Working since the mid-1980s, variously on lyrical formal shorts and long form experimental documentary, Lynne Sachs’ body of film and video work has explored the relationships between individual memory and experience in the context of large historical forces. Foregrounding personal history and autobiography, Sachs exalts the intimate gesture as perhaps the most heroic of poetic and political acts. With a keen grasp on cultural theory and media history, Sachs’s films avoid academicism in their celebration of life and mindful political engagement, presenting complex pictures of the world with lyrical grace and even joy.

Lynne Sachs: States of Belonging is a four-part retrospective of the filmmaker’s work, presented as a collaboration between San Francisco Cinematheque, Pacific Film Archive, ATA’s Other Cinema and Oddball Film + Video. The series in accompanied by a limited-edition monograph—available at screenings—featuring original writings by Susan Gerhard, Kathy Geritz, Lucas Hilderbrand and Bill Nichols.

The 2010 Wilderness Filmmaking Expedition
August 7 - 15, 2010

Spend a week making films in a remote wilderness area of the high Colorado Rockies.  We're just back from honing our equipment and thinking in Jamaica (at the Jamaican Film Workshop), and have a host of refinements and new experiences to apply this year!

This will be a truly unique event, combining an immersion in the wilderness with an immersion in zero-emmissions, self-carried, handmade filmmaking.  We will shoot film, process it under the stars, edit, and project, surrounded by the majesty of the high mountains.  This is not just a class, but a transcendent experience of what filmmaking can be, with the wilderness itself as the vast and endlessly fascinating subject.

This trip will be strenuous and is limited to 6 participants.  It is certain to be unforgettable.  Last year's trip was a great success; watch a trailer of the documentary we made about it at:

http://www.handmadefilm.org/wildernessFilmmaking/wildernessFilmTrailer.html

For details, visit our website at www.handmadefilm.org

Joel Schlemowitz: Film Portraits and Experimental Documentaries
Saturday, April 24 at 7:30 pm
322 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Suggested donation $7
Joel Schlemowitz will be present for discussion after the screening.

- Silo (2007, 16mm, 3 minutes, color, sound)
A single camera roll shot in time lapse documenting the final night of the arts and performance center, ISSUE Project Room, at their former space inside of a converted silo on the Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn. Accompanying this on the soundtrack is a montage of field recordings from the Gowanus environs.

- Teslamania (2007, 16mm, 6 minutes, color, sound)
Two camera rolls shot at the Collective Unconscious during a performance of “Teslamania” featuring Gecko Saccomanno and Tesla Coil Engineer Jamie Mereness. The film’s visual effects, double exposures, and refracted images, were all done in camera, just as we see them here.
On the soundtrack Gecko provides various “Tesla tidbits,” including Tesla’s scheme to provide free electricity transmitted through the air, anecdotes about the Collective’s Tesla Coil performances, “Tesla cooking,” and a list of the inventor Nikola Tesla’s many exotic phobias.
Music by Dorit Chrysler.

- Dame Darcy – a film portrait (2007, 16mm, 5 minutes, b&w, sound)
A short and lively 16mm portrait of comic book artist and performer Dame Darcy, seen through a filmic rollercoaster tour of her comic book, “Meat Cake,” and ending with the artist herself. On the soundtrack, a turn-of-the-last-century recording from a 78rpm Victrola record.

- Loudmouth Collective / Ugly Duckling Presse (2003, 16mm, b&w, sound, 20 min)
A film-portrait of the Loudmouth Collective and Ugly Duckling Presse. These poet-provocateurs are the creators of the infamous “Anti-Reading” series, a carnival-like alternative to the traditional poetry reading. On the film’s soundtrack we hear how the Anti-Readings were started, descriptions of various Anti-Reading activities including the Poetry Fishing Pond, the Typewriter Inferno, Poetry-Poker, Poem Portraits, the smokable poems known as Poetry Cigarettes, the memory tester called “I Forgot,” and the Diary in the shape of a Bunny. The film includes footage shot at Anti-Readings, with time-lapse, double exposures, distorting lenses, and frenetic non-traditional camerawork evocative of the playfully chaotic spirit of the events.
Awarded Best Documentary Short, Chicago Underground Film Festival, 2004

- Moving Images – the Film-Makers Cooperative relocates (2001, 16mm, b&w/color, sound, 14 min)
voices: Jonas Mekas, MM Serra
Jonas Mekas, one of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative’s founders, and MM Serra, the current executive director, describe the Coop’s beginnings, the organization’s recent struggles, and the difficulties of finding space for the arts, over richly layered images of the Coop’s recent move.
The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, founded in 1962 as a filmmaker-run distribution center, is now the largest archive and distributor of independent and avant-garde films in the world, with over 5,000 films and videos. Since 1967 the Coop had its offices at Lexington and 31st Street, but as documented in this film, it has now relocated to the Clocktower Gallery at 108 Leonard Street, New York City.
Awarded Silver Plaque, Chicago International Film Festival