XY Chromosome Project, 12 min. 2007
The Small Ones, 3 min. video 2006
Noa, Noa, 8 min. 16mm, 2006
Atalanta 32 Years Later, 5 min. video, 2006
Tornado, 4 min. video 2002
Photograph of Wind, 4 min. 16mm, silent, 2001
Window Work, 9 min. video, 2000
Following the Object to Its Logical Beginning, 9 min. 16mm. 1987..
Still Life With Woman and Four Objects, 4 min. B&W 16mm., 1986
Drawn and Quartered, 4 min. color 16mm., 1987

"Lynne Sachs is best known for her spirited and lyrical essay films---films defined by an unwavering woman's inflection and a commitment to pry the cracks in official history. However, throughout Sachs's career, we've been treated to a succession of short experimental works that tease out the details of the everyday with the same clarity of vision and instinct for the hand-nurtured image as her much-lauded lengthier works. These films and videotapes, whether they be mystified glimpses of childhood, reinventions of films past, or formal excursions into the poetic, surrender the wonder of a world seen by an artist with a soulful eye and a conscientious heart."
--Steve Seid, Film-Video Curator, Pacific Film Archive

"Equal parts humanist and formalist, poet and historian, telling tales that are both timeless and political, Lynne Sachs creates film worlds in which the textures of daily domestic life are seamlessly connected to the realms of war, political activism, and our response to terrorist attacks. In one film, a grid becomes a secret map for understanding the difference between male and female. In another, an affectionate portrait of her young daughter becomes a study of whirling circular energy. For each of these ten shorts, Sachs creates a unique film language, by weaving together images, sounds, and words that evoke a particular way of viewing the world. All of these works reveal a sensibility that refuses to flatten either life or art, insisting on a multilevel reality in which the personal and the universal become doorways to a broader consciousness."
--David Finkelstein, writer for filmthreat.com

"Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter."
-- Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

"Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings."
--George Kuchar, filmmaker

"Profound, the soundtrack amazing...the image of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful."
--Barbara Hammer, filmmkaer

"In Sachs's theatrical, microcosmic worlds, the everyday is defamiliarized. Objects - toys, hands, a cherry pie, a miniature Empire State Building - resonate and tremble." Bosko Blagojevic, Flavorpill.net

STILL LIFE WITH WOMAN AND FOUR OBJECTS
4 min. B&W 16mm.1986

A film portrait that falls somewhere between a painting and a prose poem, a look at a woman's daily routines and thoughts via an exploration of her as a "character". By interweaving threads of history and fiction, the film is also a tribute to a real woman - Emma Goldman, 1986

FOLLOWING THE OBJECT TO ITS LOGICAL BEGINNING
9 min. color 16mm. and DVD 1987

Like an animal in one of Eadweard Muybridge's scientific photo experiments, five undramatic moments in a man's life are observed by a woman. A study in visual obsession and a twist on the notion of the "gaze".

DRAWN AND QUARTERED
4 min. color 16mm. and DVD

Optically printed images of a man and a woman fragmented by a film frame that is divided into four distinct sections. An experiment in form/content relationships that are peculiar to the medium, 1987

"Images of a male form (on the left) and a female form (right) exist in their own private domains, separated by a barrier. Only for a moment does the one intrude upon the pictorial space of the other."
- Albert Kilchesty, LA Filmforum

WINDOW WORK
9 minute, color, sound video 2000

A woman drinks tea, washes a window, reads the paper- simple tasks that somehow suggest a kind of quiet mystery within and beyond the image. Sometimes one hears the rhythmic, pulsing symphony of crickets in a Baltimore summer night.. Other times jangling toys dissolve into the roar of a jet overhead, or children tremble at the sound of thunder. These disparate sounds dislocate the space temporally and physically from the restrictions of reality. The small home-movie boxes within the larger screen are gestural forms of memory, clues to childhood, mnemonic devices that expand on the sense of immediacy in her "drama." These miniature image-objects represent snippets of an even earlier media technology - film. In contrast to the real time video image, they feel fleeting, ephemeral, imprecise.

"A picture window that looks over a magically realistic garden ablaze in sunlight fills the entire frame. In front, a woman reclines while secret boxes filled with desires and memories, move around her as if coming directly out of the screen."
- Helen DeWitt, "Thresholds of the Frame," Tate Modern Museum of Contemporary Art, London

"On screen images of ordinary objects seem weirdly evocative. A duster complete with a bushy top of feathers begins to resemble a palm tree. You will discover that a great deal is happening, some of it inside your own mind. The magic of the piece occurs in the moments between sounds."
- Holly Selby, "Art Portfolio," The Baltimore Sun

Screenings and Awards: Dallas Video Festival; Delaware Art Museum Biennial; Athens Film Fest; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck, Germany; New York Film Expo; Black Maria Director's Citation; Moscow Film Festival; Tate Modern, London

Created at the Experimental Television Center

PHOTOGRAPH OF WIND
16mm, b&w and color, 4 min. 200

My daughter's name is Maya. I've been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. As I watch her growing up, spinning like a top around me, I realize that her childhood is not something I can grasp but rather - like the wind - something I feel tenderly brushing across my cheek.

"Sachs suspends in time a single moment of her daughter."
- Fred Camper, Chicago Reader

Screenings: San Francisco Film Festival, Onion City Film Festival

TORNADO
4 min.color video 2002

A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature. It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass. A tornado kills with abandon but has no will. Lynne Sachs' "TORNADO" is a poetic piece shot from the perspective of Brooklyn, where much of the paper and soot from the burning towers fell on September 11. Sachs' fingers obsessively handle these singed fragments of resumes, architectural drawings and calendars, normally banal office material that takes on a new, haunting meaning.

ATALANTA- THIRTY-TWO YEARS LATER
5 min. color sound, 2006
Available on DVD, mini DV and Beta SP

A retelling of the age-old fairy tale of the beautiful princess in search of the perfect prince. In 1974, Marlo Thomas' hip, liberal celebrity gang created a feminist version of the children's parable for mainstream TV's "Free To Be You and Me". Now in 2006, Sachs dreamed up this new experimental film reworking, a homage to girl/girl romance.

"Very gentle and evocative of foreign feelings."
- George Kuchar

"Profound. The soundtrack is amazing. The image at the end of the girl with the avocado seed so hopeful. Good work."
-- Barbara Hammer

Screenings: Black Maria Film Festival Director's Choice Award; Ann Arbor Film Festival; Tribeca Film Festival; MadCat Film and Video Festival; Harvard Film Archive; Pacific Film Archive; Dallas Film Fest; Cinema Project, Portland.

NOA, NOA

XY CHROMOSOME PROJECT #1

THE SMALL ONES
3 min. color sound 2007
Available on DVD, mini DV and Beta SP

During World War II, the United States Army hired Lynne Sachs' cousin, Sandor Lenard, to reconstruct the bones - small and large - of dead American soldiers. This short anti-war cine-poem is composed of highly abstracted battle imagery and children at a birthday party.

Screenings: TriBeca Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Tate Museum of Art London, Whitney Museum of Art


Note: The titles on this compilation DVD are available streaming on Kanopy: https://www.kanopy.com/product/films-lynne-sachs-1986-2001