Wir freuen uns, als Teil des Wintersemesterprorgamms der Graduiertenschule für Bewegtbild, die experimentelle Filmemacherin Lynne Sachs als Gastdozentin ankündigen zu können. Am Donnerstag, den 28. Oktober ab 15 Uhr wird sie über ihre Arbeiten sprechen, Filmausschnitte zeigen und anschließend für ein Q&A zur Verfügung stehen. Der Artist Talk wird auf Englisch stattfinden und hochschulöffentlich sein. Der Zoom-Link wird einen Tag im Voraus im VisKom Kalender veröffentlicht.
Every Contact Leaves a Trace
a talk by Lynne Sachs
For most of her adult life, film artist Lynne Sachs has collected and saved the small business cards that people have given her in all the various places she has traveled – from professional conferences to doctors’ appointments, from film festivals to hardware stores, from art galleries to human rights centers. In these places, Sachs met and engaged with hundreds of people over a period of four decades, and now she is wondering how these people’s lives might have affected hers or, in turn, how she might have touched the trajectory of their own journey. During her lecture, Sachs will expand upon her personal approach to making experimental documentaries and her essayistic method of asking questions of herself and others. She will interweave clips from her previous works (including The Washing Society, Film About a Father Who, and Girl is Presence) and her work-in-process, all of which take a hybrid approach to research and production. She will also touch on the writing of thinkers who have recently been of great importance to her own art-making practice, including theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina Campt and scholar and activist Silvia Federici. In this way, Lynne will examine her own current work, be it inchoate, porous and, like everything that is worth doing, deeply challenging.
About Lynne Sachs
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. 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 in San Francisco. 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 work ever since. 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 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 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 NYFA, and Jerome Foundation. Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center, the Walker the Getty, New York Film Festival, and Sundance. In 2021, Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at Maysles Documentary Center awarded Lynne for her body of work. Lynne is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. In 2020 and 2021, Lynne taught film and poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque, Flowchart Foundation, San Francisco Public Library, and Hunter College, City University of New York. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, USA.
Many of Lynne Sachs’ works films can be found on ther website: www.lynnesachs.com