13 MAY 2023 12:00 PM ET AIA CENTER FOR ARCHITECTURE FREE
Vital Voices from Indie Lit Publishers, hosted by The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), presents readings from a diverse array of independently published authors. This event will feature fiction writers Kevin Chen (Ghost Town, a novel published by Europa Editions) and Ada Zhang (The Sorrows of Others, a short story collection published by A Public Space); poets Chia-Lun Chang (Prescribee, published by Nightboat Books), India Lena González (poetry published by Lampblack and forthcoming from BOA Editions), Christina Olivares (Interrupt, published by Belladonna* Collective, and Future Botanic, published by Get Fresh Books), and Lynne Sachs (Year by Year, published by Tender Buttons); and translators Mayada Ibrahim (translations of work by Najlaa Eltom published in 128 Lit and Circumference Magazine), Ostap Kin (translation of poetry by Serhiy Zhadan in Circumference Magazine), and Jennifer Shyue (The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, a novel by Augusto Higa Oshiro, published by Archipelago Books).
BODY OF THE BODY, BODY OF THE MIND Lynne Sachs Artist Profile April 26 – May 1, 2023 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Curator: Cíntia Gil
Program notes by Cíntia Gil:
The title of this retrospective quotes Lynne Sachs in her 1991 film “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”. It speaks of a zone of experimentation that crosses Sachs’ work and grounds filmmaking as a practice of dislocating words, gestures and modes of being into open ontologies. What can be a woman, a word, a color, a shade, a line, a rule or an object? The negotiation between the body of the body and the body of the mind is another way of saying that things exist both as affections and as processes of meaning, and that filmmaking is the art of not choosing sides in that equation. That is why Sachs’ work is inseparable from the events of life, while being resolutely non-biographical. It is a circular, dynamic practice of translation and reconnection of what appears to be separated.
There are many ways of approaching Lynne Sachs’ full body of work, and many different programmes would have been possible for this retrospective. Films resonate among each other. Like threads, themes link different times. Repetition and transformation are a constant obsession in the way images, places, people and ideas are revisited. While looking for an angle for this programme, I tried to look at some of the threads that seem to me the most constant, even if sometimes subterraneous, throughout the films. The three programmes are not systematically bound by themes or built around typologies. There are three different doors to the same arena where body (and the ‘in-between’ bodies) is the main ‘topos’: translation, collaboration, and inseparability of the affective and the political. Yet, none of these terms seems to truly speak of what’s at stake here.
Lynne Sachs knows about the disequilibrium that happens between words and concepts, and about the difference between the synchronicity of life and the linearity of discourse. She also knows that words can be both symptoms and demiurgic actors. That is maybe why she writes poems, and why this programme was inspired by her book, “Year By Year Poems”[1].
1975 [girls with fast lane dreams]
Teachers push us to the precipice –
trick us with conundrums we mistake for algorithms
catch us in a maelstrom of dizzying numbers.
Searching for the exit door
I discover quick methods for finding north –
solace in the gravitational pull of geography
and head for the first opening from a school
with too many ambitions
penalty points
and girls with fast-lane dreams.
Talking about the making of “Which Way is East”, Lynne Sachs said: “the most interesting films are the ones that ask us to think about perception, that don’t just introduce new material.”[2]. Both Lynne Sachs and her sister Dana, a writer, lived the Vietnam War through television – a middle-class childhood sometimes haunted by images of that war that seemed both far away and fundamental to their generation. When Dana moved to Vietnam in the early 1990s, Lynne visited for a month, and they made a film. The film begins with a sequence of movement shots, colors, fleeting forms, interrupted by a popular Vietnamese saying about a frog and the horizon. Three layers come together, predicting one of the strongest traits of Lynne’s work: the world seen through the rhythm of a moving body, and the dialogue between different modes of feeling and thinking. [Lynne’s childhood Vietnam War images were black and white, upside down; the Vietnam landscape in 1991 is crossed on a motorbike, and nature is motion and strangeness; “a frog sitting on the bottom of a well, thinks the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot”.]
A travelog in Vietnam became a dialogue of perceptive discoveries, glimpses of meaning and, most importantly, of the many ways of being just here and now, together, facing abysses that should not eat us alive. How to not be eaten alive by life’s infinite and sublime abysses?
Girls with fast-lane dreams is another way of referring to an impulse for joy.
Girls looking at girls, girls playing with girls, Lynne Sachs and Barbara Hammer collaborating on an impossible film. How to work on beauty, without monumentalizing it? How to work on death without freezing the life within? A kid once told me: “you have to pass it through the inside, and let it out through your smart eye”. Is that translation? Isn’t “A Month of Single Frames” the translation of a place and a body, the conditions of light seen through embodied solitude?
There is some kind of radical positioning of Lynne Sachs’ gaze (gaze is a pace and a gesture, and that is its politics): allowing things to unfold as they are, knowing that it is the very act of filming them that constitutes their becoming. Noa becomes play with light. Maya becomes time and unsurmountable individuality. Central Park becomes a porous membrane for the circulation between a musical movement and the event of an emotional form.
1997 [Another baby girl drops down]
(for my daughter, Noa)
Again, nine full moons leave bare
the dust against the sky.
Air fills up with brightness.
Another baby girl drops down.
Dice on a betting table
or rich, ripe fruit atop worn grass.
The political comes forward when things are dislocated from their assigned places, becoming eloquent. When a field of possibilities is problematized by different temporalities, different meanings attach to the same words. New symptoms (not symbols) emerge from the same myths. To the territorialization of body, Lynne Sachs responds with the unspeakable layers of desire, underpinning the history of the body. To the typification of identity, cinema responds with the history of gesture.
Feminism in Lynne Sachs’ work comes from an obsession with ontological fluidity – women as possibilities, bringing with them the memory of what has not been captured by politics, the promise of kinder political places. Such invention requires the deconstruction of the gaze, the transformation of language through the power of a thinking (collective) body. Collective as in-between, in circulation, in transition with others: the Lilliths who may or not become mothers in “A Biography of Lillith”, the enfolding body in “Drawn and Quartered”, the collage that renders old measures useless in “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.
Materiality is a key aspect in this cinema, it sustains the emergence of a filmic gesture. The presence of things in their most concrete form, be it a birth, a hand helping to translate an idea, a splash of light on a face, the astonishment of a baby in front of a camera. Things occupy a certain space, move in a certain way, and their sensuality is never sublimated or forced into metaphors. It is their material presence that saves them from their assigned roles and chains of meaning, revealing their vitality as a principle for a political imagination.
Translation comes, then, as a movement between transmitted memory, embodied experience, affective vocabulary and the never-accomplished labor of form. Nothing stays determined within a field of possibilities, but the field itself is in a constant motion, resignifying every aspect, reconnecting every moment in time, every glimpse of an image. The work done around Sandor Lenard, a distant cousin, seems key to consider her full body of work. “The Task of the Translator”, presents three movements, three ways of looking for the body. It starts with the reassemblage of bones of dead American soldiers during WWII by Sandor Lenard, in a sequence that will come back in “The Last Happy Days”. Here, translation is both an effort to make sense of the materiality of time and history, and a question about the translatability of such. Like in “Which Way is East”, how can history be translated through the gestures of the present, of the living? Is the way the past escapes linearity and expresses its vitality?
The second movement in “The Task” shows a group of scholars translating an article on Iraqi burial rituals into Latin. Tentative words and articulations around a table, hands helping meaning through gestures. Is Latin a dead language? Sandor Lenard, after moving to Brazil, translated Winnie the Pooh into Latin. What paradox lies in the gesture of translating a children’s story into a dead language? Translation is a game of materiality, of dislocating the world into another regime of forms and movements. Allowing language to pass through the materiality of the present time. In “The Last Happy Day”, children tell the story of Sandor Lenard while rehearsing Winnie the Pooh. Translatability through bodies and gestures, vitality: one does not simply look at the past, but rather invents a dialogue of embodied time. In “The Task of the Translator”, suddenly the camera leaves the scholars and focuses on the drops of rain on a foggy window, and on the gestures of a hand, before we start hearing radio news about human remains after an attack.
Translation keeps all things alive at the same time – even the matter of death.
Cíntia Gil
Born in Portugal, Cíntia Gil studied at the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema (Lisbon Theatre and Film School) and holds a degree in Philosophy from the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto (Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Porto). From 2012 to 2019, Cíntia Gil served as co-director and then director of Doclisboa – International Film Festival. From 2019 to 2021 she has directed Sheffield DocFest in England. In 2022, Cíntia started the programme of screenings and study groups “Artistic Differences”, at UnionDocs (NY), as a co-curator together with Jenny Miller and Christopher Allen. She is part of the programming team of Cannes Directors Fortnight.
Gil has curated a variety of contemporary and historical film series, retrospectives and exhibitions, besides publishing articles in various publications. In addition, she has taught seminars, lectures and workshop in different institutions (Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico, EICTV in Cuba, HGK Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in Germany among others), and she is a project tutor for the Master on Creative Documentary at the Pompeu Fabra University . She has also served on juries in international film festivals, such as Berlinale, Cairo Film Festival, Mar del Plata, Jerusalem Film Festival, Torino Film Festival, London Film Festival, IDFA, Taipei IDF, FidMarseille, Seville European Film Festival, DokuFest, Ficunam, DocsNYC, Guadalajara, among many others. She has been a member of the executive Board of Apordoc – Associação pelo Documentário, the Portuguese documentary film association since 2015.
[1] Lynne Sachs, “Year by Year Poems”, Tender Buttons Press, NY, 2019
[2] “Observe and Subvert”, interview by Inney Prakash for Metrograph, December 2021
[3] In “The House of Science: a museum of false facts”.
An ongoing & growing collation of original (& borrowed) digital ephemera…
We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal—being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory—there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. Fred Moten & Stefano Harney The Undercommons(2013)
In the land of the imperial measuring system, we have an idiomatic expression that wends its way around: ‘Hindsight is 20/20.’ It’s a double entendre, one of the best. In order to fully appreciate the intention of this historically prescribed piece of so-called common sense, it helps to understand what 20/20 means and what it implies both in terms of sight, in the optical sense, and the mind. A person with 20/20 vision has what is considered normal vision as measured by a standardized eye test. What you see from 20 feet away is the same as what a person with normal vision would see. Of course, I realise that the measurement itself is based on a system that exists only in the United Kingdom, other Commonwealth countries and the United States. Nevertheless, I think it is clear that when we suggest that “Hindsight is 20/20,” we are assuming that with time, we gain a maturity that provides a deeper perspective on looking at the past.
When I turned fifty, I decided to write a poem for every year of my life so far. Each of the fifty poems investigates the relationship between a singular event in my life and the swirl of events beyond my domestic universe. Year by Year Poems(Tender Buttons Press, 2019) moves from my birth in 1961 to my half-century marker in 2011. Across this time span, I navigate within and alongside historical events such as the first landing on the Moon, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the earliest Congressional hearings in the US on sexual misconduct, the first mass shooting in a US high school, and the fight for national health care. While I could not assume that I had gained insight in the years that had passed, I wanted to explore my understanding of these singular events through my poetry.
With both frames and stanzas in mind, I turn to the work of Fred Moten, American scholar of Black studies, poetics and critical theory to help me navigate the meaning and the power of the expression “Hindsight is 20/20.” Moten challenges us to revise our understanding of the “rehearsal” as a striving for perfection, offering, instead, a more wabi-sabi celebration of impermanence, improvisation and, perhaps, imperfection. He offers readers and listeners a kind of uncanny encouragement not only to write, make music or paint but also to appreciate the notion that we can find a place for our imagination in various and surprising locations of activity. In his own 2018 poem ‘come on, get it!’ (published in The New Inquiry), Moten claims that finding ourselves in this new kind of space of engagement has the potential to radicalize us in the most fundamental ways: ‘Improvisation is how we make no way out of a way. Improvisation is how we make nothing out of something.’
To assist me in thinking candidly, sometimes skeptically, about my approach to the retelling of my own past in Year by Year, I look to Moten’s notion of ‘social arrangement, that is how things get together’ through poetry. The first time I heard him use the term hesitant sociologist was in a recorded lecture delivered in the Poetry and Poetics program at the University of Chicago in 2016. After providing a context for the evolution of sociology as a discipline beginning with Auguste Compte’s early thinking in the field of sociology and then moving forward to W.E.B DuBois’s 1905 essay ‘Sociology Hesitant,’ Moten refers to the underlying contradictions, even tensions, that exist between an impulse to write and a commitment to cultural transformation. In various other lectures and texts, he grapples with the awkward, ecstatic relationship between aesthetic experimentation and the quest for historical resonance and ultimately resistance.
Moten asks ‘What if it’s not about putting shit together but about how shit falls apart?’ He relieves us of the responsibility of simply making something new and instead encourages us to fragment, even rip apart, what’s out there—like history books that make people feel bad about themselves or suppliers of systemically contaminated dirty water.
Still, I must remind myself that Moten is searching for ‘resistance events by persons denied the capacity to claim normative personhood.’ How can, should, will I, as a white heterosexual middle-class woman living in the US, embrace his vision? When Moten reminds us of writer and cultural thinker Edward Glissant’s notion of Blackness as the ‘consent not to be a single being,’ I become aware of my own cis-concept of self, and my openness to a shifted presence. All I can do is remain cognizant of this difference, open to observing a unilateral consciousness that imposes the rigidity of that 20/20 vison that hindsight was supposed to be providing. Perhaps, we are only pretending when we clam wisdom in a “normal” sense is an outgrowth of time.
Before reconnecting with my own poems, I want to share a specific text that Fred Moten himself speaks about and celebrates often. Zong! is an example of an expression of anguish for an underrecognized horror in the history of enslaved people. It’s a book-length poem by M. NourbeSe Philip, a 182-page poetry cycle composed entirely from the words of the case report, Gregson vs. Gilbert, related to the murder of 130 African people on board a slave ship. Choosing to embody rather than recount, Philip creates a non-narrative poetic evocation of her own revulsion—
The case report Gregson vs. Gilbert, recounts the massacre by drowning of some 130 enslaved Africans over the course of ten days beginning on November 29th, 1781. The captain of the eponymous slave ship, Zong, having made many navigational errors resulting in extending the length of the voyage from West Africa to Jamaica ordered the Africans be thrown overboard so as to allow the owners of the ship, the Gregsons, to claim indemnity from their insurers, the Gilberts. When the insurers refused to honor the contract of insurance, the ship’s owners initiated legal action against them, which proved to be successful. Upon appeal, however, the insurers, the Gilberts, were granted a new trial. The report of that hearing, Gregson vs Gilbert, constitutes the only extant, public document related to the massacre. Through fugal and counterpointed strategies, Zong! explodes the coded, documented silence of the historical text to become an anti-narrative lament that tells the story of this tragic massacre: it cannot be told yet must be told; it can only be told by not telling.
Her revulsion comes through …
Philip does not offer us a history retold, in bold, with accessible, easily digestible facts, but rather a fragmented, scat-like series of passionate verbal iterations, single words floating, drowning on the page, pointed laments for the brutal murder of actual human beings on board a ship crossing the Atlantic.
For Tenement’s Rehearsal, I take my appreciation for both Moten and Philip as a jumping off point for contextualising my own practice, for recognising that my own “hindsight” has been transformed and shifted by my discovery of these two poets’ approaches to the continuous, vital, yet ghostly presence of our past in all moments of our now. Tenement Press editor Dominic Jaeckle chose these ten poems from a total of 50 for me to annotate …
1962 A nurse tugs a new baby girl from between our mother’s legs. Dad is miles away witnessing James Meredith walking up the stairs of the University of Mississippi. And other things he didn’t tell her. How long can she swim in her anesthesia? Two baby girls brown and blonde at home with Mom and a nurse. John Glenn circles the Earth and comes back to the same place he began, a kitchen table.
In the fall of 1962, there was enormous racial tension throughout the American South. James Meredith, a young Black man, wanted to enroll as a student at the all-white University of Mississippi in the town of Oxford. When Meredith attempted to register, the governor of Mississippi not only denied his application but called in the National Guard to stop the process. Hundreds of civilians, many of them armed white supremacists, came to the campus to prevent Meredith from enrolling. In the face of this mass of angry, racist citizens supported by the highest ranked politician in the state, President John Kennedy ordered a U.S. military force to go to Mississippi on September 30, 1962 to protect Meredith against the violent mob.
1970 Terrariums are the thing. I have one on my bedroom window sill. Water droplets and ferns moist fecund soil small green umbrellas shading hobbits and fairies. Oxygen in. Carbon dioxide out. A complete system. Vietnam behind another glass in the den slightly louder than the sound of my parents arguing. Punishment for being nine and not going to sleep.
The terms “climate change” or “global warming” didn’t find their way to mainstream awareness until the late 1980s. Prior to embracing an activist notion of environmentalism, the more naïve, passive approach to celebrating the Earth came in the form of “ecology,” and making a terrarium was a gesture in this regard …
1977 Our art teacher asks us to imagine what we would see if we put our index fingers in a hole. Any hole? In the world in the dirt in an ass in a mouth.
Children’s art teachers in the 1970s were not faced with as much institutional oversight as they are today. For better or worse, the classroom was essentially a private space where students learned whatever their teacher wanted to impart on them—hard cold facts, liberated views of the human body, suggestions of oneiric, somatic discoveries that might push us to better appreciate the art making practices of Surrealists …
1982
(for Ira, my brother)
The gypsy women of Paris go by in groups of five while I am in worn jeans, a pair of pumps, and a paisley blouse. Each rain floods the sidewalk with a stream of green and brown, like a studio of an Impressionist painter, curious brush strokes, relics of the Jardin des Plantes. I’m a tired college student napping in an empty Sorbonne classroom late-to-class bus rides crumbs from my morning baguette ground between threads. My evening phone booth call catches my brother as he prepares for school at home, 4359 miles away. His hello transforms this dirty glass box into four dynamic movie screens. I see him clearly at home with Mom eating a bowl of cereal and drinking a small glass of juice. I see a new diamond stud in his left ear, Mom at the sink, a confused look on her face, wondering how to read the placement of his glistening gem. What we share and still continue to hide. Raindrops slide down the fourth window pane, framing him with a man I can’t quite see. In a dark parking lot behind a downtown Memphis bar, a secret cameo of infatuation. I wipe away the condensation to get a better view as the screen goes dark on Boulevard Raspail.
There was a visible code to being gay in the early 1980s. For some, wearing an earring on the right side was said to indicate homosexuality, while wearing one on the left indicated heterosexuality. Of course, since this sartorial decision could vary depending on where you lived, confusion around identity was rampant …
1987
I hold blood semen water wax hair pus breath. All that is mine to let go is held in, contained.
In 1987, A.I.D.S. was everywhere and men and women, mostly gay but also straight, had to think more than they ever had before about the ramifications of being sexual, even simply physical, with anyone else. Other people’s bodies could become territories of potential trauma …
1988
My camera travels from blue sunlight to the orange glow of a kitchen bulb, explosions of cyan, magenta, and yellow. A troupe of twenty-four images marches from darkness toward silver halide. A 16mm target the size of my thumbprint. Study of a film frame begins my life behind the camera.
This poem stands on its own …
1990
Peggy, Kathy, Laura, Jennifer, Nina, Crosby, Lynne. We seven women pour theoretical intimacies into mismatched tea cups argue within and amongst read Irigaray and Cixous as forms of testimony imbibe glasses of California white and cheap red. Where will we sleep when we have abandoned our beds? Where will we eat when we have burned our table? How will we read when our glasses have broken? Between each page, each syllable we find something hidden in ourselves collect our own data, create our own science, begin to define. Built from the inside out, our new laboratory pushes against the walls of the old structure. An incendiary effect, yes, but not arson.
In 1990, I was in a feminist reading group where we read the French theorists Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, writers who embraced “feminine écriture” and the concept of the abject, which suggests a radical separation from normal, legal, or mainstream, especially in relationship to society, morality, and identity …
1993
(for Mark)
Our sundering begets beloved longing. Intimacy reaches from bay to bay. My head should lie down in San Francisco three hours after your ear touches down at Eastern Standard Time. Strange how I need to hear your voice, its whisper-rich tones, before my lids meet to seal the deal of sleep. Instead, our lights go out in a simultaneous surge toward darkness. With intonations of love, the resolution of an argument, the agreement: Either 7 or 31 days until. Plans made. Let go. Close my eyes. As if I am next to you. Away and together. Together.
The United States is a large country and trying to maintain a long-distance relationship with the person you love can be challenging when one person is in California and the other in Florida …
2004
(for Noa)
Your first ride on the subway, alone. The cool air of the train on a hot July afternoon. My whisper deposits secrets inside your ear, mass transit lullabies. I let go of your small hand. You step across alligator pits circus tight ropes the orange glow of the F train. Explosions in the Madrid metro send shards of anxiety across the Atlantic. My jaw tightens. Might you be safer if we still used tokens, out-of-date amulets of the 20th Century?
On the morning of March 11, 2004, 10 bombs exploded on four trains in and around Madrid’s Atocha Station, leaving 191 people dead and more than 1,800 injured. The coordinated near-simultaneous attacks targeted commuter trains over a period of a few minutes …
2007 Holus-bolus everything all at once. Swimming naked in a sheltered pond surrounded by goldenrod or perhaps forsythia. My two daughters glide across the water enthralled by a daylight skinny-dip, terrified by our stolen privacy.
In a lake with my young daughters, a huis-clos, a hermetic oasis that suggests but cannot promise protection …
* * *
Reading my poems should not require a recollection or even an understanding of these moments in history. By providing these shadings of context, I am trying to hint at the shifting and sliding that happens over time, the way that poetry allows us to choose from a multitude of perspectives—one or many, parallel or contradictory, confident or flawed points of view. Fred Moten, in his own exquisitely playful yet serious way, encourages us ‘to connect subjects that our preconceptions may have led us to think had little relation,’ subjects across time, across stature, subjects from our intimate home space, famous subjects, sublime subjects, sullied subjects, risky ones as well. Through poetry we all have the right to embrace that which we desire.
I return to Moten’s poem ‘come on, get it’ to close us out—
No University Press An un-academic press for academia
NoUP will publish argumentative work of any field, so long as it is also work that strives beyond its field. We seek work possessing a presentist enthusiasm that works beyond the policies of enclosure that define and underwrite the mission of academic publishing.
A new imprint from Tenement Press, NoUPwill exist as both an open, digital library and print publisher. Concentrating on collaboration and cooperation in lieu of peer review, the press will advocate a fair remuneration for its authors, and consider the pace (and place) of publication as an (unerringly) collaborative process. NoUP will publish paperbacks that contest and undermine the price point that render academic works unavailable to a general reader. We seek work that represents the ideas and the meanings of institutionalities gone awry. In line with Tenement’s convention, we will make our books internationally available, with short production cycles and rapid distribution, and counter the belatedness typically associated with academic publishing through active co-work and co-editorship.
The 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is presenting five shows of works by filmmakers and artists from different generations and countries who work with the short form in very different ways. They come from the arts, experimental or documentary film, their themes are personal, political or historical, they use performances, collages, text or feature film elements, demonstrating the enormous range and versatility of the short form.
Marcel Broodthaers, Belgium (1924-1976)
A programme of rarely shown cinematic works by the Belgian artist
A poet who decided to become a visual artist at the age of 40, Marcel Broodthaers created a fascinating body of work in a relatively short time, consisting of texts, drawings, paintings, publications, photographs, sculptures, installations – and films. With limited economic and technical means, Broodthaers produced idiosyncratic works that explored the boundaries and rules of film. Oberhausen will be showing a selection that concentrates on Broodthaers’ work as a filmmaker rather than on the exhibition or performance documentaries that were also made. The works are presented in loose chronological order, from Défense de fumer (1967-70) to La Bataille de Waterloo (1975), compiled by curator, scholar and author Xavier García Bardón.
The highlight of the programme is an Expanded Cinema work conceived especially for the festival, presenting projects in which Broodthaers made the screen an integral part of the work. On 28 April, in a special screening outside the cinema hall, a number of his films will be projected onto three special screens. The festival would like to thank Maria Gilissen Broodthaers for her collaboration.
Teboho Edkins (Germany/South Africa)
An agent between cultures
Born in the USA, raised in South Africa and Lesotho and now living in Germany, Teboho Edkins sees himself as a mediator and translator between cultures. His documentary works provide insights into the world of South Africa and Lesotho in particular, be it the gangs of Cape Town in his “gangster trilogy” Gangster Project (2011), Gangster Backstage (2013), and Gangster Film (2020) or the culture of cattle herders in Lesotho as in Shepherds (2020). Both Gangster Backstage and Shepherds won awards at Oberhausen. Edkins’ films are documentary in nature, and he shows them in art contexts as installations as well as at numerous film festivals. In 2020, his feature-length film Days of Cannibalism screened at the Berlinale, and his new short film Ghosts was selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.
The programme is curated by art historian and curator Susanne Touw.
Alexandra Gulea (Romania)
The first complete show of her short films
Alexandra Gulea was born in Bucharest and studied art in Bucharest and Paris as well as film in Munich. With her expressive, mostly documentary films she has won numerous prizes, including at Oberhausen. Now the festival is showing the first complete show of her short films. She often sheds light on institutional and social constraints, for example in Dumnezeu la Saxofon, Dracu’ la Vioara (The Thumb Twiddlers, 2003), where she portrays the residents of a psychiatric home in Romania, or in Valea Jiului – Notes (2018), which is about the quasi-orphaned children of parents working abroad. Most recently, she won the Prize of the German Competition at Oberhausen with Ńeale azbuirătoare (Flying Sheep, 2022). In the film, she tells the story of her grandparents, who were members of the persecuted Aromanian minority.
Curated by the author, film curator and teacher Madeleine Bernstorff.
Lynne Sachs (USA)
Body of the Body, Body of the Mind
The New York experimental and documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs is one of the pioneers of feminist experimental film. In around 45 feature and short films to date, she explores the connection between the body, the camera and the materiality of film, mixing personal observation and historical experience, essay, performance, poetry and collage. She won the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen in 2020 with A Month of Single Frames; now the festival is presenting a showcase of her work whose central topos is the body. Three programmes, inspired by Sachs’ 2019 poetry collection Year by Year Poems, explore three different approaches: translation, collaboration and the inseparability of the affective and political. Twelve films from 1986’s Drawn and Quartered to Maya at 24 (2021) form a cross-section of Sachs’s work, compiled by publicist, programmer and curator Cíntia Gil.
Lynne Sachs’ new work Swerve has been selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.
Yamashiro Chikako (Japan)
An international discovery
Born in Okinawa, video artist Yamashiro Chikako is well-known in her home country, but has yet to be discovered in Europe. In Oberhausen, she won the ZONTA Prize for Tsuchi no hito – 2017 gekijyoban (Clay Man – 2017 Film Ver.) in 2018; now the festival is presenting a first show of her work in Europe. Since the 2000s, Yamashiro has been artistically exploring the history, social issues and geopolitical conditions of her homeland. Her focus is above all on the consequences of the American occupation, its cultural influences, the blending of traditional culture and American elements: Ryukyu singing meets Verdi opera, Japanese cowgirls meets spoken word poetry. Curated by Okamura Keiko, curator of contemporary art, Oberhausen shows an overview of Yamashiro’s short film work.
69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, 26 April – 1 May 2023
Five Profile programmes:
Marcel Broodthaers, Teboho Edkins, Alexandra Gulea, Lynne Sachs, Yamashiro Chikako
The 69th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen is presenting five shows of works by filmmakers and artists from different generations and countries who work with the short form in very different ways. They come from the arts, experimental or documentary film, their themes are personal, political or historical, they use performances, collages, text or feature film elements, demonstrating the enormous range and versatility of the short form.
Marcel Broodthaers, Belgium (1924-1976)
A programme of rarely shown cinematic works by the Belgian artist
A poet who decided to become a visual artist at the age of 40, Marcel Broodthaers created a fascinating body of work in a relatively short time, consisting of texts, drawings, paintings, publications, photographs, sculptures, installations – and films. With limited economic and technical means, Broodthaers produced idiosyncratic works that explored the boundaries and rules of film. Oberhausen will be showing a selection that concentrates on Broodthaers’ work as a filmmaker rather than on the exhibition or performance documentaries that were also made. The works are presented in loose chronological order, from Défense de fumer (1967-70) to La Bataille de Waterloo (1975), compiled by curator, scholar and author Xavier García Bardón.
The highlight of the programme is an Expanded Cinema work conceived especially for the festival, presenting projects in which Broodthaers made the screen an integral part of the work. On 28 April, in a special screening outside the cinema hall, a number of his films will be projected onto three special screens. The festival would like to thank Maria Gilissen Broodthaers for her collaboration.
Teboho Edkins (Germany/South Africa)
An agent between cultures
Born in the USA, raised in South Africa and Lesotho and now living in Germany, Teboho Edkins sees himself as a mediator and translator between cultures. His documentary works provide insights into the world of South Africa and Lesotho in particular, be it the gangs of Cape Town in his “gangster trilogy” Gangster Project (2011), Gangster Backstage (2013), and Gangster Film (2020) or the culture of cattle herders in Lesotho as in Shepherds (2020). Both Gangster Backstage and Shepherds won awards at Oberhausen. Edkins’ films are documentary in nature, and he shows them in art contexts as installations as well as at numerous film festivals. In 2020, his feature-length film Days of Cannibalism screened at the Berlinale, and his new short film Ghosts was selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.
The programme is curated by art historian and curator Susanne Touw.
Alexandra Gulea (Romania)
The first complete show of her short films
Alexandra Gulea was born in Bucharest and studied art in Bucharest and Paris as well as film in Munich. With her expressive, mostly documentary films she has won numerous prizes, including at Oberhausen. Now the festival is showing the first complete show of her short films. She often sheds light on institutional and social constraints, for example in Dumnezeu la Saxofon, Dracu’ la Vioara (The Thumb Twiddlers, 2003), where she portrays the residents of a psychiatric home in Romania, or in Valea Jiului – Notes (2018), which is about the quasi-orphaned children of parents working abroad. Most recently, she won the Prize of the German Competition at Oberhausen with Ńeale azbuirătoare (Flying Sheep, 2022). In the film, she tells the story of her grandparents, who were members of the persecuted Aromanian minority.
Curated by the author, film curator and teacher Madeleine Bernstorff.
Lynne Sachs (USA)
Body of the Body, Body of the Mind
The New York experimental and documentary filmmaker Lynne Sachs is one of the pioneers of feminist experimental film. In around 45 feature and short films to date, she explores the connection between the body, the camera and the materiality of film, mixing personal observation and historical experience, essay, performance, poetry and collage. She won the Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen in 2020 with A Month of Single Frames; now the festival is presenting a showcase of her work whose central topos is the body. Three programmes, inspired by Sachs’ 2019 poetry collection Year by Year Poems, explore three different approaches: translation, collaboration and the inseparability of the affective and political. Twelve films from 1986’s Drawn and Quartered to Maya at 24 (2021) form a cross-section of Sachs’s work, compiled by publicist, programmer and curator Cíntia Gil.
Lynne Sachs’ new work Swerve has been selected for this year’s International Competition in Oberhausen.
Yamashiro Chikako (Japan)
An international discovery
Born in Okinawa, video artist Yamashiro Chikako is well-known in her home country, but has yet to be discovered in Europe. In Oberhausen, she won the ZONTA Prize for Tsuchi no hito – 2017 gekijyoban (Clay Man – 2017 Film Ver.) in 2018; now the festival is presenting a first show of her work in Europe. Since the 2000s, Yamashiro has been artistically exploring the history, social issues and geopolitical conditions of her homeland. Her focus is above all on the consequences of the American occupation, its cultural influences, the blending of traditional culture and American elements: Ryukyu singing meets Verdi opera, Japanese cowgirls meets spoken word poetry. Curated by Okamura Keiko, curator of contemporary art, Oberhausen shows an overview of Yamashiro’s short film work.
Poetry Society of America 119 Smith Street Brooklyn, NY 11201
June 6, 2023 and June 13, 2023 6:30-9:30pm
Join us for this multimedia investigation of how sounds, texts, media images, home-made movies, and sensory experiences come together in a film-poem. Filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs will share her insights and experiences in bridging poetry and cinema, with a particular focus on large-scale public events and our internal responses to them. Participants will explore and expand the intersections between still/moving images and written/spoken words, writing poems in conjunction with shooting video and taking photographs. Sachs will screen some of her recent film-poems and excerpts from her feature, “Tip of My Tongue” (2017), as examples and prompts for participants to create their own original work. Creative collaboration between participants will be a vital part of the workshop, and Sachs will carefully pair participants based on a questionnaire sent after registering.
Note: This is not a tech-focused workshop (though some basic tech instruction will be shared). The only equipment required is a smartphone with a camera.
Cynthia
Andrews was born
in Brooklyn, New York and raised in both Brooklyn and Queens. She is a former
actress, dancer and singer, as well as a notable performance poet and veteran
of the NYC poetry circuit. Her performance at The Nuyorican Poets Café was one
of the first to be archived at Poet’s House. She has been published in various
publications including ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, The
Voice Literary Supplement, The 2020 Beat Poets Anthology,
and Tribes Literary Journal, where she has also written film
and book reviews. She is the author of two chapbooks: Saving
Summer and Homeless (The New Press), and one poetry
collection: A Little Before Twelve (Poets of Queens). She
holds a Certificate of Language and Culture from Jagiellonian University in
Krakow, Poland, as well as a B.A. from Adelphi University and an MFA in
Creative Writing from Brooklyn College.
Pauline
Findlay is a poet,
filmmaker of shorts (poetry in motion) and chef. Her new book Dysfunction:
A Play On Words In the Familiar, released by Pink Trees Press is one that
will walk you down a winding road to leave you to choose; the road of
redemption or a dysfunctional circus. One of the original Silver Tongued Devils
her work appears in their anthology as well as Brownstone Poets. She’s
performed at Fahrenheit, Women of Color and Tree of Cups the Rimes Series.
Findlay has judged poetry contests and collection of videos can be viewed on YouTube.
Her method towards writing is simple, “I don’t write in things I don’t believe
in.”
tova greene (they/them) is a non-binary,
queer, jewish poet who recently graduated with a bachelor in liberal arts from
sarah lawrence college in yonkers, new york. they were one of seven members of
the class of 2022 to submit a senior thesis; at a whopping 375 pages, “the
poetic is political” specialized in the intersection between twentieth
century american poetry & feminist theory. as a part of this year-long
endeavor, they created a chronological anthology of the american feminist
poetry movement from 1963-1989 entitled who can tolerate the power of a woman
(after “propaganda poem: maybe for some young mamas” by alicia
ostriker). their debut collection lilac on the damned’s breath was
published via bottlecap press in june of 2022. they are currently working on
their second book of poetry, ohso. they are a two-time gryphon
grant recipient & received the dean’s scholarship throughout their
undergraduate education. after interning with the poetry society of new york
from march to august of 2021, they were invited back as the program coordinator
in may 2022. in this capacity, they are currently producing the new york city
poetry festival. their work has been featured in eunoia review, midway
journal, love & squalor, clickbait, soul
talkmagazine, & primavera zine. they currently
live in manhattan with their partner & cat.
Emily
Hockaday’s first
full length book, Naming the Ghost, is out from Cornerstone Press
September 2022. She is the author of five chapbooks, most recently the
ecology-themed Beach Vocabulary from Red Bird Chaps. Her poems
have appeared in a number of journals in print and online, and she can be found
on the web at www.emilyhockaday.com.
She tweets @E_Hockaday.
Ananda Lima is the author of Mother/land (Black
Lawrence Press, 2021), winner of the Hudson Prize, and four chapbooks: Vigil (Get
Fresh Books), Tropicália (Newfound, winner of the Newfound
Prose Prize), Amblyopia (Bull City Press), and Translation (Paper
Nautilus). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon
Review Online, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, Poet
Lore, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, The
Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded the inaugural
Work-In-Progress Fellowship by Latinx-in-Publishing, sponsored by Macmillan
Publishers, for her fiction manuscript-in-progress. She has an MA in
Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers
University, Newark.
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems.
Please watch the January 17th PoQ reading here. Please watch the March 14th PoQ reading here. Please watch the May 16 PoQ reading here.
Mission
Poets of Queens creates a community for poetry in Queens and beyond.
Readings create a connection between a diverse group of poets and an audience. In 2020 an anthology of poetry by a group of twenty-five poets was published. This paved the way for Poets of Queens to start to publish individual collections to help poets connect to their community through their work. Connections are furthered when visual artists respond to poets and poets respond to visual artists as part of special projects. Poets also become mentors and teachers to fellow poets in all stages of their careers, strengthening community.
They say not to judge a book by its cover, but cover designers strive to help readers forget that advice. Here are ten excellent covers that prove the importance of high quality typefaces and typography.
When designing a book cover, you have only a few elements at your disposal: the title and subtitle, the author’s name, fonts, colors, and illustration. Obviously—and this is proven by a visit to your local bookstore—there are only so many ways to combine these elements. When designed poorly, a good book can be lost in the shuffle. When designed well, though—with attention to type, color, and layout—hidden gems can become best sellers.
Since our foundry partners are in the business of creating the highest quality typefaces, it follows that their work would show up on some of the best book cover designs. After looking on our shelves, Type Network staff have picked out ten excellent book covers that use foundry partner typefaces, all of which are available through our catalog:
Using Study by XYZ Type and Freight Sans by Garage Fonts, this finely doodled cover (created through a collaboration between Sachs and designer Abby Goldstein) cleverly introduces the main content of the book: handwritten poetry over the years. The subdued color palette of black, white, and coral pink draw attention to the type in the bottom right.
Study and Freight Sans both serve well here for their humanist yet refined traits. The book’s interior balances type with handwriting, so firmer or more constructed typefaces might have drained the personality from the book.
Setting the title in all-caps adds prominence and stature, and even though they are tracked out very far, the colored letters of Freight Sans remain legible. Setting “Lynne Sachs” in Study’s calligraphic Italic adds even further warmth to the cover.
From the publisher’s website: “First published in German in 1804, under the nom de plume ‘Bonaventura’, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura is a dark, twisted, and comic novel, one part Poe and one part Beckett.”
This cover, for the 2014 University of Chicago Press edition, was designed by Matt Avery and uses Fakir by foundry partner Underware Type and PMN Caecilia by Linotype.
Selecting to set the title in a blackletter like Fakir evokes the early 19-th century German origin of the book; meanwhile, Fakir’s low contrast, sharp cuts, and straight lines draw the reader back into the modern age. The placement (on the other side of a window) and blur on the title “allude to the [book’s] macabre and voyeuristic themes,” writes Stephen Coles.
For the English translation of Tipo E’s Cómo crear tipografías, designers Elena Veguillas and Laura Meseguer chose to keep the original’s use of Multi for the title. The cover, bright orange and clear in its content, is a good example of honest, unfussy design.
Multi, published by partner foundry Type-Ø-Tones, was originally commissioned for Dutch newspapers and comes with a factual tone. Choosing to set the title in Multi Display Poster Italic, however, adds a sense of levity. For the target audience, who resent anything too playful and resist anything too dry, the cover (and title) of How to create typefaces strikes a good balance.
Middendorp’s account of graphic design in the Hague in the latter half of the 20th century is titled after a quote from “R.D.E. Oxenaar, a long-time consultant to the Dutch Mail and designer of Dutch banknotes, who was referring to the agreeable sensation of seeing one’s work come by in daily life,” according to the back cover.
The large “Ha,” combined with the yellow background and white and green quotation marks makes a bold impression and leaves the audience wanting to know more. Designed by Huug Schipper, the cover’s abnormal color palette and its use of the chiseled Productus by foundry partner TYPETR help it stand out in bookshelves and Amazon lists.
Productus is a fitting choice, as the book’s local Dutch focus all but demands a Dutch typeface to accommodate it. Productus does not simply satisfy that requirement, but—at such a large scale—its finer details shine as decidedly Dutch.
O Rio antes do Rio culminates three years of research into Rio de Janeiro’s pre-colonization history. The cover, designed by Babilônia Editorial, features both Guanabara Sans by foundry partner Plau and Pollen by TypeTogether.
The die-cut letterforms of Guanabara Sans Black reveal an engraving “depicting Rio’s early natives,” hinting to the interior’s robust illustrations. Guanabara Sans Black is big enough for this die-cut technique, while its contrasting Thin weight and the green background combine to create a dynamic and active cover, necessary for a broad-audience history book.
Published in 2013, this series of covers by Peter Mendelsund for a collection of Joyce’s best literature uses simple, solid colors with Poetica by foundry partner Adobe Originals in off white with thick, handwritten additions over top.
The contrast between Poetica’s flowing yet refined curves and the abrupt black markings reflect both sides of Joyce’s enigmatic writing, mixing the deeply constructed and referential with the eminently human and flawed. The cover for Ulysses was included in the Best Book Covers of 2013 by the New York Times; its handwritten “YES” brilliantly alludes to the character Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy:
…and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
A bold title needs a bold font, so when Time Warner Books published The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler in 2001, their designer chose Garage Gothic by foundry partner Frere-Jones Type. The book, which centers female sexuality and its complexity and beauty, didn’t require a loud cover, but one that put the word out there, simply and strongly.
Garage Gothic, unlike other tall, bold gothics, possesses an unvarnished quality; its weathered edges match the cover photo’s heavy shadows, recalling Ensler’s performance version of the title. Garage Gothic is “built from matter-of-fact geometry and softened by hasty printing,” making it perfect for big pronouncements that aren’t cut-and-dry.
Designed by agency Pixelgarten, Gute Aussichten is an annual catalog of the best images by young German photographers. The cover pairs Damien by foundry partner Revolver Type with an intentionally unsettling photo of a foot sole being stuck with a needle.
Damien designer Lukas Schneider wrote that the typeface “evolved from a personal preference for pointy shapes, high contrast and straightforwardness,” all of which can be seen in Gute Aussichten’s cover and interior. Its sharp cuts, diamond-shaped details, and alternating rounded and flat curves imbue the cover with a sense of activity, like something more is going to happen.
Cataloging the journey of three winters in the interior of Finnmark, Aasheim’s Finnmarksvidda introduces a new literary genre—skietnography—which combines aspects of nature experience, ski expedition, and encounters with indigenous people and culture. The cover, designed by Erlend Askhov, features a section of watery map and uses Satyr by foundry partner Monokrom and FF Legato by FontFont.
The colors—light blue, off white, and dark red—feel at home on the map, while the absence of green and the long red line indicate the desolate, tundra-like environment against which the author’s very human journey takes place. Satyr fits here for both its flowing seriousness in roman and its calligraphic humanism in italic. The title, thanks to its K and V, demonstrates Satyr’s italic most beautifully; meanwhile, the subtitle’s casual introduction of neologism skietnografisk shows off Satyr’s open-looped g and classic fi ligature.
This cover of Harvill Press’s 2003 edition of Jaan Kross’s acclaimed Luchtfietsen was designed by Tessa van der Waals. The underrated designer and book caretaker decided to use a gloomy Estonian painting, setting the title across the top in bright blue Bodega Serif by foundry partner Greg Thompson.
Bodega Serif, originally released in 1990, borrows several ideas from the high period of Art Deco, adding a nostalgic European charm to the book’s ironic title and tragic content—an apt contrast reflected in the cover art itself.
To stay current on all things TN, subscribe to Type Network News, our email newsletter featuring font analysis, designer profiles, type and design events, and more.
Filmmaker/poet Lynne Sachs will share a selection of short films and read selections from her poetry collection Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press). This free public event precedes an encore presentation of our Text Kitchen workshop—Frames & Stanzas: Video Poems, which begins the next day, Tuesday, Sept. 14.
The Flow Chart Foundation explores poetry and the interrelationships of various art forms as guided by the legacy of American poet John Ashbery. Through programs for both general and scholarly audiences showcasing innovative work by a diversity of artists of various kinds, The Flow Chart Foundation celebrates Ashbery and his art as an inspirational and generative force. We see poetry in particular as a conduit to exploration, questioning, and resistance to the status quo, and work to offer new ways to engage with it and its interplay with other artistic modes.
On Year by Year: Poems: “The whole arc of a life is sketched movingly in this singular collection. These poems have both delicacy and grit. With the sensitive eye for details that she has long brought to her films, Lynne Sachs shares, this time on the page, her uncanny observations of moments on the fly, filled with longings, misses, joys and mysterious glimpses of a pattern of meaning underneath it all.” —Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait of My Body and Against Joie de Vivre
“The highly acclaimed filmmaker Lynne Sachs is also a captivating and surprising poet. Year by Year distills five decades into lyric, a lustrous tapestry woven of memory, wisdom, cultural apprehension and the delicate specificities of lived life.” —Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs and When the World Was Steady
“In Year by Year, Lynne Sachs selects and distills from larger fields of notation, acute scenes representing her life and the world she was born into. Her measured, spare account brings her to an understanding and acceptance of the terrible and beautiful fact that history both moves us and moves through us, and, more significantly, how by contending with its uncompromising force, we define an ethics that guides our fate.” —Michael Collier author of Dark Wild Realm
Since the 1980s, Lynne Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and cross-disciplinary collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her highly self-reflexive films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, Lynne investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Lynne discovered her love of filmmaking while living and studying in San Francisco where she worked closely with artists Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Gunvor Nelson, and Trihn T. Min-ha. During this time, she produced her early, experimental works on celluloid which took a feminist approach to the creation of images and writing— a commitment which has grounded her body of work ever since. In tandem with making films, Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published Lynne’s first book Year by Year Poems.
From essay films to hybrid docs to diaristic shorts, Sachs has produced 40 films as well as numerous projects for web, installation, and performance. She has tackled topics near and far, often addressing directly the challenge of translation — from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions were investigated most explicitly between 1994 and 2006, when Lynne produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany—sites affected by international war–where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions.
Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker and the Getty, and at festivals including New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, Punto de Vista, DocAviv, and DocLisboa. Retrospectives of her work have been presented at the Museum of the Moving Image, Sheffield Doc/Fest, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana, and China Women’s Film Festival. Her 2019 film “A Month of Single Frames” won the Grand Prize at Oberhausen Festival of Short Films in 2020. In 2021, both the Edison Film Festival and the Prismatic Ground Film Festival at the Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work in the experimental and documentary fields.
