Now available: Lynne Sachs’ A Month of Single Frames
Posted April 2nd, 2020 in Announcements, New Acquisitions, New Films, News / Events
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. With more than 30 titles in distribution at Canyon Cinema, this latest work is one of a number of posthumous collaborations between filmmaker Barbara Hammer and artists using materials from her personal archive.
A Month of Single Frames (2019) 14 minutes | color | sound | digital file
Made with and for Barbara Hammer
In 1998, filmmaker Barbara Hammer had an artist residency in a shack without running water or electricity. While there, she shot film, recorded sounds and kept a journal. In 2018, Barbara began her own process of dying by revisiting her personal archive. She gave all of her images, sounds and writing from the residency to filmmaker Lynne Sachs and invited her to make a film with the material. Through her own filmmaking, Lynne explores Barbara’s experience of solitude. She places text on the screen as a confrontation with a somatic cinema that brings us all together in multiple spaces and times.
“Melding past and present, Sachs edited the footage and reading into a meditation on the small treasures of life before the “sadness of departure” made inevitable by death. The images in the movie work with simplicity to establish layers of rich beauty and complexity. Water playfully dances in and out of the sunshine and colored gel flags reflect rainbow-colored squares onto the raked sand dunes. Amid a background of rustling reeds, panoramic vistas, and sunsets captured in single-frame shots, Hammer wonders: ‘Is this why we make busy? So, we don’t have time to contemplate this endless expanse called life?’ With lines of poetry written by Sachs sporadically overlaid, the piece takes on significance as a poignant memorial to Hammer by a friend.”
Noa Wollstein, Feb. 17, 2020 Daily Princetonian
