Films + Poems = Lynne Sachs

Monday, September 13, 2021

Filmmaker/poet Lynne Sachs shared a selection of short films and read selections from her poetry collection Year by Year Poems (Tender Buttons Press). This free public event preceded an encore presentation of our Text Kitchen workshop—Frames & Stanzas: Video Poems.

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.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

FRAMES AND STANZAS: Video Poems — with Lynne Sachs

Thursday, June 10 & Thursday, June 17
6:30pm – 9:30pm (EDT)
on Zoom

We launch a new series of workshops combining writing + other modes of creating/thinking with this two part workshop through which pairs of participants can create video poems using only their phones. More details and registration HERE.

A NIGHT OF NEO BENSHI: Flow Chart Cabaret Cinema Returns

Featuring Davon, Brandon Downing, Michael Gottlieb, Aristilde Kirby, Jeffrey Lependorf, Stephin Merritt, Marianne Shaneen, and Edwin Torres.

Saturday, July 17th, 2021 7PM

Hudson Hall

327 Warren St, Hudson, NY 12534

We returned to historic the Hudson Hall opera house with a new evening of one-of-a-kind neo-benshi fun. “Neo-benshi” is when poets and performers remove the dialogue from movie clips and replace it with their own—singing, dancing, reading right out loud in front of the screen! The evening of re-invented movies plus poetry from North by Northwest and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Gilda and Sissy Boy Slap Party sold out the opera house!. 

Ifetayo Cobbins with Ngounga Badila in an Outdoor Juneteenth Performance

LADIES IN POSITION / MY LITTLE PRAYER

Presented by The Flow Chart Foundation and HI-BEAM

June 19th, 2021 @3pm — free

Outdoors on the HI-BEAM Stage, parked at 348 Warren St., Hudson, NY

Poet and artist Ifetayo Cobbins performed spoken word, accompanied by Ngounga Badila, on the HI-BEAM stage in front of The Flow Chart Foundation’s INCIDENT REPORT windows. The INCIDENT REPORT windows also featured art and text by Cobbins. HIGH-BEAM is funded by Hudson Tourism Board. Special thanks to Ále Campos for helping us make this special free performance possible!

Discussion & Gatherings

Parallel Movement of the Hands—A Discussion of the New Ashbery Poetry Collection

featuring Kamran Javadizadeh, Emily Skillings, and Rosanne Wasserman, moderated by Mandana Chaffa

July 28, 2021 5PM (EDT)

On the occasion of the publication of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery (edited by Emily Skillings, Ecco, 2021), on John Ashbery’s birthday, four scholars and poets discuss this momentous publishing release. The panelists will also present some short readings from the book. The audience will be invited to join the discussion.

Parallel Movement of the Hands gathers unpublished, book-length projects and long poems written between 1993 and 2007, along with one (as yet) undated work, that showcase Ashbery’s diverse and multifaceted artistic obsessions and sources, from children’s literature, cliffhanger cinema reels, silent films, and classical music variations by Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny to the history of early photography.

Mandana Chaffa is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Nowruz Journal, a periodical of Persian arts and letters, and Editor and Senior Strategist at Chicago Review of Books. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in several anthologies, as well as in The Ploughshares online, Chicago Review of Books, TriQuarterly, The Los Angeles Review, The Rumpus, Split Lip Magazine, Jacket2, and elsewhere. She was named a 2021-2022 Emerging Critics Fellow by the National Book Critics Circle. Born in Tehran, Iran, she lives in New York.

Kamran Javadizadeh is Associate Professor of English at Villanova University, where he works on the history of poetry and poetics. He is the author of the forthcoming Institutionalized Lyric: American Poetry at Midcentury (Oxford UP), and his articles and essays have appeared in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, The Point, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker.

Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collection Fort Not (2017), which Publishers Weekly called a “fabulously eccentric, hypnotic, and hypervigilant debut.” She is a member of the Belladonna* Collaborative, a feminist poetry collective, small press, and event series. Skillings received her MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts, where she was a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow in 2017. She teaches creative writing at Yale and Columbia and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Rosanne Wasserman’s poems appear widely in anthologies and journals, and her books include Apple Perfume, The Lacemakers, No Archive on Earth, Other Selves, and Sonnets from Elizabeth’s, as well as Place du Carousel and Psyche and Amor, collaborations with Eugene Richie, with whom she co-edited John Ashbery’s Collected French Translations. Both Ashbery and A. R. Ammons included her work in Best American Poetry, and as an editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she helped create many books and exhibition catalogues.