Lynne Sachs: Tip of My Tongue
Lynne Sachs: Tip of My Tongue
February 18, 2018
7:30 pm - 9:45 pm

Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian
6712 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles CA 90028


Los Angeles Filmforum presents
Lynne Sachs: Tip of My Tongue
Sunday, February 18, 2017, 7:30 pm
At the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90028
Filmmaker Lynne Sachs in person! LA premiere!

Filmforum welcomes back Lynne Sachs with her latest films. In Tip of My Tongue, twelve New Yorkers born in the early 1960s across several continents “visit” every year of their lives in a brash, self-reflexive experiment about what it’s meant to live in America over the last half century. Director and participant Lynne Sachs, who wrote her own series of 50 poems for every year of her life, guides her collaborators across the landscape of their memories. She gives each person the same historical timeline as a catalyst for an exploration of the relationship between their personal lives and the times in which they have lived. Initially strangers with nothing in common but their age, the group works together writing, performing and filming. Using the backdrop of the horizon as it meets the water in each of NYC’s five boroughs as well as abstracted archival material, Sachs’ project becomes an activator in the resurrection of complex, sometimes paradoxical reflections. In the dreamscape of the movie, each participant embraces shards of the past, knowing that his or her connection to a historical moment may be tenuous but allowing for that ambiguity and mystery. In this way, traditional timelines are replaced by a multi-layered, cinematic architecture that both speaks to and visualizes the nature of historical expression.

“A mesmerizing ride through time, a dreamscape full of reflection, filled with inspired use of archival footage, poetry, beautiful cinematography and music. Raises the question of how deeply events affect us, while granting us enough room to crash into our own thoughts, or float on by, rejoicing in the company of our newfound friends.” (Screen Slate, Sonya Redi https://www.screenslate.com/features/366)

“A beautiful, poetic collage of memory, history, poetry, and lived experience, in all its joys, sorrows, fears, hopes, triumphs, and tragedies … rendered in exquisite visual terms, creating an artful collective chronicle of history.” (Screen Anarchy, Christopher Bourne,
http://screenanarchy.com/2017/02/nyc-weekend-picks-feb-24-26-jordan-peele-curates-oscar-nominated-shorts-and-best-picture-winners-doc-gallery.htm)

INFO: www.www.lafilmforum.org , 323-377-7238
Tickets: $10 general; $6 students/seniors; free for Filmforum members. Available in advance at https://tipofmytongue.bpt.me or at the door.

Screening:

Carolee, Barbara & Gunvor
by Lynne Sachs
2018, Super 8mm and 16mm film transferred to digital, 8 min.
Sneak preview!

From 2015 to 2017, Lynne Sachs 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.

TIP OF MY TONGUE
2017, color, digital, 80 min.
Directed by Lynne Sachs
Los Angeles Premiere!

Cinematography -Sean Hanley; Editing – Amanda Katz; Music and Sound Design – Stephen Vitiello; Archival research – Craig Baldwin
Featuring: Dominga Alvarado, Mark Cohen, Sholeh Dalai, Andrea Kannapell, Sarah Markgraf, Shira Nayman, George Sanchez, Adam Schartoff, Erik Schurink, Accra Shepp, Sue Simon, Jim Supanick
Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts and a McDowell Colony Residency

“In Tip of My Tongue, the past is unearthed, turned over and reconsidered in new and astonishing ways. To mark her 50th birthday, filmmaker Lynne Sachs gathers a group of her contemporaries—all New Yorkers but originally hailing from all corners of the globe—for a weekend of recollection and reflection on the most life-altering personal, local, and international events of the past half-century, creating a collective distillation of their times. Interspersed with poetry and flashes of archival footage, this poignant reverie reveals how far beyond our control life is, and how far we can go despite this.” Kathy Brew, Museum of Modern Art

“Lynne Sachs’ lively and always fascinating documentary “Tip Of My Tongue” breathes life and even laughter into collective remembrances of the last third or so of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century. Sachs is turning 50. As with other people reaching that milestone, it’s an occasion for looking back. But rather than conducting an exercise in solo reminiscence, the filmmaker invites friends and acquaintances who are around the same age for a weekend of remembering moments from their lives over the past five decades.
Sachs’ record of her experiment avoids airless nostalgia to become a living breathing chronicle. The film’s not concerned with calling up memories for a particular year. The frequent sight of years being written on surfaces other than paper unchains the participants’ memories from the fetters of the concrete past. Instead, the recalled stories possess both present-day parallels and a small resurrected detail from the past. A childhood recollection of the Kennedy assassination seems like a foreshadowing of children’s lives ruined by the possibility of gun violence. A biracial man’s memory reminds the viewer of just how relatively recently interracial relationships were still illegal. There’s an air of playfulness to the whole project. Excerpts from the filmmaker’s poetry over the years deflate the seriousness of momentous events such as the Moon Landing. Expected period footage coexists with irreverent animation. One memory play evokes the joy of sitting underneath a tree and chatting with friends on a summer day. Sachs’s unconventional documentary style will disconcert more literal-minded viewers. Sometimes one person’s story is cut off midway through on the soundtrack and replaced with a tale from a different person. Nor does Sachs directly identify any of the participants, even herself. Some repeated shots are metaphors for the process Sachs is chronicling. But the filmmaker’s approach pays off. Sachs’ film shows that living with and through a momentous event doesn’t have to diminish our own personal experiences.
Review in Beyond Chron: The Voice of the Rest, by Peter Wong http://www.beyondchron.org/reviews-40th-mill-valley-film-festival/)

“Sachs has always taken an innovative approach to her subjects, gently offering the most world-turning observation in first-personal voiceover, with expertly impressionistic camerawork, in often uniquely collaborative frameworks. The result has … notes of humor, irony, sarcasm, even as the dialogue and event itself hold to one of the fundamentals of Sachs’ entire career: a bold sincerity. In the compilation, there is something truer than “facts” can deliver. Truth of the kind usually only fiction helps us find.” “Immersed: Bathing in Memory” by Susan Gerhard in Poverty Arts Journal, Oct. 17, 2017 (http://povertyartsjournal.com/bathing-in-memory/)

Lynne Sachs makes films, installations, performances 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. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with every new project. Between 1994 and 2006, she produced five essay films that took her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel, Italy and Germany — sites affected by international war – where she looked at the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. In 2017, she completed her newest experimental documentary Tip of My Tongue which was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts. Sachs has made over 25 films. Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival amongst others. They have also been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, Walker Art Center, Wexner Center for the Arts and other venues nationally and internationally. The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, Festival International Nuevo Cine in Havana and the China Women’s Film Festival have all presented retrospectives of Sachs’ films.

Since 2006, Sachs has collaborated with her partner, filmmaker Mark Street, in a series of playful, mixed-media performances called “The XY Chromosome Project”. Lynne holds an MFA in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute, an MA in Cinema from San Francisco State University, and a BA in History from Brown University. She has taught at New York University, Princeton, Hunter College, The New School, and the University of California, Berkeley.
www.lynnesachs.com
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This program is supported by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles. We also depend on our members, ticket buyers, and individual donors.

Los Angeles Filmforum is the city’s longest-running organization dedicated to weekly screenings of experimental film, documentaries, video art, and experimental animation. 2018 is our 43rd year.

Coming Soon to Los Angeles Filmforum:
Feb 11 – Various Positions: Works from Double Negative, with Daïchi Saïto – at the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian
Feb 12 – Daïchi Saïto, at REDCAT
Feb 18 – Lynne Sachs: Tip of My Tongue – at the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian
Feb 25 – Malena Szlam – at the Spielberg Theatre at the Egyptian

Memberships available, $70 single, $115 dual, or $50 single student
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