ONLINE RETROSPECTIVE
Lynne Sachs: Between Thought and Expression
January 13–31, 2021
For more than thirty years, artist Lynne Sachs has constructed short, bold mid-length, and feature films incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, and observational documentary. Her highly self-reflexive films have variously explored the relations between the body, camera, and the materiality of film itself; histories of personal, social, and political trauma; marginalized communities and their labor; and her own family life, slipping seamlessly between modes, from documentary essays to diaristic shorts. On the occasion of her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the artist’s maddeningly mercurial father, the Museum is pleased to present a career-ranging survey of Sachs’s work, including new HD presentations of Drawn and Quartered, The House of Science: a museum of false facts, and Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam, as well as the premiere of Maya at 24, the third edition of Sach’s temporal portrait of her daughter.
Organized by Assistant Curator of Film Edo Choi. Special thanks to Canyon Cinema and Cinema Guild for their support in organizing this program.
All films will be presented in MoMI’s Virtual Cinema, including a new video interview between Lynne Sachs and Edo Choi, which will be available exclusively to ticket holders.
Tickets: An all-series pass (including Film About a Father Who) is available for $30 ($26 MoMI members). A pass for just the repertory portion is $20 ($16 members) / individual program tickets are $5. Tickets for Film About a Father Who are $12 ($10 members).
All films are directed by Lynne Sachs.
Program 1: Early Dissections
In her first three films, Sachs performs an exuberant autopsy of the medium itself, reveling in the investigation of its formal possibilities and cultural implications: the disjunctive layering of visual and verbal phrases in Still Life with Woman and Four Objects; un-split regular 8mm film as a metaphorical body and site of intercourse in the optically printed Drawn and Quartered; the scopophilic and gendered intentions of the camera’s gaze in Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning. These experiments anticipate the range of the artist’s mature work, beginning with her first essayistic collage The House of Science: a museum of false facts. Itself an autopsy, this mid-length film exposes the anatomy of western rationalism as a framework for sexual subjugation via a finely stitched patchwork of sounds and images from artistic renderings to archival films, home movies to staged performances.
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986, 4 mins.) Drawn and Quartered (1987, 4 mins. New HD presentation) Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (1987, 9 mins.) The House of Science: a museum of false facts (1991, 30 mins. New HD presentation)
Program 2: Family Travels
One of Lynne Sachs’s most sheerly beautiful films, Which Way Is East is a simultaneously intoxicating and politically sobering diary of encounters with the sights, sounds, and people of Vietnam, as Sachs pays a visit to her sister Dana and the two set off north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. The film is paired here with a very different kind of family journey The Last Happy Day, recounting the life of Sachs’s distant cousin Sandor Lenard, a Jewish Hungarian doctor who survived the Second World War and was ultimately hired to reassemble the bones of dead American soldiers. Here Sachs journeys through time as opposed to space, as she assembles a typically colorful array of documentary and performative elements, including Sandor’s letters, a children’s performance, and highly abstracted war footage, to bring us closer to a man who bore witness to terrible things. This program also features The Last Happy Day’s brief predecessor, The Small Ones. Program running time: 73 mins.
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam (1994, 33 mins. New HD presentation) The Small Ones (2007, 3 mins.) The Last Happy Day (2009, 37 mins.)
Program 3: Time Passes
Twenty years unspool over nine short films: portraits of Lynne Sachs’s children; visits with her mother, brother, niece and nephew; a tribute to the city where she lives; and scenes of sociopolitical trauma and protest. Nearly all shot on super 8mm or 16mm, and often silent, each work is at once a preservation of a moment and a record of change, seamlessly weaving together the candid and the performed gesture, the public and the private memory, in a simultaneously objective and subjective posture toward the passing of time. Program running time: 51 mins.
Photograph of Wind (2001, 4 mins.) Tornado (2002, 4 mins.) Noa, Noa (2006, 8 mins.) Georgic for a Forgotten Planet (2008, 11 mins.) Same Stream Twice (2012, 4 mins.) Viva and Felix Growing Up (2015, 10 mins.) Day Residue (2016, 3 mins.) And Then We Marched (2017, 3 mins.) Maya at 24 (2021, 4 mins. World premiere)
Program 4: Your Day Is My Night
2013, 64 mins. “This bed doesn’t necessarily belong to any one person,” someone says early in Your Day Is My Night. It could be the metaphorical thesis of this film, perhaps Lynne Sachs’s most self-effacing and meditative work. A seamless blend of closely observed verité footage, interpretive performance, and confessional monologues and interviews, the film doesn’t document so much as create a space to accommodate the stories and experiences of seven Chinese immigrants from ages 58 to 78 who live together in a “shift-bed” apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Sachs’s quilted sense of form achieves a new level of refinement and delicacy in collaboration with her cameraman Sean Hanley and her editor Amanda Katz, as she works with the participants to exhume a collective history of migration and struggle.
Program 5: Tip of My Tongue
2017, 80 mins. Sachs’s richly generative Tip of My Tongue finds the filmmaker responding to her 50th birthday by gathering twelve members of her generational cohort—friends and peers all born between 1958 and 1964, and originating as far as Cuba, Iran, and Australia—to participate in the creation of a choral work about the convergent and divergent effects history leaves upon those who live it. From the Kennedy assassination to Occupy Wall Street, the participants reveal their memories of, and reflections upon, the transformative experiences of their lives. Set to an ecstatic, pulsing score by Stephen Vitiello, the film interweaves these personal confessions with impressionistic images of contemporary New York, obscured glimpses of archival footage, and graphically rendered fragments of text to create a radiant prism of collective memory. Preceded by Sachs’s frantic record of accumulated daily to-do lists, A Year in Notes and Numbers (2018, 4 mins.).
When Lynne Sachs agreed to meet me on Skype, I was equally excited and nervous: excited, because I had just seen several of her movies, which left me feeling like I had entered a whole new world of visual and verbal language. Nervous, because her knowledge and experience in experimental/essay/documentary cinema were vast compared to mine. Nevertheless, we agreed on a meeting and it was one of the most honest and inspiring conversations I have had on film. I began the conversation by briefly introducing myself. I am a PhD student in a biology lab, where I often conduct experiments. Perhaps that is why I’m so drawn to experimental film, especially Lynne’s work.
Lynne Sachs: What you do in your lab – which is to dive into the unknown by using materials you understand, without knowing what will happen when they come together, without a script for what the results will be – shares something with experimental filmmaking. Although, as you might already know, Jonas Mekas didn’t like the term experimental. It is kind of like saying you’re an atheist, meaning you define yourself by what you’re not, so I understand, he just says: “I make films”.
Tijana Perović: Do you feel ok with the term experimental?
I personally do. I think it turns the noun into a verb because it says that the entity itself is devolving and can’t be made from a template. I like it and I think it’s liberating.
How did you get into filmmaking?
I definitely didn’t grow up watching personal art films, made by women. I hardly knew that women were making movies. But I always have written poetry and I always did a lot of art. In university, I pursued something that you might call more academic. I was a history major, but I did a lot of studio art. So in that time, when I was at university, I took a year, I went to Paris and I discovered Chantal Akerman and Marguerite Duras. This changed me. I realized that you can make films from this place of experience, or you can bring your attention to the small things in life. You could also bring in some politics or a change for women, etc.
In a sense, I got a chance to see that a film could be a vessel and that you could throw whatever you want into it and make your own recipe or idea. That was really exciting to me and a revelation. After college, I moved to New York and I started taking classes in Super 8 and video. I ended up going to graduate school in San Francisco. That was such a transformative experience, because there were so many people there.
You know Gunvor Nelson’s films? Gunvor was a teacher of mine. In fact, Carolee Schneeman, Gunvor Nelson and Barbara Hammer were all living in San Francisco at the time. Such powerful women. Powerful in a poetic way. Do you know George Kuchar’s films? They are very rowdy and irreverent. Craig Baldwin was also there. He is a filmmaker, quite renowned, almost all of his work is made from found footage. But he also has a small, still existent, screening space, called Other Cinema. It is just like a store front. And I spent almost every Saturday there, from 1987 to 1994, and that’s actually where my husband Mark Street and I met. It was a scene and that’s how I educated myself on film. I was not the kind of person who stayed up watching all the famous fiction films on TV until midnight. I hadn’t even seen Citizen Kane until I was in my mid-twenties. Now I am interested in all of film history, but that is not what brought me to this kind of filmmaking.
Funny that you mention that, because I just watched Jeanne Dielman 10 days ago.
I actually was thinking about Chantal Akerman, two days ago, because of our quarantine. Have you seen her film Là-bas (2006)? She went to Tel Aviv, to do some teaching there. It was during a very heightened period of violence, in Israel/Palestine, so she made the whole film from her window. To me, it’s very timely to think about the window as a frame in its relationship to the film frame. The thing about long films like Jeanne Dielman is their stature. You need to spend almost four hours with her film. But think about a book. When you read a book, you need to spend two weeks with it! Four hours really shouldn’t be a big thing.
What is really interesting for me in your movies is that in each one of them there is an idea, but it flowers, it grows. In your experience, how does this idea change during the process of actual moviemaking and in editing?
Sometimes when I make a film, it starts with the material. Is there any particular film on your mind?
Still from House of Science: a museum of false facts
Then I’ll talk about The House of Science. That actually started with the collages which are in the movie. It started with the idea that I felt alienated from my own body. And I probably felt that way for most of my life, maybe until I had a baby. I wanted to move through the world almost invisibly. I don’t think that if I were 30 today, I’d make the same film. But in 1991, I felt frustrated with how my culture was constructing me. Not with the feminism, 1st wave, 2nd wave – rather as I moved through the culture and I felt this alienation from the world of science. But then it became an equal distaste for art, while I was making it. So, that was a film where I said, any idea that comes to my head will go into the film. I called it a yes film. That film is a film essay. What defines a film essay is that you are at ease with including your doubt.
So you have this idea, and it is kind of a manifesto, but it isn’t really a manifesto because you are always second guessing yourself. In a sense, you have to have more confidence in what you say by including your doubt. If you didn’t, then it would be dogma or didactic. That film really came out of an idea. Did you see And Then We Marched? It is a super short film I made after the women’s march. I didn’t have a particular idea. I had collected Super 8 film from the 2017 Women’s March, and I wanted to do something with it. I didn’t want to just document it because I thought a lot of people are already doing that. I thought I needed to shake up my understanding of what that march was, and the only way I could do that was to talk to a child. That’s been common in a lot of my work. I struggled to make The Last Happy Day for years and years, until I started to work with some children.
Still from And Then We Marched
Also Wind in Our Hair, the film I made in Argentina. Sometimes working with kids doesn’t infantalize the situation, but it allows you to experiment more and listen to the materials more and to be surprised. Maybe it’s because I had two daughters and I brought them along. But I am also very intrigued by what children bring to it perceptually. So to take something as large as the Women’s March of 2017, and to think about it from that perspective was very invigorating and turned it into something more immediate. In the end, the Women’s March sadly did not have that much impact. It was like a plaintiff call, so it did connect all of us, but it didn’t bring structural change. It brought bonding amongst kindred spirits. When I’m making a film, I often have to figure out how can an idea that I had years ago can resonate today.
Last night, at 3:30 in the morning, I woke up. We’re not as active these days during the quarantine so sleeping is strange. I got up and I took a bath. But then I had this idea for a film I have been working on for many years. It is called The Company We Keep. It comes from an English expression, often you are judged by the people your are around, “the company that you keep.” Some people use this expression in a rather judgemental way. Over many years, I’ve collected business cards, so I have about 500 of them. I’ve scanned most of them. I want to make this film kind of like an animated film where we go through them. The purpose of a business (calling) card is to be a mnemonic device. Surprisingly, I can remember a little bit about almost all of those people. I am playing with the idea of how these cards trigger something, not just what I remember, but how I understand myself in relationship to them. When you look at the cards, you remember who you were when you connected with that person, but also something about them.
Last night, I wrote myself a note. Most of the people whose business cards I have kept are in a group of people I will probably never know. But in the present, there is another group of people I will never know. These are the people whom I’m hearing about who died from the coronavirus. Recently, a friend of my daughter’s told us about two African American men in her neighborhood in Brooklyn. They were quite old, already retired. For years, they would sit on the stairs (what we call here the stoop) and talk to everybody on the block. Both of them died. Then another man I know lost a brother who was autistic. As you hear those stories, you imagine those people, you imagine them almost like a cut-out, paper-doll. You imagine their shape but they are gone. I wanted to weave that into this short film, because it makes it more vital to me now.
What is your definition of feminist filmmaking?
Many years ago, when I was in grad school, we would take turns shooting each other’s movies. A woman asked me to shoot her film, which I was excited about. We were on her set but I didn’t think that what she was espousing my concept of feminism. Even though I was very honored to be her cinematographer, I could not accept the imagery that she was creating and wanted me to co-create. I have been hesitant to shoot other people’s films ever since. This was the time when I realized that we talk about feminism in terms of holding the camera in addition to how the images of women’s bodies are constructed. I don’t cheer just because a woman gets an Academy Award. I am not actually even necessarily happy that Joe Biden has already announced that he will choose a woman. I feel like he did that as a political ploy. I am happy that he is going to choose a woman, but is that why he chose this woman? I think that a feminist approach to filmmaking takes the responsibility for the representation of women, but for me it must be broader than that. It has sensitivity to other categories of identification, whether you are talking about gender identity, etc.
I loved your talk for the Ann Arbor Festival. I especially agreed when you said that Godard has challenged the film world in many ways, but never in terms of the representation of women. So, who were your favorite feminist filmmakers and your inspirations?
Definitely all three of the women in my film Carolee, Barbara, Gunvor. Each one for different reasons. I would say that they run the gamut of different approaches within the sector of personal filmmaking. I think Barbara Hammer and Carolee Schneemann were particularly at ease with their own bodies. Carolee challenged feminism in a profound way, because she was interested in sensuality, too. I think that’s very current, but she was criticized in other periods of feminism; for showing her own body, for exuding a kind of sensuality/sexuality. Barbara also showed her own body, but in a different way: it was more about strength, strength in the bareness and nudity. Gunvor Nelson made this film called Schmeerguntz. It is so wild, and it’s about motherhood, having babies, all the mess, the shit, the body, letting it all hang out. That’s kind of her take on it. They really run – to me – the gamut. I mentioned Chantal Akerman and loving her work, and her study of women’s bodies. But it’s not just about bodies, of course.
Have you heard about the Bechdel Test? Yes.
I think it’s pretty interesting for mainstream filmmaking. It’s a handy rubric for deciding what the presence of – let’s talk about narrative film – what the presence of a protagonist does or whether a character is able to speak. I think those are interesting things. They’re not the kind of films I’m making, but I do watch them, and I think that plenty of women who make it very high up in the industry, instead of trying to change that structure, actually think that the best way to get into the business is to replicate what already exists, and that’s a shame.
We had two movies at Berlinale this year that were pretty mainstream and feminist – The Assistant –
Oh I saw that! I really liked it. It’s controversial.
At her press conference, the director said that it was hard for her to get funding because she was criticizing the industry. Sometimes these norms are really hard to break. The other one was Never Rarely Sometimes Always.
I wanted to see that. It came out, and then [lockdown happened]. Now it’s online. The other movie that came out in the mainstream, like The Assistant, on the same topic – workplace dynamics – was a film called Bombshell. Did you see that?
No, but I heard about it.
Well…I did not like that movie at all. One of the reasons was, they were talking about the abusive power in the workplace, by men who had financial or other kinds of control in the workplace. But the people who were playing the women actually were bombshells. Do you know this expression? It’s old fashioned. A bombshell is an incredibly beautiful woman.
The movie’s called Bombshell because it’s about these women who are television anchors on broadcast news, who have to be bombshells to get those jobs, but then the story is that they also have to sleep with the boss. But the film, in its texture and representation, never breaks the mould. The women who play the parts are always presenting themselves with the best bodies and make-up, etc. Whereas in The Assistant, everything becomes much more austere and cerebral, and you think about the protagonist – who she is at her desk. I thought it was much more effective.
Another filmmaker who has had a very big influence on me is the Argentine director Lucretia Martel. I study her films, to help me figure out things, around editing. I’ve really been affected by her work.
Did you have a plan for your career? How did you find your direction?
The lucky part was that I found this way of working, and relationship to the media, that I loved. I think that’s been a setback for plenty of good friends of mine: they didn’t necessarily find something they were passionate about doing. I just continue to be excited about it. I had to find ways to make that work for me. The most practical thing I did when I moved to San Francisco, was that I enrolled in a program at a public university that also had a whole cinema studies component. I had a lot to catch up on, in terms of developing a foundation for the understanding of cinema. But the degree was a Master’s degree, and then there was an art school there at the time – The San Francisco Art Institute.
They offered a Master’s of Fine Arts – which in the States is considered a terminal degree, not just the first step. I ended up doing both programs because I was thinking ‘I might want to teach’ and I have been teaching pretty consistently for all these years, but I never aspired to a tenure track job. I’ve taught at probably 15 different art schools or universities, but I wasn’t trying to raise myself up in academia. So that was the most practical thing I did. The other part was that depending on where you teach, it could be hard to have time to do your work, e.g. if they have 7 classes a year. It depends on what is expected. I have had good relationships with places where I was teaching where they gave me funding for a project. Here, we have all different kinds of grants: we have grants from the government (which are not that big), or grants from private foundations, like the Guggenheim foundation.
How did you develop your aesthetic? Did you look back at your earlier works and think ‘oh I could have done this better’ or are you happy with each step?
No, not necessarily happy. Oh my God, sometimes I look at the credits and think ‘oh why did I do that? Why did I have so many names?’ I’m actually in the midst of doing some preservation work on some of my older films. I’m doing part of it with the Museum of Modern Art, they’re working on my film Which Way Is East. It’s been interesting because I’ve had to look at it very carefully, and they are very fastidious. They said, ‘when we make a new 4K scan, you can’t push us to try to make it look like you made this in 2020, because you made it in 1994’. You think about the film stocks and things like that.
NYU has a preservation program, and they are studying the preservation of one of my very first short films, it’s called Still Life with Woman and Four Objects. We’re working on that. They just transferred it to 4K.
Still images from Still Life with Woman and Four Objects
That movie actually made me think of Chantal Akerman a lot.
Thank you for saying that. I was also very affected by Yvonne Rainer. I had seen Akerman for sure by that time, because I’d seen her in France, but I don’t know if I’d seen Yvonne Rainer’s [work].
My newest film is called Film About a Father Who. There’s a famous film that Yvonne Rainer made, called Film About a Woman Who… – from the ’70s. I have definitely been very influenced by Yvonne Rainer, but then I would say her films are more austere than mine are.
But you asked about aesthetics. I can’t impose any one aesthetic that I might’ve discovered on the next project, because the idea is the boss. The idea drives the aesthetic, mostly. Sometimes I just shoot, and it’s like I re-find my own material. Did you see this short film I made called Starfish Aorta Colossus?
No.
The whole film is shot with a regular 8mm camera that you wind-up. It’s collaboration between myself and poet Paolo Javier. That material I had shot over decades, and then he asked me if I would make a poem in honor of his book being published. I thought it was a good excuse to go back and look at all this old footage. It wasn’t like I created the footage for his poem, but I put it together in response to his poem.
What was it like to have Bruce Conner as your mentor?
I had kind of like a short-term boyfriend, and he introduced me to Bruce. I was just getting involved in filmmaking, so I had negative skills. But we got along well. Some people thought he was a bit of a curmudgeon, but he wasn’t to me at all. I would just go to his house – I was supposed to be helping him splice his films, but he would look at my splicing ability and think it was so terrible that he ended up doing it himself.
I went once a week and he would tell me stories the whole time. We would just talk and talk. He had a long-term kidney problem. He actually lived for twenty more years, but he would always have to take a rest so I would hang out with his wife. Over the years, when both my children were born, he gave them lovely drawings and we stayed in contact. His found-footage work is profound. The ideas that happen between every shot in A Movie are so fantastic. Nothing is about ‘the archive being precious’ – [instead] the archive is about a way of finding irreverence, or irony, or poetry or politics. He was interested in the clash, rather than the archive being an illustration of a moment in history.
Does your approach change — and if so, how — when working with digital versus celluloid?
It takes a lot more for me to be excited about images that are shot on digital.
[She shows me a work in progress, from which the following still was taken.]
I like the unpredictability of film – the fact that as she circles around, you go into these dark areas. It can happen in video too, but I like the way it works on film, especially in black and white: the background that’s black becomes one kind of canvas, versus another kind of canvas. I also like that it’s not perfectly sharp, because I think that in television there’s too much attention on the face. The less you show, the more interesting the face is. The precision of digital and its ability to replicate reality makes it less compelling to me. Sometimes I shoot digital work I really do like. But in digital, people tend to overshoot: hours and hours. With film, I only shot three minutes of my daughter [running in cirlces], so I have to work with that.
It’s interesting how the film shapes what you make. I watched the XY ChromosomeProject. [Made in collaboration with her husband Mark Street.]
That’s also the name of our – we sort of have a film company. It doesn’t really mean a company, but… you know. I’m glad you watched that.
How was it to collaborate? Did you plan it together and then shoot separately? Or did you shoot separately and then come together?
We made that during a period when our daughters, who are 23 and 25, were younger. We initially made it for this performance space here in New York that was also a restaurant, called Monkeytown. They’ve moved all over the world. There’s one person who runs it and sometimes I hear he’s in Australia, sometimes in Berlin. He had this restaurant (with delicious food), where everybody sat on the floor. They had projectors, so you could project on all four walls of the room. We thought it was Cartesian, so we had an X and a Y. But we also thought about XY as in Chromosomes, so that’s where we got the name.
We’ve made quite a few films together. More than films, we created projection evenings, and things like that. We did something at the Microscope Gallery, for example, here in Brooklyn. Anyway, in this particular case, Mark and I had each shot some of our own material, and we said we had to edit the film together: he would edit a shot, and I would come in on the same computer and edit the next one, like a Surrealist Exquisite Corpse. We constructed it that way, so it was not pre-planned.
How does language that you use mediate or affect your creative process? Language is so interesting in your movies. It’s very rare to find somebody who is so visual and lingual at the same time. Somehow people tend to choose one or the other.
That’s really true. And I think that’s one of the reasons I don’t necessarily identify with certain kinds of ‘purist’ wordless experimental films – but then I also really don’t identify with traditional documentaries that aren’t as playful with the image.
The thing is, that poetry is very close to experimental films. If you think about it, poetry breaks all the rules of grammar, a line break is like a cut between the shots. It makes sense that you don’t have to say ‘cine-poem’, but that poetry is in conversation with not just a love of a language, but a heightened love of language that would work with a heightened love of the film frame. Instead of it being one or the other. But for many people it is one or the other. I’m just excited about both.
It’s really nice. Maybe it’s because I’ve been watching mostly male experimental cinema for the longest time. I suddenly switched and thought maybe it’s just because women are more verbal.
That definitely could be. It’s interesting because Barbara Hammer and Carolee Scheemann both did a lot of writing. I would say in Carolee’s films, the words weren’t that important, but she wrote many books, and she was very engaged with text.
A Year in Notes and Numbers (2017) is a 4 minute silent digital video work by the American experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs, which consists of close-up shots of a few words from to-do lists and notes to self, mostly written on yellow ruled paper, with names, errands and artistic intentions written in various coloured inks, circled, crossed out, stained, creased, blotted: “Write Mom / to thank!”; “Vitamin D”; “FROGS”; “Make 2 shelves / Build 2 shelves”; “lightbulbs”. These lists are occasionally overlaid with medical terms and measurements: “Sodium / 138”; “Globulin / 2.6”; “eGFR / 86”. At one point a section from the production notes of what is probably one of Sachs’ other films is shown: “She observes herself / and others // learning”. The next shot: “Camera as extension of her body.” The next shot: “Fun of research.” We see the minutiae of a year in a life, the endless small tasks that demand to be completed, correspondence that needs to be written, plans and ideas for projects that might or might not be realised; we also see the medical quantification of the body which performs these tasks. There are personal reminders: “Write Barbara H” (Barbara Hammer, presumably); there are political reminders: “Get out the vote”. It ends with the word “Mom”, then the figure “125 LBS”, then a few seconds of swirling reds, yellows and greys.
A Year in Notes and Numbers relates to a strand in Sachs’ earlier work, which goes right back to one of her earliest films, Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986). These pieces are distinct from, but related to, the experimental documentaries about political history which Sachs has also made, and focus more closely on everyday life and its reproduction. In Still Life with Woman and Four Objects—a tribute to the anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman—a woman puts on a coat, peels and pits an avocado, suspends the stone above a glass of water to sprout it, eats a meal, and reads aloud a letter of Goldman’s. Food preparation, small acts of gardening, eating and anarcha-feminism all sit on the same level. This strand of Sachs’s work is perhaps best represented in a piece like Window Work (2000), a 9 minute sound video comprising of a single uninterrupted shot of a kitchen window in Baltimore, in which a women washes the windowpane, makes and drinks some tea, reads the newspaper. Two small frames within the larger image show miniature home-movies, which gesture towards personal memory and earlier media technologies: Super 8 film as the precursor to videotape. Window Work could be read as a kind of Jeanne Dielman (Chantal Akerman, 1975) in miniature; though where Chantal Akerman shows the drudgery and tedium of housework with an unflinching clarity, in Sachs’ film the accoutrements of domesticity are shown in shadow and used to evoke a dream-like atmosphere which encourages fantasy and reverie on the viewer’s part. Jeanne Dielman tries to make housework visible, or at least questions to what extent labour can be made visible through cinema, and in doing so, demands work from the viewer, who must pay attention, sitting through its lengthy run-time and long, slow takes. Sachs’ Window Work, on the other hand, is more playful with the concept of work—does the “work” in the title refer to the work of cleaning the window, in a fairly desultory fashion, or to the artwork we are watching? Is the work of this film a dreamwork?
In contrast to these earlier explorations of the everyday and domestic in Sachs’ oeuvre, A Year in Notes and Numbers is mundane on a different level. By showing names, tasks, numbers and stray thoughts completely devoid of any context, with no date or other clue as to what they mean, a year is condensed to a flurry of seemingly meaningless activity, combined with the equally decontextualised and slightly ominous medical statistics that appear intermittently on screen. Calcium: 9.6. Is this good or bad? Sinister or reassuring? What about Bilirubin 0.7? (According to Google, both of these figures are within the average range.) By reducing the representation of a body to written memoranda and biological measurements, this recent work by Sachs is somehow both more personal and more alienating than her earlier work dealing with similar topics. The body is reduced to a quantum of figures, abstracted into data, but not at the expensive of the person who that body is, who has family and friends to write to, lightbulbs to buy, DVDs to watch, interviews to listen to, films to make.
Unending Lightning (2015–ongoing) is a six-plus hour three-channel video installation by the Spanish artist Cristina Lucas which documents every aerial bombing over civilians since the development of manned flight. It visualises a database gathered by a large number of researchers and organisations, building on research begun in 2011, on the 75th anniversary of Guernica, arguably—thanks to Picasso—the most famous aerial bombing of civilians. Manned flight was made possible in 1903. By 1909, two people could fly in one aircraft. Aerial bombing began only two years later, in the 1911 Italo-Turkish war, a war over colonial control of Libya. Unending Lightning is an ongoing work, because it will only be complete when aerial bombing over civilians, including drone strikes, is a military strategy that has been abandoned. The central screen shows a map of the world with the locations of the bombings and the number of civilian casualties marked; the left screen shows the respective military forces responsible for dropping the bomb, the type of bomb dropped, the city bombed and the known number of casualties; the right screen shows archive and documentary videos and photography from the aftermath of the bombings. I saw it at Manifesta 12 in Palermo, where it was shown in the Casa del Mutilato, a hospital for wounded soldiers designed by the Rationalist (i.e. Fascist) architect Guiseppe Spatrisano in 1936: a large temple to fascism erected in honour of the Italian annexation of Ethiopia in the same year—a conflict which saw Italy using poison gas bombs on Red Cross hospitals. As Sven Lindqvist argued in A History of Bombing, in its first years aerial bombing was seen as a convenient and exciting answer to the question of how exactly European powers could exterminate entire populations without having to get their hands quite so dirty. The origin of this technology lies in colonial violence.
Unending Lightning is a magisterial work, one requiring a collaborative team of researchers and software engineers, the accumulation and maintenance of large amounts of historical data; it is open-ended and so almost unwatchable as a single piece, with a runtime which grows with each new drone strike in Afghanistan (almost 40 per day in September 2019 alone, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism). The visual aesthetics of Unending Lightning resemble nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation: bullet-pointed information presented in Helvetica on grey-blue backgrounds, grainy historical photographs gradually improving in quality as the work moves closer to recent bombings and the video and photography technologies which captured the aftermaths develop. While watching it, the viewer sees the unceasing global conflicts which have unfolded over the last century and more. Near the beginning of the film there are a few moments where days go by in which no aerial bombings take place, but soon it is every day, all over the globe, often accompanied by the phrase “unknown numbers of civilians killed”. Even with the enormous amount of research undertaken for the work, we will never be able to truly know through quantification the amount of death unleashed on the world by the advent of bombing from the air.
What does Unending Lightning have to do with Lynne Sachs? At first glance perhaps very little. But they operate at different ends of the same recent aesthetic tendency, exploring quantification and its limitations. In Lucas’ work, we watch something unfold which feels like an unending depiction of death and destruction, mostly of women and children; what necessarily gets left out of the work, and as such is brought concertedly to mind when we view the piece, are the actual everyday lives of the people who were killed by these bombs dropped from the air. In Sachs’ recent work, on the other hand, the abstraction of a life from a record of its daily activities asks the viewer to fill in the gaps, to imagine or project something into the space that is left open between the unfinished errands and the medical figures we are presented with. In very different ways both artists are concerned with the everyday, the way that developments in technology can start to feel familiar, natural, normal, until all of a sudden they don’t, and they erupt into the sphere of domesticity, whether that’s through the collection and retention of biological data by private healthcare companies, or the firing of a missile from a remote-controlled drone.
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+ Also: I recently appeared on a podcast, PRISMS,
in Oslo, talking about the film diary, my thinking behind it, why I do it, how
I feel about it, etc. You can listen to that here if you’re interested. +
terminal usa, life in frogner, oedipus rex, mission: impossible –
fallout, vampyr, after hours
May 11. Wednesday. I have been
having stomach issues for the last few days that show no sign of abating. I’ll spare you the details,
gentle reader. I haven’t
been eating very much and I have been avoiding caffeine and alcohol, those
usual stalwarts, and I feel exhausted and run-down and fairly miserable. I
worked from home yesterday but think I need to show my face in the office
today, so I go in and have a few meetings, trying to ignore the waves of pain.
I send some emails. I look at a lot of documents. After a few hours of this I
decide I have been visible enough and I go home, where I immediately fall
asleep for an hour. I wake up feeling a little better. In the evening I have an
online safeguarding and boundaries training session, which is fine. After it’s over, Kate, Catherine and
Tara come over for Film Club. L returns from work just after they arrive. It’s my choice of viewing. Earlier
I spent some time trying to pick something but felt overwhelmed by both the
endless choice of films available and by my sense of cinematic fatigue, which
is still with me. I am not capable of watching a lengthy film this evening, so
I end up choosing Terminal USA (dir. Jon
Moritsugu, 1993).This is a
sixty minute made-for-TV schlockfest that was a focal point of one of the semi-regular
right-wing protests against taxpayer’s
money being used to fund public television in the US: conservatives were
disgusted that their constituents’
hard earned bucks were being spaffed away on garbage like this, which
was funded by PBS. In fact, when the film was submitted to PBS for
distribution, only two thirds of stations agreed to show it, because so many
programmers and audiences found it beyond the pale. Of course, all this only
adds to its allure for me, and I am delighted by Terminal
USA, which is an accomplished work of 90s slacker black humour, a
wholesale attack on the nuclear family and the idea of Asian-Americans as a
model minority. It’s
a combination of John Waters, Gregg Araki (who is thanked in the credits) and
Dennis Cooper, exploring and revelling in a wide array of social bugaboos: drug
abuse, male impotence, religious apocalypticism, teen pregnancy, pre-marital
sex, unseemly voyeurism from pimply pizza delivery boys, queer erotic fantasies
about musclar fascist skinheads stomping on your face, disrespect for the elder
generations, sexually ambiguous bleach-blond perverts dressed as vicars and
toting firearms, and the violation of the moral sanctity of cheerleaders. It is
cheap and gross and stupid and sloppily made, it looks and sounds kind of
half-assed and rushed, and the acting is so off-tempo and stoned that it feels
like everyone present inhabits their own separate universe. It unravels into a
complete shit-show, ending with the deus ex machina of a character being beamed
up to an alien spaceship. At one point some skinheads (one of whom is played by
Gregg Turkington) erect a burning cross in a family’s front yard, soundtracked by
classic DC hardcore band Void. It’s
a highly kitsch and camp punk film, which surely would have only been a source
of frustration, bafflement and disgust for the majority of people who happened
to catch it on TV in 1993. I really enjoy it. I’ve not seen anything else by
Jon Moritsugu, but I’m
very keen to check out more of his work, which includes delightful titles like Mod Fuck Explosion, Pig Death
Machine, Sleazy Rider and,
most winningly of all, Mommy Mommy Where’s
My Brain, a short which is described as half AC/DC, half Derrida. Terminal USA is a joy: totally uproarious
garbage. Well worth going out of your way to find a copy (I didn’t watch it there, but
apparently it’s now
available on the Criterion Collection, so you don’t even have to look too hard).
May 17. Tuesday. A warm day
which I mostly spend indoors. My new schedule dictates that I should normally
be at work today but, for reasons too boring to type out, I’m not. I have nothing pressing
to do, and so I spend the day mostly in a state of anxious uncertain tension,
trying to decide what to do with myself. I send some emails. I look out the window.
I don’t really
manage to concentrate on anything and feel the old muddy worry about
squandering my life start to bubble away. At midday, I walk to the bank down
the road and hand them the letter addressed to them which I found lying in the
street yesterday. My good deed done, I scurry back inside. I eat some asparagus
and a poached egg for lunch. L is marking. Mike sends me a link to the podcast about this diary that
we recorded yesterday; I’m not in the right state of mind to listen to myself
talk so I text Catherine and ask her to listen to it for me — she assures me
that I come across well in it: ‘thoughtful’. Good enough for me. I’ve been trying to avoid social
media recently because it’s
been making me depressed, or compounding my recent spell of depression, or
both, more so than usual anyway, but I sign in to share a link to the podcast,
and then I get sucked into a few more hours of dreary procrastination. It
clouds over outside and I feel a little better about being inside.
Mid-afternoon, I decide that I’ve
had enough of this state of mind and want to get on with something useful. I
watchLife in Frogner (dir. Anne
Haugsgjerd, 1986), which Mike has commissioned me to write about for PRISMS. This turns out to be perfectly suited to today’s mood of distraction and
despondency, and it makes me feel a little less isolated in my procrastination,
which is nice. It’s
a short film, 22 minutes or so, about Anne Haugsgjerd’s efforts to sit down and write
a script for a film about Frogner, the district of Oslo in which she lives. She
sits at a typewriter, drinks some coffee, smokes, gets up, tidies her desk,
sits back down, gets up again, cleans her windows, watches a woman sunbathing across
the street, watches some people walking dogs on the street, sits back down,
starts typing, stops typing, puts her head in her hands. This, I read, is
Haugsgjerd’s first film,
and I find this information very pleasing, satisfying in the familiar note of
understanding it strikes. What better way to announce your arrival as an artist
than by expressing your incapacity to create art? The doubts, the distractions,
the lack of focus and the false starts, the blinding whiteness of the blank
page, the struggle to just sit down and actually get on with it: surely the
universal experience of the artist-manqué. Obviously, I’m
sympathetic to this strategy of defeating the block by embracing the block,
partly because I used it to get my own first novel written, and it seems to
have worked well enough there. But Haugsgjerd’s exploration of her failure to move forwards in her
work also speaks to the aesthetic strategies I’ve employed in writing this
diary, and I feel gratified to have this part of myself reflected back at me. I
am always reluctant to describe things as ‘relatable’
— doing so is cheap and easy and doesn’t
say anything meaningful or interesting about the work, often merely serving to
express the critic’s
own narcissism — but I find Life in Frogner very
relatable, narcissist that I am. There are a few stylistic elements that remind
me of other films, of course — a couple of shots that make me think of Lynne
Sachs, a little hint of Varda in some of the meta-textual
humour of the film — but
the style feels very assured and clear, particularly considering it’s a debut. The tension explored
in the film between the observation of life and participation in it, the
impossibility of simply being a spectator, and the anxieties and regrets that
emerge from trying to mediate your whole life through an artistic practice: all
of these feel particularly sharp for me, and I am impressed with the openness
and vulnerability with which Haugsgjerd explores them.“Life is
everywhere, life is outside your window. Life is pulsating there as you’re trying to write about life. … You
should have lived that life instead of making film at all.” There’s a kind of wry, amusing edge
to the film, a playfulness which stops it from feeling too heavy-handed or
self-serious, which demonstrates an awareness that the writer struggling in
front of their typewriter is, ultimately, a comic figure. And this tone makes
the closing sentiment of the film, an expression of optimism in the face of
artistic doubt, even more resonant for me: “I am both shy and an
exhibitionist at the same time. That’s
the conflict in me, but I think it’s
about exposing yourself. I think if you do that you will always find someone
out there that will understand.” It’s
a risk, but there’ll
be someone who gets it. Comforting words. You can find Life
in Frogner on Vimeo. A
really lovely little film.
Afterwards, I write the above entry. L goes to Lincoln. It starts
raining. I engage in the shameful form of active time-wasting which has
recently absorbed my life: playing The Legend of
Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Switch that I’ve borrowed from Catherine.
This is partly to blame for the last week or so of my not really watching any
films, compounding the previous feeling of burnt out apathy. I haven’t played video games for a long
time, other than fairly infrequent occasional grubby bursts of Civilisation V,
which I think I’m
now well and truly done with. Immediately with Zelda I feel fully
immersed back into the atmosphere of sweaty compulsion and addiction. It is
kind of horrendous how effective it is at sucking up time: two, three hours can
pass without any sense of accomplishment or even pleasure. It’s weird and I feel very
ambivalent about it. Tonight I manage to restrain myself to playing for 90
minutes. Then I pull myself together and watch Oedipus
Rex(dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967). I’ve not seen it before and I
watch it partly out of a stirring of the completionist urge towards PPP. I feel
like this is one of the few Pasolini films which I very rarely see anyone
saying very much about. Out of his other works it’s unsurprisingly closest to Medea in terms of style, employing a similar
visual salmagundi of elements lifted from various exoticised and appropriated
national folk cultures: like Medea, Oedipus Rex takes place in a past which can
actually be located both nowhere and nowhen, which is appropriate for a
reworking of a Greek myth which sits at the foundation of Western culture. That
said, the beginning and ending of the film are very clearly located in Italy:
the film begins with the birth of a child to a bourgeois woman who is having an
affair with a soldier in 1920s fascist Italy, and it ends with the child,
Oedipus, blind and destitute, being led around the industrialised post-war
Italian landscape, with a bunch of shots that feel more like Antonioni than
anything else I can remember seeing in Pasolini. It’s the middle section, the bulk
of the film, which takes up the riot of colour and costume and various musical
borrowings from cultural ethnographies that we also see in Medea. I think I like it a fair amount but probably
not as much as I like Medea. It’s actually quite a challenging
and uneven film and I feel more ambivalence about it than I usually do with
Pasolini, who, in all honesty, I am usually pretty uncritically positive about.
I don’t know if this
is really a success or not, but it’s
still worth watching. I think of a few other films while I’m watching it, neither of which
is very similar at all to Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex, but which perhaps can help situate my
experience of the film in a kind of Venn diagram: it’s somewhere between Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert and Piavoli’s Nostos:
The Return, maybe. I’m
very interested these days in reworkings and modernisations of Greek myth,
thanks to my efforts to work on The Bacchae, and I feel like
there is a lot here I find useful for that purpose. I don’t feel entirely satisfied when
it’s over, but I
think the problems I had with it — which, to be frank, have kind of dimmed in
the few days between watching it and writing this — are actually generative in
some way. One thing I particularly enjoy is the film’s total lack of interest in
continuity: when Oedipus is still a baby he is depicted by at least four
different children, who barely look alike at all, sometimes switched half-way
through a scene. I love this. Who cares what the baby looks like, that isn’t the point of this film, a
baby is a baby is a baby, this is a story of the universal psychological
conflict which affects everyone whether they want to accept it or not. I feel
like I should have more to say about Oedipus Rex,
maybe something which takes advantage of the very ready-to-hand psychoanalytic
engagements available to me, but I’m
going to stop there. If you’ve
read Freud and then you watch this it all feels pretty familiar and clear
anyway. I’m glad to have
gotten to it, but I don’t
know if I’ll be rushing
to watch it again any time soon.
May 21. Saturday. Will is
visiting. Last night we went to the Rutland, where we met Kate, Catherine and
L, who left us to go and watch Everything Everywhere
All At Once. Will and I did not go to see it, but kept drinking and
ended up having a long conversation with one of my ex-colleagues from the care
home who I ran into by chance. Afterwards, L, Will and I stay up until 2:30
watching music videos on YouTube. Today we are not moving very quickly. We go
get some croissants and coffee and sit outside for a bit. We go to Kollective
for lunch with Kate and Catherine, and then go for a drink at the Dorothy Pax,
next to the canal. Then we walk up the canal in the sun to Attercliffe, where
we go to St Mars of the Desert; a new experience for everyone. It’s nice. The weather is
pleasant. We spend the afternoon drinking and then get a taxi home. Kate and
Catherine rejoin us after a brief hiatus, and we order pizza from Napoli Centro
and then watch Mission: Impossible – Fallout (dir.
Christophere McQuarrie, 2018). L and I saw this in the cinema when
it came out; a 10am Sunday screening at Duke’s at Komedia in Brighton with a hangover, and it was
a really excellent experience. We choose to watch this I guess partly because
we’ve all seen
Tom Cruise’s recent
comments at Cannes being shared over and over: when asked why he feels the need
to do all the stunts that he does, he replies, smugly, that nobody asked Gene
Kelly why he danced. An incredible answer. I perhaps don’t really explore the depths of
my feelings about Tom Cruise very often, but I really am starting to believe
that he’s among the
greatest actors alive. He’s
not very versatile and he’s
certainly never complex, but he has heroically embraced his limitations and
understood his skills completely, and he’s never boring to watch, never mediocre or
half-assed. Tom Cruise is always giving everything to his work, and I always
enjoy watching him. The whole Scientology is whatever; I feel like we can move
past that — we all know about it, and it’s fucked up, but he’s still a completely eccentric genius, whose
strangeness only gets more intense the more actively he pretends that he’s in any way a remotely normal
person. The Mission: Impossible franchise
is some of his greatest work, and Fallout is
a hugely entertaining piece of cinematic exuberance. Henry Cavill, who I
generally think is hugely dull and tedious to watch, is perfectly cast here as
a bland evil CIA agent who becomes Cruise’s antagonist. In the big climactic helicopter chase
with which the film ends there are some great shots of Cavill just sitting
staring blankly into space as Cruise tries to crash another chopper into him:
the lack of any spark of intelligence or engagement with the world behind
Cavill’s eyes, the
deadened glaze of an animatronic plank of wood, are some of the funniest
moments in a film which is filled with hilarity. Another great moment is right
after Tom Cruise’s
emotional reconnection with his ex-wife, when we get to see Tom sprinting away
in the background, both arms pumping at full velocity. I would prefer if Simon
Pegg wasn’t in this film
but it’s quite useful
to have such an easy target for any irritation I feel with the film: all blame
for any lack in Mission: Impossible – Fallout can
be placed at Pegg’s
feet and then be forgotten about. It’s
a riot. Everyone in the room is shrieking and yelling, we’re all having a nice time, it’s genuinely thrilling and
exciting even though we’ve
all seen it before. Tom Cruise is a genius. I think I’ve got a long-read about him
bubbling away, so if anyone wants to commission that for a publication please
let me know and I can give you 20,000 words of hagiography in less than a week.
May 22. Sunday. Will is still
here. We go get a sausage sandwich from the café in Endcliffe Park and then walk to the coffee van in Bingham Park.
Will and I eat some cannoli on a bench. We come home and L and Will play video
games for a little while. Then we walk into town and go to Showroom, where we
see Vampyr (dir. Carl Theodore Dreyer,
1932). None of us have seen it before. I’m pretty sure I’ve not seen Dreyer’s Joan
of Arc but something in the back of my mind is telling me that
I watched it in a depressive funk in either 2017 or 2018, before I started the
diary. Which would make sense, and perhaps having seen it and then forgotten
everything about it is further justification for continuing this project, so I
can keep track of what I watch in my various fugue states. Anyway, I have high
hopes for Vampyr, although perhaps with a
slight wariness: I am aware that I often find 1930s films, even the greatest
films of the period, a bit of a tiresome slog, and I prepare myself to be a
little bored. And maybe I fade in and out of attention a little but for the
most part I’m pretty absorbed
by Vampyr, which is much stranger and more
uncanny than I’d
anticipated. As Will points out afterwards, we’ve all seen the vampire myth
explored on film a bajillion times, and there isn’t a huge amount here in terms
of plot that isn’t
very familiar, but with that taken for granted the viewer can focus their
attention elsewhere: the extremely intense and odd visual style. This is a
dream film, an unpleasant and jarring nightmare where images don’t always make sense in the way
you would expect. There are a fair amount of visual effects which, despite
being 90 years old don’t
actually feel dated or overly familiar but really add to the feeling of uncanny
nausea permeating the film. There are some shots filmed outside in a very very
soft focus which are extremely grainy and quite challenging to make out any
detail of the image and, rather than feeling like a kind of technical mishap,
these feel like the kind of half-remembered half-recognised experiences that
are otherwise only experienced in dreams. The use of doubling is particularly
weird and disconcerting. The influence of these elements is absolutely
transparent, particularly in the obvious surreal filmmakers like Buñuel and Lynch. Vampyr is not scary, exactly, but it is unnerving
and confusing and unpleasant; the plot, freely adapted from a Sheridan Le Fanu
text, is really just a canvas on which Dreyer and his cinematographers can
create some very striking visual compositions. It’s an odd film. I suppose I feel
a very clear divide during it between my deep and intense aesthetic enjoyment
in the style and the cultivated boredom I feel about watching a 1930s horror
film. But it’s good to see
it, particularly in a cinema. At home I wouldn’t give it the attention it
merits. I’m a little
relieved when it’s
over, and I probably would have liked it even more if I’d have a coffee before, but it
feels like a very worthwhile experience: getting to see what horror was like
before everyone had figured out what the genre should feel like. Apparently
there was a riot when it first screened, with the audience demanding their
money back because of how impenetrable it felt: clearly a sign of its
brilliance.
After Vampyr we go for a
beer at the Industry Tap and then walk home. I sit down and try to rattle off
as much of this diary as I can in one hour. Then I cook an asparagus risotto.
Afterwards we watch After Hours(dir. Martin Scorsese,
1985), which is a feel-bad yuppie nightmare film about a man
having a very unpleasant evening in New York. It’s really good, in many ways a
very uncharacteristic Scorsese picture, a mixture of noir, screwball comedy,
psychosexual thriller and existential horror film. There are clear homages to
Hitchcock’s style
throughout and there’s
also a really excellent moment that cites Kafka’s Before
the Law, recast as a struggle to gain admittance to a nightclub
playing Bad Brains. I read in Scorsese on Scorsese that
the both the ending of After Hours, in
which our bedraggled hero just ends up back at work the next morning, and the
Kafka allusions were ideas that came directly from Michael Powell’s response to a preview
screening at which the ending was fudged and unclear, and that Powell’s account of Kafka’s work really resonated with
Scorsese because he had recently had a frustrating bureaucratic experience
trying to get funding for The Last Temptation of
Christ. Which is exactly the kind of coincidental and relatively
meaningless trivia that I love. There’s
also a great moment where the protagonist spends a while looking at some
graffiti on a bathroom wall of a shark biting a man’s erection. It’s
a film about emasculation and sexual neuroses, but it’s also a film about the intense
lengths someone might go to in the hopes of encountering some kind of
spontaneity and novelty in their drab life. Really one of the great New York
films in the interplay we see between the unending potential of the city and
the almost inevitable frustration and disappointment that results in the
majority of the encounters we watch. It also feels a bit like a cocaine-addled downtown
remake of The Exterminating Angel, another
film about members of the bourgeoisie who just can’t quite make it home. It’s a fun watch; at times it
feels as though it’s
running the risk of getting bogged down and a little tiresome, but it has
enough jubilant variety that it stays interesting and strange, equal parts
hilarious and infuriating. Griffin Dunne, who I don’t really recognise from
anything else, is a surprisingly good lead, perfect for an increasingly sweaty
and abject man at the end of his tether. It’s the kind of film that makes you want to drink a
regrettable cup of terrible filter coffee at 2am, or, at least for me, is the
kind of film that — despite the horrible time everyone seems to be having —
makes me wish I lived somewhere with multiple all-night venues and an
atmosphere of there being an endless possibility for new forms of suffering
available to nocturnal wanderers. I don’t really know why I haven’t seen this before; in many
ways it’s an outlier
in the Scorsese back catalogue, but a genuine miserable pleasure regardless.
Thanks for reading the film diary! If you enjoy reading the film
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Light + Sound Machine Presents… YES/NO: THE CINEMA OF LYNNE SACHS
Posted by Third Man on 18 August 2015
Programmed by James Cathcart
YES/NO: THE CINEMA OF LYNNE SACHS
(1986-2015, 16mm & Digital, color & b/w, trt 88min)
SEPTEMBER 17th @ Third Man Records, Doors @ 7pm, films at 8pm
Nashville, Tennessee
Light + Sound Machine is co-presented by the Belcourt Theater and Third Man Records. Lynne Sachs will be presenting her work in person, followed by a Q&A
Likely the most accomplished experimental filmmaker to come from Tennessee, Memphis-native Lynne Sachs’ 30-year career has produced some of the most mesmerizing, contemplative observations on culture and communication ever committed to celluloid (and sometimes digital video.) Her work effortlessly infuses personal experiences into broader political/historical contexts, deploying a cinematic style that is uniquely her own while still evoking her collaborations and relationships with a veritable who’s who of avant garde cinema, including Bruce Conner, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and George Kuchar. Currently based in New York, September 17th marks Sachs’ return to Tennessee for a sweeping retrospective of her films at the 28th installment of The Light & Sound Machine, sponsored by The Belcourt Theatre and Third Man Records.
PROGRAM INCLUDES:
STILL LIFE WITH WOMAN AND FOUR OBJECTS (4 min. B&W 16mm film, 1986)
A film portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a “character”. By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film is also a tribute to a real woman – Emma Goldman.
FOLLOWING THE OBJECT TO ITS LOGICAL BEGINNING (9 min. color 16mm. 1987)
Like an animal in one of Eadweard Muybridge’s scientific photo experiments, five undramatic moments in a man’s life are observed by a woman. A study in visual obsession and a twist on the notion of the “gaze”. Presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “American Century”, 2000.
DRAWN AND QUARTERED (4 min. color 16mm film, silent, 1986)
Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium.
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME (16mm, 45 min. film. 2001)
An intimate, experimental portrait of the Catonsville Nine, a disparate band of Vietnam War peace activists who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience. Produced with Daniel and Philip Berrigan and other members of the Catonsville 9.
PHOTOGRAPH OF WIND (4 min. 16mm film, silent,2001)
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather – like the wind – something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. “Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” Fred Camper, Chicago Reader. San Francisco Film Festival
NOA, NOA (8 min. b & w 16mm to digital transfer, 2006)
Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand. Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic “Crawdad Song”.
EVERY FOLD MATTERS (10 min. excerpt from live performance and film, co-written and directed by Lizzie Olesker, 2015)
A live performance which explores the personal and social experience of doing laundry. Four performers weave together improvisation, written text, and dance in the inspiring environs of a public laundromat.
STARFISH AORTA COLOSSUS (4 min., 8mm to digital transfer, 2015)
NYC poet Paolo Javier invited Lynne to create a film that would speak to one of his poems from his newly published book Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books). Sachs chose Stanza 10 from Javier’s poem “Starfish Aorta Colossus”. This film travels through 25 years of Lynne’s Regular 8 mm film archive — including footage of the A.I.D.S. Quilt from the late 1980s, an arduous drive from Tampa to San Francisco, and a journey into a very untouristic part of Puerto Rico. Throughout the process, Sachs explores the syntactical ruptures, the celebration of nouns and the haunting resonances of Javier’s poem. Created in collaboration with Sean Hanley.
See Review of this show here in the Nashville Scene:
I feel a closeness with writers, poets and painters, much more than with traditional film “directors.” We share a love of collage. In the kinds of films I make, there are fissures in terms of how something leads to something else. Relationships and associations aren’t fixed. I always learn from an audience, about whether or not the convergence of two images is actually expressing an idea. I hope it’s doing one thing, but I might learn that it is doing something completely different. In this way the films are kind of porous; they are open to interpretation. One thing I realized recently is that I have this rhythm when I make films—ABABAB or yesnoyesnoyesno. For example, I call The House of Science a “yes film” because any idea that came into my head, pretty much made its way into the movie. The yes films are full of associations—some of them are resolved and some of them are adolescent; they’re still trying to figure out who they are. Other films are “no films.” Window Workis a single eight-minute image of me sitting in front of a window. It’s very spare and kind of performative. I felt like it had to be done in one shot. “No, you can’t bring in any clutter.” Sometimes I try to make films that don’t have clutter; other times I make films that are full of it.
Watch ‘Lynne Sachs’ Yes and No Films’ by Kevin B. Lee
Here is a list of my films in the Fandor collection. Critic Kevin B. Lee gave me the assignment to designate films that fall under the YES or NO category. Please keep in mind that these rather black-and-white distinctions do not imply a positive or negative disposition within the film. Instead, they indicate an integrated philosophical approach to the artistic rigor I brought to the creative process. I didn’t actually figure out that I was following this approach until about 2010, so I am actually imposing this nomenclature on my filmography retroactively.
Selected Films and Videos by Lynne Sachs
Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (4 min. B&W 16mm, 1986)
A film portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a “character.” By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film is also a tribute to a real woman—Emma Goldman. (This is a YES film that was inspired by my viewing of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie and Yvonne Rainer’s Lives of Performers. For the first time, absolutely any idea that came to my mind had to squeeze its way into my four-minute film. Sometimes big ideas were distilled into a gesture or a cut. So was born an experimental filmmaker. . . .)
Drawn and Quartered (4 min. color 16mm, 1986)
Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium. (This is a NO film. I shot a film on a roof with my boyfriend. Every frame was choreographed. Both of us took off our clothing and let the Bolex whirl and that was it. Pure and simple.)
Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning (9 min. color 16mm. 1987)
Like an animal in one of Eadweard Muybridge’s scientific photo experiments, five undramatic moments in a man’s life are observed by a woman. A study in visual obsession and a twist on the notion of the “gaze.” (Another YES film intended as a pair with Still Life with Woman and Four Objects. I tried to put way too many ideas into this film and it ultimately didn’t work very well. It was a risk, and that in and of itself I am happy about.)
Sermons and Sacred Pictures: the Life and Work of Reverend L.O. Taylor (29 minutes, 16mm, 1989)
An experimental documentary on Reverend L.O. Taylor, a Black Baptist minister from Memphis who was also an inspired filmmaker with an overwhelming interest in preserving the social and cultural fabric of his own community in the 1930s and 1940s. (A teacher of mine in graduate school said to me “Why don’t you put yourself into the movie? Make yourself visible on the screen.” I felt that my fingerprint on the film and the three-year production expressed my personal presence far better than my actually being in the film. I said NO.)
The House of Science: a Museum of False Facts (30 min., 16mm 1991)
“Offering a new feminized film form, this piece explores both art and science’s representation of women, combining home movies, personal remembrances, staged scenes and found footage into an intricate visual and aural college. A girl’s sometimes difficult coming-of-age rituals are recast into a potent web for affirmation and growth.” — SF Cinematheque (This film was the beginning of unbridled YES-ness.)
Which Way Is East: Notebooks from Vietnam(33 min., 16mm, 1994)
“A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot.” When two American sisters travel north from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, conversations with Vietnamese strangers and friends reveal to them the flip side of a shared history. “The film has a combination of qualities: compassion, acute observational skills, an understanding of history’s scope, and a critical ability to discern what’s missing from the textbooks and TV news.” —Independent Film & Video Monthly (I shot this film during a one-month visit to Vietnam. I traveled around the country with my sister and shot only forty minutes of film, as much as I was able to carry in a backpack. The post-production required absolute precision, focus and a willingness to work with the bare minimum. I learned about editing in this film because it was so self-contained. I could not return to Vietnam to shoot more and this in and of itself taught me to see. A definite NO.)
A Biography of Lilith(35 min., 16mm, 1997)
In a lively mix of off-beat narrative, collage and memoir, this film updates the creation myth by telling the story of the first woman and for some, the first feminist. Lilith’s betrayal by Adam in Eden and subsequent vow of revenge is recast as a modern tale with present-day Lilith musing on a life that has included giving up a baby for adoption and work as a bar dancer. Interweaving mystical texts from Jewish folklore with interviews, music and poetry, Sachs reclaims this cabalistic parable to frame her own role as a mother. (This film started with my first pregnancy in 1995 and ended with the birth of my second child in 1997. So many ideas came to my mind during this early period of being a mother, from superstitions, to feminism, to archeology, to my performing nude in front of the camera. I would even say this film is my first musical. It’s a YES.)
Investigation of a Flame (16mm, 45 min. 2001)
An intimate, experimental portrait of the Catonsville Nine, a disparate band of Vietnam War peace activists who chose to break the law in a defiant, poetic act of civil disobedience. Produced with Daniel and Philip Berrigan and other members of the Catonsville 9. (I lived and breathed this movie for three years but from the beginning I knew what it was about and I didn’t really deviate from that except on a metaphoric level and that doesn’t count. It’s a NO.)
Photograph of Wind(4 min., B&W and color, 16mm, 2001)
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather—like the wind—something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. “Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter.” —Fred Camper (I kept this one very spare and I like that NO-ness about it.)
Tornado(4 min., color video 2002)
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 poetic piece shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11. Sachs’ fingers obsessively handle these singed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning. (This film is a distillation of what I was thinking right after September, 11, 2001. It had to be a NO film. If I had added anything else, it would not express the anguish of that moment in New York City.)
States of UnBelonging(63 min. video 2006)
For two and a half years, filmmaker Lynne Sachs worked to write and visualize this moving cine-essay on the violence of the Middle East by exchanging personal letters and images with an Israeli friend. The core of her experimental meditation on war, land, the Bible, and filmmaking is a portrait of Revital Ohayon, an Israeli filmmaker and mother killed in a terrorist act on a kibbutz near the West Bank. Without taking sides or casting blame, the film embraces Revital’s story with surprising emotion, entering her life and legacy through home movies, acquired film footage, news reports, interviews and letters. (A NO movie that wanted to wander in every direction but the one where it eventually led.)
Noa, Noa (8 min., 16mm on DVD, B&W and Color, sound 2006)
Over the course of three years, Sachs collaborated with her daughter Noa (from 5 to 8 years old), criss-crossing the wooded landscapes of Brooklyn with camera and costumes in hand. Noa’s grand finale is her own rendition of the bluegrass classic “Crawdad Song.” (I followed my daughter wherever she took me, so that limitation makes it a NO film.)
Atalanta 32 Years Later (5 min. color sound, 2006, 16mm on DVD)
A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas’ hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children’s parable for mainstream TV’s “Free To Be You and Me”. Now in 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.
(This film had very strict parameters that were given to me by curator Thomas Beard so I suppose it is a NO.)
The Small Ones (3 min. color sound, 2006 DVD)
During World War II, the United States Army hired Lynne Sachs’ cousin, Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones – small and large – of dead American soldiers. This short anti-war cine-poem is composed of highly abstracted battle imagery and children at a birthday party. “Profound. The soundtrack is amazing. The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful. Good work.” — Barbara Hammer.
(A YES film that allowed me to include an avocado and a spider in a film about war.)
Georgic for a Forgotten Planet(11 min., video, 2008)
I began reading Virgil’s Georgics, a First-Century epic agricultural poem, and knew immediately that I needed to create a visual equivalent about my own relationship to the place where I live, New York City. Culled from material I collected at Coney Island, the Lower East Side, Socrates Sculpture Garden in Queens, a Brooklyn community garden and a place on Staten Island that is so dark you can see the three moons of Jupiter. An homage to a place many people affectionately and mysteriously call the big apple. (Not sure if my catagories work for this film so I won’t commit.)
Cuadro por cuadro/ Frame by Frame( 8 min., by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street, 2009)
In Cuadro por caudro, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguan media artists to create handpainted experimental films in the spirit of Stan Brakhage. Sachs and Street collaborate with their students at the Fundacion de Arte Contemporaneo by painting on 16 and 35 mm film, then bleaching it and then hanging it to dry on the roof of the artists’ collective in Montevideo in July, 2009. (I made this film with my husband Mark Street. It is one of our XY Chromosome Project collaborations so my usual rhythms don’t really apply.)
The Last Happy Day (37 min., 16mm and video, 2009)
The Last Happy Day is a half hour experimental documentary portrait of Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs and a Hungarian medical doctor. Lenard was a writer with a Jewish background who fled the Nazis. During the war, the US Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones — small and large — of dead American soldiers. Eventually Sandor found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of Winnie the Pooh into Latin, an eccentric task which catapulted him to brief world wide fame. Perhaps it is our culture’s emphasis on genealogy that pushes Sachs to pursue a narrative nurtured by the “ties of blood”, a portrait of a cousin. Ever since she discovered as a teenager that this branch of her family had stayed in Europe throughout WWII, she has been unable to stop wondering about Sandor’s life as an artist and an exile. Sachs’ essay film, which resonates as an anti-war meditation, is composed of excerpts of her cousin’s letters to the family, abstracted war imagery, home movies of children at a birthday party, and interviews. (I had wanted to create this film for about 20 years but could never figure out how to make it work. Only when it transformed from a NO film to an anything-goes YES film did it find its voice.)
Wind in Our Hair/ Con viento en el pelo (40 min. 16mm and Super 8 on video, 2010)
Inspired by the stories of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar, yet blended with the realities of contemporary Argentina, “Wind in Our Hair” is an experimental narrative about four girls discovering themselves through a fascination with the trains that pass by their house. A story of early-teen anticipation and disappointment, Wind in Our Hair is circumscribed by a period of profound Argentine political and social unrest. Shot with 16mm, Super 8mm, Regular 8mm film and video, the film follows the girls to the train tracks, into kitchens, on sidewalks, in costume stores, and into backyards in the heart of Buenos Aires as well as the outskirts of town. Sachs and her Argentine collaborators move about Buenos Aires with their cameras, witnessing the four playful girls as they wander a city embroiled in a debate about the role of agribusiness, food resources and taxes. Using an intricately constructed Spanish-English “bilingual” soundtrack, Sachs articulates this atmosphere of urban turmoil spinning about the young girls’ lives. (Again this film moved from being a NO narrative film based on a short story by an Argentine author to being a YES film that included lots of documentary material. This shift is an indication of a move toward hybrid filmmaking.)
The Task of the Translator(10 min., video 2010)
Lynne 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. (Not sure what to call this one.)
Sound of a Shadow (10 min. Super 8mm film on video, made with Mark Street, 2011)
A wabi sabi summer in Japan–observing that which is imperfect, impermanent and incomplete– produces a series of visual haiku in search of teeming street life, bodies in emotion, and leaf prints in the mud. (Another blissful NO film that recognized the integrity of keeping it simple)
Same Stream Twice (4 min. 16mm b & w and color on DVD, 2012)
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather—like the wind—something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her—different but somehow the same. (There is an organic logic to this so I will designate it a NO.)
Your Day is My Night (HD video and live performance, 64 min., 2013)
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. (Because I brought in the performance and fiction elements to this documentary I must call it a YES film.)
Drift and Bough(Super 8mm on Digital, B&W, 6 min., 2014)
Sachs spends a morning this winter in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro. Woven into this cinematic landscape, we hear sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s delicate yet soaring musical track which seems to wind its way across the frozen ground, up the tree trunks to the sky. (One very cold day in the park and some music. If there were more, it would melt. It’s a NO.)
A film portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem, a look at a woman’s daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a “character”. By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film is also a tribute to a real woman – Emma Goldman, 1986 .
2020 – 4k Digital Preservation by BB Optics.
In certain video works that employ techniques of appropriation and repetition, one can invert and rethink the soap’s televised woman and the format’s grammar of female interiority. Opening Lynne Sachs’s black-and-white experimental diaristic short Still Life with Woman and Four Objects (1986), for instance, is a tight close-up of a woman putting on a fall coat. We are immediately transported into an urban home with a female occupant—an introductory premise that is outwardly ripe for soap opera. As Sachs’s camera steadily studies the creases and folds of her subject’s clothing and her strands of hair, a voiceover announces: “Scene 1: Woman steps off curb and crosses street.” Sachs repeats the same shot, while the voiceover seemingly jumps ahead in time: “Scene 2: Holding a bag of groceries, she opens the front door of Blue Plymouth.” In its third repetition, there is further narrative disjuncture. The same woman puts on her coat as the voiceover narrator reveals her limitations, casually puzzled: “Scene 3: I can’t remember.” The muted recitation of screenplay directions both embraces and negates the lack of resolution of a TV soap. We are left wondering about the events that may have transpired in the protagonist’s life in the empty gaps of voiceover between scenes. However, Sachs’s repeated, naturalistic mundanity of domestic chores defies the desirous expectation—or the incomprehensible plot turn—that one historically expects of women’s melodrama. — “The Televisual Woman’s Hour” by Aaditya Aggarwal, Canyon Cinema Discovered
