This evening's program explores filmmaker Lynne Sachs's decade-long artistic, rather than physical, immersion in war. From Vietnam to Bosnia to WWII Occupied Rome to the Middle East today, her experimental documentaries push the borders between genres, discourses, radicalized identities, psychic states and nations through the intertwining of abstract and reality-based imagery. Sachs introduces visual strategies for working with these fraught and divisive themes. Often opting for a painterly rather than a photographic articulation of conflict, she tries to expose the limitations of conventional documentary representation of the past and the present. Infusions of colored "brush strokes" catapult a viewer into contemporary Vietnam. Floating drinking glasses moving across a Muslim cemetery in Sarajevo evoke a war-time without water. Pulsing, geometric mattes suspended in cinematic space block news footage of a bombing in Tel Aviv. By using abstraction, Sachs is not avoiding graphic realism but rather unpeeling the outer, more familiar layers, hoping to reveal something new about perception and engagement in cinema. Sachs will screen clips from several of her films and show her latest, States of UnBelonging, a film essay on the violence of the Middle East that ponders issues of identity, crisis in the region, and the hope for union, in its entirety. more at http://www.lynnesachs.com
Film descriptions:
Which Way is East (in collaboration with Dana Sachs, 33 min.1994, 16mm) When Sachs and her sister Dana 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 observation, an understanding of history's scope, and a critical ability to discern what's missing from the textbooks and TV news." The Independent ; "What comes through is such a strong sense of the place you can almost smell it!" The Chicago Reader
Investigation of a Flame: The Catsonville Nine (45 min., 2001, 16mm) On May 17, 1968 three priests, a nurse, an artist and four others walked into a Maryland draft board office, grabbed hundreds of selective service records and burned them with home-made napalm. Sachs' films is an intimate look at this unlikely band—led by Daniel and Philip Berrigan—who broke the law in a poetic act of civil disobedience. "A complex rumination on the power of protest." LA Weekly; "One of the 10 Best Films of the Year" Phillip Lopate, Film Comment; "Intriguing, so inspiring!" Filmmaker Guy Maddin
Tornado (4 min. 2001, video) A cine-poem 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.
First Steps in a Terra Incognita (4 min. 2002, video) A young American woman travels to Bosnia to contemplate life there after a period of war. The camera is her being, moving quietly in and out of apartments and mosques in Sarajevo, across cultures, between the real and the imaginary.
The House of Drafts: A Bosnian-American Collaborative Website (with Jeanne Finley, 2002, 15 min. presentation) A virtual apartment building inhabited by imaginary characters created by eight Bosnian and two American media artists. (www.house-of-drafts.org)
The Small Ones (5 min. 2006, video) During WWII, the US Army hires Sachs' cousin, a doctor, to reconstruct the bones—small and large—of dead American soldiers. Composed of highly abstracted war imagery and children at a birthday party.
Invisible (work-in-process, 30 min.) Sachs will show a longer experimental narrative version of her film about Sandor Lenard (see The Small Ones), her iconoclastic cousin who survived the horrors of WWII only to run breathlessly to the jungles of Brazil.
States of UnBelonging (in collaboration with Nir Zats, music by Ted Reichman, 63 min. 2006, Beta SP) The core of this reflection 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. A film essay on the violence of the Middle East that ponders issues of identity, crisis in the region, and the hope for union. "Both humanist reverie and implicit cautionary tale." Village Voice "Haunting, fascinating, the beautiful music score adds to the film's emotional impact." Filmthreat