Films by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
The Last Happy Day
38 min. 2009
by Lynne Sachs
The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones -- small and large -- of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war. Premiere: New York Film Festival, 2009.
Collision of Parts
15 min., 2010
by Mark Street
A kaleidoscopic reverie recorded over a period of five years in various urban milieus. An excavation of the concept of montage: small moments public and private brush up against each other, creating a charged tapestry of the immediate. Inside and outside, motion and stasis, home and travel, light and dark: a series of antimonies struggle to be heard and seen. Premiere: Tribeca Film Fest 2010.
Caudro por cuadro (Frame by Frame)
8 min., 2009
by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
In “Cuadro por caudro”, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguayan 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.
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, painting, politics and layered sound design. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany -- sites affected by international war--where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In April 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque presented a full retrospective of her work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.
For more info: www.lynnesachs.com
Mark Street graduated from Bard College (B.A, 1986) and the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 1992). He has shown work in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series (1991, 1994), at Anthology Film Archives (1993, 2006, 2009), Millennium (1990,1996), and the San Francisco Cinematheque (1986, 1992, 2009). His work has appeared at the Tribeca (5 times), Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense (Spain), Mill Valley, South by Southwest, and other film festivals. His work ranges from the abstract (Winterwheat, 1989; Echo Anthem 1992; Fulton Fish Market, 2004, Trailer Trash, 2008) to improvised narrative feature films (At Home and Asea, 2000; Rockaway 2005), His projects has been supported by a number of grants from foundations, including the Jerome Foundation, the Film Arts Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council and the NY Experimental TV Center. In 2006 he was asked to participate in the Hallwalls Artists Residency Program in Buffalo, NY. Some of his film work has been performed live (at Tonic and Galapagos in NYC) with accompanying musicians, including Marc Ribot, Zeena Parkins, Bradford Reed and Jane Scarpantoni. In 2007 at Hallwalls he presented a multi media show entitled Inside and Out: Infected Districts and Memory Lanes with Buffalo performance and music groups Real Dream Cabaret and Open Music Ensemble. He has curated and judged several film and art exhibitions including Ventana al Sur: An Evening of Argentine Experimental Film (with Lynne Sachs) at Anthology Film Archives and Pacific Film Archive in 2009 as well as Video Landscapes (2005) and Real Abstractions (2007) both at Fordham University’s Center Art Gallery. Two of his personal essays “Film is Dead: Long Live Film” and “Festival of Flight” appeared in Film Arts Magazine in 2008. An essay about film funding “Who’s Asking?” appeared Millennium Film Journal # 51 entitled Experimental Documentary. Cinema Argentina – An Argentine excursion: film frames and talk therapy (with Lynne Sachs and Pablo Marin) appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Gonzo Circus. He has led community workshops a variety of venues (Echo Park Film Center in LA, Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, NC, Fondacion d’Arte Contemporaneo in Montevideo Uruguay) on a variety of topics, including “The Devil is in the Details: Urban Street Videography.” He is Assistant Professor of Film in the Visual Art Department at Fordham University-- Lincoln Center where he teaches film/video production and other courses that engage contemporary artistic practice.
http://markstreetfilms.blogspot.com
273 Carroll St. Brooklyn, NY 11231
718 522 5856
Mstreet430@gmail.com
www.markstreetfilms.com
