Lynne Sachs (born 1961) is an American experimental filmmaker and poet living in Brooklyn, New York. Her moving image work ranges from documentaries, to essay films, to experimental shorts, to hybrid live performances. Working from a feminist perspective, Sachs weaves together social criticism with personal subjectivity. Her films embrace a radical use of archives, performance and intricate sound work. Between 2013 and 2020, she collaborated with musician and sound artist Stephen Vitiello on five films.
Early life and education
Sachs graduated from Brown University with a major in history, and a focus on studio art. She developed an interest in experimental documentary filmmaking while attending the 1985 Robert J. Flaherty Documentary Film Seminar through a scholarship. There, she was inspired by the works of Bruce Conner, who would later become her mentor, and Maya Deren. She took her first media arts classes at Global Village and Downtown Community Television Center in New York City. Soon thereafter, Sachs moved to San Francisco to attend San Francisco State University and later the San Francisco Art Institute.
It was during this time in San Francisco that she studied and collaborated with George Kuchar, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Craig Baldwin, and Gunvor Nelson. 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 that has grounded her body of work ever since.
Career
1989 – early 2000s
After completing her education in San Francisco, Sachs returned to her hometown of Memphis in 1989 to shoot Sermons and Sacred Pictures. This was her first long-format experimental documentary. The film is a portrait of Reverend L. O. Taylor, an African-American minister and filmmaker from the 1930s and 1940s. This film screened at the Museum of Modern Art and the Margaret Mead Film Festival that year.
From 1994 to 2006 Sachs worked in geographic locations affected by international war, such as Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany. Her films and web projects expose what she defines as the "limits of a conventional documentary representation of both the past and the present". It is in this style that she has produced five pieces (Which Way Is East, The House of Drafts, Investigation of a Flame, States of Unbelonging and The Last Happy Day) grouped together as the I Am Not A War Photographer series.
In 2007, the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema presented a retrospective of her work. That same year, she collaborated with Chris Marker on a remake of his short film Three Cheers for the Whale. She returned to Argentina in 2008 to film her first narrative project, Wind in Our Hair, inspired by the short stories of Julio Cortázar.
Commissioned in 2008 by the New York Public Library, Lynne Sachs ventured into the realm of online installations with the web piece Abecedarium NYC. The interactive project is an online alphabet of obscure words represented by short films made by Sachs and other collaborators such as filmmakers Barbara Hammer, David Gatten and George Kuchar. In addition to this, the project is meant to stand as an ongoing exploration through participatory blog threads and collaboration with other online media forums open to the public.
In addition to her work with the moving image, Sachs co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on "Experiments in Documentary" and co-curated the 2014 film series "We Landed/ I Was Born/ Passing By: NYC's Chinatown on Film" at Anthology Film Archives.
2010–present
In 2010, Sachs teamed up with her brother Ira Sachs and decided to adapt his short film Last Address into an exterior window installation on the sides of the Kimmel Center in Manhattan, New York. The piece is a meditation on some of the most prolific New York-based artists of the 1980s and 1990s who died of AIDS in this city, including Ethyl Eichelberger, David Wojnarowicz and Reynaldo Arenas.
In 2011, Oxford University Press published The Essay Film: From Montaigne After Marker, a book by Timothy Corrigan which dedicates a chapter to discussing Sachs's film States of Unbelonging in relation to works by Harun Farocki and Ari Folman.