Program:
Sliding off the Edge of the World,
by Mark Street, 7 min, 16mm (from 35mm), 2000
Time slows down and silence envelops a series of quotidian moments snatched from transience. The frame line is always moving, and images are stacked like nesting dolls.
Same Stream Twice
by Lynne Sachs, 4 min, 16mm b&w and color on digital, 2012
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word “maya” means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her – different but somehow the same.
And Then We Marched
by Lynne Sachs, 3 min, Super 8mm on digital, 2017
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs shoots Super 8mm film of the Jan. 21 Women's March in Washington, D.C. and intercuts this footage with archival footage including early 20th Century Suffragists marching for the right to vote, 1960s antiwar activists, and 1970s advocates for the Equal Rights Amendment.
Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor
by Lynne Sachs, 8 min, Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital, 2018
From 2015 to 2017, Lynne visited with Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Hammer and Gunvor Nelson, three multi-faceted artists who have embraced the moving image throughout their lives. From Carolee’s 18th Century house in the woods of Upstate New York to Barbara’s West Village studio to Gunvor’s childhood village in Sweden, Lynne shoots film with each woman in the place where she finds grounding and spark.
Vera Drake, Drowning
by Mark Street, 3 min, digital, 2012
A theatrical trailer buried in the garden for several years. The vagaries of nature (snow, rain, ice, sun) yield a scrupulous document of the passing of time. Soundtrack made up of ambient musique concrete and snippets of music sung by women.
Zoom
by Mark Street, 6 min, digital, 2018
Painting and bleaching a Dutch/French 35mm film to divulge haunted layers of psychological complexity.
After Synchromy
by Mark Street, 6 min, digital, 2015
An homage and reimagining of Norman McLaren's 1971 film leavened by a cascade of daily quotidian still photography.
Winterwheat
by Mark Street, 7 min, 16mm film, 1989
From an educational film about the farming cycle; a red sky vision emerges from between the tractor blades.
Drift and Bough
by Lynne Sachs, 7 min, Super 8mm, 2014.
“I spent a morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness created the sensation of a painter’s chiaroscuro, or a monochromatic tableau-vivant. When I held my Super 8mm camera, I was able to see these graphic explosions of dark and light.” (LS). Music by Stephen Vitiello
Starfish Aorta Colossus
by Lynne Sachs with Sean Hanley, 5 min, 2015
Poetry watches film. Film reads poetry. Paolo Javier’s text is a catalyst for the digital sculpting of an 8mm Kodachrome canvas. Syntactical ruptures and the celebration of nouns illuminate twenty-five years of Lynne's rediscovered film journeys.
The X Y Chromosome Project
by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street, 11 min, 2007
In addition to our two daughters, we make films and performances that use the split screen to cleave the primordial and the mediated. After returning from an inspiring week long artist retreat at the Experimental Television Center, Lynne asked Mark to collaborate with her on the creation of a piece in which they would each ruminate on the other’s visual, reacting in a visceral way to what the other had hurled on the screen. Lynne would edit; Mark would edit. Back and forth and always forward. No regrets or over-thinking. In this way, the diptych structure is sometimes a boxing match and other times a pas de deux. Newsreel footage of Ronald Reagan's assassination attempt is brushed up against hand painted film, domestic spaces, and Christmas movie trailers. Together, we move from surface to depth and back again without even feeling the bends.
Total Run Time: 67 Min
Bio: Since 2008, filmmakers Lynne Sachs and Mark Street have been showing some of their films together in an attempt to uncover connections and dissonances, pitting the x against the y, the magenta against the green, the hard edged against the ephemeral. Tonight they present 11 short films (including one they made together) created over the last 25 years. Loose themes and affinities will unspool-- chimerical traces of their children, women's voices amplified on the screen, quotidian diaristic effusions, found footage movies reimagined, weather as an apocalyptic (bell)weather and finally, the frame as a shifting, malleable grid.
