Week in New York / From the Outside In

Lynne Sachs retrospective at DCTV features screenings, Q&As, and an interactive workshop.

by Mark Rifkin 

LYNNE SACHS: FROM THE OUTSIDE IN
DCTV Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette St.
June 7-11
212-966-4510
https://twi-ny.com/2024/06/06/lynne-sachs-from-the-outside-in/

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.

The New York Times OpDocs / Contractions

June 18, 2024
By Lynne Sachs

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000009438727/contractions.html

Tennessee Abortion Clinic Workers Speak Out About the State’s Near-Total Ban

In Memphis, a doctor and a volunteer driver contemplate
the discontinuation of abortion services at a women’s health clinic
two years after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

I remember the hollowing sensation I felt on June 24, 2022, the day that the Supreme Court deemed that abortion was not a protected right under the U.S. Constitution. Everyone — on both sides of this debate — knew that women’s lives across the country were going to be drastically transformed. Since then, a lot of attention has been paid to the most heart-wrenching cases, but this decision affects all women’s bodily autonomy across the country.

I returned to my hometown, Memphis, to make a short film outside a building that once offered abortion services. In Tennessee abortion is banned, with no exception for rape and very limited medical exceptions that are being debated in state court.

I interviewed Dr. Kimberly Looney, an obstetrician-gynecologist and former medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, and a volunteer driver who had served as a patient escort for decades. The volunteer, whose name has been withheld to protect her privacy, now drives patients nine hours round trip to Carbondale, Ill., where they are able to have legal and safe abortions.

These women offer distinct perspectives on this radical transformation in American society. Together they speak to a time in U.S. history when women are wondering if they have been relegated to the status of second-class citizens. As Dr. Looney puts it in the film, “You basically, as a physician, had to start counseling your patients from a legal perspective and not a medical perspective.”

Not Reconciled / Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In

Alex Fields
June 7, 2024
https://notreconciled.substack.com/p/lynne-sachs-from-the-outside-in

For forty years, Lynne Sachs has produced adventurous work at the intersection of documentary, essay, and avant garde film. Though they vary greatly in form, all of her films seek novel ways of questioning dominant perceptions of gender, work, and artistic representation. A career-spanning retrospective of her work, From the Outside In, screens this weekend (June 7-11) at DCTV in New York City and includes approximately two dozen films, from the early 80s to brand new films.

The earliest of these films are interested in our gendered perception of the movements of human bodies. The strongest of these, Drawn and Quartered (1986), uses 8mm film stock in a 16mm projector to display a “split” screen of four frames on one reel of celluloid. The top and bottom rows are identical, but the left and right show difference scenes, initially with a man on the left and a woman on the right. The figures, both naked, engage in a series of ordinary activities: squatting and standing, speaking and gesturing. The quadruple frame, along with the film’s silence, create a choice and push the audience into awareness of where we direct our attention, including how we may interpret the man’s and woman’s body language differently despite their essential similarity.

Other early films employ different devices toward comparable ends. Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986) films a woman putting on a coat, peeling an avocado, and so on, but adds a soundtrack seemingly unrelated to the images. A voiceover reads what sounds like a screenplay–“Scene 1. Woman steps off curb and crosses street”–but these actions never occur on screen. Similarly, Fossil (1986) cuts back and forth between video of women performing modern dance and women in a Balinese village working along a river. Both films break down barriers between what we perceive to be scripted performances of art and what we perceive to be mundane performances of work.

Over the following decades, Sachs’s work expanded this interest in representation into an examination of scientific and medical literature. One of her most ambitious and complex works, The House of Science: A Museum of False Facts (1991) assembles a whirlwind collage of texts and images dealing with (pseudo)scientific accounts of women’s physiology and and women’s experience in medical contexts. Women’s efforts to speak for themselves–in poetic written memories or seemingly documentary audio records–are interspersed with supposed expertise speaking for and about them, from Renaissance art to images from science books and documentaries. The sheer variety of source material, combined with the fact that images and sound rarely match, means that the materials are never able to settle into a clear narrative, and instead are presented in their character as representations. The overall effect mimics something of the confusion of a lifetime of contradictions taught to women as demeaning frameworks for understanding their own bodies, with the clarity of lived experience struggling to emerge from among this morass. This is sometimes played as comedy, such as when the laughter of children is played over a patently stupid text describing women’s brains and criminal tendencies.

Questions of meaning and textual representation get a much darker and less playful treatment in The Task of the Translator (2010), named for Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same name. Sachs is arguably less concerned with the problems of translation between two written languages and more so with how one appropriately translates the horrors of war into a journalistic text or art work. In the film’s first section, the voice of a doctor describes the work he did during a war to preserve and present human remains while we watch footage of kids at play. In the second section, scholars sit around a table translating a horrifying article about burials in the Iraq War into Latin. In the third and final section, a radio report describes a woman’s effort to recover the remains of her husband who died in the war, while a laundry machine spins on screen. All of these segments pose an unanswerable question about how the meaning of these wartime texts can possibly be grasped by their intended audience living in an utterly different context.

In a very different way, A Month of Single Frames (2019) also deals with the idea of translation, this time between two artists. A posthumous collaboration between Sachs and Barbara Hammer, the film incorporates reels from an uncompleted 90s work by Hammer with new footage and audio recordings by Sachs. Hammer speaks through her own voice and through her work, and Sachs is implicitly in dialogue through her editing and her own footage. It’s partly a documentary, partly a completion of a once abandoned project, but its real magic is in the present tense interaction of these elements.

Sachs seems drawn to these ambiguous and open-ended forms, even in her more apparently conventional documentary work. Your Day Is My Night (2014) portrays residents in a Chinatown apartment who take turns using the same beds according to their different work shifts. The scenes are poignant, so much so that they begin to feel too perfect, raising the question of how scripted some of this might be, particularly when new characters arrive and introduce themselves without ever noticing the camera. Later in the film it becomes clear that the action is partly staged, even explicitly revealing the set as a literal stage. The film was created collaboratively with its actor-participants, who played versions of themselves and other actual interview subjects in both live and filmed performances, blurring the already soft lines between documentary reenactment and scripted fiction. The film itself emerges as only one document of a process which was, arguably, a more expansive art work in its own right. It therefore frames itself as a contingent and partial view, as interested in the political nature of representation and translated meaning as in the specificity of its subject, raising more questions than it attempts to answer.

See also this interview with Sachs published by my friends at Ultra Dogme.

Chris Marker: Vive la baleine / Friends and Collaborators

Vive la baleine / Mario Ruspoli

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

Vanessa Hope and Lynne Sachs / Filmwax Radio

Ep 807: Vanessa Hope • Lynne Sachs
https://filmwaxradio.com/2024/05/31/episode-807/

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.

LS_2024_FilmwaxTranscription06022024Download

40 Years of Lynne Sachs at DCTV / Mystery Catalog

June 4, 2024

https://mysterycatalog.com/2024/06/40-years-of-lynne-sachs-at-dctv/

By Herbert Gambill

“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.

Go here for program and ticket information.

Listen to a new interview with Lynne Sachs on FilmwaxRadio!”

A Month of Single Frames / Psyche

An artist captures the joys of solitude amid a month living in a beach shack

May 17, 2024

https://psyche.co/films/an-artist-captures-the-joys-of-solitude-amid-a-month-living-in-a-beach-shack

‘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.

Biography of Lilith by Lynne Sachs: A Review / Medium

Text and design by Ximena Màrquez Orozco
Published in Casi Cielo / Almost Heaven on Medium | May 11, 2024

https://casicielomx.medium.com/biograf%C3%ADa-de-lilith-de-lynne-sachs-una-rese%C3%B1a-f6ddd58fc154

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.

Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In / DCTV Firehouse

Lynne Sachs: From the Outside In
Jun 7 – 11, 2024
Curated by Dara Messinger
DCTV’s Firehouse Cinema
87 Lafayette Street, NYC

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

Frames and Stanzas: An Artist Talk and Workshop

Sat. June 8 at 12 noon

Pre-registration encouraged.

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.

It’s a Hell of a Place

Sat. June 8 at 4 PM

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

Fightless

Sat. June 8 at 7 PM

Q&A with Lynne Sachs moderated by artist Naeem Mohaiemen

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

Bodies and Bonds

Sun. June 9 at 2 PM

Q&A with Dara Messinger, Retrospective Curator

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

Tip of My Tongue + A Month of Single Frames

Mon. June 10 at 7 PM

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.

Film About a Father Who + The Jitters

Tues. June 11 at 7 PM

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.

Direct link to entire program: https://www.dctvny.org/s/firehousecinema/series-and-events/lynne-sachs-from-the-outside-in

“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.