March 8, Thursday, 7:30pm and 9:30pm, 2007
Director's Eye: Lynne Sachs and Mark Street

PROGRAM 1 at 7:30pm
I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
a lecture-screening by Lynne Sachs

Films and excerpts include:
STATES OF UNBELONGING (2005)
THE SMALL ONES (2006)
WHICH WAY IS EAST (1994)
INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME (2001)

from "States of UnBelonging" by Lynne Sachs

I AM NOT A WAR PHOTOGRAPHER is a screenings and talk exploring filmmaker Lynne Sachs’ decade-long artistic rather than physical immersion in war. From Vietnam to Bosnia to WWII Occupied Rome to the Middle East today, her experimental documentaries push the borders between genres, discourses, radicalized identities, psychic states and nations through the intertwining of abstract and reality based imagery. In this series, Lynne introduces visual strategies for working with these fraught and divisive themes. Often opting for a painterly rather than a photographic articulation of conflict, Lynne tries to expose the limitations of conventional documentary representation of the past and the present. Infusions of colored “brush strokes” catapult a viewer into contemporary Vietnam. Floating drinking glasses moving across a Muslim cemetery in Sarajevo evoke a war-time without water. Pulsing, geometric mattes suspended in cinematic space block news footage of a bombing in Tel Aviv. By using abstraction, Sachs is not avoiding graphic realism but rather unpeeling the outer, more familiar layers, hoping to reveal something new about perception and engagement in cinema.

"I’d been painting and writing for years when I discovered filmmaking in 1983. Making movies let me pull together words, vibrant images, reflections on politics, and newly discovered parable. My films explore the intricate relationship between personal memories and broader, historical experiences. As an experimental maker, I try to create images that lead to new ways of thinking about the language of the moving image. Whether I am shooting early evening light on a broken sidewalk, crumpled sheets or my child sleeping, I try to capture uneasy states of emotion, quiet tensions on the edge of exploding, moments of blissful nothingness. I am drawn to the metaphors of collage, the cinematic stirrings that occur when two disparate images come into contact. Working against the grain of traditional documentary, I have made films, videos, installations and web projects that push the borders between genres, discourses, radicalized identities, psychic states and nations. For the last decade, my artistic endeavors have taken me to sites affected by international war, where reality is constituted in the space between a community’s collective memory and my own subjective perceptions. My work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Pacific Film Archive and the Sundance Film festival, as well as other exhibitions sites nationally and internationally." - LS (http://lynnesachs.com/)

Intermission - 9:15-9:30pm

PROGRAM 2 at 9:30pm
EXPERIMETNS IN URBAN FASCINATION AND ALIENATION
a program of shorts by Mark Street

How does the urban milieu serve our need to explore and wander, to be at once alone and in company? For the last 20 years New York filmmaker Mark Street has found himself drawn to cities. To him the activity of wandering and shooting is immensely inspiring: the city offers endless possibilities, surprises and contradictions. Tonight he presents 6 works that update and expand our definition of the urban landscape film. The cities are compelling, but also tainted with the effects of globalization and industrial detritus so that the viewer is invited to shuttle between pleasurable and unsettled reactions to what unfolds on screen. As a whole these films include quiet portraits (Hanoi, Vietnam), street interviews (Happy?) and are fragmented and surprising like the experience of first walking through a new city.

Films and excerpts include:
Echo Anthem 8 minutes
Fulton Fish Market 12 minutes, 2004
Alone: Apart: the dream reveals the waking day 7 minutes
Happy? 19 minutes. 2000
Hanoi, Vietnam 12 minutes
New Orleans, LA 14 minutes

Mark Street graduated from Bard College (B.A) and the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA). His films have been shown at numerous festival and art venues including MOMA, Anthology Film Archives, the San Francisco Cinematheque, Tribeca Film Festival, Rotterdam Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival among others. Mark Street's work ranges from abstract hand-manipulated material to experimental narratives. Each film attempts to investigate new terrain, and he avoids being confined by a specific look or mood. He has made a graphic silent film for three projectors (Triptych, 1992), a diary film (Lilting Towards Chaos, 1991) a documentary about travel in Central America (Excursions, 1994), and a reworking of pornographic footage (Blue Movie, 1994). His 1996 film Why Live Here? explores three characters’ relationship to place. Sweep (1998) explores the shimmering world of an infant and father on a neighborhood walk. The Domestic Universe (1999) presents three Brooklyn, NY fathers discussing the vicissitudes of fatherhood as Street’s own daughter grows up. Sliding off the Edge of the World (2000) considers the passage of time in a frenetic visual poem. Happy? (2000) also confronts notions of change through street interviews in NYC around Jan.1, 2000. Fulton Fish Market (2004) considers the teeming urban market from an abstract vantage point. In 2002 he completed his first narrative feature called At Home and Asea that explores the vagaries of community and place and in 2005 – Rockaway, an experimental narrative that follows three high school girls in Queens, NY as they celebrate their graduation. Mark is Assistant Professor of Film in the Visual Art Department at Fordham University-- Lincoln Center. www.markstreetfilms.com