Lynn Sachs & Mark Street (Screening), April 6, 2014
Counterpath is excited to host filmmakers Lynn Sachs and Mark Street for a screening on Sunday, April 6, at 7 p.m. Mark Street will screen his 2012 film Hasta Nunca/See You Never, and Lynn Sachs will screen “Cuadro por cuadro” (2009) and “Same Stream Twice” (2012).
Hasta Nunca follows Mario Ligetti, a middle-aged DJ in Montevideo, Uruguay whose call-in radio show exposes the city’s “Secrets and Stories.” As Mario’s life becomes more entangled with that of his callers and listeners, his public and private personas are blurred and the intimate nuances of a city and its residents are revealed.
The film is the product of a close collaboration between North American filmmaker Mark Street and an Uruguayan cast and crew, led by producer Uzi Sabah and lead actor Rufo Martínez, a real life DJ and television personality. Shot in cinéma vérité style, ‘Hasta Nunca’ takes a deeper look at one of South America’s under represented countries, carefully touching upon local themes like the lingering effects of the military dictatorship and the illegality of abortion. The film interweaves documentary and fiction, scripted narrative and improvisation, and is as much a portrait of Montevideo as it is the story of one of its chroniclers.
“Cuadro por cuadro” (Frame by Frame)
by Lynne Sachs and Mark Street
8 min., 2009
In “Cuadro por caudro”, Lynne Sachs and Mark Street put on a workshop (taller in Spanish) with a group of Uruguan media artists to create handpainted experimental films in the spirit of Stan Brakhage. Sachs and Street collaborate with their students at the Fundacion de Arte Contemporaneo by painting on 16 and 35 mm film, then bleaching it and then hanging it to dry on the roof of the artists’ collective in Montevideo in July, 2009.
“Same Stream Twice”
by Lynne Sachs with Maya Street-Sachs
4 min. 16mm b & w and color on DVD, 2012
My daughter’s name is Maya. I’ve been told that the word maya means illusion in Hindu philosophy. In 2001, I photographed her at six years old, spinning like a top around me. Even then, I realized that her childhood was not something I could grasp but rather – like the wind – something I could feel tenderly brushing across my cheek. Eleven years later, I pull out my 16mm Bolex camera once again and she allows me to film her – different but somehow the same.
Bios
Mark Street’s work ranges from abstract hand-manipulated pieces to work that involves found footage, to feature length improvised narratives. Each film attempts to investigate new terrain, and avoids being confined by a specific look or mood. Street graduated from Bard College (B.A, 1986) and the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 1992). He has shown work in the New York Museum of Modern Art Cineprobe series (1991, 1994), at Anthology Film Archives (1993, 2006, 2009), Millennium (1990,1996), and the San Francisco Cinematheque (1986, 1992, 2009). His work has appeared at the Tribeca (5 times), Sundance, Rotterdam, New York, London, San Francisco, New York Underground, Sarajevo, Viennale, Ourense (Spain), Mill Valley, Southby Southwest, and other film festivals. He teaches film and videomaking in the Visual Arts Department at Fordham College Lincoln Center and lives with filmmaker Lynne Sachs and their two children, Maya and Noa in Brooklyn, NY.
Lynne Sachs makes films, videos, installations 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. Since 1994, her five essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war–where she tries to work in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own subjective perceptions. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, Lynne searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in her work with each and every new project. Since 2006, she has collaborated with her partner Mark Street in a series of playful, mixed-media performance collaborations they call The XY Chromosome Project. In addition to her work with the moving image, Lynne co-edited the 2009 Millennium Film Journal issue on “Experiments in Documentary”. Supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Jerome Foundations and the New York State Council on the Arts, Lynne’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and recently in a five film survey at the Buenos Aires Film Festival. In 2010, the San Francisco Cinematheque published a monograph with four original essays in conjunction with a full retrospective of Lynne’s work. Lynne teaches experimental film and video at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.